Interval 4

This is interval four, which means that we have come through a cycle, and in the normal integral a cycle would continue and finish and begin again. But the cycle would begin again with a ratchet of an increment of the previous cycle. There's a very technical name for this kind of situation. I revise and modify it so that the cycle of integration does not complete and does not recycle. One of the earliest Attentive, conscious designs of learning was the ancient Chinese I Ching. The original I-Ching from 5000 years ago had a completed cycle that came around and recycled, and this was the teaching of Fuji. Fuji about 3000 BC, and the images for that particular cycle were based on a rainstorm in the mountains and the water collecting and the reflection of the mountain in the water and the wind. And all of the eight elements of the trigrams were there in the pictorial ecology of this rainstorm in the mountains. And that cycle was eternal in the sense that it applied Again and again in a cloned way, in a universal recycling, so that each cycle gained a periodicity with a previous cycle, and all cycles then became calibrated on a single integral. And about 2000 years after that, in China came a radical revolution that when we are a part of a natural cycle, we change the cycle. Our participation brings into play a different dimension from those operative purely in nature. There's something spiritual about us. There is something conscious about us. There's something using a mathematical language. There's something differential about us which does not recycle integrals. Integrals do not stay in a cloned repeat periodicity. Something else happens. And so the itching was radically revised about 1100 BC by the founders of a complete new dynasty. In fact, the new dynasty, the Zhou dynasty, was founded to show a different kind of cosmology that the old cosmology. They call it the cosmology of the former heaven. It was universe focused, whereas the new cosmology, the new I-Ching, was based on Giving a special conscious flavor so that natural cycles no longer just repeated, but that there was a new quality instead of repeating, there was a quality of return that one goes completely around in a cycle, and then it turns and it's turning created the position of a pivot. And so later on in Chinese designs for a way to look at a the largest cosmic pattern, they would characterize the royal city of the ruling conscious dynasty as the city where you have the pivot of the four quarters and in the four quarters. That pivot for man's design is a fifth pivot, which happens because Dao has come into play in such a way that it doesn't just reoccur as Dao all the time, but that it translates in a transform to Tay, and that Tay is a time limited spatial form that has a direction from humanity. That man participates with time and space. And so the I-Ching that comes down to us, if you look at the famous Bollingen Edition of the I-Ching published by Princeton University Press, they've carried the frontispiece since the first edition In 1950, and it reads not the king, but it reads the book of Job. And our understanding largely of the saying the last 3000 years has been the Joe version of the I Ching that recycle is not as important as return, and that the important thing about Tao is it's able to be returned to from Tae. That human endeavor, though it's finite and limited, is a legitimate transform from the eternal unlimited, and that the Tao can participate in our limited lives because we can return from our limited lives back into the Tao. And so, instead of having a world which would float on an eternal recycling, making our world an epiphenomenon that the true nature of phenomena. If Dao always just recycled, would be that anything built on it, like our world, would be a world of pure appearances and never be real. It would only be appearances. It would be not phenomenal, but epiphenomenal. Whereas the Book of Joe version of the I-Ching showed that Dao transforms so that our lives are real, that the realm of Tae is as real as the realm of Dao, that the one is as real as the zero. And so, for the first time in Zhou Dynasty China. You find a binary understanding of zeros and ones, which can be writ in all kinds of filigree and complications. And so you find a characterization that the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching make a series of return to the Dao by the cycle of the 64 not coming back, just simply to recycle, but that when one goes through the entire cycle, you have saturated in such a way that you are ready to return to the Dao, and that when a new cycle begins, it begins fresh from the Dao. Again, it's not a recycle, but is completely fresh new. So a very powerful idea here That our lives are not live spent in episodes of illusion in apparency, floating like some metaphysical fog over a mysterious, invisible deep dow. But that in fact and indeed Dow is transformed into real life. And thus we live in the realm of T, really? And that T is realistic, and that our finite forms are real. They're not epiphenomenon, but they are in fact phenomena. The poignancy of that discovery over 3000 years ago in China was not easily translatable into what we would understand today the world of technology. The only technology that received it at that time was diet and food. And a lot of Chinese medicine comes out of that. The sense of Daoist handling of nutrition in ancient times was extremely important. And because the realm of man made plants was just as important as the realm of nature's plants, the Chinese Daoist garden became as interesting as the wild mountains. And the di, the Daoist garden in China was largely based on growing the qualities Teas of herbs and plants that would aid in transformation. And so there was a biochemical alchemy in China very early on. There was no equivalent biochemical alchemy in the West until more than a thousand years later. The idea that there are essential plant elements, like rare cultivated herbals made into teas that aid in transforming. What do they transform? They do not just transform the body from ill health to health. They transform Dao into our body and freshen it from originality so that one's health is not something regained so much as just now emerged. So that one becomes healthy in the sense of just now real, rather than be returned back to a previous state of better health. And so this whole notion that instead of recycling something which would put the emphasis on a rare commodity that's diminishing in resort or reserve, that in fact the Dao is infinite and one can be refreshed in a new cycle indefinitely. The knack there is not to let nature just take its course, but to participate consciously in knowing exactly at the right point, the right moment, the right focus to raise the energy of consciousness so that a return occurs rather than just a recycle. And so our education now has come to the last lecture in the integral cycle. And this lecture, rather than just occurring in a natural way, further integrating our integrating pattern, which began with nature at the beginning of the year and then moved to a higher level of organization called ritual. Nature mysterious because it is so prolific, completely open ended. And that natural processes are so abundant and mysteriously complex. But the ritual level selects and in its selection builds A realm of tae, a realm of actuality that has emerged out of the Tao of nature, so that the tae of ritual comportment is a realistic action that really occurs. But it really occurs not in just the action reaction level of causality, but occurs as an emergence from the zero base, so that informed selective ritual action makes forms that are real because they have been transformed out of the zeros, the ones that are real because they have come out of the zeros, and thus yields a binary quality where the set of zero and one as a binary always works together in computer language, we call that a bit. You do not measure anything in computing power except by bits. It's always a set. In that sense. And so in a way, the Cheng of the Zhou dynasty was a biological computation of the way in which to return back to nature and reemerge, and that this return and reemerge happens simultaneously and could happen instantly, so that there was no time lost, and there was also no spatial distance. Hence there was no causality either in time or space. And the only hitch was that the human dimension, if it were not trained to be smooth. The human moment of spontaneity. Could be glitched by hesitation, by slovenly practice, by iffy application. And so the whole Daoist training was not emphasizing time or space, but always emphasizing the transform of consciousness. Make sure that that happens in a very smooth way. And so our education, taking a cue from this, even though it's 3000 years old, it checks out in the most sophisticated 21st century mathematics. This is a strategy of taking action not on a causal level, but on taking action as an emergence out of nature. And when we take it in that way, our ritual level naturally yields a higher integral than just ritual, than just action. That higher integral is the integral of a process that's very much like nature only has been filtered through the selectivity of ritual, and that other activity is the realm of myth, the realm of experience, the realm of feeling that our our feeling toned experience flow is very healthy when it has an affinity with the way that nature flows and works, so that there is a sense of not a secondary dao in mythic experience, in feeling toned. Intelligence. The word for it is sentience. Sentience doesn't have just a secondary quality of the Dao, but it has a parallel. It has a parallel so that constantly a higher integral will yield two different ways that can braid together. It can have parallel resonances, and it can have connections of interpenetration. And both of these, the connections and the parallels, the resonances and the dovetailing. Both of these intersections can participate simultaneously in restructuring by transformation. So that just as we can transform our actions, we can also transform our feelings. We can change our feelings from not just what they were to now what they are. But we can return back to a zero based mystery of nature Dao and reemerge with new rituals that are completely fresh and real for the first time. And the feeling integration, the sentient intelligence that comes out of that is not just a repaired feeling from before, but is absolutely new, is fresh, and so there is such a thing as reoccurring that the transform reoccurs and that we reoccur. And as we do this, we do not lose track Of a continuity. It's not a continuity of point by point causal sequence. It is a continuity of shared parallel flow. So that feeling toned experience in this kind of actuality. Is a kind of a music. And so the great understanding of this was that there is a way of having a musical sentience about what you do. And if what you do, your actions in life have come out of the mystery of nature in a purely transformative way, then nature, ritual, and myth will have a yet higher integral, a deeper, more powerful integral called symbols, and that the symbols will not be manufactured or made up, but that the symbols will occur out of the feeling tone, sentience, so that intelligence will be original. And one of the signs of original intelligence is that it's creative, it's fertile, it doesn't struggle to make things. It makes things spontaneously all the time. It's the mind of the maker. It's creative. And so the fertile symbolic mind is not the product of an ordered mentality, but is in the ecology of nature, ritual, mass and now symbol. And just as myth was a parallel to nature, symbol is a parallel to ritual And just as myth connected to ritual dovetailed to it, now myth has a double. Dovetailing a dovetails into action, into ritual, into what we do. But at the same time dovetails into symbols, into the mind. So that feeling tone, sentience simultaneously connects with pragmatic action forms of ritual and symbolic ideas of of intelligent form. Let's not even call it mental intelligent form. So that intelligence has forms which are parallel to the forms in nature that have emerged in ritual action. And we call that realm of ritual action where things have emerged and in R we call that realm existence. Existence so that when one is flowing in the ecology of the real integrally. The symbols in the mind will be as real as existential things in the world. And because they are parallel, they work together not on the basis of correspondence, but on the basis of being tuned. So that the key is not to have some kind of chart of correspondences to figure out. Well, now, are these mental thoughts going to have corresponding bridges to these physical things? You don't need no chart. That's bad English. Good meaning? Is that a famous song of the of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 60s by the Chambers Brothers. People get ready. The train of love is coming. You don't need no ticket. You just get on board. It's a quality where you do not look for an index to tell you where you are. Your sense of integral is not based on a plotting of correspondences, but on a participation of paralleling where symbols and rituals go together. Go back to the earlier rock songs of the 50s, Chuck Berry we go together like two straws in a Coke. It's a quality where they belong together because they constitute a parallel set, and that they occur in such a way that the one element, the ritual naturally has a higher power of integral in the symbol, because the symbol has a very curious relationship with the rituals. The symbol indexes them like a child having the capacities of the parents indexes the genetic lineage. And at the same time has the ability to mature and make things better in the sense of going back and improving the child, going back and buying a better house for the parents when they're able to. So that symbols can go back to rituals and improve them, because they all share a Transformational quality in the integral and wonderful complex as that is, it becomes absolutely spectacular to the point of marvelous infinity. It becomes, as they used to say in the in the high dharma in Mahayana China, when Zen Chan Buddhism first came out, they used to call it the glorious incomprehensible, because as wonderful as that integral cycle is, it becomes infinitely capable of variety when you add consciousness to it. Because consciousness is like a master transform. It doesn't just transform this parallel or this connection, even if it's a double connection, even if it's a double parallel, but it transforms the entire ecology of integration as well. That you can have a transformation, which is to use a term which has been overworked instead of a transformation. In a smaller gauge, you can have the entire gauge of the integral transformed. You can transform the all. What would the all transform into anything, including that beyond imagination. It's the state of cosmology now, by the beginning of the 21st century. The January 2001 issue of Scientific American has a cover, and it says on the cover, can the universe get any stranger and the words underneath it. Oh, yes. So that one adds a range of possibility that has no limitation whatsoever to the capacities of transformation in the integral. What stops this more than any other thing is not that nature is flawed. Not that rituals are wrong. It's usually having its roots because feeling toned. Experience is not full. It's not saturated. It's not full to the point of saturation, because symbols do not naturally mature until feeling tone. Sentience is full. One of the principles of Formation in the way in which nature works in phenomenal things. You cannot get salt crystals coming out of water until you super saturate the water solution, and then all by themselves, they come out. So that symbols that are part of a natural ecology come out of the fullness of feeling toned intelligence. And so it's a matter of exploring, feeling toned intelligence long enough to get mature in that. Then your ideas, then your symbols that come out of that maturity have a fertility. They have then a parallel to the way in which actions choreograph as episodes and make sets with the symbols. We would call such actions then no longer just pragmatic, but they would have a tone miss worked and misused for a couple of hundred years now, but the original understanding was these are now ceremonies, that a ceremony is a symbolically indexed ritual, choreographed action, and that those ceremonies are not just the dancing, but include the feathers and the turquoises and the silver. And one has symbolic elements that come in to index in a way so that the actions relate not only back to nature, but relate through the feeling toned experience of the music and its It's dance to the maturation of those symbols capable of making the big transform into vision, into consciousness. Why do we dance? We dance because we are happy. But when we are happy to an overflowing. Then comes realization on level of waking up, becoming conscious. A moment of waking up and vision when it occurs like this is not manufactured by mentality. Vision becomes a third horizon of process. It parallels nature's process and it also parallels experiences, process, myth so that nature, myth and vision flow together and they flow together like a triad, but not a triad as in some kind of triangle of geometric imagery, but a flow which has, we would say in material science, it has a laminar effect where each flow level sustains the next until the forms that are made out of that kind of nature myth, vision, laminar flow are extremely strong because they are made on the level of coming out of Dao, into de, into full sentient maturity, into symbolic realization, and transforming into conscious vision. Then one has a form which one never saw in nature. It has the strength of the supernatural or what used to be called the supernatural. It has magic. It has something. It has the little sparks of possibility radiating off it. So it is a magical implement or a magical moment, or someone has a charismatic quality that cannot be explained. Even when you total up all of the elements in the integral, there's something else that's there. That special magic is the source of beauty, and it has its own saturate maturity. And when beauty is matured, what comes out of that is truth, that the form of truth is like a further form from existence. A further form from symbolic mind. It's a third form that comes from the art of transforming the beautiful into the conscious real, which is always a truth. If you're Roman enough to want to ask still, what is truth? Truth is meaning accepted to the point of being able to live it personally. So regards Pontius Pilate. Remember it well. If you come back again, make a different decision. So we come today to Aristophanes birds. The saying in Greece in the fifth century. The fifth century Athens, which was the first time that the power of the human mind outstripped by far the capacity for people to feel outstripped, by far the capacity for people to relate it to rituals and ritual actions that within a couple of generations, the power of thought suddenly became so devastatingly capable that it simply outstripped all of the basis upon which it had developed. In one single generation. You went from villagers in the hills dancing goat songs to Aeschylus Prometheus Unbound, One Generation. It's like I was looking the other day at a book on Leni Riefenstahl, who's still alive. She was born in 1902, and she's still alive in 2000. In her lifetime, she went from horse and carriage to, um, interstellar photon driven spaceships. There are times when single lifetimes or a couple of regular lifetimes enclose a massive sociological shift. And we ourselves have lived through one of these. We have come in 2001 to a world which is so different from the world of 1902, as to be almost absurd, to think that they're related, and yet they are related, but in not a causal way. Our only relationship to the world of 1902 is to recalibrate that past so that it fits into the future of possibilities. We're not going to go back to an Edwardian London British Empire outlook ever. Even though we may be beautiful anglophiles and love London and love the Edwardian propriety, we're never going to do that again. So the relation of the past to the future has a particular tone, a particular quality, which is not causal. It is a special variety of the return. It isn't that history repeats itself until we know better. History never repeats itself, because in our second year of our education, we'll discover that history is a forth process Like nature. Like myth. And like vision. But just as vision is differential. And is so much more potent because it is the realm of infinite possibility. Applied to the integral. History is even a higher energy. It's like the process of myth is on the electron level, and the process of vision is on the muon level. History is on the Tao. Particle level is really powerful. And events that happen in history because A are so much more powerful than mere experience at this level. Myth is just mere experience. It even sets itself up as being antithetical to history until one understands it better. But it is even more powerful than the process of conscious vision. And so conscious history is the difficulty that was faced in Aristophanes time in our time also, because it is a power, it is a flow that is so charged with conscious energy, where time and space and event and process and parallel and resonance and connection and dovetailing. And all of this has been raised to such a level, not just complex, but complexly complex, exponentially so, so that there is no way to face it in any kind of simplified form. Nor can we use any previous forms as models for making a relationship. Historical problems cannot be faced on a tribal level. But historical problems also cannot be faced on a visionary level, which comes as a great, great embarrassment to many would be spiritual teachers. History is its own realm of complexity, and you have to deal with historical problems historically, and the only actors on that stage are consciously matured human beings. It isn't that great men make history, it's that history only responds to real human beings who are spiritually matured, not in the sense of integrating their minds alone, but of transforming from their minds to a differential form of person called the artist. The mature human being is an artist in their life. And as only that population of people who can do anything about historical problems. So once historical problems are brought into play, like making the capacity to making hydrogen bombs, you have to have men and women who are alive and mature on that level to deal with those elements. No amount of drumming is going to save you from 100 megatons. Only the conscious navigation of the historical circumstances so that that doesn't happen. Aristophanes Birds is one of the greatest dramas ever written. It came at the peak of Athenian power. They had just sent off the most powerful armada of their whole empire building a generation. And while it was sailing off towards Sicily, Aristophanes Birds was produced in Athens. And the next year the Athenians lost the sea battles of Sicily off Syracuse and never regained their power. The Peloponnesian War ended not with Sparta beating them, but by the Athenians beating themselves by overreaching on the basis of mental ideas of grandeur and power that had no basis whatsoever in nature or in the real ritual comportments that were there, or even in the mythic structures of feeling toned. Sentience. They literally went crazy as a society and took the projected power play as being fait accompli because they could imagine it. Therefore, it must be real. And of course, that's a sign of a psychosis. And so Aristophanes Birds is a medical report, in a way, on the psychotic state of Athenian society at the peak of its power. Let's take a break. Our presentations are always extempore because they're fresh from the Dow. They don't. They get notes, but I don't speak from the notes and don't use the notes. And yet it's interesting because when you come back and look at the notes. The first lecture in the symbols section, of which this is the interval symbols, won the title. For symbols one was meaning mind integral and the original quotation is from Max Planck, 1913. Einstein, widely known thanks to the principle of relativity, laid down in his famous paper on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies that was 1905, according to which the contradiction between Lorentz's otherwise extremely well proved theory of the stationary aether, that is, that the void was a physiological material called aether, that zero had the substance of a thing. Lawrence's otherwise extremely well proved theory of the stationary aether, and that movement takes place within this aether, and the experimentally verified fact that electrodynamic optical processes involving terrestrial bodies are independent of Earth's moment motion. Our movement on the Earth is not conditioned by the Earth's movement, or by an aether in any apparent way. The revolutionary consequences of this new conception of time which extend to the whole of physics. This is 1913. First of all. Also to mechanics and beyond that, deep into epistemology. Epistemic means. Knowledge. Knowing. Epistemology. The study of knowledge. Epistemology was one of the great branches of philosophy from the Greeks at this time. Knowledge. The minds. Knowledge. Only occurs in an integral, and its objectivity is obviated by vision. Until it's reformed in a new way. So Planck in 1913, one of the few people to really understand what the new physics was beginning to churn. All these were subsequently formulated by a mathematician, Minkowski Eugene Minkowski, so that there was such a thing after that as Minkowski time space in a way that gives the whole system of physics a new unified character, in that the dimension of time appears in it as completely equivalent with the three spatial dimensions. Its applications are, for the present, still very much at the limit of measurability, so that time and space become a space time. Actually, it's a time space time not being a fourth dimension, but a first. So that this space time In its equivalent table, its equivalence. You can use the term equanimity if you like, in the yoga of time space having an inner penetrable equivalence. They operate de facto as a set, as a symbolic set, and it is this symbolic set of space time that takes transformation. If you try to transform space independently of time, you get a different kind of result as well as different results. If you try to transform time by itself, you get something other than what you thought you were going to get. But time space as a set our transformable together. And this yields a quite a surprising quality to a reality that is that in an integral ecology, symmetry. Is generally the way in which structure holds and that symmetry in sets, time space sets is able to undergo a transformation so that instead of just having resonances, one is able to have such a thing as harmonies. A harmonic analysis is not dependent exclusively on integrals or the mind. It is something that is available for differential consciousness and integral mind together in a complementarity. You do not get a harmonic analysis in nature, but you do in conscious nature, and you can go a long way with that. It's one thing to understand how to play harmonies mythically in music. It's a whole other order to be able to compose harmonically. There's all the difference in the world between the tribal drummers and the rhythms of a Mozart sonata. It is extraordinary to realize that the Mozart sonata available for harmonic analysis, having a conscious differential woven into The integral. The feeling toned integrals introduces the ability to explore new ranges of feeling that would never have been there otherwise, if Mozart hadn't written such and such a quartet or quintet. The feeling toned exploration of those dimensions of person would not have ever been there. So that we add through the dimension of our consciousness, we add to the possibility of enriching nature beyond the natural. Not so much that it's supernatural or even supernatural. Those words are conditioned by an epiphenomenal assumption, which is simply not true. A Mozart harmony is just as real in the cosmos as any kind of sound, from a bubbling brook rocking the little rocks into a murmur. I don't know if you've been out in nature, and sometimes in a deep quiet, you will hear a fresh stream in the spring with its rocks all moving. It sounds like a murmuring of voices. It sounds like a mystical conversation going on, and you can go right up to it and it's still there. It is not an artifact of your imagination. It is not just a correspondence on a metaphorical basis, but it is a symbolic weaving of the way in which a conscious nature becomes magical and one discloses to oneself possibilities of the real, those magical conversations of that brook and you, in the solitude of the mountains, add to the possibilities of meaning. And that's why a cosmos is different from a universe. A universe must have its limitation to hold its form. And the mind at its largest projection. Creates empire, an empire that eventually can become construed as a sociological universe. The difficulty with that is it is never real. And so the problem that Athens faced in the time of Aristophanes, he was born about 450 BC. He came into maturity and he wrote the birds in 414 BC. The population of intellectual politicians, the sociologically alert and active population of Athens at that time about 200,000 people, very big city in the world at that time, got themselves embroiled into a sociological spaghetti based on the mind run wild with its powers and no checks from nature, no governance by any kind of ritual, and no respect for any kind of myth. And eventually, the kind of situation that came out is that you have in the play the birds Two men who are trying to flee from the complexity of life in Athens. It's full of lawsuits. It's full of people informing on each other politically. It's full of so-called sophists who would teach you higher wisdom in terms of training the mind to be more brilliant, more clever, more insightful than your neighbors, so that you can do them in and take them over and out of this complexity. Two Athenians, two older men, are trying to flee from that, and they're trying to find nature again by going back into the mountains, back into nature. And they have each of them a guide in the form of a bird. One of them has a guide in the form of a crow, and the other has a guide in the form of a bluejay. In English, sometimes translated as jackdaw. It's like a bluejay. So these sassy birds are the spiritual guides for these two men trying to flee the complex, empire ridden, litigation bound society of Athens. And they go into the wilderness, and they are told that these bird guides will take them to a special bird called the hoopoe, like a sandpiper has that kind of a beak and a crest. And this particular hoopoe was once a man, and has assumed the guise of a bird, and has gone to live with the birds, and they are looking for a place where they can get away from the complexities of Athenian life, from a mind gone wild in crunching up everything natural to make a pattern of pablum where you can make a profit and sue others. Um, yes. And that the political process has gotten to the point to where counting votes in these little urns that professional politicians carry around with them, that you can, for a price, have victory. All of this is so humorous, because it's so ingrained in these men that they, even fleeing from it, don't know any other way to be. They go to this HuffPo, this bird who was once a man. They go through all the complications of trying to figure out, well, where to go and what to do. And they finally realized, well, we're here. We should also live with the birds and become birds. And so they come out from the transformation. And in the translation of William Arrowsmith, not really a very good translation about 40 years ago, from a wonderful place that overdid the mind. He was at the University of Chicago for a while. The two Athenians pisthetaerus and actually pronounced Pistiros. Because you can't put the s and the th together in Greek they don't go. So all the newer translations have it pistiros instead of pistiros, which is a sort of a a way that academics had in the 19th century of confusing Greek. You can't have that form of verb in Greek, actually. The name Isidoros means able to convince one one's friends to be followers. He can recruit people to do what he would like to do, and his friend is ever hopeful. Euripides. He's always hopeful. He's he's hopeful that being hopeful is very hopeful. Yes. Now, you have to imagine that this stage is a huge circular stage. And one part of that circle, sort of like a lower crescent, is a space where the chorus of the comedy comes in. And in The birds it's 24 actors, all disguised as various kinds of flamboyant birds. And that's called the orchestra in Greek. And later on it became where the orchestra pit for musical instruments for the play that's going on. So the orchestra has this orchestra in Greek means dancing floor. It means the place where you dance so that the chorus comes out not just to sing or to say something. They come out to move together so that the primal function of a chorus in tragedy and comedy is to set the cadence of movement, because it's in the cadence of movement that the pragmatics, the action of what's done shows its progression, its plot, its mythos, so that the myth that comes out is not a myth, like somebody would tell a myth. It's the mythic experience that's unfolded because the movement of the characters is in this and that cadence. How they move sets the tone of how you will feel about it. And of course, in The Birds, with 24 members of the chorus all dressed as flamboyant birds, the cadence of their movement is a cacophony, so that the whole play is funny because they're trying to make sense and eventually empire out of a situation that is always phrased. It's always fuzzy, it's never comfortable, it's always a tangled hair. So they're trying to put ribbons into a hair that is always tangled, so that everything that they do to try and make forms that would make good sense if you're not following the action of the bird chorus and the orchestra, that it's never, ever going to work. And so it's slapstick in a way, and the actors are behind the circle, sort of like a little narrow crescent at the top of this circle. And this is where the actors are. And they are dressed in old comedy in such a way that they all wear very large, like papier maché phalluses, so that the ridiculousness of men trying to make sense out of their lives when the only thing is, is that they carry their vulgarity of blatant ness around with them all the time, all the time. So you have these two elements that make the thing totally ridiculous all the time. And in between these two, these this set of their ridiculousness and the ridiculous way in which it's unfolding, they try to play it straight. And that's where the comedy is. Westeros comes out and they're dressed as birds. They're supposed to be birds. And he says, well, here we are. And Euclides says, sweet gods. And all my days, I've never seen a sillier sight than you. Pizarro says. Yeah. What's so damn funny? You and those baby wings, they tickle me. You know what you look like, don't you? Pizarro says you look like an abstraction of a goose. Yeah, well, if you're supposed to be a blackbird, boy, somebody botched the job. You're more bear than bird. We made the choice to give these barbs their bite. Remember the poor birds in that Aeschylus play? And they give us a quotation from one of the great classical tragedies of Aeschylus. It's been lost, but the line is tragically birds shot with arrows made from their own feathers. And in Aeschylus play a really tragic denouement. But here just made ridiculous. Well, what's the next move? First, we'll give our city. In other words, they are carrying the urban disease. They can't just go to the birds. They want the birds to have their own city. And of course, such a city needs a mayor. And what better than these Athenian men? Well, first we'll give our city some highfalutin name. Then a special sacrifice to our new gods, a special sacrifice. Yummy. Now what? Name? And then they go through, and they finally come out with the name Cloud Cuckoo Land. Um. I think the Greek is nephelo koshigaya. I don't know if my pronunciation is is quite correct on that, but it literally means a a place where only cuckoos call. In other words, a crazy place. Crazyville. Crazyville. Cloud cuckoo land. And that cloud cuckoo land is going to be set in the air in between the earth where men are and the heavens where gods are. And the only way that gods get the sustenance from men is the smoke of their sacrifices. And since the sacrificial smoke has to go through the air, it has to go through cloud cuckoo land, and the birds will commandeer this smoke. The gods will not get any kind of sacrificial benefit, and men will not get any kind of benefit from the gods. They'll both have to deal with them. In other words, they'll be perfect middlemen for the whole ecology of life on the planet. And at the head will be these two Athenian men. And of course, as soon as they set up shop, all of these figures began showing up on the stage. They call for the sacrifice and says, well, we need a priest to make this sacrifice. And the priest comes in with a goat. And you have to realize that the theater that this is happening in is the theater of Dionysus in Athens, and that the Dionysian mythic origins is in the goat dances, out of which the whole form of Greek tragedy came, and also old comedy. It ends up that Isidoros throws the priest out and says, we don't need priests. I can sacrifice myself. And all of a sudden the next figure to show up is somebody who's heard that they've got a city going and that they need all kinds of services. We need many things here. Um, so a priest is thrown out, a poet comes in. He says, I heard and you need to have a poet to commemorate a city. And Pizarro says, how did you hear about this already? And the would be poet, he has long hair. He says, man, there are new cities all the time. We always are ready for for the new. The next guy that comes in is an oracle mongering prophet. He says, you know, it was always predicted if you read the scrolls, you you guys are fulfilling this prediction that we made and just take a look at these scrolls, you know, and and pretty soon the table is turned and Pistiros is throwing this oracle prophet out and he says, you didn't read our scrolls where we club you and we kick you, and you didn't realize that what a poor prophet you are. And so the next person that comes in all of a sudden is an Athenian inspector, where you set up this city. It has to be inspected. And of course, you know about inspections. And the next person to show up is a city planner who was a famous bogus astronomer. And he says, you have to get this all, you know, feng shui style. You have to get this according to. And the next person to show up is a decree selling lawyer. He says you have to be protected. There are a lot of laws and you're going to run into trouble. And we have already made decrees for any legal emergencies, and we can sell you these things. And so a whole range of people come in. And as it comes to a transformation, to a saturation point of the ridiculous old comedy had a thing called a parabasis. The parabasis was where the actors on the stage melt away and the chorus begins to turn directly towards the audience, and instead of the chorus being a part of the play that's going on, the chorus now addresses the audience as if they are a part of a play without a play. Outside of a play, not a play within a play, but the play. That's the context of the play. And in this parabasis, there are two in the birds. The first parabasis, at the end of which these two Athenians come out dressed as birds. But the second parabasis is very, very interesting. It has, um, I'm going to use this Oxford World's Classics translation made a couple of years ago. Seems a little bit better. And the second parabasis begins around lines. Um. 1058 and goes to 1117. This is the end of the second parabasis. Talking about how nests have been laid down. And we're going to have all these babies that will help us make money, and our homes are going to be as spacious as temples, and we're going to have all of this. And the birds say to the audience, if you should fail to vote for us, you better buy some caps of bronze like the ones those statues have. For if you leave yourselves exposed, retribution will be ours. We'll wait until your clothes are clean. Then we birds will guarantee we'll drop our crap all over you, so that the audience has been threatened by the chorus so that they're co-opted into the play. It's no longer just a play, but the play has a double dovetailing. The audience now has been incorporated by the chorus's threats into the context of the play, within which the chorus is also dovetailing with the actors, the men who have become birds and seek to make Cloudcuckooland an empire. They can't help it. They're bitten by the Empire bug, and eventually delegates come from all over to try and negotiate with them. The goddess Iris. The rainbow comes to alert them to the fact that tampering with the gods is not a good thing to do, that men will always have trouble with this. And of course, Pastora says we're birds, not men. We have no trouble with this whatsoever. In fact, the gods better watch out. You know They need all this devotion, and there'll be no more devotion unless you pay attention to us. And we get our devotion first. We get more than a commission. And eventually the gods realize that this is, um, a very real situation that they have to deal with. And so they send down, uh, Prometheus to negotiate with the birds. And Prometheus and Theros have a little conversation that runs like this. Prometheus comes in, skulking nervously with his cloak over his head and carrying a parasol. He's doubly covered because he doesn't want Zeus to know that he's down here doing this. He's supposed to be suffering on the rock, but Prometheus is the god of foresight, and he sees that this is a really serious problem. Somebody's got to come here, he says. Prometheus says, I really must make sure Zeus doesn't spot me. Where's Pistiros? And etc. says Crikey. What's this lark who's hiding there? And Prometheus gesturing eagerly. Please check behind me. Any gods to be seen? Not a single one. Who are you? Tell me, what's the time of day? The time? It's early afternoon. Who are you? Is it ox loosening hour or is it later? In other words, is the light dimming enough that I can come out from my cloak? I've had enough. It's crucial. Prometheus says. Well, what's Zeus doing? Is he clearing the sky? Is he drawing the clouds together for a lightning strike against me? Finally recognizes as my dear Prometheus. She lower your voice. Well, what's the matter? Keep quiet. Don't mention my name. You'll have me ruined if Zeus should spot me here. If you want to know the news from up above, please keep this parasol held above my head. To stop the gods from noticing me down here. And he says, ah, it's that Promethean brain of yours again. And then they go into this large, long, involved conversation and the chorus finally says it's gotten out of hand so that even Prometheus is not enough. Sneaking down and trying to make a deal with the birds, with men, become birds with men, become birds who have an empire called Cloudcuckooland. So the gods finally send their own ambassadors and they send three levels of God. They send Poseidon, who's the senior Olympian member of the delegation. They send um, uh, Heracles. Who's the great heroic figure? The man who becomes like a god. So they have Poseidon, and they have Heracles in the third member is a barbarian god named Tribulus who doesn't speak very good Greek. He's a real barbarian. He sort of stutters and utters, and he's from the really wilds of Asia minor. So Poseidon comes to Cloudcuckooland. He says, we've come as envoys. And Poseidon says to the Tribulus figure, he says, your cloaks all askew, adjusted. Drape it properly. You're an envoy from the gods. And, uh, Heracles says, I've told you at once I'd like to get my hands around the throat. Whoever is doing all this blocking of the gods. So Heracles is this tough wrestler type guy. The governor of Minnesota. Type guy. And Tribulus is sort of like a Steve Martin in disguise. And Poseidon is like one of these very dignified game show hosts who's always a treating you to clever strategies. They try to go through with this, and of course, nothing is able to sway. The birds decide that they have the best situation going. Pistiros decides that he is, since he's the leader of this most important empire in the universe. He should have a ceremonial bride. He should get the good girl after all. Don't leaders get the girl? And here. A messenger comes to him and says, hail three times happy feathered race of birds, come welcome your triumphant ruler home. He now draws near, resplendent more by far than any meteors streaming path of gold, or even the sun's own brilliant beam. Such is his radiance flashing out from him, he brings a bride whose beauty words can't tell. He wields a thunderbolt. Zeus's winged weapon, an indescribable fragrance, fills the vault of heaven, and breezes waft into the air. Light wreaths of incense fumes from where he moves. Here comes the man himself. Now let resound the sacred chant. The muses mouth inspires. And in comes in this wedding chariot. Eros and his princess still has these stupid little wings on. But he also is carrying a big, clumsy thunderbolt because he is a thunderbolt as a thing, as authority in the minds realm would have it. I mean, you have to have superpowers that push things around, right? What's the use of having differential superpowers and being able to see magical relationalities when you can't walk through walls, fly through the air, stop bullets with your hands and all of that so that the mind's idea of magic is to have authority over things. To have the command over elements. And the mind thinks that if you have that extended, then you have the Empire indeed, and the birds as classic Old comedy. Comedy itself comes from the Greek word, which links it up with Kosmos. Kosmos was a song of revelry. It's a kind of a song only sung when you are drunk. A kosmos. But what comes out of it also is the word for kosmos that the Kosmos different from the universe. The universe is a well ordered mental projection of everything arranged in the just empire. Whereas a kosmos is the lyric expression of a drunken universe that's capable of magical adventure, so that the Kosmos is different from the universe. The Kosmos does not have any causality. It does not have any time based sequence that is irreversible. It does not have the spatial extent of limitation, but has instead indefinite possibility. And of course, the Greek philosophic mind of the late four hundreds in Athens began to see that in an infinite universe, even zeros could be real, even voids could occur and yet not exist. Even the quality of rationality in terms of numbers could admit of possibilities of irrational numbers and whole dimensions of differential Geometry open, and it was like a yawning abyss of too much challenge for a limited mentality. The speaker who came after Aristophanes Birds, who challenged that order was Socrates. And within about 15 years of the birds. Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenian state. They had lost the naval battle outside of Sicily. They'd seen their dreams of empire vanish. They had prorated their sense of power on the basis of mental certainty, and they had engendered an irrationality in themselves in response that centered around no longer being able to believe in the gods of the state. In the mythological figures that had been blurred by such productions as the birds. Zeus was no longer a feared god, and yet he was the official god of the state. The eagle of Zeus was still carried on all urban official banners, and this was the ultimate power mythologically in the political, in the social situation. And yet, as Socrates pointed out again and again, in the form of the reporting creatively that Plato did in writing his dialogues of the conversations of Socrates, he showed that the mind capable of believing this was a mind that did not know its own origins, Did not understand that its limitations were projections that had no bearing other than as Epiphenomenal appearances. And that the truth was, is that the mind in its actuality did not ever reach certainty, but reached a point of transform, and that the ultimate truth of the mind at its perfection is that it changes into something else. It changes into the butterfly of a harmonic, infinite possibility of conscious life. And so the discovery that the psyche is born not only out of the existence of the material realm from nature, but that the psyche also is born again out of the existential stuff of the mind mature to the point of rebirthing. We're going to have a special lecture next week. It's the 53rd lecture for the year, and it will be the first time that I'll give an overview of the entire structure of the education, what it is and how it works, and how it got to be that way. And it'll be the first time that I've ever shown some of the powerful capacities that come from this. This is an education that has never been seen before on this planet. Hope to see some of you next week.