Ritual 3
Presented on: Saturday, April 22, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to what we're doing today. It has a title as a place in a sequence and this is the third presentation in a sequence that when it is finished, it will have curled around and become a phase. And we're trying to establish a weaning away from subjects which betrayed us time and time again in our human lives, to learning how to learn by phases, which are natural and conscious, they are both universal and cosmic. The ritual phase is the second phase and it follows a phase of immersing ourselves in nature. And being immersed in nature allows us to re-emerge out of the immersion fresh and what comes fresh out of nature consistently is existence. And existence has a peculiar set of qualities. It doesn't just emerge once and stay there and stick and be static, but it is...because it comes out of a dynamic frequency of energy, that energy, in order to find stability, polarises itself. And when it does so it links into form. But it cannot link into form just once, it links into form resonantly, vibratically, millions of times per time unit. And so what exists, exists because it is shimmering in its energy vibration. And so all of existence has this kind of polarised energy iteration within an unlimited flow of nature and continuity.
We're looking at the way in which two of the deepest traditions on the planet looked at existence. We're looking at Ancient Egypt and at Ancient China, not to become interested in subjects of Egypt and China so much as to bring them as an initial pair to help us disclose to ourselves why it is that China and [3:07 India] were able to last thousands of years. In the case of Egypt, pre-dynastic Egypt goes back into the Naqada era, which is 1,000 years before Egypt was ever dynastic. And that that 1,000 years goes back to 4000 BC and that the Egyptians of 4000 BC were already sophisticated because they came out of a Saharan civilisation that went back so many tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands of years. It came as a shock last year when archaeologists in Northern Chad, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, found skeletal remains and fossils of a precursor of our species going back 7,000,000 years. In the centre of Northern Africa. So we have been around a long time. And Egypt, when it became dynastic, it brought together a tradition so ancient that one cannot specify it in terms of temporal history in the normal way. You have to exfoliate and exfoliate and let it keep blossoming over and over again and this is what Egyptian civilisation did. And from the beginnings of dynastic Egypt, about 3100 BC, that remained intact until 386 AD, 3500 years. And the reason why it was stopped in 286 AD is that the Roman Empire had taken for itself the Christianity that had been evolving and getting more doctrinaire over the centuries. And it became the official religion and anything practising anything else was pagan and out and so they closed everything down. The ancient temples were no longer able to be visited, you were killed. The ancient wisdom schools were closed; if you attended you were killed. On the other hand, China also has lasted for thousands and thousands of years. Not just thousands of years, but millions of years. The discovery a couple of generations ago of the remains of the first hominid being to use fire, is exactly in the spot where Beijing is today. And Beijing Man lived 500,000,000 years ago...500,000 years ago, half a million years ago. So that the place where Beijing is today has been inhabited by cognate species for half a million years. But China has a peculiar quality like Egypt did. It was sensitive to the iterative, resonant cycling and so it always had its sense of existence in cycles that were repetitive, not repetitive to be boring, but repetitive to fortify, so that the resonances of fortification would eventually accumulate to a set called a harmonic. And so both Egypt and China were alert to the fact that nature, when it accumulates its forms in such a way that our experience coming out of those forms, flowing with nature, will accumulate with nature in its resonances. And so the resonances of our culture and the resonances of nature will pair together and accumulate together so that the harmonic is not only that existence is coherent, but that the symbolic mind of intelligence is coherent as well, because the mind will come out of nature and experience resonating together into that harmonic. And the structure of the mind then will not just be a dualism, but a pairing. Not just two halves that have to somehow work together, but an interpenetrative wholeness. So that what one has then is a mind capable of two things at one: it can calibrate forms and relate that calibration of forms to the iterative frequency of the universal processes which gave birth, which sourced those forms. And so existence and mind together form a tandem and in-between them is the accumulated power of the frequencies of nature and culture flowing together. And whereas nature is a continuous change, by the time culture goes with the vibration of nature, nature and culture together become mysterious. And so our mind has a mysterious quality to it underneath its existence and at the same time over its existential sense of individuality. And when those two aspects are allowed to distribute and mix freely, their radiance generates consciousness. Their rotation generates the ability to have visions. And it is the conscious visioning that allows for a new kind of form to emerge that never would have come out of nature alone, nor culture alone. Something more than existence, something higher than mind and what comes out of it is a spirit being called the person. The art of the person. And so the artist emerges out of vision, but with such a dynamic, explosive radiance and rotational energy, like the angular momentum of a spiritual vision, is colossal in that it can sweep up the entire energy of nature, the entire energy of experiential culture, of that mythic horizon and put the swirl into something that now looks very much like a massive spiral of radiant, kinetic possibility. So that the ancient rituals were always for nature, integrals to make concentric targets coming to a centre and that the complement to it was that that centre can rotate and radiate at the same time and make a spiral. And so the spiral and the target, the integral and the differential, were the ways in which one then expressed, and in ritual mudras, gestures, the Ancient Way was, 'It comes together, it radiates out.' The sun, the stars.
We have witnessed in the last couple of days, the way in which the Ancient Chinese tradition is resurfacing powerfully in the 21st century. The Chinese President, Hu Jintao, pulled a palace coup in Washington DC about two days ago. He was addressing, in an elegant, quiet, measured way, the power leaders of the United States all gathered at a dinner. And he spoke over the heads and underneath and through the political power structure. He spoke to the assembled business community, the international corporation community and he said, 'In the 21st century, if we work together, you as the most developed nation, we as the most developing nation, we can have a very profitable future.' And so he appealed to the business leaders, 'Do not be prematurely categorised and exiled because of political myopic vision. Go into a much deeper quality.' And he cited two monumental errors in the Chinese tradition. The first was the Opium War, fought in South China, fought in Canton in the 1840's, 1840, '41. When the British Empire insisted that they had the right to bring narcotic drugs, especially heroin, opium, especially opium, into China and have it distributed because it was a very lucrative trade. And the Port Commissioner of Canton, Commissioner Lin, said, 'This is debilitating. All of the young men and young women in China, we will not permit it.' And so there was an Opium War fought. And President Hu Jintao cited it, saying, 'We are no longer subject to anyone else's empire and we are not going to be just addicted recipients of what you have to sell. We are going to be participants in producing what there is to sell worldwide, from here on out.' The second thing he cited goes back deeper into Chinese tradition because the iteration of the ritual is always to set a tone and then to deepen it by a larger order. He cited something 150 years ago to set the tone and then he deepened it because he went back almost 1400 years into Chinese ritual tradition. And he quoted a poem by China's greatest poet, Du Fu, sometimes spelt Tu Fu. And the poem that he quoted is about the sacred mountain Tài Sh?n, which is in the Shandong peninsular area of China, jutting out in the Pacific Ocean. And it's significant because near Tài Sh?n is where Confucius was born and grew up. And in ancient times, 2500 years ago, that area was called the Kingdom of Lu, L-u. It's interesting because Tu Fu's father was a minor official in the closest village to the foot of Tài Sh?n. And Tài Sh?n's god was, especially in Chinese mythological lore, the god of the dead. So that Confucius and Tu Fu both, though separated by almost 1200 years, have a concern with not just death but the way in which the reiteration of life is more powerful than the dead ending in death. And that it is possible to have an eternal return. And that eternal return has the energy of everlastingness brought into play into life because it has an eternal frequency that does not die. Hu Jintao, when quoting Tu Fu...it's a classic Chinese poem, it has a ritual form which was known as the old style and it was that there are only eight lines and you'll notice that the eight is like a basic, not only in China, but also in Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptian Ogdoad was eight divinities that are brought together and held by a parentheses of the god of wisdom and writing, Thoth. And that Ogdoad came from the city of Hermes, as the Greeks called it, Hermopolis. And that that eight fit into a pattern of another eight, which were the eight great gods of Heliopolis. Two of the most powerful of them were Isis and Osiris. And the two eights came together in such a way that the one eight of Thoth fit into the spaces and created a relationality and a ratioing of the Heliopolan eight. The central transform was that when the Heliopolan eight was just the eight, the central figure in that was Re, Ra, the sun. Not the sun, but the sun was the radiant face of that great godhead Aten, which then presented itself in the radiance of the sun Aten and this was the source of the gift of life. And one found at the time of Akhenaten, in the beginnings of a revolution in Egyptian religion, that the rays of the sun had little hands at the end. And to Isis and Osiris those little hands, in those rays, brought the Ankh - the symbol of life - and ritually gave them the symbol of life at their lips. So that every breath they would take was an iteration of the cycle of return and that their breath, each time they breathed, tuned them to the larger patterns, the harmonic of not just the sun, Aten, but to Aten, the eternal frequency behind it.
The Egyptian respect for ritual and the Chinese respect for ritual was not the kind of quality that we think of today, of being boring or imprisoned, it was the vibrant participation, mysteriously, in the energies of life in its polarised presentation of vibrance and in tune with the eternal frequency that nature itself brings. I made a translation of the Chinese poem by Tu Fu and I'll just give it to you. Many of the translations that are out are alright, but this was a very special poem. The first name in it is T'ai-tsung and T'ai-tsung was the founder of the Tang Dynasty, the most powerful and the apex of Chinese dynastic history. Tu Fu wrote it when he was 24 years old. He had just failed the Confucian civil service exams in the capital Chang'an and he came not knowing what to do and so he climbed Tài Sh?n in order to have a new life after this civil service death that was a blow to him. And from that moment on, Tu Fu, instead of becoming a government functionary under the Confucian civil service, became a carrier of the deeper Confucian concern, not with civil service, but with Jen, with human-heartedness. Because it is through human-heartedness that we tune our character to the mysterious accumulation of energies of nature and culture and when they are tuned and brought into calibration together, a whole different quality comes into play, our human-heartedness becomes, not intelligent, the word is sentient. It understands before the mind has a form, that the body is centred in sentience in the heart, whereas later on, because of the heart mysterious energy, it emerges the mind which will be the centre of intelligence, but as the heart at first. And in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we find the very first concern is not with intelligence, not with the mind, but with the purity of your heart. And your heart after death, in divine mythological terms of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, your heart is weighed on a scale, vis-à-vis an ostrich plume that the goddess Maat - Ma'at - she wears this ostrich plume as a sign of the light purity that if your heart balances it perfectly, you are then admitted to go into the 12 gate challenge of the netherworld. And in order to allow you to begin that, you are presented to Osiris, who is seated and behind him, Isis and Nephthys, the two goddesses. And what Osiris does with someone whose heart is equanimous with the ostrich plume of Ma'at, is you are allowed to go through the portal, the initial portal, which is Osiris in his resurrection completion. He is already gone through that completion and when you go through him, you go through also the beginning, like goalposts, only they're at the beginning, not at the end, of Isis and Nephthys. So that one is able now, you have the purity of heart, you have the threshold of emergence into the netherworld in its real terms and you have the orientation of having the symmetry of Isis and Nephthys, which allows your calibration now to go through something which would be impossible without all of these preparations. The poem by Tu Fu is about being on Tài Sh?n and in a resurrection mode after a social death. If you didn't pass the Chinese civil service exam, you were not admitted to office anywhere. His poem reads eight lines, each line of five characters only, so that eight times five means a 40 part poem. 40 is a traditional ritual way of showing eight fives, four pairs of hands arranged. One of the great Elizabethan pieces of music, that was written for the coronation of Elizabeth I, by Thomas Tallis, was a motet in 40 parts, 'Spem in Alium.' The human ear cannot follow 40 part motet, but the human sentience, when it is really refined, can sense the coherent vibrance of a 40 part motet. Here is a 40 part Chinese character motet, written by China's greatest poet at the turning point of his whole life, to be a free person rather than to be trapped by some false kind of society. He writes, 'T'ai-tsung, then as what? Chi, Lu, green never ending. Creative concentrate spirit, beauty. Yin yang cleave, darkness dawning. Heaving breasts breathe cloudscapes. Dilated eyes enter returning birds. Really pursue the final summit. Unified flash. All the mountains blowing.' When we re-emerge from a death, we do not re-emerge just simply as being alive again, we emerge with life which has re-emerged and can do so unlimitedly. There isn't a reincarnation so that you are just an individual again. Once returned from death, you are always alive. This is a quality which is there in the earliest traces in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The very earliest part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead comes from a time long before there were written characters that one could put on papyrus and printed as a Book of the Dead, or printed as a scroll. The original was an oral tradition that came out of the central Sahara tens of thousands of years ago. And as the Sahara Desert dried out, more and more the survivors were condensed into the Nile River Valley and it...almost as if the Nile River Valley then became a spinal column of not just survivors, but a spinal column of the condensation of the energies of nature and culture into a harmonic that finally bursts its bounds of just an oral language and became a source emergent so that there could a written hieroglyphic language. And that that symbol language emerged out of the oral tradition in such a way that the hieroglyphs themselves were like the notes within one massive, symphonic composition. And the earliest traces of that massive, symphonic, hieroglyphic, concentrated harmonic are the Pyramid Texts. Called that because the first time they occur, they occur on the inner walls of pyramids in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, some 2600 years BC. That's 47 centuries ago. And there one finds for the first time something that is already polished and perfected so that its harmonic is indeed symphonic all the way through. And the earliest of those Pyramid Texts survived all that while and are found reiterated again and again, not only in the Old Kingdom, but when the Middle Egyptian Kingdom came into play - the 11th and 12th Dynasties - one found it not only as Pyramid Texts, but they were now put on the coffins within the pyramids and they're called Coffin Texts. And then in the New Kingdom, the time of Seti I and Rameses, one found for the first time the Egyptian Book of the Dead written out on papyrus rolls, enormous. And from the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which resurfaced 2,000 years later, in Alexandria, in Egypt. As the great Hermetic books of about 90 AD, one finds in the Hermetic books exactly what one found in the Pyramid Texts almost 3,000 years before. Chapter 64 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead carries consistently all the way through. It's recognisable after 3,000 years of writing, after 50,000 years of oral tradition, after millions of years of existence in many species. It is the Chapter of Knowing, the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, in a single chapter. It is the index chapter of the entire Egyptian Book of the Dead, of all the Coffin Texts together, of the Pyramid Texts together, of the oral tradition in its full rendition. Not reduced, but brought to a focus where one could hear or read, just now in a very limited purview, what the shape of that sacred form is that when one strikes it with one's consciousness, it rings out the entire structure. In physics it's called the principle of the soliton. The soliton is a waveform that does not diminish through time or circumstance, it remains true. One of the classic illustrations of it one time was that if you had a shape of a bell as a soliton, every time that bell rang, every sound wave particle from that bell would carry the whole bellness of it indefinitely. Every star that you see in the heavens, including our sun, is like a soliton that rings. The sun is a great bell that rings. And every photon from that sun carries all of the properties of the sun with it. So that you can have an astrophysics, you can have a spectrographic refinement. By the 21st century you can take a single photon from a star and you can tell the properties of that entire star from any one photon. The principle of this - and it is a principle - is that unity emerges whole out of nature and the wholeness is such that every particle that is unified when they come together, however they come together, is also a unity. And so the ancient Chinese way of saying this is that out of Tao comes Tê. Tê, the power to be unified existentially out of the Tao. The ancient calibration though, of Tao and Tê, when it came to the mysteriousness of man participating with nature, now something further, a new dynamic was added mysteriously to nature and that was human-heartedness, Jen. It isn't just the heart as a physical organ, it is the heart as the centre of sentience, of the whole dynamic process of human life. Jen is human-heartedness and Jen was the main concern of Confucius. He wanted to calibrate, not just by Tao and Tê, but to bring Jen into play in such a way that it was the bridge between heaven and earth. It was a bridging not of two things, but it was a bridging like a membrane of a nutritional process of nature, coming into the cell of one's cultural unity and life. So that you were nutrified and in such a way that the culture would be natural and mysterious and allow for a further fertility. And the further fertility is that the mind now could emerge real from nature and culture together and have a cognate referentiality to the things of existence, in their undying unity. The mind things were called 'I'.
The book that did in China what the Egyptian Book of the Dead did for the African civilised tradition, the book is called the I Ching, the Book of the I. The book of the symbols of how they got to be there and the largest author of the I Ching is Confucius. The original I Ching by Fei Zhi, 3000 BC was about the trigrams and how they make hexagrams and relate to the celestial patterns that one finds in the changes of nature. The second deepening of it was at the founding of the Zh?u Dynasty, where that pattern was shown to be the pattern of human life as well. And so an alternate name for the I Ching is the Zh?u Yi, the Symbols of Zh?u. The book of the I Ching and the Zh?u Dynasty. But the third deeper layer was Confucius when he added the Commentaries to the I Ching. The Commentaries, the treatise is called The Wings, The Ten Wings that allowed for an interpretative flight to occur in such a way that your sentience now gave to birth to a symbolic structure of thought that would have an integrity, because the Jen was tuned to Tao and now the ritual procedures are tuned to the symbols of the mind. So that the mind indexes the rituals and the Jen hums with the energies of eternal nature. Now one has, in Confucius' terms, the ability to correct all the corruptions that have crept into human society, all of the difficulties with false personalities and literally retune man on every level, from his figures in what he does, to his configurations of what he experiences, to the forms of how he thinks it through to the centre each time. And that when he does so with a pure heart and a real mind, the centres of every consideration will align themselves into a vector of a truth core. And that vector of that truth core will be like the spine curling around with a fractal, featherlike quality and that's Maat's symbol. That she is not just the goddess of justice, but the goddess of the reality of justice, holds permanently. Let's take a break.
Let's come back and we're doing something that is deeper than has ordinarily been done. Traditionally in the past when things have gotten as confused as they are in our world today, there's been a rash of reforms which finally condense into ideas of reformation of things, or which collect and explode into revolutions. We're in a tar baby situation where any reform, any reformation, any revolution, is just fuel for the fire. So, occasionally there are drastic solutions like this one, called recalibrations, where you recalibrate from scratch, from before scratch. So that you run through the development of maturation without stepping on all the squares that ended up in that botched hopscotch game of confusion in the first place. One of the interesting books to come out in this last year was called Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, by Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winner, used to be Director of the Fermilab outside of Chicago. On the plains from Fermilab you can see the 100 storey skyscrapers of Chicago along Lake Michigan. For ancient Confucian ritual, Jen, human-heartedness, was the tone of symmetry and that if one kept that tone through all of the expressions of ritual. The word for ritual in Chinese, 'Li.' If one kept Li toned by Jen, then the accumulated effect of combed out rituals would produce a nourishment of experience that would be shareable, it would be a community experience. And because the rituals are on all levels of scope, the community could be an individual, a family, a village, a kingdom, the whole world. And so the name that China has for itself - Zh?ngguó - is Middle Kingdom, it is the tuned rituals by the Jen that holds the middle of everything through kingdoms into the world. The most powerful of all Chinese philosophers of the 20th century was named Fung Yu-Lan. And my mentor from San Francisco of decades ago, Kai-yu Hsu, in his Our China Trip, he wrote it in late 1973, just before he died in a freak accident, he records a whole chapter on visiting Fung Yu-Lan and his wife and daughter in Beijing. By this time, Fung Yu-Lan was, through decades of reritualised indoctrination, repeating his earlier work and was now rewriting all of his great philosophy so that it would be in tune with the way the state says it should be. The reason why Kai-yu got such a long interview is that he studied under Fung Yu-Lan during World War Two. And Fung Yu-Lan was his major professor and so Fung Yu-Lan is like a grandfather for me. Fung Yu-Lan lived to be 95; born in 1895, he lived until 1990. But he was a target for the Japanese invasion of China, because he was a powerful thinker who was Chinese and like my mentor told me, 'Most Chinese of my generation had Japanese minds. Because the Japanese were much more westernised, they were farther ahead. They were avant-garde were we were still struggling to get over peasantness. They were busy. Already by 1905, they were able to defeat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. They were our heroes.' But Fung Yu-Lan was a Chinese-minded Chinese and so he was a target for the Japanese to [46:31 axe] him out. And he went to the south of China, to Kunming and during World War Two, Kunming became the exile capital of China. And my major professor, Kai-yu Hsu studied under Fung Yu-Lan at Kunming. And of course because it was the end of the Burma Road, my professor, being a young, valiant man, became, because he was trilingual - French, English and Chinese perfectly - he became an interpreter for the American commandos coming into China from the south over the Burma Road. And he got involved enough with international things that he married a French woman...and their two sons, Pierre and Roland Hsu. At that time, Fung Yu-Lan was the most powerful thinker that China had had for several hundred years. And he was powerful because he went to the west in a very peculiar way. He went to study at Columbia University in New York and was there for seven years and his major professor there was John Dewey. And so John Dewey is a great-grandfather for me in this particular lineage. And John Dewey was at the time the most powerful living philosopher in the practical world and was invited to come to China and teach there, not only in Beijing, but in many places in China, to deliver the renewed spirit of a quality of philosophy that the Chinese recognised as traditional, deep Confucianism. Dewey's philosophy was Pragmatism. If you can follow the action specifically, your experience will have an exacting sub-structure of traction and will be coherent enough that the mind that is able to understand by following the action precisely, the pragmatic, practical steps you really do, that all of the combed out action will make a sphere of experience that will be integral to a single individuality. Which will then be the core context for the entire cycle of nature, for the entire integral of actuality. In the great biography of John Dewey, there's a paragraph here, it says, 'On December 20th, 1939.' That's the Winter Solstice. 1939, the Second World War had just begun in Europe, but the War with Japan had been underway for six years in China already. 'On December 20th, 1939, at a reception in the Hampshire House in New York City for persons prominent in American and Chinese cultural life, Dr Tsune-chi Yu, Chinese Consul General in New York, formally bestowed on Dewey the Order of the Jade.' It's the highest honour that the Chinese bestow on a non-Chinese. "The presentations were in recognition of Columbia University's contribution to Chinese education. In his citation of Dewey Yu described him as, 'One of the greatest philosophers in the history of philosophy. A master of human nature, enemy of no nation or men, or international injustice...but of international injustice.' According to the press, Dewey in response expressed the hope that, 'Americans and Chinese would work together to keep the flame of knowledge burning in China in spite of adverse winds.'" One of the figures in China who was interested in awarding this to Dewey was Zhoan Li. And during the early years of World War Two, the most influential thinker in China was John Dewey, not Karl Marx, or Marxist-Leninism, or Mao Marxist Leninism, but John Dewey's Pragmatism, because it was recognisable to the Chinese as a new, fresh, expanded version of the Confucian following of ritual, exact enough to have a spherical Jen that could integrate to a centred individuality of understanding. In 1945, according to the testimony of many Americans in China, Zhoan Li had convinced Mao Tse-tung to accompany him to Washington DC to confer with Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the future of China and the future of China-American relationships and the trip was scotched by bureaucrats in the State Department and the Defense Department and did not surface. And the insult was so deep and in such a way that Communist China came into play in a Maoist Marxist-Leninist way instead of in the Pragmatic relationship that would have been there 60 years ago. What Hu Jintao said two days ago in Washington DC, 'We still remember you, how you really are. Why are you choosing the forgetful, disruptive, false way of not letting us come together? What is it in the rhetorical, political power structure? They wanna keep their positions, their power, their authority and not let the world blossom. But the world is going to blossom anyway because mankind has been birthed out of the old into something new.' One of the things that Hu Jintao did not talk about but is radiantly a centre jewel of 21st century China, is that they have their own space programme. They have sent their cosmonauts already into orbit and they are planning to send Chinese to the moon. Why do you think the American political structure wants to go back to the moon? It's going to be embarrassing not to have been there for 50 years and all of a sudden China sends cosmonauts to the moon and to Mars. Because they're not only international, they're becoming interplanetary. And it is the quality of this that dominates the rest of the 21st century. That mankind now is going to be not only interplanetary, but to expand, so that we change our species name from Homo sapiens sapiens, to Homo sapiens stellaris, star system man. And what Hu Jintao was saying, the two most interesting focuses of a new dynamic would be America and China if they would work together, not work together to come together, but to work in a complementarity, because at the deepest level there is a complementarity that is operative there.
The Selected Writings - 707 pages - of Fung Yu-Lan, published in Beijing, has never been available in the United States except by special order. His great spirit of Chinese philosophy goes back and reiterates again and again that there is a deep consistency to the resonances of Chinese civilisation in history and that Confucius is the master indexer of the way in which all of that achieved its first sets that allowed for the harmonic not only to be recognised intellectually, but lived sentiently and done practically. But the greatest work of Fung Yu-Lan is his great History of Chinese Philosophy, two volumes, enormous, the basic book on the history of Chinese philosophy. And he points out again and again that at the very beginning of Chinese philosophy is Confucius. Not just Confucius, but the Confucian order that resurfaces again and again in China because the ritual pattern has a cognate quality that it is universal so it is able to adapt to new times and new conditions, new expansions. And that Fung Yu-Lan is writing a new expansion to Chinese philosophy, to Confucian ritual, combing an understanding, because the last time it had been effectively done was about 500 years before. And that great figure in Chinese thought 500 years before, about the time of Leonardo da Vinci, is Wang Yangming, one of the greatest geniuses in China. He is to Chinese Confucianism what Thomas Aquinas is to western theological philosophy. Neo-Confucian. Which means at that time, the blending of not only Confucius in Tao, but of bringing Buddhism into such a play that you had all three of the great lineages of China brought into a completely new way. The mastermind of that was 500 years before Wang Yangming, his name was Chu Hsi. And Chu Hsi's great book translated at Columbia University where Dewey had been...they developed many programmes to reach out across the world. One of them was the Columbia Teachers Program that Dewey founded on principles of William James. That if you will bring someone through all of the aspects of psychology, the complete range, they will have a capacity of fullness that no single education would be able to effect and one could do this in a limited amount of time. The other was a programme of translating classics around the world and this one is Chu Hsi's classic, Reflections on Things At Hand. Things at hand are the things, the actual stuff of the world, that is right there for your hands to touch, to use, to recombine, but the reflectiveness is that as you do this, you reflect what you are doing in the structure of your thought and not the other way around. So that the mind, instead of just being an index in a doctrinaire way and saying, 'You do these actions,' you reverse it and let the mind mature through being specific about what you are really doing and what occurs and what comes out of what you are really doing. And if you follow the pragmatos, if you follow the action of what you're doing, you will see that limited sets of actions produce certain results that are then objective. If you take these eggs and you take this pan and you take this fire, you add some veggies and some spices and you put them together in such a way, you can make an omelette. That action followed pragmatically in its activeness, step by step, is the actual way in which the energy dynamic of nature comes into the mysterious deepening of our experience and in that experience what will carry it is the flow of images, of feelings and of language, speaking language. And that speaking language will have images that have feeling tones to them, so that the human voice will be able to express the very sentient core of experience in such a way that the experience image, feelings, language will arrange themselves in a certain form which will have a beginning, it'll have a middle, it'll have an end. And the Greek word for that structure of, like a snippet of talking that makes sense, the Greek word for that was, 'Mythos,' myth. A myth is not something false, a myth is based on the ritual set that, 'If you follow this recipe you will get this food.' If you do such and so exactly in this way, the objectivity will be there, the purpose will be met. And if you know how to do this again and again, over and over again, in larger and larger arrangements, you will have then a real basis upon which your experience can be trusted to be in tune with nature. You don't have to think it through, you do it right and you feel it there. It feels right because it is right. And if nature and experience flow together, if nature and culture flow together, not only will your action sequences be exact but your mind will have a clarity to it that is unforced. It is not forced upon it by the mind's own insistence that things be extracted out, because Confucius said, 'There are two ways to get lost. One is to over-abstract and start to try to follow the mind and not really pay attention to what you're doing, in which case you stray away from nature and you falsify experience.' So over-abstracting is one way to get lost. The other is, 'You prematurely wander off into speculation.' So either way, it's not that you don't keep to the straight track and then you only stay on a track, it's that if you abstract without having a practical, pragmatic referentiality, you don't know that you have strayed in this way. And the balance to it - because nature is always balancing - the balance to over-abstraction is premature speculation, which creates a false metaphysics. That you dream up something and your dreaming up is just a part of the natural balance because you over-abstracted in the first place. And that both those conditions are ephemeral in the sense that they're not problems to be solved, but they are illusions and if you believe in those illusions, they're delusions. But their illusoriness will re-collect and will be absorbed by the actual, specific accuracy by which you do something.
Our phases are universal: nature, ritual, myth, symbol. And when we get to the second cycle of consciousness, vision, art, history, science, they're not only universal but they're cosmic. It's like the structure of DNA, that once you know it you then have an understanding that takes you out of the guessing game of just early genetic speculation and allows you to have a microbiology that now is so colossally huge, it's recalibrating the entire world and our species as well. But DNA cannot make proteins by themselves, it has to stay in the chromosomes in the cell and so it has a helper called RNA, that has many possible forms. And the RNA will come and will get a template of a half core of what the DNA is and will take that out in a messenger way and will reassemble an alphabet of 20 amino acids and will reconstitute through that genetic code of triple codons. And one of the codons means, 'Stop.' It means, 'This set is finished and now you have this.' And what you have are molecular structures which together amount collectively to very large molecules called proteins. Now the cell can use those proteins by the tens of thousands to do what life does colossally. We know at the beginning of the 21st century that it is important for us to be able to follow the action, but not the action of committees that are politically motivated, or sociologically graduated so that they produce certain doctrinaire results. So at the end of every phase, we have an interval where we get a chance to get our fresh breath and the interval week after ritual, after 12 presentations of ritual, is the greatest mindfulness document on the planet, the historical Buddha's Satipatthana Sutta, the Mindfulness Sutta. Of the techniques that one actually uses in a hypersonic yoga to be able to alert yourself so that awareness becomes indelibly accurate and in that indelible accuracy you actually do, precisely and only, each little particle step at a time and that it amounts and adds up to recognising the codon sequence and the objectivities that come out. And one is able for the first time to see the atomic and even sub-atomic structure of something as small as a moment of thought. And the historical Buddha resolved, through the Satipatthana Sutta, that a moment of thought has 16 parts. It has eight parts that are discursive, it has eight parts that always occur as a trill. Our learning has this classic form, it has eight phases and it has eight intervals. And the eight intervals are a trill that runs all the way through the structure. The interval for the nature is Lao Tzu's the Tao Te Ching, my own translation of it. And when we get to understanding the phases, we get to understand they arrange themselves, not only in a sequence, but that they pair up. And just like ritual pairs with nature, ritual also can pair with the mythic phase of experience. But what's interesting is that ritual and myth are the centre two phases in the four phases of nature, ritual, myth and symbol. Ritual and symbol are in the middle. And so the effective sense of an integral cycle is its causal centre, whereas consciousness has a complementary, not a mirror-like difference, but a complementary, because in its four phases, vision, art, history, science, it is...vision is theory and science is experiment, that have not a causal relationship but a contextual relationship. And the centre of the cycle of consciousness is art and history, so that art and history have a very peculiar relationship to ritual and myth. Art is a transform of ritual beyond its integral balance, so that the artist will know how to do sculpting or how to do painting, how to do acting, but will take it beyond its integral bounds into creative possibilities. And history is likewise that way different from myth in that yes it has a beginning, middle and end, but it has any number of interpretations that are possible, but these are the most likely and from these angles of looking at it, you get different facets of what might be possible. So while there are variants of myths, there are any number of variations of historical conscious events and one needs to revisit them again and again, look at them again and again. And that the protagonist in history is not the mental individual, it is not the experiential character, it is not the ritual figure. The protagonist in history is the spiritual person who is an art form. And what spiritual person art forms do, is that they prism possibilities. So that you get a spectrum, you get a rainbow of possibilities that is the actuality of what is happening now. The centre is still there, individuality is still there, character is still operative. Ritual action figures are still there, but they are a base that can now receive transforms. And so our learning understands we cannot only learn how to learn, we can learn how to learn indefinitely, there's no limit. And so the binary of an integral is always zero and one, every computer works on it, but the binary of consciousness is zero and infinity. And so you cannot factor in an end point, but only an array of possibilities that now are most likely this way, but if it changes it can be almost anything. Sometimes known glibly today as the quantum world. There is such a thing as two atoms in a quantum mechanical relationship, that they can pass through each other without stopping. The two atoms do not collide because they're not things in an integral, they're in phase waveform and they can pass through each other. There is such a soliton quality that once any particles, electrons, photons are generated together in an actual event, they always carry the quality of sharing the responsiveness anywhere in the cosmos. It's like a room full of violins: if you play a certain note, E-flat, on a violin, all the violins will hum E-flat. The same for atomic particles anywhere in the cosmos, those that were born together always respond together regardless of time or space. It is these qualities of expansiveness that require a recalibration of learning.
In both Ancient Egypt and Ancient China these recalibrations were done at the time. The recalibration of the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the time of the New Kingdom, some 3800 years ago, is very, very specific when you look at just the beginning sentences of chapter 64, the Chapter of Knowing, the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, prt m hrw. It's interesting that the word of, 'Day,' 'Hrw,' is very similar to the Tibetan derivation from Sanskrit, the word for, 'Heart,' 'Hri,' the heart sutra in Sanskrit is, 'Hridaya.' The Coming Forth by Day: "Osiris, chancellor-in-chief, triumphant, begotten as overseer of all palaces, triumphantly says, 'I am yesterday and tomorrow, I have the power to be born a second time. I am the divine hidden soul who creates gods and who gives funeral meals to the divine hidden beings in the underworld, in Amenti and in heaven. I am the rudder of the east, the possessor of two divine faces wherein beams are seen. I am the lord of those who are raised up, who cometh forth out from darkness. Hail you divine hawks, the wings spread, sun radiant! You live again everlastingly.'" One of the deceptions that was there for a long time...that was Wallis Budge's great translation in 1898...one of the misconceptions that was put in like a bureaucratic scrambling of it, is that those chapters in many translations were called spells, so that you got a kind of a tone that these are just ritual magic spells that are manipulating something, whereas they were not manipulating anything, they were the language implant in the actions done. The Greek word for that is, 'Adromenon,' it means what you actually do do, actually does happen and has its resonance. And if you cannot just keep track of what is that you really do do, but keep track of the way in which the sets of that are building, that will be real. And what will evaporate is the phony speculations simply fade out of existence, they leave no trace. Incidentally, in higher meditation there's no trace at all. And the wobbliness is replaced by a resonant openness of possibility, so that there's a mysteriousness. While you are exact, you're also free. And the more exacting that one becomes, the wider the expanse of the freedom until it goes out into the spread wings of Horus and eternity. And the centre is no longer just the sun but what is called the Eye of Horus, by which one sees reality openly. There's more to this obviously and next week we'll go even deeper. Thank you.