Nature 3
Presented on: Saturday, January 21, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Nature 3 and you're looking at a pair of Fu dogs and these are Dragon Dogs and they typically guard the temple in Chinese civilisation. And they have an ancient quality to them which we'll talk about momentarily. This pair actually belonged to William Jennings Bryan who ran for President three times in the United Sates and they were given me by his granddaughter Helen Bryan English, years and years ago. Very few people realise about William Jennings Bryan that he raised a Chinese boy in their own household and he was very affine to the Orient. Everyone thinks of him as being a fundamentalist Christian, he was actually a very great human being. So these Fu dogs are Dragon dogs. They are a magical distillation of a mysterious transform of dogs in nature and we've been looking at the way in which nature has a three level parfait to its flow, it is natural and then it becomes mysterious and then it becomes magical.
On the quality of nature, dogs are just dogs. On the level of mysterious, dogs have been tamed and are now a part of human life forever on, all over the world. They are still dogs but they are now dogs that have mysteriously joined the human family. The movement from dogs in nature to dogs in mystery is the deepening of the ancient Palaeolithic natural world that Palaeolithic men and women followed from time immemorial. To a great sea change when the Palaeolithic transformed into the Neolithic and the Neolithic then, when its mysteriousness deepened to a completion, a threshold where, like the Palaeolithic which had come to its completion, transformed into the mysterious Neolithic, the mysterious Neolithic transformed again into the magic of civilisation.
Very few documents that have survived in human history are as clear as the I Ching about these different levels. The Palaeolithic level is that level of the originator of the I Ching, some 5,000 years ago, FuHsi, and we've talked about how hsi is a Chinese oral word, ancient not just old, but ancient almost archaic is better, for shaman. It is a masculine shaman. The female shamaness in archaic China was a wu, and very often the term carries over so that one finds wu as a kind of deep mysterious, the way in which nature goes into the mysterious, the way in which for the first time, about the time that the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic were really having their full transformation. The I Ching came out of the natural Palaeolithic realm into the very first threshold of emergence into the Neolithic mystery and it wasn't just FuHsi but as we have seen it was a pair, a male and female pair, who were not just natural male and natural female but they became mysterious male, mysterious female and had the capacity, all of a sudden, to deepen into a magical woman and a magical man. And their interpenetration together, while it was fertile for children in nature, was mysteriously fertile for mysterious children in mystery and became twice transformed in civilisation so that they became magical to have magical children. The difference is when one looks at nature qua nature you see the changes that happen with things but when you look at the mystery you see the changes that happen within things which is their chemistry. But when you come to the magical world you come to the transformation of chemistry and to alchemy and you see not only the changes in things and the changes within things but the changes in the possible transforms of things, which are infinite.
And so the natural world has its cycle of completeness and when it is complete it returns. Very simply, in our calendar, the day after December 31st is January 1st and it will always follow that kind of circle. And so it is a cycle of completeness but one can have a mysterious transform of that. It is not simply that this year is another circle or a cycle, it is a year within a larger resonance within a larger cycle and so December 31st of 1999 was followed by January 1st of 2000. All of a sudden you have a change of not just the day or the week or the month or the year or the century but the millennia. And in this one comes finally to understand the layering of rhythms is the most fundamental quality of nature through all of its three flows: nature, mystery and magic. Our learning, our way of maturing, our way of educating ourselves and each other follows this most primordial. In its origin it's the compliment of night and day, the diurnal rhythm. On this planet, as on most planets, you will have a night and a day. On this planet they happen to be almost perfectly balanced between 12 and 12 in terms of our hours. And the 12 hours of night is perfectly expressed 5,000 years ago of the 12 stages of the netherworld of ancient Egyptian understanding of the mystery of nature. Just as the day then would have its 12 cycle. But to keep track of the 12 hours of the netherworld, one looked to the stars at night because the movement of the gates of the netherworld was always held to be a reflection on earth of the actual movement in the heavens in the constellations. This was true at the origins of the I Ching in China about 3,000BC and curiously it shows in the language, the names for the trigrams in ancient, in archaic Chinese are never found in the vocabulary of ancient archaic Chinese outside of the I Ching, outside of the trigrams.
And so it is supposed, from many decades, that those original terms came from elsewhere. They came not from the China of time immemorial tradition but further west. They came from a kind of Irani-central Asia where the carriers of that particular route that became a civilisation were the ancient Irani persons, sometimes in old literature called Turkish, people of the far west, but they were Irani but not Irani from the Iran that currently we would recognise but from central Asia. Sometimes the Greeks called them Scythians other times they were the mysterious population that when they moved north they became progressively people like the Magyars in Hungary, like the ancient population of the Komi people in Finland and north Russia. And so there is like an ancient cognate quality of the movements of people, of the movements especially at the origins of civilisation and the most powerful development 3,000BC.
In the central Eurasian landmass was the ability to move large caravans of goods over enormous distances. This required the taming of the horse and also the taming of the ox. The ox when tamed will pull a cart that can be loaded with goods, the horse when tamed can pull a chariot to defend your caravan routes, to extend those caravan routes. So the chariot and the cart, by having tamed powerful animals, is the transform of the Neolithic into the beginnings of the magic of civilisation. Tamed animals go back to about 9,000BC, about 11-12,000 years ago and the first animal tamed was the dog. The taming of the horse came much later, it came about 3,000BC and for the first time you see the introducing by slow patient decade and by century into China of the horse and of the Chariot, of the oxen that is tamed not only pull the cart in pairs but the individual oxen that is tamed to pull the plough.
And so you have this Neolithic mysteriousness that all of a sudden one understands that there are huge layers not only does nature produce the nice wild grains and wild berries but you can tame those plants and tame that ox and make that plough which then tames the earth and all of a sudden you have a Neolithic mysteriousness that does not overlay nature so much as blossoms forth out of it and gives to it this mysterious character that, out of the fibres that pull the water out of the earth into a liquoring in the stem in plant that produces the leaves, the blossoms and the fruits and prepares the way that when the flowers bloom they now perfume the air. That the magic is in the perfuming, the mystery is in the flowering and the nature is in the plant. We find traces of it even in ancient India the Chandogya Upanishad about 700BC. When it names the layers of reality it says that man is the essence of plant, not descended from animals, that all animals are descended together from plant. And just as man is the essence of plant, speech is the essence of man and Om is the essence of speech. And they usually end the Upanishad by saying, 'Shanti, shanti, shanti,' peace, peace, peace, three times: peace and nature, peace and the mystery, peace and the magic. And so a thrice greatest quality permeates everywhere and one has not only an alchemy in Egypt, one has an alchemy in China and one has an alchemy in India and one has an alchemy in Mesopotamia and an alchemy in central Asia, all about the same time. And it is a deepening of the mystery to its completeness so that the Neolithic completed itself and then transformed a second time into the magic of civilisation.
All of a sudden one sees in China, about 2,200BC, in almost an instant crisis, one finds immediately the founding of Dynastic China. And the founding of Dynastic China is the direct outcome of the maturing over about 800 years of the shift by FuHsi and his pair NuGua to bring the beginnings of the I Ching into play so that the I Ching now has its blossoming in the first Dynasty of China. And they are called the Xia, sometimes in old Wade-Giles spelled Hsia, today in pinyin Xia and it used to be said this is a phantom Dynasty, we have almost no trace of them, but we do. It's the first appearance of plants that are very distinctive from Irani-central Asia, it's the first appearance of tamed horses and chariots, it's the first appearance of ox carts and it's the first appearance of the reality that the far west is the origin of the mysteriousness of nature and Chinese civilisation.
It is always the far west which is the paradise from which the mystery of that transform emanates and one of course finds the same cognate. In Egypt it is the western desert, not at all the desert of the Sahara but the desert of the mystery which has the original paradise out of which we came. And of course the Nile valley, by 3,000BC, had become a place where civilisation could rise. Before that, the Nile river flooded and made swampy land and it was hardly able to be cultivated and before that for tens of thousands of years it was the Sahara desert that was the fertile land for Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. And as it dried out the Nile became increasingly the valley where one could count on the ability to have crops in the midst of the desiccation.
And in China the same thing happened, the Gobi desert, as it increased, as it dried out over those centuries, over those millennia. We talked about, last week, of how the dust from the Gobi blew into the central Chinese valley around the Yellow river, the Hwang Ho, and the Yellow river is yellow because it carries the sediment of this yellow Gobi desert dust. And in the central valley where Chinese civilisation first began to coalesce one finds deposits of this Gobi dust, it's called Loess soil and in some parts of Central China it is almost 900 meters deep. Like a kind of mysterious dust, when it receives moisture it becomes enormously fertile; in some areas of China you could raise two crops a year. But when the rains do not come and it dries out, it doesn't dry out into caked mud, it goes back to dust and becomes like the depression America 1930s: a dust bowl and people starve, they die. The same thing in Egypt: if one is not irrigating properly there are times where if the rains don't really come you will have huge droughts. In the Book of Genesis the seven years drought followed seven years of plenty.
And so there are cycles, there are layers of cycles and our education, our learning, builds on these kinds of cycles: day and night. The night is a process, the day is a form. And so, our learning learns the syncopation that forms will emerge out of a process and then, when the forms have their completion in a time frame, they will go back into the process and then re-emerge out of that process. And so the day does not just follow the night, the day emerges out of the process of the night, out of the process of the netherworld, out of the process of the celestial world. And so it is that every single day every single man and woman, throughout time, not just our species but species going back uncounted millions of years. The latest date is a skeleton of a protohominid from the Sahara desert, from Chad, from one of the highest mountains in the Sahara desert, about 11,000 feet high. And on the slopes a skull was found that was 7 million years old, one of our ancestors from the central Sahara. In China, just south of Beijing, in the late 1920s a skeleton was found in a cave, the Zhoukoudian cave, and that skeleton proved to be a man who had lived in the Beijing area 400,000 years ago and knew how to use fire and was called, and is called, colloquially, Peking Man. Later discoveries in the 1930s, 1940s showed a human skeleton from China that was 600,000 years old, also using fire.
But so long has, men and women, man lived in China, on the Loess of Central China, that they have become children of the yellow earth. Their complexion shows the origin from that landscape, they are not only the natural children of the landscape, they are the mysterious children of the mysteriousness of the landscape and they learn to be the magical children of the magical landscape which extends beyond the earth back into the stars, down into the, not just a netherworld but all netherworlds. And so one has a huge alchemy, of many layers that occur, beginning about 3,000BC and reaching an apex, in many parts of the world, between 2,500BC and 2,200BC. In that 300 year period one found the emergence of the realisation, deeper and deeper, that the mysteriousness is able to tame nature on any level and that nature agrees to this taming, not only the plants and the animals but ourselves, the cycles, the periodicities, time itself, space itself. And by completing that mysterious taming we prepared ourselves for the second transform into the magical.
Whereas nature completes itself in its cycle, mysterious nature completes itself in its mysterious periodicities that are expansions of it. And when that is doubly complete a third quality of layering comes in to play and that third quality of layering does not stop with completion or even the taming of the completion which amounts to a transform but it goes into a higher gear, it goes into the magical realm where it is no longer just completion and then the deep interior of completion, it becomes a furthering into a cycle of perfection. And the cycle of perfection is a cycle where the mysteriousness of nature has transformed into the magicalness of consciousness. And that consciousness now has this cycle as well but the completion of the two qualities is of nature itself and mysteriousness.
The magical is not completed by completion, it is perfected. But the perfection is in a deep complement to completion and so the perfection has also a double quality. There is, if one could speak of a natural magicness, and then there is a mysterious magicness. The perfection of the first, of the natural magicness, is the perfection of ourselves, of the spiritual persons of men and women. And the mysterious magical perfection is that the cosmos now is perfected. And so the spirit person and the cosmos have not a correspondence like in completion, they have a resonance like in a harmonic. And so one now speaks of there not just being a completed cycle or a deeper completed cycle or those two complemented by a perfected human spirit cycle. But further the perfection of the cosmic nature of the cycle gives now a very, very, infinite, eternal quality which is able in its form to have a particularly magical, mysterious, natural resonance and that resonance occurs to us as nature.
In our learning we take these kinds of syncopations: the diurnal cycle of day and night that work together now, they produce not a polarity but they produce an emergent pairedness, and a pairedness that has the qualities of symmetry and that that symmetry has the ability now to have a mysterious quality of deepening and that mysterious quality of deepening takes the centres of the deepening and allows them to exchange places. So then in alchemy the centre of the mysterious female is able to exchange places with the centre of the mysterious male. Now what you have is not just a completeness, deepened even and perfected even, but one has the ability to understand that this alchemy produces a quality beyond nature, beyond mystery, beyond magic and that fourth state one calls reality. And so the real now emerges as like a fourth magisterial stage which is not just the stage in a theatre, it is not just a stage in the theatre in a city, or a city in a landscape, or a landscape on a world, or a world in a star system, or start systems in a galaxy, or galaxies in a universe but universes within reality.
And so one learns to see that there are many levels that are coming out that were not apparent if one stopped with nature and the existential forms that have come out of nature. One has to go into at least four sets of those processes and forms coming out to sensitise oneself to the scale of the eternal, to the scale of the real. But one cannot jump there right away, you have to mature and the maturation is by a calendar of completion in the natural cycle and a complementary calendar of perfection in the conscious cycle and both work together all the time as forms emerging out of processes. And so the more that one sensitises oneself, patiently, to what this process does when it is working, one intuits spontaneously the true nature of the form that will come out of that and the first process is nature, the first forms are existence. Not just things but the limitations of actions of things that produce objectivity as well.
And so our learning begins with nature and we take it long enough to get acclimated to get a sense of its dynamic phase and then we balance that by the same amount of calendar time for a ritual to get how existence really comes into form and its formedness is always unity, always 'onedness' 31.41 if I can use that term. One does not find two thirds of a proton or two thirds of an electron, one finds the proton and the electron. It is true the proton is made of quarks but quarks tend to pair themselves all the time and they're not just enough to have a pair, there has to be a third and so quarks like to quark together and they like to make larger and larger unities. And what makes a quark? The latest probe is to try to find a mysterious phantom particle called the Higgs boson described by one European physicist one day in a kind of a trance, he said, 'Well, what we're looking for is a particle that is like condensed vacuum.' And one thinks right away how impossible this would be until one looks at the television news, just the last couple of days, from Nasa on the return of the space probe that went through the tail of the comet and brought back to earth little particles from the origins of the solar system four and a half billion years ago. And it was trapped in a gel, in little squares of gel, and they characterised the gel as 99% vacuum. So that the specks of almost infinitesimal dust can be brought back in a gel that is only 1% existential and 99% vacuum, open. And we do this as a matter of everyday technology. So we're learning to work with loess off the deserts of misunderstanding that, when fertilised by our consciousness, even that little minuscule bit is fertile for us to tame something even more deeper than mystery, to tame the magic that will allow us entrance to the real. Although this is happening now, our learning and our education are to bring a population of people into work, into creativity who will be able then to refine all of its aspects and bring about something deeper than a revolution or a rebellion, deeper than a reformation renaissance, to bring about a recalibration, a recalibration of men and women to the real, this is before us.
We take the rhythm of the day and then we group the days into a week, six days of days that occur in their natural diurnalness and a morning of the seventh day to do a set, making that those six iterations of day and night now are brought together by this seventh day morning of a presentation of learning, so that now we have not only the diurnal days but we have the week brought into its form by a presentation on the morning of the seventh day. And then we take four of those weeks together and we recognise that on our planet the moon, the lunar cycle, is four weeks. Not exactly four weeks but 30 days so that it is four weeks plus two extra days, a day that must be counted before those four weeks and the day after it, that must be counted as well. So that the lunar cycle is 30, it's actually 29.47 something, but close enough to 30 that from time to time one recognises further down the line you need to put an extra day in order to accommodate that.
So we have the daily diurnal cycle, we have the weekly cycle, we have the lunar cycle and putting three moon's together we have a seasonal cycle. And those three moons together, because it has not had a cosmological origin like the lunar cycle for the month will have it, the season would be some kind of cosmological cycle on this planet, of having three but the actuality of it is that seasons on many parts of the globe are not four seasons making up a solar year. What is more dependable is the introduction that we have done here, is to say that those seasons are phases and that there are four phases. That will then give us a completed annual cycle. Three moons plus an extra week, twelve weeks plus a thirteenth week, to make up for the days before the four weeks and the day after the four weeks, to bring those days together, and if we were strict we would say that leaves eight days, so a thirteenth week is just seven days. But notice this: always when one is working with intervalings, with what comes before the form and what is there after the form is formed, if you're including that, they do not go into a completion of form, they go into a special form where a portion of it is carried over to the next beginning.
The easiest way to understand this is that the ancient octave for Western music, Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do, the second Do is the first Do in the next set as well. And so it becomes a linking that the last of the completion is not the completion but that that last bit has done something esoteric, it has pivoted, it has turned and in its turning it goes one notch higher, it goes one calibration above whatever the completion of that previous calibration was. And so an octave, or in China it was a five note system so that the fifth note was not only the completion of the pentatonic scale but it was also the beginning of a higher order of the pentatonic scales as well. And so, one finds that in paying attention to the layering of nature, you're always looking in such a way that you're strategically open to cognise through recognition, not just cognise through perception nor to cognise through conception, but to keep your cognising open by recognising. And the 're' in recognising comes from remembering and remembering is the phase quality of consciousness.
Lets come back to nature, back to mystery and back to the magical. We're pairing the I Ching with Thoreau, we're not polarising them, we're not putting them into symmetry but we're pairing them which allows for symmetry and a polarity but also allows for a mutual circumambulation which gives a multiplicity of proportional perspectives and gives a structure of ratioing which can also be one half, one third, one fourth, three fourths, four fourths, four thirds. Ratios give us, like proportions give us, a quality of expansion and depth and transform and those qualities and those forms settle into stabilities. There are certain proportions and certain ratios which universally hold because that's the way in which nature accepts registry into relationality and relationality is always the preparation for form to emerge.
The translation of the I Ching that we're using is Richard Wilhelm who was taken to China, to the German language enclave in Shantung, which is a province that's a peninsula. And on this peninsula, at the base of it, is one of the sacred mountains of China: Taishan. He went as a German speaking missionary and very gently, quickly, in a layered way, he was introduced into the Taoist mysteriousness of China. In his book The Soul of China, translated into English and published in 1929, the reason it was translated and published was that his volume on The Secret of the Golden Flower about Taoist alchemical transforms of the yoga of the human body and the conscious human body, the key of the body that is circulated and becomes not just energy of the body but becomes the light of the spirit in its particular cycle that when it is radiant it radiates in its shiningness into the magical. He had worked with Carl Jung in doing that and Jung had worked with Wilhelm to try to understand the I Ching which was then turned over to a British translator, Harold Baynes, H.G. Baynes, who eventually, his translation was published in 1950 in the Bollingen Series.
The Bollingen Series was based on not only Jung's work but all the reverberations of Jung's work and the person who made this available was one of Jung's patients and very exquisite, we're going to talk about her in a little bit next week, Mary Mellon of the Mellon Foundation. Her husband Paul Mellon, one of the world's richest men at the time, but it was Mary Mellon who understood it is not that she is becoming healed by psychotherapy with Carl Jung's psychiatry but that all of the deep resonances that were there in what Jung's work was beginning to indicate to her were equally important. And so they funded 100 publications, many of the numbers of publications have been sometimes dozens of volumes. And so they funded the Bollingen Series in the depths of World War 2 to try to bring the full harmonic resonance of what Jung's work had sparked an interest in as a pilot light, what would this pilot light, if it were turned on and the whole civilisation were illuminated, what would it look like? And the Bollingen Series was for that.
Just at this time, The Soul of China by Wilhelm was translated and published as well. He writes, 'I was taken on a boat passed the little Island which is called The Heart of the Lake...,' this lake is in central China on the shores of which Hangzhou and later the great industrial centre of Wuhan are located. '...a deserted temple is hidden there beneath thickly planted trees,' on this little island on the lake, 'I landed near the lotus garden of Su Tung Po.' Su Tung Po was the greatest poet of the Sung Dynasty a thousand years ago; he was also a very great architect and a landscape architect. He made many gardens and villas on the Western Lake of Hangzhou. 'Stone bridges led to a pretty pavilion. The Dew drops still linger on the leaves like glistening pearls. Three small pagodas on the lake seem to wait for the reflection of the moon,' because the pavilions in sophisticated China are not to view the day but they are to not just not view the day but also not view the night but to view oneself in the moonlight, allowing the lunar light to accumulate so that one's seeing of oneself is seeing ones mysteriousness in the moonlight, which is why many of Li Po's poems are all about the moon. Not that moon up there but the source of the lunar light which in its cycle reveals the mysteriousness of our within and once we are able to participate in the mysterious nature of our within in that lunar light, we are prepared then for the alchemical transform to the magical, to the spirit where for the first time the real is within participation. 'Three small pagodas on the lake seem to wait for the reflection of the moon which flushes up amidst them in the autumn night. On the far shore, in a dense grove, is hidden the Buddhist monastery from which the road leads up through the quiet hills to the ruins of the Thunder Mountain pagoda. Many myths cling to this defiant edifice. An evil faerie, the white snake, lies beneath it where she is banned and cannot harm men as long as the holy stone holds her prisoner. In former days a watchtower stood on the pagoda, overtopping the heights round about and commanding a free view of the sea. From there the approach of the sea robbers could be seen from afar. As they steered towards the coast of Japan, the population was warned of the approaching robbers by signals. In the evening, when the sun was setting, I returned. Su Tung Po seemed to be singing in the twitter of the birds and there was a shedding of yellow radiance among the dark branches, the yellow birds at sunset showing their plumage which then would later glow in the mysterious moonlight in a very special way. A breeze rippled the surface of the lake and fireflies sped through the air. From the other shore the electric lights of Hangzhou could be seen and the stars stood in the high sky mirrored in the lake.'
Another translator of the I Ching, John Blofeld, went northwest out of Beijing, to the western hills and he went into a Taoist monastery. And he was viewing the garden, Chinese Taoist garden, and he got so deeply into the mystery of the Chinese garden in this Taoist monastery that the old Taoist caretaker asked if he would like to see the magical garden. And he was taken into a small room up above the rest of the monastery and there on a table top was a perfect miniature garden, every plant, every tree alive but small enough to fit on a table top. Incredible sophistication not only of China but of someone like Thoreau starts us off in the right way in order to pursue a way of learning which matures us beyond the limitations that we were always inculcated with and no longer should fetter us, should no longer be a stone holding back the spirit of some faerie white snake that might not be poisonous but might be an indicator in its movement and in its rest of something that we need to reacquaint ourselves with.
Rather than thinking of yin and yang, we need to understand that a deeper characterisation of it is movement and rest: movement, not a line but movement and rest, not a thing but a stability. Movement and rest are in between yin and yang which are aspects of a unity. They're the two halves that make something whole. The yin and yang make whole Te but Te is a oneness that emerges out of Tao, it doesn't emerge out of yin and yang, it emerges out of Tao. And the way it emerges out of Tao is that already there is a preparation for its emergence to come and the preparation is that movement that is continuous is invisible. Only when it comes to rest is there a visibility and the motion now, which was invisible, generates form and it's just this way that time, if time does not ever stop it doesn't register as time, it registers as eternity. But when time, in its movement has the ability to come to rest, all of a sudden we realise that there's time and now there's space. The space has blossomed out of the rest of the movement and time has become, in retrospective, the movement. And so, time space occurs together like Tao Te occur together. But for something to come from movement into rest, the rest needs to have a structure of form. And in order to have a structure of form there has to be the two elements of the energy frequency of movement that polarise and create for the first time the ability to have stability in form, in formality.
So that if you look at energy in a dynamic, it's always a waveform that has crests and troughs, all energy will register as this kind of a frequency of crests and troughs. And when you bring it to rest the polarity is that the crests now become creative of a polarity relationship with the troughs as receptive and you have the beginnings of a polarised form that now can be characterised: creative and receptive, the first two trigrams of the I Ching. Not only the first two trigrams but the first two hexagrams of the I Ching are the creative, all creative, three yang lines and the receptive, all receptive, three yin lines and they work together. And those first two hexagrams, those first two trigrams, of the I Ching have an interplay, a proportioning, a ratioing which settles into a structure of resonance which is universal. And the structure of resonance is that those two trigrams settle into a harmonic of eight trigrams and those two hexagrams settle into a matrix of 64 hexagrams, and they always do those. They do this to such an extent that no matter how many trillions of variations there are for DNA, its three part codons describe a matrix of 64 archetypal, universal sets of the way in which organic form anywhere in the universe will generate and hold because it's the holding stability that is essential for existence. And yet the mystery is that existence always comes whole out of the dynamic of movement so that if one has a movement that has no end, what you have is the source of all form of all existence.
One of the qualities of our learning was to bring back intelligence, the sensitivity, the mystery and the transform consciousness of the way in which these different resonant layers will always occur and yet with variations. There are some planets that do not have a four season, twelve month, 52 week year. Pluto's year is 248 point something years. So that by the time the New Horizons probe gets there in 2015 it will be just a little, minuscule, of a part of a morning though ten years will have gone by on this planet. So, when we acclimate ourselves off the world, beyond nationalities, for the first time to a star system wide, we need to have a differential consciousness that complements the natural cycling, a consciousness that has a perfection not that it completes something but that it perfects the ability to learn about it infinitely. And one learns that the scale of perfection is indeed a binary of zero and one and that nature, in its integral will always return to a oneness, an allness, a unity. But consciousness does not have a zero and one binary, it has a zero and infinity binary which means that perfection always returns to an openness for new possibilities. So that one has, in a star system civilisation, one has not a landscape of completion, one has a starscape of infinity. We're learning for the first time how to mature ourselves to that scalar of permanent openness. All interstellar beings had to learn to be capable of that.
And so we constantly pair, we constantly let the structure open up and we do not settle for a single year but we pair the years, one year for the natural interval, a second year for the differential and its year is not just another year, another interval, its transform constantly opens the natural cycle of the first year into myriads of possibilities and finally possibilities of possibility. And we do this gently so that there's no stress or strain other than the fact that it takes relearning to be patient and attentive over a longer and longer and finally shorter and shorter duration. The first time someone goes through a two year cycle it may seem like a long time, after a while it goes by in such a way that you get like an infinity sign rainbow shape of quality that the scintillation is enormously interesting and mysterious and transformative, all the time, everywhere.
At the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau, like Richard Wilhelm looking at the Taoist moon pavilions on the western lake in early twentieth century China, Thoreau wrote:
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it and flood the parched uplands; even this may be an eventful year which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record freshets. Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple tree wood, which has stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years. First in Connecticut and afterward in Massachusetts, from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it, which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well seasoned tomb, heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last.'
And so this education emerges again out of tens of thousands if not millions of years of mystery and of magic.
One of the qualities that we have is that our cycling is not repetitive, it's not circular. Because, when you put the dynamic into play, a circle will never come full round again but will heliacally spiral forth and form a cone of time. If one's consciousness is able to be patient and proportioned, maturely ratioed, one can have it so that the curl of the spiral is such that the next turn of the circle, instead of being just a haphazard spiral forth, will be just one order, one particular more than the previous. And if one continues to do this, the spiral will be so tight and so compact that it will resemble and old long play record whose spiral will be so magnetically sensitive one can record sound and music on that disc, on that spiral, on that record and play it back. And that one can do this in such a way that one doesn't need an old LP vinyl record anymore but just a simple magnetic tape. And even, magically, one no longer needs either vinyl or magnetic tape but simply the registry in your own electromagnetic brain. And that that spiral has a double chiral aspect to it so that one of the great mythological images, 2,300 years ago, one sees it in Alexander the Great's assumption of divinity that he had the two chiral horns of Amun-Ra in his brain, that they were laser-like engraved on the mind of the man who first conceived that all mankind was of a single family: the ecumenae. And that it wasn't the conquest of land but it was the pioneering of the interpenetration of not just peoples, not just tribes, but of whole empires of people into a single planet of mankind that would finally take its place at home among all the other planets in the stars and man would return back to a celestial rather than be trapped and just merely a terrestrial life form. We are about to do this and we are doing it every day and every year now for real.
One of the qualities that was there for Thoreau was that he was apprenticed, seemingly, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that Emerson was like the famous man, the Lion of Concord Massachusetts and that somehow Thoreau was like a junior member of the group of Emerson and yet they're enormously different. And though both are grouped together in a grouping called American transcendentalists, it's interesting to note that, in the origins of transcendentalism, the figure who was most close to Emerson was Bronson Alcott. And later in the development of Thoreau's maturity, Allcott became closer to Thoreau than he was to Emerson. Just as last week we talked about Thomas Cholmondeley, spelled, 'cholmondeley' who originally came from England and from the English empire, travelling all through India, British India and every place, came to meet Emerson. He was boarded at Thoreau's mother's home and when he got acquainted with Thoreau he realised that Thoreau was much deeper than Emerson. And when he came to send a box of 44 Asian classics, he did not send them to Emerson, he didn't send them to the Harvard University Library, he sent them to Thoreau. And at that time Thoreau was publishing his first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he had a thousand copies printed up and six copies sold. And so he had to take back the 994 volumes and store them. He lived in the attic room of his mother's boarding with two sisters, Sophia Thoreau sort of the oldest making sure the house ran well. And so Thoreau wrote in his journal, 'I now have a library of more than a thousand volumes, 994 I have written myself.'
It is an interesting thing to note that when he began his journal, 1837, he was just 17 years old. In the first year, from his first entry October 22nd 1837, ''So what are you doing now', he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry today.' Now the first word: 'solitude.' 'To be alone I find it necessary to escape the present, I avoid myself. How could I be alone in the Roman emperor's chamber of mirrors? I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.' And then he gives a little German quote, the Germans say, 'Es ist alles wodurch du besser wirst,' it's always better to leave it as it is. One can then emerge, not out of imposed arrangement but out of the nature that has achieved that resonance there and now, very Taoist, totally Taoist.
And what was even more astonishing when he came to write about harmony, this is Novemder 17th 1837, just three weeks following, 'Nature makes no noise. The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain, are no disturbance. There is an essential and unexplored harmony in them. Why is it that thought flows with so deep and sparkling a current when the sound of distant music strikes the ear? When I would muse I complain not of a rattling tune on the piano, a Battle of Prague even, if it be harmony, but an irregular, discordant drumming is intolerable.' And later, one of his most famous quotations is that if he marches in a different cadence it's because he hears a different drummer. And that became the title of the biography of Richard Feynman: The Beat of a Different Drum. What's interesting is in that first year he's only 18 years old. Increasingly, not only does he mention the classics but finally he begins to mention the Oriental classics, that he's drawn to the Upanishads, he's drawn to Zarathustra. Even though he is just an undergraduate at Harvard he is already awakening to something that was there. Was it there before him? It was there within him. It was there released by the mysteriousness and that was distilled by the magical consciousness.
It's just like in our learning, though we go from phase to phase by three lunar cycles each time, keeping our spiralling exactly spaced so that we'll heliacally move forward in movement it will also record rest at any particular point we wish to focus on in a polarised symmetry. That there will be a silent cascade all the way through if you just keep the duration. But, at any particular point, if you focus your attentiveness there will be something there to be heard, to be seen, to be smelled, to be felt. That perception will occur like some kind of a phantom firefly coming suddenly into occurrence. And if you are following the education in a cycle which includes the notes, the presentation notes are the intellectual background form of the learning but they come out at the end of the phase so that you're not given them until you're on the very next phase. And so by reading the presentation notes of the previous phase in phase with the phase that is going on you get an intellectual, conscious, penetrating retrospection along with the actual occurrence of the movement and the rest all the way and this is called a Pythagorean transform. It gives you, now, something which is truly alchemical, it gives you a retrospective reference wave to carry along with the energy as you're going on peaks and troughs. But we do something even further, it's a sales technique, 'We not only give you that for the price but we include, absolutely free with no extended payments extra, a reference wave that complements the retrospective of the presentation notes that is the ongoing year-long reading.'
For the nature cycle we take The Tale of Genji, if you wish. Lady Murasaki of a thousand years ago is so sophisticated even her diary has been reprinted by Penguin Classics because it's incredible. She is like the Jane Austen of classical Japan, infinitely interesting. The raising of a young prince, Genji, in a masculine tyranny, but he is raised by extraordinarily conscious and heartful women to understand that it's only through the transformed heart sharing that he will come into a prismatic person enough to be able to become real. And that if he insists on just being a fighting masculine prince who is privileged he will always be limited to seeing the women as slaves, as servants, as harem things and never tease out the cooperation that makes the harmonic of mystery possible and the transform of magic within participation.
And in keeping with the variety, we also add Ovid's Metamorphoses. The way in which constant change has calendars of periodicity that sometimes involve whole Ages, and as Ovid shows in the Metamorphoses, there are certainly Great Ages that shift and change. And they began, he says, from an Age of gold and become an Age of silver then become an Age of bronze or brass and then become an Age of iron which is so rusted, unforgiving, that when it changes it changes all of a sudden back to a new Age of gold and that these Ages last 500 years each, the Cycle of the Phoenix, because the phoenix, east and west, has always been a part of that. And then if you put four Cycles of the Phoenix together you get a two thousand year period where there is a change in the aeon. We live today at such a change, it began in 1992. The third year-long reading, and the year-long readings make a distributed week by week, five or seven pages a week, no more, no less. But just the distribution of it so that it becomes a reference energy wave to the energy wave of the pairs, that have their way, and relate to the presentation notes in retrospective. So you have two reference waves on an energy wave and, if you have two reference waves, the energy wave now has a capacity that would not have been there before. If you have just one reference wave you have a way of calibrating a vector; not only does the energy occur but you can calibrate it. But if you have two vectors that are calibrated, now you have a mathematical form called the tensor. Einstein used tensors to make the Theory of Relativity. Now you understand the way in which a conscious time space has a very definite calibration, infinitely possible, each possibility when it registers is exactly real.
The third example is Moby Dick, this is the 150th Anniversary edition of it and you can see the chiral Maori mask. The fourth one is Homer's Odyssey. Chose one of these year-long readings, follow the energy wave of the pairs through their lunar cycles, through their season cycles, through the solar cycle, the double solar cycle. All of this has been prepared, not only will it work but it will work exactly in your way. However you do it is exactly how that will work, it will be uniquely individualised. You will have hand-crafted your own maturity.
More next week.