Myth 2

This is myth two and this is the cover of a very famous book by Thorkild Jacobsen who was one of the great scholars of Mesopotamia and his books are all published by Yale University Press. This is a priest in Mesopotamian religion from the third millennium BC from the time of Enheduanna, and the eyes show that one is looking beyond the world to an inner visionary experience. The eyes do not focus the world in the mind. The eyes are looking to let the experience of the world pass through the mind into a visionary flow. We're used to thinking of the mind as being the catch all and that it must be within the mind and we do not understand or realise that looking in this way is not looking to see within the mind as an inner world but is allowing the mind to be transparent so that experience flows through the transparent mind into a higher form of experience called vision.
Our whole process of learning is to be able to utilise the mind as a mind in at least two distinct modes. One is the traditional mode of letting the mind be an integral structure which brings together the entire natural cycle into a focusable structure capable of sustaining ideas and imagination, capable of organising images, and for that mind, that structure, to have a centre so that its concentric symmetry centredness is a structure that allows for there to be a funnel of integration for everything in the natural cycle, everything in the existential action realm, everything in the experiential flow to come together in the mind. That's the integral structure but the mind can also be a transparency where it does not integrate but allows for two different kinds of quality. One is a mirror quality to simply reflect what is there. The other is a transparent quality to allow the experience of what's there to pass through. The mind as a mirror can reflect the world's existentiality and in that reflection it can be quite accurate. But it also can be a transparency to process not just to existential form and objectivity in the mirror reflective objectivity of thought but to allow for the process of experience to pass through the transparency of the mind into an altered and transformed process vision.
When vision occurs, experience now flows with vision and vision tends to displace the flow that nature had. Experience flows the same way that nature does and so it just receives as we've been showing in myth one the flow of experiences like the centre flow within the wider banks of nature. So that it's a deeper form of the process or better to say it's a deeper flow of the process. But vision flows in a different way from experience or nature. Experience and nature flow to come to a focus, they are integral. They come to distinct things, distinct images, distinct shapes, distinct figures, the points of an argument, the idea of a symbol. All of this is focusable but the process of vision is different, it opens out its differential. And that differentiality is consciousness. So when experience now which has for all of its time learned to flow within nature, now it tries to flow within vision but vision is flowing a different way. And so instead of it being deepened, nature now is transformed and visionary consciousness weaves with experience. And so in that weaving you get a pattern like a wave interference pattern that when it is expressed in some kind of objective form it comes out as a cross hatching weave.
One of the earliest presentations of this is that the sacred marriage bed of Inanna is a woven bed which stands out from the floor. And whereas the normal Sumerian sleeping was on mats on the floor, Inanna's bed is raised above the floor and is made out of the wood of the trunk of the Date Palm. In ancient Sumerian it's called the Huluppu Tree and it is the Date Palm's trunk that forms the bed of Inanna and her bed is also woven so that there's a cross hatching weave that she sleeps. She has her lovemaking on a patterned woven raised dais. It is the alter of the sacred marriage of the goddess of the universe. That Date Palm, the Huluppu Tree has three different architectural usages that are put to it. The trunk is the middle usage, the crown, the fronds are a second usage and the roots are a third usage. What is made out of the roots is a circle there woven in such a way that they form like a wreath or in ritual symbol a circle. And the line that one takes from the palm fronds from the fibres, becomes a long cord fastened to one of the central struts of a palm leave and this is a measuring rod so the measuring rod and the coiled, twined rope string and the woven circle of the roots is the way in which an architectural structure is laid out in ritual terms. It is not laid out initially in symbolic terms but in ritual terms.
The measurement, if you take that rod and that circle and you turn them 90 degrees in Egypt that was the symbol for eternity. And when Horus as the great resurrection bird hovers over the encasketed body of the deceased, Horus in one of his claws will hold the symbol of eternity which is the way in which to remember to measure the remember ring of the deceased back into eternal life. The Date Palm's trunk then serves as a middle ground between the roots that can become the measurement of any architecture even to the architecture of the universe and the palm fronds are the crown that can be excerpted and put into a different kind of a service and the trunk that links them together actually has two functions. The wood makes the bed of Inanna, the sacred marriage dais but also that wood is used to make her throne so that she rules not only as queen of heaven and as the queen of the earth, and as we have seen she makes the decent into the underworld and is able to come back out through a displacement of her by her lover Dumuzi, his sister Geshtinanna that they each take her place six months out of the year and Inanna now is able to have transversed the entire universe. The celestial over view which are like the palm fronds, the trunk which is the wirral that we have that has the throne and that has the sacred fertile marriage bed. And the underworld that the roots of the Royal Date Palm if they can be woven by experience and vision together into this new differential form they're able to carry in that differentiating process, a transform of nature allowing where it would only flow one way forward to be able to have a return back through it, that the differentiation is a return back the other way. It doesn't just go in a clockwise fashion but is able to go counter clockwise in a weaving technique, that weaving process and one has a form made out of the weaving process those forms are now art forms. They are not just ritual forms, they are art forms. And they call out to the symbol forms of the mind in a different way. They do not call out for referentiality but they call out for possibility. Art forms invite symbols to explore their possibilities whereas ritual forms invite symbols to confirm and organise their existentiality, their activeness in terms of meaning.
We're looking at myth which is the processing between nature and vision. It is a process that is ambidextrous in the sense that it can flow with nature or it can weave with visionary consciousness, and so myth is the first phase of a completely new quality to the universe, a quality that we're used to by the 21st Century of calling reality. That the universe not only exists and can be known as such but that it has a reality which is discoverable in its infinity. And so one of the characteristics of Inanna is that she is the goddess not only of the universe but she is the goddess of the infinity that reality offers every living fertile creature that they are able to transform out of the integral into the differential possibilities. Not destroying the integrals but opening them up, giving them a further scope. Now the measuring rod in Sumerian was called the [16:14 micu] and the measuring ring was called the [16:20 kovacucu] and these together, it's like the crown and the roots together making a parenthesis over the set of the trunk's use as the throne and as the sacred marriage bed. Those two aspects are the aspects of the rule of the world in terms of an integral and the transform of the world in terms of a new possibility. The fertility is not simply a fertility of continuing nature but the fertility has a transform quality of improving and refining nature. And so while a marriage is for procreation to continue the natural cycle and it has it's ritual and symbol confirmation in referentiality it is possible with a woven visionary consciousness and experience to have a mind now that explores possibilities that the fertility is not simply to ritually carry on the things of this life and this world but to develop a new kind of a child who will change the world. Who will change what is there and this, in the most ancient written documents we have from about 4400 years ago in Sumer Akkad, this is a divine child who is able to change the world and in doing so to reorient the mind so instead of it just being the end of an integral cycle, instead of just having the ability to be completed so that it is a very nice mirror perfectly showing the things of the world that it can be transformed to transparency through which now experience will carry nature and all the things of the world through the openness of the mind into a whole new ecology, the ecology of consciousness. So that consciousness is not in any way an epiphenomenon of the mind. It is not in the mind. It is not an inner world in the mind. And the earliest presentation of it as we saw, one is not looking to see, one is having one's looking transparent so that one is at physicality in one's ritual is pure seeing, seeingness as one would say, the gerund of the verb. And so immediately when this becomes visionable for the first time language itself changes in two very distinct ways.
Now verbs action words have time tenses, past, present and future. And even a future perfect and many other variations but the original is that now actions are no longer just ritual doing but they have time tenses. It can be that they were done, they are doing, they will do. So that a mythos is the introduction for the first time in an oral language of time tensing in verbs. And the plot, the mythos is not just beginning, middle and end but it is the past, the present and the future. It is a time tensing of experience which lifts it into a very special centring flow of the way in which nature occurs. It is now preparing itself to go through a mind if the mind will be transparent.
This happened about 4400 when written language came into play it took the refinement of the oral language that had been tending toward this for about a 1000 years. If we go back to about 3500BC we find for the very first time that there is a change in the world that had never been there before. The change is simply this, before that our kind homo sapiens always lived in the largest way in cultures and the cultures were dominated by tradition. They were sustained by custom and while they would have the extent even to very large communities like even cities, 3500 years ago you began to get intercity relationalities and this was the beginnings of something larger than a culture, something more complex, the beginnings of civilisation. It is not true that civilisation is developed with the city it's that the intercity relationalities in that patterning are the beginnings of civilisation because that intercity patterning is like the bed of Inanna. It is not just the weaving of vision with the process of mythic experience but a deepening of consciousness into historical consciousness. And that history is a very high powered consciousness just like experience is a deepening of nature.
History is an expansion of consciousness. They work just in the paired ways. Experience will flow within nature but history will flow as an expansion of vision. And so when you come into having a historical consciousness now weaving experience completely transforms itself, it's not just a woven experience for this world, for this mind, for this integral that is now transformable but that the transformations themselves are transformable. The refinement is a double refinement. And classically in the ancient Hermetic tradition the first transform was that of a fermentation, the water into wine. The second transformation was the distillation of the wine into the cognac. The double transform is that vision produces a wine. Jesus said I am the true fruit of the vine. But it is distillable and refineable so that one now has an expansion of history, historical consciousness that literally becomes kaleidoscopic and the world is transformed into a cosmos. Well Jesus is the true fruit of the vine he says I have to go and be transformed yet again and I will send the holy spirit, send the holy ghost who will teach you everything, all things. All will be able to do what I do. It's this quality of a double transform that is the true proof of a learning, of a maturation but to get there because of its, not just its complexity and not just a double complexity, integral and differential but each of those have a pair of pairs. And so the complexity is that literally of an octave but an octave that does not run in some kind of a staggered line but has a double lightening quality to it. It both is able to come into an ascension and a dissention at the same time. It's able to integrate and differentiate at the same time. And the completeness of that set together has its origins in being able to begin this process with myth. Mythic experience is the first beginning of this. It is not apparent in nature itself as a process. It's not apparent in existentiality in the ritual comportment of action and doing. It first becomes apparent when experience deepens nature and generates out of the traction of ritual actions and now you have an ability not just to have symbolic thought naturally mature and integrate meeting but that symbolic thought itself can open its way to the mirror quality of reflectivity of reflection and to the transparency of transcendence.
One of the most deep qualities of this was buried until the beginnings of the 20th Century. Was buried in such a way that the traditional habituated mind, the learned mind of civilised persons for thousands of years had buried by forgetfulness, by inattentive, inexactness a quality which was discovered increasingly at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century and one of the figures who's important in this was Jane Ellen Harrison. And we're taking her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and here's a photograph of her in her twenties. She was already becoming world famous. She was one of the first great women teachers at Cambridge University in England. She was there at a time when Cambridge was the intellectual centre of the world. The young Sri Aurobindo was studying there. Bertrand Russell was there, George Moore, GE Moore, a whole list of greats. Cambridge was the place to be. She says in her book Themis which was the trunk, the middle work, the roots of the work were the Prolegomena which we're taking because the Prolegomena is the great work that is accessible to us. The trunk was the Themis and towards the end of her life she wrote an Epilegomena and the Epilegomena is a product of her older age. She lived to be 78 and she wrote the last work when she was 71. She was born in 1850. She died in 1928. But before she died she revised the Prolegomena three times. So that the last edition was 1922 and just before she died she revised Themis, the middle work in 1927 at the age of 77. She points out, beginning on page 385 the sequence of cults at Delphi from Gaia to Apollo and she says it happens that as the cults of Delphi, we here have a document of quite singular interest, no less a thing than official statement from the mouth of the local Priestess of the various divinities worshipped at Delphi and a matter of supreme importance, the traditional order of their succession.
That is this is the geological strata of the ritual cult observances, not so much yet in their historical order but in the geological layering of the ritual levels that are due not to an historical development, not quite yet a conscious development and not a development of the mind's symbolic intelligence but a development due to the sentience of mythic experience, is a very powerful insight, one that needs to be presented and held forth very carefully. We're prejudiced. We skew everything by thinking only the mind integrates. Experience integrates as well but it integrates in the mythic process not in a thought structure. So that it is not just intelligence of the structure of the mind but it is the sentience of the process of experience which is a very, very powerful integral and its integral is directly generated by the ritual comportment, the ritual level. She says Delphi was the acknowledged religious centre of Greece. And nowhere else do we have anything at all comparable indefiniteness to this statement. And she says it is in the prologue of The Eumenides and what is The Eumenides? The Eumenides is a play by Aeschylus. It is a part of the only surviving trilogy of Greek tragedies from about 24, 2500 years ago. The Oresteia is that trilogy, is the development of the central issue in a male dominated tyranny world. The first tragedy is Agamemnon who was the brutally arrogant leader of the Greek expedition against the Trojans and the masterful general who oversees the siege for 10 years and who oversees then the complete destruction of the City of Troy such that the buildings that were constructed later had no knowledge whatsoever of the greatness of that Troy, it was like a village on the site of the ruins of a great capital city. And villages in different historical eras were built on top of it until there was like a mound because ancient cities were always built like ancient buildings on the destroyed sites of the old. You simply build layers and it wasn't until the late 19th Century that Troy was excavated by a German business man Heinrich Schliemann when Jane Ellen Harrison was a young woman in school. And it turned out that the source, Aeschylus' Oresteia beginning with Agamemnon went into a very deep exploration of the consequences and the origins and the causes of all of this and the middle players called the Choephori, the Libation Bearers but the third play that completes the dramatic trilogy, Greek tragedies occurred in a trilogy with a little satyr as the fourth element.
It's called The Eumenides and The Eumenides are the furies. At the very beginning of The Eumenides and I'm using Gilbert Murray's translation. He was a great friend of hers and her book Themis is dedicated to Gilbert Murray. The Apollo Priestess at Delphi was as prophetess, not the oracle, the oracle was always a young girl about 13 years of age just on the verge of adolescence, and completely unschooled and unlearned so that when she gave her oracle it came through her not from her. But the prophetess was the head of the Delphi Apollonian Cult and she says it wasn't always this way. First of all gods I worship in this prayer earth, Gaia. The primeval profit so that they worship at Delphi was of Gaia in very, very ancient times. Second after her Themis, another woman, another goddess, the wise, who on her mother's throne so runs the tale, sat second. She was the daughter of Gaia and so Themis is the daughter of Gaia and it's interesting because the daughter comes of course after the mother but it's in a way that the daughter is a deepening of Gaia, that while Gaia is the nature goddess, Themis is the experience goddess who flows in the deepening, the mysterious centrality so that Themis is the mythic thread of vibrant experience within the flow or primordial nature. And as such now Themis is wise, she is not wise in the mind she is wise in feeling, toned images in oral language sentience. She can say and you can hear from her and in her saying and in your hearing the images that she develops, the feeling tones that she flows with will give you a quality of being wise in your own life.
If experience is a process flow, a mythic horizon which is vibrant dynamically in the field flow of nature, nature is not so much like a flow of which experience is the centre but that experience is now a river in the ocean, oceanic field flow of nature. So that until the mythic horizon begins to have its dynamic frequency of feeling toned images languaged, nature is of such an immense context that it is not able to be experienced. And so existentiality that emerges unified, whole, each thing is what it is and has emerged and not just once but emerges in an iteration billions of times for time unit. Existence has no way whatsoever to know, to know what it is, to know that it is, to know where it came from. Those functions are functions of the symbolic thought as a mirror to reflect. But the constituents of the symbolic mind are not nature. They are integrals of woven rituals that have generated experience, mythic experience. And so it's important because it has been a long time since there was a recognition of how reality expands what is realisable. The limitations of our kind have become severely imprisoned in a realising mind that thinks that its realisation is the sum all and be all of everything. It is not the case. It's only a halfway point. And the halfway point cannot continue to dominate and distort and destroy. And so a great double transform is classically in order and now extends to the entire planet.
Let's come back to the quality of mythic experience at Delphi. Now at the centre of ancient Greece because we're taking a look at a civilisation that was about halfway between our own and the original civilisations of about 3000BC, 2500BC, the classical greats of 500BC are midway between the origins of Chinese civilisation, of India civilisation, of Egyptian civilisation, of the powerful beginnings of written Mesopotamian civilisation and so they're like a fulcrum for us in the centre. And it is a fulcrum which is already tipped the wrong way. It is tipped towards a prejudice of the mind, dominating by its realisation and of reality which ignores such arrogance. And of nature which takes in no account of such a distortion, will not recognise it as one of her own. Will not give it existence and so the mind that is denied existence by nature is not invited to transform by consciousness, has no chance whatsoever to have a deeper, more expanded invitation from the cosmos to come up and adventure and play in reality. And not simply in the games that minds consider the be all and end all. As Jane Ellen Harrison points out Delphi was the centre of realisation and of mystery in classical Greece and though in the classical Greek times it was the place of Apollo there were three levels of cult before him and all three were women. And that the earliest was Gaia, the earth goddess who was the earth as a whole, not a collection of the things in the earth but the earth as a whole. She emerged from her mother, Mother Nature who is not a thing but this oceanic field that allowed for her to come through. And so while Gaia is the earth mother as a goddess she is the daughter of Mother Nature. In Sanskrit her name is [47:33 Pukriti]. I used to call her about 30 years ago, I used to call her Ma [47:37 Pukriti]. She is the dance out of which Shiva and Shakti are able to move. When Shiva Nataraja dances through the flaming hoop the source of the fire of the hoop is Ma [48:04 Pukriti]. She is not the hoop, she is not the fiery hoop, but she is the source that allows for there to be a fire, for there to be a hoop, for there to be a rhythmic movement of Shiva Nataraja to dance forth and be.
At Delphi the earliest ritual is of Gaia. The second level is also feminine, is Themis, her daughter. Which is not just the earth in its whole but Themis then is the goddess of the dramatic weaving of the rituals into their drama. Into their ability then to weave the action sets into this basket of what is done. And the key to Themis as Jane Ellen Harrison will point out again and again in her early book Ancient Art & Ritual done for the English [49:30] Press in 1913, right at the outbreak of the First World War. She uses the Greek term [49:40], the thing done now is the thing itself. It isn't this thing that is doing something, the doing is this thing. The objectivity is the action set sequence which can be woven with other action set sequences making then your baskets of existentiality which are able to hold, what do they hold? They hold because there is a space of nature that allows for the holding to occur. It isn't just that this space is made by the woven ritual basket but the space within, and without the basket allows the basket now to have its unity, its objective form as a woven action actuality with a purpose. What it holds, what ritual forms hold is the flow of experience, the dynamic of experience. So what is within the space of the basket is the dynamic experience held by the ritual and the context of the space outside of it is the deeper mysterious dynamic resonance of it in nature. And so now the ritual form doesn't just hold the experience space within it, it doesn't just hold the images, the feeling tones, the language within it but that space also overflows and participates with, is absorbed by, it is melded into the space of nature which now increasingly as that occurs is the flow of a mysterious nature. And so one of the most ancient ritual images, not a symbol yet, ritual images is of the goddess who will hold a container of water and the water flows out from the container, and you see this in the Tarot Cards of the Star, she is pouring from one cup to another.
The hair of the Empress in the major Arcana is the flow of this and that hair goes all the way back to Inanna whose hair is the fronds of the Date Palm. She sits on the throne made from the trunk of the Date Palm. She has the sacred marriage on the bed woven from the trunk of the Date Palm, not on a floor mat but on a raised dais, woven. And when she is there on her throne, on her sacred marriage bed, her Date Palm frond hair and her ability to put her roots into the ground, into the netherworld where she is able to use those roots to weave the hoop, the [53:09 puku] and the measuring rod, the [53:29 micu] linked together by the twined string by which one can now make an architecture, not out of symbolic plan but out of ritual measurement woven together, directed not by intelligence but frequencied as an energy of sentience.
Gaia was the first cult at Delphi, Themis was the second and the third was Phoebe which is the moon. The feminine [54:13] and Apollo was only the fourth. One of the qualities at Delphi in its deep mysteriousness is that one can have mystical experiences of the mysteriousness that emerges originally out of nature on level of mother earth, and I'll just give you an example, it's true example of a good friend of mine years ago. A photographer, an ex-Navy man went to Delphi and when he was there he was taking photos and he was told by an old man that he should not just take photos there of the sanctuary and of the deep rill that is Delphi with a nice view to the bay, and he said you need to go to Mount Parnassus behind Delphi because there you will find the Cave of Pan which is the origin of Delphi, because the original mythic image was there in the Cave of Pan near the top of the mountain and it was the way in which the measurement in a ritual comportment led to the founding of the original Delphi thousands of years before, back at the time of the fertile crescent of about 2500BC. So he began to climb up behind Delphi and it took him hours and hours and hours and finally he was getting completely exhausted by the heat, by the air and he began to hear pings in the air. And as he went on he heard more and more pings until it was like a cacophony surrounding him and thought perhaps I'm going crazy or having some kind of an odd experience here above Delphi. And he came over a ridge and there was a flock of goats with little bells and each bell was making a ping. And he was filled with wonder at this and was like gawking. And the goat herd was an old woman who had just one tooth and she thought he was smiling at her and she came up to him, old as she was, ugly as she was, still expectant, what else. And he said over and over again Pan, Pan, Pan and she finally realising the truth of the situation, the encounter, she pointed behind her up and so he went up from there kind of like in a daze and a wonderment and came over another little ridge and there was the Cave of Pan and he couldn't see anything unusual, it was like a gen cave in a mountain, what could there be? So he looked in the cave and there was nothing, nothing whatsoever and went deeper and finally in disgust he turned his little flashlight off and he leaned against the wall and felt something in his back. And he immediately turned the flashlight back on, turned around and there was a rock formation of the face of Pan that had nestled right into his back and he took a photo of it. I have a copy of that photo. As soon as he took the photo of that face of Pan he came out of the cave and he heard a car and he walked around this kind of little protuberance and there was a road from Delphi right up to where the Cave of Pan was. It was a tourist bus that was going to deliver people there. He had walked all this way for seemingly nothing but it was a mystical experience. So he decided instead of riding back down he would walk down the road and he said he got down about two thirds of the way and he found a nice spot shaded in the rocks and he was exhausted so he took a nap. And the nap extended almost until the next morning. And about 12 hours later he rose and it was a completely different day and he said he felt absently changed because when he went back down into Delphi, instead of Delphi being a tourist attraction he now felt its energy. And it has a kind of energy that is like a quivering V that keeps deepening. It's like a musical tone that goes out of hearing until you only feel it. You feel in the rib cage space the heart is the only thing that can detect the mysterious deep drone. It's like animals that can detect the sound of earthquakes before they happen. It is the earth herself in her iterative rumble of the frequency of aliveness and its' there at places like Delphi.
The mythic phase of our learning is to re-sensitise our experience to the images, to the feeling tones, to the oral language of experience that deepens mysteriously, nature's flow but also generates pristinely from the existentiality. The unity, the Te of existence itself, the mind does not participate this far at all in any of this. It will later on, it can do later on. At this particular phase of maturation it does not. The mind is not important enough, it's not a big enough part for it to take part in this and so the choreography of ritual action is extremely strong in experience, the mind is not. And so when the mythic flow of experience in its mysteriousness, it tends to shy away from the mind's impress, from the inculcation of symbolic structure upon experience. And what experience does is it will shrug off the mind's attempts to control it but it shrugs it off in a iterative, rhythmic way and this is one of the purposes then of dancing, the action in ritual is to shrug off in an iterative way the designs of the mind, to take control. To direct the action because the action is not directable in its primordiality, it is experientiable from existentiality. So that's a very deep thing.
Jane Ellen Harrison, because of her background, not just as a woman born in 1850s, she grew up in Victorian society. A woman was taught as a little girl to be seen and not heard. You don't need to go to university, you need to learn certain home things or if you're going to be a very elegant lady you have to learn deportment, how to board a carriage, how to sit down, how to enter a room. And at a certain stage of your maturation, you're sent to a finishing school to make sure that you are finished. That you can comport like a lady but you are not to be an intellectual. You are not to be brilliant and she was. I'll show you again a photo of her. I put several photos of her at different ages into the notes. She is 26 years old and you can see the elegance but she always in her reminisces says that beneath her elegance is a tough, gritty, Yorkshire woman. She says of her self that people that do not understand me. She says my favourite moral song is a girl ran, how proud we are, how pleased to show our clothes and call them rich and new when the poor sheep and silkworm wore that very clothing long before. Partly no doubt it was then my childish mind, I had a pleasant picture of an old sheep suitably attired in a Victorian bonnet with strings and a shawl, but chiefly it pleased me because it expressed my innate and still inveterate dislike and contempt for everything she can smart. Perhaps it is some complex cause but my own childish sufferings in my Sunday clothes though heaven knows they were plain enough anyhow. Even now when I see a faultlessly turned out man or a woman I always expect he or she will prove to be a fool and a bore. We cannot all be distinguished but for heaven's sake let us all be shabby and comfortable.
Why the elegance then, because she was ritually trying on what she was seeing in Greek art. All her early studies and books were on Greek art and the reason for this, she came from Evangelical family that would not allow any nannies from Catholic France, she only had either Yorkshire nannies who were Evangelical qua the region or they were German and the Germans at this time were the great developers of archaeology in classical Greece. So she learned as a child how to speak perfect German, perfect Greek, exquisite Latin, upper class English and she never learned to speak French except in an awkward way. When she was a young woman before she was associated with Cambridge University she did several books on Greek art all based upon German based archaeology and the English based anthropology. Anthropology began with Edward Tylor in England and developed with the genius of Sir James George Frazer and one can still run across the myth and ritual school JG Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists of which the centre was Jane Ellen Harrison. She was the dominating genius of it all because she brought anthropology and archaeology as a new focus not looking at the Greek heritage as philosophy or literature but looking at it as ritual evidence of an experience that was distorted by the modern mind, distorted by the Victorian mind, distorted by the early 20th Century mind. And she trained herself to the extent that one of the great German archaeologist's Wilhelm Dörpfeld, invited her to go on several archaeological expeditions with him and she made friends of all of these archaeologists including the great Sir Arthur Evans, he lived to be in his 90s and he was the excavator of Knossos in Crete. So she would go to the archaeological sites in a professional way with the best archaeologists in the world at the time, the first ones. She knew the anthropology from being friends with the originators and these two perspectives together along with her uncanny ability to get down, not to the facts but to get down to what do you do? So that these facts now occur and merge and become a ritual.
What steps do you actually do and in what dance rhythm do you do them so that not only does this occur existentially but it draws out of nature what the purpose was, that if you dance for rain it will rain. Whereas the mind driven modern mentality, modern sense the times of classical Greece is that you can't dance for rain and make it rain. How can that happen? Where's the causality? Where's the causality, it's not in the mind's structure. It's not in the mind's connections. It's in the way in which the experience and the flow of nature together make a condensation of existentiality so that it does occur. Because just as ritual will emerge whole out of nature, when experience flows in the dynamic field of nature it takes the directive lead as a higher integral and it's like putting a rudder in the flow, you can direct the flow. And so experience when it is danced with its images alive and its feeling tones vibrant and its language exactly right that will happen. And she says in her writings that she must have been a naive little girl but she believed in the power of naming three favourite books of hers. She said she got to Cambridge University and one of the first books assigned to her was Aristotle's Ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics. Nicomachus was Aristotle's father. The advice a father gives to a son, this is how we do these things because when they are done this way they are really done and something approves of that. And she said it was like a breath of fresh air because there was no Evangelism, there was no doctrine , there was this great space that the freedom of the person to not only recognise but to choose what to do and to be able to learn how to do this and then have the freedom to do it. And that one all of a sudden had this world where there was an adventure in actuality.
And the second book was Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, where he talked about time not being time which is a measurement, he used the French word durée, it is a duration frequency that has no measurement, it has an on-going dynamic that is not limited to form but is an energy frequency that is always on-going. And that evolution leaps not just emerges but dances, leaps like a ballerina who will do a pirouette or like a great dancer like Rudolph Nureyev who could do a double pirouette. One leaps into existence and by leaping in just exactly the right way what was existential just before that is now existentially refined by how you just now leapt and that is now what is in existence. So that the experience really now comes out of that refined leap rather than just any kind of movement before. And in this way before the mind even comes into play the heart learns to be wise about experience, to be livingly about the kind of language one uses. To be not just accurate about the images but of making sure that they are alive. One of the greatest examples I ever saw of this very thing when Marc Chagall was painting the Paris Opera ceiling, huge dome mural, the wedges of it were about 60ft high. And in this particular photograph he was doing the panel that is Mozart, has a deep yellow around the edge and he was up on a ladder and he was holding his hand against the colour to make sure it was alive, as he a Hasid artist genius. If the colours, if the images, if the feeling toned actions are alive, as in the ceiling of the Paris Opera not only is it alive but he entire building now has a crown of life and the entire building is alive and resonates to it, which it does. It is this quality not just a Sistine Chapel, not just a Chagall ceiling of the Paris Opera but all great works of art have this sentient liveness like [1:15:31].
It is this ability before there is a mind to dominate it, the roots of art are laid in the sention reality of an experience which flows like a vibrant frequency in the field of nature which finds itself on the woven ritual actualities in which then its own living experience will give wise to a mind which does not stop with itself as a centre of importance but will have the double capacity, one to be a mirror to reflect back truthfully and accurately what is existentially really happening or to be transparent like, not just a window but an opening, an open frame through which one can now let one's experience course and when it courses through it, it changes in such a way that it flows in a different way. It's flows differentially and vision and experience now weave. And that weaving of experience is a higher integral by two orders further from the weaving of ritual. The ritual sequences that are woven together may make a basket but when you weave visionary consciousness and experience together the basket now that comes out will be a work of art. It will be an exquisite basket or it will be exquisite ceramic or it will be an exquisite imagery that is put out in art occurs in this way. It is a magical form in that it does not at all limit itself to the capacities of the integral mind. What it does, forms of art, invite the integral mind to explore possibilities it never would have conceived of. Why? Because those possibilities have more dimensions than the mind's structure have. A work of art is at least six dimensional. The mind at the most, the most super-yogi ever had a four dimensional mind. It's only when that's opened up that the quintessence of consciousness transforms the four dimensions of space, time into a completely new hand of presentation of new possibilities.
Our learning talks about the mother, talks about Gaia, talks about Themis, one of the most profound figures in the 20th Century was called the mother, Sri Aurobindo's consort and lady, the mother and her great architecture was to construct the first planetary city, Auroville, the first planetary city. And she constructed this city in Pondicherry, which is south from Madras, about 100 miles or so. And what's interesting not only that it was French/India at one time but that Pondicherry, if you go inland from it to the centre of the lower Peninsula of India you will find there a city called Salem, not Jerusalem but just Salem. And Salem is exactly midway between where St Thomas landed in India on the Kerala Coast and where he is buried in the Southern Suburbs of Madras, it's called St Thomas Hill. And Salem is exactly in the middle, it was the fulcrum of the early introduction of hedonistic Judaism's vision into Southern India. That area of India is Tamil Nadu and the Tamils as we will get to later on next week have not only temple constructs that are very, very extraordinary, they a Tamil Temple Hymns and right on the edge of Tamil Nadu, in between Madras and directly across of the coast is the great new technological centre of India Bangalore. One of the investments there is IBM, is putting about seven billions dollars into Bangalore to build a world centre for computers. There are at least 2000 or 3000 companies locating there, because this area of India is not the northern intellectual mental area of India, this is the primordial sentient vibration of an ancient India that has gone through all its transforms without stopping at the mind. And so instead of finding something there which is mental, one fines a sentience that reaches all the way up and begins to touch the developments of historical consciousness out of which cosmic science.

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