Interval 8

We come to interval eight, which means that this two year cycle has come to what? In an instruction would be the closure. And if it were a mental form, if it would be an idea expressed, it would mean that we would have come to a coda in the development and the piece would be over. But this is an education in the ancient mode. And the ancient education was not to be instructed, but to have a calibration for life, for living. That education was about the ability for life to enrich itself. And so rather than being a closure, next week will be the beginning of a different cycle. Nature one. But this next cycle will be more complex. It'll be a richer stew. I have always tried to present the material week by week, so that the phases could be apparent to someone who is following this. Now I'll begin to orchestrate a different way. Take a lesson from Matisse and a few other artists like that, and make it filled with an enriching overlay that hasn't been seen before. And because of this, I'll change the name of the education again. It's been called differential consciousness. This 202 203 cycle will be called Stellar Civilization Education. And it's meant to be sufficient to take a population into inhabiting an entire star system quite easily. This involves a double transform. The way in which life of our kind has evolved on this planet. And it goes back before even the primate species came. It goes back even several hundred million years ago to when dinosaurs and other creatures used to flock together and had proto bird like communities and ways of regarding their lives and their communities. All of that comes through to us as a culture. It comes to us as a way to live communally, within a landscape, in a seasonal cycle, and reproduce and nourish and continue. That cultural origin needs to be transformed in order for a civilization to be possible. And we have always had trouble with civilization because no other creatures create a civilization other than ourselves. And so we have never had a comparison outside of our species. And though someone like Arnold Toynbee did a study of history that was a comparison of, as he said, 27 different civilizations, they are all siblings, more or less of just a few great prototypes, and none of them are non-human. But one of the great advantages over the last 100 years is that our kind has had the ability to not only imagine, but to transform imagination into a visionary quest. And science fiction has provided us many kinds of Civilizations of different species quite different from us. And so the next cycle will factor in a comparison of civilizations from many different kinds of species. And not just that they are imaginary, but like in higher mathematics, imaginary numbers can be worked with with arithmetical functions just as well. And what you come out with is a vision which is refinable into art, and an art which is refinable into science. So the next series will be, to put it in popular language, will be the whole course appetizers, entrees with a plural, all the condiments and the desserts, from soup to nuts to the liqueurs. This time, the closure of this particular cycle comes to the eighth interval, and the intervals are always the spaces in between that are necessary because they accept something else. The prayer is built on mutual intervals, accepting each other as much as mutual fingers accepting each other. And in ancient India, it wasn't so much clasping the articulate intervals that we in the West have preferred since our discovery of the octave some 5000 years ago, the ancient India was a single interval that was brought together, and that offering that single interval had as its form. Because always with an interval, always with a background, there is a form. The form was always that of oneness. And in ancient India the oneness of all was the form that was respected from time, so ancient that they are not even counted in millennia. If you look at the place in the landscape of India, its ancient name was Bharat. If you look at ancient Bharat, its landforms are distinguished by rivers that come out of the Himalaya and those rivers that curl in a great fan out of the Himalaya and come down into the Indian plains. Those rivers have a swept confluence, increasingly confluent together, so that the rivers are like feathers that come together finally to a single river, a single shaft, as it were, of the water of the Himalayas, through all the different rivers finally factoring together, and so that the Ganges becomes the only great river sweeping down in this group. And at that place where the Ganges inherits the dynamic of the entire Himalaya is where Benares is. Benares is the city of light. It's the city of the Buddha, the historical Buddha. And just south across the Ganges, not very far as Bodhgaya, where the Bodhi tree is. This bookstore, this place where we are is named for that. For that tree in Bodhgaya. The tree that does not collect all. But that differentiates the earth into the multiplicity of the branches, so that the tree is the recursive complementarity to the rivers in ancient India. So there is such a thing as, as the differential tree, and there is such a thing as the integral streams. Two of the greatest rivers that come down in this pattern. One of them, of course, is the Ganges, which continues and goes all the way through and finally joins the confluence of another great sweep of rivers integrated by the Brahmaputra. And in addition to the Ganges fan and the Brahmaputra, there is a further western group of rivers that cluster around the Indus. Now the Indus and the Brahmaputra that begin, oddly enough, begin in a single place in behind the Himalaya range. They begin at a place called Lake Manasarovar and Lake Mantasoa is positioned, as they would say in ancient India, positioned by the gods underneath one of the most impressive peaks in the world. It's called Mount Kailas. Mount Kailas, about 25,000ft. But it's massive. It's like Mount Rainier. It's like Tacoma in northern Washington state. It is a not a pointed peak, but it is a massive buttress. And Kailas is shaped like this massive snow encrusted piling of bulk so that it reflects perfectly in Lake Manasarovar. And when Lake Mantasoa is calm, you can see the beginnings of all the major rivers of India in one place, so that the Indian tradition, sage tradition was that there is a place within us where we see the mountainous beauty of God reflected in the quiet of the waters of our spirit. And out of that flow the rivers of our life. Two of those great rivers in the Ganges fan, one of them being the Ganges, the other being a great river called the Yamuna. And where the Yamuna and the Ganges come together is the place where Delhi is located, the capital of India. Still to this day and in ancient times, before there was a Delhi, even before there was an old Delhi, that confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna had a field. And the field was called Kurukshetra. And on that field, the greatest battle in the Indian universe took place. And that battle, because it was called the Great War of Bharat, is called the Mahabharata. And the story of the Mahabharata, of this great war that took place there at Kurukshetra, I think in New Delhi, that you can still go and find Kurukshetra. No one will build on it ever, because it is the spot where the Bhagavad Gita took place. And in this Kurukshetra, this field of battle, it's not something that one could ever see directly. You could never with perception look and just see it. What you would see is a field. And so the great Indian author Sage Vyasa, his name in ancient Sanskrit is sort of cognate with Vayu, the wind. Vyasa was one of the great mystic poets of all time, and he wrote the Mahabharata. He wrote the Bhagavad Gita. He wrote the Mahabharata in a series of 18 sections called Pahvants. And in the sixth section of the Mahabharata, called the Bhishma Parva, is where the Bhagavad Gita takes place, and the Bhagavad Gita has a series of 18 chapters likewise, so it is a distillation of the entire Mahabharata into one little indexing file, as it were, for the entirety of this. Peter Brookes made a great production of the Mahabharata. There is a six hour film made of it, and the third of the videos has an illustration from the Bhagavad Gita on the cover. Krishna and Arjuna in the chariot on Kurukshetra talking it over. What do they talk over? Arjuna is the greatest warrior of his day. Krishna is the great divine messenger tutor. He is the tutorial spirit for man. He is the guardian angel for man's awakening. And what would he talk about with the greatest warrior of his day? He would talk to Arjuna about why he fears to begin the battle. Because at the moment that the Bhagavad Gita takes place, the Mahabharata has drummed up to the point to where the two opposing armies are ready to lunge at each other. And in those days, thousands of years ago, armies were massed not just to fight, but to threaten and to break the resolve of the opposing side, to fight. And so they would not just yell at each other as ordinary men would do, but because this was a yoga to shatter confidence, to shatter the spirit of the opposing person, not just to kung fu Hong Kong fighters saying ah before they lunge. But in those days there was a science to the whole thing. And so there was a deep earthquake rumble that would build through instruments and would raise to a shrill shriek that was always sounded by a conch shell, big huge chambered nautilus, conch shell blown by someone who could have blown a tuba, and the shrill shriek of a conch shell amid the rumbling din was meant to break the last bit of courage. And because both sides were doing this at the same time, the twin conch shells sounded at the same time, and the only person to hear both conch shells at the same time was Arjuna, whose chariot had been driven by his charioteer out into the middle of Kurukshetra. Because he was like a hot dog warrior, he went out to show the other side. If I have to fight you alone, I'm here, as they used to say, in bar fights 50 years ago. Here's my chest. Climb on. When Arjuna heard both conch shells, he became afraid. Not just afraid like a man is afraid. Not afraid like a warrior is afraid. He became afraid as an existential, mentally alert being. He became afraid of death. He became afraid of oblivion. And the fear was so deep that he paused. He petrified. He froze. And in that frozen nanosecond, that split second, that picosecond, the entire Bhagavad Gita takes place so that it is lifted out of time and was not visible in time. It happened so quickly you couldn't even snap your fingers. But Vyasa is not looking with normal eyes. He's not looking. Even with mental eyes, he's looking with yogic eyes. And the protagonist in the Mahabharata who's doing the looking is a sage named Sanjaya. And Sanjaya is the professional companion. Wisdom companion to the king. But the king Dhritarashtra is blind. He cannot see. And so he must have the battle described for him. And because he is blind, he must see the battle in his mind. And so Sanjaya tempers all of his language so that his imagery is not referential to perception, so that what he speaks, he paints a picture not for eyesight, but he picture Which paints a picture for mine site so that only the mind will see this. That the mind is much quicker than the eyes, and as the eye has its perceptual pace and habits, the mind has its perceptual pace, which is much faster, much, much faster. And so Sanjaya is the narrator of the Bhagavad Gita, courtesy of Vyasa. And we get to read it, as it were, looking over the shoulder of Deidara's mind. There are many editions of the Gita, and in English some of them are extraordinarily famous. This 1 in 2 volumes by Franklin Edgerton, published by Harvard University Press. In the early 1940s he was Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology in Yale University. About as important as you can get. And yet Sanjaya would never make the kinds of mistakes that are made here. And this is one of the best translations. The pecking order goes downhill steeply from here. On page 23 of his commentary, preparing the reader to appreciate the Bhagavad Gita, Edgerton has this to say about a term later Hindu religion and philosophies call this state by the well known name Nirvana. This means extinction, originally of a flame or a fire, then of the flames of desire as the cause of continued rebirth. Some later sects, such as the Buddhists, have been represented as meaning by it. Also literal extinction of life of existence in any form, but with more than doubtful propriety. This simply is not true. In ancient Sanskrit, when one would talk of extinction in the way Professor Edgerton talks about the term was moksha, not nirvana. He goes on to talk about how nirvana is a state of ecstasy, and ecstasy has nothing to do with Nirvana, just as it has nothing to do with extinction. There's a great deal of difficulty in appreciating something like the Bhagavad Gita. It takes an appreciation of the Mahabharata. It takes an appreciation of the ancient Indian wisdom tradition, which means an appreciation of yoga. And without that, none of this is visible except as a mental representation of what your eyes are looking to see. And all of that is irrelevant to the Bhagavad Gita. It has nothing to do with it at all. So that reading the Gita is one of the rarest occurrences there can be. The Gita is a distillation into a liquor of a field of distillations that are already very sophisticated and very subtle, and that the further ground, the further literature out of which those distillations have come were known as the Vedas and Vedic India goes back to very, very ancient times. The core of ancient Vedic India, the Rig Veda, goes back in terms of its written form to about 1500 BC, about 3500 years ago. But the Rig Veda, if one looks at its ten books, is not written by one person, but is composed by a number of poet seers, poet sages, angiras and many others. Yajnavalkya. Many others. So that Vyasa, who wrote the Mahabharata, who wrote the Bhagavad Gita, is in a harmonic appreciative resonance with the ancient Vedic sages themselves, but those ancient Vedic sages who made the Rigveda in its ten books made that over a pattern of many thousands of years, a ground of many thousands of years, where the various cultures of completely different landscapes overlapped and interpenetrated, so that there was a kind of a quilted pattern. And when one goes to read the Rigveda in such a way that it's consistent, that it has a logical consistency, it is not possible to do so on the basis of ordinary understanding. And so the Rigveda, for ritual purposes, in order to make Vedic civilization from India, had to have the Rig Veda combed in a new way, and it was combed in several ways. One of the great ways they called it the Atharva Veda. Instead of just the Rig Veda that the Rig Veda was reorganized, combed, and made proper so that one could have a ceremonial cycle throughout the year, throughout all the different land forms of India, and that everyone would have a common denominator of shared festivals, of shared ceremonies, of ritual modulation, to permit an understanding between different pockets of India in terms of landscape, different cultural propensities, in terms of tradition, to understand each other. And so the civilization of ancient India came out of this. There was beautiful. Mystic boy, born in 1885, who described it in his first volume of A History of Indian Philosophy. He records the old civilization of India was a concrete unity of many sided developments in art, architecture, literature, religion, morals and science, so far as it was understood in those days. But the most important achievement of Indian thought was philosophy. It was regarded as the goal of all the highest practical and theoretical activities, and it indicated the point of unity amidst all the apparent diversities which the complex growth of culture over a vast area inhabited by different people produced. This complex quilted overlay, which had been arranged in a ritual way to be like a shared latticework, was a great triumph of Vedic civilization. But as civilization will do, rather than a culture, a culture is always satisfied with the circle. A civilization is never satisfied with a circle, but seeks to go in a kind of a spiral, always widening a little bit, always opening it out so that the symbol of a culture is the integrity of its circle of ritual. A civilization's integrity is the outward spiral, like a nautilus form of the conch shell, so that war and civilization have a seeming kind of similarity to the processes of their development. And this is one reason for the great trouble that civilization has been for human beings is the inability to distinguish the structural necessity for civilization from the compelling factors of war. They seem to overlap so many times, in so many ways, that war seems to be an endemic problem with civilization, that civilized men and women eventually go to war. And so the theme of the Mahabharata is this theme, because the civilization of India at the time had achieved such a wide sophistication that the war that was produced was the greatest war of all. And of course, the scholars first looking at the Mahabharata, the Western scholars who began to first take it seriously as a work of literature were those British in India from the 17th century on, the British East India Company was operative already in the beginnings in just post-elizabethan times. So it was the British scholars who looked first at the Mahabharata, and what they saw was an Indian version of the Iliad, that somehow this was a key to the way in which cognate civilizations developed. The Greeks with their Iliad and India with its Mahabharata, and towards the end of the 19th century, around 1885, when Goodall Surendranath Dasgupta was born in East Bengal, one of the great literatures of British India wrote a volume called The Indian Iliad, and it was a precis in one volume of the Mahabharata, and that man was the father of Rudyard Kipling. But in the 19th century, not to be outdone, the German professors said The British have it all wrong because they're looking at all of these similarities of form, but they don't know the language properly. That the study of Sanskrit is the key, because the language carries the key to unfolding a literature, and you can't read something unless you know its language. And so Sanskrit became a struggle between the British and the German scholars in the 19th century. And oddly enough, there was a traitor in the German camp who went over to England, and he became probably the greatest Sanskrit scholar of the 19th century. His name was Max Mueller. And Max Mueller actually went so far it just disgusted German scholars. He actually married a British girl. So it was a real traitor. And Max Mueller saw that it wasn't just enough to have Sanskrit as a language, that you had to understand the ways in which Indian philosophy changed, used and changed Sanskrit as a language. Because the literary forms of Sanskrit, all literature in Sanskrit as a whole, would be called by the ancient term kavya. And one of the areas of study that you would have in traditional learning in India was to study kavya along with grammar, the grammar of Sanskrit. And that you would study along with those the Vedas, and you would study along with those. The medical application, the Ayurveda and these would all be cognate studies. And to be educated you had to have all of these. The focus of these, though, were to be masterful in the sense that you understood the six major forms of the Indian philosophic tradition. And so Max Muller wrote a book on the six philosophies of ancient India, and it was one of those volumes that was so penetrative that a man who became a great sage in the 20th century rewrote Mueller's study. His name was Heinrich Zimmer, and he wrote Six Philosophies of India, and it became one of the archetypal philosophic publications in the 20th century. Zimmer was the initial editor and chooser for the Bollingen Series. He died of a cold in his early 50s in New York City in 1943, but his book on the six philosophies of India was always held to be the great study of the way in which the patterns of Indian thought made a confluence so that one could understand the Sanskrit language, the different traditions and their overlay, and understand from that the appreciation of the Mahabharata and of its pair, just as the Iliad had a pair with the Odyssey. The Mahabharata had a pair with the Ramayana, and that these two great epics of India were like the two great epics in Greece, and that therefore India and Greece had a sharable kind of civilization development. And a great deal was made from Max Mueller's time on that. Indeed, there were parallels between ancient Greece and ancient India. For instance, in Plato, one of the themes that comes out in the dialogue, called the Phaedrus, has themes developed in India. In one of the Upanishads, the very same theme is given in the very same way, and the theme in the. Upanishad is that of the chariot and the charioteer and the driver. The simile, or by stringing the language of the simile together and its total story. The myth, the myth of the chariot, the myth of the charioteer. And of course, the Bhagavad Gita is very much like that Upanishadic use of it, like Plato's Phaedrus and Phaedrus use of it, except that the Bhagavad Gita is different from the Upanishadic version of it. In the Upanishadic version, you have indeed a sense that there is a distillation from Vedic ritual and Vedic imagery into a refined integral that occurs for the mind Symbolically so that the Upanishads were different from the Vedas. The Vedas had everything to do with ritual and myth, and the Upanishads had everything to do with the way in which myth is brought into the mind, into symbols, so that the Upanishads were a distillation of the Vedas, and the Bhagavad Gita was a second distillation of the Upanishads, so that you had a very complex kind of an ecology going on. You had a landscape and a history that was varied and patchy and ancient back tens of thousands of years, and that there were so many crisscrosses that this ancient tradition was always that of a complex weaving of different kinds of fibers together, so that you had a mixed medium fabric. But even with that, there was a moment of crisis in the past at a certain place where two completely different confluences came together. One was a massive confluence of oneness, and the other was a subtle filigree of manyness, and that you had this one in many confluence together. And how would you mitigate? How would you give a common denominator to this kind of complexity and this kind of unity? And for the ancient Indian sages, their resolve was centered around yoga. We're used to thinking of yoga as being like a good health thing that you do in gyms, or that you go to some kind of yogic place to do a little bit more highfalutin yoga. And somehow that all of this is workable in just normal, ordinary life. But Dasgupta in his initial reference to yoga. This is Yoga as Philosophy and Religion, published in London in 1924. He says the term yoga, according to Patanjali's definition, means the final annihilation, not moksha. But the word in ancient Sanskrit was nirodha nirodha, To the final annihilation of all the mental states. The mental states here are. Chitty. Chitty Chitty normally means mind, but it really means in ancient India. It means thought. For instance, the thought of enlightenment in ancient Buddhism was bodhicitta, so that the instant of thought is a cheetah. And in the nuclear physics of yoga and ancient India, there were sages who were as refined as nuclear physicists. The structure of a moment of thought of a single cheetah was always picked out to be 16, and had 16 parts. Eight parts of which could always be distinguished, and eight parts of which never could be distinguished and always occurred. The musical. Colloquial term is a trill, so that half of a moment of thought was a trill, was never heard distinctly, but was always heard as like a hum, and the other eight parts were distinct. But in order to resolve them, you had to have a background of total stillness for the mind to see a single atom of thought, a single chitta, and for the mind to be stilled. To this extent, not only did you see a single moment of thought, but at the very same time you saw the appearance of a kind of a mount kilos of the cosmos, and that you realize that it wasn't just that there was such a thing in the ancient Bhagavad Gita language. There wasn't just such a thing as the Atman, but wherever Atman was distinct enough to be seen, Brahman was also massive enough to be likewise observed, so that at the moment of precision, where one would come to oneself atomically, one thought moment at a time, God would be there massively, and that it was this confluence of Atman, of the one and the Brahman of the all. Not just the many, but many, many, in fact, as many, many as you want as the all, and that the one and the all occurred together Always occurred in a period quality, and that that Paradise of Brahman and Atman set up a very peculiar relationship between the pair of them. It was a relationship of the subtlest of all resonances that their resonance, because it was like the polar opposites of one and infinity, the only resonance by which they could have a relationship at all was through nothingness, and out of that was born in India. The idea of zero. The idea of emptiness pure so that it could not receive any designation whatsoever. And because it couldn't receive any designation, It could never be talked about directly, but could only be talked about in terms of preparing one for the moment where your oneness and your wholeness occurred together for you to livingly recognize the zero relationality that one and all are related, not by any particular thing, but by nothing exactly whatsoever. So that wisdom, like life, was an act of love and was a gift, that there is no cause for it anywhere in the universe, and that the only reason that it occurs is that it is a gift, is a divine gift that God and man have any relationship at all is just simply a gift. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Let's come back to this interesting issue the correlation of war and civilization, the inability of discursive civilizations to tell the difference between power and reality. It's been a chronic problem and one which a stellar civilization must solve. And this kind of presentation is ground on which that kind of resolution can be mooted. Let's come back to the inner technicalities of Sanskrit, of Indian philosophy. Let's understand an extraordinary issue. It takes someone as refined as Surendranath Dasgupta to bring the issue out. You won't find it in Max Muller's volume. You won't find it in Heinrich Zimmer's volume. You won't even find it. In a discussion by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and his great two volume History of Indian Philosophy. It's hardly discussed in Dasgupta's great five volume History of Indian Philosophy, but it forms a special appendix in his book on yoga. It was essential for a Raja Yogi to understand this, and it is something that someone versed in Hatha yoga does not know about, and that someone who practices a mantra yoga has no inkling of a karma. Yogi usually doesn't recognize it when it occurs. But a Raja Yogi must know this. The appendix, page 179 and 180, in his book on yoga is called spot vada. Vada means away, a path away. A vada is what we would call now. Thanks to Feynman, Richard Feynman. It is a path. Integral is like all those rivers that have a confluence, and increasing integral makes the confluence more and more powerful, so that where all the confluences come together, you get a single thrust and that single thrust. In normal Western philosophic fair, one would say that this is the necessary and sufficient causality. That there has to be something which carries the efficiency of the cause. And in Indian thought it usually is very much in evidence. But one has to understand that this is a stumbling block. In Sanskrit, the word for cause, Karana is similar to karma, but obviously different. Karana actually has a poetic inflection when it's pronounced in a certain way. It seems very much alliterative with Karuna. Karuna is the the lovingness of the heart. Karana, though, is cause it is the efficient carrier of causality, and that this chain of causality, it's its thrust of linking it together so that one can follow and know. All knowing takes place because one is certain that one has followed this and the entirety of the process is called in Sanskrit. Pramana. Pramana distinct from pramana, which is the carrier of causality, and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It's pranayama, not pramana. Manas like hands. Manas mind. It's literally cognate with the fact that you know that you've done it because you yourself have handled it, and know that you have handled it right in such and such a sequence, and that this is why it happens and it's there. And one can have confidence in this pramana as a process of the overall indexing of. Corona by the knowledge the knowingness of the mind has hidden within it. This whole confidence that the cheetahs are like gears, the thought moments are like gears and they gear together, and that they cause this causality. And the entire process of it is how the mind holds. Notice the hand metaphor. The mind holds ideas that noetic objectiveness is because the mind can hold ideas in cognition, and even there the word, the English word cognition carries cog, carries giftedness meshed ness. In all of this alerts one so that one's ears come up because there's something not said yet, though unheard is sensed in all this. The normal way of dismissing that is to say that it's mystical, and indeed it's dismissed around the world so many times by so many people that pie in the sky has become a synonym for um mysticality. But this is because they're not very good yogis. A real Raja Yogi understands that consciousness is not limited to the mind. It's not limited to what you can know. It is not limited to ideas in cognition, having a noetic objectivity which is referential and cognate with handleable things. Thinking. Objectivity as an action is supposed to be correlated with the action of existence of existentials, and that in this comes a deep confidence. A belief deepened into certainty that being is confirmed by having. You have it because you're holding it, and this is not true. If you believe that, you better go back and meditate again. Because the entire process is like a gift of love and occurs as a gift, and no one has anything. It was a beautiful, poignant moment in the first Superman movie, where Lois Lane falls over the edge of a building and a helicopter is falling, and Clark Kent changes into Superman. He rushes out and he grabs her and he says, don't worry, I have you. She says, you have me. Who has you? The deep Raja yogic understanding is that there is no causal link whatsoever. And because of that, there is a break in the efficient chain. The working members don't touch their interval by a zero ness, and the only way that they actually work together is because they're resonant. Later on in Indian thought, especially in South India and what was called Shaivism, Shaivism, the whole mystical music of Non-causal mystical harmonics was developed especially in South India. It was a Dravidian speciality. The ancient dark Indians, not the light skinned Aryan Indians, but the ancient Dravidian dark Indians put it in, especially the music of the large wooden flutes, the mystical flutes of South India and those mystical flutes if you can ever find them. One of the great masters of the mid 20th century was Pannalal Ghosh. And when you hear that deep South Indian wooden, throaty flute music, the notes suspend themselves in a free, open nothingness and do not occur as a tune that has any notation sequentiality but hold together because they love to be together. That glue, instead of being causality, is whirled round for all time, simply called it's there together because of devotion. And the Sanskrit word of that is bhakti. They're together because they like to be together. There is no reason for them to be together other than that they like to be together, they love to be together. And that this is why the South Indian is confident that devotion, that bhakti is the real glue that holds the Bhagavad Gita together. And that Arjuna keeps having the problem that all North Indian Aryans have all the time, because they have great pride in the clarity of their mind to follow moment by moment the thoughts and they have logically got it right, and they are afraid to let go of that, but do not recognize that that's a fear. And so that fear turns itself inside out and becomes a certainty of power. And that at its deepest mystical quality, power is an inside out freedom which gains a like a possessive quality of cursing. So that someone who is egotistical is actually living under a curse, which is a self engendered. All the time. Because if it isn't self engendered at every moment, it would just simply disappear because there's no way that it's real. Which brings us to the appendix to Dasgupta's book on yoga, written in 1924. In 1924, Surendranath Dasgupta was the most distinguished man at Cambridge University in England, Trinity College. He had been born in 1885, and he was a he was a mutant. He was a cause celeb as a little tiny boy. He could answer questions that anyone would say. He was like a natural intellectual genius as a little boy. They used to put him in special auditorium shows, and great Indian savants, who were specialists in various things, would ask the most complicated questions they could, and the young boy would simply answer them. The teachers used him as a resource in their arguments, but when it came time for him to traditionally go and study in England, this is still British India. He got his Ma in 1910 and he was supposed to go and study like Sri Aurobindo was sent to Cambridge around that time, and Dasgupta, who was like on the level of Aurobindo intellectually but deeper than Aurobindo at that time, mystically, since he was the only child of his parents, he owed a filial duty and he didn't leave. So they sent him off to a little college in another town in East Bengal. Not the big, beautiful capital city. At least it was beautiful then. Calcutta now is a mess. But then Calcutta was the great center, intellectual cultural center. It was the New York of Bengal. But they sent the young Dasgupta, Surinder Nath Dasgupta off to Chittagong, sort of like a sailor's port type thing, and he was in intellectual exile there, except for the fact that he still did his yoga. His yoga was a Jana Yoga to make learning available to other people, and he took it upon himself to write a history of Indian philosophy. And he found that all the histories of Indian philosophy that the British wrote were all totally incomplete and largely very ignorant, and that there was no Indian history of Indian philosophy, that no one had ever understood the history of Indian philosophy, ever, in all the thousands of years. Somebody about 1400 years before had done a little precis for some people, and it was on a little small wedge. And Dasgupta was the one who discovered that most of Indian philosophy was not even in print. It was in rare manuscripts copied down in single unique copies, laying in some maharajahs palace, or put in some temple or in somebody's library. They didn't even know what they had. And so he took it upon himself because he was like a super genius. How can I say it to you? He had like an IQ of 500. So he went all over India collecting the manuscripts, collecting the books, and putting them together in such a way that they had never been done before. And a certain Maharajah. Became his patron, and gave him enough money every month so that he could buy these books. He could buy these manuscripts. And Surendranath Dasgupta began putting together the greatest philosophic library in Indian history. It's now at the University of Calcutta. A special place for him. All this time, Dasgupta was refining himself and refining himself, and finally, in 1920, it was possible for him to go to England. He already had become a Ph.D. in India, but in British India, you have to have a British Ph.D. to really have the academic power. And so he went to Cambridge University, and immediately that he arrived, he was the expert on Indian thought of whatever it was. It didn't matter what area economics, politics, food, whatever it was, he was the final arbiter. And he spent three years at Trinity College, Cambridge, and there he pieced together finally enough to bring out the first volume of A History of Indian philosophy. I remember buying this over 40 years ago. I bought it in Chicago. It cost a mint at that time, and it survived all this time as my signature from the 50s. In it. He lived long enough to complete four volumes, and towards the very end of his days, he completed the first third of the fifth volume, and he worked on it until the afternoon of his day of death. And he died peacefully in the evening, a couple of hours after finishing that section of the manuscript, and volume five was published. So the five volume History of Indian Philosophy by Surendranath Dasgupta is the world standard in Indian thought, and it's the only one that there ever was. No one ever did it before or since. Dasgupta was extraordinarily famous in Cambridge. Everyone in Europe became aware of this, not just a polymath. He was a Raja Yogi. He was incredibly insightful. He could listen to any argument, and he could pull out the exact point at which someone was in error and from there on, veered off. And so he was like a devastating demon in debate. No one would argue with Dasgupta because you couldn't win. All you could do was get his tacit, non-critical acceptance that what you had said so far made sense in terms of what you were trying to express. And ever after that he was invited to all the World Congresses of philosophy. He was always the speaker for India, sometimes for the whole tradition. One of the figures who became famous in European and American intellectual history, Mircea Eliade. Wanted to study under Surendranath Dasgupta in Calcutta and wrote him this beautiful philosophic essay. I think Eliade was 20 years old, and Dasgupta recognized in Mircea Eliade's form of using his language. Eliade was Romanian, but he wrote it in French, and Dasgupta understood that this was a very rare individual. He saw in the precocious boy the future Head of the History of Religions department at the University of Chicago. And so he accepted. Eliade and Eliade, when he went, of course, was unknowing of some one of the scale, had no idea, thought he was just an intellectual. Thought he was famous, thought he was smart, but didn't understand that a Raja Yogi sees everything to the atomic level and beyond. Here's what you don't say, which will bring us to Spotify in just a moment. Eliade, of course, being 20, being a handsome young man, started to play footsie with the daughter of Dasgupta, and Dasgupta did what a Raja yoga daddy always does. He sent the young Mircea Eliade out of the university from Calcutta, and he sent him to Rishikesh, up in the Himalayas, in the gorge. And he let the Rishis break him up. They broke his physical health. They broke his body. They broke his mind. They broke everything until he was a mess. And then they let him heal. In the discipline of Rishikesh. And when Mircea Eliade brought himself back out of the goo that he had dissolved into. He went back to Europe, a completely different being. When you compare the photograph one year later of the boy who left Romania, and the man who came back with the full beard, the clear eyed yogic prow of not invincibility of power, but of penetration to the mystery. And he did yeoman service for the world ever after that a real spectacular being. Dasgupta was that kind of a figure? At the end of his stay at Cambridge, he realised that almost no one understood yoga on this deep level. And so he wrote this book. He wrote this book, Yoga as Philosophy and Religion in two parts. But the appendix on Veda reads like this. Another point to be noted in connection with the main metaphysical theories of Patanjali is the Sphota theory, which considers the relation of words with their ideas and the things which they signify. Those things, these words, them ideas, ritual, myth and symbol. That that triangle is a problem, because when you have that triangle, you have a space within that is not seen. The geometric computation of the relationships of those three things make those lines. They make that triangle what that triangle is not just those lines, not just those angles. It is also a space that has no lines and no angles. Also, the demons are out Trick or treat. Here is Dasgupta in a very beautiful way in an appendix. Because he's trying not to demolish and destroy the intellectual philosophic structure of the English language. But he does anyway, he says. And let's start again, because we have to hear it in all of its choreographed. The yogic word is tapas. It builds an energy so that the form doesn't just have itself, but it has an energy of transform that you don't notice right away. But that changes the form completely. Knowledge thinks that it knows until it realizes like job, that it never knew at all. Here's how he writes it. Another point to be noted in connection with the main metaphysical theories of Patanjali is the Sphota theory, which considers the relation of words with their ideas and the things which they signify. Generally, these three are not differentiated one from the other, and we are not accustomed to distinguish them from one another, though distinct, yet they are often identified and taken in one act of thought. The cheetah, taken in one act of thought by a sort of illusion, a sort of, is a very kind way of saying, you know, it's B.S.. The nature of this illusory process comes to our view when we consider the process of auditory perception of words. What is the auditory perception of words? It is the process by which language carries feeling through images and creates experience. The ear is the primary sense by which experience generates itself largely in a culture. In nature, it's largely the sense of touch. If you've ever been trained to let the hands see like a blind person, the hands can see very well. Blind people can tell the difference between a $1 and a $5 bill. And you say, well, how. Well. But they can't. And that's just for starters. Touch is more primordial in nature, but in culture the ear is more primordial, which is why music carries the intelligence of feeling of sentience and not thought. That's why mythology is a story which is told. You tell the story. You never write it down. In the Phaedrus, the the development of written language is called a stupid act. If you write things down, people will lose their contact with veracity because having had it written down, they will think that everyone knows it and they won't bother to learn it. They will bother only to know how to look it up so that they can know it. But knowing is quite Different from being conscious. Someone as sophisticated as Patanjali. He's on a level of Plotinus, of understanding the mystical actuality of what happens beyond and within the mind's forms, the languages, capacities in hearing and the referential that are there in mere existentials mere existentials are the founding found the ground for power. It's the final. Why do you have power? Because you can do stuff. You can make your action affect them so you have power. And as long as you believe that you are susceptible to fear, and as long as you are susceptible to fear, you are a dupe for believing in evil, and that all of that follows just like the day following night. It's all part of the same illusory process. The nature of this illusory process comes to our view when we consider the process of auditory perception of words. Thus, if we follow in ancient India, there were commentaries called bhasyas. Thus, if we follow the Bhasha, as explained by the sages uh vijnana bhikshu, we find that by an effect of our organs of speech, the letters are pronounced. This vocal sound is produced in the mouth of the speaker. That's why such a language, spoken language is called a tongue. If you speak In a cacophony of tongues. It's called glossolalia. You cannot hear. Speaking in tongues, of course, is the ancient Hellenistic Jewish way of saying that you have scrambled the hearing of the world's ear. And if you relax into that scramble, you will be able to hear something that is unsaid. It's a technique, incidentally, used in late 20th century music by Alan Hovhaness, where he has all the instruments in the orchestra play glossolalia of notes that are no longer in any musical form whatsoever. And out of that emerges the mystic ability to hear music that was not played, and to hear it with the conscious ear. Indeed, this vocal sound is produced in the mouth of the speaker, from which place the sound moves in aerial waves until it reaches the eardrum of the hearer. It's an energy carrier wave. By coming in contact with which it produces the audible sound. And all this is spelled out in ancient yogic texts, and the special modifications of this are seen to be generated in the form of letters, and the general name for these modifications in yogic philosophy is called nada. This sound, as it exists in the stage of letters, is also called Varna. If we apply the word sabda or sound in the general sense, then we can say that this is the second stage of sound moving towards word cognition, the first stage being that of its utterance in the mouth of the speaker. The second is the carrier sound. The third stage of Sabda is that in which the letters, for example, g, a, u, and h of the word go are taken together, and the complete word form gao comes before our view and our hearing. This comprehension of the complete word form is an attribute of the mind and not of the sense of hearing. For the sense of hearing senses, letter forms of the sound one by one, as the particular letters are pronounced by the speaker, and as they approach the ear one by one in the airwaves, but each letter form sound vanishes as it is generated, for the sense of hearing has no power to hold them together and comprehend the letter forms as forming a complete word form. They occur atomically, and each atom of sound vanishes so that there is an incredibly short interval, so that the next sound can be heard distinctly, and the mind's exactness is dependent upon them not touching. That yogic exactness is there by courtesy of the space between the sounds, and not that they are chained together by any glue. So that all forms of learning that do not know this are promoters of illusion, and worlds that are made on this basis are all demonic. They can't help but be because they are based upon the sense that there is a power in ignorance, which it simply does not have at all. Illusion is bad enough, but to believe it is delusion. He goes on in this vein, and indeed he goes on to an extent that is rarely ever seen in Indian philosophic thought. One of the inheritors of this refinement was Gandhi, and Gandhi understood the Gita courtesy of the refinement of surrender Nath Dasgupta in such a way that the book on the Gita, according to Gandhi, has an alternate title The Gospel of Selfless Action that in reality real action has no self as a perpetrator, has no individual as an arbitrator operator, and has no glue of culture or religion or logic that holds it all together. Why it works is because love occurs and is shareable and not for any other reason. And so the Gita according to Gandhi. Gandhi called the Bhagavad Gita after this, his work book, his workbook for and the program that he made around it was called Satyagraha. Graha means grasp, but it doesn't mean grasp to hold. Sort means the truth which one hears sort is like. And Upanishad Samsad means to sit at the feet of someone who tells you so that you hear not just what they say, but you learn to hear in between what they're saying, what is unsaid as well, and that what is unsaid and what is said resonate together. This is why, if you try to follow a lecture that's given here and you say, well, what did he say? What he said initially cannot be heard Because there are spaces left in between all the time. Precisely. So the mystique of deeper hearing can occur. Those who walk out on this have walked out on an opportunity that rarely comes, a chance to get real beyond your ego. Now this kind of wisdom has always been rare, and the difficulty in the past was that it was almost impossible to pass to someone else unless they were patient enough to learn to stay in there and not leave before the incompleted forms had a chance to show that their incompleteness was a design of architecture of the real, and not because someone didn't know. The easiest thing in teaching is to know something and tell someone else so that they know it, and then you test them to see whether their knowing matches the knowing that you have. This is an equation that is at the basis also of fear, and in the 21st century has no place any further. It also has a curious quality. If you think that truth is based upon cognition, possessing an objective form, you are already deluded beyond belief. Thus, state of affairs leads then to a confidence of probability, structuring the world of there being a statistical mechanics that's there as the best form of identity cognition, and at the top of this pyramidal truth tree is some kind of an eye which then sees knowingly all of this. And this is exactly where the Mahabharata begins, because Vyasa was a very, very great sage, and the very first section of Peter Brook's Mahabharata is called the Game of dice. Because believing that probability structures the world is a form of gambling. And the deepest confidence in that gambling is the egotistical certainty that fear is matched by identity, and that if you have enough power to promote your identity in the face of fear, then chances are that you're going to win. And all of this is an illusion. The entire choreography of that is delusional and actually is unreal. Yes, dharmas characterize that scenario. But have you never heard that all dharmas are unreal? Well, we'll have to take another two years in order to get back to this, because it just simply can't be said in any shorter period of time that I know of. There are others, but they're not here right now. And when they come, they'll do it.