Presentation 1

We come to a. Resonant set of 13 presentations on shared presence. And I would like to go immediately into an exemplar text. This is from the 21st chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Vast Taize Presencing mode is exactly Dao. Thus to follow Dao is in a present active nature is exactly abstruse, exactly elusive. Elusive o abstruse. The inside has forms abstruse o inside floating a deep being o obscure o an inside where spirits are very real. This insight has our trust from ancients to us such never departs. Witness to all recurring. On what basis can presence no such recurrence by Veracities own being. This is from my translation of the Tao Te Ching, which we put out originally in 1998, and did a larger two volume set with the whole volume on multiple introductions to the Tao Te Ching. We're looking at. The way in which a pivot of an ecology of consciousness has its spiral double transform of a cycle of nature. Lao-tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching towards the end of his life. He has said in Chinese law to have lived 200 years, which meant that he was over 100 years old. If he was born about 600 BC, it was about 500 BC. Which makes Lao Tzu a contemporary of the historical Buddha and a contemporary of Pythagoras. And those three are a good way for us to initially get a tripod balance on shared presence, not as an idea exclusively, but in its ecology of conscious double transforms. Let's start with the historical Buddha. I'm going to use a diagram from a series I did in 1990 on the Majjhima Nikaya. The middle length sayings of the Buddha and the Majjhima Nikaya is 151 remembered and then written down sutras of the historical Buddha. I chose 13 and a lightning like diagonal to highlight how it was that about 500 BC one could, like in China with Lao Tzu and in the Mediterranean world with Pythagoras, begin to mature, a vision that required an open mind. That the natural integral tends, by its own cyclic nature, to culminate in the mind, and that it is antithetical initially to an open mind, that the closed mind is the tying together of everything in the mind and in terms of the cycle of nature, in terms of an integral. It is not at all closed. It is completed. They first term of transformation is that it is not completed, that the mind in its completion has closed off a further development for the historical Buddha when he was 35. Having gone through a very difficult period in his life, went out into the world as a sannyasin seeking enlightenment. The classic remembrance of the idea of the Buddha is that he sat under the Bodhi tree and became enlightened. The actual pattern was that there were four trees, and they were arranged in such a way in the location that he was able to sit under each one of the four seven days. The first one was the Raja Yatna tree. The second was the Mucalinda tree. The third was the Goatherds banyan tree and the fourth tree was the Bodhi tree. So we're looking at a cycle which in its completeness is a lunar cycle of 28 days, portioned out into quarters, so that those quarters make a frame of reference, whose clarity of picture, then, is the integral of what one is looking at. One gets the idea from the comprehension of the completeness of the frame of reference. In China, the frame includes a fifth focus, which is the center, and that the Daoist frame of reference is not so much to the completeness of the mind, but the completeness of the cycle extending itself not to the four corners, not to the square. But once you have a line of two quarters, you go to the center, then you come back and you do the last two so that you get a Z shape. That gives you a five phase cycle, which enlarges the frame of reference to include a center. And the beginning of that particular five phase is Tao. In Lao Tzu, Dao has a zero designation Tae, which is the second, is a designation of oneness of unity. One can see that the ancient Indian yoga has not only a frame of reference of four trees, but a movable center, which is the Buddha who moves, who is the center, but is a mobile center who carries the presencing with him wherever he sits. For Lao-tzu, the Presencing is the entire ensemble, which includes a return to Dao so that Dao is the presence. Notice that Dao as a presence has no time designation has no numerical designation. Later on, this would become the taproot for the development of Zen. Zen was the merging of the Buddhist experience of the historical Buddha and they Daoist experience of Lao Tzu. In Lao Tzu. You had someone like a Chuang Tzu coming along about 200 years later, who expanded the Tao Te Ching to a mystical quality of humanity that one could not understand the Tao and the te without taking more into consideration. And in the Chinese tradition the original more consideration was done by Confucius. Confucius. When he was about 50 years of age, he had an audience, as the ancient Chinese sages would have with Lao Tzu. Who was at that time close to 100. And Confucius came out from the interview proverbially and said, who can engage the dragon? But his development was that in addition to Tao and Tay, there was a center which was really Jeon gent was human heartedness, and that this human heartedness was then the pivot by which Confucius developed his not a competing philosophy to Lao Tzu, but some kind of a development which allowed for the discursive refinement of the presence of Dao as it flowed through Tay, through unity, into the Jen, the human heartedness which was shareable. And so the quality of ancient Chinese thought was centered on a presence. Though it is a zero and gender's unity spontaneously out of itself, and that the gene, the human heartedness, though it is a third phase, actually gets a designation of two because it's shareable. It's the beginning of the way in which a dialogue can begin. And in the Confucian works, one runs across the recounting of conversations that Confucius would have with so and so, master. So and so, came and observed such and so, and Confucius remarked. The shared presencing is a gen. It is a human heartedness. It is a dialogue. And when one looks at the sutras of the Buddha, they are also dialogues. So and so comes to the historical Buddha makes his obeisance, kneels the left shoulder uncovered, and asks asks not a Buddha. The word in Sanskrit at that time was Tathagata. Tathata. Later on comes to mean Suchness. Tatha by itself in Sanskrit means true in the sense thus, and so one would translate into English Tatha as thus, so that the sutras began. Thus I have heard. I have heard because I have been in conversation, I have witnessed the dialogue, and the dialogue in its witness is here, and one can have the justness of it. Gotta in Sanskrit means gone. Not gone in the sense that it isn't there. Gone in the sense that it has gone elsewhere. And so the Tathagata. The Tathagata is one whose individuality, whose oneness is, has gone, leaving pure presence, Leaving a pure presence which is shareable outside of the cycle of nature, outside of the constrictions of time, outside of the dimensions of space. So that where one has gone as a Buddha is a higher dimension. And so presencing always is the quality of a higher dimension, whether it's in China or India or in the ancient Mideast world. When we come to Pythagoras, we realize that something radical has happened here. The Buddha has gone. Has gone to a further dimension. One would say that that further dimension is a field of pure consciousness. Lao Tzu has gone, returned back to a field of Dao, which is pure nature. In a way, the Buddha has gone towards a goneness, into the infinity of consciousness as a field, and Lao Tzu has returned back to the zero ness of Tao as a field. Whereas Pythagoras has realised that one can have the movable consciousness like a structured journeying. Not just going to zero or going to infinity, but being able to calibrate in between, and that the calibration is taking unity in its ratio ability in its proportionality, and that if one recalibrates oneself that there are resonant ratios that distribute in between zero and infinity, that distribute the oneness, but distribute it in the sense that it now comes out ratio able. If one can understand the numerical ratios of it, one can understand the proportions and one can come to understand then the harmonic. And so Pythagoras is an interesting third with the historical Buddha and with the historical lao-tzu, the historical Pythagoras gives us a way of understanding that, yes, we can return to nature completely, and we can go into infinity perfectly, but we can also have a harmonic set of resonant proportions in between, so that this world, this life, can participate and that the shared presence is a shared presence of an understanding which now has refined itself beyond nature, beyond its cycle. And all three bring out that a new quality, a new kind, a new dimension of form emerges. The spiritual person emerges to go back for just a moment to lao-tzu. This is chapter 41. Identity and rightness. Superior listeners hearing of Dao are disciplined. Practicing presence. Average listeners hearing of Dao sometimes keep, sometimes lose it. Inferior listeners hearing of Dao in a big way. Ridicule it if not ridiculed by them. Not really Dao. Dow. Therefore, in language, say bright, Dow resembles dark advancing Dow resembles returning, straight Dow resembles the indirect superiority resembles the valley more most ample. Tay resembles non sufficiency established resembles the non finished the very simple resembles the dumb. The biggest perfection has no shame. The biggest square has no corner. The biggest container has no completion. The biggest sound has no modulation. The biggest form has no shape. Great toe. Empty of name. Exact not. Dow begins completion. The Pythagorean emphasis was an amalgam of a great swath of cultural experience. Pythagoras's father, Mnesarchus, was a Phoenician. He was from tyre. He ran a great shipping industry because his ancestors had done shipping. Pythagoras got his name because Mnesarchus had married a Greek priestess. And they had their marriage and their honeymoon at Delphi. And so Pythagoras was named after the Pythian Apollo oracle at Delphi. His home became Samos, little island off what is the coast of Turkey today? Ionia in ancient Greece. But when Pythagoras was a young man about 20 years of age, he was sent to Phoenicia, to tyre, to further his education, get to know his background. And the background was such that ancient Phoenicia by that time had been civilized for several thousand years, and the original styling of that civilization had come from Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia means the land of the two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Iraq today. But not the Iraq of the earliest civilization, the Sumerians, but the refinement of the Sumerians into a transformational wine opposed to water. The Akkadian civilization of Sargon of Akkad about 2400 BC 2300 BC. His daughter Anna Duana was the first author in the world whom we know about and have her works. She wrote the Inanna epics. She wrote especially the 42 Temple Hymns, making a matrix that took all of the 42 temple sites throughout Mesopotamia and bringing them together like pearls into a necklace of a cycle and ecology of spiritual hymns that allowed a template to be placed so that sargon's great trade routes that went from the Indus River in India to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and further all the way to Crete by contacts up into Anatolia and down into Egypt. Sargon is contemporaneous, his daughter's first use of a written language that could be literate, not just a chronicle language, not just a business language. Those kinds of written languages are more related to numeracy than literacy. But the first great literate author and Sargon and his daughter are contemporaneous with the first writing of hieroglyphs, the Pyramid Texts in Egypt. There were pyramids before they did not have hieroglyphs written. The first pyramid with writing was King Pharaoh Unas, most recently pronounced wenis w, e, n, I s, and the Pyramid Texts and Narayana's writings are the earliest use that we have of a literate written language about 2300 BC. Her works were used as textbook literature literature for more than a thousand years of training scribes to become literate, and it was a peculiar technique when it first came out, because one had to wean oneself away from referentiality in the world to things that these sounds are not, just because one can point at something, there are sounds which also include the motion of relationality between things. And then there is a curious refinement that comes when one learns to look through the symbols and to begin to get the vision and to get the vision, symbols must become transparent and the first beginnings of transparency were indeed magical. To all those few, and it was limited always to extremes, few in any kind of the early civilizations. It wasn't until the time of Lao-tzu and Pythagoras and the historical Buddha That one saw the opening to a larger population. Not huge in terms of percentage, but quite numerous in terms of numbers of people. In between, there was a watershed where alphabets were introduced into written language, and the first alphabets came from the earliest of Phoenicians. This was about 1800 BC 2000 BC. So Pythagoras, when he went to study, found that his insights through his traditions, through his learnings, went a 500 year giant step back and pointed to a future that would be balanced with it 500 years or so into the future. 500 Years Back from Pythagoras is the first written Greek masterpieces, those of Homer, and it's the first time that one finds the old Hebrew, because Greek and Hebrew are both cognate languages that come out of the ancient Phoenician. The cream of the written language in Hebrew is about the time of King David and Solomon, about 1000 BC. So that one has Homer and Solomon and David being contemporaries, and both being related to the same kind of background that one had in Pythagoras. The sense of presencing, by being able to make symbols transparent, meant that there was now not just a very narrow path into Presencing, but there were, uh, highways. The Buddha's sutras Sutra in Sanskrit means thread. One must follow the thread. And the characteristic of the Buddhist sutras is that the repetition is so enormous that even in the best scholarly translations, one finds ellipses with the admonition that it says the same thing all over again, and each time that there is one step further, everything is said again, so that this one step is brought into consonance with what you are repeating. And as you do so, you teach yourself to hear visionary. You develop ears to hear because it is the aural sound which gives the first sense of being able to presence by extending your natural cycle into a quintessential dimension of consciousness, which is not integral at all. Consciousness is differential so that when consciousness come in, comes into contact, when the field of consciousness as a differential comes into contact with the natural cycle, two different qualities of presencing occur at the same time they tune. One is that the field of nature now, as they used to say, becomes magical. It isn't just integral, but it begins to have possibilities that weren't there before. And the structure of the mind is that it becomes open that the symbols instead of completing something, realize that there is something that is perfecting beyond completion, so that one aims at developing the symbolic mind to be able to see further, see deeper. And one of the qualities that came out of the Pythagorean tradition of being able to proportion and to ratio was that if you proportion a dialogue in terms of the effect of consciousness as a differential coming into quintessential fifth dimension, fifth essence Transform. Not only does nature become possible for something new fertile for creativity, but the mind in its openness is now fertile to be able to, for the first time, have a different sense, a presencing sense of person that is like a sixth dimension. Two orders beyond the individuality of the mind. Three orders beyond the character of the experiencer. Four whole orders beyond the ritual comportment of things and their actions. And when the spiritual person comes in to play as a differential, further six dimensional pivot, what falls out of the attention? What falls out of the regard is the hook. That circumstance that ritual had on you and you lose the karma. So that the spiritual person now has an ability to step out of the karma, to step away from the referential need to have identification, checking back on things, checking back on actions, and that this frees one up. So that experience now flows freely through its and its presencing blooming continuity, and that that blooming continuity is able to understand that if you learn to make all of your symbols transparent, they will perform in such a way as like an energy, like a light of light, a lumen de lumine instead of a natural light. Uh, lumen de natura. The alchemical phrase is quite accurate. The light of lights diffracts through a prismatic spiritual person and produces a kaleidoscopic spectrum. Now one can proportion, one can ratio, one can fraction light into enlightenment. Instead of there just being a rainbow of seven colors, there now is a spectrum of many colors. One now can have the gift of a coat of many colors, which Joseph in Genesis received from his father Jacob, because he was the first one, the one who learned to see the way that Jacob had learned, to see the way that his father Isaac, had learned, to see the way that his grandfather Abraham had learned to see that there is a particular knack by which one can learn how to bring the experience of images and feelings and speaking the character of one's mythic horizon all the way through the open mind into free play with conscious vision, into the prismatic spirit of the person, into the kaleidoscopic play of history. And now one begins to have a sophisticated civilization. One learns the art of person making. One learns the art of spiritual creativity. One becomes an artist and balances pragmatism with prismatic force and eventually takes the pragmatic basis of experience and makes it into an equilibrium which sharpens the quality of presence. So that Presencing. Now in the 42nd chapter of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching Tao transformations. Tao produces unity. Unity produces polarity. Polarity produces Trinity. Trinity produces the 10,000. Thanks. The 10,000 things bear Yin to embrace Yang Zhen. Even if this, even if detested, is exactly orphaned, widowed, a hermit, Kings and nobles thereby exact it for their honorific. So sometimes you lose itself and gain. Sometimes you gain itself and so lose. Jen is a presence even taught? I also teach this presencing the strong and aggressive ones resonate only death. Transcendence thus conveys tae founded learning. Let's take a break. Let's come back and immediately hear Lao Tzu again in the Tao Te Ching, and then hear the historical Buddha in one of the Majjhima Nikaya, and then come back to Pythagoras. Three. Positioning. Making a tripod. About 2500 years ago, which is about midway back of the beginnings of what we would call higher civilization, which was about 3000 BC, 5000 years ago. 5000 years ago was the beginnings of dynastic Egypt was the achievement of a stability in ancient Sumer was about the time of the Mahabharata, the Great Indian War, fought at the battlefield Kurukshetra, about 50 miles north of where Delhi is today. And in China it was the beginnings of the I-Ching with Fuxi and Nüwa with the Bagua, the trigrams, all at the very same time. That was 5000 years ago. Midway back is Pythagoras, the historical Buddha and Lao Tzu. And we're looking so that presentation to next week, we can bring the three of them forward to about 2000 years ago and see a tremendous distillation. The second transform. The first transform is the water becomes wine, a fermentation. The second is that the wine becomes a cognac or a champagne. So that you have now moved one, two, three. You've moved from an electron to a muon to a tau particle. Because this triad, this three level parfait of energy, is characteristic of the actual scientific cosmos. The wisdom traditions have always been accurate in terms of the cosmos. Here is lao-tzu. The 51st chapter, and be aware that the Tao Te Ching originally had no chapters. It was 5500 Chinese characters without any punctuation, so that it was what we would call a cascade. You had to be able to hear, to be able to read through, to be able to make your own punctuation, your own phrasing. Here's how it is in my translation. Um, the titles of the chapters were put in later on by Hong Kong about 700 years later. This is nursing. Tae. Tao Livingly presents as tae nourishes presence real form itself. Energy completes presence. Even the 10,000 things are unified, not honor Tao without Esteeming Tae Tao presence honors taste presence in esteem. However, unified presence commands but always as Ju gen. It's the phrase for self so not identity, but on pivotal thus ness. Thus those living existences Tae nourishes presence, raises presencing, nourishes the present, completes presence. The present presence instead of present matures presences. Resembles Presencing protects presence living but not to possess making but not to claim raising, but not to rule. This is called profound Tay. And from the historical Buddha. About the same time, the Majjhima Nikaya is divided into three sets of 50 discourses. Again the energy levels. This is the final 50 discourses, the first division, the ninth discourse. It's called the greater discourse at full moon time, the Maha Punya Nama Sutra. Thus have I heard at one time the Lord was staying at Savatthi in the palace of Megara's mother in the Eastern monastery. Now at that time, the Lord was sitting down in the open air on the night of the full moon. Observant. The 15th lunar month night, surrounded fully by the order of monks, the Sangha. A certain monk, the elder of called go forest dwellers, rising from his seat, arranging his upper robe over one shoulder, having saluted the Lord with joined palms, spoke thus I, Reverend Sir, would ask the Lord about a particular matter. If the Lord grants the opportunity. Well, then, monk, you, having sat down on your seat, asked what you desire. Having sat on his own seat, he spoke. Are there not, Reverend sir, the five groups of grasping, that is to say, the group of grasping after material shape, grasping after feeling, grasping after perception, grasping after habitual tendencies of grasping after consciousness. And then it repeats. And eventually the historical Buddha, through the repetitions of restating exactly what has been stated, goes the step further. The question refines itself to this next step. What, Reverend Sir, is the root of these five groups of grasping? These five groups of grasping monk have desire for root. We are accustomed loving life and enjoying the world, participating in the natural cycle. Grasping is not a part of living in the sense that it is used here. The Sanskrit word for it in Buddhism is a cliché. It's a canker. It's an impurity because one takes the habit of being able to hold and projects it out so that one grasps rather than one is able to interface. Instead of something becoming a tool, it becomes a weapon. Instead of it being a part of the livingness, it becomes saved for power. Instead of the extension of the hand as a sign of greeting, it's a sign of warning. And the greeting. If you put the mudra with the middle finger slightly forward is teaching greeting as a fearlessness between us. Giving freely the Sanskrit term is Dhana gifting. Teaching that teaching is a gifting. That learning is a sharing that the consonants. The greatest grandchild that Pythagoras had through one of his original disciples, like a daughter. Her name was Diotima and her favorite disciple was Socrates. You can read about it in Plato's Symposium, where he discusses how he learned about the that love is a spirit, a shared spirit from Diotima who learned it from Pythagoras. And Socrates favorite student, of course, was Plato. And Plato has Socrates many times in the dialogue saying, if we are not companions together, we cannot learn anything, because the consonance of the steps by which our dialoguing together arrives at truth. Alicia in Greek. The Alicia is not a conclusion, but is a convergence that the two or more of us together reach together in our sheridans, and that when we reach it, there is a moment the aha! The eureka moment, that we share the exclamatory actualization that we together have arrived. The Greek mudra for that was that you grasped it not through desire to have it, but that all of you together got it? It was a shared getting and that there is no power in that. There is instead, the distribution that the method works when shared would not work at all unless all shared it so that everyone in the participatory community arrives at it together, or no one arrives at it. The partiality of it is due to someone having grasped it rather than got it. One of the most refined of all of the 20th century movements of wisdom was the great inheritor of Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave. Gandhi's archetypal engagement was Satyagraha. Sat means. To sit is to get, to get by being so that truth getting was Satya Graha, which was shareable. Vinoba refined that by a distillation to Sarvodaya. Sarvodaya means of service to all and a Sarvodaya village. Is that no decision that affects the village is undertaking unless the entire village agrees together to it. Vinoba is great. Sarvodaya movement began in 1951, in southern India. He was coming into an area. Where? Two brothers were wealthy and controlled the whole countryside, and people were starving because the brothers were fighting. They were not getting along. And so Vinoba found there was a technique that he could employ, a satyagraha that opened up and blossomed further into a Sarvodaya Uh, he was on what was called in India, the walking yoga as a yajna. It comes from the original writer of the first Upanishad, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Uh, Brihadaranyaka means the great forest breath teaching. And the author was Yajnavalkya. And so a yajna is being able to take a walking through to discover most of Gandhi's great, uh, Satyagraha movements were presaged by a walking uh, with his staff when he got older, when Vinoba came into the village at the center of these two brothers, he sat them both down. They would not look at each other. So he said to the one, I want you to adopt me as one of your sons. And said to the other, I want you to adopt me also as one of your sons. Which they agreed to do because he was a very advanced Yogi, quite famous by that time. He had come to Gandhi when he was about 19 years old in the late 1920s. Uh, and, and Gandhi said, you're a giant. You're Bhima from the Mahabharata. But you need to, um, position yourself, and I will call you. I want you to go to the center of India wherever you find that center of India. And I want you to stay there until I call you. And they pivotal geographical centre of India is out in the mid deserts. The place is called Wardha. And Vinoba sat there for 20 years waiting to be called. And in the meantime, because he was a universal genius, he began learning all the languages of the world. He learned all the European languages. He learned Arabic. He learned all the Chinese, Japanese, all the languages of the world and read their scriptures and became very famous. And when, in 1940, in the Second World War, Gandhi wanted to have a satyagraha to alert everyone that this was not about a war effort. This was about a spiritual realization of truth about man. He called Vinoba Bhave, who appeared on the scene as soon as he appeared. The British authorities arrested him and put him in prison until the end of World War Two. And just as he was coming out, Gandhi was assassinated. So he went back to Wardha and could not come up with anything except going on a yojna. So he said to the two brothers that he had come to, he said, now that you have both adopted me, I want you to give me my inheritance now, but not to me to be put in a trust for the village. Because the everyone in the village, I feel, is a part of the way in which I am a spectrum of the prismatic person whose spirit you have come to appreciate and to adopt. And so he used that technique. And today in India, more than 100 million people live under Sarvodaya. Almost all of Bihar state, the ancient province and home of the Buddha. One of the interesting little things is that they developed a system of banking, where the pooling of the money was to make small loans available. And even in the United States. Now there are Sarvodaya Banks. You don't borrow a great deal enough to get started in a business, enough to get yourself going in. The payback rate is 99.9%. No one has ever lost a cent. Really? It isn't just to become companions together so that we reach the Alethea, but that we together go through the steps, the stages, the phases. Because they are limited. They're not infinite. In fact, there are very few. That cycle in nature are four phases, and the ecology of consciousness are four phases as well. And they fit together to make an eight. And that eight when they're together. Hum. And that humming in that complementarity is a supernatural refined, transformed, fermented, distilled, conscious nature so that the complementarity of it is a nine dimensional wholeness. If one goes back to ancient Egypt, the Heliopolitan eight gods, four pairs making eight, had a ninth who was not Seeable but was realizable. Atom. You had the beginnings of the way in which Shu and Tefnut and Newt and Geb and Isis and Osiris and Nephthys, and set when the eight were together, when the Ogdoad, when the octave was a chord that could be struck, one heard the harmonic. The harmonic is not only greater than, it is the further resonance in a dimension of the wholeness, not just the completeness of the cycle, and not just the ecology of the refinement, but that brought together one now had the ability to have another tuning that comes into play because the ninth, the ancient Hermetic phrase was the eighth, reveals the ninth. But when it reveals the ninth, one hears in the silence of the Aeneid a choir from beyond singing praises to God. And those praises to God do not record on the ear. They do not record in consciousness. They record in eternity. So that God has praises in eternity. And one of the ways in which recent mathematics and physics has come to characterize it as as a ten dimensional hyperspace is a form which has a peculiar quality to it. It brings all of the possibilities of disparate completeness or ecologies of wholeness together in such a way that there is now an 11 dimensional superstring application that does not record at all, and thus is a zero dimension, so that the 11th dimension process becomes a zero dimension field of nature, able to give immediate, spontaneous, creative, fertile birth to unities and their ratio abilities. And so there is a way of understanding by this time in the 21st century, that there is something like a symbiosis. The Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis. She's now in her early 70s at Amherst University. She was at Boston University for many, many years. She was the first wife of Carl Sagan. She has written many books with one of her sons, Dorion Sagan. The quality of a Symbiogenesis. Unlike a parental sexual genesis, a sexual genesis will always go to the qualities of the parenting. Whereas a para sexuality of a symbiotic genesis goes to the earliest primordial matrix, of which originally everything came, one goes back to. For instance, on this planet, one goes back to the bacterial beginnings of biotic life about 3.5 billion years ago. Interstellar gases have all of the constituents, the molecules for organic life. It's not dependent on coming out of an ocean of a planet like this one. It is a characteristic not only of the universe, but of the spectrum cosmos. Which has its dimensionality. From an 11 dimensional eternity that does not record exactly, which is why it is a fertile for everything. We're going to take a look in this presentation at the way in which a shared presence is not only the common theme, the common thread through a natural cycle of four, but continues in its all possible worlds, blossoming through an ecology of four more dimensions, and comes together to a wholeness of a nine dimensional process that allows for a ten dimensional eternity to actually occur. And we will see that all languages have a hidden kind of a base, so that the motion in the natural integral is that it will become discursively coded, stylized, so that one now has a way of a rhetorical completing of expression of language. That can be transformed into a poetic and that can be distilled into an analytic one moves by interesting qualities which seem to always end in AY1 comes into an infinity. One comes into beauty. One comes into history. One comes into reality. One comes into complementarity. One comes into a mystery. And one emerges in an eternity. Just a little background. One of the earliest developments here that I founded in Los Angeles was bringing Karma Thinley Rinpoche from Canada, from Toronto. I had taught for five years in Calgary. Brought him to Los Angeles to teach not only the what a lineage of lamas would be, but the highest, most powerful Lama lineage. Even, um, more um, uh, revered than the Dalai Lama are the karmapa's, but at the same time, to teach the way in which the Tibetan language was made not to be rhetorical in world referent identifications, but to be a spiritual prism language. It was never a village language. Tibetan was always made to express. In the Vajrayana, as we will see a distillation of the fermentation of the Mahayana, which was itself a transformation of the original way of the altars. The Theravada. The Theravada had a thread like lifeline that one could follow the method through to the vanishing of the grasping things, to the evaporating of the clichés, to what the Buddha said. Whatever has to be set up has been set up, and whatever has to be set down has been set down. That that differential field of infinity of pure consciousness has no longer identifications or identity. Individuality does not occur in such a complete, perfected way that it can be appreciated in retrospect that it never occurred in the first place. One of the great psychologists in Paris in the 30s was Doctor Hubert Benoit, who was, among others, the psychiatrist for Aldous Huxley. He wrote three classic books, one A Dialogue and Love, but his first book was called Letting Go and the very first paragraph of Letting Go. Um. He also wrote a volume called The Supreme Doctrine. The early paperback edition of it had a foreword by a young Alan Watts. In Letting Go, Doctor Benoist says the problem is that there was no problem in the first place that this takes an appreciative endeavor to disclose, but it can only be disclosed in sharing. You cannot selfishly do it alone. A Buddha is able to convey it because that Buddha has previous Buddhas who participate in the enabling for that historical Buddha to do this. The original Buddha, Dipankara uh, was not limited to this star system. And in fact, if you go into the mahavastu, this is the great translation by J.J. Jones, the keeper of the Department of Printed Books, National Library of Wales, translated from the Buddhist Sanskrit Great Russell Street in London is where the British Museum was in 1949. In the mahavastu, right away, at the very beginning, one finds um the ability homage to the glorious mighty Buddha and to all the Buddhas past, future, and present. Not only the Buddhas in the past and this Buddha, but all the Buddhas in the future as well, so that the past and the future are not disparate. They do not meet at a presence other than the continuity of it. And because the continuity has an equilibrium, the equilibrium is the horizon of the pivot at its actual stillness. One of the earliest symbols of this was the plumbob. In the Origins of Chinese Civilization. Fushi holds a carpenter's square, the L, with the little, uh, diagonal, so that you get a Pythagorean triangle at the corner of it. And his companion. She holds a plumb bob. If you hold a plumb bob, actually perfectly still. After a while it will be seen to sway, not because the hand is swaying, but because the motion of the earth is making it into a pendulum, and that if you arrange as a Frenchman, Foucault did little pegs in a circle. That pendulum will mark the time exactly because of the motion of the earth, because not only is the earth spinning, the whole star system is rotating, and not only is that the entire cluster of stars of billions is an arm of a spiral galactic structure that is, whirling, is a part of families of galactic structures which are whirling, and there can be 50 billion galaxies dancing together like super Sufis in the cosmos. In the mahavastu there are journeys right away. Many times did Moggallana visit hell and heard the cries. There are visits to ghost worlds, there are visits to all other worlds. And the whole beginning of the mahavastu is about visiting other worlds, worlds without end. Who all here? Whenever a Buddha teaches anywhere, the resonance of that speaking distributes itself evenly through the wisdom of the spirits. Not only karma thinley that I brought here in 1975, but about the same time I met Chidi, I was teaching a course on, uh, consciousness at UCLA. And across the hall was Chidi teaching on the I-Ching. And, um, next to me was teaching Doctor Stephan Heller of the Gnostic Society, who at the time, um, had just gotten through a marriage, and his wife had been a photographer. And she took this photograph of Manly Hall, uh, who I taught alongside for, uh, almost 12 years. Uh, he is looking at the photographer at Doctor Heller's wife as she is backing away from him, and she is tripping and falling backwards, but he is admiring with his great humanity that she, as an artist, is keeping the camera shot even. And as she falls, she holds the camera right and he's appreciating her artistry And that moment, he was that kind of a man. His photograph he wanted to give to me was this one in his office before the Great Ten tie? Uh, ten tie, as we will see, is the heavenly perfection. And it has its roots in the teachings of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in Alexandria. The photograph here on this portrait of Manley Hall. This was presented to me by the Masons at Manley's, uh, funeral ceremony and the great Masonic Temple that's now closed, uh, near the Wilshire Ebell. And they were kind enough to frame the photograph of him. Um, in the same next to him is the great Esoteric Cross. And we will talk in this series about the incredible resonance through not only this planet and this star system, but other star systems as well. And that this resonance is able to be appreciated in such a way that there is a shared presence. Not only with those companions who are here, but with those companions who choose to resonantly, cluster and be there. In this room, I gave a series in 1994 which was published as Our New Aeon. In 2001. At that time, I was just completing a differential consciousness two year cycle. This is the new millennial cycle 2000 2001 and was delivered here in this room. And I will talk about the way in which, after 42 years, the cycle was finally called the Learning Civilization. And in 2006 and oh seven, the final refinement of it was offered. And since then, these two years after that have been the development of the four themes of our new Aeon. The most interesting theme is that of shared presence. Shared presence has such an indelible quality that you will be able to have heard, and to be able to see into and through, so that when we come to such documents as the Tibetan Book of the dead, the Bardo Thodol, you will recognize why it is in this great cosmic tradition accurately. It has nothing to do with superstition. It has everything to do with shared presence resonance. More next week.