Ideas and Thinking in Manly P. Hall's Encyclopedia. Cassirer's Symbolism.
Presented on: Thursday, October 16, 1980
Presented by: Roger Weir
Symbolism
Presentation 3 of 12
Ideas and Thinking in Manly P. Hall's Encyclopedia.
Cassirer's Symbolism
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, October 16, 1980
Transcript:
October 16th, 1980. This is the third lecture in a series by Roger Weir on symbolism. And the subject tonight is ideas and thinking MPH's Encyclopedia, Cassirer's Symbolism.
This particular, um, presentation tonight is the most difficult of one for me. And probably for you as, as listeners. It's, um... it's difficult sometimes to form a just appreciation of the contribution of someone like Manly Hall, writing this Encyclopedia outline of symbolical philosophy.
Most of you have not had the misfortune of having to put up with years and years of university courses in philosophy. I had some 85 units of university philosophy over nine years. Taught it for many years. And from the travail of the long arc of error, following those kinds of presuppositions for years and years and more years, it's a, uh, it's quite an astounding thing and beautiful in a way to run across people for whom those kinds of long digressions will never happen. And, uh, it's a beautiful thing to recognize.
I want to start tonight with a poem, as I usually do to collect us. Bring us into some sort of a bouquet of companionability. I love Los Angeles more than anyone, I suppose. I, I share a view of Los Angeles with our distinguished colleague here Stephan Hoeller. I see Los Angeles as a virtual reincarnation of ancient Alexandria. And it's just charming and delightful to walk around in it and see the great synthesis of ancient learning coming back again. But Los Angeles has its ways of distracting us. And so, I try to begin with poems to bring us in and out of the cold. And it is cold tonight.
I had, uh, used a poem by Pablo Neruda last week. And I'm sitting in my study this week, I was my eye was John again to Neruda. And so, a few lines from a very long poem of Neruda called The Heights of Machu Picchu. I think most of, you know, Machu Picchu, the old Inca fortress. The last refuge of that civilization high in the Andes Mountains. And it was to Machu Picchu that Neruda went in 1945 after having suffered through the second world war. He of course, was from Chili. And like most educated Chileans he was an ambassador in Europe and, uh, when the war broke out in 1936, he was involved. And so, by 1945, he had spent almost a decade in, uh, the worst war that we've suffered as, as a species. The worst war in the sense that, uh, the final battle against what was being fought against were actually not one but differed.
And so, um, Neruda went home to South America and went to Machu Picchu in 1945. And after spending many long weeks in solitude burst forth with this long poem called The Heights of Machu Picchu. And it is a call, a clarion cry, to peer deeper into human life than simply that level at which the mind ordinarily would be satisfied with. That mind, which ordinarily would think of philosophy in scholastic terms rather than in the mystical Hermetical terms that all of us here have grown accustomed to seeing.
So, a few lines from The Heights of Machu Picchu and then into tonight's lecture. This is from the sixth part,
Then up the ladder of the Earth, I climb. Through the barb jungle thickets until I reached you Machu Picchu, tall city of step stone home. At long last of whatever Earth had never hidden in her sleeping clothes. And you two lineages that had run parallel met where the cradle, both of man and light, rock in a **inaudible word or two**. Mother of stone, **inaudible word** of condors, high reef of the human dawn. Stayed buried in primordial sand. This was the habitation. This is the site where the frat... fat grains that made grew high to fall again like red hail. The fleece of the **inaudible word** was carted here to clothe men loved and gold. Their **inaudible word** and mothers, the kings, the prayers, the warriors. And up here at men's feet found rest at night near eagles' talons in the high meat stuff **inaudible word**. And then the dawn with thunder steps they trod the thinning mist touching the Earth and stone that they might recognize that touch come night, come death. I gaze at clothes in hand. Traces of water in the booming cistern. A wall burnished by the touch of a face that witnessed with my eyes, the Earth carpet of tapers. Oils of my hand, the banished wood for everything. Peril, skin, hot words. Wine lo is disappeared. Fall into earth. And in the air, it came in with lemon blossom fingers to touch those sleeping faces. A thousand years of air month, weeks of air. Blue wind. Iron mountains. These came with gentle footstep hurricanes, cleansing the lonely precinct of the stone.
This is a symbolic beginning for us tonight. Neruda of course is a Nobel prize winning poet. And by no means a primitive individual. More like a primordial individual in our own lifetime.
Most sensitive thinking spirits have long sense coming back and returned to the human family of experience to consider the ultimate mystery from that angle, rather than the dispassionate podium **inaudible word** focuses. Which for several hundred years in the West seemed to reign supreme. So much so that the tradition which had been passed on orally person to person became hidden call, called occult given last place on everyone's list the things to investigate. All except for a few. There are always a few who pursued them with diligence, kept them alive and have passed the essentials down. So that we have here with our fundamental textbook, rather a beautiful Rosetta stone of experience that can carry us back and make a human history a sense of continuity against which we can discover ourselves in a much more full dimension.
And I would suggest that there have been two reading groups, um, two paths reading in here that both of you, both reading groups focused on the introduction. The seven or eight pages of introduction. If you could read that sometime this coming week would be just fine. And he began in the introduction, the very first paragraph, the statement of thus,
Philosophy is science of estimating value. The superiority at any state or substance over another is determined by philosophy. By assigning a position of primary importance to what remain when all that is secondary has been removed. Philosophy thus becomes the true index of priority or emphasis in the realm of speculative thought. The mission of philosophy a priori,
that is from the beginning,
it to establish the relation of manifested things to their invisible ultimate cause or nature.
Now the, the statement here that behind a visible realm is an invisible foundation, which can be approached by nontranscendent leaving or maturity is what separates the occult philosophies, in particular teaching, from what would be standard university fair. That is that the visible realm or the earthly realm is, but one part of a complementation going on. And that the invisible or Heavenly realm participate in an interchanging with the visible. In the sense that a part of the invisible realm is getting **inaudible word**, embedded, enshrined, and formed into the visible. And that in the invisible part of the visible realm is able to manifest. And that somehow, we as particulars bridge this in the sense of not just, um, ruining ourselves here and reaching up here. But bridge it in the sense that we make possible, we manifest the interchanging point. That is those elements pass in transmutation through our participation. And the fact that we participate makes it all happen and makes it all true.
This was the basis of every conceivable human ritual ever. That the Hopi people, or the Chinese people, any people that we would wish to turn our gaze to. Their ritual performance, their mythic cycle, their symbolic vision, were all to tutor themselves and each other to participate in action which would permit this bridging, this interchanging of the visible and invisible realm. That Heaven and Earth may mix through man's participation.
In distinction to this traditional or occult mode of understanding the flights of symbols and symbolism, man displays, we have a tradition which manifests itself most strongly in Western philosophy about 200 years ago. The individual involved, I guess we could, um. In case you'd like to investigate, Immanuel Kant, was one of the highlights. K-A-N-T. And after him there were a number of developments. For our purposes tonight, um, Joseph Howard(?), Nietzsche and Cassirer. And Cassirer is the author of Language and Myth, which is also one of the recommended books that we have, um, in the course.
I'll try and make this a pleasant as possible. But a Cassirer, oddly enough, being at the end of an intellectual tradition, which is almost in contra positive opposition to the secret teachings of all ages, happens to be the intellectual father of the new tradition, which carries us back to the hidden realm to the occult philosophy of the secret teachings of all ages.
The student and the **inaudible word** who left in this way was an American woman named Suzanne Katherina Langer. And she's very famous for having written the book called Philosophy and A New Key. In which she was, uh, instrumental in showing that the, the ritual of anthropology and the metaphors of music pointed to the fact that intellection or reasoning or thought has always in its structural origin in feeling and feeling tone. And that the feeling and feeling tone, uh, correspond much in a union fashion with universal currents that play themselves out in individual time in memorial. And of course, uh, when that book came out it caused quite a sensation. And she wrote a sequel called Feeling and Form. And finely towards the end of her life, she's still alive, very aged, she wrote a huge tone, three volumes, which, uh, no university will probably ever teach. Will be for persons like ourselves to resuscitate. She wrote a study called Mind an Essay in Feelings, in which she no longer even pretend that there is this...
**audio has a break and appears to be missing some of the lecture when it resumes**
Up to and including **inaudible word**.
The importance for us is that the attitude towards symbolism in this philosophic tradition is exactly that quality of ossification, which passes like shadows in our culture today before our eyes every time we wish to think about reality or our human beingness or any of the more transcendental qualities. We are always stopped because the very structures of our education, the very metaphors of our language, the pattern of political life and on and on and on, are all engendered from this tradition and produce a blind spot, right where we would like to have a window.
And so very often we come to something like Secret Teachings of All Ages and wonder my kind of which one of these should I follow? Which one of these is really the case in point? And I hope that you're beginning to realize now that in investigating, as we're doing in Secret Teaching, that it is not the issue to follow in this kind of a pattern thinking to read from page one through to the end and thus makes some historic of a linear, gradual development. But rather this is a cycle of learning. Much as we diagramed last time. A cycle of learning that requires some kind of a, some kind of an insight into the centered presence from which all of the various tradition and sections in this book, traditions in human history and sections in this book radiate out and find their comprehension. So that we may start anywhere. And the only purpose of a course of events like this is to encourage you to explore. And to explore an, a very odd yet specific way. And that keep coming back in this kind of a pattern, keep coming back to some sort of central focus, but arching your experience to include gradually more and more of a field of inquiry. Which through the constant introduction of new material, new experiences, new observations becomes richer and richer.
On the underside of this process is something like this. And I will read this paragraph. This is from Cassirer's book An Essay on Man, which he wrote in English at Yale. Uh, it is the epitome of his book The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which was the big three volume tone written in the twenties in Germany. And, uh, **inaudible word** is a really great work of contemporary philosophy.
The first volume of Philosophy of Symbolic Form is, uh, entitled Language. And the second volume is entitled Mythic Thought. And the third volume is entitled The Phenomenology of Knowledge. And so, you would think that encased on the shelf with just the last word you have only to put the bookends of your hands there and you've got the world by the tail.
And of course, it seemed at that time and the 20's that Cassirer that, uh, he might have. But of course, the world fell apart for those people. And by the mid-thirties, they realized that they had not even understood the essential qualities of basic human life. And so, coming to the United States in the early forties and at the end of his life, he wrote this book, An Essay on Man in English. And in it are just the beginnings of what **inaudible word or two** are finally picked up and carried on upper. A return back to a position which we would be more familiar with and more in keeping with.
And here the paragraph near the end in a section called Science, he says that, uh, uh, there are large symbolic forms called art, religion science, myth, language. That these large universal symbolic forums are in fact, the world in which we live and operate. And at the end of Science, he has this say. And if epistemology is the study of knowledge, how do we know that we know? He writes, "Modern epistemology no longer maintain the platonic theory of numbers. It does not regard mathematics as a study of things, either visible or invisible, but as a study of relations and type of relations." It is a very curious opening sentence. That there was no longer the visible or the invisible. That these were simply static things which belong to a more primitive mode of thought. And that the contemporary mind is emancipated from this kind of stuck in the mudness. And we now have an idea that the study of relations and types of relations is what knowledge is really about. What the essence of philosophy really is. Not to look at things, but to look at relations. Let's keep that in mind as we go along here.
If we think about the objectivity of **inaudible word** we do not think of it as a separate metaphysical or physical entity. What we wish to express is that number is an instrument for the discovery of nature and reality. It's an instrument. It is not a mysterious essence, but a tool. This is what he is saying.
The history of science gives us typical examples of continuous intellectual process. Mathematical thought often seems to go in advance of physical investigation. And further down here he talkes about Einstein and how Einstein is the Ryman geometry, which had been invented considerably before.
Then comes, very interesting here, "What we need is full freedom in the construction of the various forms of our mathematical symbolism." Now take the word mathematical out because if you're talking about science here, but he means it in general. That's interesting to make this kind of a statement.
"What we need is full trading in the construction of the various forms of art symbolism." That is, he's claiming, **inaudible word**, the basic human needs that since we symbolize and acclimate ourselves in our process of, of living in this universe with ourselves and with others. True symbolism we need to have a full freedom to be able to engender new forms if necessary. To select out those forms from the past or from tradition, which we would still find usable.
And he follows it up. Nature is an exhaustible. It will always pose for us new and unexpected problems. We cannot anticipate the facts, but we can make provision for the intellectual interpretation of the facts through the power of symbolic thought.
That is a very curious thing for someone who is in this kind of the tradition to say at the end of wonderfully clear, uh, epidemy of modern philosophy writing on the science and, uh, the place is symbolism. He returned back to that diagram that we had at the first week here. And that the primordial foundation upon which our construction of experience rests is nature as it is.
And of course, one of the great statements of **inaudible word** is that nature as it is, is called, in his philosophy, the numinous. It's the numinous. It's something which we really can't know. It exists somehow by itself. And all that we have to work with is the phenomenon. That is the intellectual apprehension of it. And so that we live constantly in a phenomenal world that does not mean **inaudible word**, but it means in a world of intellectual things. And that somehow out there nature really does exist, but in a different quality. And that we can never reach over to it because we're separated from it. We have only our mind and the realm of mind here in the mind.
What is the denied there and in this tradition. And I'll try and develop that just a little bit, so you have some idea of this. What is denied there is that there are transcendental qualities in nature and thus in human nature, which allow for free mobility and creativity. That is, just what he is claiming is needed here. We have to have the capacity to engender new forms because there could be new experiences coming up, or as most of us have lived long enough to see, our lives change. Our very personality changes. We become a different person. We haven't just emended our lives but very frequently we recognize the fact that we are quite distinctly different as an integration from what we were say 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
Now the continuity in the person in this tradition is something which, uh, um, exists as an identifiable, um, essence. And, uh, for a Schopenhauer he calls that the will. And that the will is synonymous with the body. And that in polarity with the will or the body was the representation in the mind of things. And that we have constantly this kind of a, a polarity between the world of what we think of and the world which we would like it to be for our convenience and our purposes. And it's a very peculiar thing because Schopenhauer would have agreed, but for totally different reasons with a statement of Carl Jung in one of his writings that when you are in a quandary about differentiation what to think about it ask very simple question. What purpose is it for? And quite often, this is, this self-insure again, what is it for illuminates psychological differentiation. It helps that process to become articulate.
Well, **inaudible word** and Harwood said the same thing, but not totally the opposite. That the will seek to mold the world according to its purposes. And so, one always asks what is it for, but with the emendation, the understanding that what is it for for me. Myself. Or you, yourself. And this, uh, of course became well-known again, the big three volumes set the **inaudible few words** and representation. It's still in print and has been for well over a hundred years. And it influenced many people.
Now Nietzsche began with, uh, began his philosophic career with a grand restatement of this kind of polarity that Schopenhauer had and **inaudible word** uh, initiated with the phenomenon and the noumenon and Schopenhauer with the will and representation.
Nietzsche wrote the book as a young man, um, The Birth of Tragedy. And it was about the development of Greek tragedy in the ancient Greek culture but from a philosophic standpoint. And it was to the effect that there are two modes of human comportment. One is the Dionysian, and the other is the Apollonian. And that the Apollonian attitude constantly seeks to put a form, to put a shape, to put a stamp of recognition onto wild unbridled, creative **inaudible word** of pure chaos, I suppose you would say. And that the Dionysiac is constantly in polarity with the Apollonian.
And he cited in his book, uh, The Birth of Tragedy,
The wonderful achievement of the ancient Greeks of having developed out of this mélange premise primitive ritual. And of premises of song and primitive mentality. This most exquisite, um, Apollonian form, one of the great intellectual achievements of all time within one generation of people.
That is in the generation of Pindarus, and Aeschylus lived in.
And of course, uh, as soon as this book, The Birth of Tragedy came out Nietzsche began to be thought out as this, uh, wonderful philosophic Superman. There were a couple of pamphlets that were written by classicists, but they were shunned to the side. But it's quite interesting because it was only about one generation later that the very same data became of interest to a whole new school of thinking. Uh, people who were more anthropologically oriented. And they development of course of Greek tragedy in a single generation from the old, uh, goat songs of the, of the uh peasants in Attica was seen to be a symbolic phenomenon of the highest quality. And a lot of the Hermetic understanding in traditional occult systems came back into play, uh, with a different language form. And you had a tremendous generation of people around 1920, just about the time of Cassirer writing, who were expressive. Quite the opposite conclusion from Nietzsche with the same material.
You have, if you like, to go to the library and look at uh, Jessie Weston who wrote a wonderful book From Ritual to Romance. And F.M. Cornford wrote a wonderful book called From Religion to Philosophy. And of course, the wonderful works of James George Frazer, The Golden Bough. And anthropologists in the United States have may have mentioned someone like, uh, Ruth Malinowski. And Malinowski just a, uh complete range of thinkers.
Before these people, the shock of recognition that was a phrase that made the rounds around the first world war in intellectual circles, the shock of recognition with the fact that when you actually took yourself in your basic human experience into these realms of experience, like the rituals of so-called primitive people, you did not observe what was well known in university tech and what, what would have been acceptable, um, knowledge in those circles. You had a totally different appreciation for what actually was going on and what actually the meaning for these ceremonies could be developing. And it is very peculiar that, uh, one of the best intellectual descriptive statements of understanding of that should be someone who is a student of this man who is in this wonderful tradition from **inaudible word** on down.
Which brings us up to our experience in this situation here. That I am encouraging you to take yourselves into the experience designated in The Book of Hopi as a real-life testing of ourselves and for yourself in particular. I'll just let what happens in this kind of ritual **inaudible word**. And in order to help you to manifest that experience in the best of all possible terms, I am doing my best to not make it intellectually clear in the sense of outlining it for you so that you have some map of expectations before the actuality of the experience. And thus, the form of your experience is that instead of being given any kind of lecture material from The Book of Hopi, you yourselves are reading separate ritual, which you will reconstruct here together for each other. And the form of the whole, the meaning of the entire cycle of symbolism, will begin to become apparent to you in probably two or three months in retrospect. It'll set. It'll gel. And you will have a first-hand appreciation, as close as we can get without going to live among some people, of just actually what happened and what goes on. And how this bridging take place. That there is in fact, an invisible realm, and a visible realm, and that neither of them are what we would be led to expect having the world separated by the fantastic curtain called the mind. That the stage and the audience are not the components of the theater of the world. I think the real understanding was that the whole world is the stage and everybody on it is the audience. I think Eckart said that, someplace. Shakespeare. I think he meant it too as far as I can tell.
Now, this experience with The Book of Hopi that you're engendering now needs to be augmented by a few insights and a few basic structures of backgrounds, which I will provide for you. Which are somewhat parallel to the Hopi experience. But not close enough so that it would give you some kind of an intellectual template by which to measure the success of the Hopi mind. We don't want to put that kind of a measurement upon the experience. We want to have the joy of the discovery and not the cynicism of proof if I can use that kind of distinction.
So, in connection with that, I'm presenting to you three different ways of looking at American Indian experience. One of them is through, um, an overlapping of another cycle of investigation through the book of Moby Dick. in the voids of Moby Dick, you will find that the American Indians, the Polynesians, um, cycles of understanding play a very, very strong part. And of course, as I mentioned, Melville was one of that generation who went back to find how, how is Eden now? how is paradise now? How are the realms of experience that have not been cluttered by the European mind, how is it to live among them? And so, Moby-Dick is one of those augmentations which will help in The Book of Hopi.
The second one is a series of two films, which we will see together. And I suppose that there'll be friends of ours coming. One of them is called Chalk about the Mayan Indian. And the other called Oachaun (sp?) about the Blackfoot Indian. Now with Chalk, because it is a filmed in a, in a wonderful artistic sequence, you will be able just through seeing the film itself, you will be able to have what is called an integrated aesthetic experience. That is, you'll be able in one viewing of the film to see what that experience is. And to have had it and shared it and um, that will be sufficient. With The Oachaun film it's a little difficult because there are several elements which need to be given to you. And one of them I wish to give tonight. And that, yeah, that there is a primordial mythic insight, which you need in order to appreciate it.
END OF SIDE ONE
I want to give it now because in the kinds of cycles of event that I'm encouraging you to see, I would bring this myth back at least twice more before you see the film, so that you'll have several different ways to remember having run across the myth. It's very important that not just have information in some static block, but rather that you **inaudible word** in your process of maneuvering coming across the same information on different days with different circumstances and different contexts, so that it occurred in the flow of your perceptions, that the multi-dimensional nature of this experience is one which you can participate in fully. And not just with the intellectual appreciation or the eye of insight, or maybe with even sympathetic feelings alone, the total person.
The myth is The Scarface Myth. And Scarface is **inaudible word**. And usually before the telling of a myth like this you would have... We had a, uh, a man onetime, his name Hansen **inaudible word**. I was teaching in Canada. And we were, we were trying to create the, the feeling tone of, of an ancient storyteller. So, we had, we found the oldest living storyteller among the Stoney Indians. He was over 90. And Hansen **inaudible word** like many another great storyteller was blind and was lead in. And before he began his story, he began already like a little staff that he had, this kind of a tapping motion. Getting his paces. Getting his articulation. So that the movement of his entire psyche with dynamic before he said anything. I usually try to pause and get my movement. That the old storyteller version was to have that kind of a rhythm, that kind of a, of a beat.
In that far back time, a very poor young man who had upon face a deep scar. This is an archetypal image incidentally. The man with a deep scar on his face asks a very beautiful young girl to marry him. She laughed at him, made fun of him, and replied that when he removes the scar, from his face, she would do it yeah. Scarface left camp. He wandered far **inaudible word** quest in some way to remove his disfigurement. He met one after another. Many animals and asked them to help him. But always they referred him to some other animal farther on who they said might have the powers to efface the scar. So, traveling he came at last to the shore of a great Lake. So large was it that if there would land on the other side of it, he could not see it. He had now met all the animals. Obtained no help from them. And so, discouraged, laid out at the edge of the water to die. Then came two swans swimming near the shore and asked him what trouble was. He told them and they said that far out in the Lake was an Island on which the Sun had his home. And they believe that the Sun was the only man who could remove the scar. Anyhow, they would take him to the Island, and he could ask the Sun if he could do it. As the swans told him to do, he laid down upon their back and they bore him out to the Island.
I don't know if you've ever, ever had the experience of floating on the ocean on a kayak or canoe or something. Or even one of the great lakes. There is a particular motion to the rocking of the waves. Melville mentions it again and again in Moby Dick. It is the same **inaudible word** experience that in a very deep samadhi, that the joy of the world in waves. Because our physiological neurological constitution is such that we experience a universal continuity as waves. Waves of feeling. Or currents with consciousness. That's how we received it. Even though it is a unity, we receive it as waves or flow. This is the experience that's here in this primitive myth.
A man lying on the back of the swans. Just grateful to be floating on the waters of life into the unknown to the Island of the Sun. He landed and at one met a handsome young man who told him that he was named Early Riser. And that his, that the Sun was his father. And that Nightlight was his mother.
Nightlight is the moon. And Early Riser, of course, is the morning star, Venus. The same star that Buddha in meditation in great deep Samadhi saw under the bodhi tree and that was the Nirvana of the, the Buddha.
So, he met Early Riser first. And Early Riser tells him that the Sun is his father, and that Nightlight is his mother. And that his father was away on his daily journal... journey across the blue. But his mother was at home. And he would take Scarface to her, and she would give him something to eat. It was a very large **inaudible word** that Morning Star led Scarface and furnished with belongings of the occupants. Nightlight sitting upon her couch of fine furs greeted him kindly, gave him food, asked him when he had the come. And for what reason he had journeyed filled far from his people. He told her of his great troubles.
And those of you that were in the self-enfoldment series, you remember that in The Book of Job, that there always is a day in which **inaudible word** Satan in his cycle comes first before the Lord. It's the very first thing that he's always asked and should be asked, where do you come from? What purpose have you and the universe? And of course, the statement being **inaudible word** and being, uh, unacquainted with these patterns **inaudible word or two** comes from roaming to and fro **inaudible word** the Earth.
So, Nightlight asks of the quester Scarface, where do you come from? And so, he told her of his great troubles that he was carrying a burden. He was carrying a quest. He knows he's in a pattern. And his desire to be rid of the scar so that he could marry a beautiful girl of his tribe. And she told him to be patient that it might be done. But when Sun was able to return from the daily travel, he feared that he might be angry if he **inaudible word** Scarface in his **inaudible word**. And so, she had the youth under one of her white Buffalo robes.
Plato in The Myth of the Cave says that the most difficult thing of all when one has freed oneself from the shackles of ignorance and has performed that meant to metanoia, that change of mind where one can view that shadows which one thought was reality. And able to lead oneself out of the cave, up into the light, the difficulty of acclimating oneself to sunlight, that is the actual life of the universe instead of just the cave of ignorance, blinds most people. And instead of having patience getting used to seeing with the eyes of light, they go back astounded, blinded, overawed by what they have seen and take their seat **inaudible word** again and draped the chains back over themselves. And go on as before thinking, what good would it do to be freed is only this blinding glare, this glow of overawe. This is here too in this myth because the Scarface must hide under one of Nightlights white Buffalo robes.
Well, the Sun returns. But instead of entering the lodge, he stops at the doorway and says, ha I smell a human being. Sun enters the lodge, went to his couch, and sat down, spoke to Scarface who had come out from under the robe and said, I am glad you are here with us. Remain with us. I am glad. For the sake of my son that you are his friend. He often becomes lonely, and your presence will be good for him.
On the following day, Sun had started out upon his trail across the blue and Nightlight said to Scarface, as you are my son go here and there upon the Island. There is one thing I want you to do. Never let him go near a gathering of big birds that have long sharp bills for they are very dangerous. They have killed my son that I had before this one. I don't want them to kill him.
Do you see that in the realm of the Gods man has a purpose to protect the, the progenies, the further manifestation, which could suffer harm. There can be more sons but how about this one? Would you protect this one? It's very sophisticated myth. This is a myth that is told by people in teepees.
Scarface promised to do better and several days later as the two were at the end of the Island, they saw a gathering of birds in the water close into shore. And Morningstar said to Scarface, there are they are the bad bird that killed the children my mother birthed before me. Let us fight them. You must not go near them. I promised your mother to keep you away from them, Scarface answered. But Morningstar would not listen. He ran toward the birds, and they hurried ashore and came angrily toward him. But they never got to him for Scarface ran in front of him with his spear and killed all of the birds. They took home with them that heads of the birds and showed them the Nightlight. And Morningstar told her that Scarface had killed all of the bad ones. Then her heart was glad. She hugged Scarface. Said that he was a real son to her. And when sun returned, she told him how he had saved the one remaining son from the long billed **inaudible word**. Then son was pleased too. He said that Scarface had done a great favor to him and Nightlight. That he would never forget it and then offered to do anything he could in return.
Then relieve me of this scar. Make my skin smooth so that a beautiful girl of my tribe that I want will have me for her man. I will remove it said Sun. And he rubbed the black medicine upon the scarred cheek and rubbed it off. And there remained no **inaudible word** trace of the deep scar. And he was pleased with what he had done it for the **inaudible word**. And so were Nightlight and Morningstar pleased.
But it was not all that **inaudible word** for the young man. **inaudible word** say that he was chief ruler of the above people and of the Earth and all life upon it. He instructed Scarface, just how he and his kind should worship him so that they might have a long and prosperous life there upon the Earth. And the most important rule that he gave, each summer a large lodge should be built in honor of him. And its center post hung with offerings that were most **inaudible word**. And chief among them was a hyde of a white buffalo **inaudible few word**. And there were many other instructions.
Now this is a myth, that is to say that this is the mythic core of the experience that the ritual of the Sundance is wound around. And any Plain Indians from the Rockies to the Woodlands would have understood this myth as being implicit in all of the actions of the Sundance. But when it comes time to see the Oakhaun (sp?) film, which, uh, is made of the Blackfoot version of the Sundance, this myth is implicit in the whole **inaudible word**.
Part of the ceremony involved is that man bridges between Heaven and Earth, making that complementation work, making the universal current flow between the pole so that the pole, the polarities become compliments of the unity. And **inaudible word or two** to do just that. Surrounds himself because it's not just the person egotistically alienated alone, but rather his connection with those largest symbolic forms which he wears like his universal clothing. Always. The others which whom we live, our friends and our companions. In the largest sense the human family of those who quest in the same way. And the **inaudible word** by, in this case the Sundance Lodge is the essence of the material which surround their **inaudible word** that if you're going to make a great ritual ceremony you choose the essence of the material, which make up the natural basis of your life.
Now for the Hopi Indians, the **inaudible word**, the prayer feather, or feathers and evergreen, and sometimes turquoise and they all, they, all these are natural elements. That is, we call symbolically with our vision from the natural bases and that becomes the beginning of the ritual orientation of ourselves for this purpose of making this flow between Heaven and Earth, between the visible and the invisible happen.
So that the purpose then if you want to ask again what is for. The purpose, man's purpose, is to permit that cycle to become dynamic and continuous. And of course, we find ourselves like most people have for many, many, many millennia coming into a process that has been ongoing, and we simply keep it going. There have been times in certain cultures where people have discovered that the process has stopped and had to be started again. And those peoples of course, um, always found some way in which to commemorate the beginning of the cycle again. We have, for instance, I think, in the English language tradition, one such, uh, um, beginning was the **inaudible word** exploits of the King Arthur and the round table. Or in, uh, more ancient days in classical Greece it was the ex-wife of the Trojan war. These are all indications that, that cycle of sacrifice which permitted an understanding of the world and of our place in it had come to some kind of a halt and so it had to be started up again. And these, these would forms made to, um, engender that. We fortunately come in at a time of history and in a culture where we have plenty of forms moving and dynamic.
One more thing and then we'll take a, a short break. Helping us to see this is one of the favorite little things The Tao Te Ching. The Tao Te Ching or The Way of life of Lao Tzu, which is a great boom to us. **inaudible word** that individual exists so far away from us in terms of culture and time that we are not concerned at all with whether or not, um, he was a Democrat or Republican or whatever other concerns we might want to encumber him with. He's just the most beautiful, far distant great-grandfather, to use the Indian term. He's like a great grandfather to us. that as we read translation, after translation of his word his story telling about how everything and all nothing compliment again and again, are wonderful tales for us. And we read the 81 sections of The Tao Te Ching almost as if it were a mythological cycle or a ritual cycle, which we can recite for itself in our experience. It's short enough. You can carry it around with you. It must be 50 different translations by now.
And so, two sections from this translation by an American poet Whitter Boner. Two sections just to bring us into harmony with everything that has been said today.
Existence is beyond the power of words to define. Terms may be used but none of them absolute. In the beginning of Heaven and Earth there were no words. Words came out of the womb of matter. And whether a man does passionately see to the core of life or passionately sees the surface, the core and the surface are essentially the same. Words make **inaudible word** seem different only to express appearance. If names be needed, wonder **inaudible word** them both. From wonder into wonder **inaudible word or two** open.
And then the 25th part.
Before creation a predator existed. Self-contained. Complete. Formless. Voiceless. **inaudible word**. Changeless. Which yet pervaded itself with unending motherhood. Though there can be no name for it, I have called it the way of life. Perhaps I should have called it the fullness of life. Since fullness implies widening into space. Implies still further widening. implied widening until the circle is whole. In this sense the way of life is fulfilled. Heaven is fulfilled. Earth is fulfilled. And a fit man also is fulfilled. These are the amplitudes of the universe. And a fit man is one of them. Man rounding the way of Earth. Earth rounding the way of Heaven. Heaven rounding the way of life till the circle is full.
All of this, and it's a curious thing that to the static mind, the fullness of the world appears to be a chance wheel of fortune that has no rhyme or reason instead of the pattern of a great wheel of meaning. It's a very curious thing.
Well, let's take a break and then, uh, we'll, we'll continue with the second half. **inaudible background noise/few words**
I guess maybe we'll, we'll start for... we'll go for about another 20 minutes or so. One, um, one difficulty in, uh, in approaching any kind of material. We are, we are all very sophisticated products of, uh, intellection. And we come ready equipped to overpower, um, any experience or anything personable. And so quite often, um, in our experience we run across the admonition from people who have been questing a long time to unlearn a number of techniques. Or to, in a more prosaic way, to empty the cup, which is already too full before we can begin to have anything else. And, uh, of course the vision of the grail was always reserved for that **inaudible word**. That is that, um, quester who is not already filled with the forms of what to expect.
And in this, uh, course of events the material that we are engendering constantly, uh, bringing up is meant to overlay in such a way as to produce a feeling somewhere along the line of intellectual vertigo. Of chaos. It's meant to produce this because we have to have in our own estimation the experience that look at all this. What is all this going to do? Where is it all going? Because at that kind of a junction we have a real chance then to create a threshold over which we might totally, with all of our faculties set, and begin to learn.
In this process, in here, I'm constantly trying to **inaudible word** material to create a very rich mix. So that when you take yourself away from this fulcrum, from this room and this night, that on succeeding days during the week at various moments, you might brush up again, one or more of these elements in your experience. Either through actually sitting down and **inaudible word** through one of the texts, instead of, uh, umm, watching what the neighbors might be doing or what your family might be up to. Or instead of thinking about, uh, the bills and so forth. Or that you might find yourself in the most mundane kind of a situation and some image or some ideas will raise itself unbeknownst to you. And start flashing its guildedness at you and your attention will come back. And you will suppose that somehow one of the sequence that I've been embroidering up here in this experience have caught some sunlight somehow. And that if that is possible maybe there's hope yet. Maybe all this really does yield something, I suppose we would call it magical if we were more naïve.
Out of this experience of a chaos comes a possibility for a cosmos not the kind of cosmos that **inaudible few words**. The cosmos that we realize that we are participating in. That you can look at **inaudible few words** and begin to envision yourself looking at same kinds of constellated sequences as people around the world might be at various times and participating in. And that persons throughout history might be participating in. This begins to capture the magnitude of what we are actually capable of as spiritual beings.
Triggering our perception to this as Mr. Hall writes in one of this, his most lovely little pamphlets, the, um, Spiritual Centers of Man, we are never told directly A, B, C. No one will ever do that. And in fact, even if one were capable, it would be, um, an improper procedure to just lay things out one, two, three. That they cannot be given in that way. They cannot be received in that way. That it is only through the overlay of many oblique angles that the geometry of meaning rises in our own consciousness, our own experience, our own estimation.
And so, I present constantly an array of images from all the times and all places hoping to encourage you to widen, broaden that circle of possibility. Because, uh, I think our biggest difficulty is getting, as the Renaissance people used to say, um, sense of proportion. That we're used to a very small neurotic wedge of experience and if that doesn't quite work well, then maybe the world is just not worth it. When we widen out and widen out our sense of proportion has to transform. We can no longer just add a couple more inches or a couple of more degree. That we have to change the entire dimension of our outlook. And this metamorphosis, this change is what it being encouraged here. And is supportive of that wonderful and cyclic work life **inaudible word** if you're familiar with it in some patterned way, that is not reading it from cover to cover, but having had experience with these venerable grand traditions and insight in some patterned way at some time in your experience.
It will serve as a horizon of understanding. When that sequencing of moment arises for you to explore that geometry of meaning. And you never can tell what part of what tradition will have surface for you and come to be meaningful for you. And startlingly enough, it's never that we find ourselves congruent with a tradition, but rather as Joseph Campbell observed in creative mythology, we contain whole universes of meaning within ourselves now individually. And we're putting together our own mythologies and we're borrowing and taking them here and there and transmuting it in our own experience and time. And coming up with something creative something that was not there before, which is odd, to manifest and to contribute. And so, we're looking for the unknown. We're looking for something that hasn't yet risen. Because in a very real way, that part of our experience, which is the early Riser is looking for that Earth bound scarred personage with whom in cooperation, a great pattern can be manifested again and again.
I have a few slide images to show and then I'll **inaudible few words**. And then if we could just **inaudible few words** while these lights are on.
**inaudible chatter in the background**
This is **inaudible few words**. And I remarked last time that the Navajo speak a totally different language from the Hopi even though they surround the Hopi people.
This is a presentation of that imagery that we had in the previous slide. Instead of the **inaudible few words** of the **inaudible word or two** with all the natural accoutrements, we have here a presentation of a spiritual **inaudible word** that seems to be essentially **inaudible few words**.
And then I'd like to go back to the **inaudible word** one. This is a mythic vision. And this is a spiritual vision. **inaudible word or two** through the symbolic frame of reference.
This is a mythic vision. This is done by a contemporary British Columbia **inaudible word** Indian artist named Reed, **inaudible word** Reed. Very often Indians, American Indians of a **inaudible word** Western names. The **inaudible word** used to hunt whales in great canoes.
This is very sophisticated as art and the **inaudible several words** they come before. The symbolism of the waves mimicking or being mimicked by the crowns of the boats. The waves of the ocean and the crowns of the boats and the **inaudible word or two** of the **inaudible word**. And the sunlight stings of the **inaudible word** constitutes a whirlwind wherein man lives by his ritual meaning. And it's not his purpose, to take it further, it's not his purpose to extricate himself from the water or from the boats or **inaudible word** the whales to participate in the ecology of meaning of the **inaudible several words**.
This is Paul **inaudible word** version. **inaudible several words** But you can see the checkered spectrum of experience **inaudible word** only by some kind of an inner spotlight **inaudible word or two** that doesn't conform to natural way. It's not a natural painting. It is surreal. The boat, the whale, the man are all symbols **inaudible word** against the checkered pattern of existence that flows indefinitely. **inaudible word or two** stopping and only turns back in some kind of **inaudible word or two** shape of action to **inaudible word** what we call **inaudible word or two**.
These are tattoos in a form that **inaudible word or two** in the Siberian **inaudible word** about 12,000 years ago. The **inaudible word** penetration of forms that is covering up oneself, becoming the **inaudible word** man as it were **inaudible several words**. We're, we are often covered with our images and our ideas. We tattoo them in our minds instead of onto our bodies. And then we carry just that tremendous chaos with us in suspension. And we look sometimes within ourselves and **inaudible few words**. And in this **inaudible word** inappropriate process we would rather focus that imagery. And sometimes spiritual man look very strange to these logical **inaudible word**. And if we took a Rembrandt style of a portraiture against a **inaudible word** we would have a **inaudible word or two ** but it is not. It must be **inaudible few words**.
And the same here.
And the same here.
And the same here.
All these are qualities of experience which are acceptable to us. Some more than others at the beginning. But one test, self-test, along the way is when all of these tomes of experience begin to become accessible and begin to have reverberations in ourselves. Then we know that we have widened. Widened the realm of **inaudible word**. Widened the realm of **inaudible word**. Widened our realm and the circle is getting full. And we see all the various **inaudible word** and see themselves **inaudible word** more and more to an experience like a system of meaning. And in order to express it we have to symbolize and select in.
The **inaudible word or two** experience should be available to us. That's **inaudible few words**.
Well, I thank you very much. And I hope you continue to keep reading. Read the introduction to **inaudible several words**, Moby Dick, and The Book of Hopi. Next week I'll try to introduce the very people who are reading the same ritual **inaudible few words**. Thanks again very, very much.
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