Nature 4
Presented on: Saturday, January 28, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
You're looking at the covers of two collected volumes: The Portable Thoreau, The Portable Margaret Fuller. And we're taking Thoreau in particular but we're going to imagine Margaret Fuller today as well to try to understand how difficult it is to begin with nature. How difficult it is to begin with nature because our minds are, by the 21st century, so powerfully inculcated that we have a great deal of difficulty just going outside of them.
We're pairing Thoreau with the I Ching because in classical China, for thousands of years, they have had the same problem. By the time the Chinese were Chinese, because of the powerful autocratic Emperor Ch'in Shih Huang-ti who said that, 'Everyone belongs to me and therefore from now on you are Qin people, you are Chinese'. And his autocratic rule, for all time, is registered as the builder of the great wall. There were walls before him, portions, but he's the first one to literally cement it for a thousand miles or more. And to say everything on the inside of this belongs to me and everything on the outside is out. His successor was one of cleverest Chinese peasants of all time who became the first Emperor of the Han Dynasty. He set up, he said that it is not that Ch'in Shih Huang-ti owns China, owns the people, owns everything, it is that my dynasty, which I found, which will stay in power perpetually, is the real force. And established with the founding of the Han Dynasty, they were the Chinese Romans, the Chinese exam system which was limited to the Confucian classics and anything else was literally not to be read, not to be considered. And Ch'in Shih Huang-ti had burnt almost all of the books in China, there were just a few copies of things that were left hidden, literally, in the masonry of walls, hidden, buried, hidden in the memory of old persons who remembered but the founding of the Han Dynasty, when it brought back, Chinese literature, it was brought back in a completely new language style.
And we've talked about this, how one of the generals in early Han Dynasty, shifted the way in which written language, which had always been engraved on thin bamboo, they were called bamboo books, or they were engraved, incised, on stone. Now the ink brush and silk paper took the place and for the first time you had penmanship, you had calligraphy in China, it was never there before. So that the presentation of language was restyled in such a firm, deep way that that impress has never left China ever since.
We have the same in the West but our impress is not from the Han Dynasty technique, our impress is from the founding of the Roman Empire. Augustus Caesar, his name was Octavian but he took the name Augustus, 'I am august, I am founding...' he didn't call it the Roman Empire, he called it the Principate. It is the first mature form for human beings and all minds, all learning, all education will be based upon the impress that we will make and certain books were used to stylise that mind and one of them was a recodification of Roman law. Another was the refashioning of the whole city of Rome according to the way in which Augustus Caesar saw it lasting permanently and Rome became the eternal city. One of the largest buildings in the new Rome was called the Pantheon, of which the architect was a personal friend and one of the founders of the Roman Empire, Agrippa, and the Pantheon was the domed temple of all Gods, all possible Gods. Another was the Ara Pacis Augustae, right at the entrance to Rome of the Via Flaminia that was the Northern road, the Appian road goes to the south, and that temple of eternal peace, that Pantheon, the Roman Forum where a post marker was put was mile zero in the world and all the roads in the world were measured in mileage from that post. And that post was right at the foot of the Palatine hill where Augustus had his palace and where all of the sacred writings had been brought together and it was a penalty under death to have any kind of prophetic, oracular, works in the world. Any written prophecies were confiscated and brought by Augustus to Rome and nothing was to be left out and they were all edited and sifted together and made into the Sibylline Books which was the only official prophecy allowed.
By the 21st century it is almost impossible for us to get outside of the stamped impress of the tyranny of a mind that is not natural but a mind that is inculcated by structures that are almost impossible to slip out of because slipping out of them convinces us that we are slipping into chaos. And one of the biggest difficulties is that nature appears as a chaos to an artificial mind. Let's just take a look at one thing: if I move my hand, that movement can stop or begin again. Movement and rest form a complementarity. If I keep track of the rest and say that that now is a point and I move my hand from this point to that point, those two rests are no longer rests within a dynamic, they are points and the space between them now is not a movement but is a measurable distance, it is a line. And as soon as you have a point and a line, symbolically, that line now generates in its linearity all the developments of geometry, all the developments of the way in which a compositional experience of everything can be shaped, measured, logically developed. And what happens is that the symbolic mind goes into a deep tandem with the ritual action that is no longer natural, dynamic, but is of a ritual specificity and when symbols and rituals cinch and lock, we call that identity. Now you have an identity of anything including yourself. And so we are literally raised to identify ourselves by that cinch lock that forbids the dynamic of nature from occurring at all, it's very, very scary. And what is just as scary is trying to get up outside of that cinch locked identity without having the experience that one is going to simply fall into chaos.
That movement includes a rest without impairing the dynamic and nature has not only this natural dynamic, it has a mysterious quality of being able to focus its dynamic into a form that is pure energy and not a point. So that one would say now that the movement and the rest, the rest is not a point but is a focused energy and that that focused energy has a presencing quality to it. And if you have a dynamic that has the ability to have a presencing focus, now nature is capable of being mysterious because one can go to any number of focuses and presences within the dynamic of nature and so mysteriousness proliferates everywhere. The ancient Chinese Taoists practised trying to do this and increasingly as Chinese civilisation became more and more layered and formulated, dynasty after dynasty, it became more and more difficult to slip out of this. And so techniques were devised to try to, first of all, retreat from, get out of, this situation. One would go into the mountains or go into the deserts, later on in the 1400s they went on ships over the oceans of the world, great huge Chinese fleets trying to find ways to get out of Chinese civilisation. And one of the classic admirals in the Chinese navy in the 1300s was an Italian named Marco Polo and he was so excellent at this that he was put in charge of a whole expedition to get rid of the Indonesian, mainly pirates, for Kublai Khan and introduced a quality of being able to take products, for the first time from Indonesia to some of the trading ports that China at that time had in Africa. And one of the imports that they took was the gamelan of Indonesia brought together became the xylophone in Africa and one had an interesting development of Chinese music along that time.
Nature is a dynamic which has a pause which does not interrupt the flow of the dynamic so that one can characterise nature as a process without end but that the process without end is not ongoingness necessarily without stopping, there's no stop but there is a focusing, there is a presencing. And Thoreau was one of the all-time great human beings who tried to school himself not to get ossified into any of the shapes or forms that were around. And even as a little boy, when his older brother John would be sound asleep and the mother would come in, Cynthia Thoreau, to check on her two boys and her two girls, she noticed that very often, young Henry David's eyes would be open and she asked him one night, 'What are you looking at? Why don't you go to sleep?' He said, 'I was trying to look beyond the stars to see if God was there in between them.' So as a little tiny boy he had this quality of trying to put his presence into the flow of nature so that he was a focus and not a point so that his activity would never be ritualized nor geometrised nor symbolised in a way in which it would just be mentality. But he tried to find some way to keep himself out of this and by doing so he developed a very peculiar personality. His personality was to be very quiet and extraordinarily specific without giving himself over to any idea that he was being specific, rather he was just participating in the on-going-ness of the flow of the occurrence of the dynamic of nature.
Now, when you have that, when you have that kind of a tone, existential occurrences are not things but they are energies, that presence, so one addresses them in a completely different way. You don't look to see something but you focus yourself to resonate with that focus. So that one of the most peculiar occurrences in the universe is to meet another person who is doing what you are doing. For two focuses to seek to be resonant with each other without either being points, without there being any kind of geometry between you but simply that you are sharing the same dynamic and positioning your focuses to be resonant. And in Thoreau's time this was called transcendental friendship. That it wasn't just one identity getting to know another identity and trying to make a relationship between them but that the transcendental friendship was an eternal occurrence once it happened because the occurrence was in the universal endless flow of nature and so those energies that became resonant were resonant forever. Once you've formed a transcendental friendship where in the universe would it go? Because it is a part of reality, it is reality and this brings in Margaret Fuller.
Margaret Fuller was one of the most uncanny intelligences in any country in any time. She wrote a very interesting little group of letters, brought together the letters are in The Portable Margaret Fuller, Bettina Brantano and her friend Gunderode. And these are two German women who lived at the time of Goethe and the letters between Bettina Brantano and Goethe were very famous. What happened is that Margaret Fuller decided to write on these two women, in a very special way, because she realised that not only were transcendental friends very rare to come by but that when two women make a transcendental friendship it challenges the entire nature of the [21:02 false] society, even more than a man and a man making friends or a man and a woman making friends, two women making friends transcendentally created a very interesting kind of development.
Her first essay was in the first issue of the magazine that the New England Transcendentalists founded and the two founders were Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson with a little bit of encouragement from their friends. In the spring of 1840 Margaret Fuller began to elicit contributions for the initial issue of The Dial and it was about two years she was the Chief Editor of The Dial and it became the most famous magazine of its time and of its ilk. One of the contributors that they sought was from Thoreau and another contributor was from an older man named Bronson Alcott, A Bronson Alcott. And it was Alcott and Emerson and Thoreau that are always singled out to be the cream of the New England Transcendentalists but in fact there are three women that need to be mentioned. Margaret Fuller is very much like a Thoreau in that she was able to go into nature in such a way that her presencing, her focusing of energy was not at all what had been stylised in the mind before.
In the summer of 1843 she journeyed west with two friends: James Freeman Clark and his sister Sarah. And in 1843 where they went, in the central part of North America, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, was still partly wild and partly already ground up into the civilisation so that many people were using that Mid-West as a springboard to go further west, like a Mark Twain. But there was still enough of the remnants of Indian North America left so that, for instance, one of the tribes in what became the State of Wisconsin, the Fox Indians had a wise old shamanistic sachin named Decuda 24.07 and he was the last man to know how to read all of the different Indian mounds that at one time the Western part of North America, from the Atlantic ocean to the Mississippi river, was literally tattooed by Indian mounds, some of them in the shapes of animals, some of them in the shapes of efficacies, and Decuda was the last sechin to know how to read the sacredness of the land of North America. And in fact I have a first edition of the book that Walter Pidgeon did from the 1840s, going back he'd been with Decuda since the early part of the 1800s.
When Margaret Fuller went to the Great Lakes she found that the people who were there originally, who had venerated the land like the Indians, the next generation had begun to literally plough up those Indian mounds so that they became drab little farms. And the land changed from being a sacred tapestry which had energy focuses because the land was given these focuses of resonant presence, and so instead of it just being a wilderness it was actually a sacred landscape, from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Mississippi river and on up into the Great Lakes. So that the last great ceremony that was still available from primordial sacred America was from the Great Lakes region of Canada and of the American States of Michigan and Wisconsin and that ceremony was called the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Ceremony. And in the Grand Medicine Ceremony one of the whole purposes of the ceremony was to cover the sacred landscape in an initiatory way and that as one moved forward, like on a sacred plane of symbolic movements and rests, not steps, not like a chess board, but the movement horizontally of carrying your movement and your rest in a paced way that you would then come to a vertical where the movement now was ascent by movement and rest in an extraordinarily spirit ascending reach. And this large L was like the carpenter's square that oriented you to the way in which movement and rest, nature and consciousness together formed a welcome for you that was eternal.
When she was there, she heard a story on the edge of one of the Great Lakes, from a man who had an Indian guide who was twice his size and much stronger and who had a gun and noticed that he was taking some sips of whiskey and wanted to try it and then liked it so much he wanted the whole bottle and the man refused to give it to him and she said,
The Indian persisted and at last tried to take from me. I was not armed, he was and twice as strong as I but I knew an Indian could not resist the look of a white man and I fixed my eye steadily on his. He bore it for a moment and then his eye fell, he let go the bottle. I took his gun and threw it to a distance. After a few moments pause I told him to go and fetch it and left it in his hands. From that moment he was quite obedient, even servile, all the rest of the way, all the time. This gentleman, though in other respects kindly and liberal hearted , showed the aversion that the white man soon learns to feel for the Indian on whom he encroaches. The aversion of the injurer for he who has been degraded.
Margaret Fuller writes this of an encounter of an Indian with a white man but the deeper understanding is that it also applies to the way in which men encounter women and it also, in a deeper way, applies to the way in which the human mind, once it has degraded nature by ritualising movement and by only symbolising forms, putting a geometry on it instead of a focus, instead of a rest, it's now a point, the point. And so nature becomes degraded and the human mind and human actions in life look upon nature as something which is negligible or the way in which men look upon women as being lesser or the civilised person, not just the white man, but the civilised man looks upon the primordial person as lesser, they're primitive, they don't count, they have to be taught to come into our world our way, they're uncivilised, they're barbaric. In this way, nature becomes the least likely source for reality and, because it becomes the least likely source, any natural occurrence also becomes ignorable.
And on this basis the mind increasingly abstracts itself in its mentality and becomes more and more unnatural by choice. Not unnatural because not learned but learned to be unnatural and proud of it. And in this way, experience instead of flowing with nature, experience now becomes cornered by ritualised principles of action, laws and the mind that holds them together and instead of experience being, like nature, a dynamic that will have its movement and rest, its dynamic movement and its energised rest now experience becomes neurotic and increasingly veers towards the psychotic all by itself. Because the longer that one goes with that kind of inculcation, the inculcations slowly encroach and instead of there being a landscape of sacred mounds, one now has the concrete parking lot. And the roads, instead of being a trail of discovery and adventure become instead like railroad tracks, and that must be standardised.
And so one enters into a very peculiar kind of a quality already by 1840, in New England, it had reached the proportions where it was apparent to sensitive people living then that there was going to be no way to get back to nature without fleeing completely from them to more and more distant places where civilisation had not reached. And of course this became the motive for a great many people, like a Herman Melville, to go sailing off on whaling voyages of several years to all the oceans of the world, and then when you get to a place in the south seas where there was no civilisation, to jump ship and live with the natives. And Melville's first book Typee is about he and his friend Toby who jump ship and live for several years with cannibals and learn to be real in nature with them. And when Melville came back to civilisation, back to New York City, he was unable to adjust himself and more and more turned to writing to try to exorcise from himself the encroaching falsity that kept growing in him and, not only Typee but eventually Moby Dick. And eventually when he finished Moby Dick, he was near the breaking point of desperation so the next novel after Moby Dick was called The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade and after that he wrote one more novel and then everyone dismissed Melville as being crazy. His next work was called Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, which is like a Kafkaesque novel written in the late 1850s, early 1860s.
Melville tried to recover himself, went to the Holy Land, he went to Palestine to try to get himself back into some foundation of reality, and he wrote an epic poem called Clarel, several hundred pages of being in the Holy Land, of trying to find what was the Holy Land, what was left of it, it was just a tourist trap even then in 1876. And he found only one place where he had the experience of a lifetime: outside of Jerusalem there is a particularly deep long ravine that the Kedron river stream has carved, over the millennia, down to the Dead Sea. And at the place where the Kedron plunges like a canyon, like a narrow canyon, huge deep ravine, enormously, an ancient monastery called Mar Saba was placed exactly on that spot but over the centuries and millennia the floor of the meditation cells rotted out. And when Melville was there, in Mar Saba, he went into a meditation room to pray in the Holy Land, to go to this ancient site of presence and as he walked in the floorboards were rotting and he stood and most of the floor was gone and all he could see was the plunge of many, many, hundreds of feet down into the Dead Sea desert and he had an epiphany, he realised that he was not frightened because he was there with it as a focus. If he had been there in his identity he would have petrified and it reminded Melville for the rest of his life that the real evil is that one gives into false authority rather than your personal presence spirit. When he died he was inspector for the port of New York, a Customs Inspector, the last 20 years of his life, completely unknown, completely ignored, somebody who had live with cannibals decades before and had written about them. When they found his body in his little room, he lived in a little room just off the port of New York Customs, they found in his desk drawer the hand-written manuscript of Billy Budd. No one had ever seen it and he had published nothing since decades before.
Thoreau was, again, that kind of a case. From the time in which he lived until the 1920s, hardly anyone paid any attention to Thoreau, he was always held up to be some friend of Emerson's who was just one of the Transcendentalist gang and was a peculiar character and he really never did anything that was very exciting. Margaret Fuller also was one of those individuals and not only Margaret Fuller but Bronson Alcott's daughter, Louisa May Alcott, was remembered because she had written something charming about their family called Little Women, and then followed it up by Little Men, but no one ever published work until the Penguin Classics edition came out. It came out, it had a little printing in 1873 but it was put out in 1994, it is the story of a woman's search for a meaningful life, she moves outside the family setting of her best known works, work is an exploration of Alcott's personal conflicts and a social critique examining women as independents, the moral significance of labour and the goals to which a woman can aspire. Influenced by Transcendentalism and the Women's Rights movement, it affirms the possibility of a feminised utopian society that is not co-opted by the masculine symbolic-mindedness that co-opts all actions into limited rituals and forestalls us having any respect for movement or rest or their dance. We're going to come back after the break and take a look even deeper at some of the resonances that come out of the ability to rest within movement.
Let's come back to how uncanny the natural dynamic is and why our learning begins without a beginning. If we were to have a plan, if we were to have a diagram, if we were to have a normal intellectual or mental shape initially to what we are doing, we would only deepen the inculcation into a rut and almost all techniques of maturing ourselves or bettering ourselves in the world suffer from this fatal flaw and it is a fatal flaw. The casualty is ourselves because nature is not a casualty, it is not a thing that can be casualised or become a casualty. But to be able to have our experience participate in the natural dynamic as both movement and rest, is one of the most superior and sophisticated things that human beings can do. For instance, one of the geniuses on the planet who was able to have movement and rest uninterrupted, was Rumi with the Mevlevi Dervish, the Whirling Dervishes, who maintain a pivot of complete calm in the midst of an unending whirl. This quality is a high mystic mysteriousness of nature and allows the participation of that to deepen into a magical realm.
That magical realm is the dynamic of consciousness. And when the three flows of nature and experience, or myth, and vision or consciousness, when those three flows flow together there is a curious quality of at-one-ment that occurs even though there are three but the mentality that identifies three from one is sometimes one of the most destructive false ideas that there is. For instance, in Thoreau's time one of the rising qualities of church worship in New England was the rise of Unitarianism. And those were being introduced to the new Unitarianism were completely against those who were Trinitarians: 'They go to a Trinitarian church,' or 'This church has now become Unitarian, we're leaving the church,' which meant that you just don't go there anymore, it meant that you sell your pew. Yes, families used to have specific pews and they used to have to pay for them to own them and you could sell them like property.
One of the deepening qualities in Emerson's life was his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who's the one who introduced him to Transcendentalism, which informed his sense of participation with nature so deep that it was the beginnings of Transcendentalism in New England. And the Transcendentalist Club was formed in 1836, right at the time that Emerson published his famous essay, his little book Nature , but the story of Mary Moody Emerson and the origins of Transcendentalism could not be told until her lost, ignored notebook was discovered in 1981. And this book by Phyllis Cole was published by Oxford University Press in 1998 and it's the first time that anyone really characterised that Mary Moody Emerson, like Margaret Fuller or like Louisa May Alcott, that these were women who reveal to us the dynamic of nature in the Transcendentalism, whereas Thoreau and Emerson and Alcott give us the forms. And when we put those six individuals together we're able then to notice that there is a whole resonant harmonic of many other people at the time that were not so identified and were able to appreciate something rare.
The Transcendentalism that came from Europe found its origins in the critical philosophy of Emmanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason came out in 1781 and it was the ability to back away from the forms of symbolic thought, transcending them to go into a space that was a dynamic space where one could have a transcendental criticality of the mind for the first time. That one could look at the mind as a structure from outside of its structure. Now this has been a technique since Palaeolithic times, whether it's a shamanic enquiry or in the Neolithic times it was given its obverse by yoga and the great book on shamanism by Mircea Eliade was followed by his great book on yoga; the two sides of the way in which one can go outside of the mind.
But there is a third way and that is that the transcendental quality of its dynamic includes its rest, and that that presencing on the level of consciousness has a transformative quality to whatever it comes into contact with. That's where the magic comes in. The forms change, the processes have a parallel in nature and experience but the dynamic of visionary consciousness moves the other way. If nature moves clockwise, visionary consciousness will weave counter clockwise, if the chirality of your planet, of your star system is that nature moves counter clockwise, then the differential conscious dynamic will be clockwise, so that it is its weaving that gives to conscious language usage its ability to be a poetic. Literally it's weaving words. But one doesn't weave words just simply to have rhetorical grammar and syntax but to introduce, all the time, continuously, at every focus of the expressiveness of a poetic, one has the ability to pivot at rest with that syllable, that word, that phrase, that verse, that paragraph, so that an artistic language has, in its poetic, the ability to weave the fundamental language of experience with the written forms of that language from the symbolic mind.
And so the symbolic mind learns something it did not, would not, could not ever have known: that symbols that are woven with a poetic language are transparent, one can look through them, not at them, and not have them display the kind of mental tyranny that they are capable of from an abstraction from nature. Because the transformed poetic languaged conscious mind is transparent not only in its symbols but in its primordial symbol that is one's self symbol. And instead of then identifying oneself as I am I, your identity literally dissolves into a transparency where you will be what you will be, you will be who you will be. That there is a scintillating array of possibilities at any given moment at any given, not just time, not a measurement of time, but at the dynamic, at whatever rest you come to.
To give it the best phrase, was developed by two men and a woman, we're going to take their book later in the nature, our texts, the phrase is punctuated equilibrium. It's a theory of evolution that Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba came up with a number of years ago now and we're going to take Elisabeth Vrba's and Niles Eldredge's book called Macroevolution. Their essay is dedicated to their dead friend Steven Jay Gould. In Macroevolution we will see that punctuated equilibrium is a very sophisticated conscious experience of nature that brings a special kind of history in. We call it, colloquially, natural history but when history, historical consciousness, is brought into play in nature, what form mediates between historical consciousness and nature, the only form that can occupy that particular phase, that particular rest, that particular presence, is the cosmos itself. Not the universe but the eternal omniverse of all possibilities of possibilities.
One of the insights that came out of Kant's work was developed, larger and larger as other sensibilities came into play with it like Schiller or Goethe in Germany, or like Coleridge or Wordsworth in England, and all of a sudden you had like an international group of people who were realising more and more as their sense of self became more and more transparent. And they were able to see the transparency of each other, and presence, that together one had a completely new revelation of what community could be. And everywhere that there were populations of men and women like that, you found new experiments in community came up.
One of the beautiful things about Alcott and Emerson and Margaret Fuller is that they developed a couple of communities, one of them was called Brook Farm. Brook Farm was a community established in West Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841. The head of the community was George Ripley, formerly a Unitarian clergyman in Boston, who had been in 1836 one of the founders of the Transcendental Club with Emerson, Alcott and others. Associated with Ripley and the Brook Farm enterprise were people like Nathaniel Hawthorn and other well known men. They bought a farm comprising 200 acres, its object was the establishment of an agricultural, literary and scientific school or college. So it was a learning community that together were able to share their rest within the dynamic of nature and one now comes to understand what an enormous genius was being operated, publically, at that time.
A collection of The American Transcendentalists is Perry Miller's, very good. Perry Miller when he was a young man ran away from college and went off. He, like Melville, went sailing for several years working as a labour seaman and when he came back he eventually, in a very calm way, that a man who is at home and the world of self independent action, settled into becoming one of the great professors at Harvard of American Studies. And it was in connection with that he found a very interesting document that had been lost: one of Thoreau's lost journals from 1840-1841 and the book that Miller wrote was called Consciousness in Concord . Because it is exactly at this time in 1840, going into 1841, that you find not only is The Dial magazine coming out, edited by Margaret Fuller, with all the support of Emerson and his international coterie, but Thoreau emerges more and more as a mysterious person whose ability to be transparent was literally mind-boggling to those who knew him.
And here is a testimony, this is from The Thoreau log: A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau Day By Day. The first person to do something like this was a New Yorker named J. Leyda and he did the Melville Log, because Melville was such a peculiar person, J. Leader, in the two volumes of the Melville Log, traced his activities day by day throughout his entire life and discovered that were many hidden periodicities and patterns and weavings in Melville's life that no one had known before. Lewis Mumford wrote the first critical work on Melville and its subtitle was Mystic Mariner. He is the mariner, in the mystery of nature, and became one of the great magicians of all time. That's why Moby Dick is one of our year-long reading possibilities. One can read Moby Dick indefinitely; it is always happening, it is always new.
One part of Moby Dick where Ishmael for the first time goes up to the crow's nest and he is not scared of the heights but he realises the higher he goes, and finally he is at the top of the top mast of the ship. He is looking out and supposed to be looking for whales, except what he senses - because it is the unspoken ocean, as far as anyone could see, literally, forever - he does not see the ocean as a thing, but he senses the ocean as its movement. He realises that he is rocking with the ship and the whole earth is rocking in this amazing movement. And he said, 'I could feel the foot of God on the treadle of the motion.' And then, typical of Melville, he says, 'Pity the poor Platonist who, daydreaming, steps outside of the crow's nest and plunges to his doom into the very rocking that would soothe him.'
A classmate of Thoreau is from Harvard, David Greene Haskins, wrote, 'I happened to meet Thoreau in Emerson's study at Concord. I think it was the first time we had come together after leaving college. I was quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in him. His short figure and general cast of countenance were of course unchanged but in his manners, in the tones and inflections of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr Emerson. Mr Thoreau's college voice bore no resemblance to Mr Emerson's and was so familiar to my ear that I could easily have identified him by it in the dark. I was so much struck with the strange and with the resemblance in the respects referred to between Mr Emerson and Mr Thoreau that I remember to have taken the opportunity, as we sat near together talking, of listening to their conversation with closed eyes and to have been unable to determine with certainty which was speaking.'
It was a notable instance of unconscious imitation but it isn't imitation. It is total empathy where the sympathy of two transparencies ... someone in the 9th Century, two Zen masters in China met and one of the observers said it was like two open doors facing each other. There was no acknowledgement but there was nothing to acknowledge. Emerson and Thoreau achieved, by around 1840, this kind of a synergy together. Emerson, in his journal, a couple of days later, from this report of this ex-Harvard mate, wrote, 'My brave Henry Thoreau walked with me to Walden this pm' (this is a decade before building his cabin), 'and complained of the proprietors who compelled him, to whom, as much as to any, the whole world belonged, that he must walk a narrow strip of road and crowded him out of the rest of God's earth. He must not get over the fence but to the building of that fence he was no party. "Suppose," he said, "Some great proprietor, before he was born, had bought up the entire earth, the whole globe." And so he had been, then, hustled out of nature. Not having been privy to any of these arrangements, he said he does not feel called on the consent to them. So he cuts fishing poles in any woods without asking who has the title to the wood or the fish.'
What happens when someone becomes transcendental, to go back into nature? One doesn't just become immersed into nature, one's experience also, now, becomes dynamic in its naturalness and when it flows with nature, it makes a mysterious nature, so that when human nature in its experience is not just au natural. Not just naked but nude to the dynamic and the rest, at the same time. Now, this is what makes mature mysterious. And when that deepens a second time to include visionary consciousness, now nature and mysterious nature experienced become conscious all together in the same flow, not only in the same flow as a dynamic, but in the same energy of focus.
Melville, in Moby Dick, said that his first experience, when the whaling was finished, one of the last things that they had to do was to take the amber grease from the whale, the sperm of the whale, and to heat it in these big pots and to squeeze the globules of the whale sperm, so that they would dissolve and they could be cooked down. He said five or six men would be around this pot squeezing the clumps out of the whale's sperm and as they did so their fingers, their hands, became lubricated to the point where they could not tell their hands from the globules or their hands from someone else's hands, or anything from anything else. And he said, 'It is a common experience of whalers to go into a mystic trance, squeezing amber grease, until someone from the outside comes in and brings it to a halt, that they would go on squeezing amber grease forever, undifferentiated.'
This quality was there in their communities, at Brook Farm and at Fruitlands, which was a place where Alcott was seeking to bring together something on a more experimental scale and towards the end of his life he founded in Concord, right after the centennial of the United States, he founded the Concord School of Philosophy. The lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy in 1885 was the first time that a number of their essays, the presentations and lectures given at the Concord School of Philosophy were collected together under the title Genius and Character of Emerson because in 1884 they had taken Emerson as a representative transparency to act as a person.
We're coming to something that is worth noting. In 1885, the announced year, the next year would be devoted to Goethe. One of the qualities of Emerson is that if you look at the catalogue of Emerson's library, he had more than 130 volumes on and about Goethe. The next most was maybe five or six or ten volumes. If you look at Thoreau's library you do not find that at all, the disproportionate quality. The reason is that Emerson's contact with transcendentalism was the English appreciation of the German transcendentalism. The English media between the German and the New England transcendentalism was Thomas Carlyle. The correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle is all about the way in which the Kantian, Schiller, Goethe, German transcendentalism was appreciated by Carlyle as being of a different sort and different nature from the Wordsworth or the Coleridge, which was more like natural romanticism, didn't have the philosophic, insightful depth of Kant and Schiller.
But when you look at Thoreau, he is not of the German transcendentalists and not at all of the English transcendentalists, but he is an American-Indian, India transcendentalist. He goes back to a primordality of the land, as we were talking about before, when the land was still sacred. But instead of it being sacred by being tattooed by all the different mounds, every rest in the unbroken dynamic of his immersion in nature was that his experience flow was completely absorbed by the dynamic and the rest focus of nature, so that when it came time for him to write his symbolic language, every word that he wrote was transparent to him. He could look through the words, rather than the words referencing things in some identification, every word was capable of being re-woven in a number of possible ways, and so the poeticf Thoreau's prose is one of the most sophisticated on the planet.
One has to go back a very long way, in fact one goes back, and the first person to ever write language like that, was Zarathustra, Zoroaster, about, classically, 1800BC. The songs, the Gathas of Zarathustra, the first time that one finds that quality of language and it was possible because there was a female forerunner to that. Her name is Enheduanna and she was the high priestess of Inanna in Ur, in Arcadian Sumerian times, she was the daughter of Sargon the Great. In the Sumer Akkad of that day, 2300BC, there were 42 different temples of 42 different mythology gods spread all the way in that empire from the Persian Gulf to the mountains where Mount Ararat is in the Far North in Turkey, Armenia. She visited each one of the temples and wrote a specific poet-hymn to those gods of that temple and then linked all 42 of the temples and their mythologies and their gods in a collection called the Temple Hymns and the Temple Hymns was the prototype upon which the Zarathustran gothas later were developed. We'll see in our education by next year that the great poetic genius of Mary Magdelene re-wove 42 Odes to Solomon in exactly that way to show a new religion, a new kind of a temple, of the transparency of a shared presence, focusing; a new basis of community, indeed.
One of the qualities that Thoreau prized himself on was his ability to go back into the landscape in such a deep, mysterious, mystical way that the landscape in every natural part would call out to him as he was coming into contact with it. You find a very interesting quality of it, especially in the journals: 'November 13th 1841. We constantly anticipate repose, yet it surely can be only the repose that is in entire and healthy activity.' See, the rest and the movement, at the same time. 'It must be a repose without rust. What is leisure but opportunity for more complete action? Our energies pine for exercise, that time we spent in our duties is so much leisure, so that there is no man but has sufficient of it. I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or nature can ever get the start of me' because he is eternally in movement and rest.
One finds this very clearly in the Upanishads and you find in some of the later, very sophisticated Upanishads like the Shvetashvatara, one finds that the sense of one's inner self penetrates through what had been a mirror into an openness. That once one goes into that openness, consciousness now occurs in such a way that it never not was. Out of this comes a sense, we will find, if you use the music as it's developed in the chorus, there are humpback whales that sing, they sing songs. There is such a Thoreauian composer like Alan Hovhaness who took the songs of whales and made a symphonic piece. The piece is called And God Created Great Whales, and there are two different recordings of it. To take the songs of whales to make a symphonic piece is exactly what Beethoven did about 200 years ago, walking in the Vienna woods and listening to the birds sing. He took the sounds of the birds in the Vienna woods and he made the 6th Symphony, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. One can hear the birds singing in Beethoven's 6th Symphony. You hear this quality that someone has participated in the mysteriousness of nature by adding one's flow of experience which is both a dynamic and a rest, so that the notes of the music are not steps in a composition that one plays a note at a time; there is a dynamic flow, and that the rest, which is the notes, are co-dynamic all the way through the piece.
If one adds the poetic of a Beethoven, in his artistic genius, or Havanas in his artistic genius, you get a woven-ness. Not only is your experience and your consciousness now illumined, but nature itself is illumined. Not nature itself, but nature's dynamic, unbroken, because the rest in that dynamic is like a focusing pivot in which the possibility of any particular continuance would be as likely. Out of this in our time we get string theory; that the vibration of the little loops everywhere means that the possibilities of possibility are literally endless, where would they end? Where would they begin?
Thoreau's finding of Indian arrowheads was paralleled by Confucius having a collection of Palaeolithic spear points and arrowheads himself. One of the odd things about Confucius was his ability to go the complete realm from civilisation, back through the Neolithic periods, all the way back into the Palaeolithic. It was said of him that he could identify any region of China that any kind of an arrowhead or spear point would come from. This is almost never alluded to. Richard Wilhelm, in his Short History of Chinese Civilisation, is one of the few Westerners to ever recognise this quality.
The I Ching, when it was Palaeolithic, was FuHsi and NuGua's celestial pattern. When it was Neolithic it was the Zhou Dynasty, King Wen and the Duke of Zhou. When it was civilised it was Confucius who did the commentaries and when all three were brought together, the only way that one could still make the weaving of the civilised Confucian level with the Neolithic of the hexagrams and the Palaeolithic of the trigrams, was to have a movement and rest that was not co-opted into the Dynastic power. That freeing person was Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching. And when one reads the Tao Te Ching one gets movement and rest, mountains and streams without end. The Tao can never be canned and the Te always emerges whole, and is always in that Tao.