Myth 10

This is myth ten and the title today is Sentience and Awareness. And we've talked before about how before there's intelligence, there's sentience. Intelligence is the ordering of thought, and sentience is the combing of feelings. It's difficult to to refuse to project thinking typography onto feeling. And yet we have to keep alert to do that. Feeling is completely Misunderstood if we try to characterize it in terms of thought. Intelligence is not a good template by which to understand feeling. Feeling comes first. Feeling is first. And sentience is a template for intelligence. We do not have any way to really think clearly originally unless our feelings are combed into sentience first. It's a basic principle of yoga. Don't try to learn philosophy before you can sit quietly. Why is that? Because the mind has, as it masters thought. It has an increasing abstract distance, an abstract distance from the existentials that are in the world, and also an ideological gap between its functioning and nature. The mind becomes less and less natural, less and less responsive to existentials as it gains its interior abstracting quality. And so when you get really good at thought, you can literally blank out the world. I'm sure that many of you have had the experience of driving on the freeway, and you start thinking intently about something, and suddenly you realize you weren't watching the road. You can get lost in your mind by focusing on your mind because of an inherent integral capacity in the structure of its functioning thought when it is very powerful. Reverses the way in which perception happens. Instead of seeing things and deriving images from them, the mind can see images that don't correspond to any things in this world. In other words, it has the capacity to do a kind of a thought dreaming a thinking imagery. And this is necessary. It's a part of the way in which it needs to work, but it gets in the way when it comes to understanding myth, to understanding. Feeling. To understanding. Experience. And the primordiality of feeling is something which our time has forgotten for a couple of hundred years. And it's proved to be a real difficulty. Feeling, feeling, sentience and awareness so that the notes for today begin and read this way. Existence is actually the action. It is not particularly aware. It simply is. So there's a paradox. The first objectivity in the universe is action. It's the action which is objective, not things, but the action so that things are literally circumscribed by the action in which they happen. You have to follow the action in order to know what something really is. If you look at it as a thing, you're using an abstract, an abstraction, and you're using the mind to lead, and you will always lose in a fight with life if you lead with your mind, because life ducks those kinds of blows and sneaks up on you, and you don't stand a chance. So that it's important to see that there is a paradox that's there immediately in perception and immediately there also in action in existence, so that when it comes to understanding something like karma, you can't understand that the causality and karma is between things. The causality in karma is between events and events. When they have relationship to each other, have like resonances that interfere with each other or cross over with each other, so that karma is a patterning of action and not a series of things. That's very difficult if you're going to go anywhere in consciousness to use the phony crutch of thinking that causality is between things. The billiard ball kind of diagram, it doesn't happen that way at all. And of course, in this past century, one of the great brilliant physicist was Niels Bohr, who very early on saw. And understood that complementarity is the essential reality within which the limits of causality can be appreciated. Yes, there is a causal connection. It's not between things, it's between the resonance of events. So that if you looked at the log of something like the nuclear research tools, say, outside of Chicago at the Fermi lab or in Europe at CERN, you will see that what they're looking at are events, subatomic events, and the things within the subatomic events all have a pattern and a place within the liminality of the resonance of the event. What does that mean? It means, then, that the primordiality of what is happening in nature uses a timeline rather than a spatial coordinate as its beginning. So that time is a first dimension. So that we need to orient ourselves in a very practical way. We need to have an education that understands that sequencing is not of things, but of events. And time has this kind of primordial quality to it. And time, as the first dimension in nature has its parallel in the way in which language forms a narrative vector. A mythic narrative is not a connecting of dots. It's not plotting a line dot by dot. It doesn't happen that way at all. It's a flow, and it's a particular kind of a flow. If we were able to use a kind of a high dharma, modern English language, we would call it an n flow. N flow. An n flow in that it brings in all the time anything within its resonance, so that the flow becomes richer and richer the more that it goes on. So that, for instance, the process of learning, the process of learning has nothing to do with rote sequencing of data, which you then memorize, and then you will have been educated. That's not it at all. Computers can identify million times faster than you could ever do it. They never learn. They cannot learn. So that that model of education is faulty. On a list that would drown this table in paper where it's faulty for 8 billion different reasons. So that when we look to learn, we cannot learn going step by step from what we understand in terms of steps and things, we have to be in an inflow process that in its undulation, in its resonant frequency, tunes into nature and on the other hand, tunes into vision. So that myth, feeling toned experience that begins to have sentience flies between the banks of nature and vision. Nature and consciousness. And on one side of it is the certainty of ritual. Ritual action. Not ritual things, but ritual action. And on the other, symbolic realizations, so that when you look at the way in which men and women primordially got themselves together in the world so that they could not only live, but that they could imagine new fields for themselves, they always had this entire sequence going at once. Nature and ritual. Myth, symbol and vision. All five. But in our learning, we're taking each phase as it occurs and trying to enfold the previous phase with it and the coming phase with it, so that you get a sense of analytic without being specific, because an analytic which is prematurely specific makes you if you get used to it, it makes you fodder for any ideologue process, any ideology. The last three generations have seen too much catastrophe for human beings who are used to ideological orientation. It makes everything super clear so that you know who your friends and enemies are immediately, and it's always untrue. If you were to apply the techniques of yoga to it, you would discover that you are your own enemy very quickly, and suicide would be universal, so that there is a quality of inflow to language which is intimately not tied up with, but resonant in the way in which feeling combs itself to sentience, and that that sentience has on one side awareness in a ritual comportment of what you're doing and on the other in the visionary beginnings of differential consciousness. So when we come to Wendy Doniger's translation of the Rigveda, we look at the Rigveda, the Rigveda in ten books, and near the end, in the 71st hymn of the 10th book, one of the most important of all of the hymns in the Rigveda. She entitles it the origins of sacred speech. How do we talk holy? And why is it so important that we be able to talk holy? She writes. This hymn speaks of the origins of the sacred word, speech or language. In Sanskrit, the term for sacred speech is vac vac. And of its ritual recreation through the verbal context of the Vedic sacrifice, so that in the rituals of purification, in making ready for a sacrifice, in making ready for a purification, in the way in which the ancient Indians saw this and understood this and not just Arians. If you recall, a couple of weeks ago we talked about how the origins of yoga are in Dravidian India, not not in the Central Asian areas. It isn't something that's brought into India. What's brought in is a different kind of lightning. But the thunder was always there in ancient India. Thousands and thousands of years. She writes, the social nature of language is emphasized, the social nature of language, so that in locating not an object, but in locating the resonances of events, we do not do it in isolation. We do it together in a social pattern, which is why mythology is the generator of a society of a culture, but it has its limits. It can only go so far, and about as far as it can go is a collection of what were originally tribes into a larger gestalt. The American Indian structure is perhaps illuminative here. Within an Indian nation you would have several bands so that, for instance, the the Blood Indians, the Sarcee Indians, the Stoney Indians are all a part of the Blackfoot Nation, but they're different bands. They have slight different variations on the way in which the passages of life, the rituals, the the way in which you live every day would be. But when you get to the larger cosmological rituals like a sun dance, you would share it with the main body, the main nation, so that the Blackfoot nation includes the bands of the Sarcee, the Stoney, the blood. And yet there's something larger than the nation, and that is the language every band in the Blackfoot nation speaks Algonquin, and that language was spoken from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. The Delaware Indians of James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans fame spoke Algonquin. They spoke the same language that was spoken by the Blackfeet in the Rocky Mountains, so that you have a kind of a huge flow. That is a language which has pools of nations, smaller pools of bands and then smaller pools, which would be the family structure. And while there is an opportunity for an individual to occur in a moment of hunting where you're confronted with an animal bigger than you've thought, in a moment of quest when the realization needs to be individual? Yes, that is there, but largely that is rare. The more likely thing is that one identifies oneself with the people. Ones. People are not just one's family, but literally one's tribe. And on the larger level, it's one's language group. We speak the same language, and yet groups that are in different languages can form affinities because of ancient tradition. All the Algonquin Indians, all the Algonquin language tribes have great affinity with Athabaskan speaking. All the Alaskan tribes northern British Columbia have Athabascan language. The Navajo Indians who migrated from that area to the American Southwest. Their language is Athabaskan and the Algonquin and Athabaskan language groups. Because of having a long shared history, more than 12,000 years have like cousin qualities. So that, for instance, the Blackfoot young men in the 19th century when they mastered the use of the horse. They were able to finish their hunt early enough in the summer. They had enough meat, they had enough skins, they had enough of everything to get them through the next winter, and they would have a couple of months leisure time. One of the few tribes in North America that had leisure time. So they would take their the young men would take their horses and they would ride down to visit their cousins, the Navajos. So the Blackfeet and the Navajos were sort of like horse buddies before the United States ever claimed those territories. They were visiting each other for several hundred years, quite freely, whereas the Navajos are not horse buddies with the Hopi, who live right next to them and have lived next to them for 4 or 500 years. Because the Hopis don't ride, they walk. They do not ride horses. They walk. And their languages are so spectacularly disparate that they don't. They don't see any reason of including each other as the same people at all. A different species deeper. Is that prejudice than racial prejudice? That people speak a totally different language? Family makes them alien to you because of the feeling tones being completely different. They don't modulate so that to modulate people of different language families requires a transformation of people. And that's where civilization comes from. It is a wider spectrum than tribal nations are capable of, and it requires differential consciousness to affect that. And it takes a higher order, a greater power, a greater differential power of the process of language. To do that. You have to shift out of myth even beyond vision. You have to shift out of vision into history. Civilization doesn't happen without the energies of history. Without the process of history. And history is like a high powered quality of vision. And both history and vision are differential processes and have nothing to do with the integrals of myth and nature except in a deep ultimate complementarity. And it was Niels Bohr who understood that in complementarity you have an ultimate presentation of irony and paradox at the core of the way in which events are structured. So that the quantum world is not so much a quantum world of nuclear particles, but of events which are generated resonantly around the appearance and disappearance, the manifestation and the. Winking out of the so-called particles. No one has ever observed a neutrino, but we can observe the event. No one has ever looked and been able to say, well, here is a kaon, here's a mason, here's a Tao particle that's several thousand times bigger than an electron. No one's ever held an electron in their hands. In the 103 years that we've been able to identify. And here's where the language beggars us. We've been Miseducated you don't identify an electron, you become acquainted with the liminal gestalt of its pooling around an event. And we call that image the electron. So we need to recalibrate ourselves so that our language is more truthful. It's an old, old problem of wisdom. You cannot be real until you can speak the truth. And speaking the truth is a form of sacred language. So that in the Rigveda, in the 10th book, the 71st verse is all about how does this kind of sacred language happen in the first place? And what is appealed to here. Brhaspati is the God of good language. Brhaspati when they set in motion the first beginning of speech, giving names, their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love. How does Kama become transformed from the causality of events in an integral line? Because the opening up of that particular flow into its possibilities, that's what love does, is not a sentimental trait. It is a The logical way in which energy differentiates from its integrals, and without it, there really isn't much hope for anything except a quick end to the universe. When the wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve, then friends recognize their friendships. A good sign was placed on their speech. Through the sacrifice, they traced the path of speech so that that mythic narrative, that mythic narrative is a is a vector of language. Like I'm speaking ex tempore here all the time. I'm not speaking in terms of paragraphs and sentences. I'm speaking constantly in a, in a spontaneous vector, which nevertheless has its narrative dynamic, but its narrative dynamic is not in making points clear and linking those clear points into a sequence so that you say, oh, yeah, I follow what he's saying. That's not it at all. And if you are experiencing that, then you're projecting onto what's happening here, because that's not ever happening. My yoga is to not ever do that. I've been careful for a long time, several generations not to do that. So part of my discipline, I can count on it and I check it all the time. It that doesn't happen. What does happen is that my language inflows in such a way that wherever it could pool it pools because of a resonance which you participate in. So it's a different kind of a thing. It's like the old Italian style of making a good meat sauce. You want to make sure that you put all the good ingredients into it. You can't get a good meat sauce unless you put the ingredients into it. So I'm constantly putting new ingredients all the time so that eventually, when this cooks in 2 or 3 months for you, or in a year for you, when you're ready to serve yourself, that sauce is going to be nutritive. And whatever you put it on, you'll see me as a person, not as some kind of, you know, expert. I don't care about experts. This planet doesn't have very many experts anyway. There are other planets and other star systems that have millions of experts. It never did them any good either. But Pisans are welcome anywhere in the cosmos. They really are. One who looked did not see speech. Isn't that amazing? The Rigveda, 3500 years ago. One who looked did not see speech and another who listens did not hear it. It reveals itself to someone as a loving wife. Beautifully dressed, reveals her body to her husband. There is a secret exchange always when sacred language is operative. What is that exchange. What is that? What is that? Nude to nude secret exchange of love in language. It's the way in which imagination, in myth exchanges functional places. With memory, in vision, memory and imagination. Exchange places. Imagination which is generated in myth, and memory which is generated in vision, have a dosido. They exchange functional places so that memory can function in an integral order, and imagination can function in a differential order, but the differential realm never engendered imagination. It received it as a gift, and the integral order of nature never had memory anywhere. Aware. And to misnomer computer chips as memory is great, great error beggars language is not memory at all. And that exchange of memory and imagination is very easy to recall when you think of the Tai Chi, the Chinese Tai chi symbol, it has a circle of the dark and the light, and a circle of the light in the dark, and that's the exchange of memory and imagination. In order for that exchange to happen, there has to be a transform that's operative. And that transform that's operative must be in the mind. Fantastic. His hands are. They can't do that. Fantastic as the heart is. It cannot do that. Because the hand and the heart belong in the natural order, and they have indelible functionings there. They are part of the way in which integration maintains its honesty. The way in which the hand holds something or the heart beholds something is necessary to the integrity of integration. And the hand and the heart cannot make memory, but they can receive memory as an exchange gift, because the transform is operative and allows for that dance to happen. It allows for those arms to interlock and players to pivot and switch. And the core, the fulcrum on which the mind does that are symbols so that we will see coming up a couple of lectures. We'll get into 12 lectures on symbols. Symbols are very, very important because they receive they index. The cardinality and the cardinality of integration. But they also have the ability to pivot. It's almost like a it's almost like a great dancer is not only able to do the dance steps, but is able to leap and pivot in mid-air. Symbols can do that. And in that pivot, when Ezra Pound was trying to translate the Odes of Confucius, the Liu Yin, he translated instead of Analects of Confucius, he used the term the wobbling pivot. The central objective in the mind that pivots in an wobbling way are symbols that are suspended. They're lifted out of their image based context, and they're put into like, mid-air. The teaching always says heaven suspends its emblems. There are no construction posts and beams that hold the stars in their place. They're there because of harmonic resonances, not only resonances that are there because of images, but because of resonances that reach a harmonic. So that when you're looking for a visionary way to remember how to comb the cosmos, you go to something now called harmonic analysis. There's a whole field of mathematics, very highly advanced now, thanks to men and women who took the time to understand what Bohr. Niels Bohr was talking about. That complementarity is a deeper appreciation of reality than causality, and that the causality is not even between things, but between events. In this, in this origin of sacred speech, the 70th him in the 10th book, I'll use Sri Aurobindo's translation because it it's a more accessible, I think, presentation before the origins of sacred speech, before this kind of talk, when they set in motion the first beginning of speech, giving names their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love when the wise ones fashion speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve. Then friends recognize their friendships. A good sign was placed on their speech. The hymn just before that prepares us to hear this, because in ancient wisdom you had to be prepared. You never went into an action cold. You were always prepared and not just initiated, but prepared. Uh Samskara comes from the Sanskrit word, which means to to take care, to prepare. Right. In order to do something, you have to be prepared to hear. But on the deeper level, when you get really refined, you realize that you have to be prepared to be prepared. And when you get to that level, then you go beneath the floorboards of paradox and irony, and under there you find that there is no posts and beams holding that up. That you are, in fact in a suspended reality, and thus free and thus responsible for what you do. You're not netted by some kind of abstract karma. It's what you do that nets you. And so you can also undo that. There was a there was an event in 1876. Herman Melville took a break. He was he had been one of the world's greatest novelists. And then he'd been writing weirder and weirder novels. He wrote a thing after Moby Dick called Pierre and the Ambiguities. And no one read it. And they said, this is kind of weird. And then he took the weirdness of their response, and he wrote a thing called the Confidence-man about Satan becoming a cigar smoking, white suited and white hat guy and a steamboat on the Mississippi and causing consternation. And then everyone stopped reading Melville. And about 19 years after that, Melville took a break. He had to earn his living being a customs inspector at the Port of New York. Can you imagine that? Anyway, he took a break and he took a cruise to the Holy Land, to Palestine. And when he was there in Jerusalem, he got this insight that he needed to go to the earliest monastery that he could find, and the earliest monastery he could find in Palestine is Mar Saba. There are these huge deep rills that go down towards the Dead Sea, on the Dead Sea side of of the mountains where Jerusalem is. And the deepest of those is the one. It's a rivulet that used to be called Kidron, the brook Kidron. It's not a brook. It's like a an 80 degree angle going down. And so they built Mar Saba over the top, the beginning of this deep chasm. So he went into the monastery, and it was a little rickety. And Melville finally bribed the caretaker to let him see the inner sanctum, the most solitary room in Mar Saba, which was a single room which was at the bottom. And when he went in through the door, he grabbed the door frame because there was no floor. There were just some old beams, and it was completely wide open to the chasm of Kedron. So that when you really got deep into your monastic retreat, you had to face that, that there is no floor in the universe. And if you can't fly in your spirit, then you better stay home. Here's how Sri Aurobindo prepares you to be prepared to hear about sacred speech. O fire, except the fuel I give thee in the seat of revelation, take joy in the luminous thought on the high top of earth, in the brightness of the days become high uplifted by worship of sacrifice to the gods. May he who travels in front of the gods, who voices the Godhead, come here with his horses of universal forms, pure and most divine. May he hasten with our obeisance on the path of the truth of to the gods men bringing their offerings. Ask for the fire everlasting to be their envoy. What is that? Fire everlasting? In alchemy it's called the refining fire. It never goes out. It's an eternal flame, as an eternal flame that uses a particular kind of fuel. The fuel for that transforming, refining fire is your unending dedication. To the extent that you interrupt that, that fire goes out and you have to rekindle it, and you can't do much refining if you're all the time having it out. So that the quality of being prepared to be prepared to understand about speech is that there is a continuity underneath the flow of speech, and that that continuity is the openness of silence. Let's take a break. Paired with the Rigveda for this month, we have Ernst Cassirer's language and myth. So we're using this pair of books. And these pairs are like calipers that allow us to draw circles, not geometric circles, but whole cycles of continuity. And those cycles of continuity are a part of the way in which nature works. Nature brings together, integrates all the time. And we are. Kind of like a membrane in nature. We are able to interiorize the exterior world and like a membrane, the exterior world enters into us, and that surface through which it enters that membrane is actually generated by language. Language and feeling by experience, so that our experience as a horizon is not a flat horizon, but is actually spherical because of the way in which resonance occurs. We live within spheres of experience, of experience. And when we have shared experience, then we have a community that has that kind of resonant surface which extends to the world. And the world is of such a nature. Existence is of such a nature that it accepts our impress. And they bind together. And when we are at home in the world, it means that we have bound that world to our culture, to our community, on that surface becomes very palpable, Becomes a collection of tips. It becomes the homes, eventually the palaces, the the cities. Teilhard de Chardin, in one of his writings, said that the biosphere of the planet has another sphere called the New Sphere no, from the Greek, meaning mind that our. Our habitation is like a membrane, a layer which is a transforming surface on the planet. And we live in a generation where for the very first time, our species is going to generate a membrane that's the size of the entire star system. It is a catastrophically large transformation. The surface of the Earth is about 200,000,000mi². Is nothing compared to the sphere of the star system. The star system is about 3 billion miles in a radius minimum, so that our species is going to have a sphere in the next 200 years. There will be many trillions of times the size of any civilization that this planet has seen. And so the transform that's being energized now is colossal. If we stay glued Allude to a secure culture. That culture will not only crack. It will atomize under the pressure of that expansion. And it's unnecessary because we don't have to ossify in some kind of fossil glued tradition. Our nature is to be an elastic membrane, and we can easily expand ourselves to accommodate a star system sphere that can be done, but not a single education from the past will do that. There are methods which do do that, but they do that in very esoteric ways for very few. If you take the royal road of some sophisticated yoga Or discipline from the past, some deep, contemplative discipline. You can do that for yourself. You can do that even in a small community. But the planet as a whole can't do that. The facility is not there. And that's why this education. And it had to be mocked up in such a way on the outside of all of the traditions, because it frankly cracks and dissolves all the traditions. I spent 40 years in the professional university levels and just there's no place for it. It's not a question of their right or if I'm right, it's a question that you can't put this in, that it doesn't doesn't fit. So our mythic Corizon is not a flat plane, but has a spherical body, and so the geometry of images in language and feeling are likewise never two dimensional, and they do not have a simplistic geometric shape to them, so that we have to abstractly deceive ourselves to believe diagrams. The minimum of the geometry of feeling intelligence already, regardless of even getting to thought, deals with trigonometry, and you have to have trigonometric trigonometric functions in order to really appreciate the colossal capacity in elasticity and In its expansive qualities that the intelligence of feeling sentience has. And that sentience intimately tied up with not even tied up with language and feeling flame out of the actions of our lives, out of what we do, what we do do. And that activity is revelatory, because the flow of time on an existential level doesn't stop anywhere. The flow of time in space is, in fact distributed. Distributed remarkably, equally consistently. Uniformity as one of the great qualities of existence. The atomic structure of hydrogen is the same here as it is in a billion light years away. A deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen, occurs exactly that way there. Tritium exactly that way. So that there is a great uniformity in nature. So that time does not pool in nature in space. It begins to pool only when ritual actions which are selected. Ritual actions are not just actions, but they're selected actions. And the selecting of them begins to make receptacles. Forms by which time can pool. And at the bottom of every pool is a feeling. And at the top of every pool is an image so that images and feelings are intimately related. Together, they occur contemporaneously. If I can use that term, there pools within time. And if you ripple images, you can ripple feelings. If you take a visual image or an audio image and you give it a certain ritual shape, it shapes feeling in that way. If you have a musical scale of an octave of eight notes, that musical scale is reached initially by taking a length of sound and cutting it in half, making a half, so that you have a ratio of 2 to 1. And if you can take that same length and put two stops in and you'll have in thirds, and you can make a whole musical scale which has been done out of that. So that out of the infinity of possibility in the mystery of nature, all of a sudden you have a ritual comportment which allows you to pool sound into a note arrangement of an octave. And you can actually make not only rhythm there, but melody. You can have a melodic line of almost indefinite interest and complexity. You can not only have the chance of the Blackfoot, you can have the leader of Brahms, and it's all within the same principle of pooling feeling and image. This case, we're talking about an audio aural image. You can do the same for visual. You can do the same for any of the senses so that sentience is a calming. It's a deep intelligence and feeling takes that primordially so that the heart becomes wise before the mind is even born. The hearts of species before us were wise before our species even came, before the capacity of mind to abstract even was there physiologically, there was always wisdom of the heart. One of the great discoveries of a couple of decades ago now, Mary Leakey, found in West Africa, in the rift country. She found a spot where there had been a volcano which had spewed out ash. And immediately there was a hard rain that froze that ash. And then it was covered by more layers of ash. And when she found it, she found that there were footprints in that ash of hominids, of a female hominid and a child hominid 2 million years ago, who walked across that pool of ash when it was fresh from the volcano, and from the pace of and the pairing of the footsteps, you can see that they were holding hands. We've been able to hold hands and mean it for millions of years so that our feeling wisdom is very deeply founded. It's founded on a geological scale so that the temerity of an education that thinks to lord it over feelings by structuring the mind and abstract ways is absolutely chaotically stupid. Yes. That's important. Later. Yes, it's important in terms of mind and transformation later. We don't want to hear about it now. We want to be prepared before we get there. And so the wisdom of the heart is essential to prepare us for the startling radicalness of the mind. And the mind is radical. There's no getting around it. Bertrand Russell once said, men fear thought like the plague, and they'll do anything to avoid it, because thought is wild and it will go where it wants to go. And you may not want to go there. Paired with the Rig Veda, paired with the origins of Vok, of sacred speech, paired with the way in which the samsara of imagery has a deep ritual basis, which is in the actions of being prepared to do something paired with that is, language and myth. Ernst Cassirer just 90 some pages. Cassirer, when he began, was a philosopher of science and his first publication in English. Chicago, 1923. Substance and function and Einstein's theory of relativity. Which he combs through the startling radicalness of the theory of relativity and in the early 1920s, Kassner's book was one of the few in the world that presented the real course of problems. On page 81, the paragraph is headed by italics, which read the transference of relations, the transference of relations distinguished from induction and analogy. You have to understand that at this time it was still fresh in everyone's mind that logical procedures and mathematical principles had just been wedded together. Only about 20 years before this, in a monumental three volume series of books, big blue tomes with gold stamped printing from Cambridge University Press by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Principia mathematica. They had taken Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia from 300 years before. That had made the modern mind, and it turned it inside out by showing that logic and math. Are the very same motion of the mind, and that this motion has a deceptive thinness to. It a deceptive identity to it, so that later on, when Alfred North Whitehead was trying to. Express in a more sophisticated way what he then understood. His book was called Process and Reality and nothing to do with things or identity. And of course, no one could read Process and reality. It was found about 25 years ago that the original manuscript of process and reality had been misread by the print people, and that the edition contains so many errors that it was actually illegible. And so a new edition was put out, and by this time university people were not reading Alfred North Whitehead so much. It's instructive to go back and understand. And at the core of what Whitehead is understanding are symbols. Symbols. Cassirer in 1923, one of the few people who was able to hold this enormous realization that relativity. And in three years you would have Niels Bohr's development of complementarity to such an extent that all of modern physics began to flow in that way. Cassirer writes. Rights. There is clearly manifest in all these elucidations a tendency towards an exact and universal expression of the new thought. Above all, we are concerned to guard the transference of relations assumed as basic from any confusion with merely analogical or inductive inference. Induction proceeds from the particular to the universal. It attempts to unite hypothetically into a whole a plurality of individual facts observed as particulars without necessary connection. How? Here, however, the law of connexion is not subsequently disclosed, but forms the original basis by virtue of which the individual case can be determined in its meaning. The conditions of the whole system are predetermined, and all specialization can only be reached by adding a new factor as a limiting determination while maintaining these conditions. From the beginning, we do not consider the metrical and projective relations in the matter in which manner in which they are embodied. Remember the inflow embodied in any particular figure, but take them with a certain breadth and indefiniteness, which gives them room for development. It may seem at first surprising and paradoxical, that this indefiniteness of the starting point is held to be the ground of the fruitfulness of new procedure, and of its superiority over the ancient methods. Here it soon appears that the expression of the thought here suffers from the ambiguity of the traditional logical terminology, in which concept and image are not strictly distinguished, and in which they are identical and clearly defined. Meaning of a conceptual rule always threatens to dissolve it into an abstract and schematic generic image. 1923. And the same author on the same material published in 1956 posthumously. Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, where he takes himself to task that he hadn't even he at the pinnacle, at the cream of understanding, had not appreciated how deeply radical the challenge was. How radical is it? It's like there's radicality and then there's radicality of the radicality. And by the mid century, it was apparent that we were in. Deep trouble as a species, because we had come to manufacture and to have ready to use levels of reality that were so supernatural that there was no natural way to give them shape that we had called into being and were applying. And we're using every day and increasingly so forms for which nature has no ability to limit. And that as a species, we were literally on an excursion of madness without knowing it. And the general population was saved simply because they didn't understand that. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are so far beyond mid-20th century as to make them seem like sandbox children to us. So that the problems are no longer problems that are exacerbated there. Their problems are not problems for us at all. They're simply shadows of misunderstanding that had nothing to do. They were actually extraneous to reality. And yet their work, their anxiety, their challenge needs to be preserved because it's the only way that we can teach new or younger or other people. How it came about that an impasse occurred beyond which no one could move, because there was nothing beyond it. The impasse was a dead end. And that impasse was reached about 1968, about the time we went to the moon. And the impasse was complete. As an ex-student of mine, who's been the chief of the shuttle controllers at NASA for the last ten years, said there are only a handful of people who know how to get to the moon. You can't just go to the moon. You have to understand the deep mathematics of shifting frame reference, to be able to have a self-correcting trajectory all the time, in order to be able to land there. You cannot just step onto the moon. You have to be able to be prepared one nanosecond before you do it to be exactly right. Otherwise, you don't make it. The two recent Mars landers that crashed didn't just crash because of a of a metric miscalculation. It's a generation of people who don't know how to get there, because you cannot get there by taking your pencil, your computer chart, and just drawing a line. Even a nice arcing line. You can't do that, because at every split second, the conditionals morph in such a way that they go in and out of what you would call existence, and you have to be able to factor zeros all the time, as much as ones. And without that dialogue of the binary, without Tao And your tea. There's no way that you can do that. You can't get there. The same for reaching an interior piece, an interior calm. There's no way to just simply walk there and get there. You can't do it by effort. It doesn't matter how brilliant you are, how trained you are, how trained your guru, or a whole army of girls, they cannot get you there and it becomes more precarious every step towards it, because the radical paradoxicality shoots asymptotically off the graph, off all graphs. And if you're carrying the habit of graphing with you, you are for sure going to lose because it will not be there. There's no it at all. Wallace Stevens had a poem one time. The good man has no face. And there's a line in it that said the wise of the world say the good man has no face. As if they knew. Casear was famous because he was one of the first people that the Nazis blackballed because he could understand in a very deep, radical way, a challenging way. And so they got rid of him. And one reason that they got rid of him is that he was working on a book which was published when he first got to Yale. He got to work on it. Published in 1946. The myth of the state. The state is like a tribe writ civilization large. And the National Socialist Party in Germany was a kind of a tribe that was recognizable in history in such a way that one was often stunned. How did those guys get back here? And the origins of them were formed in the time of Augustus Caesar. The power of images in the age of Augustus. They made the Roman Empire, which was the first time that someone took a civilization. They were kind of new 2000 years ago. Civilizations are only about 4000 years old at that time. The very oldest one of the first great civilizations was in India, the Indus Civilization. There was Sargon's great Fertile Crescent civilization of about 2400 BC in Mesopotamia. There was the Egyptian civilization made about 3000 BC, But it was the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus Caesar, where they learned how to make a tribe the size of an empire. And it was through this that you find. Here's a typical kind of study. Rituals and power. The Roman imperial cult. And this study. It's in Asia minor. But everywhere the Roman imperial cult was always the same. You conformed to Roman imperial power that was formed on a cult basis of a dictator. Um. The German word for Caesar is Kaiser. Kaiser Wilhelm ran Germany in the First World War. And in order to correct the mistakes of that loss, the National Socialist Party ran an Adolf Hitler and didn't call him a Kaiser or a Caesar, but that's how he functioned. One of the most difficult things to appreciate, and almost none of us in this country appreciated it, until people like Ernst Cassirer pointed it out during the Second World War was that the Roman imperial cult, while it was manufactured in the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar and formulated by the Caesars, it received a very deep modification in the Second Dynasty to seize power in the Roman Empire. They were called the Flavians. Here's a study published in Stuttgart in Berlin, 1936. The Imperial cult under the Flavians. Because the Flavians are the one who's ones who introduced a Metaphysics into the imperial cult to make sure that they had all of the occult covered, as well as all of the power. Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar were very good at covering world power, but the extent of their co-opting of power on the subtler levels was simply to commandeer all the prophetic literature. It was against the law, punishable by death to own any scrap of prophetic literature in the Roman Empire. All of it had to be sent to Rome, and in Rome it was all deposited in the safest place that the Romans could think of. And that was a temple of power set in the middle of the Foro Romano, the Roman Forum, And it was built by Augustus Caesar, particularly for that that purpose. It was discovered after the Second World War to be still intact underneath the weeds and stones in the center of Rome. And it's excavated, and now you can go and see it. It's called the Ara Pacis Augustae, the temple of Eternal Peace of the Roman Empire. It's the masculine version of the Parthenon. Only who stands in there is not Athena, the goddess of wisdom, but he who holds the world in his decision. It's all based on power and decision and the myth of the state. And only as long as you have a population who are imbued Used with a habitual inculcated mythological propensity can be controlled. And that's why anybody who challenges the mythology of the state is immediately in need of being erased. Especially someone who brings transcendental consciousness into play. They have to be crucified right away. This kind of situation is of interest to us in many different ways. One of the ways is that in the Second World War, in order to guard against the code cracking capacities of the Third Reich, they looked for an expressive way to disguise the most important communications. And they found it not in some kind of logical thought up system. But by using an American Indian language which no one could speak except native speakers, they used the Navajo language. They use the Navajo form of Athabascan. And in order to recruit these Navajo men to serve and fight in the Second World War, they produced a crisis on the reservation because for three generations the Navajo men had been corralled as just being kept by the US government and having food doled out and whiskey doled out, and they didn't know how to fight in war anymore. And worse than that, they were not able to be prepared to be able to learn how to fight. And so, facing that crisis, they brought an old shaman named Jeff King out and out of his memory, he reconstructed the ancient war ceremonial by which men are prepared to offer their lives for the beneficent wholeness of the people, and for the two Leggeds and four Leggeds for nature. And this ceremony was published in the United States, was published in New York City in the middle of the Second World War in 1943. A woman named Mary Mellon took her husband's money and said, we're going to do something with this money. We're going to make a whole series of books to re-educate a world that has forgotten all this. And the first book in the series was when the two came to their father, the Navajo War ceremonial. And in this ceremonial, Jeff King not only presents. The mythology of how this happens with all of its attendant symbols, but also the rituals and a series of sand paintings were made. And the first sand painting has to do with someone in their rainbowed resonance, finding a way to arc towards the wholeness chamber, where the meaning can, can collect, and which has a center that one can come to and far along that series. The 14th stage in the tarot deck. The 14th stage is the card for temperance, which also has a rainbow. You get the cosmos and the very next, the 15th stage or the great for bear arrangement of the way in which the centre, suspended in complete openness, is for the first time available to be found. And the Navajo. It is not a self symbol so much that's a psychological way to talk about it. It's a symbol of the mythos of centering. There is a way in. The circle is not closed. Nature tends to close circles. Nature tends to be very geometrical in that existential way. And the center is not any point at all. It's de facto there, because you traverse the entirety of the process only by completing the process do you find where the center currently is. The very same kind of ritual mythic symbolic technique is used in this ancient mandala. This is a labyrinth, and the only way to get to the center of this labyrinth is to walk over the entire surface of it. This labyrinth is in the floor of Chartres Cathedral, at the center where the nave and at the core, it's the bellybutton of the Cathedral of Chartres Cathedral. Why do men and women put these things right there? Because that's how their wisdom has shown them that it holds. Because the pooling of resonance in images is like pooling ripples on water. You have to bring it deeper to a symbol level so that it can hold. And when you make it on that level and it gets strong enough to. Hold, it holds something other than the image base. It holds a capacity newly discovered to transform. So as soon as symbols become strong enough to hold meaning, they also become ambidextrous in that they can transform. And this is why consciousness suddenly appears in those transformations. And if you're not prepared to be prepared, you don't know what hits you. And many people have fled in fear from too much light. All of a sudden, Plato and his 10th book of the Republic gives a very good precis of that kind of fear. Men fear thought like the plague because it sometimes takes them where they didn't know that they could go. One of the pernicious, repressive, regressive things is to think that mythology are stories of primitive people about the gods that they made up out of ignorance. It has nothing to do with that. And there's a whole realm of confusion. And around the turn of the century, about the time that Max Planck was discovering the discontinuity of energy and that there was an expression of the quanta, and that was the seed for Bohr's discovery of complementarity. About that same time, Jesse L Weston, who did our one of our texts, From Ritual to Romance, this Dover edition of it, she did a book called romance, Vision and Satire. It was part two of a book that was too large. The publisher split it up. The first volume is called Chief Poets of the Early English Language. Romance, vision and satire. Ways of understanding. On a deeper level how the mythic horizon works. That myth isn't just myth, but myth shifts into romance as soon as symbols come into play, and as soon as symbols come into play in a deep enough way that irony begins to surface. Irony also deepens and becomes satire. And when romance and satire are in play and have a relationship to them. It develops what was called in the 14th century. It was called vision. One of the masters of vision at that time was Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer's English is a visionary redoing of Old English. Jesse Weston puts in pride of place at the very beginning of romance, vision and satire. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, because it was the first document. It's the major document where visionary transformation of language allows us to look recursively back instead of regressively, sliding back to recursively look back and understand that the mythic horizon is an energy flow that must pool so that meaning can happen and as images pool on the surface, feelings deepen and come into a focus so that our sense of meaning always has an emotional wisdom with it, and thought elaborates the structures of sentience. Intelligence is in fact not a function of abstraction at all. Not at all. There are many whales and dogs and horses that are very intelligent, and they never abstracted once more next week.