Nature 2

We're moving into nature 2, and it means that we're now in a position for beginning to have had its beginning and its movement from nature 1. Our appreciation is one that needs layering and patience for its disclosure. We live in a time that's very similar to many other times in human experience, where the mind has usurped every function and its projections dictate what can be considered and what is not of interest.
And as we will discover in our learning, the mind in its symbolic structure is only one-eighth of the full spectrum of what is real, and that full spectrum of what is real is constantly enlarging, but nevertheless has an eightfold quality to its reality. That eightfold nature is not just a traditional wisdom of the historical Buddha; one finds it all the way through, the octave as the basic tone structure of music in the West; the Ogdoad from Ancient Egypt; the eightfold quality of quantum quark reality due to the genius of Murray Gilman in the late 20th century. All the way through we find this.
The quality of eightness allows for us to have a very interesting proportionate relationship. We can have a symmetry which is cubed and at that eightfold set then has a spatial blossoming of pairdness in its symmetry. But symmetry is a quality that is there of existentiality. And deeper than the paired symmetry of existentiality is the deep complementarity of the pairdness in nature. In nature the pairdness is not between a symmetry of Yin and Yang (to use the Chinese terms) but as a complementarity of Tao and Te. Now this is simple and it's fundamental and it is generally not understood by persons who lead with their mind. And this is not only true of the current West; it is true of the current East as well. My Chinese mentor forty years ago assured me that most Chinese of his generation had Japanese minds rather than Chinese minds, because the Chinese mind has been commandeered so long in a social matrix. The Chinese Civil Service was instituted by Qin Shi Huangdi about 220-something BC, and was in effect until 1911 AD. And when it was taken away, it was taken away by the power of the Japanese empire expanding itself; after having defeated Russia in the war of 1905, Japanese imperial expansion asserted itself increasingly and eventually took over Manchuria, and eventually took over almost all of China and that occupation lasted until 1949, when finally the Chinese armies under Chu Teh, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, marched to Canton, now called Guangzhou, in the south, and they arrived at the city gates of Canton with an army of 5 million men. It was on that occasion that the phrase was given that the Chinese people, for the very first time in their history, have stood up. And so the people's republic of China came in to play with a great disadvantage; there was hardly anyone who had a history of natural achievement, had only the heritage of a forced, inculcated social milieu and structure and force, and then had that displaced by a completely different kind of mentality, one which the Japanese mind characteristically is good at, is to hone symbols down to their ultimate smoothness and to streamline so that they are almost Zen perfect. And so it is very difficult even today to find Chinese who have Chinese experience in their consciousness. Just as in the West it is very difficult, because of the inculcations of empires that began to assert themselves some 4,500 years ago and reached an apex about 2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire, that the West has, like the East, been curtailed by an artificial mental projection. And in that projection the basic flow of nature has not been seen, has not been appreciated, has not been utilised very often, except by rare individuals, by scarce communities of groups and for very limited times in history, hardly ever exceeding more than two generations at the most, three in very rare exemplars.
And so our planetary kind, by the beginning of the 21st century, have an incumbent need to be able to, as Georgia O'Keefe said, make a friend of nature. That it takes a while to get acclimated again and just to have beautiful moments by the sea shore, just to have winning moments in the mountains or forests, simply to enjoy an hour in a garden or to be able to appreciate in very special, magical circumstances, the deep mystery of the natural gift of an ebullience, is very much needed to be given a chance to deepen, and last week with nature 1 we saw that there are three levels, there are three deeper and deeper flows of nature, and they show themselves in the electromagnetic world by the three different forms of an electron. The basic electron that we're familiar with in electricity in the shape of matter, that electron has been given, through scientific analysis, a calibration of 0.511 megavolts, half a megavolt, and so the electron will have that universally as the calibration of its energy as a particle. That is, in order for it to maintain itself as an electron, as a particle, it must have neither more nor less than 0.511 megavolts. And yet the electron has a heavier form, the muon, but whereas the electron is stable over billions of years, perhaps hundreds of billions of years, the muon is only extant in 10-6 x 2 seconds, so if you put 10 with 6 more zeros and you multiply that by 2 and you put a decimal at the beginning, that's how long a muon will last. So that whereas the electron is stable, the muon is definitely there but it is almost fleeting, and in this way, as we saw last week, nature is stable but nature also has a mysterious energy registry and that mysteriousness is much larger because the muon is 105.6 megavolts, it's almost 210 times heavier in energy charge than the electron. And so the heaviness also condenses itself in terms of time and also in terms of time space, so that the mysterious flow of nature is extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily fleeting at the same time. This is a clue for us.
And yet there is a third, deeper level to the electron than just the mysterious muon. There is the magical tau particle that was not discovered until 1975, whereas the electron was first posited about 1897 and the muon was formulated in 1937, it wasn't until 1975, at the Fermilab outside of Chicago, that the tau particle was found and identified. It is 1.77 gigavolts. It is so enormously powerful, more than just the fact that the muon is a couple of hundred times more powerful and more fleeting than the electron, the tau particle is expansively, almost asymptotically more powerful and more fleeting. It only lasts 10-13 x 3 seconds , so you put 10 with 13 zeros and multiply that by 3 and then put a decimal, that's how fleeting in time, in time-space, and how powerful the tau particle really is.
Each of these forms of the electron, the muon, the tau particle, are basic constituents of the way in which universe has a stability in nature with the electron, because it can interplay with the photon, with the carrier of electromagnetic energy, whereas the muon in its fleetingness, does not disappear but it decays into other particles and the tau particle almost instantly, in terms of any time-space decays. We saw last week that whereas there is nature and then there is a mysterious nature, very powerful and very fleeting, there is a magical nature that is even more powerful and even more fleeting.
The mind in its traditional, distorted, symbolic structure, cannot even appreciate nature, and poo-poos any kind of entertainment that there is some mysterious nature that is possible, and has no way whatsoever to conceive of a magical nature.
We're taking pairs of interesting persons and interesting books to bring them together in several different ways. One is to let them occur for us as the beginnings of traditional learning by learning how to read. We know now that you cannot go beyond a simple, cultural level of tribalism without learning to read, and if you can learn to read, you can learn on a level that exceeds that of the culture, that exceeds that of the tribe or of the group, and one can enter into a very larger realm which is known as civilisation. If you can learn to read, you can learn. But if you learn to write, you can teach. And so the ability to write and read with language is a watershed that brings people out of the cultural level where if one is participating in nature, at least you have that going for you, into that deeper, mysterious level where civilisation is possible, and then there is the opportunity for the first time to deepen that and expand that to the magical nature realm ... which is so far beyond civilisation that one traditionally uses the term reality.
So that nature is characteristic of a cultural flow, the au naturale of human beings, but the mysteriousness of nature is the deepening of it to the ability to have civilisation and the deepening of that, extraordinarily so, is the ability for our kind to be real. And so one has three different levels, and we find with our two examples, with Thoreau and with the I Ching, to begin us in this learning, we find that each of these exemplars has these three levels all complete. There is the natural, there is the mysterious nature and there is also the magical nature. There is an evolution to the I Ching that shows clearly this development and path. When it was first formulated by the traditional figure of FuHsi, the dragon man, but in his deeper presentation always paired with NuGua, his consort, and that the original I Ching was a celestial matrix, but after almost 2,000 years the I Ching was shifted from a celestial basis to a terrestrial basis, and that the whole understanding of how the I Ching worked was deepened to a more mysterious nature, that in the mysterious nature there was a recalibration of the way in which the flow of that process happened, and it was mitigated and mediated and in a deeper participant way co-created by man. And so the human I Ching was formulated about 1150/1200 BC. That was the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty, and they harkened back, leapfrogging back over the Shang Dynasty that had been in power for more than 600 years, to the dynasty that preceded the Shang, the Xia Dynasty. And the Xia Dynasty was the first time in which China began to have certain symbolic qualities: the chariot, the bow and arrow, jade, a number of characteristics that were generated in Central Asia, generated by contact with the third millennium BC nascent civilisations of Central Asia, who were running caravan routes by the time all the way into the Gobi Desert, all the way into the area where Chinese of the Xia Dynasty, even 2200 BC, were coming into contact with them in the northern and southern outposts above the Gobi deserts and below it, ancient Khotan and ancient Kucha.
Kucha had the northern routes coming down from what in our time was Soviet Central Asia, and also coming over the northern part of the Gobi desert from passes in the Hindu Kush that led all the way back up the Amu Daria to Samarkand and the northern Caspian regions, and also coming across from northern India, Pakistan, what was at that time the early pre-Vedic civilisation of Indus, India, Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, two great cities that were already by 2500 BC enormous, more than several hundred thousand people each. The Zhou dynasty harkened back to the Xia, which had emerged out of a period of five great mythical kings who had had their divine kingship emerge out of the original I Ching of FuHsi and NuGua. But when the Zhou Dynasty came in, redoing the I Ching, it was on the basis that now man was a participatory ratioing, a proportionate aspect to Tao and Te, and that this brought his Jen into play, so that we read contemporaneous with the I Ching of the Zhou Dynasty, the earliest collection of Chinese poetry called the Book of Songs.
The people of our race were created by heaven,
Having from the beginning distinctions and rules.
Our people cling to customs and what they admire is seemly behaviour.
Heaven, looking upon the land of Zhou,
Sent a radiance to earth beneath.
To guard this son of heaven it created Zhung Shan Fu.

In his nature Zhung Shan Fu in a pattern of mildness and blessedness,
Is good in every attitude and air, so cautious so compossed,
Following none but ancient teachings,
Striving only for dignity and good deportment,
Obedient to the son of heaven,
Whose glorious commands he spreads abroad.

And so you have, with the emergence of the new I Ching, now sometimes called the I Book of Zhou, the Zhou Ching, or as we would understand it today, the classic I Ching which was pointing towards a further deepening in the mysteriousness and yet at the same time whenever that mysterious nature seems within intuitive reach, it is so fleeting, it is so rare, it is so refined, that the mass majority, the great population of people, of human beings, of social norms, looks to do an enforced enlargement of the old culture, of the old tribe, and out of this then comes not civilisations but the enforcement that leads towards empire. And so we have a curious kind of a symmetry where empire and civilisation are both structural phenomena that are capable of being brought out of the same matrix, one a devolution and the other an evolution into a more macro universe, and the other a devolution into a more controlled, indoctrinated, social set of norms.
By the time it was possible, some 600 years after the Zhou Dynasty was founded and had entered a period of decay for many centuries, one had for the first time a couple of generations of Chinese who were of extraordinary ability to go into the mysteriousness of nature and to bring out the magical nature for the very first time in Chinese history. And the telling mark of this is the development at the time of alchemy. One can understand nature in terms of wood and bone, of antlers and shells, but to be able to utilise, for the very first time, the ability to go into metals, is a deepening into the mysterious nature and the beginning of the rise of civilisation. But the alchemy is the ability to magically change the metals, to change them so that they do not just occur in nature, or that they do not just come together in certain formulaic ways of producing say bronze or brass, but the alchemy of being able to change the very nature of metals into other metals rising in a resonance of their set, so that one can go from the most base metal to the highest metal, to gold, the heaviest metal, but at the same time there is an alchemy not only of metals but of minerals. So that one has the ability to go through the set of resonances of minerals and bring it to the apex where one finds the gold mineral, and that gold mineral was, in China, cinnabar. And what was curious is that the development of alchemy in China came remarkably about the same time as the first beginnings of alchemy in Ancient Egypt, about 350 BC. C
Cinnabar originally was only from one mountain in Central West China, and cinnabar, when it is heated, will disclose that it has in its mineral content mercury and sulphur, and that the mercury and sulphur together will make this mineral, and when it is leavened a little bit by salt you can have different constituents of this and in Western alchemy too mercury, sulphur and salt are the three aspects of alchemy. Jospeth Needham and The Science and Civilisation in China over the last fifty years, now about twenty volumes, showed that the development of alchemy East and West was a matter of exchange and interchange between them. It always comes as a great surprise to people to learn that the earliest Roman envoys to Luoyang, the capital of Han China, was 166 AD. By 166 AD the Romans were sending regular envoys all the way to the capital of Han China, and not only by ship, along an ancient trade route that already was developed in the second millennium BC, all the way from Mesopotamia to India to the Indus civilisation and down the coast as far as where Bombay, now called Mumbai, exists, and river systems that go into central India, all the way down the coast of Southern India to Kerala, to Madras, to those states in Southern India where the Tamil language is spoken and all the way to Sri Lanka, to Ceylon, and so it is a long period of time between having trade routes that were regular 2000 years ago, to having just 150 years after that the ability to go all the way into the central areas of Han China.
The Han people were different. They rejected the Zhou Dynasty because it had decayed over many hundreds of years and it had been seen to have decayed into chaos, and so it needed to be brought back by something stronger; and what was stronger to the Han Chinese was the success of the first really great Empire Builder in Chinese history; his name was Qin Shi Huangdi, and from him the Chinese were called people of Qin, Chinese. Before that they were from different districts, different provinces, they were never called Chinese. Now, for ever after that, they were called Chinese. He's the one that linked together various walls into the Great Wall, which was refined over the centuries and eventually became the only human construct really that can be seen from space. But in the Han Dynasty, epical change happened with language, the way in which people read language and the way in which people wrote language. Chinese characters go back, in their origins, all the way back to the beginnings of the I Ching, all the way back to FuHsi and NuGua, and they improve themselves in much better characters by the time of the Zhou Dynasty and the I Ching that we're familiar with even to this day. We're familiar with it because in the Han Dynasty the I Ching was frozen as one of the classics of the civil service exam and was never again allowed to be changed, like the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament; Rabbinical Judaism has made sure that the Masoretic Text of 2006 is exactly the same as that decided at the Council of Jamnia in 90 AD. As the saying goes, not one jot has changed. The text is exactly the same. The I Ching of Qin Shi Huangdi was frozen by the Han Empire, which is the Chinese Romans, and kept exactly the same until the 20th Century. And so one has a very curious kind of realisation that when language changed, because of the massive forceful trigger of Qin Shi Huangdi, who only lasted about 25 years, just one generation, and then his power was usurped by a very clever and very forceful peasant named Liu Pang, who founded the Han Dynasty because he managed to bring together power groups that realised that they could take over this power and not have to be so much an inheritor of some kind of dynastic kingship, but one could found a new kind of a dynasty and it was on the basis that language had undergone a sea-change. For all the time that Chinese characters were used, even with their Zhou Dynasty refinement, they were engraved on bamboo, on very fine slivered bamboo. But at the beginning of the founding of the Han Dynasty the brush and ink on silk came into play, and instead of having the stiff, stylised Chinese characters that were engraved on bamboo, for the first time one had Chinese language that was written in an individual way with the brush on silk and the ability to read and the ability to write underwent a sea-change. But not only was civilisation capable of being brought into a magical reality, but civilisation was having its shadow empire devolve back so that one had a less than mysterious or less than natural nature, one now had a demonised nature. And so empires always bring with them a demonised nature, where the magic and the mysterious are lumped together and lumped with demonic forces and so one has to spend most of one's time protecting oneself against the demonic forces, and to hope that special persons who can go into the mysteriousness are commandeered in the service of the empire, that they not be left outside of the prevue of the empire and that one has to be very careful that deeper than mysteriousness, the magicalness. And so one has to make sure that the magic is brought into service of an empire demon-protecting ethos, rather than for it to be a thrice-greatest quality of natural.
This was the state at which the I Ching was frozen, 2200 years ago, and we receive it today through several thousand years of persons inculcated into that mentality. When we come back from the break I'll introduce you two Chinese who got very close to being able to go back to not only the primordiality of the nature and to the mysteriousness of that deeper nature, but broached almost there to the magical level. The two figures are Master Ni, who is still alive, and Khigh Dhiegh who passed away a number of years ago. Two very close friends of mine. It is amazing to see that there are so few who understand Chinese nature to the depth of mystery and of magic. My mentor, Qi Yushu, was one of the few, and one of the most magisterial figures of the 20th century. The key to it is to be able to understand that in your language, in your calligraphy, you do not write a rhetorical, reductive structure to the symbolic mind, but that you make the symbolic expression of it transparent so that a poetic quality emerges into the conscious person. And while there is a cultural character and a symbolic individual on the third magical level, there is a spiritual person who exists not in the culture and not in the mind, but who exists in the realm of art.
Let's take a little break and then we'll come back.
<Applause>

Let's come back to the three flows in nature, the flow of nature in itself, which is an ongoingness without beginning and without end, and so it's ongoingness has a quality where its change is scintillating and always occurring, and yet there is a deeper registry of the energy so that nature becomes mysterious. And then there is a second deepening, even much more, where nature becomes magical. And so this three-layer level of the way in which nature is able to function naturally, mysteriously and magically, is presented in the way in which this learning takes place. The natural cycle of this in traditional wisdom was always a lunar cycle, it was always by the month, by the moon. And so it was the lunar cycle that had a quality to it that was able to be lived on the earth in a natural way, and yet that lunar cycle could be depended mysteriously to the solar cycle. And that solar cycle was then [43:40]. But interestingly enough the lunar cycle between full moon and new moon, which is no moon, if you count the full moon there are three natural phases in between the full moon and the new moon or the no moon. The middle of those three is the half moon. But in between the full moon and the half moon is a gibbous moon, where the crescent moon is dark and then there is beyond the half moon, the crescent where it's just the light crescent leading to the new moon. And so lunar cycles have a five-phase quality to them, from fullness to emptiness, which, if you take the lunar cycle then as a harbinger of what would be natural on this planet in this world, you come out with a five-phase energy cycle, which the Ancient Chinese came out with. That five-phase energy cycle occurs from the new moon of zero-ness, the Tao of the moon, all the way through the five phases that lead to its fullness, after which then it goes back, it returns back, not regresses but returns back, and so you have a cycle that has at its mysterious origin Tao, and at its full phase, its final instance of its final phase of return.
In the Ancient [46:00]West this was always the way in which a choreographed sacred movement was delivered. The sacred movement emerges out of the mysteriousness of a deeper nature. And as it occurs it goes through its expressive, gestured choreography to a place of return, of turning, and the returning of that motion is a turning about on the axis of its energy. And we call the axis of an energy that allows for a turn, we say of that that that is a pivot. And so in the ancient sacred dance one finds from Ancient Egypt all the way through the classical Greeks, the way in which a sacred dance would happen is that one has the circle of the natural movement that comes to a turn, a pivot, and then goes back through that movement in a counter-movement, and this was the structure of the earliest spiritual person poetry. In Greece it was called the lyric, and still is called lyric poetry. Someone expresses their spirit person in a scared, poetic language which can be written and can be read and can be recited, but also can be danced to, and the Greek term for that performance is a chorea, out of which you get the very structure of Greek tragedy and Greek comedy, but also of Plato's plays, The Philosophic Dialogs. Also of Pindar's poetry and the terms for this were the strophe, which is the natural movement, which is the clockwise movement, the stand or the pivot, turn, and then the antistrophe, the anticlockwise movement, but what was mysterious about it was that the pivot in the turning of the centre was also the pivot at the beginning and the pivot at the end, so that the motion did not come to a stop, it always comes to a pivot. And so it does not begin from a point, it begins from a pivoting. And so sacred motion was always understood as a chiral motion , and the chiral motion that was in symmetrical pairs, and because scared motion is in symmetrical pairs the double chirality generated a magnetic quality. And so one gets a magnetism, a magnetic field, that works with the electrical field and so it is not just that electrons exist in nature, but electrons exist in nature always in some kind of orbital chirality and structure, and if they are in the normal universe, as we were talking about earlier, they are just stable electrons but they have occurred in pairs. Not just the electron but the antiparticle, the positron, the positive electron. But just as the electron has its deeper, mysterious registry, the muon, and then a thrice-greatest, deepest registry, the tau particle, one goes from nature to mystery to magic. And the deeper that one goes, the more that the energy skyrockets but that the time space shrinks to almost an infinitesimal quality of appearance. So that the mind in its normal, natural extent, the most that it can do is to sense the naturalness of nature.
When there is a transform, and the ancient way to talk about that particular transform was always that it is a ferment, when one reads the pyramid text of Ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago, the utterances always say of the king approaching Osiris, that he will have gifted to him the ferment of Osiris, to be able to transcend the death limit in nature of life, so that life and death together are able to reoccur, to return, and come back with the rising of the new day. But that ferment of Osiris, that first deepening, is the deepening from nature to mysterious nature. But there is a second deepening, which is the distillation of the ferment. The one goes from water to wine; the other goes from wine to the cognac. It is that second transform that not only is able to do the natural cycle and pivot and do the mysterious cycle of the return into spiritual consciousness, but there is a third deepening where the entirety of the real, which these two together are in eternity, and so one has a mysteriousness. Osiris is able to give the gift of the ferment courtesy of his pairing with Isis, just life FuHsi in the original I Ching with NuGua, able to give that mysteriousness where one not only is able to be natural to the point of understanding it in the mind, of knowledge, but to go insightfully deeper, so that one now has a mysterious knowingness which exceeds the structural bounds, the defined limits, the natural liminals of the symbolic mind, and one is able to go onto a transform.
And so our conscious visioning is making one's energy higher, deeper, like moving from the electron to the muon, several hundred times more potent but also several hundred thousand times less in duration, and then to be ready for the second transform, which is to be not returned in the cycle of emerging again and again in life and death, because of a pairing, because of a fertility of the mysterious world, but that that second transform delivers a magical nature which is capable of eternity. One is no longer even limited by the ability to mysteriously return back to life, to mysteriously make the journey through another world and then go into a celestial world and have those two worlds proportioned by this world but one is able to go into the field out which all worlds emerge back into the originality of it. This quality of a triple presentation is characteristic of all wisdom traditions on the planet. We live at a time where the devolvement of the mind in its projected limitation only suspects that there is a mysteriousness and manufactures an artificial mysteriousness to satisfy the symbolic mind. Our learning is a recalibration so that this is not forestalled so much that it does not occur. And that's why we take our time to let the penetration of qualities and of relationalities have their own cooking time. We noted this morning Georgia O'Keefe said it takes a long time to learn how to see. It takes as long to learn how to see as to make a friend. And it is settling into not perception but the accumulated resonance that draws perception out, not to just its integral and conception in the mind, but draws the accumulation of the perceptible into an expansion where it has a vibration that is very participatory with nature on its mysterious level. We say then of that experience that that experience now has an accumulated quality of the mystery of nature, of the mystery of life, of the mystery of the world. And the heart collects that mysteriousness in not a calibrated, symbolic way, but in a way which is traditionally called, the word for it is sentience. So that the character of our experience is a sentient heartfullness, and it is this sentient heartfullness that in the Chinese energy cycle was at the middle of the five, and it was called Jen. It's sometimes just translated in a cursory way as human heartedness. It is not just human heartedness, it is the mysterious accumulation of mystery, so that the mystery of the heart is the experiencer who is able to participate with the Tao of nature, so that Tao and Jen together occur in what was beautifully called by a French savant, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, he said that primordial man had a 'participation mystique,' that he could not only go back to nature but that his experience could be absorbed by nature in such a way that nature absorbed his experience and his experience absorbed nature, and what came out of this was a different kind of a human being: a human being who was not just au natural, but was the embodiment of nature's mysteriousness itself. In the I Ching, and in Thoreau, who we're taking together, one finds that this is [59:27] to that rare level where the mysterious person now not only has the heart of participation with nature, but that the artist has emerged in their own mysterious expression and is on the verge of being able to disclose to that mysterious part of themselves the magicalness of the real, where nature is not just simply what occurs mysteriously at the beginning, or even occurs mysteriously in that pivot, but occurs also at the unending infinity of it, in the eternal.
Two figures in the twentieth century who were able, I think, to add to the I Ching enormously, and a third figure who was my mentor for many years in San Francisco. The first figure that we talked about today was Master Ni, and his translation of the I Ching, the Book of Changes, has gone through several editions, and the Khigh Dhiegh, who was the Rector of the Taoist Sanctuary here in Los Angeles for many years, and also produced a series of I Ching Taoist books of days from the 1970s through the 1980s. This was the year of the dog, 1982, because 2006 is also again the year of the dog.

Khigh Dhiegh also was enormously sophisticated in a very interesting way. His father was Sudanese and his mother was Chinese, so an interpenetration of two different realms and worlds. When he moved to Chandler, Arizona in retirement, to his ranch, instead of having guard dogs, he kept a flock of peacocks which make a god-awful noise if anyone intrudes on their ground and so this is a beautiful way to work with the Tao. He used to call me 'Roll with the Tao'. That was his name for me and this is an inscription, but this book, which came out in 1973, I got a copy from him in 1976 when we were both teaching at UCLA in rooms across the hall from each other; it's called The Eleventh Wing and this is the first time since Confucius that anyone wrote a commentary on the I Ching called wing. Confucius wrote ten commentaries called The Ten Wings. This is The Eleventh Wing. And what it is, is the wing is the mysterious ability to go deeper than nature, but to also go into the realm above the world in the mysteriousness, so that one comes on the verge, on the liminal of the magical. And it's the magical where the alchemy now is able to take place. Nature can have its own concourse and a mysterious nature can have its chemistry, but only the magical has an alchemy. In a very interesting way, Thoreau is a mysterious person who verged constantly on the magical and his ability to inhabit the mysterious comfortably and to convey in rare moments the magical, had two individuals that received from him a new kind of alchemical magnetic. The most famous of these persons in Walt Whitman, and they put Walt Whitman on the World's Classic edition of Thoreau's Walden, and they put him uncharacteristically for Uncle Walt, they put him in a rowboat looking over his shoulder. It's interesting, because in India, Walt Whitman is considered a Maha Yogi, he's considered one of the greatest Maha Yogis of all time, and his teacher in this, and in India he's always singled out as the teacher of Whitman, is Henry David Thoreau, so that when you come to a book like this, published by Haridas Muzumdar, Ghandi Versus the Empire, first published in 1932, it is dedicated 'Sacred to the memory of the almost forgotten American hero, Henry David Thoreau; sage of the Walden, author of the essay on civil disobedience.' And he is considered the great teacher of the Maha Yogi, Walt Whitman, which is exactly the truth. In 1855 when Whitman published the first edition of his Leaves of Grass, it was only several dozen pages long and if you read the original edition, which is out in paperback reprints, he's an interesting poet of the nineteenth century. Then he was visited in his hotel room in New York City by two friends; one of them was Thoreau and accompanying Thoreau was his old friend Bronson Alcott. And Bronson Alcott was the magisterial head of the Concord, Massachusetts Mystery School that inherited the transcendentalism of the early New England blossom and carried it into an academy of esoteric wisdom traditions that had one branch in Concord and had another branch in a farm called Fruitlands, outside, and Fruitlands gave rise to a whole Utopian community called Brook Farm.
And it was Bronson Alcott who was so wonderful at being able to pass on his teachings that one of the greatest authors of the nineteenth century was one of his daughters, Louisa May Alcott, who writes not only Little Women and Little Men but a whole raft of works that are being republished now, she's being rediscovered as one of the greatest American writers .She is like a female Jack London, completely underestimated in the United States but not so in China. In China Jack London is considered the great American author, and the appreciation for work like Louisa May Alcott's work, which is about the difficulty of maturing, of a woman in not just a patriarchal society that harkens back to a patriarchal kind of religion indoctrination, but also a masculine, distorted society that increasingly was having fun getting industrialised and all the time the marginalisation of the woman, not only the natural woman but even more so the crimping into almost impossibility of being able to emerge of the mysterious natured woman, and the almost complete obviation of the magical, natural woman sage.
When Thoreau and Alcott went to Whitman's hotel room they stayed for several days and it was a revelation to Whitman, because Thoreau, from his earliest days when he was still a teenager, 17, 18 years old, he entered Harvard at just barely 18 years of age, and for the first time he realised what an enormous genius at linguistics he was. The only linguist of the nineteenth century that came anywhere near the genius of Thoreau and language was Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was a professor of languages at Bowdoin College and he spoke almost all the great classical languages. The author of Hiawatha was one of the greatest linguists of the nineteenth century. Thoreau was the other one. And Thoreau, when it came time for him to understand that he had been challenged by this gift, not only of languages but his ability to approach nature and to be absorbed in the participatory flow to the mysterious quality, and then to have those moments where the magical nature occurred to him, he began to put all of his early Indian materials together into those Indian notebooks, eleven notebooks that are in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, unpublished still. One of the sections of one of those Indian journals is this little note on American Indian languages. He found that in a book, an old nineteenth century book called The History of the American Indian by a man named Adair, I'll bring a copy next week so you can see what an almost 200-year-old book on American Indians looks like, the Indians pronounce in a sacred way Yo He Wa. Seems to be the true Hebrew pronunciation of the divine essential name we call Jehovah, and that the Indians continued to repeat the favourite name of god according to the ancient pronunciation and Thoreau puts three exclamation points. How do ancient Indian languages come to pronounced the name of god in an esoteric, ancient Hebrew way? And when this came out there was in American transcendentalist circles, insight that the mysteriousness is that somehow god is really god, and is the god of all peoples and that the sacred name is not because there is just some kind of [1:11:37 Christorial] contact in nature, but that there is an accumulated resonance in mysterious nature and there is the possibility of a transformative magic nature that is working now.
And so the transcendentalist movement embraced not only the American Indian mysteries, but also the latest mysteries in philosophy of Kant and of Goethe, of Coleridge, of a transcendental quality to human heartedness that expands into the conscious heartedness, and that that conscious heartedness now allows for a person to be a sacred artist, and the sacred artist makes now works which are prismatic rather than pragmatic. Instead of being forms that simply work in nature, they now prismaticaly, like jewelled lenses, are able to deliver the complete energy of mystery to the point of the magical universe, the spread into beyond five senses, beyond the sixth sense into other senses. And Khigh Dhiegh mentions how many other mysterious and magical senses do we have that are now disclosable, approachable? The key to this for Thoreau was not reading Homer, not reading Aeschylus, he could translate classical Greek by the time he was nineteen, the Huntingdon has his translation of one Aeschylus' Greek tragedies that he made at nineteen at Harvard, but he learned from reading in Emerson's library that there were Asian classics, and the Asian classics that he most harkened to were the ancient [1:13:56] of Zoroaster and the Upanishads Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita. He responded to them in such a way that some fifteen years later an Englishman who had visited Emerson, name is Thomas Cholmondeley, spelt Cholmondeley, pronounced Chumley, when he came to visit Emerson because he'd heard so much of Emerson from Carlyle, Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, the author of The French Revolution and many other great books, have about 700 pages of letters between them, but when Cholmondeley came to visit Emerson he was told by Emerson that Mrs Thoreau put up boarders in her house, down the street in Concord, and so Cholmondeley stayed for a couple or three days and that's where he found that Thoreau was even deeper than Emerson.
And so about a year later Cholmondeley sent a big box of Asian classics to Thoreau with a little letter. This is 1854. He said, 'These are for you. There are 26 different classics, but in 44 volumes, because I know that you are extra special and that you not only will be able to appreciate them, but that you live them and that you are one of the originals.' And so when he visited Walt Whitman in his New York City hotel room with Bronson Alcott he was fresh from having reread the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedanta, the great swell of Zarathushtra, and he said to Whitman, 'You are like me, but you don't know that because you don't expose your expansiveness far enough.' And so Whitman completely redid Leaves of Grass. It was the second edition of Leaves of Grass is a couple of hundred pages and one notices all of a sudden this kind of mysterious quality to Whitman emerging in an incredible way. And then Whitman went through the second transform. He went through the distillation. He became not just a good man who became a Yogi, he became a Yogi who became a Maha Yogi. And the third edition of Leaves of Grass is the one that we have classically, hundreds and hundreds of pages where he says, 'Do I contradict myself? Therefore I do contradict myself. My barbaric YAWP will resound eternally through every aspect of the universe possible. I embrace all of you to come and be here.' On this level, deeper and more mysterious, and it is Thoreau who brings this to pass. In his great writing, Walking, Thoreau takes us quickly from nature to the mysterious nature to the magical nature, in the little essay on walking, one of the classics of transcendentalism.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest brightest morning sun-light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beam. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.
I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, [a shepherd] driving us home at evening.
So we saunter to the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as banks in an autumn afternoon.
More next week.
<Applause>