Vision 2
Presented on: Saturday, January 13, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Vision Two, which is the second presentation of our second year and we're looking at the way in which a differentiality opens out exactly from its interface with the ultimate integraling that takes place in thought. In the first year we explored how out of the field of nature an array of forms iteratively blinks into emergence and becomes existential and in doing so carries with it its plasma origins into a polarisation of form and that these forms hold, not statically, but vibrantly so high a frequency that the energy in matter exceeds the ability for most perception to be able to see its energy and sees only its form. And that those vibrant forms of existence constellate a traction by which a flow of images, a flow of feeling, a narrative flow of language creates like a river of our experience and though it has a traction on the ritual existentials, it actually flows within the field of nature, like the Gulf Stream would flow in the Atlantic Ocean. And if we follow the flow we carry with it the sense that the field of nature has really participated in the flow and we can concentrate not only on the existentials, but how they integral together in thought. And we discovered and learned that thought is not a form, that thought is a structure which has a cognate correspondence, an alignment that can be precise to the point of an identity. And the structure of thought and the forms of existentials can have in their alignment the sense of a geometry. And so the structure of thought and the forms of ritual action existence have a cognate quality between them. We're now looking at the way in which out of the entire integral, not just the structure of thought, but the entire integral, from nature, to ritual, through myth, to symbol, that that entirety is able to be brought to a focus that classically is called single-pointedness. And the geometry for all time in ancient times that characterised this was the way in which a pyramid would rise to its single point, or the way in which a horizon of the sea would meet the sky at a vanishing, or the way in which the light from the moon or the sun, sometimes even refined to the stars, but mainly the light from the sun being able to have a specific, single-pointed angle, which once in its annual cycle is able to be captured in a reflection. One of the earliest exemplars of this in human culture on this planet was in Ireland at a construct called La Grange, built about the same time that First Dynasty Egypt was coming together, about 3200 BC. In La Grange it was a dome that brought the underground Palaeolithic caves above ground in an architectural dome that was now a resonance of the celestial dome. And the passageway as a radius all the way through the domed structure of La Grange, the top of the dome was planted with sard, so that it looked like a bubble that had raised from the earth and had only one passageway, complete from the radius of the outside to the centre. And at the centre was an altar that was bloodless because it was an altar that was meant to have a symbol of wholeness illuminated only one moment during one sunrise in the year and at the Winter Solstice the sun at that part of Ireland, County Meath, not far from where the Book of Kells was made 4,000 years later, the midwinter sun would send a shaft of light at a completely single angle for one moment and illuminate the sun sign, cueing its recycling for the annual year. This quality of either the La Grange instant recalibrating of a new cycle of nature, or of the pyramids being able to recalibrate in a pattern of three, the pattern that was cued by the star Sirius, rising above the horizon and indicating the annual now flooding cycle had begun, or the ancient realisation of the sea vanishing to the horizon of the sky, that there was a curvature to the way in which distance now does not end, but continues in a special kind of a fall away which is symmetrical to a kind of falling upward. And so the curve of the sea and its vanishing into the sky, the water curves further on down and the sky curves further on up. And so one got in many different ways the understanding that an integral cycle of forms and the integraling structure of thought together are not the complete cycle, it is not the complete picture, that at their extreme beginning or end they generate a further quality. We today recognise it as a further dimension. That the four dimensions of space and time generate at the thresholds of either the beginning or the end in those singularities, they generate a quintessential fifth dimension which we today call consciousness. It is that conscious visionary dimension that introduces a quality in existence that we call transformation and at the same time introduces into the structure of thought a quality we call recalibration. The structure of thought does not transform, it recalibrates, whereas the structuring of forms in existence actually goes through a transformation. What transforms existentials is that consciousness, that quintessential fifth dimension, is also a field like nature, but it is a differential field. It has to have for its appreciation, not a sense of unity, but a sense of proportion, not a sense of integration, but a taste for differentiation and the very simplest way to understand this is that one cannot have an advanced technological development transforming the existentials of the world and recalibrating the integrals of thought without an exemplar like the differential gear. You must be able to take a pattern of one sequence that is calibrated in its cardinality and interface it with another sequence that has a different cardinality and have them meshed together. In an automobile you cannot drive unless the cam shaft is translated into the axles that carry the wheel for the [11:23] differential gear. In western technology the development of differential gears in the 1570's indicated for the first time that one could not only build clocks that would have like little cuckoo birds coming out on the hour, but one could now make fantastic intergeared machines and within a generation you had someone like Pascal in France building the world's first calculator, a forerunner of computers. And of Leibniz also understanding that if you mesh differentiality with the exact right ratios one can now describe aspects that exceed the circles of the cycles of just an integral nature and now are able to disclose what was hidden in nature. The greatest early mathematician to take advantage of this was Kepler, who showed from Tycho Brahe's detailed exquisitely, massive notes that the orbit of Mars is not a perfect circle, it's an ellipse. Out of this came the revolutions in western science.
It takes a vision and so in our Vision phase of our learning we're going back to two of the traditions that developed between the two of them the greatest complementarity so far in the history of the planet. The development of the Hermetic traditions and the development of the Taoist lineages. Both the Hermetic traditions and the Taoist lineages developed alchemy. The alchemy to transform the existential things of the world and to recalibrate the structures of thought no matter what those structures are. And in order to do this one takes an initial transformation; the time-honoured way of succinctly describing it is transforming water into wine. It's a fermentation process and in alchemy it is the beginning of the process of an alchemy. There is a further refinement though: now that the water has become wine, the wine can be distilled into Cognac. And so the alchemical process is not only to create a transformation in existence, but to refine a recalibration in thought and when thought is refined though a distillation of its vision, it now produces something extraordinary. In alchemy the word was not Cognac, but liquor, one makes a liquor. The first transformation makes art, the second transformation makes science and so the arts and the sciences are differential harmonics of the same processes refined and refined. And when this was recognised in the Renaissance, about 500 years ago, higher learning was the learning of the universities of the arts and sciences, they were put together as a set. And so the second year of our learning is the higher learning, it's the university level of what we have achieved in the first. Now, that first sequence we saw last week is extremely refined and going back to the Ancient Egyptian, 5,000 years ago, origins the way in which one perceives is through a series of steps and each of the steps is guarded by a gate, by a gateway. That one must have a key to be able to unlock the gate and go through the gateway and one must do this 12 times. Even the development of the grade school as 12 grades was developed by one of the greatest alchemists of all time, not somebody who was in the laboratory mixing acids with metals, but somebody who was redoing world education. His name was John Amos Comenius. And it is Comenius who developed the whole idea that there is a 12 grade process by which anyone can be matured to the point to where they are an independent, trustworthy human being to consult. And this was done about 350 years ago. Before that education was the province of the wealthy, of the royals and of a few brilliant individuals, almost always men, who found a way to steal their education for themselves. After Comenius one now began to have populations of people who were more or less educated in the sense that they could read and write and this produced a revolution in world affairs. If you can read this is the key to the first transformation. If you can write it's the key to the second transformation. Reading engenders visionary contemplation: one sees, existentially, ink shapes on a paper, that's the perception. To conceive of this as an alphabet that these are repeating limited set symbols and that they constitute words and words constituting phrases and paragraphs and sentences. All of this, limited to perception and conception, would not allow you to read. What reads is that you cue in the visionary dimension of consciousness, you read through the letters, you read through the words. And if you see first graders learning how to read anywhere in the world, they're encouraged to make pictures in their mind. And so we need to recognise, not cognise, but recognise, the mind is distinctly different from thought. The structure of thought is an integral, the mind is the differential field of consciousness. And because consciousness as a field is able to, not align with nature, but able to be absorbed completely so that it now works with nature in a very complex supernature, now the forms that come out of that, the existential forms, emerge out of supernaturalness, they become magical forms. Existence now is magical, it has the ability in its vibration to sense a co-vibration from certain things that it's affined to, from certain people that it's affined to. It is able to experience the dimension of love. And so existence in its magical emergence has now a supernature where love is a harmonic attraction that is working all the time. And in the Renaissance of course, the great translator and re-presenter of the Hermetic tradition, Marsilio Ficino, one of his greatest books is On Love.
We're going to look at the archetypal first Hermetic treatise the Poimandres, the, 'Poi,' from Greek is like, 'Poiesis,' it means, 'To make creatively.' The Poimandres is the creative minded man guided and so one being guided in the old metaphor by a shepherd, a shepherd of the people, but now this is a shepherd of the creative minded people. It is a completely different quality in that it assumes that those who are being guided are already transformed from water into wine. The blood is no longer just natural blood, it is charged blood, it is charismatic blood coursing through the individual and it is able now to be distilled further into the second, not transform, the distillation is not a transform, it is a recalibration. The transformation of things, because nature now has become supercharged, will produce works of art. And those works of art will generate a higher quality of visionary consciousness, a kaleidoscopic visionary consciousness that is truly history. And it is in the flow of history that one for the first time, for the very first time, is able to bring oneself out of the mythic horizon of experience into the historical flow of kaleidoscopic consciousness, so that you come out of natural experience double transformed into the kaleidoscopic supernatural flow of historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness, out of which will occur the analytical form of the cosmos, which we call science. And as we talked about last week, it doesn't end there, a differential doesn't end its many orders and many dimensions beyond even the curve of the sea into the sky, or the pyramids' points arranged like the Belt of Orion, or the glimpse of the sun at La Grange instantly once a year carrying the midwinter sun to the sign that it has been prepared to receive. The cosmos as a differential form is infinite and its infinity generates the field of nature. One does not come round robin, but one has a double cycle like an infinity sign that continues and continues in such a way that it stacks itself into a complexity that is able in proportion to be resolved. We have in astronomy by 2007 the beautiful quality of taking astronomical photographs, not just with the CCD cooled coupling device in place of film, but now developments that go way beyond it and one takes maybe 100,000 shots of a celestial object and on a computer is able to stack these and select these and finally bring them altogether to a super-sharp, fantastic quality of presentation that would not be available to perception or to conception. It is available because a differential gear of ratioing and proportioning has been expanded further into a set of historical qualities that leads to a scientific harmonic which exceeds the ability of anything before it to disclose, to disclose not only on the level of, 'What is it in terms of its existential form?' Or, 'What does it mean in terms of its conceptual ideation?' Or even the beauty of it in its artistic differential jewel quality, which is already amazing and important. But like a work of art that allows for critiques to help its refinement and appreciation, works of science are capable of analytics. And an analytic can be carried out into infinity. There's no end of the refinement that can be brought in a cosmos to its, not only completeness, but its perfection. And so we have two qualities that are operating here: we have a cycle of nature which is able to almost complete itself, except that if it is brought to a full completion and allowed to go in just that cycle of completion, one very quickly gets into a kind of a rut. It's like putting a mirror that is perfectly polished and the image in the mirror will show exactly, only, what is there. But the Zen say, 'If you put two mirrors and no object in-between them, what do they reflect? Their reflection, both, is empty.' The mind's structure can be taken beyond its complete reflective mirror quality to where it is able to be empty of content, including itself as a mirror, in which case it is now open.
The open mind is a requirement for life that is inescapable now that we have nuclear weapons and space travel, now that we have a global society. One of the qualities that is so important to it was emphasised by two of the greatest minds in the late 1930's who dealt with this. One of them was Niels Bohr and the other was the great mathematician Hermann Weyl. Both of them wrote books called The Open Mind and later on Robert Oppenheimer also wrote a book on The Open Mind. It is the opening of the mind completely that is necessary for us to live. We will not be able to live without adding the open mind transform and carrying it further to the distillation of the art of the person, through the flow of kaleidoscopic consciousness in history, to be able to include an analytic of ourselves within the cosmos. It is necessary to do this. So we're looking at the Hermetic tradition from the west and the Taoist lineages from the east, to look to see this great complementarity in terms of the planet. The planet is not yet mulched into a global village, it's very much needing a complementarity in order for it to develop. One emendation: the alchemy of the west was constantly the lead of the alchemy in China. The classic large studies of this are in Joseph Needham's 20 volume Science and Civilisation in China and he shows the development going back and forth, but the midwife of going back and forth was really India at that time in the BC centuries and one of the qualities from India that we have to look at and only the Hermetic tradition is able to illuminate this. It is impossible to understand what the great complementarity of civilisation is without knowing how these two traditions intertwine together through an intermediary whose fulcrum is in India, but that the transforming energy did not occur in India, it occurred instead in ancient Alexandria. One would expect then that the Hermetic tradition in its finest moment would be the locus, the source, the place out of which this would have come and yet when one looks at it one sees that there is a very complex development going back, not only 3,000 years in Egyptian history, but 2,000 years in terms of Middle East history and 1,000 years in terms of the Greco, Middle East, Egyptian development and that all three of these layers and levels come together and the locus of them coming together is that the traditional interpenetration and exchange is in a place that we know today as Palestine. It is extraordinary and only by being cultivated and civilised massively and complexly, can one reconstitute how this happened, because the history of it is a kaleidoscopic consciousness and you cannot do it without a visionary consciousness in the first place, because it is only through the transform of the field of consciousness and the field of nature coming together that you get a reverberation in the integral, not only at its beginning, but at its putative end. And the putative end is that in the structure of thought the single pointedness is a place, not of transformation, but a place of vanishing, so that a recalibration initiates itself not only at the beginning in nature, but at the centre of thought which now acquires the attentive contextuality of conscious vision. The structure of thought for the first time acquires what we colloquially call a memory. The memory is definitely a structure of thought, like the imagination is a structure of thought, an idea is a form in the structure of thought. They all occur there. But when one goes into the yoga of consciousness, there is no structure of the memory. There...in fact in Zhongshu, who we're taking for the Taoist, he says, 'The true man forgets, he doesn't hold on to it.' The Zen saying is that, 'It's a no mind.' It is that in the field of consciousness there is no structure whatsoever; there is no structure called the memory, there is no structure called the imagination, there are no structures called the ideas, it is a field. It has an energy plasma resonance whose binary qualities would be zero and infinity, not zero and one. But what is there in consciousness is remembering. What is there in consciousness is creative imagining. What is there in consciousness is the ability for it to emerge forms, but the forms that emerge are forms of art, not forms of existence. And these art forms are distinct from the forms of existence because they do not have a ritual basis, they have an artistic basis. They in fact are antithetical to rituality. An artist will always create something different, something new, something unique and the worst thing that can happen is to find that he or she is starting to repeat oneself in some ritual, habitual way. This is absolutely to be thrown out, these works are to be discarded, this process is ready for a stiff critique. We are not going to do it this way. An acting ensemble with a great director, every performance is its own presentation. No matter how many performances one is going to give, tonight is this performance and there are in acting companies around the world at certain levels of artistic refinement where everyone realises this is a magical night, the performers, the audience, the director. Something is alive in the theatre tonight. And one gives oneself over to participating in that magic and it is not just a participation in the magic of the transformation, but in the mystique of the recalibration, everyone there is recalibrating tonight. The first experience I had of this was at the age of eight. I was in a chorus of children and the finale of a May Day celebration performance on the stage was all the children with the coloured crêpe paper round a maypole and all of the adults behind us - there were eight of us as children dancing around - and all the adults with their arms around each other, singing the Broadway show tune, 'It's a grand night for singing, the stars are shining above and I feel like, I feel like I'm falling in love.' Let's take a little break and come back.
Let's come back to appreciating an historical kaleidoscope, because it is only by supplanting the flow of myth with the differential flow of history that we can come to understand, not on the basis of thought but on the vast dimensional opening of conscious space time, which includes finally when works of art come into play, a sixth dimension of a new kind of form, a jewel form that has many facets and is characterised not pragmatically, but prismatically and transforms language from being structured by a rhetoric, to being radiant by a poetic. Both Zhongshu - is our selection of the Taoist lineage - and the Poimandres - is our selection of the Hermetic tradition - are written in high poetic. And as we saw last week, the 12 gates that in the Pyramid Texts of Egypt, 3000 BC, are the 12 caverns of the netherworld through which one must pass and at each gate you must have been prepared by the right magical language key composed by Thoth, in order to speak to the gatekeeper who will let you through. And as you go through the 12 caverns of the netherworld, as you go through the 12 gates, the 12 hours of the night, the 12 hours of the day, the 12 Apostles, the 12 signs of the ecliptic zodiac, the 12 months of the year, as one goes through this set of 12, one comes to a conclusion, one comes to a finale and the finale there is whether or not after all this you will be pure. And the purity is gauged, not by something that you have, nor by something that you don't have, but that you are free of both either collected together of those requirements, you neither have or do not have. That purity is a direct harmonic with the initial entrance into the sequence of the 12 gates and that initial sequence is the psychostasia, in Ancient Egypt, the weighing of the soul on the scales of Ma'at and she is precise. Your soul is weighed with an ostrich plume, as we talked about last week and if they are in complete balance, Thoth will note that from that balance one has the equilibria of the horizon of the world in your completeness, so that you can now, with the right language keys, go through the 12 gates and come to the moment of purity. That moment of purity is being accepted into rebirth.
In the ancient Hermetic treatises, there were a set of 13 that formed the basic quality and they were found in the High Renaissance and this is a photo of the floor of Sienna Cathedral with Hermes Trismegistus doing his teaching, set in the middle of the floor. And later on one had increasing discursive iconography, but the original iconography was not that of persons, but that of a transcendental pattern and the original pattern that was placed in Chartres Cathedral, some 300 years before Sienna Cathedral, that original pattern was a labyrinth, it was a maze in the form of an infinite flower that occurs. And in the middle of Chartres Cathedral's floor you will find this labyrinth, this exfoliated eight quality, eight petalled complexity and in order to get to the centre of it one must traverse the volume of the labyrinth. It is only by completing the walking of the total labyrinth that one then comes to the centre and the centre now is occupied, not as the centre of the labyrinth as a mandala, but it becomes the base of a pivot. Who you are standing there and your psychophysical pivotness at that place generates the perfume of that cosmic flower in the consciousness, in the aesthetic, in the kaleidoscope, in the cosmos of which you are now active. Your stance is not just a rest, but it is the pivot as if you were now the piece of wood, the stick, which when rubbed in the right way in that pestle at the centre, will generate the spiritual fire. And the generation of that spiritual fire will be a radiance of the invisible now becoming manifest and you will be a participant at the origin of this divine spark flaming into that universal fire, that cosmic radiance and we that way join the cosmic of the community. In the Hermetica the 13 treatises begin with the Poimandres as the very beginning which does not count among the 12 but has a zero quality to it and the next 12 treatises in with the twelfth, which is called the Rebirth and the Rebirth treatise has as its end, just as the Poimandres has at its end, a spiritual prayer, a hymn, an ancient wisdom hymn that comes specifically from a gushing of the Ancient Egyptian, the ancient Near East, the Ancient Greek and the ancient Semitic traditions, gushing together and making like a laser, a pivot, which now is a pivot of light that has become able to shine through the entire spectrum. Not only the electromagnetic spectrum into the ultraviolet and infrared, but also able to differential geared shift from the electromagnetic spectrum to the magneto electric spectrum. No matter how powerful the electromagnetic spectrum is - and it includes everything up to gamma rays - the magneto electric spectrum is 10,000,000,000 times its frequency. So that when you are distilled into that second transform, not only from nature to supernature, but to super-supernature, one is now thrice greatest, like Hermes Trismegistus, the guide, the psychopomp, the teacher, for this as a teacher which got transformed, which got distilled to a third level. And on that level, the prayer at the end of the Poimandres and the prayer at the end of the thirteenth, the Rebirth treatise, are able to be seen as the first one being the pitch pipe tone and the Rebirth hymn being the perfection of that tone into infinity. When one is born again that particular language of the Poimandres and of the Rebirth has a particular quality when written in high dharma Classical Greek. The place that you find that kind of Greek is called New Testament Greek. It is characteristic of St. John's writing and it has a cognate quality to one other document that occurs and that is the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by Apollos of Alexandria about 20 years, 25 years before the Poimandres, written about 90 AD in Alexandria. Whereas about 65 AD Apollos wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews because he had left Alexandria to go on a tour in the late fifties, 57, 58 AD and he was called out from Alexandria because he had to perform a funeral, a funeral service for someone who was extraordinarily important. She died, or as they say in the high dharma, 'She went to sleep,' about 58 AD in Ephesus. Her name was Mary Magdalene. She had raised St. John from a little boy, he was only about 12 at the time of the Crucifixion-Resurrection and he was assigned for his Bar Mitzvah year to an instructor who could perfect his understanding and learning, not only of the Torah, but of the New Torah of interpenetrating show presence law. And it was this quality that St. John was raised with so that in St. John's Gospel and in his first letter and in the Book of Revelation, one finds the same kind of Greek that you find in the Poimandres. The great scholar C.H. Dodd did two enormous books for Cambridge University Press in the 1950's, culminating 40 or 50 years of scholarship and he puts in about 40 pages about how the language of St. John is the language of the Hermetica, especially the Poimandres. And how the Epistle to the Hebrews has that kind of quality as well and why it has a particular flair, a kind of a flamboyance which has a particular kind of poetic. The poetic is that of an acrobatic syntax, a syntax that does not just take itself out of a rhetorical structure and put itself into an aesthetic dance of high language, but that that dance includes striking leaps and pirouettes in mid-air. So that someone following that language follows to the extent that one becomes acquainted not just with moving and walking in nature, but of dancing in the art of the spirit. And in that art of the spirit there are moments where in high leaping, pirouetting, one lifts off completely from the poetic into the cosmic. In Sufi high dharma mystery the greatest presenter of this was Ibn Arabi. And Ibn Arabi, when he talks about the journey to the lord of power, talks about all the stages that go through and the word for this whole entourage of perfection he adapts from Ibn S?n?, of Avicenna, who lived a couple of hundred years before him, in Ancient Iran, about 1000 AD in Iran and Ibn S?n? called it, 'A visionary recital.' This is a performance of a visionary super-drama that occurs and brings you out of the audience onto the stage and from the ensemble on the stage to the star part, which you now uniquely do. And in that leap, in that pirouette, Plotinus' phrase is that, 'Unique flies to the unique instantly.' Not the alone to the alone, but something more primordial than one. Philo of Alexandria, who uses exactly that kind of Greek, the kind of Greek in the Hermetica, the kind of Greek in St. John, the kind of Greek that Mary Magdalene herself used. Because one of the pair of works that we will have following the Poimandres and Zhongshu will be to pair Shakespeare's Tempest, which is that cosmic, pirouetting, leaping poetic become cosmic and the Odes to Solomon, a series of 42 sacred hymns, most certainly written by Mary Magdalene in that High Greek as well. Why does the world not know this? Because the briar patch of complexities forbids this to be known, forbids this to be, not only cognisant, but recognisable and finally doable. The reason for it is the same reason that the structure of thought refuses to open up to consciousness, allows a little bit of light in through a window, or if you're really advanced, will put some skylights in the structure of thought and let a little more light in. But to do away with the walls and the ceiling, the structure of thought itself, held together by its idea of individuality, will not allow this and becomes the ultimate saboteur. The last book by Timothy Leary was about intelligence being the ultimate saboteur. It is intelligence that refuses because it will be displaced: a little learning is alright, but look what happens when you get even a little more learning, you start to lose respect for the structure of thought that you've arrived at. You stop performing the rituals the way they should be done and authority on every level, including the fact that now experience, no longer constrained by a false structure of thought and a habitual structure of action, experience opens naturally to a wider and wider and wider quality and finally becomes like the field of nature itself, it becomes free. It is the freedom of the field of nature that deserves the correct name that was given to it by the Transcendentalists like Thoreau, 'It is a wilderness wherein man finds his freedom. In wilderness is the preservation of freedom.' And the largest wilderness that there is is the cosmos, it is extraordinarily wild, it is elegant way beyond belief, it is several orders more than what you could imagine and each of those orders is an infinite array of infinities. At one time it was characterised as the jewel matrix, tri-cosmic. This was done in high dharma Vajrayana description about the time of Gampopa, who was one of the founders of the Kagyupa sect in the Vajrayana. Gampopa was the bridge between Milarepa and Dusum Khyenpa, who was the first Karmapa. Gampopa, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, is his classic. He did not know that Milarepa had passed the high dharma to him and towards the end of his life when he heard that Milarepa had died, Milarepa's ashram was on the slopes of Mount Everest. He knew in his individuality that he had lost the chance to be enlightened forever; he was too brilliant and too smart for anyone else to teach him. And he walked despondently outside of the door where he'd received the communication about Milarepa's death and when he walked through the door the entire valley surrounding him was filled with about 8,000 students of his and he wept because he got it, that Milarepa had passed it to him without him knowing it in his individuality, because he was able to convey it without knowing it, like in Zhongshu. 'You don't need to know. This dwarves knowing.' When it came time for him to pass on the Vajrayana, his superpowers picked out a monkey-faced thief who was the greatest thief of his time, Dusum Khyenpa and he was the greatest of this thief of his time because he was one of the world's greatest telepaths. And so Gampopa went into high dharma sumati and when Dusum Khyenpa came to steal treasures from him, he read his mind and he read the high dharma enlightenment and became the first Karmapa instantly.
These lineages are not like lineages of a candle then lighting another candle and so on and so forth, that would be a cardinal sequence. That has a ritual traction, it has a mythic experience, it has a symbolic integral. Rather it is...the poetic word for it is a, 'Cascade,' so that the symbol for it for all time is a waterfall. There is no way to tell one drop for another in a cascade because there is no need to, it is the cascade itself that presents itself. The largest cascades in the cosmos are cascades of hundreds of millions of galaxies that form surfaces of enormous bubbles and voids half billion light years across. All of this, called quantum foam in many cosmologies, is just the beginnings of the way of appreciating why it is that the closed, stubborn individuality, fearful of its structure of thought, will not let any more light in except just a few windows, or a skylight, or perhaps a door, so that it rhetorically can co-opt in. Like the global economy co-opting space travel, we may only go into orbit where we can keep control and keep track and you have to keep coming back for supplies, for hints, because if you go further out you become independent, you become free. If you learn to live on the moon, on other planets, on other star systems, we don't know if we're going to be able to keep our thought structure intact and keep the ritual basis co-opted and keep experience shaped the way that we want.
Zhongshu, who was the seed founder of what eventually became Zen, is one of the most extraordinary figures and in his works, The Writings of Zhongshu, the first quality that one comes to of an extraordinary position is chapter six, called, 'The Great and Venerable Teaching.' He writes this way, this is in the translation of Burton Watson in the Columbia University programme of translating world classics:
He who knows what it is that heaven does and knows what it is that man does, has reached the peak. Knowing what it is that heaven does, he lives with heaven. Knowing what it is that man does, he uses the knowledge of what he knows to help out the knowledge of what he doesn't know and lives out the years that heaven gave him without being cut off mid-way. This is the perfection of knowledge. However, there is a difficulty. Knowledge must wait for something before it can be applicable.
Now it's not quite this, the Chinese is not admitting of this and for this we have to go to a scholarly pedant, A.C. Graham, from the University of London:
However, there is a difficulty. Knowing depends on something with which it has to be plumb. The trouble is that what it depends on is never fixed. How do I know that the doer I call heaven is not the man? How do I know that the doer I call man is not heaven? Besides, there can be true knowledge only when there is a true man. What do we mean by the true man?
The operative term in Chinese is actually plumb, as in someone going into build, one needs two, a set of two, they tune together. One of the instruments is a plumb bob, the other instrument is a carpenter's square, which is the, 'L' which has the piece going, attaching to make the right angle have a smaller hypotenuse, so that one can deal with all the elements of architecture. Not construction, construction is an integral activity, architecture is a differential conscious activity, it is an art. Who holds the plumb bob? In Ancient China the plumb bob is held by Nugwar. Who holds the carpenter's square? It is held by Fuzi. When did they live? They lived about 3000 BC, about the time that New Grange was being built in Ireland, about the time that Egypt was for the first time becoming dynastic, about the time that Sumerian cities for the first time were coming into gestalt, about the first time that in central Scythian Asia the ancient Iranis were taming horses for the first time and teaming them up to pull chariots. All over the world, about 5,000 years ago, a handful of thousands of years, because there is a resonance in the kaleidoscopic history consciousness and one once gets the resonant sets and gets the harmonic, one now can go back and have both a critique of the prismatic forms, including the person and one can have an analytic of the scientific understanding into any degree of specificity into infinity. Infinitesimally small, super-exceptionally large, anywhere in-between and all proportional, all ratioable. So the phrase I coined years ago was now one has an architecture that has an art that develops ratios of the real. One doesn't just build this or that, one builds beyond the this and that. And that prismatic presencing cues the spirit of the person to emerge in its dance and to have the courage to do the leaps and the pirouettes. And in this way the true man, the true woman, are not only free to be prismatically, spiritually conscious, but to be a part of the way in which the cosmos will then generate the field of nature all over again. So that the ecology is not just returnable, not just renewable, but it is at every instance fresh. Now what comes into existence is exactly at that, not femto- or nanosecond, or even attosecond, which is the atomic level, but into infinity it is always uniquely real just now. And so the freshness is that without a conditioning rehabituation, that conditioning would vanish without leaving a trace, which in high yoga is what you get in a very deep sumati. There is no trace of the structure of the mind at all, it is open, there is no compulsion for any particular ritual, it can be engendered in any way fresh. And experience, being free in the field of nature, is likewise ambidextrously free in the differential field of consciousness. It occurred to Bertrand Russell about six years after finishing with Alfred North Whitehead the big, three volume Principia Mathematica, he reports in his autobiography - he lived to be 97, he wrote it in his nineties - he was riding a bicycle and suddenly he realised that he really didn't love his wife anymore and instantly he realised that he really didn't need his mind to be constrained by his beautiful logical thought anymore. And he says in his autobiography: 'I knew I would never again write a book on logic.' He turned around, walked his bike back home and began working for world peace. More next week.