Myth 11

This is myth 11 and the title today is Eternal Return Integral. And this is a taproot to one of the most severe problems in civilization. It's a it's a difficulty that has plagued the 20th century. And here in the 21st century, we need to clear the decks. The most famous philosophic proponent of the eternal return was Friedrich Nietzsche. And there was a book translated just a couple of years ago by the great historian of ideas, Karl Löwith, who was at the University of Vienna. History of ideas. And his book Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the mythic context within which the idea of identity is grounded. And we need to understand that symmetry is a more powerful idea than identity. That identity has a reductive Snag in it and trips us up every time that we use it. The pernicious wild goose chase of going out to search for your identity is a fruitless task. If you found yourself, what would you say? There is a famous apocryphal story of the young Jesus left out of Christianity, of course, and rediscovered in some of the lost fragments of texts in the late 19th century. It's in the gospel acts of John. It appears in a collection of apocryphal literature, the Apocryphal New Testament, all the things left out of the Bible that were collected through the millennia. And in this little story of Jesus's childhood, he comes back from helping his father Joseph in the carpentry shop, and he comes back into the living quarters. And his mother before she was the Virgin Mary. His mother is shaking and she says, your shadow came in and surprised me while I was cooking, and I didn't know what to do with it. So I've tied a rope around its leg and tied it to your bed. And in the apocryphal story, the young Jesus is shocked that she would have done this, and rushes into the sleeping quarters and sees his shadow tied to the bedstead and quickly runs and embraces it. And it disappears into him. It's a kind of apocryphal story that our search for an identity is a quest for a projection, that there is only a shadow by virtue of a space which has a between, and has something also to do with the phenomenon of light. One of the keys to Solving this kind of a conundrum. This kind of a riddle of ultimate wisdom. Can be begun by taking one of the Rigveda hymns. This is from the first set of ten, and this is the 160th hymn in the first book of the Rigveda, and it reads in translation by Wendy Doniger. Like this sky and earth, these two, who are good for everyone, hold the order and bear the poet of space. In the Rigveda, the poet of space is the sun, these two, so that sky and earth are like the parentheses which constitute a set, and that the sun is suspended within the set of sky and Earth. Or if you like, heaven and earth, so that they the quality of the the integral of light is suspended poetically in the space of a set which heaven and earth together make. That set of heaven and earth which holds the sun suspended could only hold it suspended if the earth and the sky, or the earth and the heavens are in a symmetry. The ability to suspend in a centering space is one of the abilities of a symmetrical set, and this is the taproot. This is the way in which thought arrived at the concept of equivalence. That equivalence was not an issue of identity, but that equivalence is the balance of symmetry, so that in the space of the perfect paradox, there can be suspension and a center, which can be achieved not only at some point in the center, but that all the space in the center is capable of holding a suspended center, so that all the space in a symmetrical set is a distributed Equanimity. So that out of the Rig Veda of about 1500 BC, out of this kind of sky and earth, these two who are good for everyone, hold the order and bear the poet of space between the two goddesses. Earth is a goddess. The sky is a goddess. The two bowls that give birth magnificently. The pure sun god moves according to the laws of nature. Out of this, out of the Veda came a distillation after about 7 or 800 years, and the distillation are the Upanishads. So that the Rig Veda distilled gives you the Upanishads. Shots. This Oxford World Classics translation by Patrick Ollivier is very good. It's just recent, the Upanishads. And we used to use in one of the intervals, the Mundaka Upanishad, Mundaka in. In Sanskrit, Mundaka means the razor like the edge of a razor and implies the the razor can shave away. And the Mundaka Upanishad is about how one shaves away all of the extraneous, and what you are left with is the essential, and that as you shave in the Upanishadic distilling way, you use a symmetrical application of shaving. You don't just cut from one side, but you cut from all sides at the same time, so that you arrive by elimination, by negation to that equanimity which in the Upanishad, like in the Medaka Upanishad, what you arrive at is a pure openness, where there is nothing at the center, and thus the center is the same as the entire field of the context out of which it was carved, out of which it was cut, so that while you were questing, looking for a center, that quest was a projection of the ego, and that the high wisdom self discovers that there was no specific center identity to find, but that the entire range of the search was itself the your identity, that you inhabit the entire dimension of the search, and are not to be found at the end of a search or at the center of a search, but that you can realize yourself at any time during a search. Because the principle of the logic of of equanimity and equivalence is that its distributable. One of the great mathematical laws is that distribution holds universally. Later, out of the distillation of the Upanishads that came out of the Vedas, out of the Rigveda came a synthesizing integral, a core. It was like the Upanishad of Upanishads. Just as the Upanishads were distilled out of the Rigveda, what was distilled out of maybe 4 or 500 years of Upanishads was the Bhagavad Gita. And the Bhagavad Gita is that double distillation, which shows yoga and yoga in the Bhagavad Gita, is characterized as evenness of mind. Not an achievement to be searched for. Grasp had yearned for, achieved whatever it is, but that the evenness of mind is the yoga, so that the evenness of the application of the searching is the solution. So that giving up, needing to find something like an identity is one of the great achievements of maturation in yoga. You don't look for something. You look to see. Seeing. And this is a wisdom. This is different. One way to express this to to bring this into a conceptual expression. One of the very best ways was a book by Heinrich Zimmer. It wasn't translated from the German until 1984. Artistic form and yoga in the Sacred images of India and the color Frontispieces of the Sri Yatra and the same Sri Yatra was on the cover in gold of one of Heinrich Zimmer's other books published in the Bollingen Series. The. The quality of the Sri Yatra is that it is a Vedic field which has a Upanishadic symbol, which has a Bhagavad Gita. Recognition. And the recognition is concisely put here by Heinrich Zimmer in translation. He writes and this is page 61in this book, the the figurative sacred image. And this chapter is about outward sight and inward vision, outward sight and inward vision. And on page 61 it reads, this particular, this peculiar type of visualization that fills up the entire field of view, and that is in every detail. Equally clear and self-contained is an entirety more than a mere collection of individual parts. It is a specific product of inward sight. Our physical eye, constantly in motion, can never see anything remotely similar. This quite particular kind of visual visualization, which combines two opposites. The image is broad surface together with a clear focus on a single point on it, and is totally motionless. Is the mental yet visible content that is projected upon the sacred image during the act of devotion? And this description here by Heinrich Zimmer. Beautiful description of the way in which a yogic sight is the accurate way in which the action of seeing actually happens. That the ritual of perception accurately happens this way, and that what scatters that ritual accuracy is the field of feeling toned experience. It acts as a scattering field. So that thought, which takes feeling as its template, takes experience as its ground. Thought has to reconnect With its pristine ritual reality in order to correct its assumptions that are derived from myth. And this is quite apparent in late 20th century mathematics. In late 20th century mathematics, the development was clustered around the soliton waves called solitons, hears solitons and introduction, dynamical problems and soliton systems, and so forth. It's very easy to understand. It's very difficult to appreciate if you have a bell and you strike that bell. The sound from the bell is actually bell shaped. Any molecule of air taking part in that bell shaped is itself the entirety of the bell shape. That's what a soliton is. That it does not expand by movement, but that it pulses resonance consistently in a distributive quality, so that the whole idea of a logic which assumes a movement between cause and effect, leading to some kind of identity, is itself a fiction. And it's very difficult for someone without any experience in the high drama to, first of all, to believe that this could be so. And second of all, to put it into any kind of practice because one has no traction and you have to literally relearn everything. This is a very famous problem in wisdom. And for several thousand years there have been men and women who have struggled in their times and their ages to find a way to express this, to bring this into some application. What we're doing here in myth 11 is we're looking at the way in which the eternal return, the myth of the eternal return, is itself purely mythic and useful in mythology, even useful in our next concern, which is with symbols, but that as soon as we come to the maturation of symbols, we're going to come to a watershed. We're going to come to a threshold where we must divest ourselves of the conviction that it's still useful. The cycle of exactness that gives a circle is a debilitating, pernicious habit when it comes to differential consciousness. Because consciousness has a differential quality and does not operate on the basis of a natural integral. And to have the clustering agglomerating, collecting, packing all of these facilities that help integrals to Occur. They no longer occur in that way. They're no longer useful in that way when it comes to consciousness. So that vision will be a radical transform. And the vision is like the distillation into a spiritual water instead of just natural water. Now it's something else. It's a magical water. It's distilled. It becomes the old term for it. It becomes a liquor of that particular quality. It becomes refined in the sense that it is distilled, it is transformed. And we'll find that the person is a form in differential consciousness, which means that it's a differential form. It's not at all anything that would have an identity. It could have innumerable roles that it could play. Throughout lifetimes. Without number. And not be the same. But to be the original. There's a profound difference in stacking identities so that one has an eternal recurrence of the same, and an original that is eternal. There's a great deal of difference between eternity and eternal return, and that's a very profound thing. The people in antiquity who struggled with this most profoundly were the Chinese and the Egyptians. Now, for the Egyptians, their sense of eternity was to make a replay of the cycle of sameness, make a replay of that stretch out like an accordion, just like one would cut out some kind of a shape, would cut out, say an infinity sign would have a sacred cobra, and it would be looped like this. And then you would have at the top here, it would come down into another loop, and you would see a whole accordion of these looped royal king cobras, which would be the visualization symbolically of the way in which living time occurs, and that we would occur in that way we would Re-occur not as the same, but as the original. Going into something new is a very big difference. And that the carrier wave. The carrier wave of this would be in the ancient Egyptian vision of this would be the sun, the sun RA. When RA rises above the horizon in the morning. Those who have become attuned to RA will rise with him and will be resurrected on that day. Not resurrected forever, but resurrected on that day. And that day would join all the other days, extending for millions of years so that Ra Ra is the Lord of millions of years, but the Lord of millions of years, day by day, so that the Egyptian Book of the dead is not like gaining immortality. Its title is coming forth by day. Every day. Eternal. It's a whole different outlook, and our misunderstanding of ancient mythology and ancient symbolism is because we were not ever shown the visions. And so we don't understand. We we mis interpret. In fact, it's not an interpretation or interpretation, its It's interpolation. We look at ancient wisdom with cut up eyes and piecemeal quilted minds and think that we know and we understand. And this is a very grave problem now for the Chinese. The quality of of manifestation always had for them within the set, not the set of yin yang, but the set of Tao. They always had within the set of Tao te when it crystallized, was a six part structure, so that the hexagram of the Ching Cheng is a fundamental universal form. Happens very close to the Chinese understanding of. That was the first monograph mathematically on the physics of six faceted figures. It was called the six cornered snowflake by Johannes Kepler, and he he published this in 1611. He was walking around in 1610, in Prague, and he was thinking about these great celestial events that had happened. There were supernovas. There were great comets, all within the space of maybe a decade. And he was one of the few mathematicians ever who could have understood how to approach this kind of phenomena and to find a mathematical Solution of expressing what is happening, how is this happening? How is this going on? And the six cornered snowflake is the very first step, which three centuries later, led to the understanding of why organic and inorganic forms, when they take a crystalline form, have a very specific kind of a symmetry which can be understood. For instance, the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA was a function of crystallographic investigation. Making crystals of the DNA was the only way to get a light diffraction that showed the periodicity of the registry of its shape, and you didn't see the full shape, but you saw the little blips that signaled if one understood the context. Right? That one was dealing here with a double helix that came out in a kind of a universal shape and structure. This becomes extremely important when we try to understand how the mind comes out of myth. How does the mind come out of not only myth, but out of experience? How does thinking come out of feeling? And even deeper, how does thinking come out of feeling in such a way that one can realistically parallel it with ritual? With ritual action. Remember that the yoga in the Bhagavad Gita is not a Jana yoga. It's not a Raja yoga, as you would expect. It's a karma yoga. It's a yoga of action. It's a yoga of paying close attention to what you are actually doing, so that your thought parallels exactly what you are doing. And in that set, one creates a space where the experience clarifies itself, not by discovering a center, but by realizing that all of the space that it inhabits distributes the centeredness evenly. That evenness of mind is yoga in the Bhagavad Gita. That's what Krishna keeps telling Arjuna and Arjuna. Of course, being the great warrior, his speciality was not the sword or the spear. His speciality was the bow and arrow. And there was a famous part in the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is in the sixth parva out of 18, and there's a section in one of the earlier parts of the Mahabharata, where all the great warriors who are going to fight each other are not yet polarized into two sides. And they're all taking lessons from the great teacher Drona and the teacher. Drona makes the stuffed bird and puts an eye on it and places it high up on a scaffolding. And then he has these archers. All the warriors come and they're to get set to shoot it. And then when they're set, he asks them, what do you see? And each warrior will describe what he sees. And the better warriors get closer and closer to the center, until finally one of the great warriors says he only sees the eye. And Drona lets each one of these warriors go. And then Arjuna comes and he says, what do you see? And Arjuna says, I see nothing. Drona says, you, you, you, you are the great warrior because you are completely distributed through the entire perceptual field without limiting it, so that wherever you would shoot, you would hit whatever you shot. Because the field that includes the target and the bow are not just identical, it's it's the same field and that it has an operative symmetry. And because of that, one could never miss. I remember one time, um, It's having a long evening conversation about American Indians with Manley Hall, and he told me how he went to the Morongo Indian Reservation in the First World War era, and he wanted to learn how to shoot a bow. And he was trying to do the he was an East Coast person. He was born in Kitchener, Ontario, and he grew up in New York City, in Chicago. And he was an East Coast kind of a person. He was trying to aim, and the old Morongo Indian warriors told him, you never you're going to starve. You're never going to be able to shoot rabbits that way because they're always hip hopping. You have to shoot from the hip. You don't aim the bow and arrow, but you get a synergy between yourself and and your target, your rabbit. And you never can miss. And I asked him, I said, did you learn that? He said, I got fairly good at that. So there's a quality here. The soliton, the solo turn the waves called solitons. These waves are large amplitude waves, so that any locality of it is not a part of the wave, but is a possibility of that wave, and any possibility on that wave frequency has the same thing, not the same, but that all of it is original. Another way of understanding this is like in astronomy, we say we have these telescopes of various sizes and we collect starlight, and the starlight is focused and one gets an image of that star. And instead of using photographic emulsion to make the plates for the photographs, we now use CCDs. Charged coupling devices. Polarity gone into symmetry with a unifying charge field, so CCDs have a greater refinable emulsion than any physical photographic plate would have, because it just uses the electric field potential to register anything, including one single particle of light, a photon. You could have a CCD register, a photon, a single photon, and if you were able to refine that and do that, if you took a CCD of, say, a star, say like Procyon about 11 light years from now, one of the big stars that's there with Sirius. And if you took one photon of light from Procyon. You could now analyze that single photon and learn everything there was to know about that star, because the entire star is in every photon, not just every photon coming to us, but wherever in the universe they would go, they would carry the entirety of the star. And so our spiritual self is not a replication, ever. It's an eternal original that occurs always, eternally, and is not dependent upon a return in order to establish its identity. That all of that is fictive in the first place, so that a great deal of the mythological wisdom of mankind is put into a tapestry of experience to convey not this point, not this concept, but to convey the field within which this realization can be distilled so that mythology is wise not because of what it says, but because of the field that it generates and establishes, which allows for distillation to happen. So when we look for significance in myth on the basis of conceptualization, regardless of its origin, Freudian, Jungian, whatever, we're dealing with fictive methods. And frankly, most education systems in the world are completely fictitious. They're useless. They're extraneous mathematically. They do nothing. It can do nothing except to Encourage the taste for more exploration so you can have weekends without number to find out what's real. But this quality of an eternal return integral has a threshold of radical transform, and as we get into symbols for the next three months, we want to pay attention to the fact that there is a watershed that we are crossing. It's like if you're out in some mountain system that's really major, that has running along the crest of its actuality, what we would call in normal geography. As a continental divide, the Sierra Nevadas have a continental divide. The Rockies have the Himalayas have a continental divide where the climate and the water, all of it runs in a different way. And there is such a thing as a planetary continental divide. The equator. Water that swirls this way in the northern hemisphere swirls the other way in the southern hemisphere. And if you think that this is mysterious because you're washing your hands in Rio de Janeiro and the water is going the opposite way, you don't understand the distributed spirituality of the real, and one has to comb oneself out and adjust, because how would you ever know your spirit, which is universal if you can't even understand about water draining? So there is a there is a quality where you see, for instance, in symbols you'll see an S-shaped curve with the swirls on both sides. That's like the symbol for asymmetry flow. And you'll see that everywhere. The Greeks put an interlocking wave squared waves that interlock, and you see that Greek frieze everywhere. It's not the eternal return of the same, it's the frequency of eternity. It registers as an energy, as an energy. So that one has to look at this continental divide between two different scales of function. The first scale in nature, in the integral is to establish patterns, whereas in the differential. It's to generate context, and the movement from patterning to contexting is one of the most fundamental things in education, because without that you cannot remember what you learned. Memory only functions as context accumulates and accrues. And one of the great mysteries of our kind of our not just our species, but our our whole kind, any intelligent, conscious beings anywhere in the cosmos need to find a way to understand a paradox that while memory is a differential function and imagination is an integral function as soon as the radical transform occurs. Memory and imagination switch functional places. Switch functional orders and memory now functions as a core of differentiation in integration and imagination functions as an integral core in differentiation. The Chinese symbol of the Tai chi is perfect example of ancient wisdom. The center of dark and the light in the center of light in the dark is this exchange. And so reciprocity as a conception, as an idea is very powerful, but it's a reciprocity within a symmetry that has a distributed equanimity. And this is what makes it profound. Lao-tzu and the Tao Te Ching will come to expressing something that verges upon this. And he uses a Chinese character that just simply translates as oh! Oh, because it is the interjection, the utterance of surprise again, that every time you come upon it from a worldly perspective where you got familiar with just one side of things, you discover the other side is immediately there, and you get that, oh, Eureka! This quality of building context is like the soliton generating its pulse of resonances that it's generated without movement, so that consciousness is not dependent upon time, and there could be such a thing as a conscious space without time. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Let's come back to something that Heinrich Zimmer wrote in a book published by the Bollingen Series in 1948, the King and the Corpse tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil. And he goes through a number of different tales. One of them is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The title tale is an Indian wisdom story that Thomas Mann used for a short novel called The Transposed Heads. And Zimmer was very wise about these things, and he writes, storytelling has been through the ages, both as serious business and a light hearted diversion. Year in, year out, tales are conceived, committed to writing, devoured, forgotten. What becomes of them? A few survive and these, like a scattering of seed, are blown across the generations, propagating new tales and furnishing spiritual nourishment to many peoples. Most of our literary inheritance comes this way, and so the the spores of the myths, the mythology, comes drifting throughout the world over millennia, receding, coming back again so that at one time there was a great movement in the 19th century among scholars, especially in England and Germany, to look to find the origins of these tales, to look for the myth. And we once characterized this in the 60s as slime, the ocean bed out of which all these stories would come. And of course, the slime goes back to the animal world. It's the animal world which has a lot of the characteristics which we recognize as our own, as a distillations of our own, and in a very deep way. If one looks at the animal world, the animal world. Distills the plant world so that in the Chandogya Upanishad, one of the earliest, maybe 600 or 700 BC. A very large, the second largest Upanishad. The Chandogya Upanishad gives a yogic descent of man that we are descended from plants, not animals, because man is subsumed in the animal realm. And it says in the Chandogya Upanishad, man is the essence of plants. Speech is the essence of man, and om is the essence of speech. That this declension comes to a single symbol word which focuses the entire horizon of life from plant through man, through speech to om, and comes there in that focus to equanimity. And we can see that the concern for centering, for locating becomes a central concern of thought. And thought is very good at a process called abstraction. And when we come to symbols in a couple of weeks, we'll see that one of the most difficult things of all is that the integral capacities of nature, when they interiorize become acclimated to an abstracting process of which they are ignorant and know nothing, and the mind can be for the first time alienated from its own natural base. The mind is capable of alienation. It's capable of a, of an angst, of an anxiety of separation from nature, from life, and finally, even from the whole mythic horizon of feeling. And finally, one can be abstracted even from one's own operations of mind. And in that catatonia there is a motionless frozenness, a painted ship upon a painted sea. As Coleridge said, which is an artificial image of the rest that is achieved through equanimity. That that calmness at the center of the mind, that equanimity Doesn't locate itself in the center of the brain, but is distributed throughout the entire brain. A horizon, it's whole sphere, so that, for instance, a natural symbol of wise architecture was the dome that Jefferson put on to Monticello. And the whole third story of Monticello is just simply this dome, which was painted sky blue, and there was no furnishing allowed whatsoever in the dome, so that when Jefferson, with all the complexities of running a government and on many levels, and running a whole entourage of letters to several generations who were building a new world, he went to the dome of Monticello to be alone in an architectural mind that was uncluttered by anything. It was just open. Just open to the sunlight. Just open to the amplitude. And in his great theory of poetry, Wallace Stevens said, some artists, like Paul Clay, live in a universe so vast that straight lines are seen to fall. This theatrical amplitude of the drama of realization is what a wisdom education is about. But those realizations are not achieved by crossing some threshold, and then found that the discovery is actually a disclosure that's evenly distributed throughout the entire process. One way in which that is signaled in a wisdom education, as distinct from instruction, as distinct from ignorance, is that you do not close circles in the cycle of learning. Instead of closing circles, you purposely leave the last step undone, the last step free. You leave the dome open. You don't furnish it. You don't put an image of God in heaven. You don't put an image of God in your mind. These are graven images, and like all imagery, its correlation becomes scattered and blown out by differential consciousness. There's no way that it survives that kind of a Transform so that what you get actually instead of a cycle which circles, which would be a return of the same, which truncated to an atomic structure would be the proposition A equals a, that identity, we'll know this. Second, A is distinct from the first day. It isn't that that circle is closed, but that space left open makes of a cycle a spiral, and that that spiraling can be refined so that one can learn to think one open step at a time. A physicist named Gauss about 200 years ago showed that you can do a mathematical analytic by taking isolating one variable out of a complexity, and eventually by recycling your understanding and doing it again and again. The repetition of that will clarify even an infinite chaos. One can learn to understand even an infinite chaos. Given a patients and given the wisdom of distributing. I used to call it the snowshoe principle taken from Kepler's snowflake. The snowshoe principle. Um, I had a friend in Canada who was from India. He was a Bengali. Jovial Bengalis. When they're happy, they talk all the time. And he was a map reader for petroleum companies. And he was flown to the far north in the Mackenzie territories. And for the first time in his life, he saw a field of snow that was just into the horizon. And so when he the first time he had a break, he went traipsing out into the snow field. And of course, he was being from Patna, he was unacquainted with snow and he didn't realize that snow up to your hips, that after you get out about a quarter of a mile, you get really tired and then you have to come back through that. And of course, he got so exhausted he couldn't believe it. So he was out there in the snow fields yelling, hoping somebody would hear him in the wind. And the natives told them, that's why we have snowshoes, because you walk on top of it. You distribute your weight. It's the principle of the geodesic dome. You distribute the tension throughout the entire structure so that you have a tensegrity. This quality of wisdom in structure Is building context and it doesn't negate pattern, but it transforms pattern by memory into context, which allows for sets within sets. It allows for development not only of set theory as it would be called, and one branch of that is game theory, but it also helps make a connection with the way in which types and archetypes occur in patterns. Um, in Hellenistic times, they, uh, some wisdom writings that used to talk about how, um, the spirit is wild and free and is bound by the types and archetypes of the world, and that one has to free oneself from these, the types or the images and the collections of images and their connection with feeling and the archetypes are the indexing over all master types that integrate further the types into master molds, and those master molds can be tyrannizing, especially if one is looking for a master mold of the master molds. One must then give obedience to this archetype of archetypes. And this, of course, when put into political theory, is a ruinous tyranny. Every aspect of that leads to a veil of tears, and our species has had enough of that. We don't need to have a social structure based on that kind of catastrophic failure of relationality. So when we come to using material like the Rigveda or Ernst Cassirer's language and myth, we're pairing these so that they discussion the language, the information, the sharing has a set within which currently for four lectures at a time, we're considering things, and then we'll put that set down and we'll take up another set. When we come to symbols, the first set that we'll take are two symbolic novels, one by a woman and one by a man, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. They are united because both of them are written in what is called in literature, stream of consciousness Business writing, differential conscious energy flow, and it's a masculine and feminine prepared together as a set. Now, they didn't write them as a set, but we're using them as a set. The Rigveda certainly isn't a set with Kaiser. We're using them as a set. And one of the principles here is the snowshoe effect. It is so complex, not only the world. It's almost impossible to understand the world in its complexity, because to really understand the context builds faster than you can keep track of it. And so you must acclimate yourself to taking portions and understanding portions, and not getting frightened that you don't understand how it all fits in. Because the rush to judgment is a crisis of identity, That is a play written by the demons, and that scenario plays itself out in the same way all the time, which is one of the saving graces of it, because once you see it and recognize it, you forever can tell what it is exactly there and you can stay away from it. The building of context is something that is generated originally in such a way that the original is not moved, but has like a skeleton. It has its resonance, but the resonance is combed in such a way that we characterize the entirety of the set of those resonances as a harmony, so that an analysis that is highly conscious will always have a harmonic Structure to it which one can learn. All crystals are capable of registering that kind of a harmonic. They always are. Even the double helix of DNA registers that, so that energy and frequency literally tunes itself to the molecular and atomic level of matter of life. And this is something that we're paying attention to. The sense in wisdom traditions is that the most crucial ground for preparing this kind of advanced thinking, this kind of more profound envisioning of the base of that is in the mythic horizon, where language and feeling and experience Occur in stories and in images. That the images are like the rollers on which the narrative line flows, and that it isn't that the images are sewn together and linked together in a cause and effect way, but that they flow together and are held by a frequency. It's like an energy frequency. It's like there's a carrier wave, and then there are the modulations of the images as waves with that, so that you get a very complex kind of a frequency. Eventually, when you get to very powerful ideas, like the idea of an ecumene that all human beings belong to a single family, this planet's family, um, once in, uh, in Rome in about the two late two 50s early two 60s. Plotinus, who was the great teacher of his day of of that whole century, was teaching out of his home in Rome, and his student population was about 60 or 70 people. But it included the Roman emperor Aurelian and his wife, and many physicians and philosophers. And someone asked him, is it true that physical things always have a spiritual quality resonance to. And he said, yes, it's true. Even the planet will have a spirit and different planets will have different spirits. But all those planetary spirits belong to a set which has a harmonic. And What are the great things that JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, did for the Voyager series, as Voyagers one and two went from planet to planet. Each time Voyager went into a new planetary system, the telemetry would bring back the sound of the bow shock, the bow shock of the planet moving through the interstellar medium, and each planet had slightly different sound. They put out a little whistle, which was the sound of our own planet's bow shock moving through the interstellar medium, and JPL finally correlated together after Voyager went past Neptune. All of the sounds of all of the planets, and played for the first time physiologically, that one could hear the harmony of our star system. And it's an actual sound. The deep ignorance to think that in space no one can hear you scream is the ultimate reality. It's foolish. It's. It's like pre grade school demonology. It's so puerile and that planets are alive in terms of a stellar system and thus form also a family. It seems to us to be some kind of superstitious mythological stuff. And, and yet as you get deeper into it, you realize space is not dead at all. Even in intergalactic space outside, not only of star systems, but outside of the clusters of star systems. Intergalactic space has free floating organic radicals and molecules that it's everywhere. Life is everywhere. It's freely distributed everywhere. Like the snowshoe effect. It isn't just a rare thing in only one place, but it's distributed throughout the entirety of reality so that life is structurally endemic in the way in which energy and matter come together. Matter. Crystallizing energy and energy. Differentiating matter. And so this kind of an education that we're doing here calibrates itself eventually in a way that on every level, in every order that you would care to investigate, you can prove it to yourself. You need proofs and you need to be able to prove. I remember a beautiful scene in Elia Kazan did a number of poignant films. One time he did Viva Zapata! With Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn as Mexican revolutionaries, and Marlon Brando wanted to get married. And he. Anthony Quinn said, you better make sure that she's not going to betray us. And so here they were, these two tough guys trying to figure out proofs. How can we tell? And they would figure out all these complex proofs. And this will tell us if this is a kind of a quality that mythology has. It offers the field within which proof is disclosed. It's within feeling toned experience that proofs are disclosed. Not within the mind, not within thought. Thought can be duped by itself and never know it. But the heart is unsettled if even one iota is dissonant. It's the. What was the the old fairy tale of the Princess and the pea. Even under 20 mattresses, she felt. Well, then you're a real princess because you're sensitive to that aspect. There's a famous Mahayana myth of Vimalakirti, and Vimalakirti is ill. And the Buddha says to a group of monks, he said, somebody needs to go and visit Vimalakirti and see why he's ill. And some monks come back and they say, well, you know, he's too sharp for us. We couldn't get anywhere with the conversation. He kept asking us questions and finally the chief monks go there. And they also are deeply in consternation because Vimalakirti obviously is something really radically wrong with him. That's very important. So finally, the Buddha himself goes to Vimalakirti to visit. And because it's such a momentous occasion, these Mahayana sutras become cosmological. And it's so important that even the gods come to hear what's wrong with Vimalakirti. And Vimalakirti simply feels the ill, the dis ease. Because perfection has not been distributed evenly throughout the entire cosmos. And until it is, he's going to remain sick. And as soon as that realization is there, one sees in the imagery of the sutra that this shower of flowers, which is falling like a rain throughout the universe, which the monks kept trying to brush off because they were sticking to the monks. Now just there, enjoying the rain of flowers. And out of that, as the Mahayana sutras will say in that Prajnaparamita way, what remained in the silence were the arguments were discontinued was the fragrance of the flowers. And so the deep bodhisattva wisdom was to perfume the cosmos with kindness and to forget contention. The mind does not know naturally to do this, when left to its own desserts, it has to reconnect with feeling. It has to reconnect with the heart, with experience. And only then can it know the Anahata Chakra has a direct resonance with the Saurastra Chakra, but the Ajna chakra can go very far afield and never know it. One has to watch that the last step of integration is acceptance. Acceptance and that acceptance has a very peculiar physics. Acceptance absorbs. And as absorption is complete, the resonance of perfection is released. The fragrance is there. We're getting into homilies. So more next week of a different nature.