Presentation 4

This is the fourth presentation, and we're moving into our ability to emerge out of three introductory presentations into the first, um, heavily formed presentation the fourth. One of the most difficult aspects of our kind is to get a sense of the threshold of the beginning, and to let that sense of the threshold of the beginning be crossed into actuality, into the existential, phenomenal things of this world, into the selected action rituals of this world, and to found ourselves in the phenomenal practicality of the world. Our kind. When we made the first refinement of species some 40 45,000 years ago, which began then what we call the Paleolithic. We emerged out of that special visionary supernatural dimension into a new quality of person so that what had been characteristic of the species before a body mind. Tandem. The body being existential and ritual in its figurations. Generating the experience. The psyche of our kind, so that images and feelings and language would be the effervescence of the flow of experience. That language would be the threading of experience rolling on rollers of images and propelled by a fuel of feeling that was developed out of the emotions of the body, out of the figurations of our physicality into a psyche which could then be focused and structured and become a mind. But a third kind of form emerged in the Paleolithic, and that was the spirit. So that one now had for the first time the beginnings of a trinity, of a triad of a three level parfait. Of body, mind and spirit. We're going through a another refinement. And our generation is the generation that is really on Mars crossing the threshold. There have been precursors for quite some while, but especially during the last 300 years, 350 years, it's become apparent that what is occurring is related to but an expansion of that first refinement. And it can be said very simply, the first refinement was the development of art out of a fifth dimension of consciousness added to space time, and that that refinement of species now made a spirit person. Who was prismatic rather than pragmatic, still remembered the pragmatic way of the world, of relating body to mind through the psyche, through experience, through language, feeling images. But our second refinement is like going to a third level. And that third level is where body, mind and spirit are joined by cosmos, the cosmos. The idea of the cosmos, symbolically, is the universe The one place of all the cosmos is a prismatic, kaleidoscopic verse. It is a cosmos. Its quality is not to be integral. Its quality is to reveal the discovered possibilities in the whole spectrum of reality. So if the universe is an idea, the cosmos is an infinite actuality. And our spirit person relates future forward to the cosmos, just like the mind relates to the body in referential past, so that the mind looks to confirm its integrals, its ideas, its use of the imagination by checking it out against the world, against phenomenon, against selected actions, against the figurations that generate the configurations of the flow of experience. But that that flow of experience generally comes to a uniting in the structure of symbolic thought and symbolic thought is specifically capable of having this integral, of tying it all together, making it fold into a unity, establishing that they unity can be understood by taking ideas and an image base and applying to this the sense that we now understand a completed cycle and that that completed cycle has a center, and that center is our individuality, that the precursor of the individuality is in the mythic horizon, the flow where our character, the quality of our character, is the protagonist in the experience, is the protagonist in the feeling tones, is the protagonist in the images that are now occurring in the imagination and susceptible. Finally, after a refinement of being memorable so that the refinement of consciousness is about remembering and about the creative transformation of the imagination so that art, when it emerges out of vision, it emerges out of the braiding of remembering and creative imagining. And it doesn't come to a focus like a center. It comes to a quality of presence, like a prism that allows for expression then of your spirit person in art, in paintings, in sculpture, in architecture, in music. Whereas before you had shelter, now you have architecture, whereas before you had a quality of rhythm, You now have music where before pragmatically, you had your actions and their correlate. The idea, the doctrines, marshaling those actions, marshaling the things of existence of the world into unities, into aspects that can be themselves integrated so that one has the complete wheel, one has all the spokes, one has the rim, one has the hub, one has the axle, and understands that if you put two wheels on a mutual axis, now you have a means of conveying that it isn't just a wheel, but paired. It is now a vehicle. And very early on, the development of the chariot about 2200 BC was an indication that what had been a taming of an animal some thousand years before in Scythian Central Asia. Horses were first tamed. The horses now could be paired with wheels that could be, uh, paired. And you had a vehicle that was capable of raising the pacing of what you could do. A man, a woman, can walk at about four miles an hour consistently through a whole day. When I was a young man, the head porter of Sequoia and Sequoia National Park, Giant Forest Lodge. Worked my way up to being able to hike 50 miles in a single day. 12 hour day, four miles an hour, constantly as a speed on a horse. A man now can up that to somewhere around 20 miles an hour. With chariots you can now cover in a 12 hour day some two 200, 240 miles. All of a sudden, you have the ability to carry yourself in vehicles that exponentially expand the capacities for you to organize the world. One of the first deep changes in Chinese civilization was the development of dynasties and the first Chinese dynasty, the Sha. The Sha dynasty dates from about 2200 BC, and it's the first time in Chinese. Tradition, in their entire heritage that you find chariots, because they were brought from the Scythian Central Asia along tremendous trade routes, whereas before you could have trade routes of several hundred miles, now you could have trade routes of many thousands of miles, though it took a long time to do this, one learned that you don't just go with what you have, but that you prepare the way by way stations and eventually it becomes a very sophisticated 500 BC. The Persian Empire set up a series of way stations so that you could go from the Mediterranean coast, where today would be Beirut and Lebanon. You could go through a series of 300 plus way stations and go all the way to the Persian Gulf. You could do the Fertile Crescent by doing weigh stations of taking your horses, or your chariots, or your wagons, and replenishing each day so that you could go from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf with seamlessly. In Scythian Central Asia, the distance about 2200 BC is more than 7000 miles. So that you had the expansion of our kind understanding that now the landscape was no longer just a natural landscape, but was a man planned landscape. It was scaled and indexed to our capacities, and as the capacities improved, one would select breeds of horses that were stronger to pull wagons. One would select very fleet horses. For individual horsemen, one would select a prize horses to work in teams, not only teams of pairs, but of pairs of pairs, so that one could have super chariots where you would have not only a driver, but you would have not just one warrior, but a couple of warriors who would have not just spears to throw, but bows and arrows to use. And all of a sudden, the capacity for expression of control resulted in groups that developed this kind of technique, this kind of technology. Techné in Greek means art. The art of warfare changed, and the greatest figure in that whole era of the five hundreds to about zero BC was Alexander the Great, who was able to marshal men in such a way that his infantry acted as if it were the hub of the wheel of the battle. But the cavalry was like the axis of the way in which that wheel of battle would turn would be determined. And he designed a technique of warfare that had never been seen before. When he faced Darius. The Battle of Issus, the Persian military line, was so many miles long you could not see the ends of it. He had almost a million men under arms facing the Greek Macedonians. Alexander had about 10,000 infantry and about 3000 cavalry. He immediately pivoted and went to the far end of that line and wheeled 90 degrees and attacked up the line. Contrary to all military expectations, and there was nothing that that line of million men could do, because only a few could fight at any one time. And like a professional meat grinder, Alexander's men went up through the middle of the line from an axial change way and scattered the Persians and took over the entire empire. The technique. The art emerged out of vision, but something deeper emerges out of history, and that is science. And there is such a thing as our time now, refining our species by the mastery of science. Like 45,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, our kind refined itself by the development of art. The art came out of the vision. But the science comes out of history. You cannot do science without having a historical dimension. You cannot do experiments that improve other experiments unless you know what they were, how they got there, the procedures, the pacing, the shaping, the reshaping, the taking of structures of symbolic thought and restructuring them, the taking of previous scalars and developing new scalars and applying them so that it isn't just a restructuring and an application of technique, but it is really a recalibration of men. And we are undergoing now the culmination of several thousand years of preparing ourselves to live not just in the world, but to live in all possible worlds, to be able to have a species that is at home among the stars, and the preparing of heavenly man goes back about 5000 years ago. You find at that time, in all of the major centers of the large swaths of the Eurasian landmass you find, poignantly about 3000 BC. The development of the first beginnings of Heavenly Man, of being able to rearrange the qualities of humanity, of men and women in such a way that now a refinement occurs and one of the deepest refinements that occurs is the ability to have an oral language that has a gender pairing to it, in the sense that men talk a certain way with each other, but women talk a different, certain way with each other. And when men talk with women, they talk in a feminine way with them. Women always talk primordially feminine. Men learn to talk masculine and feminine. And one of the qualities of the refinement of Palaeolithic human beings is that they no longer spoke a pigeon kind of language that didn't have a structure. But Paleolithic men and women learned to talk in these paired ways, which is not just a pair, but is a pair of pairs men talking with men, women talking with women, and a third pair that emerges of men talking with women or women talking with men. So that language now begins to have a different structure, a different quality. One of the deepest insights in this comes from a study. By Alfred Kroeber. The Handbook of the Indians of California. He writes in here on page 337. A peculiar quality that we have we've just talked about concerning language. He's talking about the Yana tribe in northern California, the slopes of Mount Lassen, going south from Deer Creek. Mill Creek. A few other creeks coming south from Lassen. The nearest um, uh, town giving access to that region would be Red bluff on, uh, uh, Interstate five or further south, Chico going north from there. Yanez chose one extreme peculiarity, which as an essentially civilized phenomenon expressed through linguistic medium, must be mentioned the talk of men and women. Different men spoke the women's forms when conversing with them. Women always spoke female. The differences are not very great, but sufficient to disconcert one not thoroughly familiar with the tongue. Usually a suffix is clipped by women from the full male form. Thus, Yana person becomes Yaya in the mouth or in the hearing of a woman. Not only will a woman then speak yeah, instead of Yana, when she hears Yana, she will hear Yana. Aluna fire and Hana water become a and HAA. Similarly, a mortar, mortar and pestle personified and addressed would be called Kimina if considered male and Kimenyi if thought of as a woman. Somewhat analogous, though essentially a distinct phenomenon, is the employment of diverse roots to denote an action, respectively as it is performed by men or women. Ni a male goes, ha, a female goes. The spring of this remarkable phenomenon is unknown. It was unknown to Kroeber at the time because he was still a very young anthropologist. Kroeber was born in 1876, and he died in 1960 at the age of 85. He is one of the world's greatest anthropologists and one reason for paying attention to this now, not simply to talk about the way in which deeply civilized beginnings changed the way in which language is used, and another way follows that when language becomes written, the writing of language is a thrust of powering up the refinement that came of genderizing the language. About 3000 BC you find the beginnings of this in China, with the first development of what became the I Ching. In Egypt, you find exactly at this time the developments that became the refinement of hieroglyphics in the Pyramid Texts. In India you find the refinement in the great Mahabharata, the Great Indian War, fought about 3102 BC of the development of yoga. The structure of the teaching, the mastery of yoga, the ability to have hieroglyphics in pyramids are three of the locuses at the very same time. About 3000 BC 5000 years ago, of the powering up of a refinement of Homo sapiens sapiens, where the art has given rise to a sense of the beginnings of history, of historical consciousness, so that you begin to get something which is different from the flow of experience in oral language like meth, or the writing of the correlate of the individual through that experience to the referential things of phenomenon and actions. Now language begins to have a visionary dimension to it all the time, and a new structure of personality which itself is not polarized but is made into a paired complementarity, so that it is recognized that not only are men and women paired They together make a complementarity, and that this complementarity is a quality of spirit can be exemplified in the bodies, can be understood in the minds, but is rooted not in the bodies, not in the minds. The roots are up, coming down from the spirit. Their spirits come together in equality of presence. And only then do the minds recognize that this is so. Only then do the bodies then comfortably express that this is so. So that the entire cycle of nature, through ritual, through myth, through symbols transformed by vision, prism by the arts, generates a historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness that allows, for the first time, a complex flow which does something that myth cannot do. Myth will create culture, but the flow of kaleidoscopic consciousness historically creates civilization, so that one has a deep transform of what was cultural tradition into a civilized heritage. And so Homo sapiens sapiens began to have the beginnings of refinement, where they began to glimpse that there is something heavenly about man, just like there's something earthly about man. And one of the earliest Chinese wisdom sayings. Man is the bridge between heaven and earth. And it's always put in that order. It's not that man is a ladder from the earth into the heavens, but that man is a bridge between heaven and earth, and that this heavenly quality is at the origin of the I-Ching, with Fushi and his gender mate Nougat. And next week I will bring a ancient coiled double serpent, people of nougat and Fucci braiding together, very much like the kind of paired helixes that are there in our DNA structure, with the proviso that we are conscious structurally that the two helixes do not flow together. They flow in complementarities because flowing in the complementarities like this gives the special kind of not just pairing, but a complementarity which allows for the development of variation to become differentiation and of freedom to become possibility. We will develop these themes as we go along. One simple way to understand this is to center it on India for a moment. We'll come back to Kroger. We'll come back to China. We'll come back to the ancient Mesopotamians. We'll come back to the ancient Greeks. In India, the development of yoga was to bring one's entire psycho physical mental order that had emerged out of nature to be able to focus in such a way that it was able to now enter into super nature. That the purpose of a yoga is not simply to have the health of the body, or the freedom and flow of experience, or even to have the certainty of structure centered accurately in the mind, but to be able to go beyond the three into a supernatural capacity. That one now not just does actions or rituals, but one does asanas that are made to shift the focus so that it is not the comportment of the body, but it is the generation by that comportment of the body to be able to have a different quality to the character, the protagonist of the experience that the protagonist of the experience now is capable of going through the mind of not being focused in the mind, but of being able to go through the center focus of the mind in a very special way, because the characters experience now is a part of an axial flow of experience, going through the hub of the wheel of the mind into the quality of supernatural visionary consciousness, which allows then for the character to become visionary. Naturally, in their experience and to then have the mind become bifocal. It can receive experience from the world, but it can receive visionary. Experience from a heavenly quality. An expansion, so that the mind now becomes bifocal. It can become able to learn and to experience and to refine from above into itself, just as from below, from the world and existence to itself. And this ambidextrous ness of the mind now allows for a special kind of a focus where before the seeing of the two eyes was always integral in the mind, so that the two eyes, in order to see in terms of the focus of the mind, had to have a focal point. They had to focus themselves to see something specific, and only through the mobility of that focus could one build up the patchwork, as it were, of being able to see more than just a collection of points to be able to organize the collection of the focal points into a picture. But when one did a powerful yoga and was able to actually see how the mind worked, it was that the mind, when it was disciplined and stilled through yoga, saw specifically a single point. Ekagrata. In yoga, one could see that it wasn't a multiplicity of focuses inside. It was a single focus inside, and that that single focus was the organizer of the seeing in the mind, and that was the seer. But the seer, when able to recognize their single pointedness, was able to carry the yoga one step further, where that single pointedness vanished in upon itself and left an openness. The first person in India to do this was a seer named Yajnavalkya. And Yajnavalkya wrote the first great Upanishad, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Brihad means a great breath. Aranyaka is a forest teaching hermits that would go off into the forest's ancient forests of India to build their little huts and to do their yoga. And after several centuries of this, Yajnavalkya, about 700 BC, was able to come to a single pointedness, so that it's there in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The world now is seen as a wild horse. The eye of which is the sun, the mane of which is the wind. And it took about 200 years for the historical Buddha to be able to vanish that single pointedness in upon itself and leave complete openness. And the realization was that the individuality is an appearance of a center, and is only a center of this wheel, as long as one continues to comport to the world in this way, and that if you stop comporting to the world in this way, you become an openness in the world that is not conditioned by the world at all. You become a permanently, completely, totally free. Not moksha as in negating the world, but nirvana as being totally, completely, permanently free in the world. Let's take a little break and we'll come back. Let's come back to yoga. The development in India of yoga in the 20th century was raised almost asymptotically above what it had been classically. The basis of that entire jump in quality, that intensifying of the technique of application, the expansion of it into a historical sense that a new science of yoga was behold, table was now possible, was introduced by the British, having taken over India and made it a part of the British Empire so that aspiring young, talented Indians would go to England for the education, for the finishing education would go to places like Oxford or Cambridge and one of the Indians from the Calcutta region of India went to Oxford to Cambridge, and became one of the greatest historians of philosophy in the world. His name is Surendranath Dasgupta. His five volume History of Indian philosophy is the first time that the entire history of Indian philosophy was delineated in such a way that one could understand and grasp every single major, every single minor, every tertiary quality of achievement in the entire history of Indian thought. And it was given a form for the first time of the complete history, out of which then came a sense of Dasgupta's first volume was 1922. Out of this came a jump in yogic application and qualities, and among the those who exemplify this, we can look at five figures just off the top. And later, as we go on with our presentations, we can open this up and see how this relates concomitantly with figures in China, with figures in the Near East, with figures in the ancient Europe and with figures in the Palaeolithic. America's five great yogis developed out of this historical sense. The first of them was Krishnamurti. The second was Mahatma Gandhi. The third was Rabindranath Tagore. And um, one of the most powerful. The fourth was Sri Aurobindo. And, um, the quality of their work. The fifth was, uh, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The quality of those five men, plus Dasgupta making a sixth, gave Indian thought in the early part of the 20th century its greatest thrust and development since classical times. One has to go back to the beginnings of the Mahayana in India to find a group that was as talented and as influential in the developing of the refinement of the species to Homo sapiens stellaris, of refining what I have come to call the yoga of civilization. What I have called the philosophy of transparent symbols. And not only the species Homo sapiens stellaris, which I have named, but the development of stellar civilization of the civilization now having a planetary culture. And a star system wide civilization. Putting us on the interstellar frontier. Literally placing us on a parity at long last. Of participating literally among the stars as part of the spectrum of spiritual beings who are at home in the entire cosmos. Sri Aurobindo. Dates from about ten years before Alfred Kroeber. Aurobindo Ghosh was his real name. He was a political radical. Early in the 20th century, and the British took umbrage that this elegant, intelligent, wealthy young Indian man was causing problems in the British rule of India. So they arrested him and decided to teach the Sami as they used to derisively call such, uh, men the upstart darkie. They put him into a special holding cell prison. It was about five feet wide and about five feet deep, so that he could only stretch out in a diagonal way, and he was put under this solitary confinement for a year. Aurobindo Ghosh had nothing to read, nothing to write, nothing to do. So he began practicing yoga. And when the year was up, the young radical stepped forth as Sri Aurobindo, one of the world's greatest yogis, with the concentration that there is a supramental mind of the Superman who is able to transform the future of mankind. And when he found a woman, a very special woman who was half Egyptian, half French, who came to India in a trousseau of the highest Parisian fashions with the tremendous mystery elan of a noble Egyptian woman. They fell in love, and she became known as the mother, and she was the lifelong companion for Sri Aurobindo. They were a shared presence pair. They were a complementarity. And together they began to understand that what transforms man now for the future is to put the new yoga into an expansion of the origins of yoga. Instead of the origins being going to a forced hermitage hut or going to a Himalayan cave, and the caves and the huts developed into ashrams where there were a number of men or there were a number of women in their ashram communities. Instead of going to a cave in the Himalayas, one went to a place like Rishikesh instead of going to the forest hermitages. One now went to a place like Bodhgaya. But what Sri Aurobindo and the mother in their Integral Yoga developed was that there needs to be a new kind of city where every aspect of the city expands, from the hermitage or the cave through the ashram into a world wide community, and they called it Auroville, the first planetary city. Built on the coast south of Madras and Pondicherry in French influenced India. And we're going to talk more about Auroville and about the development of Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, which is one of the precursors in the 20th century of developments that happened in the second half, which I myself participated in. And now, in the beginnings of the 21st century, developing and presenting something that has not been seen before. This is fresh. It's original. When Aurobindo was writing, he had a magazine, a philosophic monthly, which appeared. It was called the Aria. Aria and Sanskrit means um, literally the noble kind. Arrian's aria. The. The quality is that there is a refinement of Homo sapiens sapiens due to a special nobility, where they have raised themselves to have the dimensions of the heavenly qualities of man no longer limited to the earthly shape, but able to participate in man. Bridging heaven and earth in a yogic way. Aurobindo died in 1950. He was born in 18. 18. 50. Eight, 1865, I think. Um. They published for his centenary. Um, in, uh. This edition is 1971. The human cycle, the ideal of human unity and war and self-determination. They were all articles in the Aria Journal from 1916 until 1919. This is the period of the First World War, and it is the period as soon as he came out as this super Yogi from detention. He spent the rest of the First World War writing these articles, and then they would be collected together and put into books. In the book called The Human Cycle, which its original title was The Psychology of Social Development. When it was reprinted, it was changed to The Human Cycle and chapter nine is called Civilization and Culture. And what's important here is that at the very same time as Sri Aurobindo was writing about the human cycle and about the ideal of human unity, about civilization and culture. Alfred Kroeber was finishing his first two great works. The first one, The Handbook of the Indians of California, is about 1000 pages, and it is the first really complete survey of about 50 different tribes throughout California, with every kind of detail attended to. It was researched for some 17 years, and was finally published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, D.C. as volume 78 of the bulletins of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Dover Paperbacks has done a reprint and reissuing the first edition in publication was 1925, but the book was finished by 1917. Had been researched from 1901 on. What's interesting is that as soon as he realized that finally the Handbook of the Indians of California was going to be published in Washington, D.C., he brought together the science of anthropology and publishing in January of 1923 a book called anthropology, making this the overview of the science of anthropology. And for the very first time, one had an advance over the way in which anthropology originally had been founded in the 1860s. And we'll talk more about that next week in the presentation. But Kroeber's anthropology and his Handbook of the Indians of California occur at the very same time as the development of Sri Aurobindo's beginnings of integral yoga. Their concomitant one is developed in San Francisco, the other is developed in the environs of Madras, India. The midpoint between those two would be London, England, and the influence of London, England on Aurobindo and on Crowborough is remarkable because you have the beginnings of anthropology as a science in London. But the refinement comes with Kroeber in anthropology. One of the interesting things about Kroeber, he was an extraordinary man in terms of his adventurousness. And because his patrons were extraordinary human beings, their personalities were unbelievable. His anthropology teacher in New York was Franz Boas at Columbia, but he moved to San Francisco because his new patron there was Phoebe Hearst, who was the mother of William Randolph Hearst. And she wanted to have, in addition to the new schools of San Francisco, the new school being built in the Parnassus Heights area of San Francisco. There was a hospital. There was a medical school, and next to it was going to be a building that taught anthropology. And she selected hand, selected Kroeber to go to San Francisco to begin to found an American school of anthropology. And he arrived in 1901 and realized that in order to make it a cross section of a science, he would have to select an area, and he selected California so that the Handbook of the Indians of California is the exemplar of the new American refinement of the science of anthropology that the British anthropologists had the distinct tone of taking various parts of the Empire and comparing them, and one of the great competitors of the Handbook of the Indians of California is Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough. That eventually became 13 volumes with tens of thousands of one liners or one paragraph. Ers, all stitched together from every conceivable part of the world. Kroeber instead focused on the spectrum of the Indians of California, completely founding it on relating the physicality of the materials, of the tools, of the figured actions that they did. And just as he was achieving the ability to write the Handbook of the Indians of California, a gift from heaven was sent to him. An Indian starving stumbled into the corral of a ranch in Oroville, California, and he was seized and he was put in jail. And nobody could talk to him because he spoke a language that no one could understand. None of the Indians spoke that language, so word leaked out through the Oroville newspaper, August 29th, 1911. And. Kroeber sent a man named Waterman TW Waterman up to Oroville to fetch that Indian and bring him safely to San Francisco, where he would be housed by the School of Anthropology in San Francisco, and that Kroeber would be his mentor. And so there was an interesting kind of equality, because exactly at the time that this was happening, a work of fiction appeared in Argosy magazine by Edgar Rice Burroughs called Tarzan. Tarzan, who is a European Lord, Lord Greystoke, raised by apes in Africa. And here Kroeber had a real ancient Paleolithic man who knew nothing about civilization whatsoever, still lived in the Stone age, and he was just simply called man. But in the Yana language, it's pronounced ishi. So Ishi came into Kroeber's life in 1961, the year after Kroeber Kruger died, his wife, second wife Theodora Kroeber, wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, a biography of the Last Wild Indian and North America, and it caused a sensation. The cover of it, this is the first edition cover, shows Ishi making a salmon spear. If one goes into the photographic section of Ishi, you will find photographs of Ishi. Making fire with a hand propelled drill. Photographs of Ishi. Um making um, not only fire, but being able to make the implements and tools of his life. He was able to make from scratch bows of three different kinds of wood arrows, uh, fishing spears, the tools by which to Dress a deer, which he shot with a handmade bow and handmade arrows, tanned the skin, prepared the meat, prepared the hut where the meat could be dried, prepared everything, every tool that he needed and was able to show that there were capacities of shooting an arrow that seemed to be almost superhuman. I remember my friend Manley Hall, who told me about being shown by the Morongo Indians back in the early 1920s, that white men have difficulty bringing game down with bows and arrows because they think the animals are targets and they aim to hit the bull's eye of the target. Whereas a primordial Paleolithic hunter knows the game is not a target, but is a part of the relationality of life, and that when you are in the flow of the relationality, you instantly shoot the arrow with the bow because you coordinate in the flow of the participation, and that way you can get enough game to eat and live that there is a different quality to hunting If a civilized man tries to spear. Salmon with a two pronged handmade harpoon. You have to make the pronged pair. You have to bind it to the shaft. The shaft has to be made perfectly straight. The prong has to be literally tuned together and in order to bind it, you have to chew and masticate the rawhide thongs in order to give it a special kind of a chewed compression saliva, uh, expansion, so that when you bind the prongs to the shaft, when the thong dries, it will tighten and it will hold that prong to that shaft. And you can use that for years, but you have to fish for the salmon in the salmon way, like you hunt for the deer in the deer way, or you hunt for the birds in the bird way. So that Paleolithic man was able to live in a spectrum of relationality to the world around him, not only the animals, but the plants and all their varieties and variability, and also the minerals and all of their variety. So that man was not only in the world, he was at home in the world. He was a moveable feast of variation and of freedom that could be applied in such a way that his experience was sharable and teachable, so that there was a culture and there was a tradition of passing on that culture. Kroeber, in raising Ishi from a single wild Paleolithic aborigine for five years until he died of tuberculosis, he was able to understand more and more the qualities of primordiality, and the relationship of the way in which a natural cycle brought itself to a focus of man being at home in his world, and that the function of culture was to give a binding to that. But the binding to that had to be a special kind of a chewing, a masticating of the thongs, metaphorically, that would bind this together. And that special masticating was the use of language to convey how all of this was worked into the rhythm of the world, into the rhythm of the animals, into the rhythm cycle of the plants, into the rhythms of the minerals. In Longfellow's great American epic, Hiawatha, Hiawatha is able to speak the language of the plants, knows what they are for because they tell him, able to speak the language of the animals like a Tarzan, able to speak the language of the minerals, to know how they work together. And that this way Paleolithic man became wise about being wise and bounded together by his mythology, by his language, running on imagery, tuning feelings, feeling tones so that the basic instinctual response became something that was leveraged into a refined application. That his technique was something that was passed on but passed on in a special rhythm of presentation. And Kroeber learned how to do this. Another example of someone like Kroeber is Louis Leakey, who was raised with the Kikuyus in Africa in Kenya. He because his father was a missionary. He grew up playing with Kikuyu boys. So when he came of age, he became a Kikuyu tribal man by killing a lion, by learning how to make his bows and arrows, and didn't realize until he went to study in England and everybody was speaking English, not Kikuyu. Louis Leakey found that when he dreamed, he dreamed in Kikuyu, not English, and he became an elder of the Kikuyu tribe. Later on, when there were difficulties in Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta became the revolutionary leader of the Mau Mau. Louis Leakey was the only white man to go to see Kenyatta, and he went alone and he went as an elder of the Kikuyu tribe and was welcomed by Kenyatta not as an Englishman, not as a white man, but as a Kikuyu. And Leakey wrote a little book called Mau Mau about the ending of the Mau Mau, because he was able to show Kenyatta that man must not hunt man, that this is a food chain that ends in universal death. Leakey also learned it was the first man to be able to make Stone age tools. He could take a couple of rocks and a couple of minutes. He could fashion a spearhead from scratch. No one else had been able to do that for some thousands of years. Kroeber was that kind of a man. One of the great events in his life leading up to being able to finish the Handbook of the Indians of California. Able to raise easy. He was living in what is the section now of San Francisco. It's been traditionally called the tenderloin. He was in a hotel room on Eddy Street, just off market. And one day in 1906. The earthquake struck San Francisco. The great earthquake and fires began to break out. In order to check on the anthropological school up on Parnassus Heights. Kroeber hiked the miles up there about three miles. And when he got there and looked back, the fires in San Francisco had spread. And his hotel and every place within dozens of blocks, it eventually burned to the ground. He lost everything, but he saved his life. He saved his life because his response was not to fear, but to take the responsibility to check on the school, to check on the work, to make sure that things were not broken, that somebody was there tending the place. And in this way, Kroeber became one of the greatest men of his time. He was able to bridge the primordiality of Paleolithic culture from its inception, from its base ground and towards the uh. Development. Anthropology as a book came out in 1920 3rd January. There was a follow up, published in 1953 by the University of Chicago Press. Uh, many, many hundreds of pages called Anthropology Today. It was 30 years later, edited by Kroeber, and it was an encyclopedic inventory. And it was the first time that there was an encyclopedia of the science of anthropology that took every single aspect of it and knit it together, so that in between the Handbook of the Indians of California in 2526 years, Anthropology Today expanded this so that for the first time one could have a complete scientific overview in complete detail, up to date of where the science was and the remarkable quality of it is that the historical sense constantly is being informed in a very refined way. Not only are you dealing. With the history of the science and the history of the tribes, the histories of the traditions, the history of the culture. One is dealing with the history of those investigating and becoming more and more refined. That there were human beings who were familiar with several different cultures, spoke several different languages, sometimes very refined and erudite, would speak a dozen languages. Be at home in lots of different places in the world. Kroeber was at home in hundreds of cultures. He was familiar with hundreds of languages. He became like a refined, prismatic man and always had the ability to keep his feet planted in the actuality of the investigation. At the same time as understanding that something very large was taking shape and he was working at his death at age 85. His wife published a couple of years after he died, a roster of civilizations and culture. And we're going to look next week at the way in which the roster of civilizations and culture is something that he was looking to have an anthropological scientific meeting with the development of various historical scientific outlooks. The key one for us next week will be that of Arnold Toynbee, a J. Toynbee A Study of Civilization. I was fortunate enough in San Francisco in the 60s, about the mid 60s, to go to the PBS television station KQED, and the director of the station spent a whole week interviewing Arnold Toynbee on the study of civilizations. And he was I was there in the studio, sitting next to Mrs. Toynbee, who was remarkably, uh, ordinary in look, she wore print dresses. Little hat, carried a regular purse with her all the time. Low heeled shoes. Only when she looked at you and spoke with you did you realize what a scintillating human being, what an exquisite woman this was. And try and be himself. He was quite tall. She was very short and slight. Try and be was quite tall and whited hair with a noble quality of diction, until you saw his eyes up close. And they were like Paul Newman's eyes. They were like that baby sky blue twinkling. And one of the first things that he said at the end of the first session, he came over to Mrs. Toynbee and myself, and he looked down at the two of us together, waiting for what he would say. And he said, I hope I didn't overspeak myself, but I feel the intensity and I want to deliver it. And it was the first time I got to shake his hand and it was really something. We'll talk about, um, Crowbar and Sri Aurobindo and Krishnamurti and Toynbee and whole host of others. For the rest of this series, but we're going to bring in several surprises. One of the world's greatest science fiction writers is a woman. Her name is Ursula K Le Guin. Her father was Alfred Kroeber and her mother was Theodora Kroeber, and she grew up in that household with three brothers and parents like that, and surrounded from the beginning with Paleolithic, cultured and civilized human beings. And one of her greatest works is called the Earthsea trilogy. And we'll take a little bit of look at the wonderful Ursula K Le Guin, who still lives in Oregon. Uh, about 70 now. More next week.