Ritual 4
Presented on: Saturday, April 29, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Ritual Four and we're trying again to deepen our appreciation that the sequence that we are delivering is not in the normal, discursive way of speaking. It takes an attentiveness and that attentiveness is based on a yoga. Now, a yoga builds topos so that it accumulates and the accumulation of a dynamic gives it the ability to go into a transform where it cinches itself and achieves form. So the whole purpose of a yoga is to accumulate the dynamic so that it will come into form, it will emerge into its structure. And the structure will always have a symmetry to it which is a polarity which can undergo a transform so that the polarity unpolarises and becomes a complementarity. The complementarity then, is returned to a higher dynamic and that higher dynamic then, if one applies a higher yoga, that higher dynamic will make a higher form yet. In ancient times this was carried to three different levels: good, better, best. This yoga is new, this carries it to a fourth level: good, better, best, permanent. But it takes a while in order to do this and we are paying attention to doing it in the order in which our species came upon it. And as we have shown, again and again, the difficulty is that you cannot lead with your mind, the mind will distract you with its form. And one of the deepest things of using Ancient Egypt and Ancient China to begin our look at ritual - and this is the fourth presentation - is that both Ancient Egypt and Ancient China never made the mistake of leading with the mind, they always emphasised that ritual. The action of the sequences of what you do is the primary traction. One of the great difficulties that the Classical Greeks had is that when they looked at - in the 600 BC period - when they looked at their own tradition, it changed and became codified and the place that it was codified most stringently was in Athens. They're called the Laws of Solon and the Reforms of Pisistratus. There they took Homer, who had been the oral epic genius of Greece for 300 years and they based a whole education, a whole maturation, a whole development of a civic society, on writing Homer down into a text that could be taught in the schools to all of the sons of the aristocrats, so that they would have the same, similar background education. The same thing happened in China. The Confucian order took the old Chinese wisdom, oral tradition and codified it by Confucius. And both of these techniques led to the development of an emphasis on the mind organising according to doctrine, rather than the experience of life being generated by the traditional, ritual action comportment. When the Greeks looked at Egypt in the fifth century BC, they looked to see Egyptian gods in terms of a mythology. And what comes down to us in western civ, in all the courses since Classical Greek, is that you can understand a people by understanding in your mind their mythology, which then controlled their rituals. And this is a devolution, this is a regression, this is a fatal flaw and breaks every time. When you go to try to find a way to have a new form beyond the form of symbolic thought, that endeavour is thrown back on the mind and the mind being a polarised structure, cannot in itself entertain, without a fantasy of it, the ability to maintain a creative dynamic out of which a new form could come. And so the mind solves this problem by going back to the mythic horizon of experience, back to the images, back to the feelings, back to the oral language culture and wants to use that as its fodder for making a new form which would be an improved form of the mind, an improved form of itself. And so instead of the transform, you get a reform which is made to strengthen the doctrinal structure of the mind now involved in a process that creates tyrannies, it creates egos and it creates a false world of ritual. Instead of ritual being a form that comes out of nature, it is forced to be an artificial form that comes out of a manipulated experience that goes back and dictates what the rituals should be according eventually to the doctrines of the mind. Our learning goes back to the ancient traditions and the ancient ways that have held for all of the tens of thousands of years that our species has been capable of that third kind of form. And the third kind of form is not just the forms of existence in ritual and the forms of symbolic thought in the mind, but the forms of visionary experience, consciousness, in forms of art. And as long as our species has been capable of art, some 50,000 years, we have had those who have reminded the rest, that art comes out of a transform of experience. It comes out of a creative imagination. It comes out of an ability to transform ritual into technique. The Greek word for art was, 'Techn?.' So that the technique of the arts becomes the technology of the sciences through yet a further transform. And thus the arts are the precursor of the sciences but without the arts, the sciences are faux, they're artificial and they belong to a manipulative mind that has not only manipulated experience to go back and change the rituals, but it now says, 'Those rituals that you are doing under our direction, what they produce is art.' And so you have state propaganda that parades itself as art forms, you have cultural traditions that says, 'The crafts that we prize, these are the art forms.' And throughout all of what has come to be civilised history, the artists have said, 'No, it is different from that.'
What we are looking at is something fundamental. In both Egypt and China, the rituals give the traction of existence to experience that is able to have a flow which participates with nature in such a way that the dynamic of nature and the dynamic of the mythic horizon of experience intensify. And while you get the polarising of existentials in ritual action, in the karmic endeavour, you get a pure kind of mind. You get a symbol quality that is truly integrative, rather than regressive and that's what we are working towards. This has a number of levels like a yoga would have. You can do it as completely as you have time for, or inclination. You can do it as perfectly as your ability to stay with it is. For instance, the presentations that you enjoy each week, those presentations are in a poetic language, rather than a rhetorical, memorable instruction, or a clear, precise training. And that poetic language is because one can return back to these presentations many times, from many different angles and augment them, enrich them, deepen them, so that the dynamic of their occurrence becomes richer and richer and the topos builds and accumulates, so that the forms that can come out are not only the forms of your understanding in the mind, but they affect the very way in which our existence is real, is actual. And allows us to do the transforms, so that there is such a thing as the art of a person. One can be an artist out of visionary consciousness and create not only a portrait of yourself, a portrait of someone else, but one can create the portraitist themselves, the artist themselves. One of the great little books that came out in the great revolution of the 1920's in literature, by James Joyce, was called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Joyce was able to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because he was deeply influenced by a woman whose book was so extraordinary in its insight, that not only did Joyce gain his ability but William Butler Yeats and TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust and William Faulkner and Thomas Mann and the book is one that we're going to use starting next week. It is called From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston. And there's a nice Dover edition now, so it's available. The old Anchor paperback edition was around since the late 1950's, the new Dover will be around indefinitely. We're going to find that ritual, when it is recognised as the traction, enables our experience to keep track of the way in which the rituals allow for the generation of an expanse of experience that is able to carry itself not only to an integral in a symbolic structure like thought, but to carry itself through the transparencies of the symbols into works of art that come out of the creative imagination. Not just the imagination, but a creative imagination. And we'll see that one of the most fundamental qualities of the understanding of someone like Jessie L. Weston was that in the mind the imagination is a structure, but in consciousness creative imagination is like a force of flow, it's like a dynamic which is two orders more powerful than nature. And traditionally was called in ancient times, supernatural. And so art comes out of magic, not out of magic hocus-pocus, but out of the magic of the conscious dynamic, which has a creative imagination, which flows twined with a process that is characteristic of consciousness and that is remembering. And while remembering is a dynamic in visionary consciousness, it exchanges places with the imagination in the symbolic mind, so that now the mind has memory, a memory. And when the mind achieves a memory, its ability to access consciousness equals its ability to access experience. And a mind that has both sources available together, is a balanced mind, it is a symmetrical mind. So that its form now has an impossibility of being skewed regressively, because it is equally balanced between experience and consciousness, between the images that come into the imagination and the creative imagination that can come into the imagination. Between the ability for remembering and for traditions to come together and to form a memorable, new tradition. This is the way in which our species has improved itself.
But we're not always just taking books by themselves, or authors by themselves, we're always pairing because we're after ratioing, we're after proportioning. And so we're going to use Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, that came about a generation after Jessie L. Weston's book had such a huge impress. And Miss Weston not only wrote this, this was her final book in 1920, Cambridge University Press. And Ruth Benedict's book first came out in 1934. It is between 1920 and 1934 that you find what has been called a revolution in science, that followed the revolution in art that came in the generation before it. The revolution in the arts of Monet and Matisse, of Rodin, of Kandinsky, of Picasso, of Stravinsky, was followed by a revolution in the sciences of Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg, etc., etc., etc. The breaking point came that the art revolution was broken off and truncated by World War One and the scientific revolution was broken off by the emergence of World War Two. World War One came because of a deep, colonial application of empire by several different empires that went to war with each other. The Second World War was exacerbated because of the return of those powers to dreams of empires that would be...I think the phrase for the Nazis, it would last at least 1,000 years. One of the deeper qualities of our learning here is that there is a ritual basis, the myth in ritual school, Sir James George Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf. And we're going to take, when we get to our deeper quality of symbols, we're going to take a look at Jane Ellen Harrison, because she will give us something which we have not been able to really understand. In myth, when we take Jane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek, we will pair it with the most ancient written text in the world, The Inanna Myths, written about 2300 BC by the first great world author whose name we know. Enheduanna was a woman and she was the daughter of Sargon the Great, the founder of the Fertile Crescent Empire, an empire spanning from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, but whose trade connections went from India to Central Asia, to the eastern Mediterranean, like Cyprus and Asia Minor, all the way down to Egypt. And by these huge international caravan routes, one thing was necessary: that Sargon's Akkadian, Sumerian homeland, which had had disparate gods and disparate mythologies, had to be knit together so that the central core of it would be a new matrix where everything was not blended together into one thing, but that the pattern was such that it was weaveable so that it was extendable beyond Akkad Sumer. And the person who did this was Enheduanna. She used the basis of Inanna's rituals to make the mythic excerpt that was sustained by a very special kind of ritual basis. And from that ritual basis, through that mythology, she was able to integrate the symbol of Inanna so that she could become the hero of the Inanna epic. The ritual traction we'll see for Enheduanna and because she was the En high priestess in Ur, in the south of Sumer Akkad, from that standpoint - because her father was the king of kings - she was able to go to the 42 different temples in Sumer Akkad and do a sacred hymn for each temple in such a way that each temple's hymn formed a set of 42, which were called then the Temple Hymns. And it's the Temple Hymns that take the rituals of the individual temples and knit them together to the fabric of a knit ritual traction of a common experience, of a common imagery, of a central feeling tone that was recognisable and shareable, so that one had centrality and community together. And on the basis of that, Sumer Akkad became one of the first civilisations that was successful in not only knitting itself together but extending itself, its influences, its commonality and centrality along the caravan routes. And you find each place where they extended this, it was like news, it was something new. The ancient civilisations of India, that went back several thousand years, underwent a sea change. The ancient civilisation of Egypt underwent a sea change. The ancient northern Anatolian civilisations, all of these changed, the Aegean changed. And you find that there's receptivity to a new kind of centrality, a centrality which is not a static centre, but a centrality which is a dynamic pivot. And instead of having a point at the centre, one now has a dynamic core which is able to generate many kinds of transforms and variations. This quality, we'll see, has an ability for us to come back to ritual in such a way if we start with, as we're doing, China and India in the most ancient times and bring it up to the point to where the ritual basis was codified finally. And one finds the codification process very similar in Egypt and China. One finds that that codification process is so endemic in the mind's structure, that in Sumer Akkad, after just three, four, five generations, there was an obliteration of the international quality of the pivot core and it was reduced back again. So that instead of having a creative, imaginative ability, to have the art of persons extended internationally, one had an implosion and regression. Instead of the myths of Inanna, you had the Law Code of Hammurabi, which said, 'Here are the laws. You must obey the laws, but that the laws apply to everyone except the aristocracy. The aristocracy is not subject to law, they are a whole level of humanity separate from common people and they take their cue from the gods, from the way in which the gods are, from the powers that be.' And so you get a social stratification for the first time and it happens over and over again, not only in Sumer Akkad, it happens in Egypt, it happens in China. It happens in such a way that it reoccurs then like a bad habit over and over again into the 21st century. It is a pattern so well worn now that it has been a rut identifiable for the last 2500 years precisely. You can read the Classical Greek critics on it and they make sense today in today's terms exactly. What we're trying to do is break the bad habits because the inculcation comes from being not only satisfied to have the mind be the director, the sole director, but to live comfortably in a culture which has a regressive tone to it and the regressive tone is one that is recognisable over and over again. It's a medieval tone, where superstition replaces creative imagination and the response immediately is to look around and see what everyone else is doing who are comfortable and to try and fit in with them, the in-crowd.
Part of the beauty of using Egypt and China is that they have thousands of years in which these currents, these cycles have happened so many times, not just in little vignettes within a lifetime and not just within a century or so, but over the thousands of years of both civilisations, one can see through the expanse of the time that there are very large cycles by which one can take a look and to understand that these cycles belong to an integral that centres itself in the deepest structures of the mind itself. In Egypt the cycle was called the cycle of the phoenix and if you look at the cycle of the phoenix you can find a very interesting point of origin in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Now, we've looked at the Egyptian Book of the Dead several times over the last month, the last four weeks. We take sets of four so that we get a chance to build this topos. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead we have discovered that its original form came out of Palaeolithic wisdom, Palaeolithic experience. And its first written application was in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, going back to about 26, 2700 BC and as long as that Old Kingdom held its integrity through the late Fifth and all through the Sixth Dynasty...but by the Seventh Dynasty, it broke and one has, in Egyptian history, instead of the Old Kingdom, they call it the First Intermediate Period, where things went back to chaos. Because the alternative is not that one then has an old symbolic structure that becomes some new symbolic structure, it's that when the symbolic structure breaks, it breaks in a way in which it goes back and crashes into its matrix out of which it came and that is mythic experience. So that the feelings, the images, the language becomes chaotic; instead of being swirled in an integral way it now becomes scrambled and this is what the chaos is. A chaos is not an original source, a chaos is a previous order mixed up, so that you cannot bring out of a chaos anything other than demonic forms. In order to have something other than that, one has to go beneath the chaos back to the original source out of which the chaotic experience came in the first place. One has to go back to the very core traction of experience coming out of existence. That the original sequence of ritual actions are able to restore the order, not that the chaos has cleared up but that the chaos no longer is able to maintain its confusion and it begins to lose its dynamic and life settles back into the ordered pattern of the ritual basis, out of which comes a combed out quality of new experience. So that the renewal is to go back to the rituals of existence and do those right. Because those rituals of existence, if they are based on the way that they have actually emerged out of nature, nature will not lie. Nature in its process will be a trustworthy source, so that existence, if existence were not able to be unified out of nature, it would not occur at all. And so the whole idea that there is such a thing as a non-existent form is itself an archetype of lying. There is no way in which a non-existence form can exist. In Classical, Pre-Socratic Greek wisdom, the sage who pointed this out most poignantly was named Parmenides. He had long white hair, a long linen gown, he looked like a William Blake figure. And Parmenides said, 'What is, is and what isn't, isn't and they never meet.' They are mutually exclusive eternally and there is no middle ground between them. There is a gap of existence being quite naturally true and of non-existence being non permanently. The figure who struggled mightily with this was Plato and the old Plato wrote one of his greatest dialogues called the Parmenides. That the only in which someone who lives by what isn't and thinks that they really aren't and someone who lives by what is and that they really are, the only way in which they can be put together is in a set by a third person. By someone who choreographs a dialogue between these two people and shows them that in their dialogue they actually are generating a new form of mind. In the dialogue between someone who is and someone who thinks they aren't and yet their dialogue makes the actual experience out of which a new symbol idea can come, that there is a resolution of polarities by putting them into pairs and putting those pairs into a set which is expandable. And if you expand the pairedness one gets the accumulated resonance that allows for a mind to come into a structure where it truly is a part of a whole cycle of integral, that founds itself on nature making existence unified, generating a culture which makes a mind which is able to complete the integral cycle, so that the mind is now natural and cultural and doesn't look for identity in the rituals, but looks for an ability to have a deeper resonance of existence itself. And so the mind actually comes into existence as a part of the natural cycle. Such a mind, because nature is very open and because natural experience, natural culture, is very mysterious, the openness of nature in the mysteriousness of a natural culture allow for the magical consciousness of vision to come out of such a mind, not only naturally, but supranaturally as well. Now for the first time you have human beings who are Homo sapiens sapiens, they are wise about being wise. Let's take a break.
I'm holding a version of Mozart's 'The Magic Flute' - Die Zauberflöte - and this is the Philips recording by Sir Neville Marriner, the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields. It's one of the best presentations. We're using music in every phase to set a tone so that our feeling quality for that phase will have a way of having a deeper consistency to it. And we'll be using in every phase a different selection of music and also in-between the phases, each interval will have its own selection of music. So that in a complete development we'll have 16 different selections of music. The ritual music is 'The Magic Flute' and there is a beautiful filmed version of 'The Magic Flute' done by Ingmar Bergman, that you can find on DVD's. And one of the qualities of Mozart's 'Magic Flute,' it is one of the most sophisticated ways to present a ritual opera, which though it has any number of powerful symbols in it, Mozart does not allow the symbols to dominate the work. The ritual actions are what makes the work be presentable and the music, the singing, the words, the dramatic action base to it rises, so that our experience of 'The Magic Flute' does not come to rest in the symbolic mind, but shines through the openness of the mind into a visionary consciousness. One of the reasons that Mozart is a world standard is that he was an artist and not a thinker. He didn't want the focus of the work to be in the mind, he wanted the work to go through an hourglass prismatically and become a work of art, which it does and it's one of the world's great works of art. We also have four films that enrich each phase and for the ritual phase, the four films are all masterpieces of the way in which rituals, even though there are many symbols in the films, the ritual base of the films is what is salient. The first film is Alan Resnais' 'Last Year at Marienbad,' the second is Jean-Luc Godard's 'Alphaville,' the third is Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will' and there is a beautiful DVD of the wonderful world of Leni Riefenstahl and the fourth film - I didn't bring the DVD - it is 'Metropolis' by Fritz Lang, based on the novel by Thea von Harbou. Thea von Harbou was the wife of Fritz Lang - he was Austrian - and in 1932, when they were the most famous couple in Germany because they had produced a number of great films together, not just 'Metropolis' but 'Woman in the Moon,' 'Die Frau im Mond,' she joined the Nazi Party and Fritz Lang left Germany for the United States and in the United States entered into a fabulous film career directing other things. One of the things that 'Triumph of the Will' is about is the 1936 Nazi Party in Nuremberg. And so Leni Riefenstahl and Thea von Harbou present the ritual tone of what was current in Germany from 1928 to 1936, right in the middle of the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, the Nazis. One of the interesting qualities is how those two films, 'Metropolis' and 'Triumph of the Will,' disclose accurately for us that there was not an emphasis at all on creative imagination, but a constricting of everything according to a hierarchy of doctrine. One film, 'Metropolis,' discloses to us the massive, regressive onslaught of the danger and the peril and the other shows us the expected triumph of exactly those qualities. Not that they should be triumphant in a creative person, but that they should be triumphant in a culture that dominates by a wilful mind, the very basis upon which existence will now reorder itself as we declare and nature will of course just follow along. The films, the music and the techniques that we are using, not only in the presentations, but if one listens to an audio tape - and we'll have CD's in another week or so - but the audio tape, if you listen to it, just the audio selection, about three days after the presentation, you will hear with the radio-eared imagination a different form of the presentation. If you build a sense that after three days you're going to just review the presentation in an audio mode, you will build a kind of a layered quality. The quality will be that the imagery that comes out of the audio will have a different experiential quality from the presentation, either on a DVD or in a live presentation. It will be slightly different, related, but slightly different. If at the same time you follow the other augmentation which is suggested and that is the presentation notes from the previous phase. We're on Ritual Four, so this week you would read the presentation notes from Nature Four. Those presentation notes, which were only published at the end of the phase, not during it, are a written retrospect and they're put into handwriting and illustrations cursively so that they do not have a text quality, but they have an intellectual note quality to them, written. If you review those written notes from the previous phase in harmony, in sequence, in line with the current phase, that will also give you a slightly different quality to your ability to integrate the experience. And so the presentation and its audio make a very interesting kind of resonant pair and the written notes and the presentation make another slight, yet very differently interesting kind of pair. And the development of these two directions...and the best way to call them is that they are not directions so much, but they are vectors, they are trajectories of meaningful experience. And because there are two that are slightly different, one is a written, symbol language, one is an audio, oral language and then the presentation itself, you get a triple quality within a spectrum that is able to develop itself all the way through our learning in a completely new way. What will occur to you is that you increase your ability to have a peripheral, contextual understanding of both retrospective thinking about it and the deepening of the mysteriousness of the way in which experience can deepen and deepen and deepen. Even though you think you're going over it in a repetition, it is not exactly the same repetition. Ritual has this as its structure: it collects the iterative vibrations of natural dynamics, polarised into forms that actually now objectify and collect together so that whatever the structure, becomes objectively actual. Ritual ensures that existence has a stable thereness, a stable thusness.
In the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead there are four out of the whole classic in the Papyrus of Ani, there are a number of the books, the Egyptian Book of the Dead has up to about 200 different chapters if one took all the variants. But the five chapters of the Egyptian Book of the Dead that are most poignant are chapters one, two, three, four and 17 and the secret core of that is chapter 64. The reason being this: in the original Pyramid Texts, before there was an Egyptian Book of the Dead, before there was a more simple version of the Pyramid Texts, that appeared as the Coffin Texts, the original Pyramid Texts came out of Palaeolithic wisdom. And in the Palaeolithic wisdom it was the 64th chapter that gave the tone of the whole experience of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It has a very curious kind of a quality to it and it has a phrase in it of living for millions of years. I'm going to use the T.W. Allen translation of it, I think it carries a little bit better. This 64th chapter is like in the Upanishads there is a very short Upanishad called the Isha Upanishad, it has only 18 verses. Those 18 verses are like the crème de la crème of the 18 sections of the Bhagavad G?t? and so it is the index cream of the Upanishad of all Upanishads and the 64th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is exactly that. It is the terse presentation of the actuality of what is occurring out of nature, the emergence into existence, not just existence in the life that you are leaving because you are dying, but existence that survives the death in an afterworld, in a netherworld, where it is able to iteratively keep its existence because it goes through a cycle of renewal, so that it is able to re-emerge again. And it does this because it has an interface of two related but separate qualities of energy. The first quality of energy is eternal, it's eternity. The related and second quality of energy is everlastingness. Eternity is that it never not is, everlastingness is that it always can recyclingly, reborn, resurrectionally be again. Eternity is carried by what could be called, in ancient Palaeolithic Egyptian wisdom, the name was Aten, out of which later versions in other cultures got 'Adam.' Aten is eternity but when eternity reoccurs, it reoccurs not as eternity but as Re, the sun god. But the sun god, in order to reoccur, because it is the sun god during the day but the sun god during the night, during the journey through the night through the netherworld, through below the earth, below the horizon, that journey has to have a different recalibration and the recalibration is Osiris. And so Re is able to be Aten during the day and to refresh by Osiris during the night and Re and Osiris together are both a tuning fork allowing for eternity to still occur. To occur in the Osiris everlasting recycle and to occur in the Re day cycle. And here the 64th chapter begins and here it is: 'Mine are yesterday and each tomorrow, for I am in charge of its successive births. I am the hidden soul who made the gods and gives offerings to them of the hidden realm and to the west side of the sky, the eastern steering oar, two-faced one whose rays are seen, cloud lord who comes forth at twilight, oh ye, falcons of his who are in charge of their tribunals, who hear cases presented orally.' And in this way one has the beginning of how eternity has two ways which come together in a togetherness where each of the two have a unity in and of themselves and so when they come together it isn't one plus one, but it is a deeply mysterious source of both ones. It isn't that one plus one makes a one here, but that one plus one reveals the common origin, the common origin being an infinity. That the one does not come out of a zero but comes out of an infinitefulness. And each one comes in a very similar way out of that and so they are relatable by a common denominator, which is infinity. And that these two ones together make a proportion where you have this one and this one and a resolving third, so that the Ancient Egyptian architectural, mathematical genius was always the ability to find the two thirds of any process, any structure. And so...and if you get interested there's a Dover paperback reprint of Fred Giddings The Mathematics of the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs. Their genius was always to use that two thirds certainty in creative ritual ways in order to develop all the rest of their proportions and their understandings. The other chapters of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the first four, the first is the Hymn to Re, to invoke the presence in existence of that Reness. The second is the Hymn to Osiris to invoke the Osirian presence in existence. The third is the psychostasia, the weighing of the soul, which is the weighing of the two, but now it's not the two of Re and Osiris, but it is the way in which Re's whole thusness in existence is in itself a plume of the balanced goddess of justice, Ma'at. And so the ostrich plume is put on one side of a scale and the heart of the deceased as the thusness hopefully of being resurrected through Osirisness, is placed on the balance. And so you have Re and Osiris through the ostrich plume of Ma'at and the heart of the deceased and Thoth makes the tally of that balance. If the two are balanced together, one not lighter nor heavier than the other, then there's a possibility of the two to come together on the common denominator of their emergence equally with equanimity from eternity, to reacquire the pairedness, the two thirdsness that carries eternity with it indefinitely. And so the fourth, after the Hymn to Re, the Hymn to Osiris, the psychostasia the Greeks called it the weighing of the heart, the fourth chapter is the presentation of you to Osiris, because the journey that you're underdoing is now is the Osirian part of that whole cycle. But as you are entering into that cycle in the Osirian part, Re also is again, through millions of times millions of years, entering that cycle. And so in a very deep way you will go through the 12 gates of the netherworld accompanied by Reness, in the presence of Osirisness and your own equanimity that has been tested by the god of wisdom, who is also the god of language, who has instructed you throughout your whole life of exactly how to comport. Not to think your way through it but what you actually do to achieve going through it. And the achievement of going through it was divided - because Thoth was a moon god - it was divided during your life into a game board of 30 squares and the game was the Ancient Egyptian game Senet. Many people mistakenly have derived chess from Senet, it is different. Chess is a game of symbolic strategy, Senet is a game of ritual comportment precisely. And the 30th square on the Senet board is an image of Osiris. And the whole purpose is not to win the strategy of the game, but to do the ritual of going through, seamlessly, the entire cycle of the 30. That one cannot complete it if you start to dither about it and so your whole life you have learned simply to really do it all the way through. Because a ritual is only effective objectively if it is carried to its completion. It's like in a DNA sequence, there is a codon for 'stop' and stop means, 'This sequence is finished, it is complete. Now we will do another sequence and here are the codons for that.' But what's interesting is that in the human genome, out of all our chromosomes one of the most complex is chromosome 17, which was just recently finally figured out, it's one of the most complex chromosomes in the universe. It contains not only the ability for creativeness in new kinds of proteins, new kinds of structures, but it is also at the same time the locus for most chronic diseases, genetic diseases. Because chromosome 17 is characterised many times though its massive structure of repeats, of doubled repeats. That this sequence comes to its stop codon and then the next is the same sequence all over again and if that repeat sequence is not given a developmental kind of thrust, it develops then an impedance and so it's the repetition of it that is the source both of a possible disease and regression genetically, or of a new variation of development.
In ancient wisdom and we are taking Egypt and China together, it was always recognised that to do the rituals right means to be able to carry through the doing of them to their completion. And the tone, the feeling tone that comes out of a ritual done right is a very noticeable, detectable satisfaction, 'This was done right.' I used to show in the early 1970's when I was teaching in Canada, I used to show a film on the Algonquian sun dance, the Okan, made by the Glenbow Alberta Museum in the 1960's. The ability to do a sun dance requires ritual implements that are made by four medicine men together as a set. And by the early 1960's on the North American plains the most powerful tribe ritually was the Blackfoot. And by the early 1960's museums around the world had taken up most of these sacred implements and put them in glass cases and the attrition on the reservations over 100 years had left less than four living medicine men, so that new ritual implements could not existentially be made and they couldn't be recovered from the museums. And so they realised that this was one of the last sun dances that would ever be given and so they allowed the Glenbow Alberta Museum, under Hugh Dempsey, to film it. And one of the beautiful things at the end of this eight day ceremony, is all the men and women, not only of the Blackfoot tribe themselves but of that whole plains nation, they came from all over to participate. The Stoneys, the Cree, the Bloods, the Peigan, you had several hundred men and women in their ceremonial outfits, with their arms around each other and the holy women's voice saying, 'We have had a good sun dance and now we may return ourselves to life and go home and be home.' The whole purpose of a ritual is not to blindly follow something, but to vibrantly, energetically bring it through its completion so that that objectivity now is available to join other objectivities and build the complexity of existence so that our life can generate out of that, our experience be real out of that and will be able to participate with nature out of that. And the whole purpose of symbols are to cinch and make that so, so that the parallel between nature and culture has another tuned pair of symbols with rituals, not in identification but in a resonance that is very much like the participatory resonance of nature and culture when they're healthy together. The mind will integrate on the basis of the ritual action, not that the ritual action will be a manipulative expression of the mind's abstract understanding. So if you lead off with doctrine you immediately corrupt ritual, which immediately sabotages the cultural experience of myth so that it cannot participate with nature. And so what you have is a natural universe with false beings who are sabotaged, self-sabotaged, loose and destroying nature.
One of the deep qualities in China is the ability for the Chinese in Confucian times to understand that they were deepening something already that was both natural and mysterious, into a third level of magical, transformative quality, but it had to go back and find its traction in the right rituals. The original nature was the Tao the pairing of the Tê with the Tao came with the I Ching in its second phase, as we saw, in the Zh?u Dynasty about 1200 BC. And the third phase was Confucius taking the original Palaeolithic I Ching of Fei Zhi and the Neolithic I Ching of the Zh?u Dynasty and adding a third level of the Commentaries on the I Ching. So that in Confucius' time the I Ching now was a triple decker, not sandwich, but a triple decker process. The Palaeolithic natural process of Fei Zhi, the Neolithic family process of the Zh?u Dynasty and now the Confucian level, where the process was a visionary confirmation that the rituals come out of nature and that they generate the experience. We're using the Analects of Confucius, not his Commentaries on the I Ching, because the Analects focus for us, in a very convenient form, like the Upanishads focus the Vedas, like the ability to have certain chapters of the Egyptian Book of the Dead focus the whole. The Analects of Confucius focus for us this enormous third level process. In Book Four of the Analects there are three little pithy sayings and notice now that the Confucian sayings are not sayings for thought, they're sayings for ritual comportment. That if your ritual comportment is such that your experience is like these sayings, then you have indeed been doing the right things in the right way. If you have a contentiousness with it, the contentiousness is in your mind, being wilfully different from the way in which the combed out tone would be were you to be doing things right and so your feelings would be in tune with this. Here's the first of the three, "The master said, 'Of neighbourhoods, benevolence is the most beautiful. How can the man be considered wise who when he has the choice does not settle in benevolence?'" Benevolence of course is the human-hearted Jen. Notice both in china and Egypt, anciently, the heart was the centre of sentience and it was pre-emptive, not the intelligence of the mind. If the heart is not sentient, the mind will not be intelligent in any kind of integral way. You will always be a deceiver, a saboteur, a liar and a maker of confusion. The second: "The master said, 'Wealth and high station are what men desire, but unless I got them in the right way I would not remain in them. Poverty and low station are what men dislike but even if I did not get them in the right way, I would not try to escape from them. If the gentleman forsakes benevolence, in what way can he make a name for himself? The gentleman never desserts benevolence, not even for as long as it takes to eat a meal. If he hurries and stumbles, one may be sure that it is in benevolence that he does so.'" The word that Confucius, K'ung-fu-tzu, uses for 'gentleman,' in Chinese the phrase is the j?nz?. The j?nz? is not just a gentleman but is a man who is aristocratic in his human-hearted Jen and so benevolence is one of the regions of human-hearted culture in which he has his place. One of the high medieval qualities of chivalry is very much a j?nz? quality of being a gentleman. Here's the third: "The master said, 'In his dealings with the world, the gentleman is not invariably for or against anything, he is on the side of what is moral.'" In other words, one can tell right away that if you get caught in the polarities, it means that you're not tuning them together in such a way that the experience that comes out is already tuned. The polarity is an existential objectivity. If their tuning is not maintained, then the experience that comes out will be skewed, like a bad golf hook. It'll go one way or the other, so that when the symbolic mind integrates that experience, it will tighten the skew and you will be for something and against something else. And the more that you are, the more that you realise people who are not for you are against you and people who are for you must be united to be against all those who are against all of us. And so you see the natural integration of the mind can integrate the skew so it becomes more concentrated, tighter and tighter. This is the whole basis in Confucianism of two qualities that then fit together. They're called centrality and commonality. Here's a book An essay on Confucian religiousness, Tu Weiming, it's very famous and Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-Yung, this has a quality that is very familiar to Chinese civilisation. Centrality is not a static centre. Commonality is not a tyrannical or egotistical common denominator. Those two aspects are very easy to keep track of and to check oneself. If you are favouring some kind of static point to make, you have skewed yourself out of the neighbourhood of benevolence, definitely. If you do not have a commonality which flows naturally and culturally with ease, then you have already entered into the shards of factionalism. Both qualities were presented primordially in China through the food, through sharing the meal. We all sit at the same table, we all take our portions from the same bowl. And the archetype for this goes back to the primordial, Neolithic Chinese villages that came out 12,000 years ago, out of the Palaeolithic. Eight families were gathered together around a central well. So if you have this tic-tac-toe board, the eight edges are the eight families that worked together, like the eight trigrams of the I Ching. And the central well is like the central bowl on the central table of the banquet, the core, which is a pivot and not a static focus.
Next week we'll take a look at two of the most fabulous women of the early 20th century, who reminded everyone that there was more than just the British Empire, or the German Empire, or any empires. That man had enormous varieties of the way of being real. Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict and From Ritual to Romance by the great Jessie L. Weston. Two of the most interesting women of all time, next week.