Ritual 1
Presented on: Saturday, April 8, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Learning Civilization (2006-2007)
Presentation 14 of 104
Ritual 1: Confucian Jen and Egyptian Book of the Dead
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Transcript:
We come to ritual one, and we're using the Egyptian Book of the dead and the Analects of Confucius to begin. This is a fold out page illustrating the 183rd chapter of the Egyptian Book of the dead, and it appears in this elephant folio volume published at the end of the 1890s by the British Museum. It is the fourth volume in this size of elephant folio. And the original one was the great, uh, Papyrus of Ani that had been recovered by British Museum operatives. At this time, the British Empire spread across the entire world. With tremendous amounts of money and contacts. And in this heyday. The number one person in the world who went out to find artifacts and bring them back to London was sir E.A. Wallis Budge. And I like his version of the Egyptian Book of the dead, though many people today prefer more modern translations. The reason being that the Egyptian Book of the dead has a number of variants. And the largest complete papyrus that was recovered, the Papyrus of Ani, was 78ft long by about one and a third feet high. And when it came time to publish that. Budge figured out the format to cut the papyrus roll. Into 37 double sections so that they could be folded over and where the tape was on the fold. That tape extension would be sewn into the signature of the book, so that you would be able to have the sheets open without anything in between.
A complete flat area. We're going to come back to the Egyptian Book of the dead in detail after we talk about Confucius for a while. But what we're trying to do here is to appreciate how a ritual comportment is the practical action. Of getting something made. So that rituals are all about objectivity. Every ritual leads somewhere, and where it leads to is not so much a place or a time or a situation, but it is an emergence of the unity of existence. So that ritual is all about an existential objectifying to emerge that out of the flowing powers of nature. And that as it emerges in a ritual man's activity of doing the rituals right, so that now rituals that are done right become r I t e they become rights, and those rights are the basis of law, which then structure the way an existence will be unified and real, and have emerged out of primordial nature in such a way that if we follow those rights precisely, accurately, the experience that will come out of having done those rituals right will have a harmony with nature, that the flow of the mythic horizon of experience will be exact, like the flow of the divine flowing nature, and that these two flows together will have an ability to have a configuration. And what will hold that configuration? Configured. Will be the figures of the rituals done right. And so rituals are all about making a practical objectivity come into being.
Such that our participation in making them gives them a double face. One face will be the actual emergence out of nature. The other face will be the ability to emerge experience out of the ritual. And that those three together now will be the beginnings of form in the actual universe, and will be crowned or capped by a symbolic mind which will finish the integral, which will finish the form. And that those three phases will constitute the beginning triangle, the beginning triad. And when you add the fourth phase, you now do not add just one more phase, but you pair two triangles together to make a square, to make a frame of reference, to make a picture that will hold in its stability with its four angles and four sides. This is a standard way of comporting. And you notice that we have used phases rather than subject matter. Rather than saying we're studying anthropology or we're studying archaeology or we're studying geography, we are not studying anything. We are learning how to learn. And because we have already been immersed in too much studying over our lives, we need to recalibrate from studying to learning. And the recalibration to learning means weaning ourselves away from a recognizable instruction. A comfortable. Training and moving out into a new realm. And this new realm will be the recalibration to learning rather than the regimentation to studying, because the regimentation to studying is eventually based upon the logic of identity and identification.
Where the ritual objects will be exact reference to the symbolic. Idea in the mind. This already was obviated 5000 years ago. When an Egyptian god appears that god or that goddess will have many names. Each name will be a single attribute, so that the more attributes that one is able to see in that divinity, the more facets that divinity will have for you. And eventually we'll be like a jewel that scintillates and develops a kaleidoscopic appreciation in you for the divine. Whereas if you go for an identification that this God has this name and is this object, this ritual, all of this lumped together, you get a reductionist quality to your understand being. The mind then gunks itself up. Instead of learning to see through itself to the kaleidoscopic consciousness of vision, it only sees in terms of the identity of the seer. And the identifications that the seer is able to make, and that this reductiveness closes out the vitality of the world. It sutures our ability to participate in nature, and it in articulates by crimping our ability to have primordial experience. We began by looking at this example of the 183rd chapter of the Egyptian Book of the dead. There is a very nice translation of it. This volume, The Egyptian Book of the dead, published by Chronicle Books about 12 years ago. Done. The man who put this together, James Wasserman, was riding on a New York subway and had this sudden vision occur to him.
Why not take the entire papyrus of Ani and put the very best translation of modern times underneath it, so that one could look through it page by page, and be able to see the correlation of the text with the illustrations and the translation of the 183rd section of the Egyptian Book of the dead. Worshipping Osiris, giving praise to him in homage to Wennefer. Doing obeisance to the Lord of the Sacred Land, exalting him who is on his sand by whoever they. Person who has been buried, who is being introduced and is being introduced to Osiris, the Lord of the dead, the Lord of the underworld of the netherworld. But before that, the Egyptian Book of the dead will have a series of hymns. Those initial hymns are to Ray. They are to RA. They're to the sun god. They are characterized in the way in which these are transcribed, the very first. The worship of Rey when he rises in the eastern horizon of the sky by Ani, so that the dead man Ani is beginning by praising Rey, who rises in the east and who goes across the sky in a celestial boat. And when it comes time to set in the west, the setting in the west will be, for the ancient Egyptians, always the entrance into another quality of that boat that goes through the netherworld and comes back into dawn and rises again, so that the sun has a boat that has two facets, has two names.
One of them is able to go across the sky, the other is able to go through the nether world and come back up when one completes. The journey across the sky, and Ray comes to the entrance to the netherworld. This is the beginning of the Realm of Osiris. And so the initial. Him to Ray reads. Hail to you. Having come as Jeffrey the scarab who releases the sun in its boat for the day. Even Jeffrey, who was the creator of the gods. You rise and shine on the back of your mother, the sky having appeared in glory as King of the gods. Your mother, Newt, shall use her arms on your behalf in making greeting. The goddess nut is very often portrayed as black, a black woman whose body is covered with stars and with the paths of the sun in the moon when it is daytime. She has been raised far enough above so that the sun is able in its boat to concourse between us and the sky. And when Ray goes into the nether world. Now nut shines as the night sky. Universe. And she originally was in a love making with the God of the earth, Geb. And from them came the ability to have a special fertility on the earth. Except that there was a very special curse that came when she was separated from Geb by Shu, who lifted her up with one hand on her lips, the other hand on her vulva, and lifted her up so that she could no longer be with Geb, the earth, the God of the earth, and.
Part of the curse was that she was not ever to have a child on any day of the year. But it was Toth who, like the ancient Sumerian Enki, was brilliant about getting the analytical, special details of the universe. And he found that if you compute by moons rather than by the sun, you will have five extra days in a year which will not fit into the sun's year and will be outside of the set of the curse. And on each of those five days. Newt sired by gab. Five children. Osiris. Set. Horus, Isis and Nephthys. It is this quality in the Egyptian Book of the dead that lurking behind what seemed originally to those Europeans in the early 19th century, that first became aware of hieroglyphics and of the ability to struggle to make a translation of them all based on Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in the early part of the century. The quality that was there that came out was that at the very beginnings of written civilization already the cosmology was extremely refined and resonates and lingers throughout the rest of civilization, even till our time. Hieroglyphic writings of the Egyptian Book of the dead were used up until the first century A.D.
one of the little resonances that might be of interest to you from the 17th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the dead, the chapter of Praises and Glory sings of coming forth by day, in which the primal water God, the God of the abyss, reveals that there was a mutilation of RA, reveals that the Eye of Ra was attacked by set, and that part of the difficulty that came out was that there were seven spirits that were set to corral the ability of the movement of reality. Homage to you, O ye Lords of right and truth, ye sovereign princes who stand round about Osiris, who do away utterly with sins and offenses, and who are in the following of the goddess Hatshepsut's. Grant ye that I may come to you, destroy all the faults which are within me, even as you did for the seven spirits who are among the followers of their Lord Sepa. That is Osiris. So when we read in the gospel of Mark that Jesus cast out seven devils from Mary Magdalene, it meant that he, as an Osiris person having special relationship with her, freed her from the entire hebdomad of cursed spirits that are possible even against the sun ray, but are mitigated not in the day of ray circuiting the sky, but in the nether world by Osiris, because he has not just the ability for Ray to keep his reality all the way through the day in his boat and his other boat aspect at night in the nether world and come back.
But Osiris has died, has been dismembered, and has been brought back together again. And so he is a double quality of divinity. He has, in fact two very distinct paired names and qualities. One of them translates as Lord of eternity. The other translates as Lord of Everlastingness. The Osiris, who is the Lord of eternity. Is within the. Ceaseless flow of nature before time occurs. Before space occurs. Before any kind of limitation occurs. But he also is able to translate being Lord of eternity into being Lord of Everlastingness through his resurrection. So that one. Now, even though you are in time, limited by time, limited not just by time as a flow, but by time forms. You are free to permeate through the liminal of time forms of any duration, of any size. And the first penetration is that having successfully gone through the netherworld along with the entourage of Ray, but through 12 gates, each gate having a watcher, a keeper of that gate, and each keeper of that gate will address you with certain problems, certain riddles, certain difficulties, which you must be able not just to respond to, but to solve them. Because just to respond to them would get you into an argument, and you would never get through the gate. You would be stopped by your ability to argue.
Where? As if you dissolve the issue. One can pass through, and if one passes through all 12 gates and the spaces in between them in ancient Egypt were called caverns. If one can go through all of the caverns and all of the gates, you will be able to rise with Ray the very next dawn and the name in Egyptian for the book of the dead. Peer through means coming forth by day. Once one can come forth by day, one can come forth by day. For millions of years and into time, cycles that exceed the ability for time forms to be formed, one now has an everlastingness that is also partakes of eternity. But the vehicle for that is a transform that Osiris provides, and Osiris provides it because he has had two very powerful helpers. One is ISIS, who is always paired in special rituals with Nephthys, her sister. Because Nepthys, secretly though she was married to Seth, had a child also by Osiris and Nepthys and Isis together are like a special tuning fork where the power of set to go against Osiris permanently has been obviated. Because Nepthys is with ISIS, her sister, and they protect together. But what is difficult to appreciate and to understand in the Egyptian Book of the dead is how Osiris. Sits on a judgment throne. But one cannot get further from him until you have gone through a special ritual that is overseen by Thoth.
So that Osiris is surrounded by Isis and Nephthys and Bythos. And what Thougths does is that he provides the very refined special ability not only to compute by the moon. So Thoth is a moon god. And his very first moon is still today called the ISIS moon. The thinnest little sliver of light on the moon. And when as that slight that ISIS moon will show the whole of the moon illuminated in a lighter blue, and that lighter blue is because of the Earth shine, just like we have moon shine on Earth. We have Earth shine on the moon. And it's the ISIS moon that is like the special ring where the first little sliver of light still shows the wholeness. Not of the dark of the moon, but of the Earth light moon. And as this mystical, um, ISIS moon that you will find, for instance, in William Blake's great uh, hundred plate epic Jerusalem, he will have this great Stonehenge like Trilithon and the ISIS moon above it. And it's the sign that, uh, there are still ancient Britons like the spirit of William Blake in 1825, who still could see that the ISIS moon is not the dark of the moon, but it's the Earth lit moon, which is the first beginnings. That Ray is not only rising over the Earth, but he is rising, illuminating the moon as well. And we're given to understand that in a very real way, the Earth and Moon together form like a double planet that have a very special kind of equality.
The moon lends a kind of magical. Difference to the solar aspect, in that the lunar aspect is one of rebirthing in everlastingness in time. Ray does not rebirth in time because he does not die. But Osiris has died and has come back. And so the Osirian rituals are all about the powers of getting through Osiris judgment throne and into the process. And the very first aspect of getting into the process of going through the 12 gates of the 12 caverns is that your heart must be weighed. And the weighing of the heart. The Greek terms for it that has been used now for. All the time since Pythagoras is psychostasia. And the weighing of the heart. Is tabulated by Toth and overseen by Anubis, who was the child that Osiris had with Nepthys, and because of his special jackal headed god ship. Anubis is able to take from the headdress of the goddess of truth, Mott. He is able to take the ostrich plume and place it exactly on a very delicate, exact scale that Thoth has set up, and that that scale will balance the ostrich feather of the goddess of truth against your heart. And if they are in balance, you are able to go into the journey of the nether world because you're considered ready to try. If your heart is heavier than the ostrich plume of Maat.
You are immediately fed to a very gruesome little beast. Ammit and Ammit likes to gobble things up. He's like a Ghostbusters gobbler. Now, this is interesting because the first three double pages of the Egyptian Book of the dead, the first one are the hymns to RA. The second, the Hymn to Osiris. The third is the weighing of the soul of the heart of the Psychostasia. What we're given to understand is that the heart is indeed the center, not of intelligence, but the center of sentience. And that experience is not so much intelligent in that it is sentient. And it means, then, that the sentience is not a part of a structure of the mind, but a part of the concourse of the energy of the heart. And so experience is a flow of heart energy. It has a special frequency as an energy. And if that frequency, that energy of heart experience is able to modulate with the eternal quality of the frequency of nature, then in that flow you're able to go through the. Psychostasia. And to participate then in all of the challenges that will come up and you will rise at the end. The Egyptian Book of the dead. Originally did not appear in books, but appeared on the inside of pyramids. This is the earliest one. The Old Kingdom. The Pyramid of Unas of went. And this appears in a set of books published by the Bollingen Series.
Alexander Pyatkov and his helper in this was Natasha Rambova. Now it'd be interesting to you just as a little side light Natasha Rambova and many of the volumes, but especially in the mythological papyri, was one of the deepest spiritual appreciators of ancient Egyptian wisdom ever to have lived. And in this volume on mythological papyri, the text, she has an entire section on the symbolism of the papyri. And what is curious is that Natasha Rambova was famous because she was the wife of Rudolph Valentino, and that she spurred Rudolph Valentino and went into a lesbian relationship with a very famous woman. And this is a little bit from a biography. Natasha's name seems to be of some controversy. Her mother, Winifred Kimball, was of the prominent Mormon Kimball family who gave birth to Natasha out of wedlock, and the father's name was never known, and there were four men who claimed to be the father of Natasha Rambova. She, Winifred married a man named Michael Shaughnessy, and she became known as Kimball Shaughnessy depending on her wibsey, but her birth certificate does not carry this. She later was adopted by her mother, marrying a second man. Richard Hudnut was a very famous man in his day, and in 1923, uh, her marriage to Rudolph Valentino. Proved to be ineffective. Because the glamour of the Hollywood of Valentino seemed to her increasingly to be a mirage, because her own spiritual development was so poignant that seeing first hand the stupid play of this mirage in meshing people led her increasingly to try to find what is all this about? What is the uh uh, what is the quality of reality that one could find? She was a spiritualist.
Her huge labors in Egyptology won international praise. She died at the age of 69, in Pasadena, of scleroderma, a disease that dries up the inner organs so that symbolically, she died. The death that that an Egyptian mummy would be treated to after death, where the inner organs are brought out and put in the little jars and the brain and blood and everything drained from the body. And so it desiccated mummy. And she became this actually in real life at her death. She writes. The route pattern illustrated in the scenes of these papyri is that of the eternal repeating cycle of the Sun God. His emergence from the watery abyss at the dawn of each new creation, his descent in the west into the necropolis of the western mountain. His passage through the night. Regions of Osiris. His rebirth from the horizon of the eastern mountain re ascent back into the heights of heaven. And then she goes on from there. And what we are to understand from this ray is the ascent of the day, heading towards the descent into the netherworld. But Osiris is the descent into the underworld, heading for the ascent back into Everlastingness. Ray carries eternity, but Osiris carries Everlastingness so that for those of us who are in time, who are in space, Osiris is the key to us.
If we are able to go through the nether world cycle, Ray will carry us into eternity in the coming forth by day. There is no problem with Ray carrying us eternally. The challenge is to go through the rebirth, the resurrection challenge, which has its own portion. Like there are 12 hours to the day. There are 12 gates in the nether world. The difficulty. Is that the nether world gates are a set. They're not just a string of challenges. It's not just a sequence of gates, but it is a very refined nesting of each one into the next. And so you have to have the ability to raise ordinally your spiritual energy as you go through, and you will have achieved the spiritual energy on a high enough level to be with Ray. You will have achieved ray energy after the 12th gate and be able then to rise with Ray. Not that he's carrying you, but you rise with him. You have achieved the eternity of the Godhead in your own right, in your own person. We're going to take a little break, but I want to show one more little illustration. Here is Arnie, laying supine in his coffin. And Horus. The hawk flies over him, and what is being carried here is the Shen, the symbol of eternity. But the Shen, where it is flat has a name seal, and it will have the name of whoever is here in this ritual of resurrection.
In this case, Horus carries the Shen with the name of Ani, and it is this name that will be the signature on the hymns to Rey and to Osiris, and will call forth, then, that it is your heart that is being weighed by the ostrich feather of mod, so that there is no mistake whatsoever this carrying of one's name on a symbol of eternity already puts you in the tuned mode that you will be successful. What would then be the problem remaining? The problem remaining is that you remember what you have learned, because if on the way you forget it's all over, Ammit will have you for breakfast for a supper. And so remembering is the essential quality of reaching everlastingness and eternity. And it is remembering that is the special quality of Thoth. Let's take a break. Let's come back and look at something that has emerged that is very important for us. And that is objectivity in the universe is not static. It has its emergence into objectivity out of a limitless source. That does not have an encoding at all. So that it would appear to anything that is encoded as not being there. What happens is that the unlimited natural flow, the energy, would occupy the interstices between things and the intervals between units of time, so that there would be no way to identify objectively anything that is real, in the sense that it has nature naturally operative in it.
All that would record is the reduced forms. So that identification is a deception in itself. And. Assuming the prejudice. That you have an identity is like compounding what was an illusion into a delusion. So to insist on identity as the basis of a logic of form is an illusion, and to further insist that you are an identity that can make these identifications is a delusion. How then to wean away from what is a double bind? The only way to wean away from the delusion is not to have the illusory basis for it in the first place. Once a delusion sets in, it is self confirming because it will always use the method of identity as a logical structure and the practice of identification that existential things are reference to the mind's things. What emerged this morning out of looking at the Egyptian Book of the dead, is that it is not a question of reference in logical identification. But of a participation of resonance with the energy calibration of unlimitedness, and the only experience energy calibration that will modulate with that is the modulation of time forms that are ever lasting. It's very difficult to do it in between the forms of space. It is much easier to do it in terms of the forms of time, and so being able to recognize that it is uniting time that creates the initial seed of the illusion, that is the beginning of the possibility of the deeper delusion later on.
So that the Lord of Everlastingness, that is, Osiris, is indeed a very deep complementarity to the eternal Lord of eternity, that is Ray. So Osiris is Lord of millions of years to expand the sense of time units beyond what a mind could keep track of in any kind of identification way. You can keep track of days, weeks, months, years. You can even keep track of centuries and of millennia and maybe even 10,000 years you cannot keep track of millions of years is not possible. It does not form in the mind because the scalar. Goes off. Were you able to count that high to millions of years, you would now be bringing in other aspects that are not just, quote, local. They're not just in the star system, but they're in our star system vis a vis the heavens themselves. Because on the scalar of millions of years, it is the motion of the galactic arms themselves that enter into the energy, play into the vibrations. And so the entire star system, the sun, the moon, all the planets are now being affected, really, by the motion of the galaxy itself. The first step towards that incomprehensibility was the farthest that could be kept track of was a period of the sun going through the constellations of the ecliptic.
Over about 25,900 years, the great year was as large a scalar of time intervals that could be kept track of before the age of science and supercomputers. Now we have to keep track of very large scalars indeed whole universes, which we can do. It's not just to boggle the mind, but it is to outdistance the ability to measure time. So that the only way that one can deal with it now is not in some kind of an idea mentality referential to things, but to modulate the cycles of experience with the. Natural eternity and the only cycle that fits that is everlastingness. The cycle of everlastingness. Uh, the phrase at one time was world without end. Yes, this world, but without end. In order to help us to do our phases right. We have the pairing of people, not just parallel lives like in the ancient Plutarch way, but very sophisticated multiple transform of that by taking two persons, two classic examples of them in books, we handle, um, an entire range of problems before they become problems. One thing that we're doing here is we're pairing Confucius and his book, The Analects. The Lunyu were reissuing it with the Egyptian Book of the dead. The reason for this is that we began nature with the etching and with Thoreau, and we saw when we were going through the phase of nature that the etching originally was about 2950 BC, about the time that the Egyptian Book of the dead would, for the first time, have been entering into a formal way the beginnings of Egyptian civilization and the beginnings of Egyptian civilization.
Though they went back some 10 to 15,000 years when the Sahara was fertile, it was a grassland for a long time, like the middle part of the North American continent. And desiccation only set in about 10,000 BC. And slowly they desert encroached until there was only the Nile River valley that was left fertile because it could renew itself every year with the inundation. Not that there was a flood of destruction, but this was a flood of the return of life. And this happened every single year. And the signal for this was that at dawn, on a very special day, the star Sirius would rise above the horizon, and that would be the sign that the inundation was coming, and you could be prepared for it. If you will look at the starry expanse at night, at your convenience, you will notice that the most powerful star near Sirius is a bright yellow star that's at the very top left of the constellation of Orion. And Osiris has always been not identified with Orion, but always is an emergent divinity who has a special relationship to the constellation of Orion. That large yellow star is named Betelgeuse from the Arabic, and it's an enormous supergiant. If Betelgeuse were where our sun is, the surface of Betelgeuse would be at the orbit of Mars.
It is immensely massive, and it's only because it's 900 light years away that it doesn't just dominate everything. What is also interesting is that if you draw a line imaginatively to Sirius from Betelgeuse, you will notice that that line has a very specific length that is mirrored by the length from Betelgeuse to another star, which is very bright. Sirius is about nine point something light years away, and the other star is about the same distance away. Its name is Procyon, and the distance visually in the night sky is that there is an equilateral triangle of Betelgeuse, of Sirius, and of Procyon, and that this equilateral triangle is right away an indication that there is a geometry to the heavens. And part of the geometry to the heavens is that that geometry, rising gestalt, for the imagination carries right over immediately into Orion of the three stars forming the belt of Orion. The three Great Pyramids at Giza are exactly in the same configuration of those three stars. The third one, Mintaka, is actually a double star, but we only see one from Earth. And that, of course, the sword of Orion. And then, of course, the whole configuration, because another blue white giant, Rigel, is directly opposite of Beetlejuice. And so the diagonal from Betelgeuse through the three stars at the center to supergiant blue giant Rigel at the bottom, you get this beginning of the way in which heaven is constellated in such a way that its geometry is visible and is sentient, before we can figure out the symbolic intelligence of it.
And so very early on, the rituals of comportment were not just that one behaved on Earth, but that the Earth's behavior behaves also in terms of a geometric city to heaven. Confucius came. 2500 years after Fuxi and Nüwa, who laid the seeds of the trigrams of the I Ching. But in between there was an epochal change as we saw that the heavenly pattern of Fu XI 3000 BC was translated 2000 years later into the human pattern of the founding of the Zhou dynasty. Confucius came right at the period where the Zhou dynasty was finally crumbling in the period of Warring States, and his whole concern was that there must be some way to have a new dynasty, which would not just replace the jo, which had replaced the Shang which had replaced the Shah. But there must be a way to make a new dynasty that would be everlasting. That it would never go out of sync, and the only way to do this was to take stock of the bright splendor of the vision of the Zhou dynasty at its founding, and the Confucian classic, which is that is called the Book of Odes or the Book of Songs. This is the great translation done in Stockholm by Bernhard Karlgren about 1950. There is a good translation by Arthur Waley that is available on the net from Grove Press paperbacks.
In the Book of Songs, there are 305 songs of the Splendid Vision. But in Confucius's time, it wasn't the splendid poetic vision that appealed to him. It was the need to look at the ritual objectivity that could be teased out of these and put into the practice of repeatability, so that the rituals now became not just rituals, but would now become principles of action. The Chinese word for that is li li, so that a new dynasty founded on li not as eternity, that belongs to Tao. You cannot commandeer it, but what belongs to Tae, the unity that emerges out of Dao. You can make your ritual comportment cycle fit exactly so that it is a unity and need never then decay because Tae, like Tao, is a universal, not a universal energy like Tao without limit, but a universal form that emerges out of that energy that has everlastingness. And so Confucian was a very brilliant character. Said. The emphasis for us then, in terms of ritual accuracy is to make sure that the process of human hearted experience will fit exactly into the limitless eternity of Tao, because our ritual comportment will have Tay as its unifying power. And so the new dynasty will last forever. One of the figures. Who was convinced that this was true. Tried to set up a universal dynasty, and he was the founder of the Qin or the Qin dynasty, out of which we get the terms Chinese Qin Shi, Huang TI.
The greatest Chinese historian, Sima Qian, who lived about 100 BC, says this. That Qin Shi Huang T, trying to figure out how to make a Confucian everlasting permanent dynasty, issued an edict. We have heard that in high antiquity there were titles, but no posthumous names. In Middle antiquity there were titles, but when people died, they were provided with posthumous names in accordance with their conduct. If this is so, then it is a case of the son passing judgment on the father and the subject passing judgment on the ruler. This is quite pointless, and we will not adopt this practice in such matters here. Henceforward. The law on posthumous names is abolished. We are the 1st August Emperor and later generations will be numbered in accordance with this system. Second generation. Third generation, right down to the 10,000th generation. And this tradition will continue without end. It's about 230 BC. Then. He brought in a very interesting thing that had come up through the speculation of Confucius, because Confucius not only knew the original Fu XI Heavenly I-Ching and the Zhou dynasty humanly I-Ching, he added a third level to it, which are the commentaries. The ten commentaries, called the Ten Wings and the Confucian Commentaries firmly placed the fulcrum of ritual action on the ability to engender the human heartedness that will flow with Dao, and that human heartedness is Jen. And so Confucius took the Tao of Fu XI, the Tay of the Zhou dynasty, and not added Jen, but made Jen the ratio ING between the Tao and the Tay, so that if the Jen is engendered pure because of principled rituals, because of exact rites that produce the cycle of everlastingness, our human hearted Jen will be precisely in tune with the Tao.
And though we cannot easily get back to the primordiality of Fushi or the primordiality of Lao Tzu, we can all individually cooperate together to produce a culture that everything is followed. Exactly. And if we do this in the balanced structure that was engendered by Confucius, everything then will run smoothly. The adoption of that formally lasted for 2200 years in China. It only came to an end in 1911 and was consistent all the way through Chinese civilization. What is interesting for us that the ancient Egyptian comportment in the Egyptian Book of the dead has lasted all this time as well, and has never come to an end, is still operating, but operating in such a way that the historical consciousness of it is limited to so few people, it hardly makes any impress at all, not only on intelligence of mind, but upon the larger transforms of conscious understanding. Where it maintains its impress is in the sense of sentient well-being, because one is doing the ritual cycle right. And this goes on until our own time here at the beginnings of the 21st century.
Before there was an Egyptian Book of the dead. Those writings were not on papyrus rolls. Those writings originally when they appeared, appeared on the inside of pyramids like the Pyramid of Unas or the Pyramid of Pepi the Second or the Pyramid of SETI, so that the written language was on the inside of the tomb. The outside of which was the pyramid, and the pyramid was a very special kind of a triangle. It was a triangle that had four facets, four sides, so that its base would be a square, and the four triangles that would come together to an apex would be an apex of four times three or of 12 facets to it. And this square rising to the apex, the apex would be the risen center, brought geometrically to its pinnacle, its peak, and at that peak would be a place where what would be able to be beckoned would be the eternity of Ray. Whereas the form of the pyramid itself would be the Everlastingness of Osiris. And the first place before there were pyramids that this was practiced was at a sacred site in Egypt named Abydos, and in the first two dynasties, the central place at Abydos was the Osirian. The great monograph on it is by Margaret Murray, who is very famous not so much for her Egyptian books now, but she was famous for her books on witchcraft and theories of witchcraft, and her books on witchcraft were the founding things of Wicca and many other things.
But the Osirion at Abydos is in a very peculiar place. The Nile River has a special bend to it, and the flooding dynamic makes a very fertile patch of ground that has a very odd configuration. There are two huge abutting sharp cliffs that are spread from each other by about 15 miles, and one of these is a male cliff, the other is a female cliff, and right where the curve of the not the mountain range, but it is the high plateau of the desert that is higher than the Nile valley where the river is and the fertile land is. There is a notch leading very easily up into not the desert, but at Abydos the osirian was placed so that one was able, in the rituals within it, to go through a kind of a water baptism and an energizing of the spirit, so that one could send one's deepest spirit through that notch in the pass between the male and female protective barriers. And that Western land was not the desert, but was the Paradise. Because the Egyptian Paradise, just like the Chinese Paradise, was always in the West. Why? Because in the east, at the dawning, it is an eternal dawning. But it is the sunset leading to the netherworld, leading to the night, where what occurs is not the familiar certainty of the day, but the unfamiliar, huge geometry possibilities of the starry expanse of the night.
And so it is the night of heaven that is a problem for man. He can adapt his mind to the idea of eternity, even though he doesn't understand that he's doing it delusionally through an illusion, but he cannot find any way to adopt the delusion that he is of Everlastingness. And so for him, the biggest punctuation that gets in the way is his death. The punctuation of this whole life as a unity is that you're dead. And so it is the penetration of the liminality of death that is the root of the problem. Always. And the answer to that problem is not an answer, but it is a solution of the problem in the first place so that the problem does not occur. There was a famous French psychiatrist, Hubert Benoit. He was Aldous Huxley's, uh, psychologist. He wrote a couple of little books. One of them is called Let Go. He used a Zen koans and his psychotherapy in Paris. And he says in the very beginning of it, he said, modern man's problem is that he believes that he has a problem, therefore he has that problem. The answer is not to solve the problem, but to dissolve the illusion that there is a problem in the first place. Because when the problem does not occur in the first place, there is no worry that ever engenders itself. This takes though, a very special quality. As long as one clings to one's identity, as long as one has trust in identification.
And that is what if I'm wrong? What is going to happen to me if I let go while I'm still alive? I may be subjected to pure chaos. I may go crazy. I may blank out. I may never be able to get back into things. And so the fear, not only the fear that one doesn't know what's going to happen to you, but also the fear of the ridicule of what others will think of you when they see you having let go and don't know how to do anything anymore. Confucius. Says right away in the annals, in The Analogs, the master said, is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? First thing. Where is it? Tried out. It is tried out in the junctures of whatever times. And what are the times? The times are not just hours, days and months. The times are how long it takes for this ritual to finish its objectivity, for that action that is planned to come into its being. And so the interviewing is a ritual time interviewing. And the only way that the time intervals can be everlasting is if that ritual cycle is kept exactly in its unity. And if it does, your Jen will be in tune with dow and your tay will cycle itself in return indefinitely. The ridicule is more difficult. On this scale, then the fear of badness.
Or of death itself. And so Confucius ends his first little pithy saying, saying number one in book one, is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar? Is it not gentlemanly not to take offense when others fail to appreciate your abilities? U2 said it is rare for a man whose character is such that he is good as a son and obedient as a young man, to have the inclination to transgress against his superiors. It is unheard of for one who has no such inclination to be inclined to start a rebellion. The gentleman devotes his efforts to the roots. For once the roots are established, the way will grow therefrom. Being good as a son and obedient as a young man, is perhaps the root of a man's character. And we're seeing and are learning that the character is that quality in our experience, where sentience has its focus. It's not an identity, it's one's character. And not only do we have a character, animals have characters. Trees, plants have characters. The stars have characters so that it is a consistency all the way through the universe. That character configures experiences that can only rise not out of doubt, but out of the Tay that is held together by what you do. And so ritual activity is always looking for the purpose to finish its cycle, so that the objectivity occurs and then fits in in due time intervals with other such rituals, other such objectivity, so that they form the completeness of the cycle, the main quality of which is that it is repeatable indefinitely, and as long as that happens, we are free within.
In that particular ambit, not only are we free to have the security of Tay, but we are free because our Jen will be flowing with the Dao. And this was the final point for for Confucius. Just as our Jen will flow with the Dao, our minds will structure according to the Tay of the ritual cycle that is right and our minds will be balanced. Our symbolic objectivity will not be in identification, but it will be in a harmonic. And so, just as experience will be resonant with nature, our mind will be a harmonic integral of the actions that all people do. And if everyone participates together, the entirety t of that social order will be that it can repeat indefinitely. At the beginning of book three in order to emphasize that the wrong people doing the right things is the wrong way to go about it. Confucius said of the chief family. They used eight rows of eight dancers each to perform in their courtyard. If this can be tolerated, anything can be tolerated. The three families, the big godfather, families of that part of China at that time, the three families.
Performed the Jung ceremony when the sacrificial offerings were being cleared away. The master said Confucius in attendance were the great lords. In solemn dignity was the Emperor. What application has this to the halls of the three families? Jung is poem 282. In the song A book of Songs, the Book of Odes. It is about a ritual that can only be formed, be performed right, and this ritual is from the founding of the Zhou dynasty, some thousand years before, um, the time that we're writing, hearing of it reads this way. And translation, this is Karlgren's great translation. There are those who come very concordant. They arrive and stand very solemn, assisting. At the are the rulers and the princes. The son of Heaven is very August. Oh, we offer the large male animal. Assist us in setting forth the sacrifice. Great was my August father. He comforts me. His pious son of all. Embracing wisdom was the man in peace and war. He was a sovereign. He appeased even the great heaven. He can make prosperous his descendants. He comforts me with a vigorous old age. His descendants. Enriched me with ample blessings. I wait upon my brilliant dead father and also upon my fine mother's. This ode in Confucius's time was supposed to be intoned at a very special kind of pair of sacrifices on Mount Tai Shan, one of the five holy mountains of China. Tai Shan is on the Shandong Peninsula where Confucius was born, not too far away from it.
When an emperor wishes to calibrate himself as the son of Heaven, he goes to the top of Tai Shan and performs himself only for himself, a special ceremony that links himself to heaven. Then he comes down Mount Tai Shan, and he performs the other side of that ceremony for the people. And these Fang and Shan ceremonies. The Shan for the mountain top, the Fang, which is the, uh, the Phoenix Fire of renewal. So that now he has done something that Moses did. He went to the top of Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, and brought them back down and delivered them to the people. It was a pattern in China 2000 years before Moses ever lived. It is a quality that one goes to some kind of mountain or pyramid top, because at that particular focus, eternity will have a flash of its reality within the intervening that time forms have. So that when a great age is finished, when it's time form is finished, and before the new time form begins, there's an instant of eternity. Exactly there. And if someone is performing the connection of flowing with eternity at that particular point, what opens is the eternal eye of vision in an everlasting ness. That's why on the back of the American $1 bill you will find at the top of the pyramid is the all seeing eye. Because that vision was well known to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. They did the original designs behind that symbol. Follow the money. More next week.
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