Nature 8

Let's come to Nature 8 and let's do a reprise of going back to the beginnings of what it is that we're enquiring about. Let's go back to Thoreau and there is a section in Walden, in reading, and just a few sentences from Thoreau, to give us a beginning, a droplet, of how it is that we're hearing the language which I am speaking, rather than speaking of cadencing, because I speak in a poetic and not a rhetoric. Thoreau writes,
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise, they know little or nothing. Yet this intellectual reading in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and [suffocates the nobler features]* to sleep the while, but what we stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.
* The original says 'suffers the nobler faculties'
So we're in an endeavour to learn but to learn in such a way that we are not co-opted by an overstuffed mind. The difficulty is that we have been inculcated constantly to lead off with our mind, to check with our mind and to conclude with our mind. But what we are considering is that the symbolic mind is only one eighth of an entire complex process, a field of inquiry and the forms that emerge from not just a field but at least four different registries of that field and four different registries of form from those four fields. A field has no form, formally, but it has a process and the ancient way to talk about that was that it was dynamic. The Greek word dynamis gives us the word dynamic. It is in motion and its motion is an energy wave, it has a frequency. It has peaks and troughs, like all energy waves. You can index that energy wave either by the peaks or by the troughs, or you can index it by the amplitude squeezed into some kind of a time measurement. In fact, a very interesting thing happens, that if you take the peaks and the troughs as a pair and exchange their places, the dynamic energy whirlpools into form and you get atomic structure from which one can build molecular structures, from which one can build cells and eventually ourselves.
It is the exchange of centres in a paired amplitude that give us the stability of form and because it emerges energetically into matter, the matter is not static but it is vibrant. It occurs as an iterative of the amplitude of the way in which the dynamic has been energised and so the higher one goes in forms, one also goes deeper and more expansive into fields and processes. Out of this comes an increased energea. That Greek term, energea, was always the energy that form can now in its - not just its stability - in its objective vibrancy, it can bestow a higher order of the field of the dynamic.
Our first dynamic is nature and out of nature come the vibrant forms of what exists. The existentials, literally, of particles, of atoms, of molecules, of elements, of beings, stars, moons, etc; those existential forms have always, in their vibrancy, in their vitality, they always have an aspect where if one could really understand what they are, they are what occurs in their action of being vital. In our time we have adopted an ancient Sanskrit term for that and that is karma. But it is also is a ritual form, a ritual comportment, so that existentials have an active form that is determined, as we will see, by the way in which the sequences of the actions are delimited by this kind of exchange of peaks and troughs, brought into the energy of matter. Those energy forms now have a reciprocation, a reciprocality, to their very structure.
So when we come to understand ritual, because we're beginning with a phase of nature, which is a process field, and our next phase will be a formal phase of ritual comportment, of actions that are limited and delimited so that they make objectivities. Literally, what we do do objectively happens as a form, as a structure and that that structure has a resonance. It has a formal resonance, just like the process of nature has a formal resonance as well. The process of nature has a resonance as the experience of culture and the resonance of the existential forms of action actually occur as symbolic thoughts in the mind. Symbolic thoughts are objective and have a direct correlation, they have a referentiality as a higher integral, not just of things, but of how things are in their action, so that the correlation is on the basis of a practicality that symbols and rituals will have a practicality to themselves that is integrable, be able to be brought together. And not just together but continuously more and more together so that the focus of it becomes more and more energised, more intense, more vibrant, so that it is possible to step the mind up, to step symbolic thought up into an incredible intensity of integration.
That integration, as it climbs in the ordinal condensation, the concentration, the ancient name for this in Sanskrit was always dhyana. Dhyana is where the concentration of the mind comes more and more to a single focus, in Sanskrit it was called ekagrata, one pointedness of mind. It does not stop there because the integral is not based on one; the one is the form that emerges but the integral has, for its source, zero. So the one pointedness of the mind, if one's intensity increases, one can go beyond one pointedness, and how does that occur? It occurs because the one pointedness vanishes. It vanishes in upon itself. The Sanskrit word for that was bindu. The experience of the mind which has vanished from its one pointedness, the experience is called moksha.
But something occurs because the zeroness is, at the same time, a fullness, a oneness reoccurs, instantly, spontaneously, out of the zero, because it always does, exactly in that way, and one reoccurs but now one reoccurs with an extra dimension to the dimensions of space and time. One reoccurs with a fifth dimension, a quintessential dimension of conscious vision able to transform the other four and so the other four no longer just occur in a way of a flow and a rest of stability that vibrantly energises. It's no longer just a field and a form but one has the field of nature, the forms of ritual, the field of mythic experience and the forms of the symbolic mind. But the third process, as we will see, visionary consciousness, weaves back into the other two processes and produces, in this wovenness, a new fifth dimension, a quintessential quality of transform, so that now nature gives itself over to transformational consciousness.
Experience, which for all of its life time, for all of its life times, for all of its millions of years, or billions of years of experience, where its existence has been in between its experience of living and the natural mysteriousness, now all of a sudden the mind discovers that it is in between the process of experience and the process of consciousness weaving together and the mind acquires a new quality. But it takes a while to appreciate this and so we do what ancient wisdom traditions always did; we carry ourselves back through, from the sources, from the beginnings, and let ourselves re-mature, recapitulate the phases of how we came to be who we are. In doing so we comb through, progressively, a realisation that our symbolic minds were misused; instead of being integrators and integrals that are able to deliver a mind that is clear and open, so that one has, with the four phases of the cycle of nature, the four seasons of our first year all together, a mind which is not only open so that its pointedness can become honed through concentration, even into the vanishing, and allow for the re-emergence out of that, not a vanished emptiness, but out of a vanished openness, now the mind becomes transparent. Sri Aurobindo once had a beautiful phrase for it in English, he called it the 'mind of light', that what shines through the mind here, in the Vajrayana it's called 'clear light', that one now sees not things and only things but one can see through things, through their transparencies, and one can see psychically. One sees the extra dimension of conscious vibration that is there and one learns to see not only into things but through them.
One of Jane Goodall's books that we are using here at the middle of our excursion through nature is called [Through a Window: My 30 Years of Experience with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. We move from Thoreau to Jane Goodall by a very special process that is very much like walking. The alternation in walking, the bipedal motion also is very much like the energy wave of the frequency of a dynamic. With the peaks and the troughs we are able to make our way and gain a sense of not only motility but of balance as well and of adapting ourselves to a calibration, then, of the amplitude of the dynamic as the source of the vibrant structure of the forms that will emerge from it. By this acquaintance we begin to have a special sensitivity.
Our experience of nature now begins to become more and more mysterious and so in a way the mythic horizon of experience can be deepened into mysteriousness. It is the bringing of this increased mysteriousness into the mind that matures the mind, matures its integral so that it is able to have more and more concentration, more and more dhyana, more and more capacity to meditate. Its meditation now becomes focused in such a way that it understands that in its experience, three aspects of the flow of mythic experience begin to become salient. One of the aspects is that images occur from the existentials of the world and they occur first of all in our body and then they vibrate in our experience and it's that vibratory experience that the mind now brings the images together in an imagination, the imagination. So the mind acquires the imagination from images that register in the body. They register in objective existentials but they vibrate and the tone of their vibrating in experience becomes the source of feeling, so that images and feeling are now linked together so that the imagination in the mind has a feeling-toned quality to it. That feeling toned quality is a very powerful integral more and more, that becomes the feeling toned integral of one's sense of individuality.
So the mind gains its individuality in just this way but the individuality is prefigured, as it were, prefigured in the way in which we live, by the actions we do and configured from that in the experience of our images and our feelings and of our language. So the mythic horizon, which is the better way to talk of it, myth is the use of spoken language, to carry the images and feelings that flow, and are healthiest when they flow with the way in which nature works, which nature has its dynamic. So culture and nature are like a parfait, they flow together and when they're in sync, as it were, culture is said now to participate mysteriously in nature. We not only belong in nature but we are natural. Our culture is a natural culture and in between that, the rituals of objective existence become more and more tuned.
The body becomes healthy because our way of living, our traditions, our communities, our sense of images, our sense of feelings become toned. Our use of language becomes increasingly supple because it flows with nature. When we talk we talk about things that are real, things that are objective and the mind now gets a referentiality to objective actions that indeed have this voracity and so the mind and body now become tuneable together. So you have a pair of forms and a pair of processes. When they are in tune together, you now have something which our phases allow us for the first time to appreciate; we have a frame of integral reference. You literally have a window, you have a picture of how this individuality, in this mind, with other individualities in their minds, sharing a cultural tradition, sharing a source of images, an image base for a common imagination, imagination held in common, and a language that we are able to speak to each other, and also the feeling tones become increasingly vibrating together, and this becomes emphasised. The dance is not just in the steps of the sequence of the action but of dancing together and in the dancing together there is, increasingly, a sense of carrying the vibration of the dynamic of nature into the dynamic of culture.
One of the nicest ways to speak of this is all over North America, the North American Indians called this stepping, that the basic motion of stepping tunes you to the resonance of the dynamic of how nature really works, and now mysterious nature and culture really works this way as well. Out of this comes the rhythm of language, language becomes increasingly articulate. Its rhythm becomes a cadence of expressiveness and, if you have ever heard primordial storytellers, the myths from the mouth of ancient tribal storytellers, they will always have that stepping cadence to their voice.
I remember 30 years ago, 35 years ago, in Calgary, Alberta, teaching a course on world mythology. I wanted to include a lot of native North American Indian materials, myths from North American Indians. So I brought in the oldest storyteller from the Algonquin language family, the Blackfeet, the Blood, the Piegan, the Sarcees. I brought in an old Sarcee Indian storyteller, named Hansens Bear Paw. He was in his late eighties, he was blind, he did not speak English and would not have agreed to come to the university to deliver the myths, so I had the myths delivered in the Indian Friendship Centre in downtown Calgary. We had about 300 people show up, more than 150 of them were tribal members who came to hear the myths, the stories. Hansens Bear Paw got into the stepping cadence of his Algonquin mythology and his great nephew translated instantly so that those who could not follow the Algonquin could hear what he said.
Of course, right away, one got the experience, psychically, of him using the old storyteller's cane to establish his rhythm, to establish his cadence and to use a language that flowed in such a way that it configured by the contours of experience. Flowing around focuses and attractions and curving to avoid dead ends. This choreography of the experience of that mythic language began to have a different quality in one's mind. Instead of the mind coming together in some kind of egg crate grid, that can be applied like doctrines and codes and laws, the mind got used to an ambidextrous fluidity of form that allowed for it to have a new quality of suppleness. One noticed, after about an hour of Hansens Bear Paw delivering that kind of language, not the language of equipment, but the language of contouring in the depths of the dynamic of nature; the bodily movements that one had, had a different tone to them. The best phrase from the experience it, 'It felt when you moved, when you began to walk, that you were scuffing clouds, that you were walking in an atmosphere of fertile mystery, like, not the rain clouds that are gloomy, but the rain clouds that bring the fertility of life, only it was in your movement and in your step. The quality of it was that you were rolling on the feeling tones of an imagery like this.'
Of course we are always pairing, we are always putting a tuning fork out, and paired with Thoreau, we were using the Chinese I Ching, not to study the I Ching as a symbolic record but to go back to the I Ching as a natural expression like Thoreau. Thoreau as a natural person, the I Ching as a natural expression of how the cadences of the dynamic of nature in fact always have this kind of symmetry and that the symmetry has a pair of properties, a pair of qualities, a pair of actualities, that at the centres of the symmetry, there is an ability to exchange centres. At the extremes, not the ends, but at the higher and higher registries, one gets a complementarity of infinities. At the lower beginning sources one gets the complementarities of zeronesses. One learns that when one lives in nature the amplitudes are of unendingness and that they, in fact, link together in an unbroken dynamic that now has a special nature to it. It has within it attractors that are paired, that generate a magnetism, a magnetic.
One of the most primordial ways of expressing this, in primordial peoples around the world, is to take the two hands and hold them up like this with your fingers and to take about a six foot length, about two yards of string, it can be plant fibres, it can be human hairs, it can be anything as long as the two ends are joined and make a loop, not a knot, but they are joined together in such a way, they used to use very fine threads, vegetable or fibres, so that what one has now is a loop. This loop is an unending loop, it's an infinity. If one holds this between the two hands and you begin by making a cross between the two in the centre, one now has the beginning of string figures, the original one called cat's cradle. Out of cat's cradle one can make string figures and they are made all over the primordial world, almost every culture has it.
Our pair to Jane Goodall is Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past. She says that she learned to make about 60 or 70 of these string figures over the years and she learned the significance of them from her husband Louis Leakey. Louis Leakey learned them from his African childhood, he grew up with the Kukuyu tribe in Kenya, and he learned that every tribe in Africa has their own variance of string figures. He learned from his professor at Cambridge, A.C. Haddon, who was one of the first to write about the fact that string figures seem to be everywhere in the world and that their primordial way of very sophisticated making different kinds of forms out of a simple loops with a pair of hands, as long as you keep interchanging at the centres, and keep letting the expansion of it go into indefinite infinities, one can have almost any number. Haddon once characterised about 2000 string figures from all over the world.
The first person to ever write a monograph in string figures anthropologically was Franz Boas, a young German mathematician who had a taste, in the 1880s, for adventure and he went on an expedition to the Eskimos in the Arctic and when he got to Baffin Island he forgot all about math. He got into anthropology and became one of the world's greatest anthropologists. His 1888 monograph, The Central Eskimo, is the first time that there was a chapter on string figures and one finds not only this; Caroline Furnace Jayne's great book, 1905, with an introduction by A.C. Haddon.
It was about this time that Louis Leakey was born and grew up in Africa and found that his relationship to nature, unbeknownst to him, was actually Kikuyu and not European. He never realised this until he was sent away, finally, to university, to Cambridge, to St John's College, Cambridge, England, and discovered that he dreamed in Kikuyu, not in English, and that his sense of language, his sense of feeling tones, his sense of imagery were African. So he called his biography White African. One of his close friends at Cambridge, a man to become very famous later on, Gregory Bateson, whose great book in the late 60s, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson was also the husband of the great anthropologist Margaret Mead, the father of Catherine Bateson, who is still alive). Louis Leakey learned that it isn't just the string figures but it is all of the play of the Africans that is of an extraordinary richness and primordiality.
Haddon says in his introduction to String Figures and How to Make Them that he first, as an anthropologist, paid attention to the complexity of primordial, so called 'primitive', peoples, when he was in the Torres Strait down at the southern tip of South America. He found that their string figures are much more complex than European string figures. Louis Leakey said, 'There is a special game played all over Africa that is too complex for Europeans to master because their minds get in the way.' Just like the very complex string figures, because primordial peoples would not only use their fingers, their teeth, their toes, and they will put an extra quality in, where you not only make forms, but you make forms that sometimes disappear because the loop comes back out and these are like trick figures. There are variations; in between the forms and the forms that pull clear, there are little catch figures that you when you pull in a special way, they end up by entrapping a finger, or a palm, and one is snared. So you have forms and you have just the open loop and you have the little snares in between.
These figures and the game that all Africans play: twelve holes in the ground, six of each of two lines of holes and six little pebbles or berries that go into each of those six, six, six. So the object is for one of the two players to get the most of these pebbles, the most of these berries. You do it by however the beginning is, that player takes all of the berries from one of the holes and can go left or right, either way, it's ambidextrous, and you put a berry into each of the following holes. If you do this in such a way that you can continue to play, you can continue to keep this motion by taking all the berries now out of the last hole and redistributing them but in the counter way to however you started. You keep doing this until you come to a point where you have not placed any of the berries in the other player's arrangement of holes, then you lose your turn and that person begins then and does the same thing until that happens. The only way that you can keep playing is that you must have a crossover to the other person's territory. The winner is whoever has the most pebbles or berries at the end. It's a way of expressing the mysteriousness of nature and culture, of the infinities and of the zeroness not being endangerments but of being expansions where experience can play.
Let's come back to characterising what a complex learning that we have and its complexity is not mental. It is operative, both as a pragmatos, as a pragmatic, and as a prismatic, as well. So it involves not only the ability to sequence and bring them into an integral but to transform the entirety of the integral, phase by phase, if you wish, the whole of it, if you wish, any detail to whatever specificity you need, and so it is a new kind of a learning. I call it the yoga of civilisation, and it is new, it has never been done before like this.
Our basic presentation uses books because the book form of language that is written has been used for 2000 years and is so indelible, it's like the grain of the historical developments that we have. Our minds and our world have all this grain and we can hopefully wean ourselves away, but not to wean ourselves away so that we do not use books, but that we use them as part of the array that is increasingly before us. But instead of using a book as a text which dead-ends in the way in which the mind indoctrinates itself by a text, we pair books together so that the pair of them has a ratio capability, a proportion capability. They are tuneable, they are ratio-able, and they give us the amplitude and the trough of a dynamic, if we continue to do so.
What would be the periodicity? The periodicity I use for this, because it is cognate, then, with all the other periodicities that I use, I use them for one moon, lunar cycle, one month. Then we move to a second pair, another pair for the next lunar cycle, for the next month. If we do this one, two, three times, three lunar cycles give us a season but in order to let that season have its phase, quality and for the next phase to emerge in its own right, we have a week of interval in between the phases. At that point, instead of using a pair which would interfere with the phasing, with the dynamic energy wave we are creating with our paired books, our paired people, in the interval I use a single classic spiritual work. The first one, with Nature, I use the Tao Tê Ching, I use my own translation of the Tai Tê Ching with an auxiliary volume called Multiple Introductions because something like the Tao Te Ching is not just a book, it's a harmonic of resonances, and so one has to have a multiplicity of approaches to it, in order to let it have its space to do its cooking.
When I was 19 at the University of Wisconsin I was a poor student and in order to live I cooked at an Italian restaurant owned by the Chicago Giancani family in Madison. I learned for four years how to cook from an old Italian woman named Maria. She always said, 'You have to give the kitchen plenty of space and give what you're cooking plenty of space to move around, you let the pasta swim and don't stuff it and for the sauces you simmer them slowly with the meats and everything.' Cooking in this way, then, turns out to be very tasty and also easily digested. Our learning is paced so that not only do we have lunar cycles that make seasons, we have four such seasons that will make an annual year. The annual year will have a solar cycle quality, related to the lunar, twelve lunars, but will also include four intervals, so that the four intervals in a solar cycle will be like an extra month but not a month tacked on in addition, but a month calibrated will be a solar version of a lunar cycle.
But in order to nourish that year-long, we have another kind of a book. I call them 'book journeys' and there are four of them that constitute, each one by itself will be a separate track by which to do the pairs of the lunar cycle books. The year-long readings, one is Homer's The Odyssey, one is Ovid's The Metamorphoses, one of them is Melville's Moby Dick. I use the 150th anniversary edition that just came out with the Maori resonance mask, the chiral magnetic field, human face. The fourth is by a woman, Lady Murasaki, who lived about a thousand years ago in Japan, and is one of the most sophisticated writers of all time. The Tale of Genji is written at a time when the over-masculinisation of power in that shogun Japan had to be tempered in order to make life possible for women and children and also for men outside of the power struggle, the Samarai ethos. So The Tale of Genji is about raising Pringe Genji by very intelligent and sophisticated palace women who teach him how to be human without truncating his ability to be a powerful prince, and eventually, who knows, perhaps even the shogun and yet one can live with him, one can interface with him.
Each one of these year-long readings I have portioned out in our course navigational outline, so that if you are choosing the track, say, of Moby Dick, we're at Nature 8, so the eighth would be the section called Knights and Squires in Moby Dick. If you're reading The Odyssey, the eighth would be Book Four, starting with lines 420 and moving just a couple of pages, and the same for all of the selections. I've portioned out these year-long readings so that they will be distributed in such a way that they will cover the entire annual shape of a year of the education. I used to call this the 'snow shoe effect'.
I had a friend in Canada who was from India. He was a Bengali and they are very affable. He was aerial reconnaissance petroleum expert and he could read the landscape and the maps and tell where the exploration needs to go. He had never been in snow and so he decided one day that he would walk out from the camp, they were up on the Mackenzie River. He walked out what was like about a city block's worth into the deep snow and didn't realise until he got out that just that far that he was completely physically exhausted from walking in three to four foot drifts of snow. When he turned to go back he realised, being a very competent engineer, he figured out he was not going to be able to make it back, he didn't have the energy. He was sweating, he was getting exhausted and of course on the upper Mackenzie River you can get very, very, very cold. When the wind blows you can have a 50 or 60 degree below zero wind chill factor. Luckily one of the Canadian cooks had been watching him and walked out on snow shoes on top of the snow, and gave him a pair of snow shoes and he was able easily to walk back. I remember my Bengali friend telling me this and I've always had a respect, the primordial way to make your way is to learn how to be where you are in its natural terms, and then you can go with freedom.
We not only have the year-long book going with these, these make a basic energy wave. This added to it makes what we would call, then, a reference wave. When you have a wave and a reference wave now the dynamic is not only a process but it is a vector which can be calibrated. You can tell that you are going in that vector. Now you have an ability to have trajectories but also, because we do not just stop here with a reference wave, but we have something else; we have the ongoingness of the learning and the notes from the previous phase that were not available in that phase. At the end of that phase I make them available and so you can read the Science notes from the previous phase along with the Nature phase as it occurs. By pairing the written notes with your basic wave you get a new kind of a wave. This is called, in physics, a pilot wave, and has everything to do with memory extending the ability not only to have another vector, you have a reference vector, now you have a pilot vector and when you have two vectors, now you have the capacity to have a tenser relationality. Now you can do relativity and quantum mechanics.
One of the interesting books that came out a while back was from John Bell, J.S. Bell, one of the leading interpreters of modern quantum theory and computers. This was published, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press. He says, of a pilot wave developed from de Broglie's mathematics in quantum theory by a genius named Everett - and, at the time, 1957, when he first came out with it in a monograph, everyone said, 'This is science fiction, this cannot possibly be': 'Each observer has representatives in many branches of a linear Schrödinger equation so that it is just an illusion that the physical world makes a particular choice among the macroscopic possibilities contained in the expansion; they are all realised and no reduction of the wave function occurs. All possibilities are equally real if you have a pilot wave active.' It goes on from there and Bell's little monograph on this is exceedingly powerful.
We have our notes previous so that if you look at Science 8, Science 8's notes written as a pilot wave, the title of that presentation was Ancient and Future Women, because we were using at the time a pair of women, Barbara McClintock, whose half century of studying Indian corn maize and understanding that the genetic structure, corn has just about eleven or so chromosomes instead of our 23. She found that the genes in the chromosomes of maize, surprisingly, jump around and give a kind of evolutionary variant mutation capacity so that a genome is not a static thing but has an element of play in it. It took about 30 years for people to catch up with Barbara McClintock and realise, they're called now jumping genes. It is not a plan that is engraved and that's it. God is not a fundamentalist. He is a realist and She knows how to be transparent and have exchanges in the centre and to have complementarities in the infinities and in the zeros as well.
If we have the pilot wave and the reference wave, and we have four different tracks for the reference wave, so that in an active population of people doing this you will have four different tracks for the reference wave but it will be highly individualised because what is used in the basic wave will always be up to the individuality of the person doing the learning. So you get a kaleidoscopic variation, which is literally infinite. The more persons who do this together, the better it works in terms of disclosing not only its complexity, but in that complexity the basic infinity sign double attractor coherence, like the cat's cradle string game, that the variations are of indefinite relationalities that increasingly give not only an integral but a differential that is a harmonic.
You can have any number of resonant sets that will constitute a harmonic. I use the octave because that's the music we're most used to, from the Ancient Egyptian all the way through classical music, Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do. But the second Do is not just Do, Ra, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do but that second Do is the beginning of the raising of that octave one note higher. So the next octave will run in an ordinal way, like on a piano you'll have a little bit over eleven octaves that you can play. But one can have, like the Chinese, a pentatonic scale of music, five instead of eight, or in India there are many raga possibilities of different scales and early in the 20th century Arnold Schoenberg showed that you can have a twelve tone serial scale and compose very well. Then it was recognised by the late 20th century, there are an infinite number of musical scales. We will never run out of new music, ever. It doesn't matter how many trillions of star systems have music, there will always be new musics to be found.
But interestingly NASA put out, about 20 years ago, a little whistle that if you blew it, it was the sound of our planet in orbit around our sun and that every planet around a star system has a different tone. Its bow shock imploding into the solar wind gives a particular note so that one could have, like the Pipes of Pan, the sound of the eight basic planets of our star system and you could sound them together, that would be the chord, the actual Pythagorean mystical chord of the music of the spheres in its pitch-pipe completeness. But in order to get to that quality of sophistication, not being awed by it but having it available for our play, for our further learning, we have a number of other enrichments that go into this. Not just the reference wave and the pilot wave but we have an enrichment of the way in which the basic wave is generated and that at each time, each phase has its musical composition. These are two versions of the same composition, Alan Hovhaness, And God Created Great Whales. He took the songs of humpback whales and made a symphonic piece and so we use that in The Nature.
At the end of Nature the interval will have its own musical augmentation. We're using Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rights of Spring, so that each phase, with the interval, together, will have a pair of musical, not just tones, but musical compositions that will allow for you to give whatever complexity you need, so that at the end of a year you will have had eight selections of music arranged in an ordinal ascendant and descending order. We have of course not just one year but two years, so we have a double annual cycle, so that what you get is not only a form and its referent that are practical, because they integrate, and they integrate to any degree of identification that you would like to have, but we get the differential as well, which has a complete different ecology, as Gregory Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind put it, 'Nature will have cycles but consciousness will have an ecology.' Once our consciousness has an ecology we are able now to weave that ecological sense of harmonic back into the complete cycle of nature and recognise there was a hidden ecology in nature as well and that there therefore is a very magical kind of transform, there must be a cycle in the ecology of consciousness as well.
So nature and consciousness have an interchanging, interpenetrating quality. On the most minute level they will have an entanglement, so that once there is a harmonic between two electrons or more in some kind of a vibrant form, no matter where they go in the universe ever after that, they will always be tuneable together. On the higher register, there will always be, in reality, a complementarity which is infinite, which does not preclude it being in a harmonic, or being resonant, or being consonant. Rather, it is up to us to be able to be sophisticated enough, refined enough to be able to tell this, not just to know it, because the mind, as an integral form, has its limit, naturally, and needs to be open to transform, to go into the differential unlimited. So that while the working binary in an integral universe will always be zero and one, in a differential cosmos the binary is zero and infinity. It takes getting used to this.
Now, our next pair of books, we're going to use two very interesting groups of people. First is the double helix, James D. Watson. Watson and Crick discovered the double helix because a natural cycle, when put into time, does not deliver a circle, but delivers a spiral. As it circles it moves forward in time and so it has a spiralling quality to it so that the cone of time-space in a dynamic actually has this spiral quality to it. It can be very tight and in fact if it is very tight so that the next circle of the spiral is just one element more expansive than the previous one, you will get something of what an old LP record used to be, a 33⅓ record; you can record something linear, like a piece of music, on a tightly wound spiral and have a perfect playback from it. In this way, the mysteriousness of nature lends itself to be woven with the conscious magic of the visionary process and one now gets something like the phonograph record.
We're taking not only the double helix but we're taking with it a book that has just come out called Macroevolution: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency. This book is by both a man and a woman, and they wrote it together because the third figure who was a life-long friend of those two had just died, his name was Stephen J. Gould, who was one of the most magisterial figures. He not only wrote on evolution, he wrote on everything conceivable. He had a monthly column in many national magazines. He wrote on baseball, he wrote on politics, he wrote on evolution and his great magnum opus that came out just at the time he died at age 59 was an about 1500 page book on evolutionary theory published by Harvard. The two editors are his friends, Elisabeth Vrba and Niles Eldredge. Niles Eldredge is the curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Elizabeth Vrba is at Yale University and publishes at The Palaeontology Society in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and a number of other places.
We're going to use their Macroevolution, a series of little vignette essays, brought together and paired with the double helix of Watson and Crick, to complete Thoreau and the I Ching, Mary Leakey and Jane Goodall, and then Watson and Vrba and Eldridge, and conclude the first phase with the Tao Tê Ching. When we moved, then, to Ritual, the next phase, we're going to pick up a thread from the I Ching and the Tao Tê Ching. One of the first books that we'll use in the pair, the first pair, will be Confucius Analects, the Lun Yu, which is about the ritual comportment that the Tao Tê Ching is about the non-ritual of comportment, but the I Ching was completely changed by Confucius because he wrote ten commentaries on the I Ching and they became the ten wings. They're folded into the I Ching so that we not only have the I Ching of 3000BC, of FuHsi and NuGua and the I Ching of King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, at the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty, about the time of the Trojan War, that we have a Confucian I Ching that has been used as one of the classic state exam texts in China for 2200 years.
The state exams were used up until 1911 and still today one finds creeping back into China the Confucian ethos, that one must be very careful about what you do and keep it consonant with tradition on the one hand, and with insight, possibilities on the other, otherwise you lose balance, you lose symmetry. You lose the ability to have creativity and that the creativity comes from a very special exchange of centres; the centre of the mind in its imagination changes places with the centre of visionary consciousness which is not a thing but a process, remembering. So that when remembering goes into the mind it becomes the memory and the imagination, when it goes into consciousness becomes creative imagination.
Now you have the ability to have art out of a centre that not only remembers but basically is enthused because it can creatively imagine. Later, the other conscious process, history, will be when the creative imagining is still operative but the conscious remembering comes back into play more and so it's like electromagnetism. You always have electrical and magnetic together but in the electromagnetic spectrum, it's the electrical that takes the attention with the magnetic as a smaller adjunct to it. But those equations of James Clerk Maxwell solve the other way as well, there is a magneto=electric spectrum where the magnetic takes the forefront and the electric supports it as a smaller role. Those two together weave and in their weaving they make a cosmos that is not only visionary and magical, but one that is historical and memorable.
Have you never heard 'God is the Lord of history'? In our learning and in order to have a contemporary quality along with the nourishment of the music we have, every phase, four films. The four films for Nature were selected so that they deliver a quality of enrichment in a measured way, a paced way, a stepping way. We begin with Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. We move to Fred Schepisi's The Ice Man, about an oil company finding a frozen man 40,000 years old and he is brought back to life. They discover that he was on a visionary journey that had to be finished and 40,000 years made no difference whatsoever, he has to finish his journey. The third film is Quatermass and the Pit, about a science fiction story set in London where they're making a subway tunnel in London and they run across something buried. They think it's a bomb at first but it's very big and it's very unusual. It turns out to be a ship, a spaceship from Mars that had come to earth five million years before. In the spaceships they found apes that had enlarged brains, that they had been surgically altered on Mars and brought back to Earth to seed, not a new kind of humanity, but a new kind of organic vehicle which the Martians then could psychically inhabit and save themselves by being able to live in our world.
The fourth is Forbidden Planet, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, set in the great star system of Altair. The crew that goes there finds the only survivor of the expedition is a Dr Morbius who has learned to read the language of the Krell, who disappeared from the planet in one single night two million years before because they had perfected the ability to have psychic projection of matter anywhere on the planet instantaneously, all of them. When they did, they forgot, as Morbius comes to understand, that there is an elemental primitive quality, the mindless primitive, out of which they had evolved and comes back into play. Then one night all of the Krell send all of their personal hidden demons to each other and the entire planet is depopulated. 'Ah,' says the spaceship commander, played by Leslie Nielsen, the great comic actor of later times but he is the young Canadian actor who plays the courageous pilot of the spaceship that has come to relieve them. Walter Pidgeon plays Dr Morbius. Morbius says, 'But the last Krell died two million years ago, how can there be one of these psychic demonic phantoms?' Nielsen says, 'You don't understand, your own psyche has tuned in. The machine has tuned itself to you, it is your personal demon that killed everyone else and is killing my crew. You're the one and you are helpless, you cannot do anything about it.'
This is a way of nourishing through music and through film and through a quality of activities we call projects. Each phase has its own set of worked out projects, taking the cue from Thoreau, the projects for the Nature are to take four walks. One walk is from where you live in any direction left or right but that the second walk then should be the opposite direction to keep some symmetry. If you walk from where you live around to the left and come back home, the next week take a walk to the right around and come back to where you are. The third walk is to go the same direction as before but further out, longer and come back to where you are and if you do that second walk the fourth time further out and then you come back. This is the ancient technique of Palaeolithic hunting. No matter where you are, if you keep the butterfly effect going in a symmetry, you will not only explore where you are but you will give it natural coordinates, so that you will know where you are, not intellectually, but that your body will be at home in the landscape because it will be a vibratory remembering in its very body. That's why you find in primordial peoples always this kind of magnetic, chiralling, tattooing, not just on the face of the tattooing but the whole bodily experience of landscape is that it is like being tattooed psychically to it.
Once upon a time in North America, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the Mississippi River, the entire landscape was sacred mounds. Effigy mounds, animal mounds, not just one or two mounds, tens of thousands, the entire landscape, because it's very ancient. The blood types show that American Indians have been here in two great waves, one of them 12,000 years ago, the other about 25,000 years ago. They didn't come just by a land bridge, that was 12,000 years ago. The originals, oddly enough, came across the Pacific Ocean, from Oceania, because the string figures that the American Indian tribes all have are related to the Asian string figures, especially South East Asia, and very much like the Australian Aborigine string figures, and the Oceania island string figures.
They all have a cognate quality and as Lewis Leakey points out and Mary Leakey learned, and she points out, and Jane Goodall, who went even deeper, learned: it isn't just Palaeolithic man, it isn't just other species of hominids that go back two, three, four, now seven million years, but the great apes, the chimpanzees, the gorillas, the orang-utans that go back 70 million years, they have a particular vibratory wave form. Primates, like the great apes, came in 70 million years ago with two cognate qualities of evolution. 1) For the first time you have flowering plants and 2) You have trees. Before that you had giant ferns but no trees. Ferns became trees. Weeds now, even, have flowers and primates, that are 98% of what we are, occurred all together 70 million years ago.
What we are trying to appreciate next is, not only can we go back 70 million years but through Macroevolution we can go back 500 million years and through the Double Helix we can go back three billion six hundred million years to the beginnings of life on this planet, to the beginnings of living forms. When we go back to the original bacteria on this planet, over three and a half billion years before, we discover that there had been a couple of major evolutionary developments that originally were not there and because they have occurred, instead of there just being single cell, now there are multi-cell organisms. We will start next week by taking a look at these two together. Thank you for your quietness.