Interval 2
Presented on: Saturday, July 1, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Interval 2 which means that we are making an articulate inter-space between two phases. Our conditioning has been, for several thousand years, to study subjects and by studying subjects we prepare everything to be subsumed under the mind. The mind being structured to do this does not know that it is not the only show in town, and disengaging the mind involves a paradox because we're asking the mind not to do what it does. The only way to really affect that is to give it a show, so that the context that it's dealing with shifts to a sense where it can't quite make the ends meet. When it does this the two ends, because they do not meet, what develops in the middle is a flow that does not have any end.
This is the beginning of wisdom. It was always difficult to teach this and in Ancient Greece, from Pythagoras to Plato, they worked out a way to do this by not having the emphasis on written words, on written language, only to deal with an oral language. In this beautiful volume called Therapeia: Plato's Conception of Philosophy, Robert Cushman says, 'In the first place Plato says that knowledge of being is brought to birth with greatest difficulty, only on condition of long application to the subject and continual living with it.' And then goes on to saying, 'There is secondly, when knowledge comes, it dawns suddenly as a discovery and in default of this insight, nothing less can be a substitute.'
In Sanskrit that insight is a vipassana and is an integral spacing, like our intervals between the two phases. In one of the most important Buddhist sutras, in fact it's always been traditionally for 2500 years accorded first place among all of the remembered talks of the Buddha, the discourses. It's called, in Sanskrit, Satipathana, it means mindfulness, the mindfulness sutra. The vipassana insight moments punctuate the Satipathana Sutra like our intervals punctuate our learning. Our learning, the learning civilisation, being in eight phases, is a, not just a 21st century but a third millennium form of the eight-fold path. It's an updating of the Buddha. It is an updating of Jesus, it is an updating of the Chinese ,from FuHsi to Lao Tzu to Wang Yangming to here.
What's interesting about the historical Buddha is the incredible irony of his lineage and it's usually not told but it's important for us, I think, just to know a little bit. He was married to a princess named Yasodhara. They both shared a great grandfather in common and he was a king, Jayasena. He was a king of a whole district of the high foothills of the Himalayas, the Shakya clan. Though in the Buddhist time the kingship had not gone down his family line, he was the head of the prince of the Shakya clan but the king of the time was over in the Kasauli region, further along the Ganges to the west.
But Jayasena was truly a king at the time and this is very interesting. He had a son and a daughter, the great grandfather and the daughter's name was Yasodhara as well. When she married, she married a son of a prince in another district called Koli. Their daughter, then, was another Yasodhara and she's the one that married the historical Buddha so that his family lineage was like a pretzel. When he decided to look outside of the world that had been presented to him, a royal lineage, very important, beautiful wife, young son, Rahula; the historical Buddha was 29 and he happened to look through a chink in the world that had been presented to him.
He went out on his own in the evening when everyone else was retired and he went out of the palace grounds, out of the privileged area and he came upon starving, impoverished people on the edge of the town. They were not only starving and ignorant, they were diseased and he was crushed to find out that most of the world was in this condition. He was unable to sleep and this enormous revulsion rose in him and he informed Yasodhara that he could not stay where he was any longer, that he had to go out and find out what was going on. Because of his privileged position the only person that went part way with him was a faithful servant named Channa. Channa drove the royal prince's chariot out of the palace grounds, out of the town, and left him off on a stream coming down from the Himalaya where there was a yogi camp. Not quite an ashram but a camp of ascetics, Sanyasis.
For seven years he went from place to place, from camp to camp, from ashram to little gatherings and he kept tightening his asceticism. Finally he became so initiated, there is a classic statue of the last mortification of the historical Buddha and he is literally just skin and bones. By this time he was 36 years old but you see in the features of his face that he is determined to carry the body and the mind and just the skin and bones to oblivion, if that's what is there. In this ascetic condition he literally fell in the dust one day and a woman came out of a hut and she brought some little rice cakes, moistened it with her own spittle, force-fed him and brought a little cup of some honey and nursed him back to where he was able to finally sit up again. He realised that he had gone the wrong way, completely, that he had gone to a dead end and that the dead end was a combination of three dead ends together: 1) a greed to find enlightenment, 2) to a lust to have it and 3) an anger that he will not be deterred from this. Those three braided together made a perfect cable of illusion that he believed in and it became a delusion and that he was surrounded by this.
So he came to a very interesting large grove and in this grove four trees were singled out and he sat under each of these four trees for seven days, so that the cycle of the seven was a lunar cycle of 28 days under four trees. The first one that he sat under was called the rajayatana tree, the king's stool, the king's seat. Not a throne but a place outside in a garden and ever after that the historical Buddha loved to teach in groves of trees. So he sat under the rajayatana tree for seven days and he realised that there were wisdom persons going back in time beyond calculation and that they were not just wisdom yogis but that they were beings whose beingness had come to a single point in the centre of their mind and that the mind was unable to recognise anything when that single point imploded upon itself and vanished. Though it vanished, immediately, spontaneously, slightly different from where it had vanished, something new occurred which was not a point but which was a dynamic pivot, just a pivot in quality.
Instead of there being a structure at the centre of something there was now no centre but there was a dynamic whirling and later on he would do this kind of a motion, which was like setting the dharma chakra into motion; not into motion of just going around in a rotation but that that rotation because it had, not a centre, but it had an axial invisible pivot, he said of that, we would say today that it generated a torrential angular momentum and that that angular momentum took the place of experience. The flow of experience was no longer the basis upon which his mind indexed things but that the experience now was at a transcendent quality where it had this invisible dharma chakra pivot where what was occurring had no particular form that would stay put but it constantly kept coming back instantly, freshly, into existence all over again like an iteration.
He moved from the rajayatana tree over to a big huge banyan tree, the goatherd's banyan tree, named because a goatherd could have his whole flock of goats under this one tree in the shade. India's very hot sometimes. He sat for seven days under the goatherd's banyan tree and then he moved to a third tree called the mucalinda tree. There is a tremendous flower that comes out of the mucalinda tree. When he sat there a tremendous Himalayan thunderstorm came: lightening, thunder, torrential rain. As he sat there a huge cobra came out from the roots of the mucalinda tree and wrapped itself around the Buddha and put its crest over his head, not to kill him, but to protect him, because, not just of the rain, but because of the lightening. The cobra, having its grounding into the roots of the mucalinda tree, was like a lightening rod that protected him. In India, in Sanskrit, snake is naga, but this is like a naga raja, this is the kind of serpents whose hood has a reverberation of an entire harmonic and so is usually presented as a seven headed cobra which is a royal sacred protection over someone. When the thunderstorm passed after a couple of days the king cobra unwrapped itself, king cobras can be about 25 feet long, they're huge, they're very rare.
And then he went to the fourth tree which was the bodhi tree and sat under the bodhi tree for four days and came to that poignancy where he could instantly disappear the centre of his mind and it would instantly reappear as that pivot. It occurred to him, he sensed that there were two travelling merchants who were watching him under the bodhi tree. They came and they saw that this was like a magnetic yogic figure beyond anything they'd ever seen and they asked for a blessing, they asked for a teaching. The seated historical Buddha had a thought that instantly came into his mind and the thought was, 'They are offering me food, how will I take nourishment? There is no one here to take nourishment. They are not really there to give nourishment and the nourishment is only conditional and temporary.' And so without anything more, because he was not thinking at all, he reached and took the food.
And then the thought came up, 'How will I teach? Who is there here who could say what that could convey to someone who really is deluded that they are there? How would this work?' He just simply began to talk and it struck him in a very powerful way that if you show someone, patiently, how to keep a focus ,that comes down to a fundamental; the fundamental being that the body does things before you think of it, before you experience it, you do. The doing of doing has traction that gives a base to how experience rises. The tone of experience rising is feeling, in Sanskrit it's called vedana.
If one focused one's mindfulness on the body, in the body, simply as the body doing and just doing, and the most mundane actions are the best, whatever it is that you are doing, one is mindful that this is just simply what you are doing and continue to do. You will repeat styles of that doing; if you take food, you will take it in a bowl, largely, put it in your mouth, digest it, wash the bowl, that these simple actions become noticeable sets of sequence that have a gravity that allows for the magnetism of experience to generate itself. If you can focus on the body as the body and expand that to feelings as feelings you can then carry that over in a further expansion to the mind and you can be mindful of the mind being a mind.
When you are experienced enough and mindful enough about the mind what leaps into clarity is that the mind being the mind is a structure that has objects, there's content. In the structure of the mind it isn't just an abstract structure but that there are mental objects lodged there in the criss-crosses of the structure of the mind. And so the fore-foundations of mindfulness were that kind of a sequence of being able to be mindful of having that Satipathana: that if you can train yourself to just be in the body; and then just be in feeling toned experience; and then just be in the structure of the mind; and then to focus on mental objects; it occurs, at that point, with those four, like the four trees of his enlightenment, that one has made a frame of reference.
One has made a square of attention and that this square of attention is extremely important because it can be completely open. It does not have to have anything in it and the square of attention then will be, what is called in vipassana, bare attention. When it's bare attention, when it is just a frame, there is no picture in the frame, but just a frame, you can vanish the frame and the attention does not dissipate. But the attention, now, instead of being on an empty frame is on the openness within which a frame could reappear, or it could disappear, and it does not affect the openness that one is now attentive to. And so the whole archetypal process of bare attention was developed by the historical Buddha to begin.
It is a difficult thing as Cushman points out about Plato, about his Therapeia, that in the dialogue, in the exchange of oral talking with a pointed purpose, in Plato it is not to expand but to contract, so that there are levels of contraction of what it is that you are actually attending to talking about. At the first level is that of pure opinion, doxa, in Greek, and that becomes condensed so that you have informed opinions. Then you have really honed opinions that are no longer opinions but they are definite ideas. One now is talking, not from opinion or from honed opinion, but by the precision of ideas and that where the precision of ideas condenses one stage more it comes to that single point, a single point where it doesn't matter what pro or con you took about any issue in the universe; at that fourth level of coming together the only thing that occurs, that's important, is that both of you have come together in an absorption which is shareable. Socrates said of that that this is the companion moment when we become philosophers, we become lovers of wisdom because we are sharing this incredible discovery and revelation.
Cushman says of Plato, 'We are now prepared for a final observation about the nature of elenchus, dialectic is the truly persuasive art because it employs a form of verbal interchange which procures conviction in the minds of the participants.' It builds upon agreements but its instrument is the elenchus by which error is divined and eliminated over and over again but there are stages to this. But in this process, human beings learn that they have not really known anything for what it really is but only for the rationalisations that are identified in length to presumptions about one's actions. And so one has a very odd situation; you have a karmic traction which doesn't generate just some kind of magnetic experience but it conditions it in such a way that when the mind indexes it, the mind assumes that this is the way things are.
In order to not do this, two different kinds of transformation have to happen. Because of the nature of double ignorance and in view of the power of the elenchus, nothing but dialectic is able to constrain a man to decide for, or acknowledge, a fifth kind of reality, a true reality, for the first time: aletheia, in Greek. Because the highest knowledge, like the worst ignorant, involves the entire moral and intellectual nature, Plato was justified in declaring that such knowledge does not even get started if a man's life is confused, greedy, angry. One can't even begin: why? Because whatever traction there is, is already heavily salted, heavily seasoned, and will produce a kind of bitter or sour or distasteful or repulsive experience which, when it is brought in, the mind will become revulsive and cannot blame itself but blames everyone else. If it does blame itself it leads to complete disgust.
When the historical Buddha delivered his sermons, his discourses, they were collected eight days after he passed on. The middle length sayings are called the Majjhima Nikaya and there's 151 of these in the Majjhima Nikaya, it's about the same proportion that you would find in the Psalms of David, the Psalms in the Old Testament, about 151 of them, and the Majjhima Nikaya is like the Psalms. It's the big way in which a complete canvassing of the full, not just the sphere of what the Buddha taught, but the angular momentum of what those teachings will be as they occur and enlarge themselves and come into ever more harmonic discoveries.
In South East Asia the computation of the Buddha's states is a little bit different from the North India computation. In North India he was born in 563BC, died in 483, but in South East India he is said to have been born in 625BC and so in 1956 they held the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha called the Buddha Jayanti. At the time one of the trouble spots, again, in our time, is a trouble spot, was the country at that time called Burma. It is Myanmar now. In Burma there was an old Mahathera, a great elder, senior monk. His name was Narada and usually distinguished people in Burmese will have the first name of just 'U' like the Secretary General of the United Nations at one time was U Thant, U Narada. U Narada lived to be almost 90 and when he died in 1955 he left a version of the Satipathana Sutra active in Burma which became the vipassana technique that is taught all over the world today.
His prize student was a man who took his last name, not Narada, that was his dharma name, but his last name was Sayadaw. We can find books now by Mahasi Sayadaw, The Progress of Insight: A Treatise on Buddhist Satipathana Meditation. Mahasi, Maha means great and Si in Burmese means drum. He was raised in a community, in a town where the monastery had a particularly huge drum so Big Drum, Sayadaw, his teacher, delivers this. He's the one that carried vipassana outside of Burma to all of the countries of the world. Before he died over 200,000 people round the world had received exactly what the Buddha had taught 2500 years before, lensed in the beautiful work of U Narada and delivered in this beautiful way by Big Drum Sayadaw.
Narada was famous for putting together the Buddha and his teachings, a selection that runs to almost 700 pages and then to make a graduate form of that, a deeper form called A Manual of Abhidharma. Abhidharma means 'beyond the dharma'. It means, then, that there is a truthfulness that can be realised and the realisation fully of that truthfulness vanishes; all of the conditionality, all of the limitations that had been there in the body, in the feelings, in the minds, in the mental objects. What comes into play then is this pivotal dynamis which in its dynamic, it generates a kind of a Tesla-like energy, that when that comes into form, the matter formed out of that are dual forms. They are no longer existential things of the world, they are like cosmic jewel forms that interrelate like a matrix.
So the universe now, instead of being existential objects, separate from each other, is now a jewel matrix that is unlimited and infinity. This quality that the abhidharma has was said to be a non-verbal teaching of the Buddha originally and the classic example of it was the flower sermon where the historical Buddha simply held up a flower. It was not quite a mucalinda tree blossom but it was very similar to what we have today as day lilies. The only person who smiled was an elderly ex-sorcerer monk named Mahakashyapa. The historical Buddha handed him the flower and that was the beginning of the whole tradition that eventually became Zen Buddhism.
It's interesting because Mahakashyapa was the most powerful sorcerer yogi in India at the time. He was the Simon Magus of India. He had 500 apprentices learning how to do this black magic, really powerful yoga. His speciality was to terrorise people by making big psychic poisonous serpents that infested their neural system and made them very frightful and easy to manipulate. The historical Buddha walked into, like Shane, he walked into Mahakashyapa's camp and asked him if they could put him up for the night. They decided that they were going to make an issue out of this lone wisdom samurai. So Mahakashyapa put him up in his own hut and they gathered around and they sent these vicious poisonous images of big serpents. But of course the historical Buddha had been protected by the largest, most transcendent, poisonous king cobra of them all. And so he accepted in grace the power of all of these psychic serpents and brought them into this quality of an angular momentum of the energy movements of all of the snakes of the world and burnt out Mahakashyapa and his 500, so that they didn't have any psychic energy left.
In the morning when he came out he went over to Mahakashyapa and he said, 'I think you better come and learn from me. You better tell these boys that they are going to have to find other teachers because you are going to be busy learning something from me. You are going to learn the power of gentleness, of being able to follow exactly what happens in your body and get the traction of following exactly what happens in your feelings and be able to integrate that, so that you can see exactly what happens as your mind and exactly what is in that mind as mental objects, and that you are not any of those at all. And even if they are let go or vanished, a not-you still occurs.'
That occurrence will have a paradox. It will be able to be matter, matter in Sanskrit is called tathata, tathata means suchness, really is there, but at the same time it is punctuated by Sunyata, by not there. And so it carries its zeros and ones all the time in the complete composition and you can focus on either the zeros or the ones, depending on whether you want to have an infinite dynamic or whether you want to have an energised form or prismatic form. Or you can put them into sets together and you can generate a sense that you are a jewel in the jewel matrix of the cosmos and that such a person now is not an individual who has a tathata but it is a tathata that has gone. And so he referred to himself as the tathagata, a tatha gata: tathagata. One who is not here in the way that you are assuming he is here but he is also gone in such a way that you didn't ever know and that the presentation of those two together as a set is tuneable and you can tune that. It is the Satipathana mindfulness that gives you the way to tune that and bring that tuning fork so that it can be struck. When you strike your tuning fork, the entire reality now replaces what you thought was your individuality. Instead of just realising who you are, you realise the reality that really occurs. Let's take a little break.
Let's come back to our flow and we're developing a particular kind of a flow by pairing, and we're pairing books or persons, famous books, famous persons, to create a sinuous flow that is consistent all the way through a double annual cycle. In the dynamic of that flow there are two additional perspectives that need to be factored in for a full picture. One of them is to look in retrospect back at where you had been at some graduated, related moment and we do this by the presentation notes. Every three months I'll put out 100 pages of the presentation notes, the notes I make to myself during a week and those 13 weeks together.
The technique for this retrospection is a Pythagorean technique to look back in a geometric way so that when we are on a certain presentation for a phase you will be reading that number of the presentation of the previous phase. So last week we had Ritual 12, you would be reading the presentation notes from Nature 12 so that after three months when initially you would have the presentation either live or by the DVD, and that after two days review an audiotape or a CD so that you get the oral, you get the radio version of, not the dramatics, not just the visual presentation, but just the audio. With the imaginative mind's ear of hearing, which is actually a primordial mythic experience, so that you would listen two days later to the oral presentation of it and then sometime during that week in between the presentations and after listening to the oral you would read the notes in retrospection and you would being to get a close and central thread of following.
The thread in sutra, in Sanskrit was originally thread. In fact when full moon days come, monks around the world will sit together and they will hold, very lightly, in their hands a gold thread that all of them will share together and they will chant that discourse or that sermon together, or that Vinaya text or whatever it happens to be. It's not following the thread so much but letting the thread run through you in common, so that the community now is woven by a common thread. The fabric is not a fabric of many threads but it's a resonance of a single thread that links all and has no end. So you get like a super-string of community out of this. If you chant from memory rather than something that is live, it's akin to your reading the presentation notes of going back in a retrospective way. But the retrospect is not to go back and check on something, it's not a reductive process but it's one of activating, not the past, now remembered, but a new, fresh experience that recasts the past and becomes a new past.
Now that retrospection is a dimension, a further dimension, of the four dimensional presence that you have and not only is there three dimensions of space and a dimension of time but there is a fifth dimension, a quintessential dimension of consciousness, of remembering. The mind will structure and make a memory but the visionary conscious dynamic will be remembering. If it's a retrospective remembering that is braided in with this special process that we are doing, you now have a three part braid. If you add one more kind of vector, is what it's called, the retrospection will actually be a reference wave for this energy frequency. There is another kind of wave that goes with this called a plot wave which is looking ahead. Part of the looking ahead is that one is looking in the sense of participating in an ongoingness, which our learning is; what is coming next, what is up next. The thread that holds that pilot wave together is, not the sequence of the presentations, it's not the retrospective of going back and checking the notes that are cognate with that sequence but it is a track over a year-long, 52 presentations of a classic journey, literary journey.
In each of the two years we have four tracks, four selections. In this first year, the selections are: Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, the classic Japanese literature epic; Ovid's Metamorphosis which is the classic Roman epic; Homer's The Odyssey which is the classic Greek; or Herman Melville's Moby Dick which is a classic planetary journey. Melville is one of the first human beings to be at home in the entire world. American whaling ships from the early 19th century literally went everywhere on the planet. For years at a time, three, four years at a time and they were familiar with places in Polynesia, on the coast of Peru, anywhere in the world, including the oceans of the world. One of the qualities in Moby Dick is that Ahab, who is after killing this white whale, has made charts of the entire planet for the first time of the migration of whales over every ocean in the world and he can track, for the first time, where a specific animal, Moby Dick, is going to be at a specific time of the year and that he will meet that animal at that place at that time and kill it because he knows the world in this way. But it's not knowing the world in a creative way but knowing the world in this demonic way. He has developed his own planetary net in order to assuage his own individual vengeance.
So we use Melville's Moby Dick and this is the 150th anniversary edition that Norton paperback's puts out with a chiral mask, this is a Maori mask, but it's very much like the facial tattoo of Queequeg in Moby Dick. Every week there is a reading of about four or five pages out of any one of the four classic journey texts. If you are reading Moby Dick for this year, this is the 26th presentation and just to give you a little sample, a paragraph from chapter 85 of Moby Dick, The Fountain, listen to the tone of it. It's very similar to what we are talking about in mindfulness, the Satipathana sutra of the historical Buddha and the way in which in the 20th century the vipassana lens of the core of the Satipathana sutra was brought out at first by a single monk in Burma and finally now spans the entire planet regardless of whether one is religious or atheistic, whatever gender, whatever denomination, not dependent upon belief, not dependent upon disbelief, but simply a method by which one can step from the body and its rituals to the mythos of experience and its feelings and images and language, into a mind which has a symbolic structure that can be logical and precise. It can be centred and that one can step a fourth time into being able to locate mental objects in that mental structure that has been integrated from that feeling-toned experience, that is based on the ritual actions that one actually did.
When that happens as a set, as that four-cornered frame of reference, that square of attention, as we call it, a fifth, a quintessential quality is possible to come into play. That is the space of the frame without any picture whatsoever in it. If one absorbs oneself into that space the frame can vanish and you maintain a bare attention presence to complete openness. That complete openness will spontaneously generate a new kind of a form. Not an individual, not the character of your experience. Not the physicality of your body, but an infinite ongoing flowingness that can be prism-ed by special kaleidoscopic forms.
Here's a few sentences from The Fountain, Melville's Moby Dick. 'That for 6000 years and no one knows how many millions of ages before, the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea and sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep with so many thousands of hunters for centuries back should be close to the fountain of the whale, the spout. Watching these sprinklings and spoutings that all this should be and yet that down to this blessed minute 15 and a quarter minutes passed, 1.00pm of this 16th day of December, 1850 AD. It should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are after all really water or nothing but vapour. This is surely a noteworthy thing. Let us, then, look at this matter along with some interesting items, contingent. Everyone knows that by the particular peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim. Hence a herring or a cod might live a century and never once raise its head above the surface but owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodic visits to the upper world? For he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for in his ordinary attitude the sperm whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet below the surface and what is still more his windpipe has no connection with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spherical alone and this is on the top of his head.'
And so Melville goes into a deep mystic reverie that they are not just hunting prey but that there is something increasingly mystical that keeps generating out of this voyage of The Pequod. Out of the crew of this Pequod, and as Moby Dick goes on as a novel, it becomes more and more specific on the details of every iota of what happens and yet the more that one gets into the details the more that the story begins to transcend those details by more and more and so you get a paradox. You get an almost textbook description of what is actually physically done, the rituals, but the experience that comes out it more and more jumps, jumps out of the life that one has, into a mystical consciousness of visionary quality.
He says, Melville, he said, in fact, in some of his letters, I have seen this myself, you have to watch out for new young crew members who have never experienced this before and the first time they do they get lost in the mystical absorption of the whole thing. And he said 'Woah' to that young neo-Platonist who has climbed up to the crow's nest at the top of the mast of the ship to look out for whales and gets absorbed in the motion of the planet's oceans and the rocking of the ship and realises that his whole movement in the crow's nest is tied, as he says, with the treadle of God's foot on the basis of existence and unknowingly missteps and plunges to his doom off the topmast.
He said older crew members must temper the young ones, that this is going to happen to you because you're out in the planetary ocean now, you're not in some ground that's delimited. The planet has no limit here, it's the entire planet here that you're dealing with and it has its own resonance. Like a bell it rings holistically, totally and that if you really pay attention and tune in, any action that happens on the high seas happens planetarily all the time and you begin to get it. Every time you simply do something you're dancing with the planet itself. If you are paying attention to the stars and the sun and the moon you realise that all of this is in some larger harmonic, that is iteratively dancing and that there is no way not to find that out if you are really specific. That you will become cosmic at the very same time and it is a total paradox. What you do is like an hour glass, you realise that it isn't anything that is going like sand from one to another, that this is time but that time, actually, is a dimension of eternity.
Remember last week we were talking about Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Zen travel logs where Basho begins saying that days, months and years are travellers in eternity. When one begins to get the awakening, the call, the beck and call to come out from where you think you are and begin to journey, if you really do do this that Zen-like realisation will open reality. Now, whatever it is that you do, you are travelling in eternity. The Satipathana sutra of the Buddha that we are taking as our interval, special interval today, has that quality. Just reading a text of the Satipathana sutra will not do it. This was the point of U Narada in the middle of the 20th century when he developed the vipassana technique to go out throughout the planet. There is probably several tens of millions of people now that practice vipassana all over the world.
This little book was written in 1877 by a Welsh savant who devoted his whole life to Buddhism, to study it, translate it. He married a beautiful, large, red-headed woman named Caroline and the two of them became two of the great translators of Buddhist texts in the late 19th and early 20th century. He writes: 'The period called Vas from the Sanskrit varsha, rain, is, in Ceylon, the finest part of the year but in India it's the rainy season, the monsoon season.' There are no regular religious services, the peasantry celebrate the reading of the [Bana 1.02.13] or the Word at Vas time as their great religious festival, they put up under palm trees, a platform roofed but quite open on the sides, but ornamented with bright cloths and flowers. Round it they sit in the moonlight on the ground and listen through the night with great satisfaction if not with great intelligence to the sacred words repeated by the relays of the shaven headed monks.
The greatest favourite of these readings is not the technical philosophical stuff, it's not the subtle mystical stuff. What they like are The Jataka Tales, the oldest fables and stories common to mankind all brought together. There were about 550 of them. Mrs Rhys Davies' Selection of 47 of The Jataka Tales, it's reprinted here by Dover paperbacks, it's seven dollars. It's interesting because these are tales, this translation is by the great daughter of Inayat Kahn Noor, Inyat Kahn, 20 Jataka Tales. They are tales of the Buddha's previous life as animals, as fairies, as Gods, as any kind of creature when the Buddha was such and so. These little Jataka tales link together in such a way as to show that it is not a reincarnation of your individuality. It's not a repeat of your character. It is not just simply an iteration of your physicality, 'Oh I was so and so in another life.' The Jataka tales show that the web of all life everywhere shares a common life.
When a great female mystic in the 12th century, Hadewijch of Brabant, in what is today Belgium, Flemish territory then, wrote of the incredible intense passion that comes to realise that everyone is related in that love, in that life. To separate out is exactly the ignorance of hatred of anger or lust, that that other person is as real in that love, in that life, shared life, as any aspect of you ever was, even when you were a parrot, even when you were an ox, even when you were a monkey at some time, even when you were a fairy goddess at some time. All of that, in that jewelled matrix, is not representable but is presentable and when its presentation is accurate, it is presentable as a wholeness, as an allness, that has the ability to constellate into things and thingnesses but also into non-things and non-thingnesses. Therefore that mindfulness, to have all four foundations of mindfulness, to make the corners of that bare attention see-through, that quality has a vibration, that is a harmonic, that is able to cascade itself into infinity, so that one would never hear a note without hearing the chord and one would never hear that chord without hearing the whole range of it into infinite silences so that one hears and hears sets. And hears the silence within which those sets and those notes now lyrically play and dance.
The quality of the classic Buddha, the historical Buddha was always the tone of this quality of cosmic nobility and that the presentations of any of the discourses, any of the sermons, were given in such a way so that the oral language reverberated in the reality of the life that you really are in and that your ability to hear was your becoming familiar enough to be able to recognise it and then precise enough to realise it and then opened, differentially conscious enough to live it.
It is interesting that the Pali Text Society edition of the Majjhima Nikaya, the middle length sayings, was translated by a woman, I.B. Horner, Miss Horner, and in here is Number 10, the Satipathana sutra and you have, this is the translation of the beginning, all Buddhist sutras always begin with 'Thus have I heard' and in whatever language translated, 'Thus have I heard' is always carried, for instance, in Tibetan, 'Thus' is 'Evam' and so you will have a Tibetan character for evam and just seeing that is like seeing the seed out of which all the discourses will be able to generate themselves from that thusness, 'Thus have I heard at one time the lord was staying among the Kuru people in a township, of the Kuru is called Kammassadhamna. While he was there the Lord addressed the monks saying, "Monks, revered one." These monks answered the Lord in ascent and the Lord spoke thus: "There is this one way, monks, for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrows and griefs, for the going down of sufferings and miseries, for winning the right path for realising nirvana, that is to say the four applications of mindfulness, what are the four?"
What you get here is the interplay that the Buddha weaves, not by a monologue of sermonising but of including the hearers in a dialogue that has the quality of a monologue's dynamic. He will speak and reply and turn it over and as one goes through this you'll notice that there is a technique where he will cover all the bases. He will present something, he will present its opposite. He will present the resolution of those opposites and then the opposite of that resolution, so that you get a fourfold logical initial frame of presentation and then the Buddha will step through that directly to the hearer, that 'That was not the point, this is not the point, that was not a criticism, this is not an emendation.' Our being together is what is real and it is the disclosure of that that is everything, that is simply ... all of the rest of it is like shadow puppet choreography to set the landscape of possibility out of which we can have our reality and that that reality is very, very big magic because it confirms a freedom of a new past and a possibility of an infinite future in an open centre of the present and so that present, instead of being a time point at the centre of the mind, vanishes. It's called a bindu in Sanskrit and instantly reappears in a supernal bindu as not just a new beginning but a beginningness without end and that this is the way in which a mindfulness is delivered some 2550 years ago, about this time of the year, 2550 years ago.
Next week we go to the beginnings of a new phase, the phase of Myth, of mythos, of the mythic horizon and as we do, in every phase I have tried to work in two world class women who vibrantly dominated a field of wisdom inquiry in their times. We are going to take Jane Ellen Harrison's classic great Prolegomana: To the Study of Greek Religion. It's still in print from Princeton, the Mythos Series and Diane Wolkstein's recent translation of The Myth of Inanna from the authoress of the Inanna epic, lived 4400 years ago, her name was Enheduanna, she was the daughter of Sargon the Great, the founder of the Akkadian Empire. She was the first world author whose name and whose background we know. So world literature beings with Enheduanna.
She was told when she was made high priestess in Ur of the Moon god that because her father had brought a completely different level of civilisation into being, it wasn't just Sumerian city states that were federated into districts and into overlaying kingdoms but Sargon was the king of kings. He stretched the whole fertile crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea and out into the island of Cypress because you could get copper there and it's a good thing to have, into the inlands of the Irani Plateau because you could get in there and you could begin to make interesting metals, contacts with the Indo civilisation in India, contacts with Egypt, contacts with the Scythians, north of the Caspian sea where the Zarathustrans originally were. And so for the first time you had an international world linked by huge, long 10,000 mile shipping or caravan routes.
In order to keep the vitality of this Sargon said to Enheduanna, 'You have this writing talent and you're writing the Inanna epics, we need to have something to bring together the 42 different temple styles in Sumeria Akkad that have been here for thousands of years' so she went to visit each one of those temple sites in each one of those cities and she wrote a sacred temple hymn for each one and then beaded all those 42 temple hymns together. Inanna is almost dwarfed by the 42 temple hymns as a tapestry. It was the first time that here was a world religious delivered in hymnal song. You find that literature is preserved because it was the standard literary text for 1600 years in the Middle East. The archaeology has shown hundreds of copies of the temple hymns in Inanna because they were the school books by which people who were literate learned to read and write in the first place. She was like Homer, she was the foundation of a civilisation.
What's interesting is that Jane Ellen Harrison, when you pair them together, you get a colossal insight. Jane Ellen Harrison grew up in a British Empire where nothing was more of a boys' club than the classical scholars, of England trying to outdo the classical scholars of Germany and women were not supposed to be a part of that. Jane Ellen Harrison became a Cambridge Don when it was almost impossible for a woman to even get into Cambridge University and she became perhaps the most famous woman of her time.
With the chorus, that we will get to next week at the beginning, of her Prolegomena, it's not the study of Greek religion, it's what you need to survey first, what you need to reconnoitre first before you can even begin a study. She will say that the fount of it, the Greek word for it was dromenon. One must be able to find, in the mythology, the ritual base and find the particular effective action of the moment, the dromenon, the thing done, where in this ritual at this point is this done and what is it, what do you do?
Once you know that, you have for the very first time, a way of realising that experience is not just chaotic, not even dreams are chaotic but that there is not so much a hidden structure to it but there is traction of a dynamic and what it does is it churns energy and so experience is an energy frequency. It's not a form. To tune that energy frequency, that's why the mind is a form. Symbolic thinking is the tuning of the frequency of experience but if you presuppose that the experience must be just the content, things, mental objects, you obviate experience from being real. That stops the mind from being able to realise because instead of realising out of the actual experience that comes from actually what you do, the mind gets caught in an abstract tape loop. It just identifies and confirms that it knew all the time that this is the way things should be.
The phrase, levelled against Jane Ellen Harrison at the time by the Victorian ethos of the British Empire, 'We're no longer subject to the confusion of these barbaric peoples and barbaric times. We have crawled ashore from all of that, we have arrived. You see our clubs, our salons, our empire. What need do we have to look back at anyone else? We have our own society.' One of the most elegant women that ever lived, she refused to participate in that. More next week.