Presentation 8

They come to the eighth presentation, and we're looking at how a build up towards the threshold of almost ultimate change has come upon our kind, that the very species that we belong to. About 40 some thousand years ago refined itself not into a subspecies, but into a refined species and Homo sapiens that had been stable for 160,000 years, refined themselves into being able to produce art. Our refinement in our time is that we are able to produce science. The context out of which art comes is an extra dimension, as we have been talking about. It is the dimension of consciousness. And so consciousness is that quintessential fifth dimension in the deep magic of the theater. It's called the fifth Business. You can block out the play, you can learn the lines, you can pack the house, and you can have the stage manager fluidly presenting. And theater will not happen sometimes, because it is not tonight that the magic is there. So there is always the quality of someone in the production to invoke the fifth business to bring the trigger of magic in. So not only does the show go on, but the evening is given over to this quintessential event because a conscious dimension has come into the four dimensions of space time, and that dimension always transforms space time, and the transformer that is able to make an art out of the application of that fifth dimension is the artist. So that art is an extra dimension to consciousness. And because it is an extra dimension, it is a sixth dimension. So that whenever you have an art involved, you now have two dimensions beyond the four dimensions of space time, and those four dimensions of space time have a wonderful character that they form a cycle. They form a cycle that is so dependable that we still use in every language the colloquial phrase of something being four square. Foursquare. Here in Los Angeles, one of the great evangelical churches was called the Foursquare Gospel. Aimee Semple McPherson put it up over by Echo Park, though those four dimensions also give us a frame. And it is a frame for the picture that we have, but it is also a frame of reference, because two of the corners of that square are angles of perception that correlate. The second angle and the fourth angle correlate in such a way that they're referential. The fourth corner has its certainty because it can check diagonally across to the second corner, and when those two angles are together, one understands that the whole frame must be in order. It must be in focus so that the picture, whatever it is that is one one is able to discern must be accurate as far as nature allows it. So convinced of this that the fourth corner, that fourth angle now says because its referent is aligned, that this diagonal is the guarantee of the identification and it becomes a mathematical term as necessary, it becomes recursive in that it feeds back, and what it feeds back is if we now have the identification aligned and are referenced there, then this fourth angle is self referential, and one then can be certain that you have achieved your identity. That fourth corner is the symbols and the symbolic structure of the mind has that capacity. That second corner is the existential reality of things, their physicality, but also their physicality in the sense that what they do is a part of their existence, of their existential reality. So one of the time honored words that we use in English to talk about that second corner is ritual. It's what we do. And that things that exist exist because it's what they do, they keep occurring. It's not that they blink out of existence and then blink back. It's that the energy that sustains them has a frequency where it has its registry, and those registrations are vibrations. So that when one gets down to the atomic scale or the molecular scale, all things have a vibrancy which can be calibrated. One can come to understand. One can even come to understand that such a thing as starlight or sunlight is able to be put through a diffraction pattern so that one can see the rainbow. Or one can see not just the rainbow from sunlight, but one can see in starlight an even more refined prism, a diffraction grating that allows for thousands of registrations of lines. And when you apply it to the sun, the first person to do this was a scientist in the 19th century named Fraunhofer, and for him, these lines in an astrophysical spectrum are called Fraunhofer lines. They're dark. They're dark because they're of elements that are not there. And the lines that show up are elements that are there. And when one looks at other suns, other stars, they all have their individual spectra and one can tell what they're made out of. One can see what their pattern of their Fraunhofer lines are, and one can learn. Then, as we have learned that our species now for several hundred years has accelerated the capacity to be able to do a differential analysis, which is two more orders of dimension beyond art, so that science is really four dimensions beyond the natural cycle of space time. And before the last 300 years, and intermittently even since then. Anyone coming upon these qualities says that this is supernatural, and it in fact would be super natural. It's not anti natural, it's dimensions above supernatural. So that we have become used to the fact that there are certain blessed beings who are able to convey further dimensions and transform space time. And that that transformation is something that has an ecology to it and like nature in its cycle, has four dimensions. Consciousness has four dimensions, and an ecology not in a cycle. It's an ecology. Because when the phases proceed of the dimensions, the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth dimensions come into play. They continually build up an accumulation of application to the transform of the dimensions of space time, so that eventually one has a figure extraordinary like Jesus, who could change the physicality, could change the symbolic integral of space time, and also hone the visionary quality of consciousness, the artistic form of consciousness, and a another kaleidoscopic process in consciousness which we habitually simply call history, but is really mysterious, and that an eighth dimension of science comes into play that one can eventually come to understand analytically how this works and why, and that the word for it then is that man has exceeded what he was just in nature, even though just in nature allowed him to become an individual with an identity and the ability to identify and to bring the whole cycle of nature to a fullness and a completion. And yet always there were moments, there were events, there were special persons who were not psychic. They were not in terms of the integral symbolic order of mental, but they were spiritual. They were spiritual because they had in their lives those extra dimensions. They didn't come and go. They were there. And when they were there, to the extent of someone like a historical Buddha or a Jesus, all of a sudden you had the four dimensions of the natural cycle and the four dimensions of the ecology of consciousness, which because they had a special kind of a relationship as a whole, the four dimensions of nature always tend to want to produce integrals. The four dimensions of consciousness want to have differentials. So that you have, when you bring the two of them together, not an eight integral, but you have an eight dimensional complementarity. And the realization that the complementarity itself then is like an extra dimension. It's like a ninth dimension, not because it is a super integral. And we'll see that one of the best yogis of the 20th century did not understand that one of the most powerful yogis of the 20th century called his Yoga of Integral Yoga and his structure of the mind the supramental. It is not that with all due respect, but that the complementarity that nine dimensional is not a form, but is a hyperspace process, and that that hyperspace process produces an ultimate infinity form, which we know as reality. And if one wants to be mathematical in trying to use a special kind of differential language, which mathematics is, one comes to see that it's a ten dimensional. Reality. And one of the great books from about ten years ago. Hyperspace by Michio Kaku A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. His book that became a bestseller was called Einstein's Cosmos How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time. And when one comes to the very end of it, one of the very last paragraphs he writes, these parallel universes might provide yet another explanation for dark matter. If there is a parallel universe nearby, we will not be able to see it or feel it, since matter is confined to our membrane universe. But we would be able to feel its gravity, which can travel between universes. To us, this would appear as if invisible space had come, had some form of gravity, much like dark matter. And in fact, superstring theorists have speculated that perhaps dark matter can be explained as the gravity produced by a nearby parallel universe. This also is an error. This also is a very complicated act of egotistical hubris, because the ecology of consciousness is not subsumed in the integral at all. The mind is not the arbiter of what is real. The spirit is several dimensions superior to the mind. And the cosmos. As an eight dimensional home is several dimensions superior to the spiritual person, so that there is now a relationality not of referential back for certainty, but of referentiality forward in humility, so that the quality of the spiritual person is not to check the world for who they are, but to extend praise so that they may participate in being real. This is good. This is a quality that now refines Homo sapiens sapiens into a new refinement. And I've given it the name for the last, at least 25, 30 years of Homo sapiens. Stellaris. Star. Wisdom. Man who is at home in the entire star system but also is at home being on the interstellar frontier which extends out beyond even galactic limits. We have photographs of the background radiation of the entire universe. These are not stars. These are not galaxies. This is the energy left over from the creation, the origin of the universe. And if you flick it just a little bit, you'll see in the holographic. The second survey was even more refined, and the third survey is going on as we speak. This is from the net. Uh, January 2009. Astronomers to gaze back in time and map the history of the universe. And this is a new series of scientific analytic instruments. Notice that as one has the cone going out not just to an idea of a universe, but the whole spectrum of a cosmos. Now one is able to see that time has a special quality. It doesn't just go back in time, but it has a parenthetical symmetry with the future. And the more that you go so-called back in time, the more that you are able to analytically understand the future so that all of time becomes. Within a parenthetical where the original is a zero that begins and its symmetry is with an infinity that doesn't have to begin because it never ends. It never was ended. It never was begun. So that one comes into a very peculiar mathematical quandary. If you have a high mathematic and you're working with an equation, and equations are those diagonals of symbols and reference. If you have an equation, you can work with zero or infinity within that equation. And the equation will always work out in terms of its analytical accuracy. But in the middle of the 20th century, when math got really sophisticated enough to not only notice this as peculiarity, it became, in the most advanced math of the most advanced science, that it always occurred every time you worked out an equation dealing with the really subtle qualities, not just of existential things or symbolic forms of them, but with the relativity, largeness, or the quantum smallness. The equations always came out with not only with an infinity, but it came out with unlimited infinities so that they had to invent a kind of a filter. That would take the infinities out of the equation, so that one could understand what you were dealing with and, and have something that would register, and then you could take the results that you could work with because it had been renormalized and that was the word that was used, renormalization, that this mathematical filter renormalized so that the infinities were taken out of the occasion equation, and it did not disturb the accuracy vis a vis the mathematic vis a vis the referentiality in four dimensional space time. But what it did was to abstract out so that one had blinders on, and did no longer realize that one had done a reduction by the filter, so that yes, it worked with existential application. It worked with mental symbolic forms, but it was dealing with apparency in four dimensions of a least a ten dimensional reality. So that there was a special prize that was offered a long time ago when math was first starting to be powerful enough to bring these things through. It was a prize for somebody to be able to explain why, at that time, they hadn't gotten sophisticated enough to deal with the infinities. But one of the things that got in the way is that when you had a higher dimension of geometry, then the kind of four dimensional geometry that people had dealt with for a couple of thousand years. A man in 1859, his name was Bernhard Riemann. He offered a prize because his equations not in the integral geometry, but in the differential geometry that he had invented and come to understand, we call it Riemannian geometry today, or sometimes because there are many variants of that, it's called differential geometry. He offered a prize for anyone who could explain why in that mathematics, in that differential geometry zeros occurred all the time, not only all the time. They occurred exactly. So that he said, zeros are the space between numbers. That the existential actuality of a number is something because it is surrounded by a zero before it and a zero after. One is one because it's just one, and two is one more than one, just one more than one, so that the whole cardinal number sequence, if you just pay attention to reading the numbers, saying the numbers, if you just pay attention to counting, you have evaporated. The fact that the zeros coexist, but invisibly with the numbers, and not only with the numbers just before the numbers, because what occurs before one is zero, so that it was capable for deep spiritual men and women even 5000 years ago, to understand that oneness came out of not nothing, but came out of a mysterious ness. Who knows? But one can't give it an assignment. One can't label it. One cannot number it, one cannot count it. But nevertheless it is real. It is not an artifact, but it is real. So that when one has counted through a certain set of numbers, we use the Arabic numbers now one through nine. And when you come to ten, now the zero appears. But it appears after the one instead of before the one, so that ten is a one and a zero. But the zero after the ten means that the power has gone to the order of ones, and one to the one is ten. If you put two zeros one two to the second power, you have 100. If you have three zeros 1001, now is one to the third power, that these are powers of ten of one. So that one now has an ordinal scalar with which to understand. Existential reference of symbolic forms. But the subtlety, the mystery in it is that the original one came out of a mystery. Came out of a zero. And the first men and women to recognize us were the Chinese. And they called that Zero Dao. And what came out of it was Tay and Tae means has meant in Chinese um itself. It is the unity that it is, and that no matter what happens to it, that those facets of it are also unities there also. They also have their oneness. And then the realization was that the only way in which one could show to oneself the mysteriousness of the Tao was to put the two together, the zero and the one, and triple it. Repeat, repeat a polarity pair of the one, and the polarity pair of the one was at one half of. It was like one, and the other half of it was like zero. But the way to express it is not through numbers, but through, uh, diagrams. And so the one half of the one that was like one was an unbroken line. And the one half that was like Dao was a broken line. It had the space in the middle to say, it's mysterious. We don't know. But we do know that it operates this way so that by pairing those, one would come to a dead even limbo. So you put a third line in. It can be either unbroken or broken. It doesn't make any difference, because both of them will show a four stage cycle of integral. Both the broken line will have four different phases, and the unbroken line will have four different phases, and that if you pull them together, they will have a quality that is truly mysterious. Not only now does one come out of zero and be one, but the one is able to be one half and one half so that the polarity is equal. But in that polarity that's equal. If you run it through all of its cycles of permutations of possibilities and you bring them together, the two now the two has a form which is cubed Two to the third is eight. Now it really got mysterious because if one comes out of zero, and if the one is able to be developed into a pair of that pair. Now it is said not only is there the mystery of Tao and the unity of Tae, but the unity of Tae has a polarized pair called Yin and yang. And that if you play with the whole cycle of yin and yang, you will come up with an eight. You'll come up with a matrix of eight possibilities that are universal. They're always there. And the first description of that eight matrix cycle, because it was 5000 years ago, was of a rainstorm in the mountains. Probably the first people to really come to understand this. Their names, legendarily, are Fu XI and his consort, Nu Gua. And there is a very, very famous. Um, I've showed it to you, uh, last week. Um, the pairing of Fushi and Nugui is that they are dragon people. They come out of the mysteriousness that one doesn't really know, but it is like Dao. So that they are not dragging people in a negative way. They are dragging people in a mysterious way. And the original dragon in Chinese understanding 5000 years ago was that in the night sky, the most conspicuous thing is not the moon, not the planets that move, not the comets, but. And not even just the stars. But the fact that most of the stars collect together in a cloud, and that that Milky Way cloud was the original dragon, and that in the sinuous energy, not just a straight line frequency energy, but a wild energy. The part of the dragon that touched nearest to the Earth at the horizon at the winter solstice correlated to Polaris, the North Star, so that now one could draw a plumb line from the North Star through the Milky Way closest to the earth, and heaven and earth would have for the very first time, a plumb line by which one could center the pivot of whatever relationalities you had. And so the female holds a plumb line, while her deeper than husband, deeper than companion, her eternal pair. Fucci holds a carpenter's square. It's like an L that's linked with a diagonal. And if you have a plumb bob and a carpenter's square, you can build. True. You can put the foundation where it really should be put in such a way that it really will be a foundation. And you can build a building from that. It will and it will be there so that the referentiality now includes more dimensions than were there before. And for the first time, you get a sense that an architecture can be appreciable and it can be worked out in terms, in terms of a geometric city and that that geometric city can be raised at least to three levels of certainty. The sphere becomes the full cycle model out of which one can now hold in the symbolic shape of the mind, the wholeness that all of the parts and all of their movement are going to obtain. If you take a diameter of that sphere, you will have a disc. And that disc becomes the halo symbol for the spiritual. Because they can do this, They can see the disk of the sphere of the heavens. And if you extend that disk through the sphere, you now have an infinite plane. And the ancient name for it in all cultures turns out to be translated as horizon, that there is an infinite horizon that runs through the disk of man's capacity to understand the sphere of the wholeness. Now you have something which is extraordinary. You have a spiritual person who is able to transform the world and transform themselves to refinement, so that they are now at home in heaven. We're going to take a break in just a minute, but we need to carry this one more phase forward. The future that occurs always transforms the past so that the past, whatever it was, is new now. Any time that one begins a conscious visioning, the past becomes malleable. It's going to change. It's not going to change like a parallel universe. It's that the universe now has begun its cosmic ecology. All possible worlds. You don't have to go to a mental projection of parallel universes. A cosmos is not a universe. The greatest, one of the greatest yogis of the 20th century did not understand that missed that which is extraordinary until one realizes that he was educated in England. He was taken out of Calcutta at the age of seven and put into the best schools in England. He went as a seven year old to Saint Paul's School. Saint Paul's Cathedral in London is like Saint Peter's in Rome and the Saint Paul's School, founded in the Renaissance by John Colet, absolute mastermind, had studied with Ficino in Florence and took the Florentine Renaissance back to England, back to London, back to Saint Paul's, and founded Saint Paul's School to open the Renaissance in England. And so Aurobindo Ghose came from a very wealthy, medical successful family in Calcutta at seven was put into Saint Paul's School in London, and because he was a universal genius, when he was ready to come out of that, he was put into Cambridge University in England and became the outstanding intellectual genius of of that time. This is in the. He was born in 1872, so he was taken to Saint Paul's when in 1880. And, uh, he was taken to Cambridge. And by the time he was 20, he not only had graduated, he had learned all the major languages to learn um, including Sanskrit, including Greek and Latin. He could read Homer in the Greek, he could read Virgil in the Latin. He could read the Mahabharata. In Sanskrit, he could read all the European languages. He read Goethe in German he, and on and on. His intellectual genius. But when he came back to India, he came back to India in the 1906 era, where he again was not a star English intellectual, but he was offended that he was considered a dark skinned Indian. What do you mean, an Indian? I am, I am a gentleman's gentleman. I am more master your civilization than you do. So they threw him into jail. We're going to teach you. They threw him into a little cell, five feet wide and about five feet long, so that he had to sleep curled up. He had nothing to do. They gave him no books, no paper. There were no nets, no radio, no TV. So all he had to do for an entire year was to do internal yoga. That's all that he could do. And when they opened the cell door and he came out, he was no longer the gentleman's gentleman from Calcutta or London or Cambridge or anywhere else. He was a universal Yogi. So he went to the far south of India. Down to the French Coromandel coast of India, below Madras. And he began to understand that he had the ability to generate an ashram and not teach like they taught at Saint Paul's School or Cambridge or in other places, but that he could make a ashram community where the yoga of the entirety of the sphere allowed for the disc of spiritual understanding to come through enough to extend to the horizon of infinity. And Sri Aurobindo. While he was involved in doing this, World War one broke out in 1914, and almost exactly when it broke out, a young, beautiful woman. Her name was Mira because her mother was French and her last name was Alfassa, because her father was Egyptian. And this beautiful French Egyptian woman, about 30, who had, since she was a little girl, been also a spiritual genius, had gone through all kinds of disciplines, had been everywhere in the world Tokyo, Cairo, Paris. She mostly lived in Paris, everywhere in the world, and she met Sri Aurobindo, and they got each other immediately that they were a parenthetical of many dimensions beyond what most people would consider attraction. And they were together for 60 years. We're going to take a break and come back. This is what they look like in 1950. Let's take a break. Let's come back to an anomaly which truly has puzzled us. It was there in the 18th century, and the response from men and women like ourselves was to produce revolutions that would reset the way in which time space was experienced and kept track of. In the French Revolution, they said, this is the year one. Now, if they had been really wise, they would have said, this is the year zero. If we look at the 19th century, the 19th century, as a historical century progresses from the revolutions, not just the American Revolution and the French Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution, the romantic revolution. The more and more that the struggle to upset the apple cart not only upset the apple cart, it frightened the horse. There is a whole year of presentations. I did one time 52 90 minute presentations on the development of the 19th century. And the overall picture is that as it progressed, the certainty and the confidence in existentiality, of physicality, of symbolic understanding dissolved. It didn't fray, it dissolved. So at the end of the 19th century, you had the discovery of X-rays. You had the discovery of subatomic particles like the electron. You had the discovery of all kinds of indications, like H.G. Wells, the Time Machine, that all of this is not up for grabs. One can't grab it anymore because what was considered real had evaporated, had dissolved. And so the 20th century came in and the overwhelming emphasis was on parapsychology, psychic research, the head of the Psychic Society, based not only in London but in the United States, in New York, but especially its head was at Harvard. Was the greatest psychologist of the day, William James. Before there was a Freud. Before there was a Jung, there was a William James. He wrote the world's first textbook on psychology. He made The Science of Psychology. The two volumes are still available in print because it is a masterful survey of the entirety of it. He was the president of the Psychic Research Society because he himself had been initiated. As a young man raised to be a universal genius like Sri Aurobindo. William James father crammed genius regimen on his children, and two of them responded and became world class geniuses William James and his brother Henry James, the great novelist. The only daughter, Alice James, finally psychologically collapsed and had to be taken care of for the rest of her life in an institution. The other two managed, like young men, to elbow their way out of the family complications. But William James was the one who got appointed as a young man to an expedition to the Amazon jungles in South America. The great, uh, uh, Professor Agassiz at Harvard was going to do a scientific survey of the Amazon jungle, and young William James went along with the expedition because his father was very famous and quite wealthy, and James himself was raised internationally. He went to school in Germany as much as he did in the United States. But on the way he got ill on the ship, and as it went into the harbor in Rio de Janeiro, he literally had a breakdown. It's hardly ever alluded to. It was not a mental breakdown, not a physical breakdown. It was a spiritual break down in the sense that the confidence that he had in the world that he was raised in evaporated all of a sudden. He was hospitalized for several weeks. They were making arrangements to send him back home to Boston, to Harvard. He came out of the hospital room and he said, I'm not going back. Furthermore, I'm going into the Amazon jungle alone with just a native canoe person with me. I want to do the collecting, not as a part of the expedition, but I'm going to be my part of the expedition myself. And he spent several months alone, not only on the Amazon. They went far enough down to where the Rio Negro comes in. The Rio Negro is the Black Water River. The Amazon is a kind of a muddy brownish river. And where they come together at Manaus, they flow like two serpents, intertwined for hundreds of miles, not mixing because they're not miscible, because the sediments change the composition of the liquid. And James all by himself. You have to understand, this is before the Civil War in the 1850s, there was hardly anyone who went into the Amazon jungle. It was filled with peril. He thrived. And when he came out, William James was no longer a boy. He was no longer a young man. He was no longer a Harvard genius. He was no longer a German university student of great promise. He was like a shaman. He understood mysteries are exactly and precisely mysteries, and to be with them, one has to become mystical. And to become mystical, one has to get past the mirror reflection of the mind. That one is psychic. Because the mystic knows there's no one there to be psychic. Subjectivity is a fiction. It's a role that is thrown up so that the show can go on. But there are men and women who do not put the show on. Not only is the show not going on, there's no audience, there's no cast. And that's only for openers, because the mystic has a differential conscious field that does two things at the same time. It is miscible with the field of nature, and so nature becomes magical. It's capable of anything. It becomes wild. Wild in the good sense, and the structure of symbolic thought transforms. It gains something it didn't have before. It gains the memory. And in exchange, because it's like a dance, it extends the imagination to the differential field of consciousness. And now the imagination becomes creative. It's no longer the store place of images. It no longer arranges images into a base, into a complex thread woven into the fabric of a base, an image base out of which one now can do the integral ING of things. The imagination, when it enters into the field of differential consciousness, becomes differential, no longer integral. It doesn't make pictures. One of the great Indian savants was a German named Heinrich Zimmer, whose father was a savant, and Zimmer. The first time I read any book on India philosophy was Six Philosophies of India. I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. I was 17, and I ran across this big fat paperback published by Meridian Six Philosophies of India. And I thought, I've got to know something about India. I don't know why, but. And so instead of just paying attention to my electrical engineering courses, I started reading it. And the crowd that I hung out with were graduate students, perennial graduate students, 35 year old graduate students. And they said, well, what are you reading? Well. Do you understand this stuff? And I started to explain and finally they said, you you really get this? Maybe you're reincarnated. Maybe you were an Indian before and an agronomist. A soil engineer from central India, Nagpur, in the desert. He looked at me in Nagpur. They're very dark. They're black, black Indians, ancient, Dravidian, mysterious. He said you do not understand. But before tomorrow's dawn, you will at least have heard the Bhagavad Gita from someone who could present it to you from memory. And so we walked around the University of Wisconsin on Lake Mendota. It's a long way around. And on the other side of it is the insane asylum for Wisconsin. So you don't want to go too far. So we walked. And this is a Wisconsin winter. This is cold. And he kept reciting Pavon by Pavon. And with the glistening eyes and the Gunga Din smile, the soil engineer clued me in that you have to get into the rhythm initially, and then you have to understand that the rhythm has like a combed bar, and that the notes of what is being sung here are arranged on that bar, but in a creative way, so that you learn that the rhythm has intervals of realization. And if you can't carry your realization constantly with you, you're not in the real rhythm, you're only in the percussion. It's not just the percussion. There's a sitar playing a raga called wisdom, and the raga in the Bhagavad Gita is sung by Krishna and the tabla player is Arjuna. And when one understands not only how to hear this, but how to be with this in its wildness, that was over a half a century ago. I once did an American reading of the Bhagavad Gita, nine 90 minute presentations. It's only on audio tapes. There was no DVD at the time. The quality of a great Yogi like Sri Aurobindo is that he was a literature. He was a writer of poetry and of epics on the level of the author of the Mahabharata. Vyasa, who lived about 300 B.C. the Mahabharata took place in ancient history 3102 BC, but it was written down first about 300 BC by Vyasa. There are at least several plays classic plays like Greek Tragedies by Aurobindo and a great epic called Savitri. The woman that was with him. Meera became known as the mother because of the primordiality of the mother when she was. Uh, young in 1897. She lived to be 95. She was a beauty. And in this book on the mother, there are various little photographs of her. Here on the right she's in Algeria. On the left she's in Tokyo. But one of the curious things when it comes to Buddhism. There was an interview. Someone asked her, what is the little vehicle and the great vehicle? These are Buddhist terms. This is the translation of a Pali word, I believe it is said that the religion of the North is the great vehicle, and the religion of the South is the little vehicle. The little vehicle abides by quite a strict teaching, according to what has been preserved or believed to have been preserved of the words of Buddha. You know, the Buddha used to say that there was no God. There is was no persistence of the ego. There were no beings of higher worlds who could incarnate here. There were no. He denied almost every possible thing. The religion of the South is like that. It is extremely nihilistic. It says no, no, no to everything. Well, in the region of the north which has been practiced in Tibet and spread from Tibet into China and from China to Japan, one finds the bodhisattvas who stand for saints, as in all other religions, all the previous Buddhas who are also like some sort of demigods or gods. I don't know if you ever had a chance to visit a Buddhist temple in the North. I saw them in China and Japan for you. Enter halls where there are innumerable statuettes, all the bodhisattvas, all the disciples of those bodhisattvas, all the forces of nature deified. Indeed, you are overwhelmed by the number of gods. On the other hand, if you go south, there is nothing, not a single image. I believe they speak of the great vehicle because there are lots of things inside, and the little because there are few. I don't exactly know the origin of the two terms. It is pathetic. That someone who would be at the pinnacle of 20th century spirituality has no understanding of something fundamental. There was no little vehicle. It was called the Theravada. It was called the path of the elders. It's the path integral of those who learned personally from the Buddha and passed on that learning through a manic recitation of exactly how he taught, and he taught by sutras, sutra and Sanskrit means the thread. If you see Theravada monks like from Sri Lanka or from what used to be Burma, Myanmar or Thailand, if you see them chanting together when they chant the sutras on special occasions, like the full moon, they will hold a golden thread among them so that they recitation will be not only in the right chant rhythm, and that rhythm comes from ancient Vedic India. It comes from the Rigveda. It comes from the chant pace of the language of the Rigveda, brought into the continuous thread of the sutra, so that when one has made the circum ambit of the way in which that unbroken thread cycle has woven its way through the chant rhythm, one will come to the realization that that's it. That's what this sutra is complete. You have heard it, thus have I heard, and I have heard it all the way through. And what it comes to is not the end. It comes to the realization that all phenomenality is like this. It has a cycle, and when the cycle is completed, it is completed. Historical Buddha said whatever needed to be stood up has been stood up, and whatever needed to be put down has been put down, and whatever needed to be realized has shown. There is no one to realize, there is nothing to realize, and that this stops samsara permanently. Suffering is real. The way out of suffering is just as real. This is the way out of suffering, just as real. And that they're never, ever, not only again will be suffering there never ever was. Suffering is also real. 500 years later, the chant rhythm was replaced, and it was replaced by the kind of rhythm that one finds in a language at the time, 2000 years ago, it's called Syriac. Syriac is a Semitic language, a North Semitic language. Its origin goes back to Akkadian. It goes back to the reign of Sargon of Akkad 2003 50 BC, who refined a previous language, Sumerian, so that the Syriac language has about 3000 years of history behind it. And what's interesting is that the way in which Syriac came into play is that it was refinement in a learned way. Of the kind of creativity that was there, and a Semitic language called Aramaic, but was especially formal in its poetic to the origins and the way in which Hebrew language develops its poetic, especially in pairs of lines and in certain other poetic qualities, and that the origin of Hebrew preceding the Syriac came out of an ancient language called Ugaritic about 2000 BC. And that Hebrew began to emerge about 1400 BC 1300 BC. And right at the same time, the old forerunners to Classical Greek, which was Mycenaean, also matured so that Hebrew and Greek, Classical Greek, Classical Hebrew, both paired, came out of the same language matrix, and that Syriac was a way in which the refinement of the Poetic of Hebrew and the refinement of the Poetic of Greek were able to be tuned together in such a way that there were certain masterful writers at the time who could write a poetry either in Greek or Syriac, and it would be poetic in both languages at the same time. And if you translate it, the poetic Greek or the poetic Syriac into Hebrew, it would read like poetry in Hebrew as well, so that the poetic was trilingual And the greatest master of that trilingual poetic was Mary Magdalene. And if you read her odes to Odes of Solomon, they read in Syriac, original or in Greek, original or translated into Hebrew original. They read poetic. But the disciple who was most poignant because he spoke Syriac since he was born with Saint Thomas. He came from the far slopes of Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon is not only the home of the Jordan River coming down, it's the home of the Orontes River going up and eventually comes out to the Mediterranean Sea, about where ancient Antioch was. And another river runs from Mount Hermon, and it curves off to the west and goes to the Mediterranean, about where the ancient city of tyre was. The city that's there where the Jordan empties into the Dead Sea. It's final thing is ancient Jericho. Thomas came from the Syriac area of the Orontes valley. It's called the Baqa'a Valley. Very, very ancient. He was the disciple who was sent to India. And because he was sent to India originally for the Hebrew communities in India, they were not in North India. That's where the Greek Indo-Greek kings were. The Hebrew communities were in the south of India. They were on the west coast, and they had been there from time immemorial. And it was a very lucrative business because you dealt largely with exporting spices like pepper and cinnamon and so forth, and you could pack in small barrels, an awful lot of product because it was used sparingly. And so it was very lucrative. It was difficult for people to handle these things because you had to take them not only a long ways. You had to go through many ways stations, difficult peoples. Each port was difficult. And the people who had the most experience with long caravan trade routes overland first, but then finally by ships were the ancient Jews, not Jews? They were Semitic, and they were operating 300, 350 years before Abraham was born. And they ran the trade routes from Mesopotamia to India to the Indus civilization, which was very sophisticated. They weren't called Indians. The ancient name for them was Meluhha. And from Meluhha through Magan, which is today Oman and the United Arab Emirates, up to the island of Bahrain, which was called Dilmun at the time and up to the ports of Sumeria like Lagash and so forth, which at that time were on the Persian Gulf. So that Semitic traders were used to handling lots of different languages, lots of different kinds of people, different cultures, and being able to link them all together with a common understanding that the trade that's going on here benefits everyone, and that one of the great benefits of it is that they tipped all of these ports and places with an indispensable element, a metal that could only be found in a few places in any kind of a commercial way. And that metal was tin, because if you mix a little bit of tin with copper, you get bronze. And so the whole Bronze Age was fueled by the supply of ten, which was very difficult to get. And how do you get it from the Indus Valley all the way into Anatolia to where Troy was because of Semitic traders who were able to handle this all the time, and later on their descendants, the Phoenicians, carried this to the west, all through the Mediterranean, out into the Atlantic Ocean and down the African coast. They liked especially not having ports where they had to have fortresses to protect their goods and themselves. They like little islands off the coast where they could purchase the rights to have trading ports there. It wasn't going to interfere with anybody's kingdoms. One of the far South African ports is off the great headland. The country now is called Senegal, and the city that's there is called Dakar. The Paris of Africa and the little island just to the south, off the Dakar headland is called Gorée, and it was a Phoenician trading port. About 1500 BC. The Egyptians began to understand that if they worked with the Phoenician trading ports that are going off to the west, if they reopen another kind of trading port going to India, they will be able to run competition to the northern Semitic trade routes. And the Queen of the Egyptians. The pharaoh at the time was a woman. Her name was Hatshepsut. She started sending fleets of 60 ships at a time from Myos Hormos on the Red sea, down through the straits that were bridged by ancient Sheba and ancient Saba. Saba is today called the Wild Highlands of Yemen and Sheba is called Ethiopia. And so they grew very rich. And because it was a female pharaoh, they got the idea that there are talented women. So they began to favor having a queen of their own. And 500 years later, the Queen of Sheba was the most wealthy woman in the world and also one of the most brilliant, hard to find a man on that level. So that's why she went to find Solomon to check him out. When Saint Thomas went to the south of India. When he was sent there, after he did his duty for the Jewish trading communities on that coast, he went diagonally inland to go to the other coast to be able to begin seeding the gospel in a new way. In the midpoint between those two coasts is a city still called Salem, like Jerusalem. It's still there. It's still called Salem. But on the other coast, the place that he came to became one of the great cities of the world. It became Madras. It's called Chennai now. And one can still find Saint Thomas Hill in Madras, where he was buried. He's the one that seeded the transform of the Terra Veda into the way of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The great way, the Mahayana. And so when people began to ask, well, how is the Mahayana different from the Theravada? Many later people said, well, it isn't so much that it's a Theravada. It's like, it's it's okay, but it's okay for you. It's not okay for the cosmos, and that there are capacities to our dimensions that are like the great way. So the Mahayana is not just different from the Hinayana, the little way. It takes the path integral of the Theravada and hourglass spectrums, the whole thing into a cosmic spectrum, so that one finds, a thousand years later, one of the glories of the planet. One finds at a desert trading nexus where all of the currents and all of the amazing developments that had happened over a thousand years came together at a place called Dunhuang. A series of caves with art illustrations like ancient Paleolithic caves like the Ajanta Caves in India. But here was the great Mahayana art. And when you look at them and I'll bring some, uh, uh, illustrations of it next week, it looks like Henri Matisse painting a thousand years ago on the edge of the Gobi desert, one gets the ultimate speed of the subatomic particle flow of a cosmic spectrum, one gets the astrophysics of the ten dimensional quality. A thousand years ago. If the Sahara had not dried up in a catastrophic way, that was unseeable because no one understood complex long term geology. That area of the central Gobi has a huge lake. In Tibetan it's called Lop Nur. One of the peculiarities of the Sahara is that that lake migrates over centuries. It has its migrational path, and when it dried up, where all the cities had been developed and built on it, the people had to either move away or die. And the lake went into more of what is today Tibet rather than what is today the Sinkiang of far west province of China. The Tibetans said, no, it's our lake now. You're not coming in. All those places were undiscovered for a thousand years until Sir Aurel Stein, the Jewish English explorer with his little dog and 5 or 6 bearers and a couple of wranglers for the animals in 1900 found the material, and when he showed up at Dunhuang, he found that the caretakers there were using as firewood the art scrolls, the books, the paintings that were rolled up and they had burnt. Who knows what kind of Alexandrian scope library. And just as he was complaining about that, in a very spiritual prayer, one of the walls collapsed in a slight earthquake. And when it fell, it opened a whole library, room of art and books and things And Sir Aurel, being a very good ancient international trader, made a deal. Right then. Whatever you need, I will get for you. Whatever it is, you name the price, I will pay it. And he loaded hundreds of camels, other pack animals with the goods. And because he was a tough cookie, he got them all the way back to the British Museum in London, where they are today. And hardly anybody ever goes to see them because they do what academics do. They catalogue them, they put them away. They're very valuable. You may not go and see them when we make facsimiles, we will make some of them available. One time I was researching for one of my master's projects, the Book of Kells, which is in Trinity College Dublin, but UC Berkeley had a huge facsimile of it in three great tomes with a purple royal purple box, and even the facsimile was wheeled out by an armed guard who stood next to me while I did the research. I could not do anything but look at the pages, look for permission to turn the page of the facsimile and do my notes. True story. This is Berkeley, 1960s, a facsimile. If you go to the British Museum, you will not even find the manuscripts still together, because all of the books were moved to the British Library, not the British Museum. And they certainly never made it to the Great Rotunda Reading Room, even though it has about 30,000 volumes in the reading room. They have millions of volumes that are packed away. Hardly anyone gets to know them. It was due to the Japanese publisher, Kodansha, because they were at the time, making so much money. Japan could just. They made a beautiful boxed set of three volumes out of deep gold. Huge. I'll bring one of them in next week. Only the set cost about $5,000. I happen to have a patron at the time, Lawrence Rockefeller, who said, let's get a set. Sometimes you can just do that. So I have that set. And in there is not only the Fushimi in Nagoya. Beautiful presentation, but there is a Greek looking man on a piece of tapestry holding up a hermetic caduceus from the center of the Gobi Desert 1200 years ago. How did he get there? Because part of the Mahayana is also the Hermetic tradition, also the Arthurian tradition, also a great mystical tradition. And if one were able to put the whole spectrum out, one would have to call it the great way. It is the Milky Way of this planet's heritage. And when we mature, we will have a planetary park. Called the New Jerusalem. Everything from Mount Nebo to Jericho up to Jerusalem. Bethlehem to Hebron, down to, uh, the, uh, beautiful sites on the Dead Sea. And get a confession to Qumran. And that whole patch will be a planetary park preserved for mankind, where all religions, including Buddhism, including Taoism, have a place because it is the spectrum of the planet's experience with the mysteries in ten dimensions. More next week.