Presentation 6

We come to the sixth presentation, and we're understanding that in the natural cycle there is a frame of reference. It is like a square classically I have called it for many decades a square of attention. It's the picture. Or as the British Empire used to say, it can be a big picture. But it is not only the picture, it is the frame of reference of the picture. So that whatever is in the picture is composed in terms of the square of attention, and its meaning is a referentiality, meaning that the attentiveness of the symbolic structure of our mind is looking through this frame of reference to get the meaning, and the meaning is what is in the picture. This is the classic cycle of integral. It has held together by a bar of alignment of referentiality, going from the symbolic structure of thought back to the things in the picture, in terms of the frame of reference. Other than that, there are qualities of experience that do not fit into that cycle. The first obvious aspect of it are dreams. The referentiality of dreams is not to the things in the picture so much, but in terms of a hidden meaning. And so, dream masters are always those who have trained themselves to use a particular technique. The technique is perfected by astronomers who used to observe the stars. The night sky, and learned very early on that you cannot continuously look at a star and continue to see it accurately. You have to look with what is called averted vision. You have to let the circulation of your observation not be riveted to a simple bar of alignment, of perception, conception, and so averted vision gives you a clearer look. And this is called in yoga, an accumulated penetration. The time of the observation then, is elastic in terms of the expanded field of averted vision. This allows for consciousness to occupy its own field, which exceeds the frame of reference, which exceeds the cycle of the integral, and allows one then to color outside the lines to learn to look at the context within which this is being shown to you, within which one is identifying. Within which one is practicing an integral for accuracy, one begins to. Experience that there is a fifth dimension operating, and it is what we today call consciousness with the caveat that consciousness is not a part of the integral cycle. It is a complement to the integral, and its mathematical complement is the differential. You can have integral equations. You can have differential equations. You can have an. Integral geometry. You can have a differential geometry. So that further fifth. Becomes something outside of the four essentials of space time the four dimensions of space time so that the field of consciousness is a fifth essential. And we use the Latin, uh, phrase it's quintessential. It is the essentiality of the essentials. It's the higher essence of the essences. And so in the theater, the magic of a production is called the Fifth Business. It's magic because it is there, but it is there in an intangible way. It is invisible to perception, and consequently it is invisible to the referentiality of the integral of conception. So that conception now has to undergo a sea change. It can no longer be the identifications, however accurate they may seem. That certainty in itself is an indication of a limited frame of reference, a limited square of attention. The averted vision allows one the accumulated penetration to such an extent that there is an extra dimension, then, of the quintessential field of consciousness, and it becomes familiar to the observer, who now learns to compose their seeing in his daybooks, the great hermetic American photographer Edward Weston said composition is the strongest way of seeing. And that the composed seeing has an aesthetic, not a integral cycle, however accurate. And that that inter inner cycle meaningfulness in human terms, in societal terms is termed um the the politic. Based on the Greek word for the city polis. And so the meaning of the Latin CV. Cvt becomes supposedly on that basis, the root for the word for civilization. So that politics of the symbolic structures of thought is the ultimate meaning of the whole cycle of nature and of the obviously then of the nature and meaning of man and his life. Except for the actuality that dreams are outside of this consideration, that not really hemmed in by a politic. But dreams become a quality that can be appreciated in an aesthetic. And so the ancient dream masters, who learned with not only averted vision to see the stars more accurately and do not just look at the star, but to look at the arrangement, the composition of the stars, and to make constellations. Now, when someone, as an observer looks at the night sky in terms of constellations, the star relationalities within those constellations become more apparent and one learns after a very long time, hundreds of years, to make then a square of attention in terms of the constellations, and one loses the primordial consciousness in its differential field, it's reabsorbed back into a symbolic structure of integral thought. This happens to our species progressively over time. And so a new scalar of averted vision must be introduced every so often just to keep up with the attrition. And sometimes, as in our age, it is of a crisis because the time forms that naturally then allow for the integral symbol structures of thought to reabsorb what was before the differential conscious context. It now is assumed to be a part of the more accurate, larger picture. We were born into a time where that picture. Was permanently shattered so that it was not re absorbable back into the structures of symbolic thought. The discovery of X-rays and of electrons and of whole other possibilities of the world in the 1890s led to a fracture which widened and widened in the early 20th century, and by the time of the late 1920s, the fracture split the entire possibility of the symbolic structure of thought re-absorbing of doing its old stuff. The last time that this happened was 2000 years ago. And the time before that was 4000 years ago and 4000 years ago is of interest to us because we are trying to do a distillation of a very superior transformation 2000 years ago, which itself was a fermentation of the previous 2000 years before it. So if you go back to the time of Jesus, he is doing a transform of what happened in 2000 BC. And in order for us to appreciate what we're facing, what our differential field of consciousness actually now is exploring in terms of a meaning that was only intuited 2000 years ago, taught accurately enough, but almost no one could hear it. No one could see it. Whereas now the harvest is great. There are many men and women today on the planet, tens of millions who will be able to see it and to hear it and to understand it. But no one has presented it yet in the mode by which that can be done. And that's why this work has been going on now for almost half a century. To do a yoga of civilization so that a new appreciation for the ecology of consciousness can come into play and enrich the integral cycle so that its frame of reference is complemented by a diamond of insight. And when you put the diamond of insight together, when you montage that with the square of attention, you get the Mandala of Wholeness, you get an eight spike, eight angle mandala, which has a peculiar property. The eight has a peculiar property. An eight pointed star still has the symmetry of an integral, but it has the radial symmetry of a differential. Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which this was expressed, about 2500 years ago in China, was the ancient pattern of Chinese peasants was to gather eight families together so that the plots of their land fanned out and formed a pattern. And in the center of those eight huts, houses, fields was the well. So if you can imagine a tic tac toe game symbol, the center of it, the ninth is the well, and the eight are arranged around the well as the center of a flower, of which the petals were the fields watered in common, worked sometimes in common There are, uh, colossal natural catastrophes in China. They yellow dust from the inner Gobi Desert sometimes blows in and makes a martian like sandstorm. So the Chinese people literally are the children of the yellow Earth. It's why the Yangtze is called the yellow River, the Huang hull. Because there are times in those dust storms that it is just it's colored yellow for months for thousands of miles. Also there were huge infestations of locusts from time to time. The great 1936 film The Good Earth about China, written by Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize winning Hermetic American. There is a filmed version of a locust attack, a locust storm. So China understood that there are catastrophes that happen. There are also vicissitudes that happen. The problem of warlords and bandits is endemic in places like China. The quality was always to appreciate that there must be a source of renewal, and that the source of renewal is not just to go on fighting this or that, but to make sure that the energy completes its cycle and when it completes its cycle, it will naturally go back into the Dow and re-emerge fresh from the Dow so that the Tay will be pristinely new. This is the whole basis of acupuncture, of Chinese medicine to let the key, the key circulate all the way through so that you get a five phase energy lowest energy cycle. And the fifth phase is the phase that allows for the other four phases to complete themselves at the same time of going back into the Tao, and that the only way that this is not natural in its ecology of the eternal return is if something interrupts that flow, if some obstruction in the body is getting in the way of the flow of your qi through that natural five phase cycle. Tor T gen E, and then the key. And the key is the transforming quintessential fifth. It is sometimes referred in Lao Tzu as the 10,000 things because it's a differential. It's not about T as a unity, it's about the differential reality differentiability of all making and all which is um, uncountably, um, not specified. The 10,000 things is a phrase that you can't keep track of how many there are. They all do participate in the Tae. They do participate in the Tao. They do participate in the EA and they do participate in the Jin. But the problem comes with the EA, with the symbols, with the fourth of the fifth phases. And it's almost like the finger that points the pointing finger. The Tao, the little finger. The tathe, the ring finger, the jend, the middle finger, the e, the symbols, the pointing finger and the opposable movable thumb. The key that allows for the hand then to carry the mind into further discoveries, further applications. It is a very difficult thing to appreciate that the structures fracture point is in the symbolic thought. We have to be careful with our language and not talk loosely, because we are trying to learn fresh and not relearn tradition. We're trying to emerge freshly from an open field of nature into the existence, into the existentials that we are into the existentiality that we do, which surely is the basis for our language. It's the basis for our images, it's the basis for our feeling tones. But we do not fracture there. We fracture in the symbolic structure of thought in a natural way. That it has become passé. It is lagging behind because it is busy with its energies of reabsorbing what was outside of it before, and reabsorbing and incorporating it makes it stodgy, makes it like a sponge that is now tainted with having absorbed too much. It's no longer a sponge, it's bloated. And so the renewal in nature was always to go back to nature, to have the rituals so that they do not point towards the symbolic mind, but they point back to being reabsorbed by nature, because nature can reabsorb and does not become bloated. And so the traditional world feared symbolic thought for good reasons. They did not really know how to keep it healthy, and the only ones who had a glimmer of insight were those that dealt with dreams, those that dealt with artistic or compositional qualities and were able to come out of the field of vision consciously, like they came out of the field of nature existentially so that the prismatic person of the compositional aesthetic was able to see that there is a correspondence, there is a parallel, there is a pairing, and that just as nature and consciousness can pair, so ritual and art can pair as well. But one learns the rituals as techniques that are available in a whole new spectrum, so that the artist learns how to look at what is there, how to do what is doable, but with an eye towards a composition of something different, not something that is ritual, but something that is artistic. And so the spiritual person becomes an artist composing their life and appreciates others in this light, whereas the ritual comportment. Fears to go into the symbolic structure, whereas the artist does not fear to go into the symbols, into the symbolic structure of thought at all because they are not subject to a linear referentiality. They deal instead with a resonance referentiality forward. They're ready for something new all the time. They're ready for something different all the time. And so they have made friends with symbols, and they realize that the symbols are there for a long time because of this cycle, and that the cycle should not be scrapped, it should not be negated, should not be squelched, but it should be encouraged to complete itself in the sense that the frame of the frame of reference is still there, but you can have an appreciation that the picture of the composition can be different, and that it's better alignment to Referentiality to the past is at best deceptive, and at worst a leading one's astray consistently so that the symbols become an open frame. One of my good friends in San Francisco in the 60s, the Emmett Grogan, who was the founder of of a group called the diggers, giving away free food in San Francisco, uh, there were a number of us that were gathered one night, uh, at the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Ronnie running the mime troupe. We were doing, uh, antiwar demonstrations. One of my favorite characters at the time was David Simpson. He was a professor of English at UC Berkeley, and he and I, uh, arranged to have two early American deer hunting rifles with a part of a carcass of a cow suspended between them, labeled the bone of contention in an antiwar demonstration against Vietnam in San Francisco. And at that meeting, same meeting, Emmett Grogan came up with the idea let's make free food available to two different populations at the same time, cooked in the same way, all by free contributions of food left over from that restaurant's didn't use, or that distributors had extra. Let's serve half of it in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park to the homeless. Let's serve the other half on Market Street to the executives and teach them that there is a resonant bond between the homeless and the wealthy, that this was the source of the war. In its visionary healing mode, it was eminently successful. The quality of having a symmetrical frame of the square of attention, without presupposing what fills the picture, gives you a creative scalar for what images can be included in that composition, or what feelings may accompany those images, and further, that the language changes from a rhetorical structure of traditional persuasion to a poetic of the opening of possibilities of appreciation, one moves from persuasion to appreciation. One moves from a rhetoric to a poetic. And this transformation is a major aspect of bringing the fifth business of the field of differential consciousness back into play, and encourages the spiritual person to emerge forth from this new combined field. The core of it is that instead of opposites, one now understands that there can be symmetries. And another way of saying that that there are pairs. Here is from the authors of Zarathustra from 2000 BC. 4000 years ago. That those living 2000 years later, in zero BC zero AD, were able in their time, to appreciate the amazing transform that had been initiated and now had come to the point historically where it needed to be distilled and put into a even more refined aspect to it. This is from the 30th Yasna of. Zarathustra's Gothus in my translation. Remember the original languages of Weston. It is not an Arabic or a Persian. It is an Indo-European language, very similar to the English that we now use in its poetic. Now I speak to you seekers in pairs. Mazda creates wisdom and Ahura is the beginning of praise, while prayer is in Vohu mano and insight moves as Asha, as stars Constellating Paradise. Listen with inner ears best and see in your aurora mind two ways. Differentiate by choice each a person or an ego. Either before any great aeon happens, best for you. Awaken each to teach so that there is a shared mutuality of teaching now, which is not instruction. It is not performance. It is presentation. So that symbols, instead of representing symbols, now present. Let's take a break. We come back and we're looking at a menorah, and this is a Chinese menorah. The great caravan routes that went west from China went all the way across what was called for a long time, Chinese Turkestan, the Gobi Desert, into the farther west, which was originally a pair. One went over the Hindu Kush into the areas of northern India. The other went straight ahead and went over the Pamirs into what became a Soviet Central Asia. Not long ago now Tajikistan. Afghanistan, Uzbekistan. This menorah has seven, but the central one is raised above the other six, divided into two sets of three. In order to understand that this central candle, this central light lights all of the others, that these six divided three three are a pair of triplets, but that the triplets are related to each other in terms of pairs. So it's three pairs, and that the seventh is actually a secret pair in itself, and so that the menorah with seven candles is actually an eight structure. Octave transforms symbolic form. Let's come back to the lines of Zarathustra to understand that the central light is not one, but two related in such a way that one speaks of it as a double word to show that it is a tuned ratio ability. It is a proportionality and not an identity of oneness, but is a ratio of differential possibility. The central candle in ancient zarathushtra's gases is later on, 1500 years later, and especially about 2500 years later, referred to as Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda is a tuned pair of special differential conscious reissuing. Here's the translation I read earlier. Now I speak to you seekers in pairs. Mazda creates wisdom and Ahura is the beginning of praise. So that there is a Mazda is always the splendour, not the splendour of the sun. It is the splendor of light, of all the light and the universe. In a way, Zarathustra can be understood in ancient Avestan as meaning ancient light. That this light is fresh as we in the presence of it, behold it. But has been beheld eternally is ancient light. One of the interesting, uh, helio graphical investigations of just a few decades ago, discovered that the light from our sun, though it takes eight minutes to get to our planet from the sun, that light bubbling up from the center of the sun, almost 900,000 miles in diameter, takes about a million years for it to slowly percolate up through the convection spirals, the millions and billions of them on the star. And that by this convection, it takes a long time. So that that light that comes to us has been percolating for a million years to come in eight minutes and be here and to irradiate and illuminate the entire star system and beyond to other star systems. Our sun is a medium sized star. It's visible to the observing eye for somewhere around, uh, 3 or 400 light years before it begins to dim and not be seeable. There are stars that are magnificent that are available for, um, a thousand light years, like Rigel, the blue white giant, or like near to us. Sirius is available to be seen quite a distance out, almost a thousand light years into the galaxy. This is a quotation coming up from Mary Boyce. She was the great scholar of Zoroastrian thought and history, and she did a textual source for the study of religion, uh, on Zoroastrianism and a big three volume history of Zoroastrianism for E.J. Brill in Leiden, the Netherlands. She died just a few years ago. She was a, uh, quite viable. She was born in 1920 and died on April 4th, 2006. She says of the Heptad and the seven creations in ancient Zarathushtrian understanding of wisdom 4000 years ago. These teachings were fundamentally new, but it was the old cosmogeny that which provided the basis for Zoroaster's thought. So the first act which he conceived. Ahura Mazda as performing was the evocation through his Holy Spirit, Spenta mainyu. The Holy Spirit that was tunable with Ahura Mazda was able to ignite six Holy Helpers. They were called of lesser divinities, the radiant beings of Zoroaster's earliest vision. These divinities formed a heptad with Ahura Mazda himself, and they proceeded with him to fashion the seven creations that make up the world. The invocation of the six is variously described in Zoroastrian works, but always in ways which suggest the essential unity of beneficent divinity. Thus, Ahura Mazda is said either to be their father or to have mingled himself with them, and in one later Pahlavi it's a language. Later, uh, several couple thousand years later, text his creation of them as compared with the light lighting of torches from a torch, so that the central menorah in ancient Zoroastrian not ism, but ancient Zoroastrian. Zarathushtrian vision is that this light of lights is able to ignite by pairs three other pairs. Six other spenta. Um. Um mainyu. The um. The six great beings. Then in their turn, Zoroastrian Zoroaster taught evoked other beneficent deities who are in fact beneficent gods of the ancient. Uh. Quote. Pagan Iranian pantheon. And so there was an enormous play spenta the crucial word spenta. Used by Zoroaster of Ahura Mazda and all. His creation is one of the most important terms in his revelation. Basically, it seems it meant possessing power and when used of beneficent divinities, possessing power to aid, hence furthering, supporting, benefiting thro constant through constant religious use. Spenta to acquired overtones of meaning, like the word holy, which similarly meant originally mighty strong. Holy is therefore a close rendering, but to avoid suggesting concepts alien to Zoroastrianism, some scholars have performed preferred bounteous uh because it has no religious associations in English, and so does not convey the sense of reverence implicit in Zoroastrian spenta. The rendering holy has therefore been generally preferred throughout this book. The six Immortals are in pairs, so that if one takes the outer pair and brings it into the center one, which is a hidden pair, one now has a diamond of insight, and the inner two on either side are actually paired so that the three pairs do not run out from the center so much they run from the perimeter, as it were, to the center, which is a tuned pair, and that this makes a diamond of insight. And then the two on either side are tunable pairs, and that those tunable pairs are able to be brought together and make a square of attention within a diamond of insight base behind it. And in this way, the intangible, as it is said colloquially in English, the intangible is a field that supports the tangible and that the tangible when it is paired in tunes, so that the two pairs in tune together to make the square reveal the hidden ness of the diamond of insight, and that the core of the Diamond of Insight is not that it is a four, but is the three where the third of the three is actually a pair. This comes down in Christianity in such a way that the Trinity is father and Son, but the Holy Ghost is a double name. You can read in the gospel according to Philip, and that the Holy Spirit is a double name is feminine. That the Holy Spirit is the teacher of everything. And so there was a deep understanding that the primordiality is of a field of the father, the transform is of the pivot of the son, and that the distillation of that in not just a second transform, but in a differential refinement, makes the all able to come back in its ecological cycling to the primordiality of the father, so that one has now a kind of an energy circuit by which an H quality that's a pair of a square and a diamond together creates a new ninth, and that this new ninth has the ability as a complex field to generate a form that is not limited to the integral, nor is it an infinitely differential, but has a qualities of both. And that 10th is what today in string theory is called hyperspace, a ten dimensional hyperspace. That hyperspace is the form of forms and is able to generate a process that, in terms of its generation, would be an 11th dimension, but in terms of the way in which it does not record, it occurs as a zero. And that the basis of number was able to be understood about 2500 years ago. That when you count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, the 10th is the one again with the zero. So that the way in which Pythagoras expressed this, because he was the first to comprehensively encompass the precise presentation of mysteriousness. So it not only remained mysterious, but it became mathematical in the sense that one now understood number. He put ten dots in a pyramid. In a triangle. One dot at the top. Two dots below three dots below those, and four dots below those. The tetractys that one could understand. Now, if you could buy the averted vision of not looking fixedly at something, but looking acrobatically at the constellation of the context within which the forms were vibratory, one could now begin to understand and see that the scalar of the ratio being extended. The cardinality of lines of geometries extended that into the ordinality of powers and released it to the possibilities of a goodness. So that what was brought into tune, and instead of being a tuning fork now, was released from the ritual traditional association of a fork with a tine to a tunability scalar, and that if you had a scale of four such tuned abilities, you had released a matrix form that was capable of characterizing almost anything indefinitely. The simple way that the Chinese expressed this 3000 years ago was to say that there is a two, a pair that is carried to the third power. Its cubed Two times two times two is eight. And that the eight were the Bagua, the trigrams. And that because they were now brought into a new relational scalar that included not just the trigrams coming to make hexagrams, but that the matrix of the hexagrams was eight times eight. It was a square of that cube. And so 64 Hexagrams make an ecology and a cycle together that are able to characterize in a nine dimensional reality, all of the aspects of space time in their four dimensions, and all of the further harmonics of consciousness and therefore dimensions, brought together in a nine dimensional understanding that allowed the emergence of a hyperspace something further. This. This is true. This is the pivot of the Tao Te Ching. It's the beginning of the way in which Lao Tzu shows us at this pivot. One is understanding presentationally this constellation. Dow produces unity. Unity produces polarity. Polarity produces Trinity. Trinity produces the 10,000 things. The 10,000 things bear Yin to embrace Yang Zhen. Even if detested, is exactly orphaned, widowed a hermit. Kings and nobles thereby exacted for their own. So sometimes you lose itself and gain. Sometimes you gain itself and so lose. Jen. Is presence even taught? I also teach this presencing the strong and aggressive ones resonate only death. Transcendence thus conveys to profound learning. That these translations have developed over many decades of averted vision, of accumulated penetration, of being able to see the larger constellations, and finally to not only be able to see the entire night sky planet wide, but the entire cosmos. Astrophysically. It is the ability for this movement to give us a sense of where the next 2000 years are opening to, and one of the great finds in the Gobi Desert brought back to the British Museum by Sir Aurel Stein, was a very interesting, um, illustration of the way in which the ancient wisdom gave us a key. We're looking at a bit of tapestry that was buried under the sands of the Gobi for more than a thousand years, and we are trying to understand, in an age that is inundated not with an ignorance, but with a supercilious confidence in its arrogance, artificiality. This is the age that is opened up at the top to not only the ninth, but to a hyperspace. This is the Hermetic caduceus. The Hermetic caduceus. Classically, for Hermes was a caduceus of intertwined pairs of snakes that curled up, and the center rod had a ball at the top, which was like the sun. These are the twined serpents worshipping, guarding the central light. The central sun. The tie in between the cycle and the ecology that leads into openness, as a caduceus now has the ability to not only be held by someone, but to be held between a tuned pair of someones, because what they are doing is they are sharing the light and the figure that has survived best out of the Warren Tapestry. This have been woven about 1200 years ago, about 800 A.D.. Not just in Central Asia, but remember, its name for a long time was Chinese Turkestan, because that area of the world received impresses, of great transforms being carried by incredible events and caravan routes that extended for thousands and thousands of miles. And the first great caravan route in the world over pure land not involving any kind of ships was from roughly where Samarkand is in Uzbekistan to where a Chang'an Shiyan is in China, it's an enormous distance. It must be at least 6 or 7000 miles. That caravan route had an exchange place. The central exchange place was at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains and there two different streams came down from the Kunlun Mountains and in each of those streams. Streams further up into the mountains, a very rare precious mineral, a jewel mineral called jade was able to be discerned. The ancient name for the place was Khotan, now abbreviated in Chinese as Hotan. But Khotan, ancient Khotan was the place in which the far western Asia caravan routes made a big exchange to the caravan routes now that went into China, not stopping at Chang'an, but going all the way to the Pacific Ocean coast, which extended it another several thousand miles, so that you had an immense caravan route that went from the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Japan 4000 years ago. And out of this jade became the synthesizing symbol of the Dao for the first dynasty in China, the Shah dynasty, founded about 2100 BC. In honor of that, and because of its peculiarity that jade was found in two different rivers, but two different kinds of jade were found. One river had whitish jade, the other had darkish jade. Uh, not black, but a deep spinach green jade. But it was called dark, the light and the dark together. But it was curious because the jade was not visible as some kind of a striation in a geologic formation. They were chunks of jade in the stream bed under the stream, mixed with the rocks, and so they would take young women, young girls barefoot, whose feet were tender, who could walk over the rocks of the stream bed and could tell by the feel of their feet where there was jade instead of just the stone. And so the preciousness of the jade was that it was a divinatory finding of the roots of femininity out of the mysterious mountains. The Kunlun means the Dragon Mountain range so that the jade was a gift of the dragon through the divination of the tenderness of the step of the young women, and that was carried into China from the Central Asians, who are about the time of Zarathustra, learning to spread themselves out in a colossal way because they had done two things and brought them together, much like the two kinds of jade. They were at the very beginnings of the Bronze Age, where instead of having copper as the metal, they learned that if you added a few percent of tin to the copper, you began to get bronze and bronze tools had a tremendous strength vis a vis copper, and for the first time you could have wheels made with bronze rims and spokes and a bronze, uh, axis linking those wheels so that the two wheels could have a symmetry and become a chariot. And that one then could bring a new dimension. The taming of horses into play as a pair. And so with a pair of horses and a pair of wheels, the wheels length by an axle going between them, the horse's length by a pole. In between them you had the spinning axis and the stable axis, and all of a sudden you had a chariot, and the carrying of jade by chariot users into China produced the first Dynasty of China about 2000 BC. Czartoryska comes about the same time. He is the final wisdom of a pre metal age, right at the cusp where a metal work was coming into play in such a way that now metals became mysterious because they were transformable by ratios. Bronze is a mysterious metal because it is only made by someone understanding what the ratio is to make it how you smelt it. And so it is the original source of metallurgical alchemy. Bronze does not occur in nature. Man consciously must compose it, and when he does, the bronze rewards him because it is shiny, and the only shininess that is close to it is gold. So that this is a usable version of the gold. This is the radiance because the Age of Bronze for the first time had the glorious warriors. A bronze shield held in full sunlight will almost blind you with its glint. The bronze sword is flashing, is like lightning in the hand. And you put a bronze warrior on a trained horse, and you have one of the most formidable aspects in the history up to that point of the power of man to transform himself. A man walking can go maybe 20, 30 miles. When I was in shape at 20 years of age and had been the head porter at Sequoia National Park for a couple of years. I one time hiked 50 miles with a Czech friend of mine, and we were so exhausted at the end we fell asleep in the parking lot, which couldn't even get in the car. But a man on a horse can cover 100 miles in a day. All of a sudden, the range that you had caravan routes that would have taken interminable time before now. You could plan out. We're going to set up caravan routes all the way. We're not just going to follow this river system to where it ends. We're going to go over the passes and drop down into other river systems, into other terrains, and we're going to extend ourselves. And so civilization about 2000 BC Took a tremendous leap, a turn, because along with horses and chariots, the bronze, the traveling routes came the first alphabets. Now you had an incredible mix. You had the ability to not only keep track of deals, buy little glyphs and little numbers, but you could give accounts of who you were dealing with and where you were going and what you would find. And you could describe it, and you could describe what they believed, so that when you got there, you understood what they were about. The way that they related to the world. And so you began to have, for the first time, the interpenetration of large scales of humanity. And those who kept the scalar all the way through the caravan routes were the keepers of the way in which business and understanding the technology and the technique of self improvement and transformation went together. All of a sudden you had, about 4000 years ago, a quality of men and women that we today would call international. They still had kings. But they understood that there was something called the King of Kings. There are still people who are the royals of the kingdom, but there are people who are hyper royals of the realms of all mankind. And so you began to have a percolation of this from just a handful of men and women. Uh, maybe not more than several hundred to maybe not more than just several thousand. Who knew how to run this? How to sustain this, how to train for those? You have to have groups of trained horses and repair parts for chariots strung over 8000 miles of Central Asia China to just get your goods to market. But when you did, you had a monopoly because you brought materials that were not able to be brought before. And so you find in China for the first time in the next several hundred years, you find fruit trees that never grew in China. They grew in what is today Persia, in Central Asia. You got the peach, you got the pear, you got the cherries. They got the spices. They got the cinnamon. They got the pepper. They got many other goods like silk. And so you began to have not only an international world, but this kind of understanding. And we're going to take a break and come back to the rest of this next week. This is from my translation of Zarathustra. This is Yasna 30 hot three. These paired primordial spirit ways, when in a polarity mind, then appears in thought and in word particularity as our deeds, either good or bad. And of this pair those wise choose the bright, never the dark ignorance. Therefore, when paired, these spirits together were first created life and its nothingness. Thus to the end of existence, either regressive as deceit or real as truth in our sublime mind. From this spirit pair a choice, deceit worsening, the doing of doing, or the true spirit in purity. Adamantine eternal as heaven's cloak. He who delights in the hurried openly by true actions celebrates Mazda. More next week.