Nature 1
Presented on: Saturday, January 7, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We begin with Nature 1, and we're coming mid-stream into a mysterious process. Our lives before have acted as a baffle so that we don't experience the mysteriousness of nature as a process, as a flow. And so our beginning is to undo, to unhitch those filters, and because it's a complex, layered process, it has to be done with a careful opening and unfolding as it goes along. And the entire phase of our nature in our learning is to back away from the baffle of a confused overlay that is largely synched together by an artificial mind, artificial ideas, distorting doctrines, and in order to facilitate this backing away, I have layered it so that we have in the 12 presentations of Nature, a progressive expansion back into the mystery of nature.
Our first beginning is with one of the most natural men every to live on the planet, Henry David Thoreau, and his heyday was a little less than 200 years ago, but we're pairing with him, because we're constantly trying to get a sense of radical proportion, of creative ratioing, and so we're always bringing together, sometimes in symmetry, sometimes in complementary motions, sometimes in polarised forms, but always the pairs to generate for us a frequency, an energy wave as it were. And paired with Thoreau, and we're going to use the portable Thoreau as one of our pair, and we're going to use the I Ching as the pair to the portable Thoreau. It's interesting because when we come initially to Thoreau, the most famous quote to come out of him is from his little essay, Walking, which has been reprinted in 100 or 200 different forms, and the sentences that have been quoted since the revival of Thoreau, early in the 20th century:
The West of which I speak is but another name for the wild. And what I have been preparing to say is that in wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends forth its fibres in search of the wild.
And it is this quality of Thoreau that has made him the founder of the whole ecology movement that surfaced in the 20th century, and little reprints like The Natural Man: a Thoreau Anthology or The Natural History Essays are indicative of a return to nature, but in returning to nature one is returning to an immersion into a flow that has an energy frequency that is detectable but detectable in the baffled artificiality and confusion of our normal lives, it is so weak as to be almost undiscerned. It is to facilitate this discernment that the nature phase steps back from Thoreau at 200 years to the I Ching that progressively goes back to 5,000 years ago.
And one of the good things about the I Ching is that it has several phases in the development of itself that are very distinguishable. The I Ching that we have, that we look at today, was stylised in the Han dynasty about 200 BC, and formed the basis of the state civil service exams of China for almost 2200 years. Those civil service exams began with the I Ching and went through four other Confucian classics and then ended with the I Ching again, and however well you did on those civil service preparations and exams, you were given a pecking order in service to the dynasty. That order lasted until 1911 AD, unchanged, frozen. But that Han dynasty I Ching was a reworking after a catastrophic, apocalyptic revolution in China. There was an emperor and his name was Qin, from which the word Chinese comes, Qin Shi Huang [7:43 Qi], the Great Emperor who built the Great Wall of China and who, in order to set up an imperial empire in just the way he wanted, he had all of the books burned except a handful that were approved, and those were the Confucian classics that became the basis of the state exam. His realm lasted only for less than one generation, and after that there was a marked change where scholars who already were getting used to the exam, were trying to put back together texts that had been burnt, and many of the texts that were revived were not revived in the original Chinese languages that had gone back to the ancient pictographs of several thousand years before. So that the Han dynasty rewrote all of the classic literature of China, in terms of Han dynasty, and in doing so the original language, the original words, no longer carried the hieroglyphic meaning that was there. It was as if like in Egypt no one would ever have been able to see the ancient hieroglyphs - one only could see say the presentation of Egyptian wisdom in Latin or Greek, and not be able to read the hieroglyphs. This happened in China. And so there were esoteric individuals and groups who sought to relive the ancient ways and like Thoreau's of their time, they went back into the original matrix out of which China had originally emerged, and the original matrix of China was extraordinarily rare. Chinese civilisation largely in the north, the north plain cut by the Yellow River, the Hwang Ho, and the Yellow River curves around and goes through a pass where great mountain ranges come together and one pass called the Hangu pass, goes through this mountain range, and the Yellow River cannot penetrate the range and so flows north for some hundreds of miles and then circles around the top of that mountain range and goes off to the deep west where it originates in a mountain range called the Kun Lun mountains in the far west of China, on one side of which is the Gobi desert, on the other side is the vast Siberian forest lands. So that China, in its primordiality, came out of a curious amalgam of river delta systems along the Pacific Ocean going inland for several hundred miles of villages and towns and clan gatherings along the Yellow River, and also had their source deep in the Gobi desert, Siberian forest interplay in the Kun Lun mountains. It was 3,000 BC that the forest, Siberian Forest shaman, named FuHsi (Hsi is a shaman mail, the female shaman is called a Wu), FuHsi, the male shaman coming from the Siberian forest ethos and his partner Nuwa, and here is a tapestry found in the Gobi desert about 100 years ago by Sir Aurel Steine, of FuHsi and Nuwa, both are dragon people whose dragon bodies intertwine and they look remarkably like the double helix of the DNA. They hold a pair of implements, the male, FuHsi, holds what is known as a carpenter's square, which is used to make forms that are stable, like triangles, like squares, rectangles; whereas she holds a plumb bob, and the plumb bob is there to establish a pivot of balance within a dynamic. So that Nuwa carries the balance of the dynamic and FuHsi carries the angle of the form. And together when they are brought into interplay together, their interpenetration produces a fertility that allows for a third element to come forth and the saying is this, in China: Man is the bridge between heaven and earth. Meaning that man is born out of an interface of a masculine heaven dome of light and space, and its interpenetration with an earth that is dark but receptive and fertile, and that man exists then in between the dynamic of the earth and its pivotal balance of flow, and the stability of the heavenly dome of form. So that the Chinese sense always in their civilisation at whatever period, have a respect for two qualities that must work together to produce creativity and fertility, and that this interchange between the two of them is the flow of nature; that nature is not a construct of either one by themselves, but is the interpenetrative flow of energy forms that emerge out of a mysterious dynamic, and that while the earth carries the dynamic, it is heaven that bestows the creative flow. To the Chinese, FuHsi and Nuwa together established a way in which one could communicate with man, not by pictographs which were primitive at that time, and not by ordinary spoken language like with mythology, but that the communication between heaven and earth was through number, and so numeracy became the communicative language and the fundamentals of this were that zero for the mysterious Tau and one for the unity of all were not to be used in the calculation of the interpenetration of heaven and earth. Tau belongs to heaven in its zero-ness and openness, and oneness belongs to earth in its unity and the voracity of its is-ness. But beyond that was the development of 2, the number 2, being designated for the earth and the number 3 being designated for the heavens. So that they found that while you could not symbolically represent zero and one by lines, you could represent 2 and 3 by lines, and the 2 was represented by a broken line and the three by an unbroken line. So that now one had a kind of visual algebra for the numerical communication of heaven and earth, and it was up to man as the bridging child of the two, as the inheritor of the ability to hold the ratios and proportions of 2s and 3s, and to stylise them that 2s are essentially even numbers and 3s are odd numbers, so that the earth became a receptive repose for the evenness of number, and heaven became creative and fertile for the oddness of number. And so you found that the Chinese in the I Ching came to appreciate that there were ways in which ratioing and proportion could be developed by using the 2s and 3s together in terms of lines, broken and unbroken. But because there was not just heaven and earth but the third, man, there had to be three lines, and when you took the pair of unbroken and broken lines and put them into triads, you got a set, a matrix of 8.
And the way that the original lines came out, was they were literally drawn in the sand, in the dirt, in the dust of north China, because the land, the fertile land in north China, is actually not the kind of loam that we're acquainted with in the West, but it is millions of years of dust that has blown in from the Gobi desert, and that this dust has settled in huge, deep deposits, hundreds of feet deep, across the whole of the North China Plain, cut by the Yellow River, and that that dust, when it is moist, is extraordinarily fertile. It is like a top-soil in which you can grow almost anything. But if that dust, it's called loess and it's yellowish because it comes in off the Gobi desert, and the Chinese complexion of being yellow is said to be because they are children of the yellow earth, that they have lived for hundreds of thousands of years with this kind of natural tone and natural soil. When it is dry, it returns to dust, and this happens about every four or five years throughout Chinese history, so that there's always a need to recognise that the very land that supports your life is exactly the source of your death, and so the very same basis of the world and of heaven is both precarious and graceful at the very same time. And so the bridge of man, between heaven and earth, is a precarious bridge that must always be held in balance. Otherwise chaos will resolve. And so the Chinese understanding of nature is that human participation in nature is always to be sensitive to maintain the balance, the equipoise, and that this is done through a participation of keeping heaven and earth fertile together. The rains from heaven are signalled by the thunder and the thunder is complemented by the earth churning up the winds. And so when it came time for the trigrams of the I Ching to be originally put together, one had that thunder and wind went together, and also mountains of the earth are reflected in rivers, reflected in lakes, which because of the tone of the light from the sky give the image of the mountain in the water, illuminated by the sky, and so mountains and streams or lakes were also paired together, just as heaven, as a creative, and earth as a receptive, were paired together. And then two other elements that made then four pairs, fire and water were paired together.
That three line structure had a beginning where on one side you had an unbroken line below two broken lines, and that this gave you the beginnings of the evolution of the development of the creative, and in the next it went to the middle and in the third it went to the top, and if you took the top, the middle and the third you would then have the three creative lines, and this was the trigram for [23:48 Qin], creativity, masculine creativity. The other column was the broken line between two unbroken lines, and rising to the middle and to the top, and then abstracted, the three broken lines together, this was Kun, the receptive. But in order to give this matrix of 8 a way to have a bow of exchange tied into its very structure, the centre of 1, the creative, which would be Kan, the water, and then Lee, the fire. Those two trigrams were allowed to exchange places and still maintain the development of the columns. So that you had now an eight-part trigram that had as its base the building up towards 1, 2, 3, of heaven, earth, and man, and when you had the period-ness running all the way through it in the matrix, you had the ability to have trigrams paired together to make the hexagrams, but it took almost 2,000 years for the hexagrams made of the pairs of trigrams to be understood, to have an extended, expanded numeracy, and that this expanded numeracy brought into play a completely new transform of the way in which one saw the lines, in which one saw the ability for man to understand the meaning, to receive the communication. The original I Ching trigrams were based on change in a complementarity, whereas about 2,000 years later the emphasis was not so much on change but on the changes as that they applied to man. And so now, instead of having the trigrams that were natural of heaven and earth, fire and water, mountains and streams, one had the trigrams as the mother and the father, and the three sons and three daughter; the eldest son, the middle son, the younger son. So you went from a heavenly I Ching to an earthly I Ching, and those persons who put together the earthly I Ching, the human-focussed I Ching, founded a new dynasty, the Zhou Dynasty, about 1100 BC. They came into play in such a way as to obviate the previous dynasty that had understood that they were indeed the inheritors of the power of heaven and the control of the earth that was the Shang Dynasty, and they had , according to the Zhou, progressively shielded themselves from nature, baffled themselves from the understanding and came finally into a frozen aspect, symbolised by the fact that what now archaeologically signifies the Shang Dynasty are the Shang ceremonial, ritual bronzes: specific shapes for specific ritual actions, for specific ceremonies that did not change. And the Zhou Dynasty, when it came into play, said this was lacking the mandate of heaven and disrespecting the nature of the earth, and that man therefore had suffered and had become unnatural.
Let's shift over to our paired Thoreau for just a moment. When we read, 'The west of which I speak is but another name for the wild, and what I have been preparing to say is that in wildness is the preservation of the world.' He later in the essay on walking says, 'The civilised nations, Greece, Rome, England, have been sustained by the primitive forests which rooted anciently where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture, little is to be expected of a nation when the vegetable mould is exhausted and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of the fathers.'
There's this quality that one finds also in the I Ching that in order for it to be used to make work, it had to be returned back into its primordially by those who would use it, and so one found at the origin of the I Ching, about 3000 BC, the interpenetration of heaven and earth produced magical beings, not just spiritual in the sense that they were transcendent, but magical in that they were transformative. And a good example of that are the Qilin. The Qilin are Siberian reindeer who have been transformed into dragon reindeer, and these dragon reindeer occur in pairs, a male and a female pair. The male pair is the light jade and the female of the pair is the dark jade. One of the characteristics of early Zhou China was recovering jade back into Chinese civilisation so that the jade replaced the bronze. The bronze Shang ritual implements were replaced not only by jade like in Qilin, but in jade that became stylised into shapes, and two of the shapes are some of the most important shapes for the I Ching and for understanding China.
The first is the circle with the hole in it and when it's made out of jade it's called a pi, spelt pi but pronounced 'bee'. It is the symbol of heaven. The other is a rectangular object that has a circular cylinder within it. It is called a tsung, and the tsung, made out of jade, is actually a sheathe for the penis of the heavenly power. And so the tsung is the symbol of earth who receives, who receives the formality of the masculine heaven, but receives it in a feminine, receptive, earthly way, and the pi that has the hole in the centre is that heaven's order, the masculine, though it has a 3 quality, in its mysterious centre it has a Tau zeroness. Just as in the centre of the tsung one has for earth a unified singularity of fertility, and so the pi brought into the 3 the zeroness of Tau, and the tsung brought into the 2-ness of earth the 1. And all of a sudden you had a completely new kind of sensitivity to nature and it took a while for this sensitivity to nature to rise in China and by about 600 BC you found a completely new angle of understanding presented by the Tau Te Ching by Lao Tzu, which was the new vision of the I Ching, not just of the original celestial model of . FuHsi and NuGua, nor the Zhou Dynasty, the Chinese name for the I Ching sometimes is the Book of Zhou, the founding of the Zhou Dynasty. Lao Tzu brings both those together within a more primordial context going back before FuHsi and NuGua and so his book is not about Yin-Yang, it's not about heaven and earth so much, but is about Tau and Te. And in Lao Tzu one understands that Yin-Yang are polarities within Te, and become complementarities when they shift their ratioing from 1-ness to zero-ness. That when Yin-Yang are brought into play with Tau, they now have shifted the way in which they're able to interpenetrate, and their interpenetration now is of a magical nature. The Tau allows for magical creatures to exist and it means now that man and woman do not just exist in the Yin-Yang of Te, according to the earthly mode of unity, but now they become magical woman and magical man and are able to interchange in such a way that together they produce a completely new kind of fertility; not a fertility of the earth, of the Te of things, of the power of existence, but of the Tau, which is the mysteriousness. And its symbol has always been that of the dragon. So that the power of the unity of Te symbolised by the tiger, is complemented by the Tau quality of the dragon, so that one finds now that FuHsi and NuGua instead of being primordial people are now dragon people, magical people. The original FuHsi was always portrayed as a long-finger-nailed sage with long hair, wearing a leopard skin and sitting in such a way that he saw in the dust the diagram of a tortoise, and the trigrams arranged in their matrix of eight, and he, with fierce eyes as some kind of primordial man, was staring at them to see into them; whereas the dragon people do not have to stare in to see the meaning. They do not have to read out the numeracy and the symbols. They generate the mysteriousness themselves and so now you had in China, for the very first time, a sense of alchemical, magical nature that was the reality behind heaven and earth, and because man could embody the magical beings of heaven and earth, now men and women were capable of not just living in a paired way, the traditional Chinese understanding was that we have two souls, we have an earth soul, the poe, and we have a heavenly soul, the hu, and when we die the po remains in the tomb, and the hu ascends into the celestial temple, so that man is a ratio of tomb and temple while he is no earth, and when he dies the poe of men and women remains fading in the soil, and the hu remains challenged to ascend and go to the celestial temple, but by the time of magical beings, men and women were no longer too different souls but had been brought into a mysteriousness like the Qilin, they were now magical spirits, and the word for that, very traditionally, is Shen. And then Shen remains undivided, un-split, because it is transformed into a magical, different third. This third finds that not only is that Shen at home in heaven, but on earth in a way the phrase is mountains and streams without end, that there is no longer any kind of geographical limitation to the earth, to the world, that its dynamic now extends out to all kinds of magical worlds as well, so the world no longer has just a geography, but it has an alchemical, magical land that extends all the way into the heavens. One of the great studies of Tang Dynasty Taoist astronomy is called Pacing the Void, that man no longer looks just to the stars, but is at home in the spaces between the stars as well.
Let's take a break.
Let's come back to our beginnings and we've been looking at some magical creatures like the Qilin and FuHsi and NuGua going back at least 5,000 years and we're understanding that the I Ching delivers for us in a very pure form, the different layers and levels that human beings have had to go through in the ordeal of previous civilisations, and that all previous civilisations have encrusted human lives in such a way that the surface living has become brittle and deadening and draining; whereas before, for 150,000 years, our species lived in cultures that were flowing in nature in such a way that the participation was not disparate, there was no disparity in the flows, so that experience and nature were always not one but they were a rich flow out of which came a sense of not correlation by referentiality, but of participation by mutuality. And so human life was always mutual with nature, human experience was always not identifiable but it was always liveable. When civilisations began to come in about 5,000 years ago, they brought with them a need to shift from the flows of nature and experience to the stylisation of existence and the things of existence with a correlation in mentality. And we saw, the first mentalities that were calibrated to arrange things that exist into sequences, into hierarchies, into orders, those were all triggered by the power of a new symbolic construct, and the first symbolic construct was not literary but numerical. Numeracy precedes literacy by 4,000-5,000 years. And as we saw with the I Ching, the Chinese understood in this numerical communication that somehow man now was the necessary arbiter between heaven and earth, and because man could not in a symbolic way with existential reference be the arbiter of Tao, or the arbiter between Tao and the unity of oneness of all things, the universe, man could not be the arbiter between zero and one, and so had to be the arbiter between the ratioing of twos and threes. And that the lines of the trigrams, the unbroken line was given a value of 3 and the broken line a value of 2, so that earthly receptivity was an evenness and equanimity and a balance that had to be maintained, and that celestial things were odd in the sense that they were able to procreate, to be fertile, to be radical, to come into play; and that human life then was in this precarious need to keep the balance of the earth and wildness and fertility of heaven in a balance in themselves. And so you had different layers of the same time, you had the balance of Yin and Yang on the earth and then you had the balance of the earth with heaven and then you had the need to balance man's symbolic mentality with the existential rituals, the actions. That existentiality was not just things, but limited actions that we do, the different rituals and principles, and all of these balances now were like different coordinates in a very complex sphere. And increasingly it was refined and refined until the surface of the sphere became brittle, encrusted and whoever was within that structure became trapped, increasingly. So that the way out was not to further any development along that line, but to completely change, but to change one had to go back to the source. One had to go back not to the 2s and 3s but back to the Tao. And when one went back to the Tao, what emerged out of it was the mysteriousness of the 1. And when one had the zero-ness of the Tao of nature and the oneness, mysteriously, of the universe, those two together made a very esoteric third. It wasn't the balance and pairing of 2 and 3, but the balance and complementarity of zero and 1, and out of this came a resolving third expression which was a higher level of nature, the magical nature, the supernatural. And so the Chinese understood that when you were seeking to bring yourself back into reality, one went back to nature originally to begin the participation of your experience with nature, and it would deepen into a tone of mysteriousness of the oneness of all things, and then it would deepen into the transformative, magical nature of that everything is proliferate, indefinitely, infinitely.
And so the Taoist energy cycle came into play, which had five phases like the five fingers of a hand. The first phase was a zero Tao, the second phase was a unified 1 Te, and the third phase was a Jen which had a 2 quality but not the 2 quality of the earth, it had a 2 quality of man balancing Tao and Te of zero and one together. And when the Jen as a 2 was the balance of zero and one, the fourth phase, which was the symbolic mind, the mind having symbols, the Chinese word for symbols is I, the symbols book the I Ching, the I Zhou, the symbols of the Zhou Dynasty. The I had a 3 quality so that symbols were now seen as the fourth phase of natural, mysterious, magical nature, so that it could now make a fifth phase which was originally called, the Chinese phrase means the 10,000 things, it means multiplicity. Everything indefinitely. And that that multiplicity of the 10,000 things is able, if all the previous phases have been kept pure in their emergently, scintillating transforms, the 10,000 things will be able to slip back into Tao in such a way that they will come out unified again in a new Te. And that this cycle then is like a recycling of the real but requires for its extension that we have been able to go back to nature as a process, not as an idea of it, back to the mysteriousness of nature as the mysterious unity of it, not in the sense that it makes sense to the mind in its mentality; and third, that it becomes magical, it becomes alchemical, it is able to transform and one can now have not just Palaeolithic reindeer but one can have Palaeolithic reindeer who are made out of jade who are called Qilin because they are magical reindeer, and they also have a mysterious quality and they also are the way in which the Chinese had come finally to understand through thousands of years of permutations of the I Ching, just how this occurs.
The origins of jade like this are peculiar. The original finding of jade was from the Kunlun mountains on the edge of the Gobi desert, just before you get to the Tibetan plateau, and two different rivers come out of those mountains, and when they come out they meet on the edge of a fertile strip of the Gobi desert, and the trading post that was there for thousands of years traditionally was called Kotan, now it's called Hotan, and at Hotan these two streams came together. One of the streams had deposits of fractured jade of the white quality, and the other stream had fractures of a jade geology of the dark quality, but that the only way that they could be found was by women who would walk bare footed and bare legged in these streams and with their feet they would feel, among all the stones and pebbles, the touch of jade and the raw jade then would be brought by them out, taken down by the men into Kotan and at Kotan they were ferried by caravan into China. So that the white and black jade, the different Qilin that are here, are like an esoteric way of understanding the interpenetration of nature has three deep phases to it, it is natural but then it is mysterious and then it is magical. The natural quality gives life, the mysterious quality gives a scintillation to life and the magical quality gives a supernatural eternity to life. And at each phase, each of these three phases, men and women are able to participate in that quality of nature, they're able to be natural together in nature, but they're able to be mysterious together in mystery, and they're able to be magical together in supernatural magic. In which case, they are progressively freed from the encapsulating area; the world encapsulates the existence of natural things. But when one gets to the mysteriousness, then there is larger realms of the world, the mythical qualities of it, the extension of it into the stars and other celestial sites, the commits, the meteors. The quality then of the third in the magical is that one has transformed out of the transform, so that one has done a very esoteric thing. The first transformation is traditionally called making wine out of the water, but the second transformation is distilling the wine into the cognac, so that in alchemical terms, both east and west, the term liqueur means the twice-transformed essence of what its nature was. The mysterious wine gives the joy to existence, but the distilled second transform gives the eternity to one's spirit, so that the magical quality of nature is an eternal life in a supernatural extension of nature. The mysterious is the in between, is the initial necessary coming out of the purity of nature, but here was the aspect; one could not do this until as we begin today talking you have to unhook yourself from the falsified, brittle chainmail constructs that were held together not by a Taoist energy cycle, they didn't begin with Tao, they began with the self-prservating nature of the ego. And so the mind that came out of that was like the final cinching thing and everything else then got its directions from the mind as it had sized up the sequencing, the hierarchies, the order and brought it all together. Whereas the Taoist energy cycle as far beyond the mind as nature leading up to the mind was. So you had the mind at the centre, rather than at the end. Our education is sensitive to phases rather than subjects for this reason, but there is an extension because we're not Chinese, we're not Taoist, we have a planetary nature, and when one expands this to the planetary, instead of their being a five-phase energy cycle there's an eight-phase energy cycle, and the eight-phase energy cycle, amazingly, is able to be seen in the Chinese Taoist I Ching cycle. The eight trigrams are indeed an eight, but there is a quality that is here, that is very esoteric. The twos and threes are also important, but they're important in a way that was not understood in antiquity. It was only about 400 years ago that anyone ever on this planet understood the ratio between squares and cubes, other than in a symbolic, visioning quality.
The person who initially understood the symbolic visioning quality was Pythagoras, and he understood that there were two complete dissentions that meet together in a single focus. One is the movement by squares; the other the movement by cubes; and that they meet at 1 but not 1 as a finality but 1 as the springboard to carry the powers of zero into the expansion of 1 by squares and by cubes. The classic place in which one found this was in Plato's last great dialogue, the Timaeus, which was the expression at the time of the highest Pythagorean natural mysticism, that one moves by squares going 2, 4, 8 and one moves by cubes going 3, 9, 27, and that this inverted V is the Greek lambda, and so in an odd way, just like in nuclear physics of the 1980s one had a lambda shift, literally, in the way in which one understood the mathematic of emergence of reality. 400 years ago it was Kepler who understood finally that the arrangement of all the planets and moons in our star system are by resonances of the periodicity squared over the distance cubed, and that if you do this the ratio will always turn out to be a 1. So that if one knows the periodicity of a moon around a planet, or the planets in their orbits around the sun, if you square their periodicity of orbital time and you cube the distance that they are, that ratio will always be a 1. That's called Kepler's Third Planetary Law, and it was developed and devised about the time that Shakespeare was writing his magical great play The Tempest. They occur almost similarity in time Cervantes was writing the second half of Don Quixote, so you had three of the most magisterial renaissance magicians of all time, Kepler, Shakespeare and Cervantes, all at the same time delivering something that was showing again that nature becomes mysterious, becomes magical, and at each layer, our nature deepens into its complexity, so that now when we are in that kind of nature that is natural, we have the capacity to deepen that twice over and one then says classically in the west, alchemically that one now lives in a thrice-greatest nature, a supernatural, magical nature, where alchemy is the scheme of the day.
The mind, in order to tune itself to nature, needs literally to tune into its frequency, and the frequency of nature is its energy cycle, where it will have its sine wave quality, it will have its peaks and it will have its valleys and it will have its stretching out or condensing in, the longer the wave, you get radio waves, the shorter, you get x-rays, gamma-rays, and so that electromagnetic spectrum is simply the shift in the periodicity of that energy wave, and in order for it to have a referentiality in terms of its energy, rather than in terms of mental reference, you need a reference wave to go with it. And when you have a pair, tuned to generate the frequency of the energy wave and you have a third, a reference wave with it, you're able now to correlate, not in terms of mentality and enforced ritual doctrine arrangement of people, things and situations, but in terms of the flows themselves, so that nature and experience are both correlatable to a third flow, which is visionary consciousness, and when all three of those are in play, one has now three different qualities of natural existence. One has the natural existence of the healthy body; one has the mysterious existence of the open mind; and one has the infinite magic of the spiritual eternity.
And so body, mind and spirit are delivered into their own realms of naturality. Because we have lived through a time where the overlay of confusion and brittleness is so severe, the first phase of nature progressively takes us back, uncoupling by giant steps from the false mentality back into the natural flow in the easiest possible way, we start with Thoreau about 200 years ago, move to the I Ching about 5,000 years ago; then we shift and go to Mary Leakey, who deals with nature where man is 5 million years old; then we go to macroevolution, Elisabeth Vrba and Niles Eldredge, where nature now is not just 5 million years old but will become 500 million years old, but to bridge the 5 million and the 500 million, we put Jane Goodall with her work with chimpanzees, which go back 50 million years. Then we close out with the double helix by James Watson, which takes life back 5 billion years. So progressively as this nature phase occurs, using pairs of ratioable people, things, to generate for us increasingly this expansion as a time-cone going back in huge increments, 5,000 years, 5 million years, 50 million years, 500 million years, 5 billion years and then when we come to the second phase of ritual existence, it will emerge in a completely new way and we'll begin with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, also going back, because the I Ching dates from about 3,000 BC, the Egyptian Book of the Dead also dates from about 3,000 BC but has also, like the I Ching, gone through very definite layers of development. Just as the I Ching in Fu Shi's time, was largely trigrams and their mystery, the Zhou Dynasty, 2,000 years later, saw the hexagrams in such a way that they rearranged the trigrams and you had the heavenly matrix of the Palaeolithic Chinese I Ching going to the Neolithic quality of the Zhou Dynasty I Ching, and then that was transformed again about 500 BC by Confucius, Kong Fuzi, and it was Confucius who brought in not the importance of Tao and Te and Yin and Yang so much, but of Jen, and now one didn't have just the original natural symbols of the trigrams, fire, water, earth, heaven; now one had a family structure of mother and father, oldest brother, middle brother, youngest brother, oldest daughter, middle daughter, youngest daughter. So now the family structure came into play and that eight-part family structure had a very esoteric quality to it, that was there in the mysterious level of nature. Picture for yourself the crisscross like a ticktacktoe game. There are eight positions in that ticktacktoe but the ninth position in the exact centre has no one there. The ancient Chinese village was like a ticktacktoe game with eight houses holding many extended family beings, and in the centre the ninth was the well for that village. It was the hole in the ground, and not only is it the hole in the ground, but we have seen that the Chinese pi, which is the jade symbol for heaven, had the circle with the hole in the middle, but the Chinese also had a sceptre that had a hole in the middle, and this was a resolving way to bring the symbolism into play. That hole in the slightly shaped, not the circle of the pi, that's always left empty, but in this hole was inserted a polished piece of wood, so that now you had the jade and the wood together as an implement that was like a symbolic hoe, that one could now till the ground, one could plant and tame the plants and tame the animals. It was a symbol of the Neolithic level. In Egypt one saw the same, very similar thing. The original Egyptian hieroglyphics of the pyramid texts are all about a heavenly quality of transform and the old kingdom had that quality, but when you come to the new kingdom a thousand years later, there is a complete change and the Egyptian quality in the Book of the Dead, instead of being just the pair M'huru which meant coming forth by day, now the Egyptian Book of the Dead had an application that was changed. It was more arranged around man's centre in the process, whereas the centre before was for the pharaoh as the sacred divine king, as the bridge between heaven and earth, his tomb was at the same time the temple. In the New Kingdom now one had the family of those serving the pharaoh were an extended sociological family, and you found this in China at the same time in the Han Dynasty. They took a census and a survey, one of the few in the ancient world, and they found that there was 130,000 people who worked for the head man at that time, the Emperor was Han Wudi, about 140 BC, and his extended sociological family was 130,000 people and their dependents, and their whole aspect was to keep him in power, and his whole responsibility now was not so much to balance heaven and earth but was to make sure that all their work was preserved in his power. And it's about that time that you find a revival in China of the mysterious and the magical in a group of men and women who met outside of the court, a man named Prince Liu of Huainan was the centre of this salon, of this group, and the book that came out of that called the Huainan Tzu is all about the mysteriousness of nature when Tao is brought into play and the magicalness of existence when Te now is transformative in the doubles and cubes that are always symmetrical and brought into play, so one increasingly now has a magically ratioed transformable world that is not commandeered by the empire, by the pharaoh or by the emperor, by the encrusted civilisation, by the entombment of false ideas. Thoreau, whom we are pairing with the I Ching, was one of those figures, very rare in history, his interface with nature was schooled by mysterious, magical happenings all the time. He and his brother got interested in some of the old stories about Indians around Concord, Massachusetts. He was young, he was about twenty years old, he was a student at Harvard University, he was studying Greek well enough he made his own translation of Aeschylus at twenty, from the Greek. The manuscript is the Huntingdon Library here in Los Angeles, in San Marino. But while he was fooling around with his brother John, playing at Indian finding things, he said to his brother, 'Here stood this great Indian chief and right over there then would be his arrow,' and he reached down unconsciously, subconsciously, and the rock he picked up was a perfect arrowhead, and it stood there in his hand and he realised that he had been touched by something that was incredible. He had been given the portal into the mysteriousness of the earth and the magicalness of the deeper supernatural, and so he began to add to something that he had begun in 1837 when he was eighteen at Harvard. Someone said to him, 'Why are you not keeping a journal?' so he began to keep a journal. And now, a couple of years later, he began to keep his Indian journals, and the Indian journals of Thoreau are still unpublished. They're at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. They were bought by J P Morgan in 1909 from someone that had the very big collection of Thoreau manuscripts, so the Pierpont Morgan Library has not only all of the forty volumes of journals, but has the eleven volumes of the Indian journals plus a twelfth volume of Canada journals. They're in the basement of the Pierpont Morgan Library in a wooden box that Thoreau made out of pine himself, and they're very difficult to get to. I was fortunate enough to have the Pierpont Morgan Librarians make me a set of the unpublished Indian journals; they've never been published. What he did was he began to read everything he could on Indians in the early 1840s, and keep notes and make extracts, and then he and his brother John would go out in archaeological expeditions to try and find things and then began to understand that there were still some old Indian descendants left and when they went up into Main one of the Indian descendants who was able to be found there said that he would guide the Thoreau brothers around, and so the Indian journals began to take on a mysterious, magical, mystical tone, and he began to realise that he was becoming Indianised, and rather than being European trained as like at Harvard, to be some kind of what, minister in some kind of a congregation, or some kind of a teacher in secular schools, he became more and more White Indian, and as he did, he began to find that nature now instead of just being 'natural' to him, was revealing its mysteriousness to him. And as he did, he realised he needed a further transform from the mysterious into that deeper magic, and like all Indians when you get to a certain spiritual maturity at that level, where you are affined to the mystery of nature, now you need to go on a vision quest to get into the magical realm. Walden Cabin was his Indian quest. He took himself for two years and in one of the most poignant parts of Walden, when a deep, deep snowstorm blizzard had piled snow so that every window and every aspect of the cabin was completely under snow, he couldn't get out, there was nothing to see, he suddenly, because he had been tuned not only to nature but to mystery and into magic, went to the fireplace and looked up the flu and there was a square of blue sky, and he understood that he had become free.
More next week.