History 6

We come to History Six and we're looking at the way in which the beginnings of the United States and the great transition in dynastic China have an interesting interplay together. This is an old Chinese figure, that belongs in a set of eight Chinese figures. The original eight were the Eight Immortals of Taoism, but this set is an improved, later version. The Eight Immortals of Taoism were from the 500's, this is from the late nineteenth century ecumenical quality and in a couple of weeks I'll bring all eight and you'll see that they've incorporated sages throughout the ages, including the Buddha, who was not in the original Taoist Eight Immortals. What this presents, graphically, is several thousand years of understanding that there are sets and that these particular sets are more than instructive, they tune our sense of a harmonic. And the Eight Chinese Immortals were a set for Taoism when it became an 'Ism,' that was not just philosophical, or perhaps metaphysical, but had extended itself into the social realm. There was a tremendous collapse of authority in China when the Han Dynasty fell permanently. And the Han Dynasty fell in the early 200's AD and the Han were the Chinese Romans. And we're looking at one of the great historical figures in China and of the planet, Ssu-ma Ch'ien. And Ssu-ma Ch'ien was the Grand Historian at the most powerful point of the development of the Han Dynasty. The Han Chinese came on the heels of the most severe change in Chinese history. The Emperor's name was Ch'in Shih Huang-ti and the 'Huang-ti' means 'Heaven's own authority' and 'Ch'in,' from 'Ch'in' we get the word 'China, Chinese.' He said, 'There are no more tribes, there are no more little kingdoms, there are no more provinces, there are no more dynasties of any kind. There is only one people of Ch'in and you are mine.' And in order to graphically convey this, he produced two events at the same time that are usually not mentioned together. The first is mentioned all the time: he took all of the sections of northern barriers and re-cemented them and made it into the Great Wall of China, which stretches about 2,000 some miles and is visible from space, from orbit. At the very same time, to commemorate the finishing of the Great Wall, which of course has fortresses and garrisons every so often and that the Wall is not a wall, but is actually a military road, raised up above the landscape far enough that it's like an elevated freeway for military power, wide enough that you can march troops back and forth and quickly supply them. And that all of the roads that are needed to supply them with horses, with armament, food, provisions, with reinforcements, were all in place and all of those roads led to the Han capital, Chang'an. And in Chang'an, to celebrate the finishing of the Great Wall, the establishment of his version of a dynasty...sometimes it's called the Qin Dynasty, or the Ch'in Dynasty, it really was himself. In order to cement this, he held a huge bonfire of the burning of the books. It was under penalty of death for anyone to withhold any of the classics and all of the books were burnt in Chang'an in a great pyre. If you recall, there was a beautiful scene in one of Stephen Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, Indiana Jones and about the Holy Grail, The Last Crusade. And there was a Nazi burning of books in Berlin, which was overseen by Hitler. Ch'in Shih Huang-ti, about 220 BC, did this in spades. Many books, in fact almost all books, survived the Nazi book burning in Berlin. Almost no books in China, all of China, survived the book burning and it was only because of certain copies of things that were hidden away in the masonry of walls, or taken out and buried somewhere in the mountains or in the hinterlands, or that were old individuals who had memorised classics, that almost anything was retained after that event. He preserved only six books, which were then codified and they were the Chinese classics and anyone coming into the service of the Emperor had to prove that they had interpreted and read these six Chinese classics according to the way in which the interpretation should be read. In other words, it was more than brainwashing, it was more than a tyrannical inculcation, it was meant to be and became a severe dislodgement of the traditional, customary ethos in China. Eventually, Ch'in Shih Huang-ti died. A new Dynasty was made, the Han, under Gaozu. And Gaozu tried to bring back his version of the good old days, but his vision of the good old days was to have a number of concubines as wives and many children and in fact, it turned out that he had eight sons, who all became then kings. He apportioned to them various kingdoms, but he was run from the inside by a family that were called the Lius. And the Liu family was headed by a matriarch, who became the Empress Liu and she would insert relatives behind and underneath and parallel to any appointments that Gaozu would make. So that eventually they would sabotage any of the appointments: 'They are plotting against you, they must be killed' and which they were and 'We need somebody immediately to replace them. We have someone here who can.' And eventually the Empress Liu took over the running of the early Han Dynasty. The people who manned the farms, the trades, were so thankful not to have the tyranny of Ch'in Shih Huang-ti, that they put up with the corruption that always attends the courts in the capital city. The farther you are from the capital city, if you don't run up against the envoys and emissaries and officials of the court, in the provinces, you will be left alone and life will be liveable for you. But increasingly, what occurred is that anybody with talent, like creaming rising to the top, came to the attention of the court, came to the attention of the Liu family, came to the decision of the Empress Liu. She was one of the most vicious human beings that has ever lived on the planet. I will give you one story from Ssu-ma Ch'ien on the Empress Liu, from his Records from the Grand Historian of China. Gaozu had a concubine that he loved dearly. It was probably a case of true love, unusual. She had a son who was a marvellous individual, who was very much like Gaozu and he felt that this likeness was an indication of heaven's attention. The Empress Liu made sure that that concubine and her family were implicated and in such a way that as soon as Gaozu passed away and died, she had the son poisoned and she had the mother treated in the most inhumane way that she could come up with. She had her hands and feet cut off, she had her eyes plucked out, she had her ears singed off, she had a deep herbal concoction given her so she could no longer speak and then she was put into the royal latrine. In China, the latrines generally were that on the top was where you would have the stools and underneath is where you would have pigs. She was put with the pigs in the royal palace latrine and left there to be a warning to anyone who would cross her.
Ssu-ma Ch'ien delivers in his Grand Histories of China, half a million words. Decades in the research. He gives these kinds of stories impartially to show that he himself had suffered a very interesting kind of brutality. His father had been Grand Historian before him, Ssu-ma Tan and when Ssu-ma Ch'ien was young, he was blessed by being able to go on expeditions of exploration and travel, on military explorations, political assignments, everywhere in the kingdom, everywhere in the Han Dynasty. So that he became acquainted and took notes all the time and built up a tremendous reservoir of first-hand information of how things are run, what the relationships are, what the farms and the agriculture are to the merchants, are to the towns, are to the highways and byways, are to the capital. And by the time he was 47, he was perhaps the most beautifully prepared historian in the world since Thucydides. Then he ran afoul of the Emperor and he was put in prison and castrated and left there for three years to suffer the humiliation, the ridicule, the impress that, 'You do not transgress against dynastic power.' They finally let him out and for the remainder of his short life he wrote the Records of the Grand Historian. And in it is one of the complex documents up to date on the planet. This is a little bit of a blurb from a Chinese edition of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, published in Beijing in 1979. One of the first times that Communist China loosened up enough to let something like this come out. This is really dynamite against all empires, all dynasties, all power groups, for all time, everywhere. He arranged it so that there would be 130 chapters, mostly divided into symbolic layers. There were 12 basic sections that were categories of annals, there were ten sections that were headed by tables of relationships. There were eight treatises on important developments, ceremony, law, calendars, science, astronomy, sacrifice. Then there was the hereditary, 30 hereditary houses, where you would trace what each of these houses and these families...there were detailed relationships, almost like a Robert Graves I Claudius, only on a scale of thousands of years, 2,000 years, in 30 families. And then finally he interspersed another energy layer in it of 70 lives of not just good people, or famous people, but human beings who stained the times and left a mark that is still circulating in his own day. Ssu-ma Ch'ien was born in 145 BC and lived roughly to 86 BC. In this, we get an insight into the way in which history is a kaleidoscopic flow. It is not simply a stream of experience, but it is the streaming of conscious relationality, so that what teases out the meaning, is not the continuity of the flow, nor the integral understanding of the ideas and meaning of the flow, but it is, instead of the stream of experience, it's the streaming of a kaleidoscopic consciousness that has the powerful lenses of human beings as persons, the dominant mental structures of individuals who are not persons that lens arrays of possibility, but who maintain and embody the power of authority. 'We're in charge of the laws, we're in charge of the courts, we're in charge of the military. We are in charge of the political economy, of the doctrines of state religion. We are, not just an establishment, we're the individuals who embody this and if you cross us individually, you have transgressed all of this list.' A very Kafkaesque situation. In this flow, the lives of the individuals, the annals of the groups of chronology, the way in which the tables, indexing relationalities that cannot be adequately expressed in prose, but one can see by these graphs...this is one of the earliest uses, intelligence uses, of graphing in the world. And with all this then, the hereditary lines being traced back, for our concern, for our learning, for our kaleidoscopic, conscious purpose, he takes it from the beginning of dynastic China to his own time, which turns out to be a 2,000 year period. It's another example of the aeon, of a double millennium, of a quadruple Cycle of the Phoenix and that an aeon establishes the largest form of civilisation in its various manifestations. Ssu-ma Ch'ien saw that in his own time, a jump in the order of refinement of civilisation was due. Because at the beginning of dynastic China, what triggered civilisation in China, in the dynastic form of expression, was roughly a 700 year period of development from legendary kings and sages. The earliest one is always called Fuzhi, about 3000 BC and we have seen in our learning, when we began with Nature, the first lecture, the first four lectures, were on the I Ching as established by Fuzhi and developed 2,000 years after him by the Zhou Dynasty. So that from Fuzhi to the Zhou Dynasty, to the I Ching, where the I Ching is no longer a celestial, mystical template for how Tao works, the Zhou I Ching was the earthly, human expression of how that Tao becomes Tê, how it becomes something that is applied and applicable and that we now have a participation and a responsibility and an opportunity. That if we have our human I Ching arrangement in tune with the celestial I Ching arrangement, now a new, splendid capacity will have emerged for man and in the Zhou dynasty, when it first came into play, with the human revision of the I Ching...the I Ching that we have today, if you get the Wilhelm Baynes edition from Princeton, you will see that right facing the title page are the two Chinese characters that traditionally were there 1200 BC. It reads: 'Book of Zhou.' It's the book of the Zhou Dynasty, founding it. It's not just I Ching, Book of Changes, it's the Book of Zhou, presenting how those changes happen for human beings. The Zhou Dynasty is about a millennium before Ssu-ma Ch'ien, before the high point of the Han Dynasty and indeed, in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's time, the Han Dynasty had its most powerful ruler and his name was Han Wu Ti. The Dynasty, 'Han,' 'Wu,' in the sense that, 'No one is more mystically capable' and 'Ti,' he's 'Heaven's mandate choice.' And in order to make sure that his power was recognised, he performed what Ssu-ma Ch'ien points out as the most important of all of the power ceremonies in dynastic China. This is in Burton Watson's translation for Columbia University Press, Volume Two. The chapter is 'On Heaven, Earth and Man' and it's basically on the Feng and Shan sacrifices. 'Fang,' as it's pronounced, is the 'Phoenix,' 'Shan' is 'Mountain.' So this is the sacrifices as a paired, tuning ceremony. One is that the time has come around in a Cycle of the Phoenix, because the Cycle of the Phoenix is there in China, as well as in Egypt, as well as in Greco-Roman Europe, as well as it is in ancient Iran. The phoenix is the symbol for the cycle of time, that the time has arrived and it is here now and that the focus of the time is here for the one who unites the land with the mandate of heaven. And in order to do that, the four corners of the land were marked out symbolically by four special, high mountains and the mountain in the centre, the peak in the centre, would be the fifth peak. And so the five mountain peaks of China, a ceremony was made on each of them, where the Emperor alone would go to the peaks of those mountains and perform sacrifices from himself to heaven, so that he alone receives heaven's mandate, exactly on time. And then he would come down from the mountains and he would perform sacrifices of conveying whatever power he designated to whatever individuals, in proportion he designated. And by that, the Empire, the Dynasty, the Dynastic Empire, was established, because only he could deliver the calibration of authority, could dole it out, could retract it back on his own recognisance and could be the one to determine just how much power you had been given and by your transgression of the power that was given to you, to help bring heaven's mandate in, you deserved to be punished severely because you have transgressed the entire order of heaven and earth, by crossing the Emperor. In the conclusion to the Feng and Shan sacrifices, this is the paragraph that Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote, castrated and humiliated and in his early fifties and he wrote this about 90 BC: 'The present Emperor'...who would be Han Wu Ti. 'After performing the Feng and Shan, made another tour 12 years later, visiting all the five peaks and all the four watercourses. The magicians who had been instructed to watch for spirit beings and those that had been sent to search for the island of Penglai in the sea'...the Isles of the Blessed, Penglai. 'Failed completely during that time to produce any evidence of success. Cun-sun Qin was supposed to be observing the spirits, but he too had nothing to show for his efforts and could only make excuses by putting out the footprints of giant men. Thus, the Emperor grew increasingly weary and disgusted with the inane tales of the magicians'...the 'Wu-shi' in Chinese. 'And yet he was bound and snared by him and could not free himself, for always he hoped to find one who spoke the truth. From this time on, the magicians who came to him, recommending sacrifices to this or that deity, grew even more numerous, but the results of all this are as you can see.' Two points: if I hold up a hand and you count the fingers, there are five fingers. But if you count the spaces between the fingers, there are four waterways, not just waterways for water, but there are four spaces for Tao to flow. There are five elements of Tê that can grasp and it has the power to existentially grasp and hold and command because its power is fed by the Tao, coming into play, such that the Tê of this hand has the balance of a yang strength and a yin ability to receive, to receive heaven's mandate and to command it masculinely to the kingdom. Not just the kingdom, but the empire, the dynasty. And so the dynasty is not only an empire of geography and all of its social realms, but is a temporal cycle that is completely bound up into the receiving of the mandate from heaven, from Tao and the ability for the power of the Tê to make it happen, to institute it.
Han Wu Ti ruled China for almost 55 years. He was in command of a China that already, in 120 BC, stretched from the Pacific Ocean, all the way to the beginnings of what was for a long time Russian Central Asia. Almost all the way across the Gobi Desert, almost all the way to the mountain ranges that separate places like Tajikistan from the Far East. It was the first time that Chinese power, or any power in that part of the planet, had reached such an extent. And there were some fortresses of Han power as far as Indo-China, as far as what is today Vietnam and some outposts of power all the way up into Manchuria, into Korea and beginning to go into what today is Siberia. So that at the time, by the time Han Wu Ti passed away, in his rule, Rome and China almost completely enveloped the known world, except for the subcontinent of India, vast stretch of Africa and of course the Western Hemisphere. The Roman Empire and the Han Chinese had dealings with each other and it is the first time that what we know today as the Silk Road was established. And the movement of trade all the way from Han Chang'an to Rome and Alexandria in the west, was one of the more lucrative long trade routes and it was the appeal of re-exploring this that later on led to the expeditions of the Polo brothers, Marco Polo and his relatives, to try to retrace the Silk Road and return and return back to China in the 1300's, after almost 1,000 years of broken contact.
What's important for us is to understand that history does not move in the same way that mythic experience moves. The flow of mythic experience will always have a ritual basis. Ritual actions, with existential items, in a practical usage, will be the base and flowing like a stream of experience on that base, rolling on little rollers of images, lubricated by feeling tones of fluid, emotional variants and kept into a process of accessibility in custom and tradition by oral language, all of that integrated into symbolic orders of thought, in a mentality. And in this way the entire integral is completed and is complete, but that completeness leaks in two fundamental ways. One is that nature does not co-operate in man's mentality of completeness. Nature is not a part of the flow of experience, but is the field out of which the existentials emerge and within which the flow of experience happens. So one can think of nature as the ocean of Tao and experience like the Gulf Stream. The mythic horizon is like a Gulf Stream, which we know now encircles the entire planet in a planetary, large river flow that freshens the oceans of the world. Taken as a whole, the ocean of the planet is like the field of Tao and the stream that circles and zigzags around the planet is like the flow of the mythic experience. Both leak in the sense that they're not commandeerable in a completeness form, or a completeness cycle. Nature leaks in such a way that we will in experience have dreams, we will dream. No matter how commandeered you are, your capacity to dream will still be there. But there's another leak: not only does nature not co-operate, but the supernatural does not co-operate either. The visionary, differential consciousness, the momentary insights, the trance possibilities, the unusual events, the supernatural occurrences, all of these are ways in which the cracks appear. And the mentality, in order to preserve itself, will try to interpret the dreams for you in a standard way, so that you will have to come back to their structure and that they will limit the ways in which insight are allowed to have a play, that the supernatural will be propitiated in a ritual way. And so ritual magic and authoritarian dream interpretation, are two of the ways in which a tyranny will always preserve themselves. We're gonna take a little break, but one of the reasons for doing our learning in this way, is that we're not simply taking extraordinary events and documents in our humanities heritage, but we're pairing them and pairing with Ssu-ma Ch'ien is Benjamin Franklin. When we come back from the break, we'll see that someone like Benjamin Franklin is also an aeonic figure, but his 2,000 years go back to Alexander the Great. Let's take a break.
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Let's come back to the choreography of what we are doing. We're presenting a yoga of civilisation. No matter how insightful we are, there are built-in limitations. One of the built-in limitations, is just the way in which perception happens. Two eyes must focus on a point out there. When you do a deep meditation, the focus of the point maintains itself in the mind, so that the mind's imagery is very much like the perceptual imagery that you see. But if you bring into play a fifth dimension of visionary consciousness, the point will eventually vanish from view and you will no longer perceive and the neurological basis of conception will no longer be operative and so the mind will be empty. The empty mind instantly can re-emerge, but with imagery that is not points of focus, like perception, but wholenesses, like a resonances of a harmonic. So that a Zen master will say, 'Once you wake up, you will not see things, you will see wholeness. Your looking will have a lookingness that is whole.' Now look here: a yoga is made to incrementally prepare you for this scale of transformation, so our yoga takes a perspective and rotates it incrementally until, after a whole year of four phases, like four seasons, you will have a complete integral cycle and you will have rotated a limited view, a limited perception, 360 degrees. In doing so, because of the way in which it is set up, not just a simple rotation, but because it's layered and interfaced with incredible, refined capacities and techniques, that having completed that, the sense that will occur, is that with the completion, it does not close or stop, but what occurs to you is that the point of the rotation is actually a pivot and that the pivot is not your individuality, that's a part of it, it is not your character, that's a part of it, it is not your existential body, that's a part of it, it's not the ritual figuration that you do, that's a part of it, it's not the mythic configuration of how you live, that's a part of it, it's not the symbolic structure of your thought, that's a part of it. All of these are not only parts, but they establish that the seer is not a point of focus, but is actually a pivot of openness. Now, in doing so, one experiences in the second year, as you go through Vision, through the Visionary phase, that that pivot actually is a whole field in its own dimensional right and that that field has a way of interpenetrating with the field of nature, so that the field of nature now not only becomes creative of emergence...and in fact an emergence which is vibrational, it's vibronic, it's an iteration of so many iterations per time unit, that actually maybe there are femtosecond vibronic iterations, so that something doesn't just emerge and statically is there, but that its emergence is a frequency, energy frequency, that can be calibrated, it can be known, it can be realised. Yet, in order to do so, one will have had to go beyond the limitations of the integral into the differential field of consciousness, to begin something new, which also transforms nature, so that the integral is going to have a completely new, charged, super energy quality to it, so that whatever emerges iteratively out of it will now have a vibronic energy that is supercharged, it will be scintillating. It will have not only the electromagnetic energy quality, it will have its complement from the differential field of a magnetoelectric complement and that the frequency, the iteration, of a magnetoelectric spectrum, is about 20,000,000,000 times what the electromagnetic spectrum is. Whatever height of energy you can have in the electromagnetic spectrum, the magnetoelectric has 20,000,000,000 times that, which means now that the field of possibilities is open. Not only does it not have boundaries, the boundlessness itself is a miscalibration of the way to speak about it at all. To have perimeters, instead of boundaries, is also completely evaporated and washed away. One can use that kind of language, but it is a pedestrian way to talk. Out of that complex field of differential conscious nature, emerges new forms, which are forms of art. They're forms of spirit, they're forms of the artistic spirit person and those forms are prismatic, rather than pragmatic. They're not based on practicality, they're not based on practical action and the referentiality of ritual existence with symbolic mentality. They can use that materia, but they use it in a creative way and not only creative imagining as a function of differential consciousness, as a field, but remembering as another function of the differential conscious field. So that the art forms, the spirit person forms coming out, are like lenses that now lens arrays of possibility, spectrums of variability. And out of this lensing, as one gets more and more used to it and able to bring in one's frame, one's square of attention, the mythic horizon of experience and its form of symbolic thought order, ideas, conceptions, now you have new kinds of forms. The lenses prismatically become cut finer and finer and they transition from lenses to like jewels. Now the jewel person as a spirit comes into play in a very powerful way and generates something existential forms could never generate. They generate a kaleidoscopic consciousness of flow, which is not a flow like the stream of experience, but the streaming of like light. And so the jewelled person now fractionates a flow of almost infinite possibilities of light, of enlightened, not only seeing, but living. So that history becomes a kaleidoscopic flow like light and at this point, what generates out of the energy of that, is science, real science. Science which is the cosmos in its reality, as not only a whole form like a universe, but a perfected matrix, jewel matrix, like a cosmos.
At the time that Ssu-ma Ch'ien was writing, at the very same time that he was doing his first grand, complex history...like if Ssu-ma Ch'ien were like Thucydides, there is someone who was like Plato who did that for China. Plato was a contemporary, later contemporary, of Thucydides. The contemporary of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's name was Prince Liu An. And one of the editions of a selection of his first chapter is called The History of Great Light, published in England by the Shrine of Wisdom. The Shrine of Wisdom Press was funded by the Huxley family, Aldous Huxley and all the different Huxleys, Julian and so forth.
The objects of these books are to assist all you who are endeavouring to follow by any means, or by any system of religion, philosophy or mysticism, the mystical path leading to union with the Divine, as the good, the true and the beautiful. To enshrine the most essential and vital aspects of truth which have been presented by the great religious, philosophical and mystical systems of the world and by the known great teachers of mankind and which are most capable of elevating, enriching and expanding the human consciousness, to contribute towards the synthesis and harmonic integration of all presentations of the wisdom of the ages, by relating all particular expressions to the universal first principles from which all are derived. To preserve at the same time the peculiar beauty and appeal which each particular expression possesses as a unique and distinctive facet of one integral truth.
It's not enough. The integral cycle is only half, it's only the bread, it's not the meat; you don't get the full sandwich. If you do not have a differential ecology to pair with the integral cycle, eventually all complete integrals know that they are complete and that completeness in itself begins to set in a devolution, a spiralling down. And this is exactly the point that Prince Liu An made 2100 and some years ago in his classic book called the Huainanzi. He was the Prince of an area of China. Out of the eight sons of the founder of the Han Dynasty, only two were left alive after the vicissitudes of struggles of life under the early Han. One of them became the new emperor of the Han Dynasty and set up the beginnings of greatness that would lead to Han Wu Ti. The other son, King Li of Huainan had a number of grandsons and Prince Liu An was one of his grandsons and eventually actually, technically, became the King of Huainan. He's the Plato of the Han Dynasty, he is the figure, born about 180 BC. And in order to refine himself, to cut the facets of his jewel person, he invited a number of people to sit with him and to discuss with him all of the classics, all of the great works, to review all of the histories, to look at the way in which human beings and human life and celestial energies and mandates of every conceivable kind...and the proverbial form of that group around him were eight sages and that was the archetype of the Eight Immortal set, the prototype by which the eight great sages of China...which I will bring in two weeks, two presentations and array them before you, so that you can see all eight in an early twentieth century presentation.
When Han Wu Ti came into office, became the Emperor, he was one of the most extraordinary figures at the beginning in Chinese history. He was charismatic, magnetic, tremendously learned, capable of...real world figure. In order to commemorate his coming in as the new, great Han Emperor, Prince Liu An presented the Huainanzi to him as his coronation understanding that always paired with a great ruler, is a great councillor. For every king Arthur there's always a Merlin. Someone who really understands the magic of consciousness and the way in which it transforms, the way in which Tao really is the field out of which all Tê comes, all unity, all power, emerges and emerges energetically, so that if one understands energetic frequencies, patterns of emergence, transform capacities, you can literally create the most beautiful world possible and actually bring it into play. The whole point of the Huainanzi is, 'This is how it's done.' The great section of the Huainanzi that has drawn attention for many years, chapter nine, called 'The Art of Rulership,' published here by University of Hawaii Press. But not only 'The Art of Rulership,' but the first chapter is about Lao Tzu and the Tao and the second chapter is about Chuang Tsu and the way in which the magical Tao has a supernatural tone to it, by which one is not only naturally pure in the way of mystery and emergence, but now with Chuang Tsu one is magically alert to the transforms that are possible. Not only do you have in Lao Tzu the ability to see how all iteration emerges out of Tao, as Tês, but in Chuang Tsu you have the alchemy, you have the way in which they can emerge differently. That this form that is already emerged can be redissolved back into a solution and re-emerged into something new, a new form. One later...the term that was used in the West of the 1600's, 'The mysterious magnum,' 'The great mysteriousness.' And you'll find a big work by the German mystic, Jakob Böhme, The Mysterium Magnum. It's the essence of alchemy and Chinese alchemy comes out of the beginnings of Chuang Tsu and of course, the great alchemy is not just the alchemy of forms, but the alchemy that eventually became Zen. This quality in the Huainanzi has a peculiar way of being expressed. Here's the translation of just the first couple of lines from this translation, The Great History of Light: 'Tao is that which covers heaven and supports earth. It is the cause of the extension of the four corners and it formulated the eight points.' Not only do you have four corners as the angles, but in-between those angles, in-between those points, you now have spaces, intervals, that initially can be considered points and so the eight points are a realisation that there is something in-depth here and the easiest way to envision it is this. The four corners are a square, so there are four points here. That conscious insight, instead of being a frame of reference, is a diamond of recognition. So you put the diamond of recognition on top of the square of your conception and now you get a mandala with eight points. Now if you put that mandala into rotational motion, the eight points play as if they were a frequency, not just uniting the whole, but giving a harmonic to the whole. Now there is such a thing as a music, a spirit and a music. 'Its height cannot be measured, nor its depths fathomed. Tao enfolds the universe in its embrace and conferred visibility upon that which at first was formless. Flowing like a fountain, yet impalpable, its energies bubble forth in the void and fill space by ceaselessly flowing a transformed murky chaos into crystal clearness.' Into the differential, kaleidoscopic jewels, those crystals, where the light now is not just electromagnetic light, but an invisible light. In the Vajrayana called 'Clear light,' but it doesn't mean clear light, it means empty of electromagnetic calibration. It's a magnetoelectric light, it's different. It's not the light of seeing out in a focus, it's the light of being able to recognise wholeness. So that instead of seeing the point of something, one sees the infinity of all. And so the saying is, in ancient Taoism, 'You can always tell a Taoist master because the pupils of his eyes will be square, but the eye will be round.' So with the square and the circle together, he sees not only the four points of the frame, but he sees the diamond in its greatest chiral rotation, which will make the sense of a circle. Later on, the high refinement of the Abhidharma of the historical Buddha, was that a moment of thought, a 'Bodhicitta,' an enlightened moment of thought, actually has 16 parts, only eight of which are ever visible, distinctly and the other eight only occur as a trail. So they occur as an invisible, gestalt sense that there is a ninth. The great Hermetic treatise that was found, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in 1945, not Gnostic at all, but Hermetic, is entitled, The Eighth Reveals the Ninth. If you're able to see the square and the diamond together as a mandala of the eight and you put the sense of the rotation of the invisible eight with it, one gets the sense now that there's a mystical ninth at play. In our learning it's like this: we have four phases in the first year, four phases in the second year. The first year is the integral square of natural. The second year, the four phases are the diamond of insight. If you put the two years of our course together, you get the mandala of a deep complementarity that reveals then that gestalt sense of the ninth, which is actually not a ninth, but is eight more that are chiral in a magnetoelectric way. And in order to provide for that, our four phases have an interval space after each one of them, both the first year and the second year, so that the eight intervals together are that ninth, which is the eight invisible, swirling as a ninth, as a trill. In a bodhicitta, in a high-powered Buddhist meditation, if one can deepen meditation to a transform, what happens is that the meditation changes, its alchemy happens and it becomes a contemplation. And when it becomes a contemplation, it means there are now more dimensions than completeness had to be complete. It isn't that it's incomplete and it's certainly not that it is complete, but that the whole notion of completeness as a form is provisional and so completeness gives itself over to the wonder of another way of talking. Instead of completeness, now one talks of perfection. That wisdom is not limited to being a part of the completeness, but that wisdom can be a perfection and out of this the Sanskrit term is the 'Prajñāpāramitā' can be perfected. And at the beginning of Prajñā in the Prajñāpāramitā, is the 'Danapāramitā,' which is the 'Gifting.' Not just giving, but the gifting and the gifting in a very interesting way. The great medieval, Jewish philosopher, sage, Maimonides, Moses Maimonides, said, 'The highest form of giving is that no one knows who gave and no one knows who received. You are just gifting.' Given that on this level, God helps the giving and helps the receiving. The Prajñāpāramitā is like this. The Danapāramitā that begins that is to participate in that flow and when you do, what emerges now is that the limitations of existence not only transcend, so they become multi-dimensional, but they go through a second transformation, they go through a distillation. And out of this comes a very, very powerful way to speak and in the Huainanzi, the Chinese phrase for this is, 'Kan-Ying.' 'Kan-Ying' means the 'Resonance, the mutual resonance.' That when you have a mutuality of resonance, now each energy frequency wave, 20,000,000,000 per nanosecond, interpenetrate in such a way that they set up a wave interface and the wave interface generates a kind of momentum that is not existential, it's not symbolic. The momentum that it generates is that of cosmic infinity and so now everything becomes gifted with the possibility of participating, harmonically, in cosmic infinity. An early novice will say of this, 'This is an oceanic transcendent quality.' And after a while the ocean shrinks to a distant idea of someone who didn't really see wholenesses yet.
Here's how Prince Liu An, gifting Han Wu Ti in 139 BC, in the Huainanzi says in translation...this is the Canadian charge d'affaires in Beijing, Charles Le Blanc, he's from Montreal.
The mutual response of things, belonging to the same category as darkly mysterious and extremely subtle, knowledge cannot explain it, nor discussion unravel it. Thus, when the eastern wind arises, clear wine flows. When the silkworm exudes fresh silk, the strings of the shang note snaps. Something has stirred them. When a drawing of the moon is traced in ashes, the moon's halo becomes incomplete, in accordance with the drawing and when a whale dies, brush stars comets appear. Something has activated them. Therefore, when the sage rules, he treasures Tao and does not speak, yet his kindness reaches the 10,000 people. But when ruler and minister distrust each other in their heart, concave and convex halos appear in the sky on each side of the sun, the sun dogs. These are indeed evidences of the mutual influence of the marvellous Chi.
Or Ch'i. Actually he means here, Prince Liu An is talking about not just Ch'i, which would be the energy of the body, but 'Shen Ch'i.' The original Ch'i, like Chi, is Chinese, means the 'Vapour, the fragrant vapour of cooked rice.' The steam of cooked rice is where the word Ch'i came from originally. 'This is the spirit food vapour.' It's different, it's 20,000,000,000 times the energy. And when it comes, it floats not the world and its things, but it permeates through the world, bringing them through their limited completions into the fabulous array of eternity. The Chinese phrase for this is the phrase for Chinese painting, based on written language calligraphy. Calligraphy is the symbolic, painting is the artistic. And the phrase is, 'Mountains and streams without end.' You could journey forever in the mountains and streams without end. And there are beautiful inns and interesting companions and fantastic adventures ever, always. 'Therefore, mountains clouds,' writes Prince Liu an, 139 BC, to the new Emperor of the world in China, Han Wu Ti. 'Therefore mountains clouds are like prairie grass. River clouds are like fish scales. Drought land clouds are like blazing flames. Torrent clouds are like billowy waters. Each thing is affected in as much as it resembles or partakes of the shape and category of other things.' But there's a whole new realm that's available. In 127 BC, to commemorate his 55th birthday, Han Wu Ti gave him to the two emblems of the highest gentleman of the Empire. He gave him a stool and a cane, not a cane to walk on, but a cane by which the storyteller beats his rhythm to give his teachings, the sage cane. And the stool is the stool, not for in the house, but the garden stool out. One delivers the teachings of the sage in one's own garden. In Classical Greek, the name for such delivery was 'Hermeneia,' which has come down through the ages to mean in English, 'Interpretation, hermeneutics.' But the hermeneia was the place where presentations by a sage, to guide, are given freely to all who will receive them and to whomever received them, to them it was given. The quality was also extended in Imperial favour that he would no longer have to appear at court functions; he could stay at home, teaching wisely in his garden. Then he was betrayed by a disgruntled retainer, a plot was hatched and by 122 BC, a few years later, he was executed, every member of his family to several generations were killed and everyone who had ever helped him was murdered. To combat this there are kaleidoscopic persons like Benjamin Franklin, who from time to time re-emerge. And if you want a catalogue, the American Philosophical Society has published hundreds and hundreds of pages of all the things that Benjamin Franklin printed. Among them are things like A Treaty of Friendship Held with the Chiefs of the Six Nations at Philadelphia, September and October, 1736; Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania; Poor Richard's Almanac, from 1937, 1938. Sermons Preached at Christ Church in Philadelphia. The Whole Proceedings and Votes of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin hand-set all of the type for all of these documents, personally, so that by the time he was in his fifties, he was a kaleidoscopically conscious person, like Prince Lui An of the Huainan, like Ssu-ma Ch'ien of the Han and found a hearer who could hear him, Thomas Jefferson. This was the bicentennial, 1976, booklet that Charles and Ray Eames put together here in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles. And this is their kaleidoscopic time layer that is very reminiscent of the structure of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Histories. All of the different ways in which one can follow threads through, that are not just flows, but are kaleidoscopic, conscious layers of something new.
Next week we will take a deeper look at Benjamin Franklin and the quality of the jewelled person, finding that the light energy that flows through history can actually be tapped and collected. It was called electricity and it turned on the lights of civilisation. More next week.