Presentation 5
Presented on: Saturday, May 2, 2009
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to the fifth presentation, and it is of interest to us to be aware and alert that this is not a lecture. A lecture is meant to instruct. And. It is. Not an entertainment. It's a presentation which is to develop a contemplative ear. The contemplative ear hears through the words into a visionary field. In tribal life, in ordinary societies cultures, one hears is Mythically. One here is traditionally. In a presentation one here's an expandable experience. It's the parallel to reading. One does not stare at the letters. One reads the words and the phrases. The sentences or the paragraphs, and one reads through the symbols. So one hears through a presentation. One hears something which is no longer confined to a rhetorical structure of mentality, but accesses something that is beyond rhetoric, something that traditionally we use the Greek term for it. It is a poiesis. It's a poetry. It's a poetic. A rhetoric can be utilized to instruct, but you need a poetic in order to develop the visionary field of consciousness and initiate the ecology of consciousness so that the person hearing or the person seeing are able to hear through the mythic into the poetic, to read or see through the mental structures into the art which then has a curious possibility. When you base yourself on things and on doing on those actions, the things then that are selected out so that, you know, and these are the selected things. This is what we use.
That is a pragmatic selection and usage and gives to traditional actions. An ability to then follow it through mythically as a flow, and the flow goes from the things and their use to the way in which you put it together integrally. And all of this is a cycle. We have been looking for the first four presentations at a diamond of insight of four individuals who were contemporaneous. Three of them actually were contemporaneous, and the fourth had a renaissance at the same time and so classically joined them. We began with the Tao Te Ching, with Lao Tzu. We moved then to the classical historical Buddha. We went then to Pythagoras briefly, and we'll return to him more today and next week. And then we went to Zarathustra, who in his renaissance under Cyrus the Great founding the Achaemenid dynasty, became known by the Greek translation of his name as Zoroaster Stargazer. My involvement with these goes back to a very interesting beginning. When I did my translation, finally of the Tao Te Ching, this was the beginning of the introduction. Eventually I would do five different introductions, and so it was like a multiple introductions to the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu has a planetary audience now. Through English language translations and with universal appeal, there might be 100 translations now. A planetary audience needs to read the Tao Te Ching. Yet colloquial English is unprepared for much subtlety. It tends towards jargon and hype following fad and advertising.
The creative syntax of colloquial usage can be tapped, but this fits into the disciplined grammar of long tradition in such a way as to produce paradoxical structures. What is needed is a paradox friendly mind to take advantage of this peculiar quality. In the West, the solution was to be able to appreciate allegory in the time of Jesus and the time of Philo of Alexandria, the ability to hear language in two different ways at the same time, obviated the loggerhead of paradox and opened it up to a visionary dimension. And this visionary dimension was something that was beyond the essential. It became quintessential Quinta essential. The ability to face paradox transforming into allegory is presaged by a feeling tone that comes into play in language that begins the shift of the balance away from myth into subtlety, and that feeling toned quality is irony, so that one finds. The first great master in the west of irony was Socrates. And in fact, when he was a young philosopher, the great Soren Kierkegaard's first book in Copenhagen was on the Irony of Socrates and how it opens up so that instead of following the rituals by codified tradition, one begins to appreciate that there is something else that is ironically, coming into play, in a sense of irony, prepares us for the way to unblock to an un opposite a paradox, one deepening way is allegory. Another is the quality of insight. The insight has a farther range than allegory or irony, but utilizes both of those qualities.
Here is the rest of this paragraph. 20th century English language poetry has done us great service by exploring the paradoxical structures of thought and feeling intelligence. Still, there is a nicety involved. Paradox is sensitized best by a prelude of irony. Irony prepares the delicate juxtapositions for deepening into paradox. Without such ironic sensitizing, the juxtapositions tend to become surreal in mental abstractions. Irony keeps human hearted sensibility just what the Chinese term zhen. It is a peculiarity that in the West, Lao Tzu was always juxtaposed as being opposite to or alternative to Confucius Kung Fu Tzu, whereas the actual tradition reveals a paradox. Lao Tzu was older by about 50 years. He was born about 600 BC. He lived to be over 100, so the Chinese tradition was that he was 200 years old. The first time that Confucius met him in an interview. He was already 50 years old. And it was at that meeting that traditionally the mythic saying was that he came out saying, um, who can say where dragons live? It says, the dragon. Who knows where it is that he lives. The actuality is that Confucius had a deep transform, a deep morphing at the age of 50, and spent the next 20 years of his life developing a series of ten commentaries on the I-Ching. Because Lao Tzu had an angle of vision, like a ray of differential conscious insight light that was able to open up the symbolic structure that for about 500 years had been the high water mark of understanding the I-Ching with Lao Tzu.
The possibility was opened up for there to be a historical development that had not taken place yet, and it was Confucius rather than Lao Tzu himself. In writing the Ten Wings, they're called the Ten Commentaries. And if you look at the great English translation, the Wilhelm Baynes translation of the I Ching, you'll see that Confucius's commentary is distributed equally two different ways through the Achang one to open up the seeming mythic paradox of the words, and second, to further the possible resonances, then of a poetic understanding, so that one is no longer just reading the etching in terms of a divination, according to rules to get results that then have to be interpreted. But one has the ability to carry the seed pebble into its ripples. And so it changes the pragmatic emphasis of doing a divination. However you do it. Tortoiseshells yarrowstalks coins. It takes it out of the pragmatic, not to exclude the pragmatic, but it takes it so that the pragmatic opens up and blossoms into the prismatic. And so when we read the etching with all of the ten wings of Confucius, we begin to understand that it is not about divination. It's not just about prophecy. If it were, it would just be a a visionary excursion through a ritual means, and there would be a square of attention that would begin with ritual, move to myth, cap in symbols, and have a dash of vision.
But you would have still a square of attention. You would have a frame of reference, because as long as you stay ritually based, you will always have the symbols aligning with the rituals. The symbolic structure will have a moment of insight, but that moment of insight will be co-opted by the symbolic structure, and the mind will think that it had the insight. Whereas if you do either of two paired movements, the paradox is that as long as you remain ritually based, you will not understand. You will understand with quotation marks. One movement is to go more primordial, to go back to nature. The other movement is to let yourself wander free and easy in vision, in consciousness, if you go either way, you obviate the base of ritual and its confirmation by symbols that then use the referential base to make language and feeling cupped within a parenthetical, and to mistake that for actuality, when is precisely simply a special case of not being wise. Yet as soon as you go back to the zero ness of nature or the infiniteness of vision, what occurs instead of the referentiality is a quality that begins to have presence. So that irony now resonates through paradoxes. That would be opposites. But one understands that the pairs of the opposites engender a resolving third, and that that third is a prismatic opening up, literally a blossoming.
And this is where the poetic comes in to play. I want to give an example of this. Um, this is from a book of mine called San Francisco 60s. Poetic. My poems from 1958 to 1970. And here are some lines from a work called Sequoia matrix Sutra, written in the summer of 1960. I was 19 years old. Wandering together on vague Sierra paths, dramatic parapets, bleak amid canyon dimensions far above the plunge. Clear water. Outer edges. Greens and granite. Terry a moment. Those windy places. Those long moments. Bent, stooped in the rushing updraft. Fluttering hoods ever hooded with hickory. Staff anomalies. 20th century being in the world. Way out there in September. Sierras. And we gnarled and weathered. Ever quiet. Ancient pines rooted in sheer granite. Hokusai. Vigilance and vistas and visions. Dynamic history. That primordial push that towers up and walks with big steps or makes us attentive in passionate apprehension, listening in on ourselves and our privilege. It is now time to open the sealed orders. We have been writing them for 14,000 years. Oh, thrice greatest Hermes. You are my blood and my nerves confirm my reality among the stars. Go outward bound and be so that I am to be. And you are, and we will have been before and since. Fine. Raging blood and nerves of that heritage. Finding your silhouettes and autumn Sierra Nevada silhouettes, picket hoods and the broad flap of capes.
Beneath our Lincoln green cowls. A roaring silence. Being able to master a poetic gives one a extraordinary advantage. Because one comes into play then as a poet, as a minimum six dimensional, prismatic person for whom rhetoric are the children's alphabet blocks and you can put them together in that way and make words, and you can then develop a vocabulary. You can develop a simple grammar, a rudimentary syntax, but the words never lift off the page. They flow in a mythic linearity between the rituals and the symbols. If you make rituals more primordial and they are reabsorbed into nature, this does not happen. The flow of myth, of language, of feeling, of images does not then stop with the symbols, but goes beyond them, shoots beyond them into a visionary apprehension. One begins to see into one begins to see through. One begins to have a consciousness as a dimension, and that is not reintegrated into the mind, but is allowed to have a prismatic, multifaceted, jewel like person. One now has a personality, one still can have an individuality, but one has an individuality as a facet of one's personality. One can still have the character that one is in mythic experience, but that character is a quality of the person, can be matured, can be not just taught, not just instructed, but matured in the sense of transforming and that one of the hidden treasures, a pleasure that has now become a treasure.
One of the hidden treasures is that you can transform transformation. Literally, you can take the wine that you made out of the grapes and distill it into the champagne or into the cognac. This distillation is a second transform, and the distillation belongs to the kaleidoscopic quality of history. It is a kaleidoscopic consciousness that allows us to. Gain something that we would not have had before. Um, that is to have an analytic. When you have a poetic, that becomes an analytic. You now have the ability to have something that is not an alignment, but rather is the ripples put into a harmonic so that the harmonic set now becomes capable of being a science without the kaleidoscopic multiple dimensions of history. Science is not possible. So when we hear that we need to now, by 2020, have the largest proportion of population in the world of students who can master math and science, a stated goal by Obama just a few days ago. It is not possible to instruct someone in math and science without getting them bored, because it crams back into a mentality, a ritual referentiality that cages insight so that it is not free to play so that one doesn't develop an aesthetic appreciation for the kaleidoscopic beauty of history, and that the beauty of history is that you now have a whole spectrum of prismatic persons interacting together. And it need not just be contemporary of the same time, of the same place.
Any man or woman who has participated in life with those dimensions is now a part of that community. Einstein has been dead for over 50 years. He's a part of almost every discussion on cosmology in the world. Still one still has a fondness of the old man walking with his hands behind him from his little house on the campus of Princeton, across the open quads alone into the Institute for Advanced Studies, run at that time by J. Robert Oppenheimer. The same for Lao-tzu. For Pythagoras. For the historical Buddha. For Zarathustra now becomes Zoroaster. And when we put that diamond of insight together, we realize that in the Chinese wisdom, there was always a center that was included into the movement. A center of a square. Now that is the seed of the transform. And that fifth aspect. In the old five phase Daoist energy cycle was called. The old pronunciation was qi. Uh. The correct pronunciation today is Qi qi qi. It is the energy which is conscious and primordial in nature that now circulates through and brings the cycle back into an ecological ability to not only repeat or to continue, but to transform, to improve, but to improve radically, and that at a certain quality of radicalization, one begins to participate in a kaleidoscopic historical way and to develop an analytic. We talked a couple of presentations ago about the discovery of calculus, of how Leibnitz and Newton discovered calculus about the same time, Leibnitz, on the basis of a translation of the I-Ching into Latin.
Uh, Newton, on the basis of being a universal genius, looking at gravity and the ability to understand optics. Though his optics was not published until later in life, it was the first work that he did in the 1670s. In China, calculus was developed in the eighth century, was developed 800 years before Leibniz and Newton, but it was used as a discipline in Daoist monasteries to train the mind to be acrobatic and not to just simply base itself on counting arithmetically, or on just in a children's building block way of dealing with adding and subtracting. Multiplying, dividing. Commutative. But to open up the ability for there to be a play and mathematics on that level is a poetic language. Once one learns to stop being satisfied with instruction arithmetically and begins to have the play of insight which shows that there are no limitations to the developments that one could go through. We have now more books published on mathematics every year then were ever published totally in the world because it is a creative art And mathematics on that high level is an extraordinary poetic. And later on, in one of the presentations to come, we'll take a look at the way in which someone like a Richard Feynman or a John von Neumann were able to take the acrobatic ability of mathematics as a language and give it a completely new expression, a new vocabulary, a new play.
And so with Feynman diagrams or with the developments that John von Neumann, who in the early 1950s was the first to develop what became known at that time as a differential analyzer. It was the first working computer in the world before an Eniac. Before any of the other developments that came with like Univac. And I mentioned to you that if you take a look at a 1951 film, When Worlds Collide, it's the only record on film in the world that is not classified of showing what a differential analyzer was able to do as early as 1950, that it was able to take the genius of insight and give us an extra resonant tool to carry calculation into the ability to have a celestial mechanics in the matter of a few minutes in no more than an hour, which would have taken geniuses months and months to go through in the old computational way. Uh, Johnny von Neumann worked on the atomic bomb projects and, like many of them, contracted cancer and died at age 54. He was about to give the Silliman lectures at Yale University. And his wife in the hospital took down dictation and helped him write two short papers that were published posthumously, called The Computer in the brain. As long as you limit yourself to the brain, the mind does not blossom. As long as you try to do the computation in a ritual base in a closed symbol integral, you will be limited to something that increasingly becomes abstracted from life, becomes desiccated from the juice, has a deadening quality so that the natural reaction, the normal reaction, is to be purposely unknowing about math.
It's beyond me to be disinterested in analytics, to eventually sap and squelch the aesthetic capacity of spiritual persons, and that all of it then flows unseen, like through a vacuum cleaner, sucking all of this back through a field of differential consciousness that is not even seen. And as it evaporates from the capacity to be not just aware of it, but to be living in it, nature also then vanishes, and you are left with things that you can pound as your basis, with procedures that you can specify, and one becomes increasingly diced up by this kind of modular idiocy. Here, before we take a break, is a little bit of my translation of lots of this is in, uh, high. 21st century English poetic. It's called keeping the people. None. Hyphen. Exalted. None exalted. The worthy shows to the people, not some emulation. Not prizing the difficult to obtain its treasure shows to the people. Not a busy thieving. Therefore spirit Jen in presence governs empties the people's hearts filling infancies weaken their desiring, strengthening their bones shows and people as non knowing, non desiring shows knowing ones not daring some quote busyness indeed busy in non-business than non not governed by going back to the Tao.
The Tay stops being the arbiter because the Tay in its actuality is always oneness is always unity. So that the mind in its symbolic integral will always find an identification satisfaction at this connection. One gets back. I have identified it. There it is. These things prove it. These actions in this sequence. Do it. All of this is a deadening parenthesis on experience, and it becomes corralled. And as it becomes corralled, it becomes, instead of a stream of feeling and language and images flowing in the open field of nature, it becomes pressurized and one becomes neurotic. It's like a vacuum, no longer in its openness, but is condensed to a vacuum tube. And the earliest computers, Eniac and, uh, Univac, had huge vacuum tubes. It forbid the ability to have a transform which the transistor brought into play. And by the way, the first transistor was made in 1947. It was very clumsy. It was quite large. I'll bring a photograph of the first transistor next week. Now we can have nano transistors approaching quantum computing, and that only opens up to us the kindergarten level. Someone once estimated that the free human mind is superior to the highest computer capacity we would have and run it for 6000 years. We have an extraordinary capacity, but the field is a field where nature and consciousness weave together and create the ambiance of presence. A closed mind blinds one so that you not only do not feel the presence, you not only do not have images eternal, but your language shows increasingly the dulling stutter of someone who is not available for for a poetic.
When we come back, I will finish the poem that I wrote at, uh, part of it at age 19. Here are the closing lines, and we'll take a break and then we'll come back. You are my blood and my nerves confirm my reality among the stars. Go outward bound and be so that I am to be. And you are. And we will have been before and since. Fine raging blood and nerves of that heritage. Finding your silhouettes and autumn Sierra Nevada silhouettes. Piccard hoods, the broad flap of capes beneath our Lincoln green cowls a roaring silence. Let's take a break. Let's come back to a difference between a poetic language and a rhetorical language. Rhetoric is always to satisfy a mental structure which. Does something to symbols. That makes them past referential. In order to confirm their meaning, the meaning will have to be predetermined and one needs to see. Then if you make a match, if the identification holds. If the referentiality is aligned. Those alignments are lines drawn through the language and feelings and images of a mythic flow, which has its quality, all natural as a stream flowing in the open when it is corralled. When it is made to be referential in its identification, it's like the Los Angeles River running through concrete banks.
It only runs where it's put by engineering. A poetic is a language that has wings. It is able to fly above the ruts that were established. Here's the conclusion of this particular section. The Sequoia matrix Sutra of 1960 had about ten parts. This is the the conclusion to part three. Out on jagged bastions jutting into sky, water drains a jubilant Dow in North America. Apollo at the Cape. Psychedelia on both coasts. Ah, yes, Garrett, we guard against ghost stories. New American eagles and fledgling flights where there have always been shrieking shapes of witches trees. Singular red angles against blue noon spherical ness. This deepest sky above pastoral meadows, sweet valleys, romantic foothills fruited plains, surreal landscapes. Above those golfing greens, picnic parlours, this deepest ground where we grow, we are standing now, stooped in the updraft, intense after the taking of Hamid. Lemon tea. We turn, pushing on again, wandering in the larger pattern. Silence is shrouded in whipping black and Lincoln green into a wilderness. The source of poetry is a visionary, infinite field of differential consciousness, and that field is also the source for science, so that the arts and sciences come from the same source. In science, it's called theory. From the Greek theoria, which meant contemplation. If we cannot sustain a contemplative continuity. Then we do not have an analytic, nor do we have an aesthetic. And so the arts and sciences become dismissible extras. They become luxuries that only the talented few enjoy because they enjoy it.
And so the education of human beings becomes more and more truncated to the planned reductiveness that rewards, like an arcade game, every identification with a bell and a light and a point. If we are to have a planet and a humanity, we need to have a learning civilization. After 42 years, the learning Civilization ran its final two year ecology in 2007 and 2008. This is. A few lines from a page called acceptance, which was between the two years. The first year was the integral natural cycle. The second year was the ecology of consciousness. The last stage of integration is surrender, the releasing of resistance to complete effects, the actual completion. It's like a mantic mantra. Word om ends with an exclamation mark. This is a space of focus created by our bringing together or even throwing together, which is where the Greek term symbolon comes from. It's impulsively thrown together so it explodes as a cluster of blossoms, releasing the seeds, whereas. The closed cycle was always brought together as a closed fist. Did you get the point? Did you grasp the meaning you're being told? Distinct from the clenched fist. The grasping. Is the open hand. The greeting, the teaching and the teaching is a shared presence, learning that the quality of presence permeates the saying in the High Dharma when it was new, was that it was like a perfume. It was the perfume of consciousness that made a flower out of every encounter.
No movement is the surrender for giving up. Getting further. As long as you are addicted to getting further, it means the application of the closed integral cycle so that you do not get something like this from Lansing. This is the fourth of 81 sections of the Tao Te Ching. Um. My translation, uh, the title of the section is called The Nun's Source non e tao empty, yet employing it evidently never exhausted. Profound O corresponds to the 10,000 things presences. Ancestor blunts. Sharpness unravels complications, modulates presence, light resounds, even dust to tranquility O corresponds to similarity sustained. I don't know whose son seems heaven's own ancestor. Similar to this is from Zarathustra. Again my translation. This is Yasna 31. The first hot. These teachings heated there in an unheard word. When falsely taught, the true to deceit darkens, while for those best dedicated they are in Mazda heartened. And the next hunt with this way an un choosing one is obvious to reflection All who do so choose our beloved teacher, Ahura Mazda. Then by this doing awards Asha to our great life. Ushas the feminine order, the feminine order of the concourse of nature that is kept free. The five phase Daoist cycle has a great source in common with ancient Zoroastrianism with the original Zarathustra, because there were caravan routes developed, the Greek term for those people were Scythians. They lived where it was. Pakistan is now. And the earliest Greeks that had come from the north down into Greece also knew that these roots can be affected if one goes to the farthest eastern shore of the Black Sea and following through what is now Georgia.
River valleys that go eventually through Armenia into Azure by John, and by where Baku is today on the Caspian Sea. One can go across the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the giant river. The Greek name for it was the Oxus. The Central Asian name for it is the Amu Darya, which one can follow back from the Caspian Sea across from Baku. Linked back to the Black Sea, one can follow the Amu Darya to its source in the Hindu Kush. One pass goes down into northern India, the Swat Valley. The other pass goes over the tail end of the Himalaya and drops down into Chinese Central Asia. Sinkiang. Around the fortress frontier city of Tashkurgan. The first phase was always a dao, which has no number. It is a zero field, but it is a fertile zero field and spontaneously dances with unity with Tae. So that Tae emerges spontaneously. As if there were a supersaturated hyperspace plasma. As soon as there is a vacuum. Perfectly. A particle occurs, and every particle of every particle is itself a unity. And so the integral cycle begins with that way, and the emergence is signaled by time. Time as a first dimension which blossoms into the three dimensions of space and initiates, then the cycle of the integral, Its source is in Tao, but mysteriously.
But if you're arithmetic and you're counting, if you're numerical, you start with the one. But there are operations that disclose the mysteriousness of the one because it has not only cardinal linearity, it has ordinal symmetry, which is beyond the ancient Pythagorean way of explaining. This was the Greek letter lambda. Lambda is like an inverted v instead of the V, turn it upside down. If you start with one at the top and branch down and you go buy doubles, you go buy squares two, four, eight, and on the other you go down, buy cubes three, nine, 27. Both start with the one, but the relationality between the squares and the cubes will always have a unity, a oneness. The distributions of planets in our star system. Bode's law is because if you have the squares and the cubes of the orbital distance from the sun and the motion, you will always come up with the ratio of oneness between them. That ratio ability was always the mark, not just of a rational, but of a ratio able proportionality, and the proportionality was always the source of the tuned symmetry of an aesthetic. Whereas the tuned ratio ability was the source of an analytic, so that aesthetics and analytics are related to each other not in an alignment but in a harmonic. And that the source, because it is of an infinite field of differential consciousness, the form that shows the infinity is the cosmos.
It is an infinite form. It is an infinite form because it is able in its high dimensionality, to come back into play with time space in such a way that time now has its extension into timelessness. So that one then comes to. The next. My translation again of the Tao Te Ching. Emptiness is function. Heaven, earth with no Jen. Thereby the 10,000 things busy like straw dogs. Spirit. Jen. Not with Jen. Thereby the hundred families busy as straw dogs targets for each other. Heaven. Earth is space itself is like a billows indeed empty, yet not collapse. Moves yet continues emerging. A boaster, frequently emptied is not likely to retain such balance. Notice the sense of irony in Lonzo is very similar to that in Socrates. There is not a teasing that has a buried accusation of being stupid. It is an appreciation that the subtlety cannot be corralled in a mental structure. Because mental structures will always reference themselves on an identification. Whereas the surprise that creativity is always in discovering things unknown. One of Herbert Read's great books on aesthetics in the 1960s was the source of Things Unknown. Which leads not only to art but leads to the curiosity, historically, of developing a sciences and of enjoying the mysteriousness of nature and the surprise of consciousness not being cudgeled because you don't know. The Delphic oracle saying about Socrates was that he was the wisest man, and his reply was that he didn't.
He knew that he didn't know everything, and it was pointed out to him by several people in Plato's dialogues. I once did a couple of series on Plato's dialogues. Um, it was pointed out to him, this is what made him the wisest man. He knew that he didn't know, but he was he who didn't know. Because his teacher, Socrates, his teacher, was a woman, was Diotima of Mantinea. Who was a prize participant in the Pythagorean communities so that Pythagoras is the grandfather to Socrates. So that when Plato was about 40 years of age, and because he was an Athenian aristocrat and quite smart, quite brilliant, interested in politics as as a good Greek would be. How you set up a structure. He was invited to Sicily, to the big city of Syracuse, the Western Greeks, to try and educate the young son Dion of the tyrant. And they were unhappy with him because he was teaching the young one not to be a tyrant, to become a philosopher king. And so they wanted to kill him. It's a traditional response. You're ruining our power. Fortunately, the big man in southern Italy In it was Archytas. Archytas in Tarentum sent for Plato and saved his life. And he said, now it is time for you to get educated. You're really smart. You're really capable, but you don't know how to teach. And so you have to do what Pythagoras did.
You have to go to Egypt. You have to go to the priests of Heliopolis because they have techniques that are old beyond belief. Ancient, incredibly. Those techniques were there 1400 years before Plato went there. They were there, um, some 1200 years before Pythagoras went there. I'll bring in a photograph of a 13th century B.C. monk from Heliopolis, and looks very much like a present day monk of the 21st century. But received a tremendous refinement about um 1700 1650 BC. Because there was an infusion of a genius who was a dream master. His name is in the Old Testament, in the Book of Genesis. His name is Joseph. He was the 11th son of Jacob, so that his great grandfather was Abraham. He sold into slavery by his brothers into Egypt, but eventually became the wisest man in Egypt and saved Egypt from seven years of drought. You can read it in Genesis towards the end of the book. As a reward, he was not only the second most powerful man in Egypt, then a Jew, but he was given a wife, the daughter of the head priest of Heliopolis, and they had two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, who then were welcomed as two of the 12 sons of Jacob, two of the 12 tribes, Manasseh and Ephraim. The only way that this can happen is because their mother had to be Jewish, and the only way she could be Jewish. Her name was Asenath, was that her mother had to be Jewish, so that the high priest of Heliopolis married a Jewish woman, and that was the sister Dina of the 12 brothers.
So literally, Joseph married his. His niece Asenath. What happened is that the Heliopolitan wisdom at that time was deeply transformed by Joseph's genius at being able to interpret dreams. And that coincided with the development of the high usage of alphabets for the first time. And the earliest alphabets came from the northern part of the Phoenician coast. Um, there is a ancient hill and wild fennel grew on that hill. And the ancient city that was there, just off Fennel Hill, was called Ugarit. And that's where the first alphabet was made. And the whole mythic image of Prometheus carrying the spark of fire from heaven to man in a fennel stalk comes from that. The gift of fire, the gift of creative fire, the gift of a poetic language and the earliest alphabet out of that source of alphabets. About 1200 BC broke off into a pair of language groups. One developed into Greek. The other developed into Hebrew, so that Hebrew and Greek are twins that were born of the origin of alphabets in the same place, so that if one goes back, one of the great discoveries of all time were documents that were written in an early form of Greek called linear B, and they were translated by an architect, Michael Ventris, who toyed with them and finally learned to translate linear B, and so we knew about Knossos and King Midas and that whole range going back to about 1700 BC, but before linear B, there was something even earlier, and it is called Minoan Linear A, and linear A is not yet translated because there are no cognate languages.
At the time it was like unique, but there is a cognate language to linear A, which also has not been translated, and it's called Harappan, and it's in India and the Indus civilization, Mohenjo daro and Harappa. And those languages go back to the very origin of the way in which a language was stretched out of its numerical ness into its mathematical ability, which included then a poetic and an analytic, and the origins of that were in accord about 2300 BC. Language. Helps us to mature if it is free. And the freeing up of a language is within the context of nature being natural and consciousness being conscious that they interweave together the zero and the infinity, so that one, paradoxically. Cannot be left without a logic that can function either way. It's tuned both ways. If it is tuned to the oneness of things, to the integral of things, you get a certain result. If it's tuned to the infinity, you get a pair to it, a result. The integral result is the electromagnetic spectrum. The pair to it is the Magnetoelectric spectrum. I call it Milewski's spectrum.
It was first characterized brilliantly by James Clerk Maxwell in his great theory of treatises on electromagnetism, but writing in Victorian England of the 1870s, they dismissed the negative solutions of the math because they were interested in the positive solutions. This is electromagnetism. But the other solutions work just as well. But they work in a negative way to the positive of the electromagnetic spectrum. They work in such a way as to engender infinities. And Milewski in the 1980s, John McLusky, when he was at Los Alamos National Labs. A genius, he's now in Albuquerque, uh, works in a highly classified place at Sandia. In the midst of Kirtland Air Force Base. But raises his flowers and things in North. He and his wife Ethel and North Albuquerque. Just to keep humane. The magneto electric spectrum has a frequency of about 20 billion times what the electromagnetic spectrum is, but its frequency does not tune to one. It tunes to zero. That transforms without a hitch into infinity. High level mathematics in the late 1940s, early 1950s into the 1960s kept running into the problem where when you would do quantum physics mathematics, you would be in a blizzard of infinities. So a technique was made to sieve this, to filter those so that you get the closest approximation. And that closest approximation will then have a probability. And if you take the error bar probability away and you're left with a sizable probability, then that's good enough as an answer in the integral.
But it's not the answer, it's an approximation. It is a mask of the featureless face of the real. Israel. To take the precise math which gave you the infinities, and then you get the approximation. That's called renormalization. You bring it back to the norm, back to the traditional expectations of this mental structure. And so you're dealing constantly with high level gambling. The best portrait of the insidiousness the insanity of gambling was by Herman Melville. It's called the Confidence Man. It's a Mississippi riverboat. And the devil has become the white coat, cigar smoking gambler on the boat, leading people astray constantly because getting them to understand nothing is that important unless you have the money. And the best and fastest way to get the money is to win. And you can learn to gamble. It's also a theme in the Mahabharata from Vyasa about 300 BC. We're looking at a way of learning. Presence does not only persist, but never does not persist. So that to use that kind of language, perseverance furthers has a duplicitous trap to it, because one is always interested, then, in keeping the pressure up. So that one cannot go, for instance, into the ocean and be oceanic. One understands well, I'm at such and such a GPS. The dolphins or the whales don't have GPS, they don't need it because they course freely. Here's the way in which Lao Tzu. Is exposed. It's called completing form.
The sixth of the 81 Valley Spirit, not death. This is called Mysterious Woman. Mysterious woman herself. The gate. This is called Heaven Earth route. Constantly. Constantly seems to re-occur using itself Non-effort. The continuity. Is such that the five phase energy cycle in China. Eventually, through a Daoist yoga about 500 years ago, the masterful figure then was named, uh. Uh. Yang and I'll bring some of his material in in two weeks. Tao is the first of the five phases. Tay is the second, but Jin is the third. But if you look at it, the Dow is a zero. It does not have a numeracy. There's no numerical for it yet. Zero is a number that has ordinal properties of power. If you add a 0 to 1 you have a ten. Compare zeros, you have 100. You can triple them. You have 1000 jumps in order ordinal. But because the T is one and the Jen then is two, it's Tunis is the pair of the tor and the t of the zero and the one so that Lao Tzu very often calls it spirit. Jen. Jen, as in Confucius, is usually translated as human heartedness. Lao Tzu uses it specifically to be open and says spirit Jen, because the Tunis of the spirit Jen is that there are two ones, both carrying their zeros with them, so that their one plus one is a shared pair with a common denominator of nature. And so my phrase for this many decades ago was reissuing the real.
When two or more are gathered together in my name, I will be there. Out of this, if the Tao te Gen flows ecologically, a fourth phase comes in. The Chinese word for it is E, as in E ching. It means symbols. It means that the symbols are not in the structure of mental thought, but that they are fertile so that the brain can become the mind. And when the mind is conscious, it is able to do a shared quality. It's an emergency in this world at this time. That shared quality is that two human beings are able to tune each other together. A Socrates way of expressing how he learned it from Diotima is that this is an act of love. It's not so much an Eros. It's not so much an agape. The family love. It is love as a spirit. And that that spirit love allows for companions who are able to transform together. And there's no limit to the number of companions, so that one can have a whole community of people who carry their zeros with them and their oneness, and they participate quite freely in a harmonic. This was the source of the Pythagorean communities. It was the source. Then when Plato came back from Egypt, he founded the Academy in Athens, was the first academy. It was the first wisdom school that was established in a public way. And he ran it for about 40 years. More next week.