Interval 5

This is the fifth interval, which means that the differential now takes the transform further and one simple way to understand it. A transformation is coming from form through a transform to a new form. The new form, not being integral but being differential, has a further capacity to distill. So it's a further transformation. It's a second transformation if you like. We're going to use Rumi Roommate today and in the Sufi cosmos. The way in which it moves is from blood to wine to light. Blood can transform into wine, but wine distills into light so that there are two different processes. A transformation is a movement from the integral to the differential. A distillation is a movement within the differential so that you have an attentiveness that has within it a super attentiveness. And this quality I'm going to read a couple of sentences from a recent study on Rumi, a biography by Franklin D Lewis. Sama sama is a difficult word to translate. It has usually been rendered as audition, but this sounds like a musical tryout. Spiritual concert as a translation has also been tried, but in the usage of Rumi it is much more than listening. Sama ideally involves the use of poems and music to focus the listener's concentration on God, and perhaps even induce a trance like state of contemplative ecstasy. When this happens, it often moves the listener to shake his arms and dance so that the Mevlevi order of dervishes or the whirling dervishes, and they are from Rumi. There is this quality of Rumi in his vision that distills into art that we need to sensitize ourselves to today. It's deeply related to the mysteriousness of nature and one of the most arcane things to appreciate is the beauty of a distilled form. And it's. Its affinity with the mysteriousness of nature. The distilled form. Like a spirit, like a spiritual person not being an integral form, finds further qualities of itself not its integral self, not its identity, but of its differential functioning capacity. Finds further resonance of itself in farther realms of freedom. And that that farthest realm of asymptotic freedom is God's presence, which is the cosmos, which is the mystery of nature, so that the spiritual person is distilled, double transformed away from the world, away from the world where one had one's physical origins, one's cultural matrix, one's symbolic explanations, but that that entire ecology of ritual world, mythic experience and symbolic explanations, all of that was transformed into vision and vision distilled into art so that this poem. My translation of one of Rumi's poems translates like this. Often as you like. Look into me. You will not recognize me. Through a hundred different natures. What you have seen of me. I've chosen such an abode beyond all the sights. So come, enter my eyes. And with this sight. Behold me. You in love with smiling lips. Me without lips. Smiling. You ahead fulfilled. Happy. Me a whirling spirit. Mary. So that it's not just a difference. It's not just a distinct difference of the same kind of things, but that Rumi is a transformed thing, quite different from things, and then distilled from that transform even further. How? How is this possible? How does the how does this capacity occur? It occurs because we could never learn it. So it would have had to occur eternally because there's no way to make that happen. Man can learn to transform, but he never knows the mystery of distillation. And so distillation as a transform of transforms is a gift, but not a gift as some thing or some process which separately can be given. But it is the condition of the real that as soon as you have earned and learned to transform from the world to your visionary consciousness, that visionary consciousness inherits the further capacity to distill into spirit, and that the surprise, the great surprise in that is that the spiritual person is not at all an entity, not at all a thing, but completely different is a differential form. And that that surprise has an affinity to a secret. A great secret. And the great secret is that the cosmos is God occurring without time and without limitations, so that it's not even an issue of being absorbed in an all that's still an integral, imaginative fantasy and is extraneous to actually what does occur. But what occurs has no limitations of existence, and yet has great complementarity to existence if it wants It's to show that in order to come to Rumi. And today's lecture is blood, wine, light. The blood of the heart can transform to the wine, the mind, but that carries over into a vision, which distills into spirit, into light. And in the Islamic Sufi world, one of the most precarious of all understandings is that there is such a thing which is not a thing, which is the perfect man, that the man, the perfect man is the man of light. And so there is a beautiful study Translated from the French. The man of light in Iranian Sufism. Henry Corbin. And in a section of this book, he comes to this kind of a couple of sentences where he's laying before the reader a series in a sequence, a category, and an order, which initially the mind takes to be something it can identify. And we have to hold it lightly, because it seems so powerful, as if it would help to explain. And we are constantly having to pinch ourselves and remind ourselves that we're not after explanations at all. All explanations are detours. Which knowledge loves because that's its nature. And that distinct from explanation, is understanding, because explanations love to proliferate into further explanations, whereas understanding likes to transform into wisdom and wisdom, being differential and not integral, has the capacity to self distill into. Sometimes in the Islamic world, the English word that would translate what they're saying is the ineffable. We sense the 18th century and English would use the term sublime. Wisdom finds a harmonic with the sublime. The cosmos is sublime. The spirit has this A wisdom which has been distilled out of understanding. If you get interested about a. About a quarter of a century ago, a man named Gadamer wrote a book called Truth and Method about explanation and understanding. And it's a good beginning where you can begin to acquaint yourself with the ins and outs of being able to discuss this issue. But that volume is a work of philosophy, and you have to put it back on the shelf after you've taken it off for a while and walk away. It's useful only as an instrument, as a tool for a moment and then should be put back. Here's what someone dealing with this Wrote a man named R.J. Howard in a book called The Three Faces of Hermeneutics. In an article entitled History and Hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur describes Gadamer's and Another Man Habermas's philosophies as the ascending and descending pathways of hermeneutic reflection and hermeneutic comes from the ancient root. Yes, the word Hermes is in there, but it means the ability to understand through language. How can I say it? The filiation of language opens mysteriously, so that we learn to read between the lines so that a hermeneutic is a class of understanding based on letting the explanations settle to the bottom and letting the understanding fill the wine bottle in age, right? So that when you decant it, you leave the explanations behind. You decant the understanding, but you use the understanding with something else to provide your meal, your nutrition, so that the ascending and descending pathways of hermeneutical reflection, that there is such a thing as building up to an understanding, and there is such a thing as taking that understanding and then applying it, the integral and the differential. He goes on to quote, he says the metaphor already suggests recurs. Paul recurs own perception that the two directions should really be the correlative ends of a single path. He contends, however, that neither Gadamer nor Habermas has found the way in which this complementarity might be worked out as a complementarity, which is true. Ricoeur at the University of Chicago for some years, was really a genius at applying a differential consciousness to the schemes and plans and tropes of thought, of thinking that it had come a long ways in sophisticated processes. And our friend Henry Corbin, a contemporary of Ricoeur, writes In the man of light in Iranian Sufism, because the man of light is a hidden figure in Rumi, which we would like to be able to appreciate. Coburn writes, so far we have been given the names of three organs or centers the soul, the intellect, and the heart. Two other centers, the spirit and the trance consciousness. In um, uh, in Arabic, sir. With two R's, sir. The trance consciousness. The spirit. Huh? It's like Hebrew for the for the divine spirit. It's a it's God's breath who rules The trans consciousness is the secret, so that there is a differential spectrum of freedom beyond the already distilled spectrum of the spiritual person, and that that further range is God's range. Carbon rights, all of these, this entire ecology forms a mysterious whole. The first three, the soul, the intellect, and the heart can have a special kind of modification the soul, which we'll get to not as a thing, but as an adventure of approaching the soul, can be made transparent. And the intellect can be made open. And when the soul is transparent and the intellect is open, it leaves a free range for the heart. And that the heart, immediately, because of the nature of the real, has its complementarity with the spirit, because there is no intermediary or what would be the classic intermediaries in the natural development are so refined that with transparency and openness, the heart immediately dances to the hidden music of the spirit. And in dancing with the hidden music of the spirit, the trans consciousness of God envelops both as they occur in their unity. So if there is such a thing not as a unity of reconciliation, but a unio mystica, there is a mystical wholeness which does not occur because of any process. We do, and does not occur for any process which we omit at all, has a very mysterious quality. So that he goes on and writes in this vein, this light. One of the qualities that obviates all of this enjoyment happening is in the individual. The individual. Better to put it for our concerns as individual ism. It's an ism. Individualism is an ideology. It's a. In the great sociologist Max Weber, it's a carrying form for paternalism, the way in which the individual is a reductive mental object which is mythically, sustained and ritually expressed. The rugged individual is largely an atavistic and not a heroic figure, and its organizations are built to further themselves rather than to develop anything else, and thus they are regressive and corrosive, and the more, the better that they work, the less that any reality It can occur. And so they become obscuring. And these this kind of individualism is not dependent on our particular species but is already there in primates. 100 million years ago. The alpha male of the monkey group is already that kind of individual. And the hunting troop of chimpanzees under one dominant alpha male pecking order is already in place. But before, um, before flowers ever came through in evolution, it's already there so that it goes back to such an not an ancient way, not even an archaic way, but one would have to say that this is primitive on the scale of even evolutionary development. But however old, that kind of alpha male paternalistic individualism is, it is briefly here vis a vis the rocks. Geologic time dwarfs it. This star system has been here 4.5 billion years, and the universe was 10 billion years old before this even began to condense. So that what Rumi is writing about is an affinity, not through identification, but an affinity through a harmony with the primordial reality which so outdistances the primitive that one sees through the instinctual realm as if it were just a veil. And it isn't just the instinctual realm because this culture is out of sync, or because this civilization has died, or even because this species now has learned to transcend its origins, it goes back to scales beyond belief. So that here's another poem, my translation of Rumi. And it reads like this, this time in entirety. Wretched in love. I am this time entirely cut from soundness. I am plucked out my heart with something else Living intellect, heart and mind. Root in bottom. Burning. Oh, men. Oh, men! Civility. No more this in me. Mad man's mind. Uncrossing. Through that my heart is going. Mad man here is weeping from my excitement. Fleeing. I with death go mingling into non-being. Flying today my very intellect repelled me so totally. So tried to scare me. As if I could not see. Delivered even from the bow of stars. From circulating blood free I licked many a bull beggarly greedily. Expedient. Am I confined in the world's prison? Else? Why in prison? Why me? Is it stolen? Anybody's property. Like infant in a womb. My nurtured blood. Born once ordinary. Born now I times many. So that the differential distilled spirit. Has changed. Has changed. Not from things, but has changed from a transform already. So that you get the sense of something moving from things which have existence To differential forms which do not depend upon existence for objectivity. And so they are things twice removed or things squared. And then the distillation from that is as if one moves to the higher order of the cubed, so that one has the existence and the transform and the distillation one has a thrice greatest quality. And the Iranian Sufism, the man of light is part of the Hermetic tradition. It's part of Hermes Trismegistus wisdom and goes back to a very, very long range of insight because of the influence of this kind of Mysticism after the 14th century. If you look at the way in which alchemists would always give the heritage of their Hermetic tradition, they would always include at the origin, not Hermes Trismegistus, but Zarathustra, so that Zoroaster, Zarathustra is the earliest and Hermes Trismegistus comes from that. Because of the influence of the Islamic Sufi perfuming of that tradition. Because the early West learned its Hermetic tradition not from antiquity but from Islam. The earliest alchemical treatises in the West are translations out of Arabic. Uh, Robert of Chester and time, of Robert Grosseteste and Roger bacon. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas, Re-acquisition of Aristotle for the Roman Catholic Church, is trying to fight to wrest Aristotle away from the Moslems, from Averroes, and before Averroes, from Avicenna. And it's Avicenna, the Iranian doctor from the nine hundreds, who brings into play the ecology of how all of this activity forms. He called it Avicenna's word, for it was translates. The English word would be a recital, a recital, a not a rehearsal, but a performance of an eternal Drama that involves music and voice. It is a visionary recital, and one of Cobain's great books is called Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. How is it that the dance, music, words, singing, presentation of this performance of a reoccurring drama of how we recover our originality by a double transform, a transformation once from existence into spirit, and then a distillation of spirit into eternity into God. This quality of mysticism, this quality of the Sufi outlook. By the time it comes to Rumi. Rumi lives in the 1200s and he though he was born in 1207, it wasn't until he was in his late 30s, maybe around 1245 1250, that he suddenly was shocked out of his deep understanding into the capacity to distill wisdom. And that event happened because he met a man and fell in love. No, it's not a homosexual thing. It is a mysterious alchemy of the real. It's so far goes beyond sexuality that sexuality itself would be but metaphorical to the deeper reality. Sexuality's attraction holds an existence, and as long as nature occurs naturally, it's there. But as soon as it's transformed, as soon as the body and the mind are transformed into spirit, a deeper quality comes into play. Whereas sexuality is the grain in the wood. The deeper, deeper than the grain in the wood is the matrix out of which existence itself emerged. And in alchemy it's called the prima materia, the primordial material which has no limit and can take any form. And that the shifting of gears from existence into a transformed form requires shifting the gear through a neutral spot of momentary reacquisition of the primary material. The material primordial. And that if you don't go back through that, then the transformation doesn't take. And what you have is a transposition. You have a phony. And most so-called transforms in this world are pseudo. They seem like something happened. And because it's so much better than the confusion of before, it seems like this is really important. And because somebody could teach that to millions of people easily, they become famous. Oh, man. Oh, those girls have 8 million followers. Wow. They must really be powerful. Well, not really at all. It's all extraneous. So that the quality of operative transform, even before you get to the distillation, is to learn that the soul's transformation is one of purity. Its invisibility is one of purity. One of the great authors in world spiritual heritage lived in the Midlands of England in the 14th century, in the 1300s, and came right on the heels of Rome. He was a contemporary of Chaucer, And they had learned by that time to not only appropriate the philosophic stuff. Aquinas is from about 100 years before Roger bacon, 100 years before from the 1200s. And by the 1300s. The appropriation was not just through bringing Aristotle away from the Arabs, or bringing alchemy back away from the Arabs and bringing it into the West, but that the instrumentation followed, so that in the 1300s you find, you find even with Chaucer. He writes the first great treatise on an astronomical instrument called the astrolabe, of an instrument that keeps track of cosmic movements, the stars, and that this is very powerful because it goes deeper than astrology. Astrology is a residence that comes down and affects the natural, whereas the astrolabe is an instrument that allows the mind to go into transcendence beyond the influence. Coming down back to the influences, going back to their origins, and one learns to keep track, to have the ratio of the movements according to a harmony of a scale that you learn to be able to listen to celestial music, knowing your horoscope doesn't do anything for increasing your appreciation of celestial music. And Rumi is all about that, because it is only through celestial music that you could dance in such a way that your physical body would become dizzy and your mental alignment with that body would be so confused as to resemble madness. And yet you would be perfectly clear as an unmoving pivot. And when Ezra Pound was looking for a translation of Confucius's Analects, the Lunyu, he used the phrase the wobbling pivot that the way to which to establish the axis of stability is not to orient yourself to the north and south poles of the Earth, or the north and south poles of oneself, but to put in the axis in terms of celestial spheres. And that when one puts in an axis like that, you get a different readout, that the readout has nothing to do with the mind. Great is the mind is. Its greatest achievement is to be able to organize itself so that it can step outside of itself, so that the mind learns that it can be quite intelligent, distinct from the brain, so that even when the brain dies, the mind doesn't die because it's not made of existence. Though the body is, and because the mind can be opened, the ultimate integration is the acceptance of openness. But so too, in the center of that mind is the soul. And the soul learns to no longer respond to the world, including the mind, So that the cell has the ability to be completely transparent, so that you have a transparent soul in the middle of an openness and a transparent soul, like the hole of the doughnut in the middle of the doughnut, which is complete openness. Follow once called it. He said, there is such a thing when realizing God of a silence within a silence, and it is in that doubled capacity where the pairs are no longer polarized, nor are they aligned, but they are in a complementation which has a motion of its own. And the motion of its own is that it has a dynamic which obviates time and a radiance which obviates space. There's a great painting by. A Jewish Sufi called a Hasid named Marc Chagall. The creation of man has the angel of the presence carrying man. And there's this big spiral of color and the radiance of all these rainbow lights coming out so that both occur, and that this is the visionary realm of carbon calls it the immaterial realm, which means images are transformed out of their image carrying capacity, and even transformed out of the integral that the mind is able to make of symbolically organizing images and carried into a realm where the organizing principle is not integral but differential, so that what one is interested in are proportions and not things, functions and not rituals. And this is an extraordinary thing. We're going to take a break. But I want to this is a translation by the great R.A. Nicholson. He was a teacher of A.J. Arberry, and he wrote this, translated this about 103 years ago. It was published by Cambridge University Press and or Oxford University Press in 1898. He Rumi in this poem is talking about the prophet, talking about Muhammad, and how Muhammad, when he first began to speak, he would not speak the language of this world, nor would he speak the language of Explanation of the mind of the mental. But he would speak spiritual words, and because he spoke spiritual words. Next to this palm tree, this palm tree grew to love the prophet so much that felt a part of him. And later on, when they built around this area where he habitually spoke, they built an area that eventually became a mosque, and they built a little lecture for him to seat at. When he first sat at the lectern and began to speak the palm, the pillar was so lonely for him that it split. The philosopher who disbelieves in the moaning pillar is a stranger to the senses of the saints. He says the influence of melancholia brings many fantasies into people's minds. Now this is idle fancy of his is but the reflection of his own wickedness and infidelity. He denies the existence of the devil, and at the same time is possessed by a devil. If thou hast not seen the devil, behold thyself. Without diabolic possession. There is no blueness in the forehead. Whosoever feels doubt in his heart is a secret philosopher. He may profess firm belief, but some time or other that philosophical Blayne vane will blacken his face for all to see. Take care, O ye faithful, that vane is in you. Within you is many an infinite World. Within you are the two and 70 sects that Islam was supposed to break up into. Eventually through history. Woe to you if one day all of them put forth their heads. The individual. Is an idea that is put into the mythic process of feeling toned experience. And for such a construct, the correct terminology is subjective. Subjective. Whereas the person is not subjective at all, but is objective but objective differentially so that there is an enormous difference. There is a difference of at least three orders between the subjective individual who lives in the culture, and a spiritually artistic person who is affine to the cosmos, so that the difference is not just a difference of apples and oranges, but is three orders removed, which is a lot. So that Rumi writes, sleep falls for the intellects cleansing which mad man is awake at night wondering day or night, mad belief existing. That thing he knows, he knows is holding wheels. Turn worlds day into the night. Generating so wheeling the mad man's spins his there abiding so eyes asleep, all eyed soul becoming no head but eyes eternal tablets reading bird or fish become. If madness is your desiring. Yet that does not stay while your sleeping. Become an imposter. So beloved at night is waking his problem solved as she her hair unlocking different. The mad man pregnant soul at her is looking. No wonder she becomes unto his gazing. If you can be told of Shamsie's world reigning to Breeze's sun. The bright world circumscribing. At 37 he met. Not met, but he saw. He instantly saw this madman from Tabraiz Shamsi Tabrizi. And instantly everything was different. And he spent several years, much to the chagrin of all the people who thought he was an intellectual. His family, who thought he was really the the patrician of the whole lineage. And he just, he he went completely into what they thought was madness. And eventually conspired together to get Shams Tabrizi away from him. And he disappeared. Who knows what happened to him? The relatives would never say. But Rumi was completely different. Not from the transform which he already had done, but from the distillation further out. In Apocalypse Now. The character played by Marlon Brando is described by the character played by Martin Sheen as having broken from the world and then broke from that. So one is really, as they used to say, in the 60s. Far out. This peculiar quality is that the person, the spiritual person, is an objective reality and not a subjectivity. And to the objective person. Somebody who is subjective is always just acting. They're always just in whatever episodes they're reliving. And the culture is writing the script for them and handing them the circumstances, and they're just going through the role. Whereas the spiritual person is like, the great actor can play those roles, but can play those roles with style. And if need be, can step off the stage and walk out of the theater. So it's an enormous difference, but the world cannot see the difference in kind, but only sees the difference in degree. And so the Sufi is a interesting character. But character is a better name for individual for that phenomenon. The carrier of the process of myth. The carrier of experience. Experience as the energy wave and its carrying through a medium. And this medium is existence. But the carrier wave through operating through existence. The carrier of that is the character. Our character and our character is not objective, but is always that kind of a process. And that kind of a process is a is a, we would call it today, a dynamic, a dynamic. So character has a dynamic and the carrier of that dynamic is the heart. And the heart carries that frequency through the blood. So that in ancient understanding, there was always the comportment towards existence in terms of a sacrificing blood to show that you recognize that your conserving of your blood is not more important than the mysteriousness out of which existence came, and the blood circulating supports that existence. It's an homage. It's a sacrificial homage. In fact, the word sacrifice means to make sacred. And it was a great transform to have bloodless Thus alters. To not have blood on the altar shows a great transformation of understanding. But there is a further distillation where you also don't have altars. You learn not to put bloody victims on the altar because God doesn't demand that. But you learn, finally, that you don't need altars at all. This is not necessary. For whom is it necessary? For what scale of process would it still be relevant? And so the quality here in Rumi is. That explanation must give way to understanding, and understanding has to give way to a deeper quality of surprise at secrets. So in his discourses, in addition to writing poetry, Rumi did discourses and he also did a series of little wisdom stories. A whole cycle of them and the discourses. The title in the original is Phi Phi, and it translates as in it what is in it? What is the name of this book in it? What is in it? This is how one of them begins. He's relating this. The master said. Someone said to Taj al-Din Khwab, These doctors of divinity come amongst us and deprive the people of their righteous beliefs, he answered, it is not the case that they come amongst us and deprive us of our beliefs. Otherwise, God forbid that they should be of us. For instance, suppose you have put a golden collar on a dog. You do not call it a hunting dog by reason of that collar. The quality of being a hunting dog is something specific in the animal. Its part of its character. Whether it wear a collar of gold or of wool, a man does not become a scholar by virtue of robe and turban. Scholarship is a virtue in his very essence. It's part of his character, and whether that virtue be clothed in tunic or overcoat makes no difference. Thus in the time of the prophet. God bless him and give him peace. The hypocrites sought to waylay the faith. So they used to put on the prayer robe in order to make those who imitated. The ritual slack in the way of religion by corrupting and watering it down. Reductive imitation. For that they could not connive until they made themselves out to be Moslems. Otherwise, if a Christian or Jew impugned the faith, how would people listen to. Him? And then there's a quoted quatrain. So woe to those that pray and are heedless of their prayers. To those who make, display and refuse charity. This is merely words. You have the light, but you do not have humanity. Seek after humanity. That is the true purpose. The rest is mere long windedness. What is secret in this is that it is not a one way street, but is a two way street that not only is it that there are those who are seeking find, but it's that which will be found is also seeking us. The seeking goes both ways, and because it goes both ways, it is in reality a complementarity, a whole already, and that it is a question. It's like the Elizabethan phrase that Shakespeare used to use all the time. It's not that you find something, but that it's well met that you meet so that the meeting is a distillation of the finding, which is already a transform of the searching. So that if you're searching all the time, you're not going to be able to find because you're into searching. So you have to articulate the searching so that there can be a space for finding. And in that finding that space, if it's transparent enough, not only is there a finding, but there is a meeting so that one becomes not only surprised that you found by not doing occasionally, but that someone else found you in the midst of that not doing. And Rumi says that this is the essence of God that God meets us secretly in our surprise, so that the whole thing about love falling in love is not falling in love like boy girl or girl girl man man. It is being surprised that that receptivity disclosed a meeting with God came to you and said, friend, so that the surprise was that you could be free of the world. And the secret is that you could be back in the world with God as your friend, not as true, but as a oneness that you carry, that you go with you everywhere and your friends of all the world. Kipling's phrase in Kim is his epithet, for Kim was a friend of all the world It's that quality. When Islam began, it was ferocious. In its first hundred years, it spread from Spain to the Indus River by force of arms. You believe or you die. And it wasn't until about 100 years later that the first transform of Islam came about. And it came about because of a woman. Her name was Rabaa Al-adawiya, and she died in about 801. And she lived in what today is the Basrah area of Iraq, Basra, down by the Persian Gulf at the end of the Euphrates River. And the curious thing about that Basra area at that time was that there was a sect of people who were influenced by a very special apocalyptic group of Jews. They were Jews who were around John the Baptist, who did not become Christians, but who carried the apocalyptic expectation of John the Baptist into several hundred years of living up in the northern part of the Euphrates River, where it arcs over the center of that was around Harran. Why did they go there? Because they were trying to go back to their origins. And Abraham's father, Terah, was from Haran. So they Figured we're living at the end of days. So if we go back to the origins of days, we will find some way of meeting. And so these people, called the Mandaeans, went for hundreds of years to the area of Harran to try to find what was the original mix out of which Abraham came. And the whole Jewish lineage receives its fount as a lineage, and that the first linchpin in that lineage was the covenant with God, and that the symbol, the synthesizing symbol, that is an amulet, held the first covenant together. It's Moses writes it in the Book of Genesis. He said, God made a covenant with Abraham, and he set his bow among the clouds as the sign thereof, so that the rainbow was the linchpin amulet of God's covenant with Abraham, and that begins Judaism as a heritage. Otherwise, Abraham's father is much more important in the Jewish sense, or his mother in the retrospective Jewish sense. Who was Abraham's mother? But no one asked that because it is not relevant. Because the rainbow censuring the original covenant between God and man, has this capacity to then begin something. And ever after, whenever there is trouble, one goes back to recover the original tone and resonance of that covenant. And that covenant was from the time of Abraham, about 1900 BC till the time of Jeremiah, about 600 BC, so it was good for 1300 years. And in all that time, those Mandaeans living as an apocalyptic sect from John the Baptist trying to recover their Judaism in Haran, were suddenly pushed by the Moslem invasions out of that area, and they were pushed into the godforsaken land, the swamps at the end of the Euphrates River. And that's where Basra was the last dry land. Everything beyond that are delta swamps, so that the Mandaeans became like Middle Eastern Creoles living in the swamps of Louisiana. And they learned there to cook in a special way. You cook Creole style, you cook with a little bit of magic, a little bit of bayou magic. It isn't just in the flavors, it's how you deliver it. So that the Mandaeans were the environment in which Rabaa Al-adawiya, this woman Sufi saint, grew up and she learned a very special way of delivering language. And her spiritual poetry is unbelievable. Her, her motto, which comes down, is like a saying in mystical Islam the neighbor first, then the house. Learn who you live with before you worry about where it is that you're living the neighbor first, then the house. So that one has to see in a special way and a young wise Man once. Was worried about other people's sin and how he tried his whole life not to live in sin and claim to be innocent of sin, and her reply to him on meeting him was, alas, my son, your existence is a sin without which none other can compare. You forgot that you already exist, which is already a condition of untruth vis a vis the mysteriousness of nature, so that you have to learn to undo that, and not by, but by. You have to transform. You like my language? That what is brought into play again. Is that the mystery of nature from which existence has emerged, is allowed to play freely so that it not stops with existence, not registers in the existentials, but goes through the existentials. And if it just went through the existentials, it would reverberate in the mythic level. So you have to make sure that the mythic level is not going to stop it, by appropriating it, by commandeering it. And then if it went through the ritual level, through existence, through the mythic level, it still has to deal with the symbol level with the mind. But if the mind is open, the only place where it could stop is the exact center of the mind and the soul. But if the soul is transparent, then the mystery of nature moves through all those levels, the entire ecology of integration, and emerges without any kind of diffraction as an energy wave from primordiality. So that one's vision then, is primordial. It's not conditioned by rituals, not conditioned by any myths, and not conditioned by any symbols. And when that happens, then the vision is not of this world, but is of whatever the mystery of nature is, and that's of God pure. So that one's visionary genesis of consciousness, out of which the artistic form of the person is made, is purely divine, so that the spiritual person emerges out of a vision, which is God's energy from the mystery of nature unchecked. It's like a a laser, a set up that usually works with mirrors. And if you don't have any mirrors to diffract it and and go into all kinds of things, you just have the pure light, then that pure light, what happens to it? It goes on. And the Sufi in Rumi's way, is looking for an opportunity to not to be and not to understand, but is looking for this kind of opportunity. My translation, drunk with secret winds. Secretly lute to flute to tambourine. Secretly Heart stealer hidden. O beloved, my faithfulness is required secretly years, for years in this drunkenness, and my soul has been weeping secretly I ask, where then are you? My heart? Heart replied, in the house secretly left was the sun, and right was the moon. Amid that the great gorgeous one secret life. Heaven's king sold this great one to me. I paid him her price secretly. Here darkness does not last because my glow is from all divinity. Secretly as fire I am and dead. What? Smoke? As a sign for calamities, secretly let our souls not be free from calamity. So they win from them gifts secretly. Shams Tabrizi cooking his stews. Sufis all invited secretly. It's been compared to the way in which Dante, once in his life glimpsed Beatrice and she became the spirit guide for his entire life. And when he wrote The Divine Comedy and finished with his guide Virgil for the Inferno and the Purgatorio, the first two thirds of it, the final third, the Paradiso, he had to give up his guide Virgil, and he found he met Beatrice across the river and her car, the wheels of which were like whirling dervish angelic beings, and there were eyes of God everywhere, and she smiled at him. Was it a question of erotic love? Beatrice? When Dante saw her, was nine years old, and he saw her once, and he saw her in a glance once. Because it's not dependent on time, it's not dependent on sociological relationship. It's not a physical thing. It is not a mental thing either. It's a ratio of the real. It's a mysterious laser beam from the mystery of nature that went all the way through and was never deflected by anything, and came out so that one had a moment of being precipitated as a differential form of a spiritual person without any complications whatsoever. Because this was the right ray. This was it. And so Shams Tabrizi was that for Rumi. And called himself a madman. Not because of being mad in his mind, but because he was objective in mysterious action. Because then one's ritual actions as the tone and timbre of existence. One's ritual actions then are not just transformed, but they're also distilled so that the Mevlevi order of the whirling dervishes, they will not to make the body dizzy or to make the mind uncoordinated, but they whirl so that the still pivot. Has a harmonic with the cosmos because their axis has shifted not from the polar. North and south of the world, or from the poles of the mind, or even from the personal poles. Of a differential consciousness in the cosmos, but have shifted to the kind of polar axis. Of God, where there is no north south whatsoever. How could you ever be dizzy? From what orientation are you? Not directly there. Next week we go into art.