Myth 4
Presented on: Saturday, July 29, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to Myth 04 and what we're doing again is we're setting up a frame, a square of attention, and we're doing it with a special sequence of one, two, three, four so that we actually have a pair of pairs, because we're working with an ancient wisdom concourse which did not take subjects in categories and teach them by rote. Instead it was an on-going concourse that had no beginning and no end but within it, when one came to talk about it, to share images, to share feelings through language, there was a dramatic beginning, an extension of complication, and an end. This plot was the myth, the mythos, and so we're looking now to come to some square of attention where the first four presentations of myth will make an alignment with the first four presentations of the phase that came before myth which was ritual, and those in turn will come into an alignment with the first four presentation of our very first phase which was nature. But instead of having, like in a croquet game the hoops arranged, nature as an initial phase does not have a form, it only has a process.
It's only when existence emerges and becomes cinched through polarity that form is able to take the dynamic that nature occurs as and cinch it together as energy put into a form that will hold, that will have stability but it's stability is not static it is iterative and vibrant. And so all forms do not simply emerge but they are always emergent and so the way in which in the Western tradition we used to talk about this is that this is a becoming, it's not something that has become but it's a becoming, it's a gerund, which is strange because the other word that was used cognate with it was being which is also a gerund. Be-ing, become-ing and so there was a confusion about 400 years BC, there was a confusion between something that was and something that wasn't but was trying to be, and one of the classic solutions to this was a distinction made by a white-haired sage, very long white hair, wore long white garments and his name was Parmenides and Parmenides was like this wild wisdom sage from Elea in Greece. And he wrote a mystical poem which was one of the first great Pre-Socratic as they say, before Socrates, one of the first Pre-Socratic Greek philosophic classics, The Way of Parmenides had a particular phrase embedded in it immediately and the phrase was this, 'What is is and what isn't isn't.' And that they never meet. And it produced a sensation at the time and the first person to try and deal with it was a man named Heraclitus. He said it isn't that something is and then something isn't isn't, it's that there is a constant becoming that never ceases. There is nothing that is and there is nothing that isn't, there is only ceaseless becoming and the ceaselessness of the becoming is what is real. And he used a phrase saying you cannot ever step in the same stream twice. You cannot step into time as a flow consecutively in the same way. Whatever it is that you have done now affects what can be done in every aspect to it and so you find the beginnings, in Heraclitus, of a Greek sense of karma which for the Greeks instead of being karmic was causal. That it isn't just that you cannot take a second step in the same way because of some karmic complication, but that the sequence of causality is such that they are connected, that those are points which connect and make a line of development and lines and points and crossing lines making angles, making triangles, making squares that there is a geometricity then to sequence. And that the essence of ritual existence is the comportment accurately to those causal sequence steps that developed the geometry.
One of the aspects though in between Parmenides and Heraclitus was that behind both of them was the genius of Pythagoras, who had unlike almost any of the other classical Greeks, had studied for decades outside of the Greek ethos. Though he was born on Samos, he was born on Samos because his mother was a priestess of the goddess Artemis. Samos is off the coast of Turkey in the Aegean Sea but his father was from the Near East from a city being currently bombed, from Tyre. Mnesarchus ran shipping routes because he was Phoenician merchant, very wealthy, and his ships went all the way through the Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar out into the Atlantic Coast of Spain and Morocco and perhaps as far as what is today Britain and Ireland. But he also had ties like all the Phoenicians had of not only having shipping lanes that went through the Mediterranean, but he had caravan routes that ran in ancient tandem all the way up to the Caspian Sea, all the way over to the Persian Gulf down to the Red Sea and from there along the South Arabian Coast all the way to India. Now those trade routes sound like they're very sophisticated, but Pythagoras' father living about 600BC, 550BC comes 2000 years after the great pioneering of those trade routes was done, as we have seen, by the father of the woman who wrote the Inanna epic. Enheduanna's father Sargon the Great of Akkad set up an empire that ran trade routes everywhere from the Aegean to India by 2400BC.
In that peculiar quality of early pioneering and setting up for the very first time, it was required in order to make this work to take a huge, what we would today call a quantum leap, a jump of complexity orders and the largest threshold which was leapt, quantum leapt, was the threshold between culture and civilisation. You can have cultures that agree to get along because their neighbours or cultures that are fighter cultures at war but to have a civilisation means to transform the cultures, so that what transforms is that the mythic horizon of experience, which is the cognate thread of process in myth, that mythic horizon of experience is the way in which cultures have their flow with nature and they are, all cultures are, natural. They relate because of the parallel but civilisations are supernatural in the sense that they do not look to nature to be cognate with, to flow with, but that the flow of historical consciousness in civilisations flows in a harmonic with the flow of vision. And it is visionary consciousness that runs contrary to nature in the sense that it does not fit into nature like experience does but it weaves transforms whenever it comes into contact. And so vision is magical. It is magical in the sense that it is supernatural, in that it will change nature and as it changes nature now what existentially, iteratively, vibrantly emerges from nature emerges from a transformed nature and has a magicality to it. If you're favoured with it you will say nature now has a special charm. If you are ill-favoured, nature has a peculiar demonic quality. So that experience in myth now tends to have a seesaw effect, not just between good and bad but between something which is naturally whole and something that is magically suspect, because it can be charming or demonic at the same time. That it isn't nature that is charming or demonic but is the weaving transform of vision and we saw last week, where the huge commitment of cultures collecting by the dozens to have to go through a historical vision, a transform into civilisation, their concern is that human experience does not stay in myth but transforms completely to a historical sense. So that civilisations live in a high powered conscious flow that not only transforms nature and not only transforms the symbolic mind, but transforms the entire cycle of nature so that now it does not just go in its circularity, in its cycle, or even in its ellipse, but that there is a transform to the entire thing and one comes out with like an infinity sign. And so vision, when it first occurs, makes a challenge to the mind and makes a challenge to nature, but when historical consciousness develops and comes into being a civilisation myth now has to give way to this. This is anathema to all cultures, to all peoples because it means now giving up seemingly all ties to nature and instead of having the confidence that one could return back to the safety of nature, that one's experience can be refreshed, that the whole purpose of having rituals that are done right, one of the great preliminaries is always to purify one's self so that one can go back to nature. So that nature will accept you, Mother Nature will let you come back in. You are part of the family of the whole cycle of what is natural. If that entire cycle is supernatural, transformed, then experience is not safe in nature ever again. The mind classically faced with this dilemma will choose, instead of struggling with the incommensurabilities of it will choose to be abstract, and the mind choosing to be abstract bastardises its natural integral quality.
The mind is made to bring things together, bring them together in ideas, bring the images together in an imagination, bring the feelings together into a sense of one's self, of the individuality of being the centre for a whole target of processes, of phases, of developments, and that there is where I am. I may stand there, I may be there, whereas the civilisation, starting with vision, changes the centre to a pivot. It is no longer a centre, a centre point. There is no longer the confidence that something stays there, that at the centre all of it is integrated and is whole and is unified individually, and so one of the great challenges that came by the development in the last couple hundred years, the challenges were how is it that we will be able to maintain the valuation of individuality, the valuation of experience that is able to be at home in nature? The alignment of our ideas and our imagination with the way things are done in existence, the existential things. How can we have a confidence in a referentiality that what we think and what we do and see and work with are capable of an alignment, of experience being able to not only correlate them together but to make a sense of logicality about them? And increasingly the mind in its abstraction, as we will see when we get to symbols in a couple of months, the mind once it begins to abstract, its first plan, it's first strategy is to make an abstraction of logic so that the logicality now dominates the ritual world, that the actions must be in sequences that make sense to the mind. And this of course sabotages, in a very curious way, the ability of one's mythic experience to be natural, because instead of experience seeking to be natural, it seeks to be contained within the symbol ritual alignments, the geometricity, the abstraction of it that we fit into the shapes that have been cut out by the mind saying if we do such and so we will be safe not naturally but we will be safe in the complete integral cycle. And so we are lured away from living in such a way that we live mythically within the flow of nature, we now live within the structure of mentality. And that structure of mentality is strong enough to protect itself from the transforms of consciousness. And so one of the hidden qualities is that a little learning is a dangerous thing.
Once you get to the point of control and you have the world arranged according to your doctorates you have experience conforming to this, you have the ritual specified and laid out: as long as everyone does this in this way we will then be safe, and your appeal to nature is naive. Your appeal to try to have your experience flow within a natural flow makes you primitive. Your whole safety lies in your learning how to do, learning how to experience, learning think in the ways that we have worked out for you. And of course the difficulty in this is that nature is not co-optable, the process of nature does not stay within the geometricities that are put out. And so one constantly has this repairing of fences, repairing of boundaries, the ceaseless dissolving of the boundaries. The strongest mental tyranny structures ever made on the planet were those that came in the enlightenment of the 18th Century, in the 1700s, where the power of thought, of mental indoctrination, was such that the very thought that nature could offer some kind of a challenge to it was considered in itself an artificiality of not naivety but of being primitive, and anyone who matured themselves beyond that now with their nice powdered wigs in the salons of Louis 14th France, everything was going to be exactly the way that we have planned it. Even the planets and the universe moves with the geometricity that Newton has shown and that we have come to understand and we are in control. And that entire view was sabotaged twice over by two men almost about the same time. One of them was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was a wild French [23:21] intellectual who had lived fabulously and would come to write one of the great confessions of all time, a book full of such exploits as most men would daydream of, but Jean-Jacques was out on Lake Geneva in a row boat trying to think over some escapade that had gone the wrong way, why would she act that way. And he floated on the calm waters of Lake Geneva and he said as if by some magic the entire surface of Lake Geneva became a 'placid mirror' upon which he was the only human being floating in complete calm and he dissolved back into that complete calm. The mirror of the context of nature, and out of this Rousseau said when he came to he knew that the world was a false construct and out of this came the beginnings of the French philosophies critiques that civilisation had become a prison, had become a tyranny and was one the routes of the French Revolution.
The other individual was Benjamin Franklin, in the proverbial, trying to figure out what lightening was, flying his kite with the little key and understanding finally that lightening as he called it, was electrical. And not only electrical but it could be contained in these beautiful little jars from the Netherlands from Leyden, Leyden Jars and you could arrange a series of say a dozen or eighteen of these Leyden Jars and you could store the universal energy of lightening, electricity, in a battery and you could apply this energy from the battery and you could make electrical connections and that man could work with nature in such a way that nature let him transform. Transform not in the sense of against her, either charmingly or demonically, but that there was an enlargement of nature and that man then was not supernatural so much but that he was a forbearer of a new quality of nature, a refined nature. That the transformation was not to make things magical, either demonic or charming, but to open up and expand the applications of nature and out of this came a different sense that experience was now experimental. And when Rousseau and Franklin's insights flowed together, the quality was that individual could experiment with their own experience and come to a refinement which had not been there before, and that this refined being was no longer an individual but had a multiplicity of an array of possibilities. Instead of being the coordinate geometrically of an alignment, A is A logically, now one will be whatever ratios one would like to develop. It isn't just one but it can also be written as one over one and then one can develop a whole series of ratios and out of this came one of the most primordial revolutions on the planet, the development of what we today colloquially just call classical music.
The difference between an ancient music and a medieval music and even a Renaissance music and people who were composers like Bach, Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven on up is extraordinary and colossal. One of the mythic origins of this, this is from a collection of essays in tribute to Edward Burnett Tylor, the founder of anthropology, for his 75th birthday published Oxford 1907, we'll get to Tylor in just a little bit. This is The Ethnological Study of Music from a man from King's College, London and he says:
We distinguish to kinds of scale, one is by collecting all the tones utilised in the various tunes of a given people, the folk songs, the folk motives, while the others form by collecting tones which are to be found in a single tune. We may term the former a general scale and each of the latter a particular scale. The music of a given people therefore consists of a single general scale and a series of particular scales.
We will sing this song or we will hum this tune but all of those tunes and all of those songs are a part of the cultural inheritance which we have. The tones which a people employ in their music are not merely dependent on aesthetic appropriateness, their exact pitch is in part determined by the construction of musical instruments, what do you have to play on. For the ancient Near East it wasn't just a flute but they discovered that if you have two flutes together with the same mouthpiece, that you could produce double notes at the same time and instead of having just a feeling from one of the notes you had a special kind of odd feeling because it was two notes at the same time and that's why the Pipes of Pan, if you were not au natural so that you could just simply hear it and respond to it, it would drive you crazy, because you would not be able to identify what you were feeling. This double also was there in terms of the olfactory sense. If you take frankincense it is different from regular herbs, different from regular scents, frankincense has a peculiar quality of awakening two different feeling tones from the olfactory sense; and not only frankincense doing that but myrrh, especially when it is burned as an incense, myrrh has a very complex quality, not just of two olfactory senses being activated at the same time but actually, if one is able to become scientifically discursive, 16. So using myrrh as an incense 16 different feeling tones at the same time came out from that. This is a very curious thing because in order to duplicate the complex quality of myrrh by itself as an incense, the ancients worked out a series of 16 different scents that would come together and in Greek that incense is called kyphi and kyphi was used when myrrh not able to be found. Not that it couldn't be found, but it could be found in only one of the area of the planet, Southern Arabia, what is today Oman, and the place was named Ubar, and unless you had access to Southern Arabia by shipping or by complex caravans that went along the coast, either the Persian Gulf Coast on the Arabian side or the Arabian side of the Red Sea, access to myrrh was impossible and so kyphi developed just in case the supply was cut off, because the temple incense had to be offered once the complexity was gotten to that stage.
Here's about musical instruments: their pitch is determined by the construction of musical instruments and by the difficulties of instrumental technique. Not just the flutes and the tambourines and the percussion, but there were developments that lead to extremely complex musical instruments and one of the most complex ever developed was in Indonesia called the gamelan. The gamelan, the primordial gamelan, the best way to call it is the xylophone. It is able to be played in such a way that the resonances of one metal piece struck carries over and so the sounds accumulate. One of the interesting qualities is that the great Chinese naval expeditions in the 1400s went in their great trading of 6000 hundred ships at a time, maybe 10,000 people involved, they went all the way to the coast of Africa and took the xylophone from Indonesia to Africa. And the African sense of rhythmic complexity was superior to that of the Indonesians and the Chinese, and so you find a development in African music after about 1500s that becomes enormously complex. Not a geometric complexity of the mind but a visionary complexity of the body moving in a rhythm which is not just natural but is supernatural as well at the very same time. And so you find a very curious thing. Why was it not developed in China? Why was it not developed in Greece? Why was it not developed in those two broad areas? Because of this: mathematical principals have always influenced the fixation of the pitch of tones, whenever civilisation has sufficiently advanced to enable calculation to do so. Among the Greeks Pythagoras divided the string in ratio of two to three and the Chinese shortened the pipe in the same ratio. They both chose the same way. That kind of geometric ratioing, thus they produced the interval of a fifth, two to three, and they divided the shortened pipe or string again in the same ratio and repeated the procedure, thus obtaining a geometrical progression of fifths, bringing these relations to the initial tone. Two-thirds, two-thirds squared, two-thirds cubed, two-thirds to the forth, etc., etc. and so you have powers of a two-thirds. Pythagoras learned this from the Egyptians.
Ancient Egyptian mathematics was not Greek for several thousand years, 2500 years before Pythagoras. They were able to calculate two-thirds of anything but they did not have a complex mathematic. They had a ritual application of this and so if they would have a complicated step of applications of the two-thirds rule. If you get interested in this a man named Giddings did a book on Ancient Egyptian mathematics, I think Dover Paperbacks produces it.
One of the qualities that we're trying to understand and appreciate is that we come out of a very complex 5000 year period of not civilisation but of failed civilisations. And when the civilisations fail they cannot simply decay and go back into some kind of cultural ethos, they don't go back to a cultural ethos, they don't go back to nature and just live naturally. It's true and wilderness is the preservation of man, but because of its origining not because of one being able to get back safely to it. You cannot go home again but you can bring the hominess of origin back into play in a large orchestration, into an infinity sign. What happens in decay is that the decay tends to go back and find safety in an oceanic visionary quality, which of course doesn't occur in nature, it occurs in the transform of the mind. Out of the mysteriousness of experience into the mysticality of vision. And so failed civilisations seek to reproduce a safe natural mythology of experience in the transformed form of a mystical quality of changing experience and nature in just the right way. This is a reduction. It puts vision not into its own ecology of development, as we will see in our work, but it sieves it so that it is under a captive quality in an increasingly suspicious mind, imprisoning the energies that would be there in art, that would be there in science, imprisoning the dynamics of history, the dynamics of visionary consciousness into mental forms of them, into ideas of them. And as long as the mind is dealing with ideas of them it is happy.
One of the great sociologists of the 20th Century, David Riesman, looking at the America of 1947 after the Second World War wrote a tremendous indictment of it called The Lonely Crowd, as long as you are part of the crowd you'll be okay. The moment that you go against it you will be shunned and you will be lonely. The crowd is not concerned with freedom, the crowd is concerned with the appearance of freedom, and the appearance of freedom is to be on top of fashion which is ceaseless change. And as long as one is contemporary with ceaseless fashion as it comes in and out of season and out of play you are then free, are you not? Riesman ends The Lonely Crowd, with a second volume called Individualism Reconsidered and with that he levelled a devastating critique of education, especially in America. And a short little book, we'll bring it next week because we're trying to understand why it is that what we're doing, we're learning how to unlearn from a mind which is addicted to and habituated to a whole array of artificialities. And at the same time to bring it back through in a recalibration so that it can really be a mind, it can really be an integrator and that the strongest part of integration is to leave a space in the centre for transform to pivot so that nature can participate in consciousness and consciousness can participate in nature.
Let's take a little break and come back.
Next week with Myth 05 we move to a new pair, we're always pairing our materials and we're using books because books have been for 2000 years the structure of the mind and the structure of the civilisation. It's true that we live in a time where both that mind and that civilisation no longer work. But in order for us to have a new mind and a new civilisation we have to be able to come forth out of the ruins of the old. So we pair books together so we do not have texts which imply subjects, but we have a ratio which implies a harmonic. One of the books we're going to use for the next four weeks is Gladys Reichard's classic Navajo Medicine Man Sand Paintings. The other is Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The reason for these, the sand paintings of the Navajo are very similar to the Vajrayana paintings in Tibet because they are related peoples.
There were two incursions into North America and South America from Asia, 25,000 years ago the first incursion was of South Asians, like Indochinese and they went all the way down to the tips of the South America and they went to the Southern part of the United States, what is today the United States. The second incursion was about 12,000 years ago, different blood type, they were from Northern Asia, they're very related to the Siberians and the Tibetans. My daughter, adopted daughter, was Black Foot and when she was two I had Karma Thinley Rinpoche give a blessing for her and he noted that she was indistinguishable from a Tibetan child, both psychically and physically. She had the blue birth mark at the base of the spine that all North American Indians from the second incursion came with, whereas it's not true of the others. They're different blood types, different language types. The Navajo are interesting because they were originally, their language group is called Athabaskan, they were from Southern Alaska, Juneau, that area, and migrated about 1500AD to the American South West. Their migration included an acclamation of the horse so that you will always find that Navajos are very tall and they ride horses, whereas next to them are the Pueblo peoples who are very short, they do not ride horses they walk. They speak an Uto-Aztecan language, the Navajos' Athabaskan is of the north like the Algonquin language. So that they sand paintings of the Navajo medicine men and one of the greatest of the medicine men, his Spanish was name was Miguelito but he was called Red Point because of a place in the landscape that he was resonant to.
Gladys Reichard, as we will discover, is one of the world's greatest anthropologists and she went to live with the Navajo in a very special way. She went to live with them so she learned like a Navajo woman would do, how to raise her sheep, how to shear her sheep, how to card the wool, how to spin the woollen threads, how to make a loom, how to weave your rug on the loom and by the time you're finished with that whole process the sheep have gone through a year and they're ready to be sheared again. She learned how to make her own Navajo weaving. She learned the language, she did the dictionary, one of the earliest dictionaries. She was always honoured as a daughter of the people and her work is one of the classic works in anthropology. Not of someone who intellectually abstracts the culture, but who is able to insert her person in such a way that she was able to live the mythic experience in keeping with nature which almost all North American Indians still preserve. They preserve the ancient Palaeolithic technique, and it is a technique, of being able to have your vision flow with nature in such a way that it does not scramble the process of your experience. And when your visionary consciousness weaves completely with nature like a Navajo rug, the experience that you have are the images that are embedded in the woven fabric of consciousness and nature. So that the feelings, the images, the mythos, the language is the pattern in the weave. But that the weave is not of things, the weave is of the process of nature and the process of vision so that the process of experience now flows freely between the two of them and the great image of this is that one now is capable of the thunderbird. One is capable of being on that heaped accumulation, the cumulus clouds of fertility rising above the mountains, and one is now able to participate in the whole cycle.
We first run across that bird in Inanna, written about 4400 years ago. The thunderbird then is called the Anzu bird and here's how it reads. The first time that the thunderbird ever appeared in a written literature on this planet. When Ereshkigal, the sister of Inanna who rules the other world, a place of the dead radioactive to life once you are there, you may not leave, except by a substitution.
When Ereshkigal was given the great below for her domain, the god of wisdom, Father Enki set sale for the underworld and the underworld rose up and attacked him, at that time a tree, a single tree, a Huluppu tree was planted by the banks of the Euphrates. The south wind pulled at its roots and ripped at its branches until the waters of the Euphrates carried it away.
I plucked the tree from the river. I brought it to my holly garden. I tended the tree waiting for my shining throne and bed.
This is Inanna who takes the Huluppu tree which is a Date Palm, from the trunk of the tree which has a wood that can be worked with and as you know in contemporary Iraq and places like that wood is very scarce. The Huluppu tree, the Date Palm trunk was used to make two special sacrificial ritual items that founded her whole mythology. The two great attractors of her mythology were the ritual implements made from the trunk of the Date Palm, the Huluppu tree. One was her throne, because she is queen. She is the queen of heaven and she is the queen of the earth, brought together not of a culture but of the weaving of all cultures into a civilisation that is capable of being expanded.
Enheduanna was the first international poetess, the first literature in the world actually written. She went to the 42 different temples that were in Sumer in Akkad from the Persian Gulf up until the Anatolian Mountains, Lake Van, Lake Urmia, what is today in the area of Tabriz, in the area of almost up to the Black Sea. Her throne is one of the ritual implements, the other is her bed, her sacred bed. And it is the palm fronds that are woven together that make the mattress of the bed; the trunk makes the bed in its frame, in its shape, in its legs that hold it up. The normal sleeping was on mats on the floor. Inanna's bed is raised from the floor and woven so that she is able to not only sleep but to make love raised from the earth, still on the earth but royally raised so as a sacred marriage, like the throne is a sacred throne. And the fronds of the palm, the crest of it is woven to make the support for her sacred marriage and it gives a complete new look. The ancient Christian Palm Sunday is the Palm Sunday just before the crucifixion, before Easter, before Good Friday and that Palm Sunday, little crosses are woven out of the same kinds of palm fronds. It's not a crucifixion; it's a sacred marriage of a completely different kind that blows through the threshold of death as if it weren't there.
That's the whole point, not that one suffers death, but that one shows the amperage of the spirit, to completely blow through the threshold of the appearance of death, which is not real. Its appearance, it is only imagery. The roots of the Huluppu tree, the Date Palm were woven together to make a hoop, a circle, and part of the roots were a cord that linked that circle to a rod. And it was by this circle and this length of cord and this rod that one built anything, houses, palaces, cities, the whole architecture of man on earth is from the woveness of the roots, the whole celestial sacredness is from the woveness of the fronds and linking them together are the throne and the royal marriage bed from the trunk of the tree. In the Huluppu tree though, in the Date Palm, at the crest, living there.
Then a serpent who could not be charmed made its nest in the roots of the tree. The Anzu bird set his young in the branches of the tree and the dark maid Lilith built her home in the trunk. I wept, how I wept. Yet they would not leave my tree.
So the roots that would be of the architectural, the measurement, has a serpent demon that will not leave, will not allow you to utilise those roots to get to them. The Anzu bird is in the crest, you may not come to harvest these dates or this palm frond, and Lilith, the dark demonic feminine encases herself in the tree so that you may not utilise this. The person who comes to the rescue is Gilgamesh, the great hero.
From the trunk of the tree he carved a throne for his holly sister.
From the trunk of the tree Gilgamesh carved a bed for Inanna. From the roots of the tree she fashioned a pukku for her brother, the first architect king, Gilgamesh.
From the crown of the tree Inanna fashioned a mikku for Gilgamesh the hero of Uruk, that he was able to weave the basis upon which a sacred marriage bed would be able to be utilised by both together, raised, on the earth but above it. And that Anzu bird became later on, a sign of how the cycle of historical time in its mythos was encased in the return of this Anzu bird in the shape of a Phoenix. And that the Phoenix was living in only one place in the world, in Southern Arabia because its home was in the myrrh bushes of Oman, and every 500 years it would take off from there and fly to a very sacred place where it would, because of its fiery nature, it would combust and burn and from the ashes of its birth that would the way in which the young Phoenix would be nutritionally brought into being and the young Phoenix would be able to emerge, not just from the ashes but because of the ashes having burnt the egg in such a way that the new Phoenix would be able to hatch and come forth. And this cycle of the Phoenix of every 500 years was one of the great metronomes of early civilisation. Cultures feared the bird, civilisations used the cycle of the bird to give them a sense of the larger structures of time, the larger shapes for the harmonic of human life.
When we get to trying to understand mythology we're trying to understand that it's not something that is a lie, it's not something that is made up, it's not a myth but that the mythos itself is the dynamic of experience and its flow carries images within it that are wild, like nature is wild, and only have their taming if the ritual actions have allowed these images to come out of the exactness with which one has moved, the actions that one takes in the ritual. Ensure that the images will be clear and be distinct. The mind thinks that it makes the images distinct, it does not. It receives the images from what we would call character. The character of sentience which is there in the mythic flow of experience, that bases its traction on the ritual actions having their sequences, capable of being woven. If the sequences are unrelated to each other they cannot be woven together. Now what you have is something that is unravelled. A ritual comportment of action sequences that is not able to be woven will end up in a tangle, a plate of spaghetti. The only way that that happens is not because of nature, not because of ritual and not because of myth; the only way that that happens is an interference of the mind. If you cannot weave the bed of the fertility of the world which is the sacred marriage not only of human beings but the way in which plants and all animals occur is that there is a woven place in existence for that to actually occur, for that emergence to have its place and the emergence is not in the mind, it's in the existentiality of existence itself. If the mind usurps the place then the weaving of experience is something that is done artificially in the mind and does not really happen in existence, does not really happen in action. Only a projected surrogate of existence, a projected surrogate of action, records the thought that one has done this. The thought that this is the way it should be, and thus tyranny is the cinching of artificiality that is undetectable by a mind that is not integrating from experience with is flowing on its traction of ritual comportment that really iteratively emerges from nature in a pristine way of existentiality. Hence the whole purpose of a mythos is to ensure that one's experience is able to flow with nature and also weave with vision. If it can flow along with nature then one says of this, this is the river of life, if it can weave with it one then has the boats on which to sail on the river of life. And so it is the whole image of a great river with a special boat that is the proof that one has a mind that is pure, has come into this ecology, the circle where every aspect, every phase of the integral is available.
The classic dissembling in civilisation that is not there in cultures is that civilisations very quickly reduced things to their subjects, to their categories. To the various disciplines, this is what this does and this is different from that, this study belongs to literature. This study belongs to exercise, this study, our subject here is something completely different from your subject. This is the unravelling and all civilisations on the planet have met their doom, literally, by becoming unravelled. Not a single one of them has ever worked. The way in which the cultural sentience of understanding this classically went was that there must be a lifecycle to civilisations like there's a lifecycle to existential things. Like everything will have its birth, will have its maturity, it will pass away its old age and its death. And this assumption, this cultural assumption that civilisations are like existential forms that have a life history has been the most devastating conviction of the last 200 years, because the conviction increasingly is that the civilisations that were left are old, they deserve to die. And that something new will just come automatically in its place, will automatically be born. The crucial difference is that while a culture can naturally have its iteration, a civilisation does not come from a natural iteration. It comes from a visionary origin and not from nature. Its development is through works of art as prisms not through rituals. Its experience is not the experience of cultural imagery and cultural feelings and just spoken language but of a historical transform of that. And the most devastating of all is that the mind is not the integral, not the be-all. That the cosmos itself as a phase of science comes not into realisation but occurs as a form of it all in reality and the difficulty for the mind while it can participate in almost transform it cannot participate voluntarily in its transform of itself from realisation to reality. It simply will not do this. Not that it can't do this, it will not do this. And so the difficulty comes when the mythic sense of experience is challenged by the historical sense of consciousness, the mind will not allow that to occur and so what you get is you get a reflective regression that seems completely natural to the mind that if you're going to talk about the cosmos you have to talk about it in terms of its mythic images. Its feeling toned integrals. And so you get a cosmology that is a mental mythology instead of an historical disclosure, the historical disclosure will disclose that this is all real. Whereas the mythic surrogate discloses that what we are doing is realisable and the choice every time that a civilisation reaches this crisis is for the best minds, the most courageous persons to choose to find a new myth. It is a dead choice because it is the final key to the way in which it will not work, it will not happen. One of the origins of understanding this came in the latter part of the 19th Century, after about 100 years after Franklin and Rousseau, it became apparent in the latter part of the 19th Century that what was happening is that the trust in the physicality, in the social cultural structure was beginning to dissolve, beginning to fade. To not have the confidence of the tenacity of the stability that it once had.
And as the 19th Century went further and further towards the 20th Century it became more and more apparent that the certainty of the world was literally dissolving and the archetypal example of this was the discovery in 1896 of x-rays, that there was such a powerful quality loose in reality that made the certainty of existential things simply ghostlike and as a result of that you found a huge mythological interest in extrasensory perception, in ghosts, in ghost stories, in psychic events and of course the central figure in that was William James who was the first President of the Psychical Research Society. Who had in 1890 published two big volumes, the first text book on psychology as a subject but if you read into William James' big epic making two volume psychology it's not about a subject, it is a presentation of an array of human capacities which is more anthropological, the study of man rather than psychology, the study of the psyche.
The great contemporary of William James was E.B. Tylor the founder, not of the subject of anthropology, he said of anthropology it was the complete study of man in every aspect of him and when he did his first volumes of primitive culture, two volumes done in 1871, it went through several editions, by 1903 there was a fifth edition of it out and he kept expanding it. The subtitle is researches into the development of mythology first philosophy, religion, language, art and custom. In the two volumes, in volume one mythology is three complete chapters out of eleven and he says among those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge to be dispelled by a little more is the believe in an almost boundless creative power of the human imagination. The superficial student amazed in a crowd of seemingly wild and lawless fancies which he thinks have no reason in nature nor pattern in this material world at first concludes them to be new births from the imagination of the poet, the tale teller and the see-er, but little by little in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province of the poets land has been shaped and built over and people backward from our own times, the course of mental history may be traced through the changes brought by modern schools of thought and fancy upon an intellectual inheritance handed down to them from earlier generations and earlier, and the effect of those was to produce the impetus not only for James' great array of psychology but for the development of Freud's interpretation of dreams.
And one had all of a sudden a quality where the mythology in order to be rescued from the oblivion of the fragmented spaghetti of ineffectual existence was re-woven in the mind as a new science of psychology but at the same time was being explored in a completely new way by the development of anthropology. Our interest in this is that that period of anthropology from the late 1860s to perhaps the early 1940s, in that 80 year period the strongest motivation for an anthropological understanding was the North American Indian. It was out of the development of understanding that the language differentiation in the North American Indian populations was the greatest in the world. For instance, in Los Angeles there were more than 20 language groups. That's more linguistic diversity than all of Europe. Plus many dialects because it was always a crisscross oasis trading ground. Every conceivable tribe had their little liaisons coming in and through. Los Angeles was not a mess but always an incredible array of more possibilities than any one culture could ever have entertained.
It was the study of American Indian languages that most interest Thomas Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase extended the United States beyond the Mississippi river all way to the Pacific Ocean and he collected and had made up the first original grammars and vocabularies of the various Indian languages and he collected them together in the White House. And when he retired to go to Monticello his whole purpose was to bring all the American Indian languages together in an enlightenment study of what would be a proto-linguistics though wagon with the trunk of all these dictionaries was lost in a river crossing and that opportunity was lost to Jefferson. Was reconstructed at the end of the 19th Century by a group of anthropologists centring around Franz Boas and a genius named Edward Sapir and it was this that formed the basis of the modern study of linguistics, out of the study of American Indian languages.
What was startling was that the time indexing in American Indian languages, the personal differential conscious array was more complex than either the classic Asian or the classic European civilisations. The only place in the world that you found a cognate complexity was in the Australian Aborigines, in the Bantu Southern African peoples and in the Indians of America you found a complexity that was based upon a rhythmic harmonic that was not reducible to a mental geometry. It had to be lived through and carried into a spiritual amplification in order to not be understood but to be appreciated. And so this education is very much in that kind of a tone. It is something to do long enough and close enough until the appreciative quality begins to engender itself and when it does the understanding will be there but it will be there in its proportion.
The clearest symbolic understanding is only one eighth of the entire array and the array is not a dead array like a measurement but it's an array like the octave of a musical scale. One can have an indefinite number of compositions once you have that scalar as we have discovered by the early 20th Century. There are also an infinite number of possible scalars. Most of Western music is based on the octave, most of Asian music on the pentatonic scale. We know from Schoenberg on through electronic music that there are an infinite number of music scales. One can use 12 tones, one can use enough notes in a computer music that you could have 200 million in the scalar and make musical compositions out of it.
We live in a realm where the next civilisation will be the star system minimally and the culture will be the planet altogether. The entire planet will be a culture. The entire star system will be a civilisation and they have that kind of a proportionate relationship. This planet is 8000 miles in diameter. The star system is one light year in diameter, several billion times the size of it. This is the scalar, this is the ratio of a culture to a civilisation but the civilisation is not the container, the civilisation is prismatic form like works of art and shows the array of possibilities. One light year in a galaxy that is 30,000 light years just in radius and probably close to 75,000 light years in its nominal diameter and that the nearest large galactic structure to us is 2 million light years away and that one can see 13 to 14 billion light years where there are literally more galaxies than there are grains of sand in the Ganges. For our next culture the planet seems huge, it is a handful. And for the next civilisation the star system seems huge, it's just as far as the symmetry of arms would embrace as a new prism, as a new lens, and our frontier is not a Louisiana purchase but it's exploration of an interstellar frontier. Within 20 light years of this star system there are several hundred star systems. Within 100 light years of this there are several million star systems, a world without end.
To be able to explore that takes a recalibration and that's what this is. One of the great anthropologists who came out of the American Indian experience was AL Kroeber in 1962 in Chicago. He published a roster of civilisations and culture. About a century after Tylor's origins of anthropology one of the interesting things about AL Kroeber, he and his wife Theodora adopted into their own home the last Indian of a vanished tribe, his name was Ishi and they raised him in their family. And he sensitised Kroeber and his wife and his daughter to the Palaeolithic array of American Indian time tensing and of a person spirit journeying. And while Kroeber became perhaps the most famous anthropologist of his age and his wife Theodora one of the most charming writers of their age, their daughter who grew up with Ishi became one of the world's greatest science fiction writers, Ursula Le Guin, Ursula K Le Guin, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin and she was able to write about different species, not just different races. Not only different star systems but different dimensions even of our star system as if it were her own backyard.