Interval 1
Presented on: Saturday, April 1, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to the first interval and we're using classic spiritual books from planetary heritage to give ourselves an articulation between the sets of presentations that constitute a phase. Were we not to have an interval, the phases would coalesce and become a longer sequence. This scrambles articulation. In the codons of DNA or RNA, the readouts are always articulate and there is a special codon for 'stop' which means 'no longer continue this sequence'; that the sequence has not only ended but that the entire sequence is now not just a line of instruction, it is not just an information but that that line of instruction has curled itself in such a way that it is a set that sparks an emergence. Where does that emergence come from? It comes from a source, a pool of capacities, of amino acids, of molecular structures, of atomic structures. Where do they come from? It is a profound realisation that eventually, when you push back the emergence of things you come to an interface where they do not come from further things.
By 2006 the anticipation through tests going on now at the big CERN Large Hadron Collider, the LHC in Switzerland, outside of Geneva, which, when coming online in 2007 will be able to explore a threshold beyond the causality of things, because sub-atomic particles, in order to have their quarks, or their leptons, or the inter-reaction of the gluons, or photons, or the Z particle, the W+ or W- particle, the threshold is one of a very high energy, a very deep penetration into the beyond, the physicality causing other physicality. The closest understanding is that there is a vacuum energy which can condense and in the condensation of vacuum energy one has the ability to have an emergence of energy as a dynamic wave which can loop into a polarisation and become a particle. Those particles all have a quality of unity, they are what they are, and they can come together and make larger unities. That larger unity holds both the initial unity and the aggregate expanded structure of unity so that what we have here is what the ancient Chinese call Tê.
Tê is the power to be in something and to hold the integral of unity all the way through its building of structure, so that at each distinct, definite layer, horizon, of emergence, of combination, it will be precisely natural in its cycle of integration and in its maintaining the unity all the way through its different structural developments and levels. But the source of the Tê is in, not a non-Tê, but in a complementarity to Te: Tao. We're taking for the Interval 1 the Tao Tê Ching because it is one of the most fundamental presentations of the way in which out of a condense emptiness, an energy wave, a frequency of dynamic occurs naturally and in its resonances builds the capacity for an emergence where those resonances can achieve a mutuality of polarity which allows them to be stable in the conversion of the energy into matter, into things, waves into particles. And yet the matter preserves all the time, everywhere through the mutuality of wave and particle, of dynamic and of energy structure. We know today that in order to really characterise this mutual interplay it takes a very curious, traditional geometry of understanding.
The first understanding is unity, is really one, and that really one emerges whole out of really zero. When one emerges really out of zero, the pair of them constitutes the first model, the first initial reconnaissance of what a two would be; that the zero and one together are a two but a two which is still mysteriously a unity preserving in its carrying over source the zero. So while one takes a look at stages, zero, one, two are three stages and they complete themselves in a four stage fullness, not with four but they complete themselves with three, that that two and that unity together are a three but it's in the fourth stage. By this time one can characterise a matrix which holds throughout the universe into 21st century physics precisely, expressively, that zero, one, two, three as a matrix are enough to establish the ability to have a very sophisticated higher mathematic, a very sophisticated physics, astrophysics.
One of the most profound things that came out 50 years ago, a theory by a Chinese man, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills, called the Yang-Mills theory, and here is the 2005 publication, 50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory, published in Singapore just a few months ago. It is a salute to half a century of excellence and of development and here in just a little note, C.N. Yang, who is at the Institute of Radical Physics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, writes that he is proud to be receiving this tribute and that the editor has asked him of something from the past, and he concludes with this little paragraph: 'The pages that I sent you were written in 1947 when I was a graduate student familiar with Pauli's description of gauge theory' Wolfgang Pauli, one of the great physicists, 'At the time I didn't know very much about the 1929 article by Weyl.' Hermann Weyl was one of the great mathematicians of all time, 'I was clearly focusing, then, on a very important problem. Unfortunately the mathematical calculations I had carried out repeatedly in subsequent years I could not find today, they had always ended in more and more complicated formulae and total frustration, that the refinement refined itself into a complexity that frayed. It became more and more complex so that the refinement, instead of recovering originality of either its oneness or its zeroness kept finding more and more of what the Chinese used to call the 10,000 things, which now are ten trillion things, which make ten more trillion things.'
So you see that unless one comes to a certain quality of being natural au naturel, of being in the flow of nature in the way of which nature is, not in the way in which the mind is, not in the way in which the mind presupposes that nature must be. Yang concludes, 'It was only in 1953, 1954, when Bob Mills and I revisited the problem and tried adding quadratic terms to the field strength, FMuv, that an elegant theory emerged. For Mills and me it was very many years later that we realised, in a Pythagorean retrospection, that we realised that the quadratic terms were in fact natural from the mathematical standpoint', that a matrix of four, a quaternary, will always be enough to establish a frame of reference, a frame for the picture, the big picture but that the mind, in its place, the Chinese word for that stage of the mind is I, symbols. The symbolic mind will consider itself the fourth, where nature is the first, and the principles of existence, the rituals will be the second, the third will be our experience of that, what we call myth, in our phases, and the fourth will be symbols. But the Taoist from the Tao Tê Ching, from Lao Tzu, understanding is subtle and profound that the four are not one, two, three, four. The frame does not have one two three four as four corners, four angles, four sides, but that the very first is a zero which you cannot count as yet is real. And so the frame is zero, one, two, three as a quaternary and this is very difficult to understand unless your mind has been combed through, the whole process of beginning with Tao, not beginning with it but beginning within it.
And so our education begins always with the process, the ongoingness of nature as a Tao and we begin our whole learning with the I Ching. And now we are articulating it at the end of the first phase, the first twelve presentations that constitute the phase of nature with the Tao Tê Ching. The Tao Tê Ching comes in a very interesting way. The first beginnings of the I Ching, as we have presented, were with FuHsi about 3000BC who made the trigrams and who understood the ecology of the eight trigrams as having an exchange of centres from two different modes: the columns of the unbroken line and the column of the broken line that in the centre of their three steps of change, that they exchange places and so the middle trigram of the one column operates in the middle of the other column as if it were profoundly really there, though naturally it's in the previous first column. As it shifts its centre place, the centre place of the other column shifts mutually with it and now operates in the first column and that the trigrams for that exchange are fire and water and that 5000 years ago two of the greatest universal solvents are fire and water.
But there is a great universal solvent that comes in addition to fire and water and that solvent is a solvent for organic things and that solvent is alcohol, alcohols, the fermentation of things into a special juiced thing. The fermented is not the water but the wine and that the wine takes a further transform, a further alchemy and now one has not only a fermentation but one has a distillation: the wine becomes a cognac. Now, as the wine is a third universal solvent for organic molecules, organic things like enzymes, amino acids, proteins, the cognac will be a fourth universal solvent but what it dissolves is not the organic but the spirit things that come out of the organic transform and so one has fire and water and the alcohols of fermentation and of distillation.
With that quaternary one is able to take a look at the way in which a solution is not a dissolving away from anything natural but is a dissolving into the solution state. One of the all time great examples of this is to take ordinary salt, sodium chloride, and dissolve it in warm water and if you get the solution saturated, if you put one more little pinch of salt in, it will trigger catalystically a re-crystallisation of the salt out of the super-saturated solution and will come back into its original form. It will return back, it will have completed a cycle of phases and the Tao Tê Ching is famous for all time of showing that the largest cycle of return involves a five phase quintessential energy cycle, the Taoist energy cycle. What is interesting is, if it begins with zero, the fifth stage, the quintessential stage, will be one of return back into the Tao so that the cycle continues. If the mind stops the counting with itself, it does not go into the alchemical transform but imputes the fifth phase to coming back to a mind's construct of the Tao as the fifth phase. So you get a false transform which is really a transposition and it is the transposition in the mind that gives rise to all of the travails of our species on this planet.
One of the few great translations of the Tao Tê Ching, without minds coming into manipulative, self-sabotaging unbeknownst to it play was done in 1884, published in Shanghai by Frederic Henry Balfour. His translation has been out of print for 100 years, university microfilms in Ann Harbour, Michigan, University of Michigan, make these copies available. Here's Belfour's translation of one of the most profound little sections of the Tao Tê Ching, just a paragraph or so, this is 24, Lao Tzu, in translation writes, 'A man who raises himself on tiptoe cannot remain firm. A man with crooked legs cannot walk far. He who says himself that he can see is not enlightened. He who says himself that he is right is not manifested to others. He who praises himself has no merit. He who is self-conceited will not increase in knowledge. Such men may be said to search after Tao that they may gorge themselves in feeding and act the parasite. Moreover they are universally detested therefore those who are possessed of Tao do not act thus.'
One of the aspects that get in the way traditionally and seemingly immediately and lodged and is still there today is that Lao Tzu in his lifetime came at the end of a large section of historical time, it's called the Spring and Autumn period, when the Zhou Dynasty that had been the glory of China because when it was instituted about 1200 BC, 1100BC, about the time of the Trojan war, they made an epical change in the I Ching. They went from FuHsi's heavenly I Ching to the Zhou Dynasty's human I Ching. Instead of looking at universal processes in nature, they looked at those universal processes that were there in man's experience and life. Instead of there being the trigrams which were expressive of fire and water, heaven and earth, they were expressive now of man and woman and of sons and daughters: the younger son, a middle son, an older son, a younger daughter, middle daughter, older daughter, and so the human family for the I Ching became the way in which the expressive symbols were understood. It was said then FuHsi's I Ching was a former heavenly matrix whereas in founding the Zhou Dynasty is was now the human matrix. That Zhou Dynasty was exquisite at its time and slowly over the centuries, like all constructs, lost its steam and juice and for several centuries the Zhou Dynasty was in increasing disarray and reached a threshold about 480BC.
This is interesting because Lao Tzu would have died a very old man just before that 480BC. From 480BC all the way down to the 230-225BC era, that is now known as the period of warring states, where the decay and the disarray ended up in several centuries of constant continuous warfare between kingdoms and fiefdoms and different groups of people that was an unceasing warfare: it went on continuously for all those centuries. In the period of the warring states the problem was not to understand FuHsi and not to understand the Zhou Dynasty's human family but it was how to understand to bring order out of the warring state's culture.
The solution was that there needed to be a superior integration where all the different cultural aspects were united in a single over-weaning society, that there should be a society of political order and of economic order and that this should be a higher integration. It should be someone who is the war lord or war lords, the king of kings, it should be an emperor who not only is in a dynastic quality where there are kings and kingship but there should be an all time powerful one immense man, an emperor, who looks over the empire of the society of the social order which commandeers the culture on the basis of the culture and the nature being together in a very tight synchronous energy flow. And that the rituals that come out of nature should be commandeered by the symbols that come out of experience and they should be airtight so that what came out of this at the end of the period of the warring states was a completely different understanding of the Tao Tê Ching and the man who was responsible for that is named Han Fei Tzu. His book is called the Han Fei Tzu and if you're looking for a good translation, Burton Watson has done it for Columbia University Press a number of years ago, the basic writings of several great Chinese philosophers, Han Fei Tzu is the most profound of those.
It's interesting because the monograph for the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy, The Philosophical Foundations of Han Fei's Political Theory, published by the University of Hawaii press is very profound. The reason being is that it took the two special chapters of the Han Fei Tzu that take a look at Lao Tzu. One, Chapter 20, is about explaining Lao Tzu to everyone, including the emperor, and chapter 21 is illustrating Lao Tzu but notice that it isn't explaining the Tao Tê Ching, it's explaining the Lao Tzu. It's not illustrating the Tao Tê Ching, it's illustrating the Lao Tzu so that by the end of the warring states period there was a considered emphasis not on Tao Tê, the book of Tao Tê, but the book that belongs under the aegis of Lao Tzu, the Lao Tzu. One finds even today studies like Lao Tzu and the Tao Tê Ching, with the emphasis on Lao Tzu, which would be fine, expect that this is an extraordinary continuation of almost 2300 years of official ignorance as to what really is available, not for inspection, mentally, but for transform consciously and a further distillate transform historically.
Without understanding that consciousness is not a thing, not a form, but a super process and that history is not a thing, not chronological forms, not king lists, not lists of dates of wars and politics and economics, but a very high distillate of the conscious process and that historical consciousness is a very high powered transform. A process like visionary consciousness, that doesn't integrate but differentiates, and that without being able to jump oneself, alchemically, out of the integral cycle of constant return within that circle, one will never be able to understand that the mind is deceived by seeing the world as a target of concentric circles. The innermost one being the circle of self and the outward circle the liminal of one's target of being, the way in which the mind conceives nature, and that this target, though it is very true in terms of integral nature as a cycle, undergoes a radical alchemical change twice over and instead of being a target of concentric circles, now, one has a spiral that continuously opens up as it opens out.
Now, this is a very ancient primordial wisdom and one can find this even in the ancient descendants of Chinese after being away from China, North China, for 10,000 years, the American Indians, in the Northern part of North America, the first incursion of Orientals were from South China, from Indonesia, and they came over about 25,000 years ago but the second wave was about 12,000 years ago through the Bering Strait and down through the Mackenzie River delta, the coastal part of North America. About 2000 years ago, in petroglyphs in Southern Utah, one finds that at the summer solstice there is a meeting of a shadow which creeps from one side and a sunlight which creeps from another side and meets exactly at this focus in the summer solstice and it's been doing this for a couple thousand years. From the one side one sees the target circles within circles and on the other side one sees the spiral. Where the light of the spiral meets the dark of the target one has the metronome that this is the summer solstice and that its direct link to the winter solstice allows one to have where the target and the spiral are the equinoxes and one now has a calendar of a quaternary which is absolutely true for the whole star system and that the earth is real in its natural cycles within that because the star system is natural within that cycle, within it. In my translation of the Tao Tê Ching, I translate a very beautiful section of the Tao Tê Ching, number 10. I translate the title of that particular chapter, chapter 10, 'Can Do'. It reads this way: 'Sustaining discipline, body-embraced unity, cannot disintegrate. Concentrate Qi conduces the gentle, an infant's tone. Washed clear, profound intuition. Non-faulting in loving people, ruling country, practicing, non-busy. Heaven's gate open, close, like a mother bird. Bright openness, four cornered penetrating as is her mystery. Birthing presence, nourishing presence. Birthing yet not owning. Doing yet not claiming. Raising yet not ruling. This is called profound Te.'
The outcome of the warring states period was the establishment of one of the most brutal tyrannies on the planet. A man named Qin Shi Huang Ti took over China and gave his name for the rest of history, 'You are now all mine, you are Chinese' Qin-ese. In order to make sure that everyone understood, he built the great wall, cemented all the little fortifications together in the only structure visible from space built by man. 'Anyone within this is mine, anyone without this is subject to my decision about their future.'
We need to understand that the political understanding of the Tao Tê Ching is a mental deception, not that there isn't a wisdom about human order in the Tao Tê Ching but it is not about the ritual level, it is not about the cultural level, it is not about the mental society level. It is about the transform of all four of those into different qualities of fermented alchemy and of being able to distil that conscious quality which comes out, not as a ritual of laws, not as a culture of tradition, not as a mentality of doctrine, but it comes out as a new transformed alchemical nature from which emerges not just the figures of existence but the persons of spirit. And the spirit person is able to take their transform source heritage and when working with that in the historical consciousness able to transform a second time and what is distilled out of that is civilisation. Civilisation is a super, super form of our kind of being, in a life which is harmonic, not only with the planet and the sun and the moon and the other moving stars, the planets, but all the stars that one can see, that we are now then harmonic with the cosmos.
The Tao Tê Ching is about reclaiming that double transform so that one now is not only natural in integration but what is also real in differentiation, so that you do not just return on a treadmill of obedience to the controlling authority but that all of that is able to be transformed twice over and in doing so, nature accepts this. She not only is natural but she comes mysteriously and then she comes magically and then she comes really. Let's take a break.
This is FuHsi and Nugwa. This was the inner lid of a coffin that was found in a cemetery called Astana that is outside of Turfan which is in the Northern part of the Gobi desert, not the Gobi Desert Tarim basin proper but just on the other side of a massive spur of the Tien Shan mountains in that second desert expanse was the way in which the traditional movement from China through the Xinjiang Gobi wilderness went north into Siberia. Turfan was the ancient trading nexus for that caravan route which was not the silk road but was a road as yet unnamed in popular understanding but it went into the huge enormous expanse of central Asia. That expanse of central Asia did not go further west but went into the deep north. So one found, at this time, FuHsi and Nugwa come at the very beginnings of Chinese civilisation, about 3000BC, about the time that Egypt was being dynastically brought together, about the time that Sumerian city-states were beginning to really coalesce and become a Sumeria.
What's interesting here is that it is not a sage, it is a pair, a male-female pair, who together are a mutual sageliness. It is later on as we were talking before the break in the Zhou Dynasty that this pair was interiorised and the exterior presentation of oneself was now in the Zhou Dynasty, the new splendour of the new kind of kingship that looked at human life as being capable of a cycle of Tao. While one had the kingliness without to have the human cycle of Tao in one's kingdom, in one's culture, one had the interiorised sageliness within and so the ancient Chinese way of saying this by a pithy saying, 'Sageliness within, kingliness without.'
While the sageliness within to the mind, in its deceptive egotism, thinks of the sage as a male, the sageliness was really, esoterically, a male-female pair whose mutuality generated the wisdom because FuHsi and Nugwa hold instruments. He holds a carpenter's square so that he can get the angle right and true things, she held a plumb bob because she was able to get the pivot right. Because, without the centre of the form, the angles now are just angles in an unconstructable chaos but if he will place his angles in a quaternary around her centre, you will now have not only a form which is existentially real in the four dimensions of time space but you will have a transformable, alchemical structure in a five dimensional reality. The fifth dimension will be the transforming quality at the pivot, at the centre.
And so the Chinese way of counting the reality of a structure is not just one, two, three, four to frame it but to count one, two, in the centre for three, then four, five, so that you have a Z. One, two, three, four, five. That Z has the ability to have a five part set. In Chinese music it's called a pentatonic scale, in the Tao Tê Ching it's what has been characterised as the Taoist energy cycle: Tao, Tê, Jen, I, Qi. As we talked earlier, the basic quality that is there is that you do not begin counting with one but you begin your count with what you cannot count and yet you give it its due and that is that you begin with zero. The basic quaternary, the basic frame, is zero, one, two, three and that is working with Tao Tê but when you are working with the Tê which will take a Tao transform, you have to count the centre as well and so you count zero, one, two in the centre, three, four, to make the Z. In order to emphasise the subtleness you can count the two twice whereas later on in Chinese understanding they would count one, two, three, four and count the centre as five because of a very esoteric ancient way that came from FuHsi and Nugwa's era.
It was a way of understanding by dots, almost like an ancient Pythagorean technique, that if you have a dot and then across from it you have a pair of dots, why across from it? Because you don't to go into a sequence, you want to go in to a generating gestalt. And so the generating gestalt will always have a symmetry quality and so the two dots are opposite the one dot. Then you will have three dots and then you will have four dots and then in the centre you will have five dots. Because of the doubling of the centre, to keep the balance, to keep the pairedness paired, as it were, where the one dot is, now you have six dots, where the two dots were now you have seven dots, where the three dots were, underneath it, you have eight dots, and the where the four dots were you have nine dots and in the centre you have ten dots as well as five dots. And the way it was expressed was the five dots in the centre and five dots in a double line above and below it so that, now, one had a ten, a decade of two fives, a pair of fives, going over the same transformative gestalt and that the centre is the pivot, it is not just a centre but it is a stack of centres indefinitely and that stacking of the centres is what makes it a pivot. So that, when the pivot turns, every possibly aspect of the four corners become rotational and acquire what we would call today accumulation of rotational energy. In physics it's called angular momentum.
So now you have a vital vibrant structure that not only has radial qualities that are geometric but you have a rotational quality that the spin to it and that geometric quality of polarity, like polarity of charge, is increased now with the ability to have a rotational angular momenta quality. In nuclear physics you characterise a particle by its charge and by its spin but there is a third element and it is so strange it's just called strange. Every particle will have not only its charge, which will be a function of its energy as a mass, and of its spin which will be a function of its angular momenta rotation, generally baryons have a spin of one half and occasionally there are qualities of particles that have a spin of one, and there's one very odd particle that has a spin of three halves. You will have not only charge and spin but you will have the strange and the strange is the transformational jump to a different order, a mysterious deepening of the nature. In the deepening of the nature, all of the other characteristics that were there now have a more wondrous strange possibility of even larger.
We know today that this transformation not only goes into strangeness but it goes into something that was even deeper. In nuclear physics it's called charm. There will be top or up and down better to start with up and down, and this is how quarks were initially, when they were discovered and found, that there is an up and there is a down and then there is a strange and then there is a charm. Then there is a further pair, a third pair that came into play, prosaically they are now called bottom and top and that out of this one gets a matrix not just of six but, as always, doubled, in the sense that it is paired, so that you have a matrix of six that has another aspect to it, another six, so that the set of twelve is not twelve but it is six and like a shadow six. The six leptons are shadowed by six kinds of neutrinos which are ghost particles. Those ghost particles have a particular quality: they shift energy levels constantly. Neutrinos coming from the sun to the Earth will skip along and shift their different qualities while they're on way and that many of them are undetectable so far because they go to the very highest quality, the Tao of neutrinos, which no one yet can detect because it's the subtlest of the subtle of the subtle taking a very high energy exactness in order to detect, but which can be mathematically characterised in vision, in theoria.
The Tao Tê Ching, Lao Tzu, is a magical transform of the FuHsi Nugwa interior and the Zhou Dynasty I Ching exterior. Not only is there the sageliness within and the kingliness without, there is now the spirit being quality that takes both those together and radiates it further out into much different dimensions and rotates it further out into a greater angular momentia so that the universe now has expanded. It not only has a heavenly within and an earthly without but it has a super spiritual, beyond the universe, quality that is not just nature nor mysterious nature but is magical nature. Now the universe has a magical possibility, an alchemical possibility. Lao Tzu, in the Tao Tê Ching, in my translation, in section 14, in my translation of the Chinese characters that begin each section, I translate it as 'Praising the profound' and my translation reads this way: 'Looking, presence unseen is named colourless. Listening, presence unheard is named soundless. Reaching, presence beyond grasp is named incorporeal. Thus these themselves not subject to objectivity, therefore deeply paired and unitas, surface never clarified but bottoms not obscure. Continuously continuous. Oh! None one can name. Reverts, returns, re-non thing existence, called non-formed presence, a form of non image iterating, thus forming is abstrusely abstruse. The front of presence not seeing ahead, the rear of presence, never seeing behind. Holding fast as ancients presence Tao. There, governing, immediately. Our existence. Now, you know our ancient beginning called Tao thread.'
In order to get away from the false mentality of commentating and writing learned scholarly introductions I have done a multiple introductions kaleidoscopic array. Half a dozen, not essays towards an introduction, but a layering of enough possibilities of introducing it so that one can get that the facets on this can be rotated and, when you do, the kaleidoscopic possibilities have their angular momenta so that the angles of your perspective are shown to be quite firm when they are angled exactly that way and yet can be moved and changed and it doesn't destroy the angle that was there before. And it doesn't just augment it by some new angle, which now displaces it, but that one gets the scintillation of the possible and becomes able to taste the more refined quality that it is a jewel that one is looking at, not a geometric thing. And that a jewel requires an appreciation of aesthetic dimension and that when the appreciation of aesthetic dimension is in play, it generates a further distillation of consciousness and out of that comes a kaleidoscope of kaleidoscopes called the cosmos. And its scintillation is in such an infinite set that one can behold it only through a prism of possibility of all possible worlds in every possibility. That prism is the spiritual person.
In old China we had two different qualities that came together and at death those two qualities went apart, polarised: the hun and the po. One went back into the earth and was absorbed into the earth, one went up and was faded into the heavens but when Lao Tzu came along with the Tao Tê Ching there was a third transformative spiritual person whose spirit was able to bridge not only heaven and earth within and without but to maintain a multidimensional reality because that Shen, that spirit person lived not in the earth, nor in the heaven but lived in the infinite cosmos, the Tao, behind, through and beyond all the limitations. When, as we were talking earlier, before the break, when at the period when the Zhou Dynasty had frayed for several hundred years, in the spring and autumn periods, had hit a crisis of constant warfare between fiefdoms and kingdoms, the period of the warring states for hundreds of years, right at that cusp, at that threshold was when Lao Tzu did not die but he passed out of the purview of the world.
There is a very interesting thing, it's something that is paralleled, for instance, in the Old Testament with Elijah; the person of Elijah never died. He was, as the saying is, swept up by the spirit of God and taken away in a chariot of fire so that he could sometime later return through the water because the fire and the water are complementary solutions in our four dimensional world. And of course the return of Elijah in the esoteric Jewish way was that John the Baptist came back, Elijah was the master of fire and John the Baptist was the master of water and came back exactly at the same spot where Elijah had ascended in the chariot of fire: the ford of the Jordan river just before the Dead Sea and, of course, everyone knows the location as the meeting of aeons.
Lao Tzu was immediately understood in his time, in his day, by a man who was younger by a couple of generations, about 50 years younger, and that man was Confucius. Confucius is the Latin pronunciation, his name in Chinese is Kungfutzu, Master Kung. His burial place in Shangdong province is still visitable, it's still there. The great Chinese historian Sze-Ma Chien, whose historical records in this nice little translation by Raymond Dawson, the same one who did our Confucius Analects that we are going to start with the Egyptian Book of the Dead next week, in Ritual. His translation of Sze-Ma Chien, he wrote in the Han Dynasty, was condemned to a life of constant toil to write his great history because of a complication: he had been castrated and so all that he had to do in his life was work on his relentless bringing of a history which is one of the greatest works on the planet. He is the one that gives a short biography of Lao Tzu and we do well to hear at least a couple of paragraphs from Sze-Ma Chien's biography of Lao Tzu, especially in view that many scholars today think of Lao Tzu as a collection of different authors over hundreds of years who really had to do with the political set up of things and that one needs to be a little more scholarly about these things.
Here's Sze-Ma Chien, who lived 2100 years ago: 'Lao Tzu was born in Ch'u-jen village, Li district, Ku country, in the state of Ch'u. He was surnamed Li, named Err, styled Poh-yang and posthumously titled Tan. He was the keeper of the archives of Zhou.' In other words he was he head librarian for the Zhou Dynasty and he was the few people in the world who had access not only to all the books and records but who could read them and who had read them over a very long lifetime, who had distilled the entire history of China in himself.
When Confucius went to Zhou, to ask him about the meaning of propriety, Lao Tzu responded: 'The men whom you talked about and their bones have already rotted. Only their words remain. What is more, when a gentleman is in keeping with the times he rides the chariot, when he is not, he drifts with the wind.' The chariot was the vehicle for the officials, only people with very important high paying jobs could ride the Rolls-Royce chariots around and they rode these chariots because the chariots were the sign of official position of wealth to put you away with law suits if you have anything to say against them. And the riding of many officials in chariots was a constant theme in Chinese history, so that one reads in the great Tang poet Du Fu in one of his poems, he says 'The capital is full of chariots filled with officials, with all kinds of titles, who do not smell the blossoms.'
Sze-Ma Chien says Lao Tzu cautioning Confucius. Why? Because Confucius was looking to the past, to reinstate what those people then considered wise, in ways of keeping things together and Lao Tzu was saying, 'When a gentleman is keeping with the times he rides the chariot, when he is not he drifts with the wind. I have heard that a good merchant secretly hides his goods and appears to possess nothing and that a gentleman of great virtue assumes the appearance of ignorance. Abandon your arrogance, multiple desires, pretentious affection and excessive ambition; they are of no benefit to you. This is all I have to tell you.'
Sze-Ma Chien does what all great Chinese writers do, he doesn't draw the moral but he emphasises to those who are hearing or to those who are reading, he emphasises the under platform which has allowed this story now to emerge to you and the overview at the same time that pulls that platform through your having read it or heard it into a higher understanding. To say that there is a moral behind it reduces it. There is a platform of emergence before it, underneath it, which is a complementary that is pulled by the conscious overview, the vision, that will pull that platform through your experience of hearing it, your experience of reading it, into this higher realm. Here it is, Confucius left and said to his disciples, "I know that birds can fly, fish can swim and animals can run. Whatever runs can be trapped with nets, whatever swims can be caught with fishing lines, whatever flies can be shot with arrows but as for dragons, I do not know how they ride the wind and clouds and soar in the sky. Today I saw Lao Tzu; is he not like a dragon?'
Now the original dragon in ancient China and FuHsi and Nugwa's time was the Milky Way. The Milky Way has an undulating aspect, especially in the Northern china reaches which are almost the beginnings of where Siberia are, so that you get a very curious play. The Milky Way has a particular quality of having an undulation in the sky and exactly at the winter solstice the bright star Polaris shines down through the lowest coil of the Milky Way dragon. And if you spot the earth exactly in that pivot from Polaris, the North Star, through the dragon's centre to the Earth, one now has the Winter solstice pivot of the whole way in which the Earth goes with the heavens. If you bring that into an interface with what I talked about of the ancient American Indians in their petroglyphs of pairing the target of circle cycles with the spiral of conscious transforms and of the light of one meeting the shadow of the other, exactly at the summer solstice, you begin to see that primordiality in our kind has been exceedingly brilliant, not just for thousands of years, friends, for tens of thousands of years.
Sze-Ma Chien ends with pulling this, for those who have heard or who have read and whose understanding now has been permeated by the understanding being brought through your experience of it, and transforming it into consciousness. Now you can hear something that is of a higher energy of consciousness: historical consciousness, to do with Lao Tzu. And you will hear it in a super-super conscious transform. Here is what he wrote, here is what you will hear: 'When Lao Tzu cultivated himself with Tao and Tê he became concerned with self-effacement and anonymity. He lived in Zhou for a long time but he saw that Zhou was on the decline so he left. When he reached the pass' this pass was in an enormous mountain range, it's the only pass, the Han-Ku pass, that goes from the central plane of North China over this pass and you enter into a whole huge fertile long river valley, the river is called the Wei river and the big city that was there in ancient times is called Chang'an and today it's Xi'an. If you follow the Wei river further west it goes out a long way into Gansu province and eventually goes into the Gobi desert. Where it hits the Gobi desert was the ancient series of caves of Dunhuang. From Dunhuang, one trail goes north into Siberia, one goes on the silk road out to the north of the Gobi and the other goes south along the Gobi. Those three roads that converge there at Dunhuang are the three ways that one can reach the west.
'When Lao Tzu reached the pass, the keeper of the pass, Kuan Yin, greeted him with delight', not Kuanyin but his name was Kuan Yin, when the keeper greeted him with delight, "Since you are going to retire, could you make an effort to write something for me?" Consequently Lao Tzu wrote a book with two parts which discussed the meaning of Tao and Tê in a little over 5000 words and then departed, no one knows what happened to him since. It is not so much in two parts but it is in two resonances that make a whole, it's like the two halves of the brain that will make a mind, it's like the two hands that will make a clap, it is the pairedness of Tao Tê which produce a thunder so loud that it is silence to us: a flash so bright that it seems dark to us.
There is a beautiful way of expressing this and in the Lao Tzu in the Tao Tê Ching, just one chapter before the end of the 37 chapters in Tao, before the Tê begins, 36 is called, as I translated it, the two Chinese characters, 'Secret Words': 'That which desires to contract itself, surely, definitely, had stretched itself. That which desires to weaken itself, surely, definitely, has strengthened itself. That which desires to bring down itself, surely, definitely, has raised itself. That which desires to reduce itself, surely, definitely, has endowed itself.' This is called 'Secret Words.' 'Receptively meek, conquering the unbending strong. Fish cannot escape from their depths. The country's own sharp tools cannot thereby be brandished against Jen.' As Tao Tê form a set together, the emergence is the form of the pairedness Jen. Jen is the human heartedness and though it is the third in the Taoist energy cycle, the Dao itself as zero has been able to pair with the Tê of the one so that the oneness is unimpaired by any other than its unity. That the Tao is able to permeate without being comfortable so that the unity is not only one but it is one that is able to be naturally stable and emerge and that when the Tao and the Tê together form a set, now the third of the energy phases emerges out of the mutuality of those two.
We will see, starting next week when we look at Confucius' Analects, the Lun Yu, his central concern is how does that Jen work? How do we maintain it, how do we develop it? One must have had the Tao Tê but, now, one has the emergence of Jen and so Confucius is all about looking into, looking at, how Jen works but as soon as Jen is brought into play, in the set of Tao Tê, it joins the pair of Tao Tê in a very special way. It is not just a third term but it comes emergent in the mutuality of exchange between the other two and so Jen becomes like a line that makes Tao Tê into a ratio. So now you have three symbols in a set. You have Tao, you have a ratioable proportional line, now, you have Tê. The Tê will always be the denominator by which men will compute and the Tao will be the numerator. But after a transform it is the Tê which is the numerator and it is the Tao which is the denominator. In that ratioable set of three symbols, with a pair of terms mediated by the symbolic expression, one now has the ability to have a parenthesis put around that set and that parenthesis in Chinese is called I, it means symbols. So that the fourth phases is the encapsulating of the idea of the Jen ratioing Tao and Tê into the idea of Tai Chi. Now you have something which is enormously profound and you have the ability to rotate that Tai Chi and, in its angular momentum of rotation, what is generated is all the dimensions that take the world out of its limitations. The ancient Chinese figure Pan-Ku is shown with a Tai Chi, it is Manipura chakra, which he turns and as he turns it, it creates the world. Next week the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Confucius' Lun Yu. Rituals.