Ritual 2

We have arrived at Ritual Two and what this indicates to us is that we are pursuing a yoga which is a very refined, special yoga. We're sitting together in a deeper meditation than traditional yogas have. Traditional yogas will centre the body so that within that circled, cycled centre of the body, our experience can in its waves of feeling and images and languages, have some way to also be centred and that at the very centre of that now target, is a centred individuality, the centred self, which as it gains its yogic centre, becomes a singularity. It becomes a completeness, a unity and when it does, that whole target of yoga, of body and the deeds we do, the experience and the words we say and the mind, the thoughts we have, achieve a form which is very much like a bell. And in that state of yogic integral, the integrity of the concentric forms is such that anything that then in that equanimity occurs, it strikes the bell and the bell totally rings as oneness. In physics it's called the soliton; solitary wave that does not dissipate. And so a yoga is meant to bring body, experience and mind into a layered target of unity, so that its ringing then has a resonance which is not just a part of the bell, not just a fraction of the target, but that the entire form in its complete integrity is in every bit of sound. That if you could record one particle of sound from that bell, the entire bell would be in that particle of sound. The principle of the soliton is that there are no parts to it, each part is the whole. A visual soliton is where every photon that comes out from that bell-like structure will carry the entire imprint of the structure. Every star that you see in the sky is a bell that rings in such a way that its ringing takes billions of years to go through its rung cycle. And our sun, which is a star, has been ringing for about four and a half billion years and every photon that comes out from our sun carries within itself the entire printout, readout, of the sun. So that you could take one photon from our sun and tell in a calibration what it is, what it's made of, the elements. Something happens though, in a yoga. When the form is complete, its very next resonance - because it is complete in every aspect, in every part of it - that resonance from the wholeness is different from any kind of resonance before. It means that now every single particle of that completed form is in every bit of the furthering of that form and so the resonance of it is, we call, consciousness. And there are no parts of consciousness that do not have the completeness of the integral already in them, no matter how small. And so we're doing an advanced yoga, not just for the body and the mind with experience in-between, but we're doing the further - I call it the yoga of civilisation - of carrying that yoga into the complementary cycle of conscious vision, of spiritual person, of historical conscious history, into the scientific cosmos, where the forms there are not completeness, but they're perfection. And so one of the ancient ways to talk about it is that this now is not knowing, like in epistemology, it's not realising, like gnosis, but this is a furthering quality where one now is dealing with the perfume of the whole rose, with the perfume of the whole lotus, that the flower of completeness has its presentational quality that is now converted into presencing. And so in the presence of the spirit is something which is like the soliton bell ringing; it is a furthering of the whole into infinite possibility. And so the spiritual person as a yogic advanced being, is unlimited in their capacity for perfection. And the phrase first made about 1900 years ago in northern India, the phrase was, 'Prajñāpāramitā,' 'The perfection of wisdom.' And about the same time that you had that phrase in India, you had the same phrase being used in Egypt, in Alexandria, 'The perfecting of wisdom.' And the same phrase was used in Iran, the same phrase was used everywhere in the world that was a part of the bell of civilisation. And about 1900 years ago a whole new yoga came into play on the planet. We are now in the further reaches of that yoga, where we're carrying it out again into the cosmos. Not only for sure and for real, bodily and in our experience and in our minds, but also in our spiritual persons, in our conscious visions, in our history and in that scientific cosmos, which itself is not a limited completion, but an infinite perfection of furthering possibilities. So that one would say in computer talk, while there is a binary of zero and one for any system, there is another binary of zero and infinity for someone who could make an infinite variety of those systems. And we're learning to do that, but like every yoga, it takes the initial practice to do it and right now we're in the ritual phase of our learning, where the focus is on, 'What do we do and why do we do it?' And then the further corollary, 'Just exactly what do we do?' And just as precisely, 'Why is it that we do it that way this time?' And some slight variation at another time, 'Are those discrepancies, or is that a range of variety that goes into the fullness of the completion? Which is more likely?' We're taking two of the longest civilisations on the planet to give ourselves a beginning push into ritual. The two civilisations we're taking are China and Egypt. Egyptian civilisation lasted completely for 3,500 years before it was cut off. The Roman Church Emperor Theodosis in 384 AD, made it a crime by which you were killed if you went to any Egyptian traditional temple and worshipped in the original way. And so everything was completely stopped and cut off at 384 AD, that had been in effect in a formal way from 3000 BC and was informally in effect already creatively several thousand years before that. In fact, the man who was commissioned about 250 BC to write the ancient, traditional spiritual history of Egypt, his name was Manetho, he was commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Alexandria. And Manetho showed that Egyptian civilisation went back so many thousands of years that it actually gets lost in the last vestiges of the Palaeolithic. And that whereas the Palaeolithic wisdom was always in the caves, the eventual emergence of the pyramids above ground are like geometric caves that further advance the old Palaeolithic wisdom into something that looked forward, not just from the caves to the outside world, as they did in Palaeolithic times, but from a conscious Palaeolithic pyramid cave looking out towards the stars. All this is more than 5,000 years old. We're taking Egypt because it lasted for all that time and would still be going on today. And the other example is China, because China has been in effect almost preserved intact in an uncanny continuity for 5,000 years. Two things occur that are amazing to us: we're using as examples, as exemplars, because we need something to get our feet in so that our movement will have some traction, so we always use a pair of individuals, a pair of writers, a pair of books, to get us pitch pipe tuned so that we will have some traction in our yoga, in our being together, in our yoga of civilisation. And the two aspects we're using is from Egypt, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and from China, the Analects of Confucius. And they're being used because they have a deep quality of not only focusing back to their past, but a focusing the past before them into a present that is now in our past. But that that present that they had in their past is recoverable in a recalibration in our present and is valuable to us, because it discloses to us why it is that ritual is the most primordial registering form in the universe, because ritual is not just about us, it is about every aspect of existence. That existentiality carries to every particle of every thing and what it carries all the way through is that unity is so primordial that when Tibetan or Egyptian writing comes up, there's always a sense that there is a special, unique mark that is made to convey that this is oneness. And the Egyptian hieroglyphic, it's a single line that looks exactly like a one. And when to emphasise unity in this primordial way, one would have the hieroglyphic symbol for the sun, the circle with the dot in the middle, the centre of the target. And if you put a line, a one, underneath it, it means, 'The sun itself.' And one of the most powerful pharaohs of all time, he was Pharaoh for two thirds of a century, he's usually called Rameses, but it isn't Ram, it's 'Ra-meses,' it means, 'The sun,' 'Ra,' 'Mes' means, 'Of him' and plural of that, 'He is of him always.' And then under that sun one had the line, meaning, Rameses was in fact, 'The son of the sun god himself' and by being so, achieved and became the sun god himself. And of course Rameses is extremely important to us because he was the Pharaoh at the time of Moses. The Egyptian experience that comes to its fruition in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, goes back a resonance to where the hieroglyphics of the Egyptian Book of the Dead were put into the outside and the inside of the coffins and they were called Coffin Texts. But even further back from that, before that happened, they were put on the inside of pyramids and they were called Pyramid Texts. And even further back from that they were put into the memory of a very sophisticated and rare group of men who were the priests of keeping of track of the way in which languaged form emerges out of the ritual comportment of having our actions tailored and limited so that the sequences of those tailored action steps will make a thing. And that when those things are made, they will be as real as rocks, as real as anything in existence and that by putting the parts of those ritual objectivities together, you will create then something which when it has its present quality, it will generate the reality of human experience. And that human experience will have a way to test whether this really happens or not, because the experience will indelibly register in the heart. That feelings and images and oral language register in the heart, so that the most important thing at the origins of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, at the Coffin Text, at the Pyramid Text, at the original memory back 6,000 years ago, out of the Sahara 10,000 years ago when it was still savanna land, the mark was the ritual of the weighing of the heart of the deceased. And that heart, if it were weighed and was in balance with something on the other side of the scale that was pure, if that scale was equanimous, that person then was introduced to the possibility of everlasting life, to be presented before Osiris. And that if Osiris justified the purity of that heart weighed against the ostrich feather of a goddess named Maat, then that ka of that person in the netherworld had a chance to go through a special 12 section gamut and if they were able to go through it continuously, they would be reborn everlastingly, every time a day occurs, for millions of years. The place that you find this in the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the third of the illustrations and in Greek it's called the psychostasia, the weighing of the soul, it really is the weighing of the heart. But originally, before there was a Tibetan version of the Book of the Dead for instance, there was always a Prajñāpāramitā in the Mahāyāna. And before there was a Prajñāpāramitā in the Mahāyāna, there was the wisdom of the historical Buddha. And before there was a historical Buddha, there were historical Buddhas all the way back to some original Buddha, so many timeforms ago that one cannot even give it a calendar. The Egyptian Book of the Dead in its classic presentation came out of the New Kingdom, which was about the 18th, 19th Dynasty, but it went back to the Coffin Texts that were there in the late 11th, early 12th Dynasty, which went back to the Pyramid Texts that were in the fifth and sixth Dynasty, that went back to the emergence of dynastic Egypt in the first place. And where it emerged in the first place was alongside the Nile River at a place called Abydos. And Abydos had a special hall that was sunk into the fertile land and it was called the Osirion and the great study of the Osirion by Margaret A. Murray - this was done in 1903 - she is, as we mentioned last week, as famous for her feminist writings on the origins of witchcraft, out of which came organisations like Wicca, but she was also one of the great experts on Egyptian religion. She says this about Osiris, "Here on these hieroglyphs, when we read them translated into English words, or English phrasing, they read in the Osirion, 'Osiris Khenti-Amentiu, Lord of Abydos, under the name of Khenti-Amentiu, the local god of Abydos, Osiris worshipped as god of the dead.'" She says then, 'The chief centre of the cult was naturally, originally at Abydos, the sacred city, where the head of the god was preserved as a holy relic. This head, with the long wig, was the emblem of Osiris and was carried raised on a long pole, on a kind of litter, in the solemn processions in the temple of Abydos. On the walls of the Osiris chapel in the Temple of Seti at Abydos, two representations of the sacred head are shown and in the back part of the temple where the mysteries were celebrated, there is a third representation.' So that when you come in the entrance, you see the head as the emblem that you're entering into a sacred ritual place and at the very back of the temple, the head occurs again so that you know that here you had an entrance, there you have the furthest penetration and a turning around and coming back through the temple in a different way. And the prototype for that is not some building just built 1,000 years before Abydos was built in 3000 BC, but the first place that we recognise the same pattern is at Lasgo 20,000 years ago. And that when you come into Lasgo immediately, the first image, painting, on your left is a black stallion's head. And all the way through the main gallery of Lasgo when you get to the very back, there is a stalactite that comes down way at the back, the deepest penetration of Lasgo and there you will find that black stallion's head again. And at that point you turn and you come back through the gallery, but not back to the entrance, back to a side gallery, through which a deeper initiation is given. The first hallway is to bring you into a transformation, but the second hallway is to distil that transformation into something unbelievable. Which is, the first gives you the assurance that your life is real and the second gives you the assurance that your life is real forever, you will not die. Not who you are does not die, but who you are as a part of livingness, everlastingly, which is absorbed by eternity. One of the interesting things is that the term, 'Ab,' which means, 'Emblem,' it means that head of Osiris and the rest of it, 'Do,' means, 'The hill,' the hill of the emblem. Because it is the hill that rises out of the inundation of the Nile into that fertile land, that allows for the Osirion to float when the Nile floods and to be a testimony that it will flood again and that life will be there as long as the Nile continues its natural cycle. And you will be there, even when death supposedly floods you, or life supposedly floods you, you will still be there, not only season after season and year after year, but permanently, everlastingly. It's interesting that Abydos, with its Osirion, should mean the place of the hill, because Confucius was a very peculiar man and he had at his birth a peculiar anomaly on his head, that was very much like a small hill on his cranium. And so he had a very peculiar name when he was little; his nickname was 'Tsiu,' which means in Chinese, 'A hill.' The boy with the hill. And it was an unusual childhood because his father had been married for decades to another woman and he'd had nine daughters and no son. And when he was old, when he was more than 64, he found a young village girl who had gone to the hill outside of town and made a prayer to have a son. And she got together with the old man and they had a son and that son grew up to be Confucius. But as soon as he was born, the father, because he was old, very quickly died and the mother in her prayer vision had him buried in a place not far from the town, called Fangshun, it means, 'Shan' means mountain. 'Fang' is a version of 'Feng,' which is like a phoenix. It means a place where reoccurrence can happen, of prominence. But she did not tell the little boy exactly where the father was buried and so the little boy grew up and instead of playing like little boys always do, he played with the ritual implements to try to contact his father, to try to find some way to get with him. And so he grew up literally playing at trying to do the rituals and trying to do the ceremonies. And when he was come finally to the point to where his mother died, an old woman in the town took pity on him and told him where his father had been buried. In the meantime, Confucius had only committed his mother to a temporary grave and had her moved then and put next to his father at Fangshun. And from that time on, Confucius dedicated himself to trying to understand, 'Why is it that the ancestral vibrations are so powerful in me?' That his mother was not married to his father at the time that he was conceived and born. She wasn't married until later, at the very end of the old man's life. What the resonance was for Confucius that by having done the rituals right, he achieved a peace within himself, of the deepest possible level. And he found that his father's family went back to a very distinguished family. That some 13 generations before him, his family were dukes of a kingdom and almost kings and that he had never really understood this and known this. And that when the current baron of that area of China was dying, he told his son who was going to inherit that baronetcy, he said, 'You must go to,' not...Confucius' name was K'ung, the family name was K'ung, 'You must go and see him because he is the one who most really understands how the ancestral energy goes back and the descending energy for the descendants goes forward.' And that these two energies, the ancestors and the descendants, have a kind of completeness, so that they make the ripples of any present action real back into foreverness. And that if we practise what we do, with all integrity, no more intensity than is required simply to do them exactly right, that exact rightness will reverberate and register everlastingly. And we will have the accumulated energy of all of our ancestors who have done this and all of our descendants who will do this, so that the present axis of the action of your life will be like a pole star in the heavens. And the efficacy of it, while it may not happen exactly right at any particular given moment, it will eventually sift itself out into reverberation that is exactly right forever. And so Confucius, K'ung-fu-tzu...the Confucius is a Latinization of his Chinese name, Latinized by the early Jesuits who went to China. The Jesuits first went in 1583, to Peking, now Beijing. The first Jesuit leader, Matteo Ricci, Portuguese, was insistent that if they can convert the Emperor of China, they could then convert all of China. And the Emperor of China, like all emperors of China, had been Confucian since the founding of the Dynasty that gave the name, 'Chinese,' to the Chinese, the Ch'in Dynasty, about 230 BC. And so they wanted to understand Confucius - Master K'ung-fu-tzu - and they made translations into Latin of the Confucian books and they found that it was more stable than any western empire tradition had ever been, including the Roman Empire. Because the roots of the stability of the Chinese dynastic system went into this ancestor descendant resonant targeting, that made everyone who participated in that an actual part of the completion of the eternal reality of it. And so they were not only safe because they had a social position, they were not only safe because the family had a social condition, but that they were safe permanently in the universe, because the universe itself, in its oneness, endorsed their participation in this form. This shocked the Jesuits so much that their translations became very precise and one of the places that received this information - because they were very active in the South China Sea and in Indonesia - were the Dutch. And the Dutch brought copies of these Jesuit translations from the Chinese in Latin, to Amsterdam. And the most brilliant philosopher of the time in Amsterdam was Spinoza and his young friend, who was a genius, visiting him, was Leibniz, one of the founders of calculus. And so the first western philosopher of major genius to discover the Chinese world order was Spinoza and the second was Leibniz, one of the founders of calculus. And the first thing the 20 year old Leibniz wrote of any significance, is a book On the Natural Philosophy of the Chinese. University of Hawaii Press publishes a translation of that. And in that was laid the seeds of a universal language that would speak, not only for all time to come, but would allow us analytically to go back and speak for all time in the past. And that with a mathematic that was complete, we would be able to describe the past and the future perfectly from a completed present. And so the conviction shared by Newton in England in his own western, alchemical, hermetic tradition, was shared with Leibniz, who first got it from the Chinese Confucian, Taoist understanding, through the Dutch bringing the Jesuit Latin translations to Amsterdam. We're gonna take a little break, but this is the most important thing for us: if we bring our sense of yoga consistently, because of the way in which this is being presented, it will settle itself into that target-like unity of oneness. And anything that then awakens that bell-like target, will commence that second cycle which is not just a cycle of completeness, but is an ecology of wholeness. And the ancient symbol for that was not the circles within the circles to the point of the centre, but was always the spiral that opens out from the target to the spiral. And the pairing of them together, you get a different kind of a structure than anyone could possibly have imagined, except very rare spirits. In our time, one of the greatest paintings of the twentieth century was by Mark Chagall, of, 'The Creation of Man,' by the angel of the presence of god. And when you look at that painting, you see the radiance of the completion and the spiralling of the energy of infinite possibility, all focused together, not just in a creation, but in a creation that can create themselves. Let's take a little break. Let's come back to our sense of present. What we're talking about is that ritual involves existence. Its primordiality is to participate in the unity of existence, the universe. It is a oneness place. Its unity has a completeness which does not diminish, other than that it is covered, so that in reality, the only problem we have is with deception. Now someone who says, 'This programme takes too long, it takes two years to go through it' and my reply is, 'A life of ignorance is too long, it takes you eighty years to go through it.' Our quality of attentiveness here pulls the plug on ignorance in such a way that it does not reoccur. And because it does not reoccur, what occurs is what is practically, really, existentially, there. And when our thereness is tuned, the very tone of whatever it is that we do or say, has a reverberation that not only occurs as we say it, or do it, but occurs back into our lives before we had that integrity and forward into future possibilities of ourselves that have that differential tuning. So that the ancient understanding of reality is that a ritual done right frees one to be presently complete and to be everlastingly perfect. It is not just that the stakes are high, they're the only stakes that are real. Any and all other aspects are subsidiary. The reverberations become so peculiar, like this morning we were talking about how the origins of the Osirian resurrection rituals at Abydos, the place of the hill, are uncannily reverberated again by the physiological anomaly of Confucius having a hill bump on his head and him being called the hill as a kid. In the earliest version, the recension of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that came at the very earliest almost 3,000...more than 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, 4,500 years ago already. One of the deepest images that occurs there in the Pyramid Texts...and this is from a classic by one of the great American savants, James Henry Breasted, The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt. Don't let it fool you that it was published in 1912, because he is held as one of the great experts. He was the first world scholar to understand the new edition of the Egyptian Pyramid Texts that had just been published by a German scholar named Sethe, Kurt Sethe. He says in his chapter on the Osirisation of the hereafter, 'Thus the old purification ceremony,' the ritual for getting pure, the ritual cycle for being finally pure, 'Thus an old purification ceremony in the presence of the gods and nobles of Heliopolis and hence, clearly solar, represents the dead as cleansed by the spittle of Horus and by the spittle of Set.' This ceremony had of course nothing to do with the Osirian ritual, but when the ritual introducing this ceremony was Osirinised, we find King Osiris inserted before the purification formula of Pepi, Pepi II, that was the Sixth Dynasty. That's about 2200 BC. In the formula of purification, assuming that Osiris was purified by his arch enemy, the foul Set. Because in the later recension of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Theban recension, Set is the arch enemy. It isn't just that he kills Osiris and then dismembers him and hides the dismembered body all over Egypt so that they will never be found, but of course his members are found by Isis and she remembers him and brings him back into life. But what Set did, not just a murderer and a hatchet job and then hiding the body, but he gouges out the eye of wisdom from Osiris, the Eye of Horus. So that the Eye of Horus is not a member that can be brought back in. A new Eye of Horus must be given to him and this new Eye of Horus is given to him by Thoth, who reconstitutes that. And it is the Eye of Horus whose all-seeingness is so important that that Eye becomes embedded in the wholeness of the sun, so that the sun itself is the Eye of Horus. And the arch symbol for Egyptian integrity of reality ever since is the sun with the great wings, the winged sun. But as we talked about this morning, the sun in fact is a bell-like structure. The welling up in our star of hundreds of millions of energy cyclones that percolate the energy of the core of the sun up through its structure, is like a vibratory bell that takes about a million years for that to reach the surface and when it does it takes about eight minutes for that energy to get as far as our planet. So that the light by which we see is an ancient light; it was at the centre of the sun a million years ago and just now got here for us. Because of this bell-like ringing, not only of the sun, but every star in the cosmos, in whatever galaxy there is, rings with light, the sound carries the light and so the primordiality in ritual is to pay attention first of all to the sound. The voice carries the sound pace in its articulation, which then is able to bring the ritual of present activity that is efficacious into its alignment with a mind that objectively is able to understand in an integral, that this sound of this language, carrying these images with this feeling, in this articulation, aligns those actions in the universe with this individual's mind, so that it is now positioned co-ordinately in the universe. It is now ordinally able to be centred, to have a centre and the great discovery is that that centre will have a completeness with every other centre that is established, so that there is something like an axis of sole, core centres, not only for all of us, but for every being that has an integral possibility of alignment, with unifiedness within the universe. And that community of aligned centredness extends to every star system in every galaxy one could ever wish to discover. And because that community of the blessed is whole in a completeness, any time anyone of them is rung, hearing the truth, the entire community hears it and vibrates together, energises together. And so when someone spiritual says, 'Do not get entrapped in struggling against petty deceptions because something has pissed you off in this life at this particular juncture,' work towards the refinement of your yoga to bring that centredness not only into alignment with what you do, actually, but that that aligns with everything else.' Here's the curious image that comes out in the Pyramid Texts, that reoccurs later in history twice in the most mysterious and resonantly magical ways possible. Set is not the enemy, he and Horus together help make a tuning fork initial way in which Osiris can begin the steps and stages of connecting through his action aligned with his centre of a scalar that reaches from earth to heaven. From the terrestrial into the celestial and here's what it is. 'He calls on thee, on the stairway to the sky, thou ascendas to the god.' This ladder leading to the sky was originally an element of the solar faith, maybe 10,000 years ago already. That it had nothing to do with Osiris is evident, among other things, from the fact that one of the versions of the latter episode represents it in charge of Set. The organisation of the latter episode is clearly traceable in four versions of it going back a long time. That ladder is a dream vision that Jacob has and it's called traditionally, 'Jacob's Ladder.' One of the great visual art works of all time that presents it is by William Blake. A mystical watercolour engraving called, 'Jacob's Ladder.' And in Blake of course, the ladder is not just a ladder, but is the spiral swirl that goes ever out into the heavens. That ladder, which was in the Pyramid Texts 5,000 years ago is in Jacob's dream about 3800 years ago and at one of the most poignant moments in his ministry, Jesus says, 'You will see something more miraculous.' He's talking to Nathaniel and Philip, who were two of the most powerful disciples. He told Nathaniel, 'I know you, I saw you praying under the date palm before you came to meet me for the first time.' And Nathaniel says, 'Well you must be the Messiah. I was completely hidden in my deepest prayer to God and you saw me.' And he says, 'You will see something more wondrous than that. You will see the Son of Man with the angels ascending and descending on him like a ladder.' Towards the end of her life Georgia O'Keeffe, who became one of the greatest visionary artists of all time. She was nearly blind, she was in her early nineties and she was in awe of the space programme that was beginning at the time to send human beings into space. And she has this beautiful painting of the northern New Mexico Desert that she had loved for almost a century. And in this bright blue, robin's egg blue sky, is a golden ladder that's suspended there, like a vision that there is a calibration of our ability to step without having to have what we step on rooted into something pedestrian like just physicality. The I Ching says, 'Heaven suspends its emblems' and that's why they work. They work because they don't have to depend on something else causally. They work because they, like a Tesla energy, collect an integral from everywhere and radiate it and rotate it out to everywhere. The symbol in hieroglyphic for Maat, the goddess of wisdom, her name is this little hieroglyph where my finger is. And we can read this hieroglyph...you can read Egyptian hieroglyphics in about two weeks if you get this little...this was originally published in France and then Dover republished it. The 'Ma' has this hieroglyphic sickle, but there is also then this hand which is 'a,' this little half circle, which is, 't,' Maat and here's the ostrich plume. And after it is a little hieroglyphic determinative symbol, which is a papyrus rolled and sealed. Each step on that ladder has a papyrus roll that is sealed and if one were able to have the sets of the complete movement to where visionary consciousness is released radiantly and rotationally, permanently, infinitely, one would count seven steps. And so there would be seven papyrus rolls sealed and when one opens the seventh seal, one then has the apocalyptic foreverness. So you can see, we can go very far. We can now look at the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt - this is Volume Two out of three - and we can see the Eye of Horus with its wingedness and we can understand that the rituals are not done out of superstition. They are done so that the traction of existence reaches into our lives, into our culture, into the tradition and that that cultural tradition will be carried by a flow of oral language, of the sound of letters, of the sound of syllables, of the sound of words and their sounds will be the letters, surrounded by the syllables, surrounded by the words, surrounded by the utterance of the prayer itself, surrounded by the furthering of the entire composition together. The original Egyptian Book of the Dead has about 759 utterances that have been found and detected, but there have been many that have been lost, because the original recension, the Heliopolin recension was completely lost except for the Pyramid Texts. And those Pyramid Texts did not occur until the Pyramid of Wenis, or Unas, as it used to be pronounced. And the following six dynasty pyramids...and all of those pyramids are not at Giza, but they're at Saqqara. The great pyramids at Giza do not have Pyramid Texts in them because the architecture itself of those pyramids is the language that is put into the ritual texts of the Pyramid Texts, which then became the Coffin Texts, which then became written as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And all the translations that come from it come from, not the Heliopolin recension, but the Theban recension. And the Theban recension is not from the Old Kingdom, but it's from the Middle Kingdom. The New Kingdom of the time of Rameses and Moses is a long time, 600 years, after the Middle Kingdom, which is already many centuries after the Old Kingdom, which is thousands of years after the original, before there was anything written. It was an oral tradition going back, as we said, back into Palaeolithic cave times. The earliest Palaeolithic caves that show us the arrangement of the cycle of the rituals come from Cosquer, just off the bay where Marseille is in southern France and that goes back to about 35,000 years ago. So we're looking at the way in which existence in its resonant unity is brought into the pacing of how we do things in our lives and that if we are modulated and articulated in this way, our lives will begin to reverberate and we will be able to, not just recall, not just remember, but able to remember and to creatively imagine, truthfully, back and forward at the same time. And so there begins to be a larger domain than your cranium for your mind. And the way that it was shown was that there is a holiness bubble outside of your head, bigger than your cranium and that is expandable, infinitely. So that one carries around not just the mind of the successful person who manipulates and gets what he wants here, but of the successful enlarging spirit who is real forever. And so the ritual comportment, if it is limited, if it is condensed, it becomes karmic. If you put action into a game, then the rules of the game will control your actions. If you live on gamesmanship level, you better just keep playing the game. What do you win if you play the game right? You win the limited success of the game. What have you obviated? Eternity. It's an easy choice once you understand. Games must have rules that limit and limitations are always deceptions. Do you think that infinity is going to be clipped by deceptions? Hardly. One of the qualities that we're trying in our yoga here, is that the continuance of that yoga gives us the initial alignment and as we do so, the initial alignment has its reverberations. For instance, we have always four films for each phase, which characterise in a more contemporary way what is that we are disclosing and discovering. And the four films: the first one is by Leni Riefenstahl, which is called, 'The Triumph of the Will' and 'The Triumph of the Will' was shot in Nazi Germany, at the Nuremberg Nazi Party festival, at the personal invitation of Adolph Hitler. If you're interested, Leni Riefenstahl became one of the great controversial figures in the world. She lived into her nineties. The second film is, 'Last Year at Marienbad,' Alan Resnais. The third is, 'Metropolis,' the film that Fritz Lang did in the silent film days in Germany. And the fourth is, 'Alphaville.' 'Alphaville' is one of the most peculiar films that you will ever see. It's Godard's take on a garrulous French detective who is assigned to go to this all-embracing modern, technological, urban area called Alphaville - the, 'First place' - run by a computer. And everyone in Alphaville is tuned to the computer so that they work exactly like a machine. Computer perfect, Confucian society, Egyptian ritualised society, only brought current to the late twentieth century. The only person in Alphaville who is not co-opted by the computer is the detective and he finds a way to go through the computer program labyrinth of the perfect system, because he is immune to the deceptions. Of course there's a play in Alphaville...Godard could not help put his New Wave and had a lot of appreciation for Hitchcockian moments in cinema and you find him finally just pulling out an old-fashioned gun and shooting a few machines. And ends up taking the daughter of the master of the city, who is computerised since she was born, taking her out of the city, where she will no longer have that reverberation of the deception system working. And of course we recognise that Lucas' THX film is all about leaving a place that was computerised to completeness and that someone who goes outside of it no longer has that tone of deceptive systemisation. 'Logan's Run' is another film about this exact same thing. What we're looking at here increasingly as we go into ritual, is that if we comport ourselves in a very special method, a yogic method, of not just doing an action once, but of specifically doing it in sets of four...I hope that this is coming through because it is not something to ignore. If you're not able to have it come through, please leave the room. This is not for murmuring. The sets of four set up a co-ordinate of a set of four, but that co-ordinate of the set of four is not one, two, three, four, but zero, one, two, three. If the set of four begins with a zero, one has a registration before the objectivity is able to begin its form, so that the set includes the motion before the form begins. And so our yoga begins with nature, not as a form, but as a frequency of process which is able to emerge forms unified. We began with the I Ching, we began with the way in which Tê emerges from Tao and that its emergence from Tao is in such a way that it not only has a heavenly, celestial pattern, but is able to be reflected and have a terrestrial, earthly pattern. And that while Fei Zhi's I Ching of 3000 BC is a celestial pattern, the Zhou Dynasty pattern of about 1200 BC is the human pattern. When Confucius came into play, he aligned those two patterns together to form in a rotation of exactly 90 degrees, a new pair. And that new pair now was able not only able to bring the Tao of heaven and the Tê of earth in a bridging, but to calibrate the bridging by a new scale within that. The bridging was a third element, Jen. Human-heartedness, but that Jen human-heartedness is not just bringing Tao and Tê into an interface, it brings them into a calibration of yin and yang. So that yin and yang are not a calibration technically of Tê, but are a calibration of the flow of experience in Jen, of human-heartedness. It is in the Egyptian Book of the Dead that sentience is in the heart, the weighing of the heart of the psychostasia with Maat's ostrich plume headdress. And it's the weighing, not that the heart is lighter than the feather, or heavier than the feather, but that the heart and the feather of Maat are exactly the same, so that one now is a participant in the goddess of justice's plume. It reverberates later in romantic literature, in Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, where Cyrano says, 'One thing remains unstained above the world and that is my white plume.' All of these reoccur through thousands and thousands of years of planetary heritage and what we're doing is canvassing the entire planet so that the entire heritage will be ours within two years, at the same time that we learn a recalibration that is new. And that is to leave deceptive subjects to the side and to bring ourselves into a yoga of civilisation of phases, which are not only universal, they are cosmic as well. We will look deeper next week at the way in which Confucius, when he brought Tao and Tê, the original I Ching and the Zhou Dynasty I Ching together, that he made a completely new I Ching because he added Ten Wings to it. Just like the wings carrying the Eye of Horus, the Ten Wings are the ten commentaries of the I Ching by Confucius which opened up possibilities that were not possible before. And it was within a couple of generations of Confucius opening it up, that you get several new schools for the first time in Chinese life. You get the Yin Yang School, Yin-yang-chia it's called. You get the Five Elements School of Zou Yan. You get the Legalist School of Han Feizi. You get the Mohist School. You get the way in which the Confucius-ordered set of four books, again, the Book of Poetry, the Book of History, the Book of Rituals and the Book of Music, together form a Confucian square that then is able to carry four Confucian classics and set the structure of a frame of reference that for 2200 years gave a stability to Chinese dynastic civilisation, that was only shook in 1911. And because it is so indelible, is coming back into play again, almost as if it resurfaces out of the resonances of a past that reasserts itself again. The great commentator in the earlier part of the twentieth century on the Confucius wisdom was the great Chinese philosopher Fung Yu-Lan. During the Red Revolution of the 1960's, the Red Scare, he was completely taken out and embarrassed and ridiculed. He was made to do field hand work and repudiate all of the Confucian heritage. Now he is back in fashion again as being one of the greatest philosophers of Chinese time. But the greatest philosopher of Chinese time was a man named Lin Yutang. And Lin Yutang records in his Wisdom of Confucius, the only record of Confucius meeting Lao Tzu. He was 29 years old, he had achieved fame as being one of the most interesting young men of being able to go back into the ancient rituals and understand how they come present into an order that can be projected indefinitely into the future. And so the duke of that terrain, that country, where he lived, took one of Confucius' prized disciples and Confucius gave him a two horse chariot, a page and a driver and sent him to the imperial capital of Zhou at that time. The history was written by Szuma Chien about 100 BC and it reads in this way, 'Their doctrines should hardly be applied to the people because of their emphasis on funerals and their habit of letting a family go bankrupt in order to provide an expensive burial.' But the emphasis was not on burials, but recovery of ancestral energy and the projecting of descendant energy. And so the ruler knew that this was true. They were sent to meet with the librarian in the capital of Zhou and the librarian was Lao Tzu. And Lao Tzu says to him, 'The only thing that an older man can tell a younger man is the truthful advice about reality.' There are peculiarities which you should pay attention to, that are paired. Lao Tzu sent him off with the following advice, 'I have heard that rich people present people with money and kind persons present people with advice and I'm going to present you with a piece of advice. A man who is brilliant and thoughtful is often in danger of his life because he likes to criticise people. A man who is learned and well read and clever at arguments often endangers himself because he likes to reveal people's foibles. Do not think of yourself only as a son, brilliant and thoughtful, or a minister at court, learned and well read and clever at arguments.' In other words, do not get caught in either prong alone of your interest. One of them is a ritual comportment which will snare you indefinitely into the dangers of being accurate in your criticism. The other will ensnare you indefinitely in the dangers of revealing the errors of others because they are very sloppy and do not care about existence in its accuracy. And so they will always be tangential to what is present and real and they will have a taste for the tangentality. And when presented by the directness of the real, they will be disinterested. And it is an automatic disinterest, full of arrogance, which leads to just furthering itself. So what Lao Tzu gave to Confucius, to K'ung-fu-tzu, if you stay with the tuning of both those, you will be able to inhabit the presence in the space between them and keep them tuned together, keep them balanced. And in this way, in that equanimity, whatever you are doing will have, not just a completeness to it, but a purity of penetration. Next week we'll look at how Confucius, in his fifties, was singled out for the first time to take over the organisation of the confusion and chaos of the whole state of Lu and how quickly Confucius brought it back into a ringing resonance of order that all of Chinese history for thousands of years has admired as the greatest man who ever lived in China. We'll look at that in Ritual Three.