Myth 8

Let's come to Myth 8 and I just want to make a correction from last week; I was trying to give an example of atomic structure of elements and I'm afraid it got pretzeled a little bit. The atomic number of an element is the number of protons in the nucleus and I misstated that carbon had an atomic number of eight, it's actually oxygen that is eight, carbon is six. When I was talking about the progression from helium I was talking about how helium with an atomic number of two has an atomic weight of four and that oxygen with an atomic number of eight has an atomic weight of 16, meaning that the protons are matched with neutrons and the weight of electrons is almost negligible. Helium is 4.001, I believe. Carbon, with six protons in the nucleus, has an atomic weight of twelve and it's just a little bit more than that, probably .01 or something like that.
The illustration was that structure in existence has a peculiar quality of falling into integrals and that the further complications are also integrals, they are also unities. One of the hallmarks of existence is that its unity confers traction on wholeness and so the whole purpose of the cycle of nature is to maintain wholeness, which comes out, of course, if there is an impairment. Then there is something that has to compensate to try to restore, not only the wholeness, but that there is an equilibrium to the structure of wholeness and that equilibrium is the balance. But it is not always a linear balance because existentials do not just statically exist but they iteratively, vibrantly, vibratorially exist. So they have not only a balance in their structure but they have a radial quality that tries to maintain symmetry and they also have a rotational quality that tries to maintain stability. If we symbolise a natural cycle by a circle it can also have a balance and a structure and a symmetry and complementary if it's an ellipse, that also a whole, just like a square or a rectangle, or a triangle and a hexagon.
In myth, one of the qualities that comes into play - in addition for it being generated by the way in which existential things maintain their wholeness and have a balance and generate compensations - one of the qualities of myth, then, is that experience will found itself on ritual. But as we are understanding and very soon going to come into play, myth also is responsive to a further integral from symbols and we are going to see that come into play in another month. But symbols, while they are like the seal on completeness of the natural circle, say, there definitely are experiences which are extraordinary: they colour outside of the circle, they colour outside of the ellipse. Generally when that kinetic occurs, it occurs in the form of a spiral that will go outside of the circle and create an inner thread within the circle which extends, then, beyond the circle and so a spiral becomes definitely something which is formidable: it is the kinetic dynamic of a transform beyond the normal, natural limitations. They are not limitations so much but boundary conditions and if you have a boundary condition, anything that is existential, a structure within that boundary condition, will have not only a structure, objectively, of what it is, but it will have an energy frequency of what it is as well. With a bounded condition that energy frequency will have multiples that are characteristic of the kinds of numbers that we were talking about.
Within a boundary condition if you have a vibration that goes from one, the beginning of the bound condition, to the end of the bound condition, so there is only one vibration in that particular unit, if you put a node in the centre of that then you will get a sine wave: you will get an energy condition that then has a node at the centre and creates in the bounded conditions rather than just the limitations, they also then become nodes. So that by centring in the vibration of a bounded condition you produce not only the centre as a node but the points at which the bounded condition occur in that energy frequency. They will now be not just the circle but they will be points on the circle and you will have then, with the centre, you will have that equilibrium of line. If you put two nodes on a bounded line then you will have structure that reads in a quaternary: it'll rise and fall, rise and fall so that you will have a four part energy wave frequency with a pair of nodes but also the end points as nodes will give you another kind of a balance.
What's interesting in this is that when you have a spiral, a spiral can either go outside or it can go inside of that energy wave. In some of the most primordial qualities of symbols, this is from Gladys Reichard, one of her earliest books, this is a reprint in one volume, originally it was two volumes, Melanesian Design - the Melanesians are the blacks of the South Pacific Islands, New Guinea, New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands - and she did a study of their art. One of the largest motifs in their art is the spiral, all primordial peoples will have this spiralling quality. There is also, she notes, especially, the development of the spiral so that instead of having just a single spiral it will have a double coil. It can have two spirals that go the same way but they will have different planes that intersect or you can have complementary spirals of one spiralling in or the other spiralling out or you can have the beginnings of barbs to the spiral or branches to the spiral and so you get very complex structures, finally, that come out. One of the illustrations that she has of a spiral is the fact that many of the designs - we're looking at this one at the top - look like modern art from Matisse. So it isn't just spirals but it's like the energy frequency will have a quality of being able to be followed as a gestalt where part of it is invisible. One has to recognise that these are not primitive peoples but they are primordial peoples. Their primordiality goes back to the Palaeolithic which means that they are used to looking in between the aspects that we would think of as being existential and seeing the spaces in between.
A simple example of this is someone who is Palaeolithically trained, for instance, in a forest, will be able to look at the spaces in between the leaves and the trunks and the vines and be able to see movement as it moves by blotting out little fragments of light. You can develop this, when I was doing deep meditations in the early 1960s in the Sierra Nevada, I could pick out the movement of animals after a while quite a distance off in the Sequoia Forest, simply by paying attention to a wider range of looking than looking at things to let the looking itself occur. This looking itself is a quality of not so much perception, looking at objects, as configurations of letting the figurations including the spaces occur together in a pattern. This is extremely important to understand because our experience, primordiality speaking, has this inherited, almost instinctual tone to it. The mind, if it is not trained to be open to this will close that off and will lose the ability to have an imagination that is open, not just open to existentials in ritual comportment to their action but also miss the pragmatic aspect of experience and to be non-knowing, oblivious, really, of, not the form of nature, but its primordial dynamic. So one of the qualities in myth is to bring oneself back or to bring the tribe back or to bring the various groups back into a sync with nature that opens to the spaces as well as the things.
The history that we are looking at in terms of mythic experience, not just the American Indian sand paintings of the Navajo, but we're pairing with it Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, J.R.R Tolkien's translation of it. One of the qualities that is here is that our modern mind, our modern education, by modern I mean specifically in the last 150 years but especially in the last 80 years, leaves out a great deal of the comprehension that used to characterise human beings in better times. For instance, if you go to any of the resource books on knighthood, on chivalry, they will tell you that chivalry began in the age of Charlemagne, that knighthood comes from the age of Charlemagne in the 800s, and this is simply not the case whatsoever. If one were to go to the standard great tome on, this is On the Order of the Garter: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the founding text on the Order of the Garter, but the author, Elias Ashmole, being comprehensive individual, he shows in here that knighthood actually can be traced back, the foundation of the equestrian order among the Romans, not Charlemagne, but the Romans more than 1000 years before them, 'But to raise the structure of knighthood upon a more substantial foundation, we shall with greater certainty descend to the Romans among whom we find there was, from the very infancy of their military glory, an instituted body and society of knights constituting a select number and this is recorded by Livy.' Livy is one of the great classic historians of the Roman Empire, just at the beginning of the age of Augustus.
If one were really learned, one could trace knighthood back, not just to Rome, but to China, because it occurred in China more than 300 years before it appeared in Rome. This is a little history of The Chinese Knigh- Errant by James JY Liu, an exquisite professor, a dozen books to his credit. He points out that the knight-errant first appeared on the Chinese historical scene during the Warring States Period, 403-222 BC against a background of political instability, social unrest and intellectual ferment. Politically the royal house of Zhou had long lost control over its nominal vassals who now called themselves kings and engaged in constant warfare with one another and their constant struggle for power. So the Chinese knight-errant belongs to the age of Chuang Tzu and of Mencius.
Of course the contact of the Romans with the later Han Chinese, the Han Dynasty who came into power after 222BC, Rome and China had contact, both from trade in the areas of what is today Indo-China. There was a Roman fortress in Vietnam 2000 years ago. Also across the great trade routes through Iran and up through central Asia along the Amu Darya River, which was an ancient trade route because the early Irani Scythians established a trade route all the way into the Gobi desert by 2000BC already and in fact horses were tamed in Irani Central Asia first. This is near the Aral Sea where Samarcan and several other cities are and they are not only the first people to tame horses but to team horses together to pull big wheeled carts called chariots. And so when you look at the beginnings of dynastic China the first time that you see a dynasty in China you see the first chariots, the first horses, the first use of jade because jade was a trade item, a very expensive item that small quantities of it were worth quite a bit and jade was taken from ancient Hotan, both into China proper and then back into the Irani area.
If you look at the botanical development in China there is a whole large volume published almost 100 years ago by Berthold Laufer on the Irani plants that were introduced into China like the peach and the rose and many other fruits and vegetables and flowers. All of these were cultivated originally in Iran. The word paradise is from the old Persian, a paradise is a transformed nature, not to transform it out of nature but to transform it into refinement so that hidden properties come together and one now has, instead of little tiny buds, one has a very large blossom. Instead of very small natural fruits, now one has something which is an edible peach or an edible pear.
So that knighthood is not at all something that began with Charlemagne, it goes all the way back and the most courageous orders in the world were the military orders. The strongest military order in the world was always the Order of the Garter and these are illustrations from one of the pages, I unglued it so that it could be shown. It is the greatest military order in the world limited to just those of the greatest courage. If you get interested, there is a volume, done by Brigadier Sir Ivan De La Bere, published in London, and he was Secretary of the Central Chancery of Knighthood in St James' Palace from the Second World War into the 1960s. The Queen's orders of chivalry, and here it lists Ashmole in his institutions and ceremonies of the most noble Order of the Garter published in 1672, opines that the order was founded in 1349 or 1350, so that the dating of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is from the middle of the 1300s, which is an extraordinary time. When you look at the contact between Europe and China in the 1300s the figure that comes to mind immediately in a grand way is Marco Polo and his brother. So that the Polos went to China about the time that the Order of the Garter was founded.
Here is the little section in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that is the tap route, it is the mythic tap route of how all this came to be some 650 years ago. Sir Gawain, of course, the previous year, defended the honour of the Round Table from this challenge by the Green Knight and it was a beheading game, a form of ritual riddle that you get to cut my head off and then a year from now you come to my palace and I will cut your head off. In the meantime, in all of this time, Gawain has tried to bear himself with the dignity of the Round Table carrying its ethos, its pride, its integrity and when he comes into the Southern regions of old Scotland, there is where the Green Knight has this semi-supernatural mystical palace. The lady of the palace, the wife of Sir Bertilak, as he says his name is, is one of the most beautiful women that anyone has ever seen. She, of course, is playing another level of the beheading game with Gawain: that he will lose his head over her, he will fall into desire for her. And she baits him with trying to get him to exchange kisses but Sir Gawain has made a pact with Sir Bertilak, who he does not know is the Green Knight, that whatever gifts he receives during the day when Sir Bertilak comes back from his hunting, Gawain will give things back that he got so that he is completely even with the board, nothing owed.
The lady finally tells him that he is going to face certain death unless he has a very special protection: her garter, a green piece of silk. And Tolkien translates just a few lines this way, '"Do you refuse now the silk?" said the fair lady, "because in itself it is poor and so it appears, see how small tis in size and smaller in value but one who knew of the nature that is knit there within would apprise it probably at a price far higher. Why? Because it is woven in a very special way that its weave is a complex weaving of this silk"' and the silk of course is from China come all the way through Iran, come all the way to England, come all the way in trade. England was in a 100 years war with France and so a great deal of the continental contacts were between England and Italy and so Chinese items that would come through Iran and come into Italy and make their way into England, it was a very rare material. But this garter is not just a piece of silk but it's specially woven criss-crossed silk so that it has a kind of a sealing quality to it. Anyone who wears it now, it's not just a token of the woman, it's a token of the protection of life itself and so the garter has a very special place, '"For whoever goes girdled with this green ribbon, while he keeps it well clasped closely about him, there is none so hearty under heaven that to hue him were able for he could not be killed by any cunning of hand." The knight took note and thought now in his heart twould be a prize and that peril that was appointed him when he gained the green chapel to get there his sentence if, by some slight, he were not slain, twould be a sovereign device.'
In other words, the experience is a clustering of images that somehow are seeking to posit themselves, not quite yet for us, in the symbol which it will become. The Order of the Garter uses the garter as the central symbol of human courage under duress but in the mythic aspect of it, it is that the feelings and the images and the language all begin to densify the dynamic of experience so that it begins to have a quality where it is not just a field of experience but it is a resonant field of experience that has, what we would call today, density waves in it. As those density waves proliferate, every image, every feeling, every word in a refined language will have its own ripples of density waves and they will interpenetrate and they will weave together and what you get out of this is a tapestry of experience that is sealing. Not sealing as a form but sealing as a dynamic so that when it is tuned back to nature it will not fall out of nature because it will be sealed there in that flow. Because it is sealed in that flow, not only by the deepening of nature into mystery, but it will have had access to going outside of the forms of the cycles of unity of nature, outside of completeness, to a super completeness which is called perfection and it is that perfection which is supernatural.
In the natural cycle the completion is that something is born, lives for a while and then dies and will have to reproduce in order to continue so that the children will be born, they will live for a while, they will most certainly die, they will have to reproduce. But the perfection is that there is a quality that is supernatural where one does not die but one transforms. And so in the mythic horizon there is a quality not only abasing itself as a mysterious deepening of nature but of accepting a mystic supernaturalness from a visionary realm: that nature in its unity, in its existentiality occurs suspended in something that is unlimited. It was difficult to imagine an infinity or a void and so what was imagined generally was that it was a further realm, it was a larger kingdom, it was God's kingdom, it was this divine realm. So the person who would first pioneer the spiral out of the complete circle of nature or ellipse of nature and be able to go out into the supernatural, that that journey was a quest journey and that that figure, that character, that individual who could do that and return and come back was now a hero. The hero is able to return with a supernatural gift, bringing with it a protection against death, injury, instability, maiming.
And so one has, again and again, this sense that there is a special quality to the weaving of experience when it is mysteriously deeper than nature and mystically retrieved from vision and that the first interface where this will happen is in dreams. Dreams will participate both in this natural life and also in other beyond dimensions of the realm and that by deepening dreams one can come to a very great dream. Once one has mastered the ability to have a great dream, a third stage occurs where the dreaming that was first natural and then great because it was the culmination of all experience in a symbolic dream of having the centre of the mind active in it, the third level was that this is a dream as a divine gift. It is a visionary dream and that those dreams, one does to have to sleep to have them but they can occur in an awakened state but the awakened state must have a continuity of the mysteriousness of existence raised supernaturally and that realm, then, was called contemplation, the contemplative realm.
Meditation belongs to experience; it belongs to the mythic horizon of that dynamic. A meditation is the balancing of the body and the mind but a contemplation is a balancing of the mind with a transcendental form called the spiritual person, with the spirit. And so all meditation is a dynamic medium, mediating the body and the mind, contemplation is a dynamic differential medium mediating the mind and the spirit. And so one has, in art, art forms, the art of the person, the art of person-making, the artist as a creator who is able to take their experience and bring it into the imagination in the mind and exchange that imagination with the remembering function of visionary consciousness so that now the mind will have not only the imagination but will have the memory. The visionary consciousness will not only have remembering but it will have creative imagination and so art forms come out of the ability to modulate in increasing arrays of harmonics, creative imagination and remembering. When these interpenetrate together one now has not the form of the individual, not the flow of the character and not the figuration of what they do; now one has an emergent form that hitherto was considered supernatural and now the artist creates themselves, creates works of art. What is introduced then is the dimension quality of aesthetics and aesthetics has a very curious quality: instead of criticisms of it leading to picking away at it, critiques in an aesthetic improve the quality of what it is, it works just the other way. Instead of being tattered by criticism, art improves its forms by criticism and so art critiques in this way lay the foundation that later on will be the higher improvement that the sciences, scientific forms offer because they are able to be refined through an analytic. Let's take a little break and let the sirens go back.
We come back and we're looking at a sand painting spiral. This is from the Shooting Chant. The combined authorship is Franc Newcomb and Gladys Reichard, two women who are extraordinary. They were looked upon as being amateurs, largely, not just because they were women in a science which should be a man's world but Franc Newcomb's being there was associated with the trading post and Gladys Reichard's being there was because she was financed by Elsie Clews-Parsons because she had sort of adopted her along with Franz Boas as sort of like their daughter in the field. But one of the qualities that these two women had, which none of the other anthropologists had, was that both of them were adopted by spirit daughters of very powerful Shaman medicine men. Franc Newcomb was adopted by Hosteen Klah and she did a biography of Hosteen Klah published by the University of Oklahoma Press, Navaho Medicine Man and Sand Painter. This frontispiece is the whirling log design which not only did he do sand painting but he wove rugs, very large rugs of the sand paintings to make them permanent. These rugs now are in the museum in Santa Fe, the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. It was set up by Mary Wheelwright and here's a monograph, A Study of Navajo Symbolism by Franc Newcomb and Mary C. Wheelwright and the rugs are very large and they are set so that they go down into the floor. They can be raised electronically so that one can see the individual rugs, the individual sand paintings.
The Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art publishes books like Hail Chant and Water Chant and in smaller little monographs like Wind Chant and Feather Chant. These four chants together form a set around the shooting chant but the shooting chant had a preview, a precis that we're taking as one of our texts, the Navajo Medicine Man Sand Paintings, so the Shooting Chant and the Medicine Man Sand Paintings are like two parts of a single volume, they are the centre and the other four, the Hail Chant, the Water Chant, the Feather Chant, the Wind Chant are arranged around them. What is curious is that this is the ancient blessing, Mudra, if you will, of early Christianity. This is exactly the ritual Mudra for making a sand painting. The sand painting is made by having a hogan where it is going to be performed completely cleared and cleaned and then large containers of natural sand are brought in and dumped in the centre of the hogan. The chanter who is going to make the ritual, make the ceremony, do the mythic chanting, will take the baton from weaving, from the loom and will begin spreading that fresh natural sand for an inch or two in depth for the size of the sand painting that he is going to do. Then he will take this configuration and seven different little containers of colours, four primordial colours, black, blue, yellow and white and by mixing together you can get a pink, you can get a greyish blue or you can get a brown.
With these seven colours and this particular little configuration of the hand, he can take sand and put it in the trough with the two fingers and by the motion of his thumb he can literally write accurately by making a dot, by making an incredible straight line, by making incredible spirals, curves, and, in a way, that sand painting, then, is done, seemingly, in such a very simple way. Gladys Reichard says, 'They just press this sand with the thumb so that it falls through the crack made by the two first fingers as exactly the point where they want it, that's all there is to it. The painters make a tiny dot or line along an unbelievably straight or curved line or what they will because of the skill which lies not in the materials or the position of the hand and fingers or in any other particular thing but in the coordination of muscle, mind and materials.' In other word, what is being done here is for the first time we are beginning to see that the sand paintings are a written symbolic language. Largely though, the experience of them is in the mythic horizon but the making of them, the being able to write them is like the first level where the mind and the materials and the muscular tone along with the experience of being able to do it just exactly right creates a written language which is quite impressive.
If you look at the quality of the sand paintings, the cover of this is Big Thunder and all the other thunders will come out from this blackness. It is a quality where the black is not only a colour for the east, the north is generally white, the east black, the south blue, the west yellow and usually runs in the sun-wise, clockwise, direction. It can run the other way as well and the colours can be shifted. One can have black at the north and white at the east as well but it usually works the other way around. In making this, the experience in its density waves creates a kind of a space where the mind now will be able to absorb the images and have them stay in the imagination. But they only stay in the imagination in a natural way if you can follow the ritual. It's the ritual traction of doing it, then, so that you see where you are as you are doing it and then you know where you are, that one starts at the centre. And the sand painter will work out from that centre both in a radial way to expand it and in a chiral way to make sure that the directions and the colours and everything begin to have its special concourse.
The quality that occurs, finally, will come to these kinds of complications. We recognise them as like Tibetan sand paintings, mandalas of the Vajrayana, and they are very similar to the way in which the sand paintings of the Navajo are made and which they function. Our learning also is a form of sand painting of mandala-making and the different proportions and parts of our phases constitute the making of a sand painting that takes two years to make. Why does it take two years to make? Because it ha s a deep accumulation of the mysteriousness of experience which deepens and deepens into a way which is expressed in Navajo sand painting very primordially. If you move from each of the four directions so that they criss-cross at a centre, the centre will not just be black, it will be a hole so that the centre out of which the sand painting is made is a hole that goes to other dimensions. To a hole which is a pure openness that allows from the primordiality the energies of primordality to come up and suffuse the entire sand painting, that the entire mandala now is brought into vibrant existence. It itself becomes a living tapestry, it becomes an organic entity and that this organic entity is able to include not only whoever makes it but whoever it is made for because they are seeded on top of it and they act as an energy condenser of the experience, of the vibration, of the vitality of that ritual form, giving them the recalibration to their experience. So that their imagery now has a natural origin coming up through the centre of the sand painting, it has a pure ritual traction because it has been made very carefully to be exactly what it is; fresh, not only from nature, but it has the artistic vision of the sand painter as well.
It was very difficult for most, if not all, outsiders to appreciate what happened here. It was Gladys Reichard and Franc Newcomb that were some of the fist people to understand that you have to prepare yourself not just to look at what this is, to follow the ceremony anthropologically or as a tourist, but as someone who is spiritually adopted into this process. For Gladys Reichard, she learned through weaving and one of her first books is called Spider Woman because Navajo women learned to weave through spider women and here is a loom with all of its accoutrement. Spider women instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom which spider man told them how to make: the cross poles were made of sky and earth cords, the warp sticks of sun rays, the helds of rock crystal and sheet lightening he baton was a sun halo, white shell made the comb and then there were four spindles, one a stick of zig zag lightning with a whirl of canal coal, one a stick of flash lightning with a whirl of turquoise, a third a stick of sheet lightning with a whirl of abalone, a rain streamer formed the stick of the fourth and its whirl was white shell.
What was interesting when this came out in 1934, Gladys Reichard recognised that this spiral, this whirl was an indelible quality to primordial Melanesian art, that very frequently the really deep Melanesian artists in New Guinea, in the Admirality Isalnds, in the Solomon Islands, when they were due a ritual figure of a spirit being, the naval of the figure would be a whirl. It would not be a knot that was static but it was a churning, generating centre and that then she recognised that the entire quality of weaving involved the mystery of initiation so that one now did not just participate but one mysteriously helped create. One of the hard cover copies of Weaving a Navajo Blanket was called Navajo Shepherd and Weaver; that one goes not only to the shepherd but to the weaving. She signed this first edition and she signed it with her Navajo name and her name that she received as a girl in Bangor, Pennsylvania but her Navajo came because it was given to her by Miguelito. Miguelito was the medicine man who gave her the first spirit family adoption and Hosteen Klah, the one who did this for Franc Newcomb, Newcomb then produced a number of volumes, Navajo Bird Tales, Navajo Folk Tales and a very esoteric volume, Navajo Omens and Taboos, a collection of traditions, household sayings and so forth, intimate folklore, family life. Because part of the quality of being open, now, to the supernatural is that the supernatural now has an ability to intrude: it can come into the life of an individual, it can come into the life of the tribe.
So that the whole experience of being a Shaman was precarious because the first thing that happens is that one opens this hole to the further realms, the further dimensions which are not only beneath the world but above the world and so you can have influences come from both and those influences are transformative. If they are introduced in such a way that they are disruptive it introduces a contamination which the longer it stays the more evil that it is. It isn't just that it's bad, it continues to get worse; it isn't just that it is an initial evil, it continues to generate evil. And so the whole quality of protection from this kind of a witchcraft, if applied by someone who has taken over from this, and so a negative Shaman is a very dangerous figure. So that the quality of development for a visionary contemplative supernatural quest must be grounded, not in the earth of existentiality but it must be grounded in the sense that the flow of the character is natural. If our experience is a mysterious deepening of nature then whatever transcendence that there is will be a mystic helping; if our character is not flowing in a natural way, if it is impeded, if it is manipulative, then whatever transcendence is done begins to have an incursion of evil, of witchcraft, as a matter of fact. One of the earliest monographs on Navajo witchcraft, which produced a sensation when it came out by was by Clyde Kluckhohn whose book on the Navajo with Dorothea Leighton was the standard textbook on anthropology for many years, Kluckhohn, the big man at Harvard for many years.
The sand painting was a speciality not only of Franc Newcomb and Gladys Reichard but of Leland J. Wyman as well. In his great discussion of the windways of the Navajo and the Cherokee Apache, he writes, 'The late Gladys Reichard' this is 1962, she died in 1955, 'The late Gladys Reichard who made the most extensive study of Navajo symbolism ever accomplished came to the conclusion that no colour sequence runs through a single chant consistently and that there is no fixed colour pattern for directions or sex.' He goes on to point out that it's not quite true but what her point was is that in the natural experience mysteriousness of nature, one does not appeal to symbolic consistency. The desideratum of symbolic consistency is a mental imposition at this stage, at this phase of development because what is overwhelmingly important is that your experience will flow as a deepening, as like if you have a horizon of natural experience then you want your mythic experience to have both that cleft, like the cleft in the earth of Delphi, or that rise like the rise of a mysterious mountain.
The very first monograph on Navajo chants was called Mountain Way and it occurs here in 1883, The Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, John Wesley Powell was the editor at the time and it's the Mountain Chant has a very special couple of colour plates and I want to just show two of them. This is the first colour plate of a sand painting every made in the world, from the American South West, and you can see off to the side here the dark circle that has the quaternary in it. It is the hole through which emergence of primordial existence occurs in the first place and is now structured so that it has a quaternary and in the second, if you can see it, it appears at the very centre of the sand painting. It has been able to not just migrate from outside to the centre of it but it has come from the mysterious supernatural and now is at the very centre of the entire plane of the sand panting. When a centre comes in that particular variety, and we've talked about his many times before, it is no longer a centre spot but it is an axial pivot. So that the entire sand painting now will have not only its design and its structure as a ritual thing that has been made and the colours and everything structured so that it has ritual existence, it has its figuration, it will have a dynamic configuration that is experienceable. Experienceable, especially by the chanter, the sand painter, and he or she for whom this has been done so that the chanter will be one pole of the axiality of that sand painting experience and for whom it has been made, they will be the other pole of that axis.
Together, working together in that axial way, they will be the boundary conditions for the pivot. And as we talked about at the very beginning today, if you have a boundary condition, now any geometricity between them will have the ability to register energy as a frequency which is specific and definite. We talked initially that if you put a node in the middle of a bounded condition you now have a beginning of a sine wave. If you put two nodes, now you have a four part quality to that sine wave. Like our learning is an eight-node so that we have an energy that is extremely refined and powerful enough to penetrate illusion or delusion of any kind, once you get to that state it's like an octave in music; now you don't make sound or noise but now you have a music, you are able to write symphonies, you are able to make string quartets, you are able to have a rock group.
This quality of the accumulation of resonances into a harmonic has for its equilibrium not something which is just a straight line but is always a curved spiral and that that curved spiral will transcend and go out not only outside of the plane but outside of the geometricity of the plane into something which is a very high powered dynamic. It now has a kinetic energy that is not in just a potential conserved and reserved, but that that energy is an attraction source as well. It's not just a reserve that one could draw on but it is like thrown ahead, like foresight, so that you do not just have the background but you have the foresight helping you and the entire spindle, the entire pivot of experience now runs from the character of who you are in your experience, all the way to the spirit person of who you are in your art. So from myth, through symbols, through vision, into art, you have a new quality of human being, that was not possible before.
As long as you stay in experience, human life will have the qualities, the textures, the temperament of a culture. When you add symbols to that, all of that now integrates higher so that you have not just a culture, but you have a social world. That social world, as we'll see when we get to symbols, is extremely powerful and is really quite extraordinary. Here is what it reads out as, 'In nature, it works by modulation of occurrence. In ritual it works by the geometry of existence. In myth it works by the modelling of experience and that modelling of experience centres around custom fortifying tradition into belief which generates, then, culture and the way, classically, that it is kept healthy is that culture and nature are flowed together.
But when you bring in symbols, all of a sudden the social world is transformed, when we get to Symbols we will talk about this. What shows up is any kind of skew that is there in the mythic horizon of experience, because it is not objective, because it is not a form, will not be noticeable by a mind that looks to objective forms. So the defect in one's character does not become apparent to the mind, especially if the mind is just doing its thing of further integrating, further empowering, one just makes it worse because one now brings it into a defective form. The deluded mind is not based on illusion so much but on the belief in the illusion, integrated, interiorised into a self-indoctrinating idea and this, then, becomes the source of the manipulating ego; a centre which will not open to a pivot but a centre which seeks to dominate by maintaining the plane in its design and forcing the ritual actions to conform to its indoctrination, to its own idea, to its own selfishness. So instead of there being a transforming self, there is a selfishness. This is a difficulty that in culture was always addressed by keeping the rituals pure in that if those rituals were not pure, your experience would not be able to be natural. It would not flow and fit in with the way nature occurs and so you would notice that this has to be done right or what is done is now needing to be changed, needing to be refined so that experience will flow with nature. So the tuning of experience to nature in myth was always moderated by the accuracy of ritual actions.
It is not that karma is bad, it is that karma is inescapable, but if your actions are right the karma will be fine. What comes into sabotage is - when we get to the Symbols we'll understand it even deeper this time - there is no way to tell that the experience is not modulated because the mind increasingly, then, will abstract itself from nature and will be able to dominate the ritual actions and by default, then, will support its own sourcing and defective existence with all the rationalisations needed to keep it going, to justify it, to self-justify it. And so, oddly enough, though it is the most powerful integrator in the whole natural cycle, the mind cannot heal itself. It has to go outside of itself to reinstate health once it's impaired. But the reinstatement cannot come directly into the mind, it goes into making experience transparent enough, ambidextrous enough that it will check itself against visionary flows of consciousness as well as the flows of nature. And so experience now flows, the mythic horizon will flow between two occurrence fields, one of them natural, the other supernatural, magical, if you will.
The social world will have an essence to it. The visionary phase will have a quintessence to it. It will be quintessential in the sense that it will fit like the pivot in the centre of the structure of the symbolic mind and introduce the kinetic quality of being able to sense that one is out of balance. And so visionary quests are always quests not to go and find something but to reacquire that other part of the pivot of wholeness. That's where the sand painter comes in, not as the healer, but as the co-worker, to establish the healing of the pivot experience. But the pivot is not a thing, the pivot is the radiant and chiral kinetic of spiritual experience, visionary experience which becomes the spirit. This is what makes it an art.
If you have some acquaintance with ancient India, their ceremonies are remarkably similar to those of the American Indians, especially in the South West and Great Lakes region. This is a recording of the Agni ceremony in India, this was done, the University of California Press sponsored this, Chants and Recitations from Ancient India. If you listen to these cassettes, they sound remarkably like American Indians in a ceremony chanting. One could hear this and not know its source and you would not initially be able to tell that it is not American Indians chanting, whereas it's Ancient Sanskrit from the Vedic ceremony of Agni.
The Agni ceremony, from about 3500 years ago, takes place because an eagle-shaped platform is made out of mud and straw and bricks, just like the sand painting is made on natural sand base and where the eye of that eagle will be is a place where the sacred fire will come down and ignite and give not only sight to the spiritual eagle but will allow it spiritually to fly. This particular ceremony is not for an individual but for the health of the entire community, not just the community around but for all of life, that all of life, now, will have this healing in the sense that the sacred fire will light because the pivot in its kinetic dynamic will churn like a stick in a bevel and the friction will ignite the fire and so the fire will ignite through a yogic energy.
The same quality happens with a sand painting; whereas the pivot is not some kind of fire stick but the pivot is the chanter and for whom the chanting is done in a spirit chirality of deep enough intensity that the sand painting will vibrantly come alive. That ritual form, then, will make the interface between the experience and the nature so that one's experience comes back into sync with the natural flow. There no evil takes place, cannot take hold whatsoever. All impairment vanishes because one has come back into focus, one has come back into tune.
Next week we are going to move to a third pair. We are going to go to one of the wisest women of the 20th century, Susanne K. Langer, who came out with a new philosophy of art based upon the understanding that if we go to a ritual basis for art without first going to a mental basis, we have a way of reintroducing a healthy symbolic quality because the symbols will be vibrating between the ritual and the art as two objective qualities that calibrate the mind back into its fullness. The test of it is that the more that the art objectivity comes into its differential form, the more it will begin to dominate the way in which that pivot occurs and the pivot occurs at the centre of the mind, which is not a thing, but a space of openness, so that that black, fertile primordiality of the hole at the sand painting where all of it would come out, even if there is not a black hole at the centre, if the entire sand painting came out from that effervescence, it's like a galactic structure, will have a super-massive black hole but will also have a high energy pivot. It will have a double axis. The most powerful things in the universe are the black hole axes of galactic structures. Our quality of maturity of an ecology that is resonantly there in that universal harmonic; we function in that way.
The second thing that we are going to take a look at is the way in which language, now, at its origins posed problems all the way because of its written character from about 2500BC until about 400BC, we are going to look at Plato's great dialogue The Phaedrus. The most indelible challenge to human beings was that the written power of a symbolic language was stronger than any of the cultural forms, stronger than the social worlds that had been achieved at the time and they called for a transformation from the cultures and from the social worlds to a larger form. The trouble is they did not understand that the larger integral form will simply be a mental prison. The larger forms than the mind are always differential forms like works of art, like spiritual persons, who then have a resonance that is attracting them from the cosmos as a form. Without the art of the spirit person-making being harmonic with the cosmos, one doesn't know about the ambidextrousness of the pivot and one settles more and more for the fortified centre of the power that now becomes an imprisonment. More next week.