Myth 7
Presented on: Saturday, August 19, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We're going to myth 07 and we're trying to appreciate, as usual, that our phases present for us not just a morphing of actuality but the expansion of actuality into its different stages and that there are thresholds between the stages that act not just as interfaces and membranes, but act as ratioing proportionars and those proportions and those ratios are a part of the heritage of civilisation, and reached a very sophisticated level about 2500 years ago with Pythagoras. And it is Pythagoras who founds the first community of men and women together in terms of the phases of their maturation: their maturation in their life cycle, their maturation in the development of their character, of their minds, of their visionary consciousness, of the sense of the art of the transforms, the art of the bunching together of ratios in a resonance so that one now has a harmonic that is a complement to the unity of the integral. And the harmonic is the array of possibilities of the differential, balanced together in such a way that one gets a sense of the historical consciousness coming into play and establishing a kaleidoscope of possibilities that is the dynamic by which civilisation continues not just to exist, but to occur in a harmonic. It is out of that harmonic that the sciences come, and the ability to analyse, to have an analytic that is in a harmonic with the arts and their critiques. Both those together complement the ability to have an existential practicality and a symbolic way of ideas and the imagination of bringing the practicality into a pragmatic understanding of how things work, why they work that way and how we can sustain and maintain ourselves within that practicality by that pragmatism and continue to live successfully on that basis.
The difficulty is double. One is that if the mind is closed off it eventually will reduce that integral to its bare bones of abstraction, and where one had a symbolic understanding before, by ideas, one tends in the abstract to have a logical bone structure that is like a code of laws, and the clothing of that becomes just simply a dried out doctrinaire way of understanding and the integral becomes destructive, self-destructive. The other difficulty is that there is more to reality than just the natural integral and men and women from Palaeolithic times, 40,000 years ago on, have always been alert that the supernatural intrudes onto the natural. It comes into play and will come into play so that the wise thing intrudes onto the natural. It comes into play and will come into play, so that the wise thing about an integral cycle is to shape it in such a way that it will welcome the supernatural to come in and hopefully to participate in the openings that are made and come through that way rather than destructively.
This is called a quintessential, a fifth essence. The four essences of nature are that nature occurs, that existence is established, unified, that experience flows in a deeper mysteriousness with nature and that the mind is a deeper stability of form that is referentially cognate on a higher order with the existentials in their unity. The fifth essence is that of transform. At some period in early historical work all the way up until the 17th century it was generally referred to as magic, magical, from magi, from the ability to understand that the supernatural comes from above the earth, from celestial patterns, from the stars, from the sun, from the moon, where they not only occur existentially but they have symbolic patterns. They have a zodiacal gestalt, repeatable cycle of relationship. And in addition to an astrology, there is an astronomy. One can understand that the cycle of the sun is not just 365 days but there's a quarter of a day as well, that the lunar cycle, while it has its 28 days in the cycle, one has to take the new moon as a part of that cycle, both at the beginning and at the end, so that it really you have 30 days if you take the entire range, not just the 28-day cycle of the moon in its different crescents, but that it also has a dark of the moon or if you wish to take it in its complementary it has a full moon. The conscious way was always that the mythos was of full moon to full moon. Buddhist monks today on every full moon will have a ceremony. The dark of the moon was always an earth mystery, it was from the netherworld, the underneath. The full moon above, the new moon below, coming together.
In their interface, one of the deep mythoses was that there was on the surface of the earth, in realms, in kingdoms, there were special people like a king or like a queen, who were responsible for balancing out the celestial supernaturals and the sub-terrestrial supernaturals, coming together, both of them able to have incursions into life on earth so that our mythic horizon of experience, the mythos, the myth, is not just about the stories, and not just about the narrative of the stories, but there are celstials and sub-terrestrial figures, characters, individuals, who can come into play and it is up to the king or it is up to the queen, it is up to their royal, noble court, to hold the balance of these supernaturals coming into the natural cycle, to not only maintain the natural cycle on its plane, in the horizon of the natural, which is already complex enough, but that the supernatural from two different sources is able to come into play and so it was the royal prerogative to hold that openness.
We've been looking at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tolkien's great editions and translations of it. Sir Gawain is a member of King Arthur's court, and the central unifying symbol of King Arthur's court was the round table, and that round table had places for each of the knights of King Arthur's court, but there was one chair that was left open, no one occupied that chair, and that chair, that space, was called the Siege Perilous, it is a dangerous place because it is left for supernatural presence to come into the round table, to sit at the round table, to be there in such a way that the plane of Arthur's realm, that mythic horizon, had the openness to allow for a supernatural presence to come in there and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is about the Green Knight coming in as a supernatural figure.
But he does not come in to sit at the round table, he comes in to challenge the integrity, the nobility, the unity and integrity of that nobility of that structure. And has this ability to crack the court, to crack the round table, to challenge it in such a specific, special way, and the challenge is one that goes back to Ancient times, back to Palaeolithic wisdom.
One of the interesting books concerned with King Arthur, the round table, Sir Gawain, Heinrich Zimmer's The King and the Corpse, a series of wisdom stories from all the mythologies of the world, from India, from the Middle East, tales of the soul's conquest of evil. Evil being a supernatural challenge that must be met, not simply to conquer evil or to outdo evil, but to restore the equilibrium, the balance, the ratioing, the proportioning, that was upset by the incursion of the supernatural and would have destroyed the unity, would have shattered the mythic horizon of experience, if the challenge had not been met. And the response is not a response to the challenge, the response is a restoration of the equilibrium. And so balance was always the sense that without a balance there is no way to coordinate the unity of a complex structure. And so the unity of the complex structure is always given its deepest diameter, its calibration of equilibrium, its balance in a stability by which all the other dimensions of coordination of integration, and even of appeal to ordinal levels and cardinal sequences, all of this, this entire entourage of necessary measurements, necessary determinations, is that there must be a horizon of equilibrium.
The Green Knight comes into challenge and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is given here in The King and the Corpose, not just Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but several versions of this that go into a rather more esoteric understanding. The title, The King and the Corpse, comes from an ancient India wisdom myth. There is a king who is challenged by a supernatural magician who comes and gives him particular riddles and this challenge of riddles occurs in a cemetery, in a graveyard, not a quiet graveyard. Ancient India cemeteries were horrific places. There were bodies that were hung and left to rot, there were bodies that were being burned on purifying pyres, it was a little wedge of hell. And so the cemetery was an extremely harsh, caustic location, which only the very highest yogis were able to apprentice themselves by doing their yoga, doing their meditation, in a cemetery of this hellish array. Such is the myth in the title story of Zimmer's book germane to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, indelibly important for our understanding of myth as the third phase in the integral cycle of nature. The cycle where experience deepens the occurrence of nature into a mysterious nature so that the equilibria of myth is a mysterious equilibria and not just the natural equilibrium. That it must have the natural component of the equilibrium balanced with the supernatural so that nature and super-nature, nature and magic must be balanced in a mythic horizon, for equanimity to occur. Which means that now the flow of experience is not only mysterious vis-à-vis nature, but also has a magical quality vis-à-vis visionary supernatural consciousness and the way in which the magic will always transform nature. When vision is magical, it is alchemical in the sense that it will always change nature. So that the deep ancient wisdom way for an equilibrium to be made is not to have magic and nature, not to try to balance them together because you cannot do this. This is the origins of black magic. The supernatural will always now not balance with nature but seek to change it and in a wildcard way, who knows if it's going to change for the better or the worse? It can be angelic or demonic and it is a toss-up. It's pure chance. It is 50:50 and if one doesn't handle the equilibrium, slowly, inexorably, the supernatural overtakes the natural and no matter if it started 50:50, it always slides and ends up demonic.
So that the magic of vision must be itself transformed in order to from an equilibrium with nature and the transform is to transform it from magic to mystic. When vision is mystical, it can balance with the natural. Nature will balance with the mystic, but nature will be corroded, in the sense not that nature is corroded but that the existential developments, the rituals that come out of it, will suffer a corroding interference. So it's not the gnostic understanding that nature is flawed. It is the hermetic understanding that it is the rituals that become flawed. They're not able to emerge out of nature. They emerge out of a scrambled interference with nature. The difference between the gnostic and hermetic is extremely graphic. The gnostic is always a mythology. The hermetic is always an art and science of civilisation. It's a completely different thing.
In The King and the Corpse, this king who is responsible for bringing his kingdom, his realm, back into equanimity, is challenged by a black sorcerer, black magician, in the graveyard, in the cemetery, and challenges him by saying, 'If you cannot answer this riddle, your head will explode!' And as soon as he gives him a riddle and he's able to overcome by answering that riddle, the sorcerer puts another riddle out to him. 'If you don't answer this one, your head will explode.' And so the challenge is that the symbolic integral will not only not achieve equilibrium but will explode itself into oblivion. The inside out of the integral is the explosion into oblivion.
Finally the young king realises that there must be some way to transform this riddling challenge which is increasingly demonic, to transform that magic into a mystic quality, so part of the myth, part of the narrative, part of the structure, is that along with the riddle is a challenge that is posited with it, that this young king, in order to save himself from this situation, must go to a tree where a corpse has been hung and cut it down and bring it back to this magician, back to this sorcerer, who will then put an end to this riddling, because the riddling occurs when the king goes to cut down the corpse, severs the tie, puts the corpse over his shoulders and is carrying it back to the magician, back to the sorcerer, back to his magic circle that he has drawn on the ground in the graveyard, where he's going to exorcise this whole thing. The corpse comes alive and it's the corpse that gives the riddles. 'If you don't answer this riddle your head will explode.' And as soon as the king manages to answer the riddle, the corpse goes back, magically, hung back on the tree. And finally the king understands that he must not respond to the magic to balance it, but must transform the magic into the mystic, and by doing so he offers his existential wholeness that he will not answer the riddle. He will take the explosion of the head. He will no longer play this demonical devolving game. And as soon as he does, the corpse stops giving him riddles and tells him the truth of the situation; that as soon as he would succeed in carrying this corpse, riddling corpse, back to that black magician, the black magician would take over the king's soul and that's what the whole scenario was about. The mythos was about him being so determined that he would finally succeed and take the corpse there, and then it wouldn't be to exorcise the corpse but to take over the soul of the king, and the corpse says, 'When you have lain me down in the circle and he has you kneel to participate with the ceremony so he can exorcise me, you must take your sword and you must cut off his head.' And this is exactly what happens, and the king is freed, the corpse is released from its demonical, zombie games, riddle games, existence, and all is purified. This cutting of heads, this losing of one's head, becomes transformed not by fighting against losing your head, but by transforming the magic of you might lose your head to the mystic of exchanging heads.
Now the supernatural is a mystic exchange of heads, exchange of centres of the natural cycle rather than fighting to try to have the natural cycle sustain desperately in the way in which you thought it should be, you were taught, you were brought up it should be, your beliefs, your religion, your families, your whole heritage said you must do this, you must fight to do this. Made you fragile in the sense that you were susceptible to a supernatural magical incursion, and that the secret was not to fight against it but to transform its visionary basis. How so? Because visionary consciousness in itself is a transforming dynamic. And the dyanmis of visionary consciousness is remembering. Remembering. Not the memory but remembering. Consciousness is primordially in its dynamic remembering. The verb in its gerund.
If the head which at its centre is not ideas, so much, the ideas will have symbol centres but the centre of the structure of the individual mind is the imagination. The way in which images that carry feelings that are embedded in the oral language, in the speaking, because the dynamis of myth is language carrying images that have feeling toned vibration, vitalities, and that all of this is integrated in the imagination. Cognate with ideas and different symbols, but the imagination you can even just spell it with a capital I, the I of the individuality is the imagination stability of one's self. But that can be exchanged. It can be exchanged with a mystic, visionary consciousness, and when it does, the remembering dynamic of visionary consciousness exchanges places with the imagination and in the mind now it becomes the memory, so that a quintessential sense of individuality is what remembers in the memory and now the imagination going into visionary consciousness becomes creative imagining. And it's out of the dynamic of visionary, creative imagining consciousness, which already has remembering, that art forms come.
The creative, not the creative imagination, but creative imaging, synergising with remembering, in this differential complement to nature, produces the prismatic forms of art and the analytic forms further on of science, which includes the cosmos.
They will be gems and jewels and not just elements like atoms, or further integrals of atoms which are molecules. Nature will always make elements, and out of the elements make molecules and out of the molecules make cells and many other structures. They will always have a special kind of unity, but a differential prismatic form is like the crystal that has an introduction of electromagnetic energy to it, light for instance, or on a higher level even from that, which is a whole order of mystic beyond what supernaturals usually have. That's called the dharma, but there is a high dharma where it is not just an electromagnetic light but it is a super-light, magneto-electric. About 10 billion times the intensity, the amperage of it. Now it isn't just that there is a king and a kingdom, but that the kingdom is the whole community in its circle of being able together to hold that equilibrium. And so the round table becomes like the secret diameter of the sphere of the kingdom, the heavenly celestial hemisphere, the deep, mysterious terrestrial afterlife underneath the earth hemisphere, and both those held together by the integrity of this dynamic, stable plane. And the old hermetic form of this in the enlightenment was always what was called the Magdeburg Spheres. If you take two metal spheres and you join them together and you pump out the air so that you have a vacuum in, all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot pull that apart. This now has been hermetically sealed and the seal is by the transform of the magic of the within from being just like the air outside to being a vacuum which is a mystic state, not just the normal state, it isn't just that the air is now inside just like on the outside at all, but has been transformed into that vacuum, into that zeroness which now cannot be taken apart. There's no way to have an incursion either from above or below, because all the above and all the below has been sealed together. The pattern within the round table that holds that quintessence together is called the hermetic star.
It's not that there's a square or a triangle, but there's a hermetic star at the centre of that. That holds that, but it is not an existential thing, it is a symbolic ratioing proportion of a whole hand that has come together not only to grasp and understand integrally, but to present fearlessly in high dharma teaching that this is what occurs. And it is on Sir Gawain's shield that the hermetic star is his symbol, and also on his horse, Gringolet, the hermetic star appears on the saddle fabrics that hold the knight in place. In Medieval jousting days one had to have a very strong saddle on a very strong horse, with stirrups and the whole thing, in order to hold a lance and do your sparring, or to have a knight's sword, not a rapier but a broadsword that was enormously difficult to control, and the control did not come just from the strength of your arm or of your wrist, but came from the whole posture of your body, so that you would be defeated if you could be unhorsed, if you could not maintain your posture of the right curvature to absorb the shock that was coming from the opponent, and also to hold you in balance so that you could deliver your lance or your sword, and it was an extremely difficult posture to maintain, especially as tournaments would go on and you'd have to face again and again the same situation, or even more poignantly in a battle. Protracted battles would take all day sometimes. And if you got tired at all, if you flagged at all, you were usually killed. The tone of the tuning of that complex posturing is exactly like the restoration of the equilibrium between the supernatural from above and the supernatural from below. The tone of the posture is maintained by a kind of a yoga, the circulation of which is courage. Courage. Not strength of muscle, but strength of character, put into the strength of an individuality, raised to the differential prismatic strength of the spiritual person, and so it was a spiritual way that one is not fighting to overcome an enemy; one is maintaining the spiritual courage of one's person for the mind that could be quite convinced that they're not going to win, to council one's character who's getting scared because this is rather horrific, and goes down to the body which starts to cringe and flinch, because its figuration is facing dismemberment, death, madness or complete oblivion. And so the spiritual person reaches all the way down through their courage, and the tone of that kind of courage is the ancient meaning of nobility. Only someone who is noble is able to do that. Someone who is ignoble will never be able to do that. And so Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of these great archetypal mythic stories if you will, narratives, but it shows very clearly for us that what is involved here is an enormous range of not just cognising what something is, but recognising what it could be. And it is the balance of cognition and recognition together that produces the sense of that hermetic star of being able to seal the architecture of the basic form, the diameter of the sphere, in its actuality, so that the centre is centred, the rim is circled in its cycle and that the interior of that sphere is empty of all deception, of all just simply being boxed and packaged from the outside. It's been transformed so that the interior of that realm, of that sphere, is now supernaturally mystic. A vacuum is a mystic state not a magic state. The difficulty is that the un-matured human being will never know that distinction. It takes a very special spiritual maturing in order to appreciate that, to be able to recognise it. But one of the good things is once one has that recognition knack, you will never lose it again. Not in any lifetime, ever after. Once flashed there, it's an eternal occurrence. Let's take a break.
Let's get back to the establishment of an equilibrium is the diameter, the circular plane that allows for a sphere to have its unity, so that an architecture will have a stable structure if all of its coordinates, if all of its measurements, are integrated such that the composition now will occur and be maintained within the integrity of that sphere.
Let's take a look at a way in which that equilibrium is expressed in Gladys Reichard's Weaving a Navajo Blanket, this is a Dover paperback reprint of it. She learned to establish herself because of her loom and her weaving, from the Navajo women who accepted her into their sphere, and this is how she writes it, on page 69, if you let me share with you three short paragraphs by her, so that you can appreciate vis-à-vis what we talked about in the first half. This is how a primordial ritual expression is balanced so that the experience will be rich enough in its dynamic to emerge the symbolic centre, so that it will be in alignment with the ritual, existential actuality of its unity.
Although the weaver has arranged the tension rope of the loom, she has done so only casually, her purpose being merely to attach the moveable part of the loom to the loom frame. [Remember the ancient Inanna, the hoop of the roots and the rod of the branches, the fronds, and then linked together by that twined thread , that cord; so that the shuttle is linked to the loom in a very similar way.]Now that she has strung the edge cords and completed the harness, the tension rope occupies her attention more fully.
She makes it tight, watching at the same time the warp, beam, to see that it remains parallel to the web beam at the bottom throughout its length. This may mean that she pulls the rope somewhat tighter at certain points than at others. There is a definite limit to the amount of straightening she can do by this means. The limit is soon reached.
She takes a string and measures the distance between warp and web beams at both sides. If there is not more than one-half to one inch difference, she will be able to correct it by regulating the rope. It is not likely to be more than half an inch if the weaver is a good one. More than that she detects without measuring. In case the warp is uneven, as it was in my first rug, the worker takes her place before the loom and patiently pulls each warp through its end twining, until no evidence of unevenness in length is visible. When Marie and her mother [Marie is the wife of Red Point, the great sand painter, medicine man] strung my first rug, one of the cross-pieces of the warp frame must have moved after the length was measured and before it was fastened. Consequently it was at least an inch and a half longer on the right than at the left. Marie began a little to the right of centre and pulled each warp carefully until she reached the left edge. After this the measurements at right and left corresponded fairly well. She tightened the rope once more, pulling it somewhat tighter at the left than at the right. All was now in readiness for the weaving, which is accomplished by means of the greatest coordination.
Just as the Navajo women achieve an equilibrium in the annual life process by their weaving of the rug, it's not just that the loom and its warps and webs must be balanced, but that this is the focus of an entire annual cycle of tending those sheep, of shearing those sheep, of carding that wool, of spinning out the yarns, of making sure that the loom with ... it's not lumber from a lumber yard, wood is very difficult to come by unless one can go into the mountains, into the hills; all of this takes a set and a time and a pace and then the weaving of the rug. The entire cycle is an annual cycle that brings the plants and the animals of the landscape, and the life scape of the tribe, of the women, of the woman, and here they initiated a woman who was born in Bangor, Pennsylvania, not far from the Delaware river interface with New Jersey, north of Philadelphia, I imagine 60-70 miles, something like that. Not far from where Washington crossed the Delaware. Who was a loner, and went to live with the tribe because it was seemingly a chance assignment, and when she got there she was adopted into Red Point's family and not just adopting her so that she could do her ethnological work, her anthropological enquiry, but that she would become tribal.
Primordial peoples will accept others into their family, because the family is naturally by kinship, by blood, but it is also quintessentially by spirit, and so the spirit family dimension of primordial peoples has been concomitant with our species, one would suppose, from the beginning, about 160,000 years ago in Africa. But at least from the evidence of Palaeolithic art, some 37,000 years ago, when it first comes into expression into the terminable play. We can see that it has been refined already for 10s of 1000s of years, and so we can take it that the equilibria that we are talking about is not an equilibria that was designed at some time in the past, but at some primordiality that comes from the species emergence itself. We're talking of 150,000 years, not of something 5,000 years ago, not of something a couple of hundred years ago, not of something recent. But the complexity and the refinement of it became densified throughout time, throughout development, because it's not only the quintessential visionary consciousness that comes into play, but more and more works of art come into prismatic, expressive stability, into that kind of differential existence, and as they do they change the weight of the ratioings, of the equilibria, and some 5,000 years ago there was an enormous weight thrust change. Not the weight so much, but the thrust of it, and that's when history, historical consciousness, began to be stronger than traditions, stronger than customs, stronger than cultures, civilisations took over the bulk of the dynamic from cultural traditions. And as they grew, as they became more capable of delivering that oomph, that dynamis, the mythic horizon of experience became a minority factor in the phases. The square of attention now did not include myth for the first time since it had come into play. Not only is there a mythos for our spaces, there was a mythos also to some extent for any creatures that are sentient, that feel, that dream. Dogs dream. Horses dream. And if you mature meditating in forests, like I did, plants dream, trees dream. They have those tones as well. Not to the same extent or the same kind. Dolphins dream. So the saying, in wisdom, is that all sentient beings have a character, which one learns to respect and to recognise. Each particular animal will have its own character, each particular plant will have its own character. This tree is special, that cat is very special, this horse is amazing, etc. For the first time, when historical consciousness comes into its kaleidoscopic array, it tends to displace the mythic horizon in the square of attention, in the frame of reference, and the shift is that the foundation of the frame of reference, of the square of attention, is now the symbolic phase, symbols.
The square runs symbols, vision, art, history, and so when you have historical civilisation consciousness come into play, the symbolic mind must be the basis of the attention. It must be the foundation of the square, of the frame of reference, of the composition of what one is seeing and how one is seeing it. And the difficulty, of course, is that the mind, which has been used to be being the top integrator since it was first emerged, now has to give way because it's only one-fourth, yes, it's the beginning, it's the basis, but the other orders, visionary consciousness, art forms, like the spiritual person, all transcend the mind, they're all of greater orders. And now the historical consciousness of civilisations transcends the integral, individual, the individuality of the mind, so it must have by now already learned humility. And the humility in its seed is when it first does the secret exchange of centres with visionary consciousness where it's the imagination goes into visionary creative imagining and accepts remembering as the memory, and so it is extremely important to be able to remember one's place in the larger harmonic order, and not to mistake that it is going to be suffering if it's not OK. It may be that its suffering is a part of the health of much larger whole patterns, and in this way a sacrifice extends so that there is such a thing as self-sacrifice.
Now one of the most poignant qualities in a mythic horizon is that the ritual traction from which it has generated, forms will emerge out of process phases, but other process phases will be generated by ritual phases and you can see that only by this kind of a recalibration do we get an opportunity to have a comprehensive, strategic, recognising as well as cognising, on scale of reality, comprehensiveness. All other forms of education are partial, truncated and have failed, all of them. Not a single one of them ever worked.
So we have to do all this again.
The indelibility of the ritual traction and the generated experience work together in a very mysterious way, and again our phases are an opportunity to understand how this works, and it's rather simple but not simplistic. It has a complexity but one that can be recognised and remembered.
When we began our education, and our education is like a great sand painting, it's like a great mandala, and we are sitting on this sand painting to get recalibrated to the health of reality. And the speaker here is singing over the community of those sitting in this mandala, in this sand painting. The quality is there at the beginning where we talked about Tao having zero and Tê having one, the nature has a Tao zeroness because it is an unbounded dynamic, but the Tê, ritual existential forms, will always have a unity, they will always have a particality, and it's true you can't find a single quark, they're always in pairs or sometimes triads; nevertheless, they occur existentially, the same for atoms. The key is that when the calibration starts with a zero and then you have a one emergent out of that, the third phase is a putting together of the zero and one so that third is always the equilibria of the zero and one together, so in a way the Jen, the human-hearted-ness, the mysterious quality of the mythic phase, is that it is a balancing of the Tao of nature with the Unity of existence. And when you come to the symbols phase, it's the fourth phase and all of a sudden you have a new kind of stability of form. The mind is a very stable form.
Now it works this way. In the atomic elements of the universe, the first element that emerges is hydrogen, given an atomic number of 1, but it will occur in three different varieties: it will occur as deuterium (heavy hydrogen) atomic number 2, it will occur very rarely, nevertheless it will, and have stability, as tritium (atomic number 3) but when you get to atomic number 4, now you have a new element, helium. So that the elements jump from hydrogen 1, to helium 4. That's how the stability of existential unity is held. Now because the 4 is not just primordial because it is an interesting number, the designation that this is 4 comes from the indelibility, the square is a square. It doesn't matter about numbers. Helium will be helium, in its atomic number, and it will hold that quality even though it becomes isotopic, or can be. One can have helium 3 but it's still helium as an ionised atom and not tritium as a third form of hydrogen. If you double the four of helium to atomic number eight, now you have carbon.
Carbon is one of the most stable elements in the universe, absolutely phenomenally stable and holds its stability as an element through three different forms of itself. It can be simple graphite, which is like soot, or 'carbon lead', it can be crystalline like diamonds, it can be raised to an extraordinary third state where it is what is called Buckyballs. Carbon 60 is still carbon but its form now is that you have gone from soot to a diamond to a Buckyball, and now you have carbon that occurs in nature existentially, and compacts itself in nature, very magically and mysteriously and even mystically as a gem, as a diamond, but that third transform, that third state, is actually the second transform, it raises it to a cosmos level. Now carbon 60 as a Buckyball is a cosmic rarity that is nevertheless stable. Once generated and made you can work with it and do amazing things.
So the elements, hydrogen moving from 1 with its 3 forms of hydrogen 2, deuterium, hydrogen 3, tritium, jumping when it gets to 4 to helium, and you double the 4 of helium and now you have something working like carbon. Now if you double that to 16, now you have Oxygen.
Now right away with just this, the 16 is not just the 4 squared but it's like 4 cubed. Now you have what we began today with. You have proportions and ratioings, and measurements and calibrations that are capable not only of natural integral but they're capable of a supra-natural differential. The first is capable of an arithmetic, a ritual counting that can be raised to the symbolic level, but the complement to that is a mathematic. It begins with the transforms that one can do and the transforms include a creative imagining so that now, in a mathematic one can even have imaginary numbers. They still work. Now you have an unlimited range. There is no limit to the range of mathematics in the cosmos. There are more branches of mathematics in the last 50 years than there were in the previous 50,000 years. There are monographs on areas of maths that are so super-natural that they distil the transform from the magic to the mystic to distil the mystic into the unbelievably and possibly true. Wonderful possibilities, beyond belief.
Our understanding is that once these stabilities are placed, they do not place statically, they place vibrantly. That is to say, the iteration measurements and proportions and ratios are real for ever. They're constantly there. They can be re-contacted. One can be tuned back to them, not just to their vibration, but to the participation of that vibration in your vitality. So that once a pattern in established in this very special quintessential transform way, once visionary consciousness comes into play and emerges the art prismatic form, like the spiritual person, they are prominent, they are eternal, they outlast the universe, because they have, as a part of their proportioning, of their ratioing, they have the zero of unlimited nature before it was ever emerged, even into resonant iterative vibrational forms of existence.
The same thing happens here in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And Tolkien is extraordinarily capable, and by the time he and E V Gordon publish their edition in 1925, it was exactly at the time that atomic theory with Niels Bohr and Rutherford, with the mathematics of the young Heisenberg, the young Schrodinger, the young Wolfgang Pauli, the young Paul Dirac, all of these things happened at the same time because they were part of a gestalt which is eternal and can be re-contacted through a tuning, and that's what this education is all about. It is a recalibrating so that we're able to have a mobile atonement to every aspect that our species, and sentient species before us, generated on this planet. An infinite number of video channels! So that we can go back and retune so that the Egyptian Book of the Dead is not way back then, but is vibrantly here now, that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has his spiritual courage now, while you are reading it! And that future tuneabilities will already be tuneable. One doesn't have to wait for extra-terrestrials to be extra-terrestrial.
I had a beautiful conversation one time with Tik Tienanan, who was the founder of the University of Oriental Studies, and the Abbot for all of the Vietnamese Buddhists, and he said one time that he was interested in the space programme to see if they could go there instantly like he could, by just throwing his high dharma capacity out. When the historical Buddha taught the Mahayana Sutras, very explicit that those Sutra sermons were attended by trillions and trillions of beings from all over the cosmos. Because it is rare to be able to hear a spirit that is tuned all the way from before hydrogen all the way through all the elements that are possible, and can speak spontaneously with any degree of precision or ratioing or transforming that is needed and necessary. It's a difference in scale. It's as different from instruction or inculcation as it is from watching a great artist at work. One of the indelible things about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is that it has a pre-Christian quality of Christianity deeply, resonantly embedded in it, and it is so deep that it reoccurs in recognisable forms in places which are extraordinary to most people. One of the places it reoccurs is in the Muslim Neoplatness, the Equan al Safa from Bagdad, the Bagdad of the times of Harun al-Rashid, about the 800s AD. When Europe was in the dark ages, Bagdad's Islamic civilisation spanned everything from Spain to Indonesia and the magical transform into the mystical distillation was a part of it, and one of the great vehicles of this, that we use in the second part, year two, is one of our year-long readings is the Arabian Nights, the 1001 Nights, Scheherazade. 1001 stories about the transforms in a kaleidoscopic, historical consciousness, from nature to super-nature of the magic to double super-nature of the mystic and how all of this plays like a weaving. It's like this Weaving of the Navajo Blanket, where Gladys Reichard learned from the Navajo women that the balance of the loom, of the weaving of the rug is the balance of the whole year cycle, of raising the sheep, shearing the sheep, carding, spinning, weaving, dying, the whole thing, and when the rug is finished one is ready then to commence the cycle all over again. It's a metronome of an annual year-long cycle, all to establish the equilibria, and one of the first things that was woven are not blankets for tourists; the first Navajo weavings were saddle blankets for the interface of the rider on the horse. We talked about the medieval jousting and how the rider had to sit on the horse in just the right posture, with the stirrup invention to brace against the shock of someone else's lance, against the hefting of your shield to withstand a blow of that heavy broadsword, enormous concussion, and can kill. And to have your thrust, to have your swing, all of this is because of the way in which the saddle was able to sit on the horse. The Navajo used the saddle blanket to sit himself on his horse by her equilibrium of the annual cycle. They worked together in that way. And if I can find it I'll bring in a very special Navajo saddle blanket, it's a yeibichai, it's a holy spirit figure of [1:15:25] which I procured for my daughter from the Navajo Nation a long time ago.
When you're on a horse with that kind of a woven saddle blanket, you're seated in such a way that you are secure because of the way in which that existential ritual reality generates the stability out of which your experience can emerge whole, out of which your mind emerges in a very natural way. And recognises that it looks back not to the things of nature, but to the alignment with the things of nature, to the common origin from the natural dynamic. One learns to see the mystery of nature through the existential things. One doesn't just look at the storm clouds over the San Francisco mountains, going to bring fructifying and fertile rain; one looks to see the choreography of this great atmospheric interpenetration of the earth and of maybe the first stars in the evening above the clouds, and one participates then in a mysterious nature that is capable also of accepting, from the higher side, a mystical dimension of vision. So that if a mythic horizon has the sky mystic vision, and the earth and deep in the earth traction of existence, now the equilibrium, the stability of the pattern of your life experience, the pattern of the tribe's experience, the pattern of the community's experience together, the mutuality of it, has a particular tone and one of the best words ever used for that tone was engendered in the 1930s, by a friend of Tolkien's, a writer named Charles Williams. Charles Williams was a member of a group called The Inklings, and a couple of years ago they published The Inklings Handbook. The little tavern they met, The Eagle and Child, and part of The Inklings was Tolkien, J R R Tolkien, Charles Williams, C S Lewis, Owen Barfield, Dorothy Sayers, occasionally T S Eliot and A E Waite. It was a fantastic group of people who had distilled themselves out of a hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Largely founded and developed by W B Yates, who one time, threw one of the errant members of the Golden Dawn out, Aleister Crowley. He said, 'Wisdom Schools are not Reform Schools. Out!' This is not about magic, this is about the transform of life energies of experience all the way through a mind that is open to wonder, through a visionary consciousness that is able to engender works of art. We're not after magic rituals, we're not after that whatsoever. That's like bad children's pseudogames, it's nothing, less than nothing.
Something that is really inconsequential will leave a little wisp of soot in the universe when it goes, black magic leaves no trace whatsoever. It was never real. It cannot be. And so one learns in this recalibration to see with the artist's eyes of the spirit prism, of the creative person who has remembering as a natural differential development, a supernatural differential remembering.
We're going to talk more next week about how indelible this whole order is. One of the qualities that is the pulse of the mythic dynamic is language, and Tolkien, in writing his great works, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, twelve books of Lost Tales, he developed fourteen different languages. You can write in these languages, you can speak them, with a whole coordination of how these languages came out, and one of the qualities that's in here is that in his Elf language he called the Elves Eldar, that they were of the stars, in their own tongue. And that they had come out of the West, and one of the languages that they spoke was Qenya, and in making the grammar and syntax of Qenya, the elf language, he used a lot of the language from Finland, because it's a very ancient, archaic, special language, not Indo-European. And we'll talk a little bit more about that next week.
Gladys Reichard is the one who did the Navajo language up and her Navajo Grammar published in 1951, and many little monographs on the language, she has many poignant things to say and we'll go into it more next week, but this is fundamental. 'Most important is the consideration of the characterisation, the character of the Navajo verb. It is usually a monosyllabic form which cannot be used independently but always requires prefixes.' So that a verb in Navajo is like a quark, it's never only existentially what it is; it's always in ratio, it's always in proportion to prefix, suffix, and there are several pairs of tuneable prefixes that angle the verb so that its pure mythic dynamic is able to engender a form that is cognisable in the mind, that aligns with the form of the existence that came out of nature in the first level of objectivity. We'll talk more about it next week. You can see that we're getting deeper into a recalibration. We're not instructing ourselves in something small. We're recalibrating to a very real reality.
More next week.