Interval 4
Presented on: Saturday, December 30, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Interval Four. The largest rhythm that I present is a pair of annual cycles and you can think of those annual cycles together as the double helix of the DNA. One of the elements, one of the helixes in DNA goes one way and the other helix goes the other way. So they do not go in parallel, they go in an interweaving cascade of spiral arcs that have their cognate connectiveness in such a way that in DNA atoms of phosphorus are part of the bonds that hold them together. And phosphorus, as you know, is like the stuff of matches, it ignites. It also brings together phosphorus, potassium...they're these kinds of elements that bring things together in such a cinched way that the energy bunches in a way that allows for a concourse both ways and when it parts, it parts cleanly. So when the DNA will replicate itself the phosphorus bonds will separate cleanly very quickly and engender their pair to come into play. So the two annual cycles are like the two double helixes and those double helixes carry chromosomes; for us there are 23 chromosomes, for corn there are 14. In our programme the phases are the chromosomes and the eight phases are like eight chromosomes of ways in which people have matured in our species for the last 50, 60, 75,000 years. Within those chromosomal phases carried by the double helixes, there are genes and each presentation is like a gene. And a gene has its work in application when it directs the formations of proteins and enzymes, so that all of the metabolic processes necessary for organic life can work. And so the presentations are meant to be genes that provide for you in your response to it, in your involvement with it, in your learning, in continuity with it, to be the proteins and the enzymes of how you mature and how you learn. In all of this we have emancipated ourselves completely from a bug list that is longer than the dictionaries of what has been wrong with human life, with human culture and with the failures of any civilisation to maintain themselves beyond several hundred years at the most and then slide into millennia of decay. So we're presenting something that is both traditional, is both basic to the reality of life and which is new. The intervals are like the four seasons, they're like the equinoxes, they're like the solstices that give an annual cycle its seasonal development and initiate a new phase. And in this one then moves from chromosome to chromosome, from gene set to gene set and within the genes set there are certain genes which are free to move around. In genetics, they were discovered, as we saw, by Barbara McClintock and popularly they were called jumping genes. They are called transposons and they allow a great many aspects of modern microbiological research to take place. We know now that symmetry, pairedness, is so fundamental that the single strand RNA that goes out as a messenger to carry the direction of the assembling of amino acids by such a gene into the various proteins, we know now that if you double that RNA with its symmetrical negative, that the two of those together will silence that genetic message permanently. Not only will the message not work that time, it changes the way in which the structure of the RNA will be, unless it is worked with to reinstate whatever it is. So that that RNA is called RNAi, small, 'i,' interference RNA. And it's useful because one can learn how to cut and make clear exactly what a sequence is and what it will do, what the sequence, no matter how long it is if one would write it out linearly, that you can have a definite arrangement of quanta, that, 'This gene does this, in these steps, in this array.' The presentation of the intervals is not meant to silence anything, but to be a celebration spacing, so that each phase can be worked within itself, or it allows for an ambidextrous comparing or contrasting of any phases and in this way one can learn how to learn. So this is a form for our future that allows us an indefinite capacity to understand what it is we are doing and what really occurs when what we're doing...and how we can actually change what we're doing and in this way not manipulate, but come to craft, like a jeweller, the jewel quality of ourselves. The most ancient application of this in India was several thousand years before the Vedic age in India, which goes back to about 1500 BC. India was sophisticated by 3000 BC, when the great Mahabharata Indian War was fought in north India, not too far from north of Delhi, modern Delhi. The ancient civilisation of India was pooled in several different venues; the most sophisticated of them was the Indus River valley that stretched from the Himalayas down to the Arabian Sea. And there were two great cities there: Harappa in the north, Mohenjo-Daro in the south and they both had about 400,000 people, 2700 BC. They had sewer systems, they had paved streets, they had a very sophisticated civilisation and they sent products all the way into Mesopotamia and from Mesopotamia the Sumerian Akkadian brokers took those goods and took them all the way to the east Mediterranean, where is today Syria and Lebanon and Israel. All the way up to the Black Sea, what is today Turkey, all the way into the Aegean Islands, all the way down into Africa, as far as Ethiopia. And in Ethiopia, because of the quality of the Arabian ports, the south Arabian Peninsula ports and the difficulty of overland travel, Ethiopia was very quickly a favoured destination, like southern Mesopotamia, of goods and influence from India. And so you found some 5,000 years ago that there was a mixing of the ancient, pre-Aryan, Dravidian Indians with the Africans and you get today the look of the Ethiopians, who are actually very ancient India Africans.
We're looking at Patanjali, who was the archetypal Ancient India sage who wanted to bring out qualities from the most Ancient India that had been buried, that had been overlaid by the great Aryan invasions from Central Asia, from proto-Iranians, from Scythians and they brought in the Vedic civilisation that then is recorded in the Rigveda, or the various arrangements of the Rigveda, the Atharvaveda etc. In that Vedic civilisation the ancient Palaeolithic wisdom of India was covered up by ceremonies and procedures and social caste systems that were alien to early India. By about 700 BC there were certain qualities in the life cycle of India, where elderly men and sometimes elderly women...elderly meaning that they had already raised their families, they had already done their business, they had already come to a completion of their generations of the life cycle. And if you were still alive and if you were still viable, the procedure in very Ancient India was not to go on vacation, or retire, but to go out into the forest to meditate, to go to the mountains to meditate, to go to the Deccan deserts of India to meditate, to close your life out with a consideration of, 'What did all this mean?' And out of that came a new kind of woven teaching that was not Vedic, but had the kernel of the Vedic overlay germinated in an Ancient Indian, Dravidian way and out of this came the kind of writings that we recognise today as the Upanishads. And the Upanishads, the first ones, the first two, were huge, they were large, they were hundreds of pages of written out...the first one was called the Brihadaranyaka, the Great Breath Forest Teaching, the second was the Chandogya Upanishad. But after a couple of hundred years, the Upanishads became more and more short, terse, to the point that what was being looked at is not just the whole seed, but the kernel of the seed, not the wheat grain, but the wheatgerm in it. And so the later Upanishads became refined more and more to exactly show...because the meditations had become very powerful and condensing and they became what we would call today super yogas. And there were certain talented individuals over a period of three, or four, or 500 years, who finally worked out the condensation of the Upanishad wheatgerm kernel so that you could present, in any emergency, with any kind of interruption that would be conceivable, you could present the entirety of human maturation realisation in 18 verses. The Isha Upanishad is only 18 verses. If you look at the Bhagavad G?t? it is 18 chapters, but the Isha Upanishad is like the crème de la crème. Then about 150 BC came a genius who we're looking at today, his name is Patanjali. And Patanjali's Yoga Sutra sought to take that wheatgerm, that kernel, from Upanishadic condensed wisdom and to give a teaching whereby that wheatgerm kernel could enter into the seed of your innermost being and be a transposer that would give you a new capacity to exfoliate yourself in terms of reality, rather than in terms of the culture. In terms of a universal quality of maturation, rather than any social conditions. And that the mind, which had mastered the social conditions, or your status in the caste, or the tribe, or the area had mastered the cultural traditions, or the ritual obeyance of codes and laws and procedures and principles, had mastered the graphic practicality of life. You were given in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali the opportunity to regrow your life in terms of a universal series of stages of maturation. And so the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali is like if you would take your own innermost person and take a spark of actual spiritual life that is eternal, how would you then regrow yourself in the remaining time of your life? And this is what Patanjali presents in the Yoga Sutra. There are many learned volumes and traditions on Patanjali; after almost 2200 years you can imagine that they are extraordinarily convoluted. India specialises in being complex to whatever degree of complexity one could imagine. The figure who masterfully recut the thousands and thousands of years of India philosophy best was Surendranath Dasgupta and his History of Indian Philosophy, the first edition of volume one came out in 1922. He had spent from 1910 on, trying to find a way to make India, Indian philosophy, as exactly presented as western philosophy would be. It was published by Cambridge because he was associated with Cambridge at the time when Bertrand Russell was there, Wittgenstein was there, G.E. Moore was there. The time of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the pinnacle of refined western logic and western philosophic tradition. And Surendranath Dasgupta, who came from a very distinguished Bengali family, extraordinary in Calcutta, set himself a life's work and he spent the last 40 years of his life working on his History of Indian Philosophy. He published four huge volumes and the fifth was shortened by his death in 1952. He's extraordinary for us for another aspect in that he is the one who received a handwritten letter from the adolescent Mircea Eliade from Bucharest, Romania, who had read in some of his books and wanted to come and study Indian philosophy with him. And the good Professor Dasgupta invited Mircea Eliade to come and apprentice himself. But unbeknownst to Eliade, who was rather a bohemian, European radical - he wrote occult novels, he did all kinds of very bohemian living style things - he didn't understand that he was being invited by one of the most sophisticated teachers on the planet to come and be apprenticed to him in the sense that we would understand that if you're going to learn, you learn because, on the principle of magnetics, it is the constant process of contact extended that remagnetises your ability to have thought in the first place. That the neuronal patterns, not only of the brain, but of the entire body, are in this kind of teaching yoga reorganised and reassembled on the basis that it will be a fit psychophysical, body, mind, spirit to be the fertile ground out of which your seed with the spark kernel of eternal wisdom growing, so that would have a psychophysical body within which to manifest itself. It would have a neurophysical quality of capping this so that your consciousness then would be able to have not only the initial samadhis necessary for expansion, but you would be a fertile being for this to happen in all of the exfoliation. Eliade, when he arrived at Professor Dasgupta's house, was taken with the beauty of his daughter and after some charming months of proto liaison, the family began to notice the difference in the tone, the difference in the appeal of the household, of the daughter, of young Eliade and so Professor Dasgupta cut him off and gave him an assignment to leave the pleasant yoga of sophisticated urban Calcutta and to go to Rishikesh to get the real, ancient yoga quality of discipline. And of course the ancient yoga was...I think the word that we would use today is brutal. The ancient Rishi tradition was based on suffering, on, literally, a psychic dismemberment, a breaking of all of the bonds that had you make sense of the world in any way whatsoever, so that you are left completely diced up, mashed up, thrown away. One of the techniques of that ancient yoga was to do your meditation in the cemeteries. In those days the cemeteries were not nice places, with little tombstones and beautiful grass. They were places where bodies were being rotting, cremated, ghoulish, absolute nightmare places, nightmare places, Hieronymus Bosch type nightmare places and you would do your years of meditation in that kind of environment. In Rishikesh it was by that time found you didn't have to go to a physical cemetery, you could create a cemetery in the psychophysical quality of someone's personality, of someone's character, of someone's sense of individuality and they would progressively go into a complete chaotic nightmare swirl meltdown. And then out of that they would be encouraged to reassemble themselves.
The photograph of the young Eliade going to India, shows a cocksure, 19 year old genius and two years later when he came back to Romania he had a full beard, he had those steady eyes, he had that mound of yogic Sadu hair and for the rest of his life he was one of the most formidable thinkers on the planet. Devastatingly precise. His two great books, one of them is on Shamanism, how you take someone apart completely. People that go for shamanic weekends have no idea. And the complement to it was Yoga, which was how to reassemble yourself out of the mess that a shamanic initiation delivers. In one of the really beautiful moments in one of Joseph Campbell's lectures, he talked about speaking to a young Inuit shaman. He said that he was sick over and over again and then finally they realised that he was too much in touch with the supernatural, the other world, so they took him out away from the encampment and they placed him alone, with no food, no medicine, no company, in a little hut. And he said, 'I was left there to die and I died over and over again, until a threshold was crossed where there was nothing left to do but to accept that you had died.' And he said, at that moment, an absorption swept him into an openness that he has never lost since. Yoga has this quality of being able to pull back out of a chaotic swirl a new lotus that this time has a particular quality and character. Its seed wheatgerm kernel is eternal, so that what develops out of that you now are an eternal being, you will never die. The yogic word for that is, 'Purusha.' Purusha is the radiant being whose true home is in eternity. The source, mysterious source, out of which one would emerge this purusha, is called, 'Prakriti.' Prakriti, I used to call her Ma Prakriti, Mother Nature. That there is a quality that Mother Nature allows as prakriti, to make a field, which in its invisibility is so subtle that as soon as you begin to index it in terms of dimension, in terms of time, it shies away from the reach of the index. And so it backs away from time as a sequence because eternity is not usually miscible with time. And as soon as space blossoms out of time, that space becomes not only blossomed out of time, but it becomes indexed by time so that that space begins now to have literally a fabric of its dimensions, its three dimensions, which is cinched together and the ancient way to speak of it is you now have a time-bound spatiality. If in a yoga you are able to silence the timing mechanism which is not in nature...nature is already backed away from time before existence has even emerged and existence is already time-bound of its very existential nature. And nowhere in cultural, tribal experience in the myth, in the methos, would one run up against this in anything other than mythic images, mythic feelings, mythic narrations. And ordinarily in the structure of the mind, its structure is meant to be the integral of all of this. Only when the mind is silenced to the threshold, to where there is no more content in the structure of the mind, it's only in that silence that you find this kind of a quality from Patanjali. This is how the Yoga Sutra begins...I'm using Alistair Shearer's translation, called Effortless Being, it's actually...it's a very good English poetic that he uses. 'And now the teaching on yoga begins. Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.' And from there Patanjali begins to go into the specificity by using an ancient teaching technique that was common both to India and to Greece, not so much in Egypt and not so much in Mesopotamia, but the Ancient Indians and the Ancient Greeks used the hand to do a lot of presenting. And so when you hold the hand up, fives are a way to index something in a typology which can be gestalted, or can be paired, or can be shown in their singularity or in their sequence and the sequence in a set, which allows for a resolving fifth to make grasping, rather than holding on, possible so that one can get it. 'The five types of mental activity,' says Patanjali, 'Are understanding, misunderstanding, sleep, imagination and memory.' So that one has this ability all of a sudden by the fifth verse...the Yoga Sutra is divided into four parts and the first part has 51 verses, the second part has 55 verses, the third part 55 verses and the fourth part 34 verses. So that by the time you get to the fifth verse of the first part, you get for the first time the first hand geometry of how you're going to proceed. You're going to proceed literally in the laying of hands onto your own development, but that development cannot take place until you have first unravelled the delusions that you have lived by. You have learned not to depend just on perception and its ordinary conception, to see because seeing in that way, perceiving in that way, conceiving in that way, you cannot tell what is illusion, what is appearance and your belief in any illusion will be a source of delusion. And it is like a contagion: once there is the inability to see appearance even as a necessary illusion, the conception will be flawed to the extent that it will corrode all of the structure of symbolic thought. Like a bad apple in a barrel, eventually every apple in the barrel will be flawed, will be corroded. And so the quality in yoga is to make sure that there is a detailed inventory of exactly, completely every aspect that must count and that the process of unravelling is not to go into chaos, but to purify. That the yoga teaching is not to break you down like the ancient rishis at Rishikesh would have done thousands of years ago, but to wean you away to the procedure of the continuity of the yoga. That the yoga itself is of such a nature that its thread will be such that if you follow it, it will eventually - because it is designed to do this - it will vanish. It will be like making a suture on a wound where the thread of the suture disappears into the body and leaves no trace. And so one can depend not on being left in a chaos, but left more and more purified. And so a yoga...and Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is the most sophisticated of all of the yogas presented in India until the advent some 250 years later of a new scale of wisdom called, traditionally, the high dharma, the Mah?y?na. There is a quality - and we'll come back to it after the break - but there is a quality here where the source is prakriti, Ma Prakriti, Mother Nature and her whole field will operate more and more invisibly the more that existence comes into play as existential things. The thingnesses will generate a shadow of themselves, an antiparticle, an antiness, to maintain the universal symmetry. So that it is not only, as we spoke last week that electrons are positive charges, positive particles that polarise with protons that are positive, electrons themselves will have a hole, it will be a vacuum space that is positively charged, but will not be a particle. The antiproton is a particle so powerful that it is equal to the proton and if they are brought together what is left is a complete combustion into total energy. Proton collisions are the basis of the new Large Hadron Collider, coming online in December 2007 in CERN. It will produce conditions that are very close to the beginning of the universe for the first time on earth. The quality of Ma Prakriti is that she nourishes by letting you go. Aldous Huxley, in the Perennial Philosophy called it the, 'Via negativa.' You are able to proceed in complete freedom because there are no obstacles there. What panics the character that has been addicted, addicted to the world, is that as you take away the aspects that have worked for you, you are left with the negatives of those aspects and you, being addicted to illusion and believing in it, which is delusory, you believe now that there are dark things, rather than right things. That there are demonic things that you can't put your finger on, that are antithetical to the way in which you live, they're antithetical to life, they must be and they must be there. And so one becomes haunted increasingly and in this haunting a fearfulness builds like a penumbra, like a massive shadow field of life itself and one becomes invalided in that the only way to deal with this is to agree to it and to live by it. One of the most fearful presentations of that moment is in a short novel by Joseph Conrad, which was made into a film called Apocalypse Now. And Marlon Brando playing the old demon-haunted American General, says to Martin Sheen, come to kill him, he said, 'You must make a friend of horror, must become your daily teacher, otherwise it is too horrific to sustain.' Let's take a break.
Let's come back to a very interesting situation. How does physical reality have any connection with spiritual consciousness? They don't ever touch. In Ancient India tradition the physical structure of existence had its methodology - it's called sankhya, sankhya yoga - and what was archetypally special was that Mother Nature and the spiritual purusha, like a mother and son, never touched, yet were intimately in a deep complementarity, whose set of the two somehow touching in invisible ways, constituted what was real. It's as if saying that, 'This mother never had a child and this conscious son, or this conscious daughter never had a mother.' How is it then that they are a family? What is the precise method of adoption, both ways, that is operating here and creates then, not a social family, not a cultural family, not a ritual, blood tie family, but creates what we would call a spirit family. And that that spirit family, because it's not limited by blood ties, blood types, cultural norms, social realities, has a completely free pattern to its familyness and is indefinitely extendable, it's a shareable family. The recognition is mutually because there is a kinship, not on the basis of rituals, not on the basis of the mythic horizon of experience, not on the basis of the structure of the mind. Its kinship tang only becomes spontaneously apparent when the mind is quieted and Patanjali, in his writing will emphasise that more and more. 'The practice of yoga is the commitment to become established in the state of freedom. Freedom is that triumphant state of consciousness which is beyond the influence of desire.' It's a commitment not to be committed in any way that you could identify. Later on in the high dharma, 1,000 years later, the phrase that would be put in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, the Vajracchedik?, right at the centre of the Diamond Sutra, which steps up to an apex, makes a single statement and steps back down in perfect symmetry from that apex - rather like the structure of the Iliad by Homer, which is punctuated exactly in the centre by the death of Patroclus - the phrase in the Diamond Cutter Sutra is, 'Awaken the mind by not letting it rest on anything.' If it does not seek to ground itself, to identify itself, to attach itself, if one shies away from those attachments, from those identifications, constantly, completely, perfectly, you become affined to the way in which Mother Nature has also shied away from those things. She recognises you immediately as kin: 'You're my kind of son, you're my kind of daughter. You are able to do this in your field of consciousness, like I do it in my field of nature.' And so the unboundedness of consciousness gets adopted, or as the Yoga Sutra says, 'Absorbed by the freedom of the field of Mother Nature.' Your unboundedness and her total freedom from not accepting limitations of identification, etc., etc. allows her and you then to have a completely different quality and the Yoga Sutra says, 'The mind ceases to thirst for anything it has seen or heard of, even what is promised in the Scriptures. And supreme freedom is that complete liberation from the world of change, which comes of knowing the unbounded self.' And since the unboundedness of the self has no way to have a definitional shape, the shapedness is like the radiant radiance that comes from the scintillation of a jewel. It has its characteristics and qualities in radiance, not in outline, not in what in medieval western philosophy used to be called the, 'Accidents,' the qualities that belong to something. 'It's hard or soft,' 'It's red or black,' all of those are accidental to the appearance of its existence, but have no applicability when one drops down into the source of existence, or one rises up into the blooming of the mind into unbounded consciousness. This quality Patanjali shows is only theoretically determinable by the structure of the mind and cannot actually spontaneously recognise when it really does occur, because the real occurrence of it, though similar to the refinedness of symbolic thought in its structure, is different.
I'm putting in the notes for Symbols on the very first page of Patanjali a little article from the current issue of Nature. And it shows two concentric ripple wave fronts interacting and in a super computer, when they interact one gets an interference overlap pattern that is geometric and one can look at it and I've outlined it in the notes so that you can read what the pattern looks like. The pattern has the familiar, 'X,' shape of resonances that Watson and Crick got from the crystallography of running DNA in a crystal form through an X-ray analysis. Will always show that the double helixes, where they intersect each other, will make little blips that outline an, 'X,' in graduated, symmetrical blips. The super computer outlines it in blue, but in pink it is from high-powered laboratory experiments and actually what happens is that you get a gem faceted form that's recognisable because it's the way certain gems like emeralds are cut to bring out their radiance. It is a kind of a vesica piscis quality that is not in a form, but is in a radiant, multi-dimensional, faceted cut that looks exactly like a gemstone would be from its refined presentation.
The purusha is not a self which the mind would be able to recognise, though it can figure out an abstract version of it. It is only when the mind is quieted, even from its own figuring out and the last vestige that is left of its figuring out is when it has stopped figuring out any content in terms of itself and is left only with itself as a structure and keeps figuring itself in the old way. When it stops doing that, when the figuring stops, the ritual figuration also changes the way in which a configuration will occur. And the configuration now will be initially invisible, because there is no figuration there for the mind to integrate into a conceptualisation. The configuration will be invisible radiation thresholds that are only apparent when consciousness emerges the spiritual form of the radiant differential conscious person, the purusha. Then notices that the shape of the experience founding this radiance is that they experience itself in reality is the jewel made by the interface of the field of nature and the field of consciousness. The interpenetration that makes then the shape of the harmonic of the eternal, expandable spirit family. This has later in Patanjali an interesting presentation. By the twentieth verse of the first of the four sections of the Yoga Sutra, the phrase reads: 'This samadhi' - this meditation - 'This samadhi is preceded by trust, perseverance, recollection, tranquillity and wisdom.' So you get a five again, you get another hand. The Yoga Sutra in the first section started with the five qualities that go into interference and lead to illusion: understanding, misunderstanding, sleep, imagination, memory. Now there are another five that are posited together, but it takes a subtle reading of Patanjali because this is not at the beginning, this is almost halfway through the first of the four sections of the Yoga Sutra and one has to count, not just five, but the samadhi itself is a sixth sense. And when you do so you recognise that in Patanjali for the very first time is the seed kernel which a couple of hundred years later, in the high dharma, will be the p?ramit?s, the six p?ramit?s, the six perfections. So if you list them so that you have six, you have the samadhi itself, then you have trust, perseverance, recollection, tranquillity and wisdom. The six p?ramit?s are d?na, s?la, k??nti, v?rya, dhy?na, prajñ?. Prajñ?, of course wisdom. Dhy?na is the concentration, it is the way in which samadhi itself occurs. V?rya is, in Sanskrit is like our English, 'Virile,' it means a strength, but a strength that one can trust in, almost a fortitude. K??nti is patience, which is very much like the Yoga Sutra's perseverance. S?la means order and it's very much like the recollection quality in Patanjali. And d?na, which is gifting, is very much a tranquillity, not to get, or to have, or to want, but to give, to bestow the quietness of shareability, of any and all, indefinitely. And so in Patanjali, about 150 BC, you find posited a quality of very high possibility that took another 250 years for it to mature. And the first place that it matures in India is in A?vagho?a's Awakening a Faith in the Mah?y?na. One of the qualities in A?vagho?a, about 90 AD, is that he learned a transform of the old Buddhism. He learned it from a special old guru of his, whose name was P?r?va and P?r?va was from the east coast of India, Orissa State, which has a couple of very powerful rivers that go inland in the India subcontinent, much like the Amazon would in South America and one of the largest, most powerful river systems that goes in is the Godavari. And the Godavari, when it goes in from the Bay of Bengal into India, all the way into the central Deccan and curves around, that Godavari River was the frontier that the original St. Thomas...was one of the original 12 Apostles from Jesus, was sent to carry the high dharma to India. And when St. Thomas first landed at the old Jewish trading ports in Kerala, on the lower west side of the tail of India, the subcontinent, he crossed over through the central part of the Tamil speaking language and went to Madras, where his tomb is today, on St. Thomas Hill. But the farthest that he travelled...he travelled into Ceylon and he travelled up the east coast of India as far as the Godavari River and inland from the Bay of Bengal on the Godavari was one of the earliest of the Mah?y?na temples, called Amaravati. And Amaravati was the first time that you had a Hellenistic, Jewish, early Jesus, pre-Christian church, high dharma transform of the Ancient Indian Vedic religions. And just inland from Amaravati, less than 50 or 60 miles, is another site, a hill called Nagarjunakonda, which is where the great architect of Amaravati, when he was young...his name was Nagarjuna, one of the world's greatest philosophers, was also an architect. When he was young he built Amaravati and when he was over 100 years old he built Nagarjunakonda to be a transform from the beginning, where Amaravati is a transform of Hinduism into a cosmic way. Nagarjunakonda is where there's a transform from the old Buddhism into the new Buddhism of the Mah?y?na. P?r?va was a teacher of A?vagho?a and Nagarjuna is like the grandson generation to A?vagho?a. A?vagho?a's name in Sanskrit actually means, 'The horse neighing.' When the horse, when the stallion, whinnies, or the healthy mare whinnies, the word for that sound is a?vagho?a. When he was a young man in Russia the integrity of the author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, the Russians called him, 'The eye of the horse,' because he was exactly seeing what was real and true. Nagarjuna was the eye of the horse neighing of A?vagho?a, who received it from P?r?va, who received it from St. Thomas. And so you find an interesting transform that when the cream of the Yoga Sutra from 150 BC leaves its kernel trace, especially in southern and eastern India, it becomes the first way in which India was able to accept the new way coming from Jesus, through St. Thomas and to find a way to open up and exfoliate a series of harmonics that is not only true, but deeper than truth. It says like this if one were to put it in contemporary English: the deepest quality of someone is their ability to pair with someone else. Jesus perfects those pairings and God makes those pairings eternally in their perfect reality. And so one gets an expansion where it is no longer just the kernel of the seed of the beginning, but the entire flower has been able to come out, the entire garden is able to be grown and the bouquets that one could gather to gift from that are endless.
Next week we take a look at the beginning of the differential conscious ecology, the second year and we're going to begin as we began with the first year, with a high dharma version of the I Ching, the writings of Tsongzu and we're going to jump from Thoreau all the way back to a high dharma origin of the tradition that Thoreau came to exemplify and inhabit. We're gonna go back to the original Hermetic treatise, the Poimandres, the Creative Mind Shepherd, written in Alexandria about 90 AD, exactly at the time, the same time that A?vagho?a was writing the first Mah?y?na Sutra. Those kinds of correlations one can trace and just to end with some correlations for you: a contemporary of Patanjali is the Teacher of Righteousness from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Prince Liu of Weinan, whose group in China, discussing the subtleties of the Tao, produced the classic, the Huai-nan Tzu. So the Teacher of Righteousness in Qumran, the group around Prince Liu in China, the Chang'an and Patanjali in central India, all about 150 BC, give this kind of an indication that this wave front was not a culmination, but it was the beginnings of a new harmonic that would be harvestable in about 200 years. In about 300 years the harvest would have been able to be replanted in a completely new quality of fertility, would be there in the world. At the end of his Gospel, St. John - who wrote the Gospel about 66 AD and wrote the Book of Revelation about 96 AD, years later, in exile - at the end of his Gospel St. Peter is overhearing that Jesus has said to him that he will come for him, 'Wait for me until I come' and St. Peter, of course, characteristically misunderstood and thought that he was saying that St. John would not die. And St. John, at the end of the Gospel - you can read it - says...corrects Peter and corrects all those who would think in that reductive way. "He did not say I would not die, he said, 'You will tarry until I come.' It is different, it is not that you will be eternal, but the perfection of the pairedness which I will bring for you, that is eternal.'" More next week.