Summer Solstice: The Tao of Journeying
Presented on: Saturday, June 21, 1980
Presented by: Roger Weir
Summer Solstice: The Tao of Journeying
Presentation 1 of 1
Summer Solstice
The Tao of Journeying
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, June 21, 1980
Transcript:
June 21st, Roger Weir on The Tao of Journeying.
Special event lecture series for Philosophical Research Society. And I'm somewhat out of practice. I haven't lectured five years to the day. I resigned a very lucrative position for ethical reasons five years ago, in Canada. And so, this is quite an unlimbering of dusty things for me. And I'm very glad to be here though. I think that the aims of the Philosophical Research Society are commensurate with the highest ideals of civilization, at anytime and anywhere.
I would like to begin with a collection of attention, my own, as well as yours, by reading a poem which is apropos of the tone of what I would like to present before all of us today. I am not one of these lecturers who knows exactly what he wants you to know. I'm one of these family-type diners. I put a huge bowl of nourishment out in the center someplace, and we all try to partake of that. And that's the style that I was trained in by a Chinese master in San Francisco, who refused to let me be a normal American graduate student. And so, this is the way that I've always learned to do things.
This poem is entitled The Snow Man. And the author is quite an interesting figure, incidentally. His name was Wallace Stevens. And he was an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company. In fact, he was for many years one of the top executives there at Hartford, Connecticut. And typical of the Tao of Journeying, he used to write his poems in his mind on his way to work in the morning commuting. And when he would get into his office, the first thing that he would do was have his executive secretary take the poem for the day.
And Steven's poetry is quite interesting because it is a poetry of the mind, almost exclusively rather than of the page. And two of his very great friends, E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams were poets of the page. You have to lift their poems off the page almost with your eyes in order to see what they're doing. Stevens hovers in our attention someplace in between our ears and our inner ears. And this is a poem that he did when he was a fairly young man. I like it very much, and I think it's a good beginning for us today. Entitled simply, The Snow Man.
"One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow. And have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice. The spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun. And not to think of any misery in the sound of the winds. In the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare places. For the listener who listens in the snow, and nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
Let me try once more, just to set the tone. A good poem has to be read twice anyway. The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens.
"One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow. And have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice. The spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun. And not to think of any misery in the sound of the winds. In the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare places. For the listener who listens in the snow, and nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
This is pure American Zen, if you wish, or Taoism. It's a very peculiar thing that this land of ours with its hodgepodge of traditions and sort of scarecrow structure of wisdom teachings. The shattered early primordial wisdom that was here with the American Indians and our technological deluge and our economic grandeur that produces that greedy neurosis called business. It's strange that this country would have produced already in just a few hundred years some of the finest and most refined minds and sensibilities that the world has seen. We are extremely fortunate to have these kindred spirits and souls accessible to us in the language that we speak every day. And in the kind of consciousness that we carry to the supermarket or to work or to home every day. And it's this accessibility of the great tradition of wisdom that belongs to the everyday here in this country that I think eventually will set us apart.
This grand tradition of wisdom used to be the private prevue of the elite. Whether set aside by tradition or by circumstance or by design, most likely under the sword of conquest or the obfuscation of very, very, very secret Tao. For us, it's an open-fare, and all we have to do is make the choice to simply investigate and carry with us in our daily living little hints and clues which eventually for us can elicit the very finest response. A quality of presence of being that when directed to things as they are, yield fullness of vision. The nothing that's not there, and the nothing that is.
This is a very, very peculiar situation, and in direct contrast to this, in parallel of sorts, within a contrast, our immediate tradition here in the West begins with Homer. Most likely our only introduction to Homer ever is The Odyssey. The Iliad being one of those perfectly balanced, huge murals. Geometrically form and focused on one incident in the center and everything just balanced precariously on one inside, the inside, the nature of **inaudible word**. The Iliad is a little inaccessible to us. It's rather like those...The reading of The Iliad is like the launching of a great mysterious gray battleship in the fog. It's so large and so cumbersome that one is never quite sure what it is. But The Odyssey, accessible to us. Its light, skipping rhythms. Its charming sequencing of fantastic images and holy images, finally brings back to us a sense that we after all, after 3000 years, are very close to this beautiful blind sage.
**inaudible word** Homer is reputed to have written a hymn to Apollo that if any beautiful lady happens to ask him, "Who's the best writer of all time?" tell her it was a blind old man in rocky **inaudible word**. His psalms were the best. And that was about 3000 years ago.
But in The Odyssey, a very peculiar set of circumstances were given to the hero, who has had the great success in war. Who has wandered around the world and has had great excess...success and excess. And has been offered what we would think the magna cum laude degree of humanity. He's been offered immortality. He may live forever. And not simply as that **inaudible word** who living with decay with age and finally just be terrified by mortality. No, Odysseus was offered this wonderful immortality to live with a Goddess for all time. He turned it down. He said no, I'm going home. She couldn't understand. And I suppose most peoples at most times would fail to understand the point. Is it not some kind of ultimately secure paradise that we seek, after all? Is that not the objective and the goal? Are we not looking for a heaven or a nirvana. Or some situation where we are forever then protected? Why turn it down if it's offered to you? Odysseus does. And we in our kind of way of living is very simpatico with that. You see, he has an ally. He has the open kind of wisdom. He had the friendship with Athena. And he knows that the completeness of life is the important thing for him.
And in The Odyssey, his commitment is always never just for himself, but to finally return home. It is his homecoming. And the vision of this homecoming for him is like a quality of presence of mind, like in the poem The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens. It gives him the capacity that any kind of a daily gestalt, a melee of images or a satisfaction of desires or perhaps the sense of outgoing adventure. Whatever the situation. Whatever the events. He has within himself that piercing perception, the presence of mind, the presence of presence itself, if you can use that kind of phrasing, to see through to his homecoming which is not forbade him. And the rest of his companions, as you must know, all perished. He alone made it home.
Athena, then, is worth our looking at. And it seems at first glance that Athena would be as far from Lao Tzu and Taoism, as far from The I-Ching as one could imagine. And this is so, and that's why they are so close. Because we're not dealing with the scale of values that the ends become more and more disparate. We're dealing rather with a fullness of being. A fullness of the perception of being. Where the ends curve round and resonate together. And we find kinship with people at the farthest ends of the earth and at the farthest ends of time. Because we are similar and ultimately, in a very, very pleasantly mysterious way, with them we are interchangeable.
Athena, I guess I should outline this for you a little bit. Athena was not simply left to the province of a book, The Odyssey or The Iliad. She was not simply left in some volume of mythology. Athena was taken into the daily life of the Greeks of Attica in the most profound sense on the highest point in their terrain, on the Acropolis. Where time-honored for thousands of years structures of religious sacrifice had been built. They built for her in the age of Pericles, the finest building ever built anywhere. The buildings called the Parthenon. And it was at the time it was built and still today an absolute miracle in the perception of architectural form and significance. And throughout all the ages, the Parthenon survived to the wonderment of all cultures and civilizations until it was used as an ammunition dump. And some foolish military excursionists a few centuries ago demolished most of the building by sending a rocket into this ammunition dump.
But when it was built, the Parthenon in its structure contained two rooms. One small room for the kind of treasure which the businessman would recognize, the copper with the monies and so forth. The other contained the treasures that everyone in the city came to recognize. And that was it was the sacred space where this enormous statue of Athena, about 40 feet tall, that's about a four-story building. Wooden, but covered with glittering ivories. And every year, this statue of Athena would be cloaked by what was called the peplos, which was a huge cape. And it would be carried in this grand procession by the people of the city of Athens, every year, up to the Acropolis into the Parthenon with great ceremony and drape it around the Goddess. And what was on that wonderful cloak of Athena? Embroidered were all the mythic images that were significant to the imagination and minds of Greek people. And they were almost all derived from Homer. Genius and the perception of Homer.
And to make sure that no one would ever forget how it was done, they simply carved on friezes around the Parthenon the events that would take place every year. And so, we know exactly what they did because we still have those friezes. And we know exactly the dimensions of the building because even from the ruins we can compute the design of the whole.
This kind of sense of completion entering into the everyday lives of its people is the only process that ever ultimately retains its significance for human beings. This is the only thing that ultimately matters. And we find parallels with this. The odd thing is that our problem today is a problem not of happy, mythic images to embroider on the cloak or even a place in which to carry it, but we don't understand too well any longer how to bring these things together. It's the integration of them that's become a problem for us. Partly because we have an insistence on form, on the things which are. And we forget that every form that is accessible to us is accessible by virtue of the formlessness which allows that form to penetrate through to our perception.
In other words, we're saturated with the yang of things. And almost unknowing of the yin of things. We're almost unable to allow that, the popular phrase, that which is not. The nothing. The emptiness of the cup as to the utility of the vehicle. This is the problem.
And this is where the Tao of journeying becomes a fine art for us. And a possibility. Because we have in our sensibilities the capacities read to you in this Wallace Steven's poem and in **inaudible word or two**, which I will present today. We have that capacity to see both the yin and the yang, the form and the formlessness, together.
Let's try another poem by Stevens to try and focus this a little bit. This is a poem which I think focuses very, very nicely the tone of what I've been saying for about 15 minutes here. And it's simply entitled The American Sublime.
"How does one stand to behold the sublime? To confront the mockers. The mickey mockers and plated pairs. When General Jackson posed for his statue, he knew how one feels. Shall a man go barefoot, blinking and blank? But how does one feel? One grows used to the weather, the landscape and that. And the sublime comes down to the spirit itself. The spirit and space. The empty spirit in vacant space. What wine does one drink? What bread does one eat?"
This is an insurance executive composing this on a commuter train. These thoughts are easily accessible to us, except that normally they occur to us in such fleeting instance that when we are young and naive, we write them off or dismiss them as just little blinks of insight. And later, when we come into the fullness of our powers of perception and mind and so forth, we try to make intellectual quandaries out of them, and we end up tying big plates of spaghetti noodles. Nothing comes out. The baby's crying. We've got to go to work, and we're distracted and everything's left. And then finally, some of that comes along like this. And we get a chance to hold it in front of us for a little longer than a second. And for sure there is. It is accessible. It is easy to see. It's easy to feel. It's our own. And this is part of the Tao journey. This is part of the contemporary way of life that we find ourselves akin to.
And with the ancient Greeks, with Homer, with Odysseus, who is the man of many miles, he has an infinite variety of ways of looking at the world in that sense, and at people. And when he comes in contact with people, he tries to know their mind, their style of thinking, their style of presentation. And all the way through the great voyages in The Odyssey, the experience with Polyphemus, the experiences with Circe or Calypso, Scylla and Charybdis, throughout all these great episodes, Odysseus is learning a variety of ways in which has can deal with what we would call fantastic reality. But the real test for him is when he comes home. And when he presents himself. He comes not as the triumphant warrior, but as a beggar in disguise. He knows that the appearance which he carries forth is going to identify him, it's going to be the form by which he is responded to. And Odysseus is enough in control of the total perception of himself that he can wear a disguise almost, in the phrase today, for real.
When he first lands, again, in Ithaca, and he talks to the shepherd Eumaeus to find out the first information about the state of his homeland. He gives a fantastic story that he's actually a son of a rich Cretan merchant and he'd been chased out of Crete and whatever. And later on, he goes through another spiel to Penelope, his wife. In disguise, he tells her a similar story. He does not lose track of himself. He does not lose track of the importance of keeping his power of penetration and vision. The sense let's use the Sanskrit word here, prajna. The sense of wisdom which cuts through, which pierces through. But it creates a divergence as any image of the sword. The cutting through of wisdom of perception creates a sense that there are forms but that they are at play, and at motion in a matrix, in a field, which in and of itself does not present a thing. Is not an object. Is not capable of being labeled or adequately named.
And this brings us to perhaps the finest statement, perception of the un-nameable. and that comes from a Chinese sage which we all know, Lao Tzu, who lived about 600 B.C. And in the beginning, the very first chapter of The Tao Te Ching, he makes a statement in sort of paralleling couplets. And it's the finest statement that I know of for us. There are over 50 translations of The Tao Te Ching in English. It's a very easy, almost rule-of-thumb way of focusing on this problem of the form and formless. The yin and the yang. The situation that obtains when insight is opportune. When the sense of presence is kept in mind. And we look at things. All of a sudden, we have this inner play of forms and mystery. This is how Lao Tzu expressed it, in translation.
This incidentally is a translation by Edward Hercules. And is contained in a book published in Switzerland about 30 years ago. And just to refresh,
"The Tao that can be discussed must not be eternally. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The name is the mother of all things. Always without desires, thereby one beholds its secret. Always having desires, thereby one sees its return. These two are of the same origin, but different in name. Together, they are called the dark one. The one still darker than the dark one. The gate of every mystery."
Now there is a convenient way in which this has been expressed in a symbol, which we all know. And that's this wonderful symbolic device called the Tai Chi. Supreme. Ultimate. And this of course, is well known. All of us have seen it. Most of us for many years of our lives. This is quite an unusual device. In fact, one of my favorite illustrations of the magic of the Tai Chi was in an illustration that a student of mine did one time of four old Chinese sages. Three, three Chinese sages, simply sitting under a tree in **inaudible word** staring at the Tai Chi.
This contemplation of men, this meditation upon that, is inexhaustible. It's a phenomenon that as we get more and more used to it, we begin to see emerge a new tone to the quality of feeling. The sense of presence inside of us. It begins to have almost like, let's say the plaining edges around the dark chakra, when we understand that that symbol is in motion and that we are in motion with it so that it seems not to be in motion. That is to say, this symbol and the contemplation of this symbol gives us a sense of increasing intelligence about our sense of presence. So that it is not simply always a diffuse awareness or an undifferentiated universal experience. Or simply an incident of cosmic consciousness is what **inaudible word or two** about 90 years ago. It becomes more and more intelligible. That is, we begin to understand and be able to express in increased patternings of images which finally emerge into what we call a language. And we begin to make sense to each other intelligently about the qualities which are symbolized here. Brought together and integrated here.
Two examples of ways in which this does not work. One, and many conceptions think of the Tai Chi, or a phenomenon symbolized by the Tai Chi as a simple polarity. A polarizing. A positive and negative. A yes and a no. The light and the dark. This, this sense of blind polarity, like this, is simply a loggerhead. In fact, in the Tibetan imagery, the Galpo, the foolish devil, is always painted exactly one-half black and one-half white. This is the image of a foolish parallel to real wisdom. It produces nothing but a loggerhead of tension all the way through. Although one can develop a sense of regard for it and come out with great philosophies based on it. It is the kind of stupidity that a computer without a human being would come up with as wisdom. And all of that, everything derived from this understanding of polarity is truly illusion. It has no basis whatsoever in any reality.
A second closer one, is the phenomenon that can be symbolized somewhat like this. Let's label this. This is a mechanical distribution of energy. The same thing said for this divine polarity applied here, although it's more difficult to see, because this seems to have the sense of inner play. It seems to have the kind of interchange that we would think that we've been talking about all the time. But the fact is that this mechanic distribution of energy also leads to the same blind illusion of this kind of polarity. This problem was very famous in Greek thought about two generations before Plato. And it produced the kind of conundrum, and conundrum is the philosophic word for a tension which cannot be resolved. On the Homeric base, on the back of Odysseus and his understanding of wisdom personified in Athena. But before the Parthenon was built. Before they understood what they had. A philosopher named Parmenides from the city of Elea came up with pithy statement which stymied the Greek mind for about a generation. He said, "What is, is, and what isn't, isn't." That's a damnable thing to try to wrangle with in your mind. To try to spin out in terms of the iconography of a human life, it is almost impossible. And it produces almost by mirror paralleling, a reaction so that one goes completely over to the other side and thinks that is so completely wrong, so completely devastatingly a dead end, that the exact opposite must be true. That what is not must be what is. And what is must be what is not. And one gets a topsy-turvy kind of a world.
Plato working on the basis of a great insight made by Pythagoras. And Pythagorean insight, I think can be illustrated by the use of 10 dots. Famous in antiquity and the Tetractys. Pythagoras realized that the imagery of, that is expressed as a number has a relational reality that is true all the time anywhere. And yet is not in and of itself an object or a thing. For instance, the idea of two thirds, where is that? The idea of that something could be three fourths. There is no particular object that is a two thirds, or a three fourths. And yet, the concept, the relational concept coming out of the basic symbolism of the tetractys becomes something fascinating. It gives us the confidence that somehow in things that are not objectively there, the key to what is in fact objectively there resides. And that by getting away from blind polarities and going into relational metaphysical perceptions of the world we come a little closer to a resolution. Or at least to a solution that may allow a resolution.
This phenomenon took place about the same time that Lao Tzu was writing The Tao Te Ching in China. And about the same time that the Tai Chi was being focused on as a possible resolution for the Chinese style of the quandary, which Parmenides had annunciated so well. Plato wrestled with this idea from his early days until the end of his life. And in Plato, I'd like to point out to you two places, two dialogues, in which he made steps which are still accessible for us in our daily experience to apprehend. The first one was in a dialogue that's usually written off as one of the minor dialogues of Plato and it's called The Charmides. Charmides. Charmides was a handsome lad. He was a dashing swashbuckler. Beautiful body, beautiful smile. Charming, graceful movements. And 25 years after Plato's dialogue was set, he was on The council of Thirteen **inaudible word or two** almost tore Athens apart. Part of the irony in Plato is that he always shows us what the true nature of people really is.
But Charmides, in that dialogue, the concept that Plato was trying to bring out, and the form is simply Socrates and a few friends talking. Socrates questioning this handsome, dashing lad. Trying to find out what it is that sets him apart. That makes him tick so well. And the Greek word for it was sophrosyne. And Sophrosyne is kind of an inter-balance. Aa kind of a self-knowledge. But it's very peculiar. It's full of ironies. Because of Socrates elicits both from Charmides and from his sophistic teacher Critias who was there and several others. He finds out that none of them, including Socrates himself, can say just what it is. Because it is a very peculiar knowledge, it is a knowledge of its own self. And as long as the human being is thinking in terms of these kinds of loggerhead schemata, a knowledge that is knowledge of itself is a conundrum. There's no way to resolve it. It is forever a problem. It is as Chris **inaudible word** wrote in one of his books, an impossible question and is always going to be impossible. And be impossible until the paper is thrown away on which it is written. It's unresolvable, because it does not come to focus in the horizon of meaning which this expresses. Nor this.
On this horizon of meaning, in the sense that finally we can approach that knowledge of knowledge. And it has a very peculiar **inaudible word**. It is practical. That is, it translates into daily life. It isn't just some abstract phenomenon, but it's very practical. Because in sophrosyne is also the implication of something which one does. The old Greek phrase was doing one's own. Doing your own thing. But knowing that you're doing it and actually doing it and not setting your self-consciousness aside from the doing it. And that togetherness was sophrosyne. Which is what Charmides as a young man exhibited but couldn't say what it was. And of course, if it remains naive that kind of an energy, priceless though it is, veers off, atrophies, decays. Becomes something as we know from The Book of Changes quite distinctly different from what it was.
Second dialogue that I'd like to mention to you by Plato, dealing with this issue is called The Sophist. Usually in universities, American universities in particular, you can take 1000 credits of philosophy and they will never read The Sophist. They never tell you that The Sophist is worth reading because it has a part at the end of the dialogue, about 12-15 pages, in which Plato finally says that the world of forms is peculiar because forms have an interchangeable, basic nature. And that only by taking the whole realm of forms and their context together can we know any one of them. And he lets it go at that. And he says that a Sophist is the kind of philosopher who will never know that. And so, he's confident that his scheme or his map of things is the scheme or the map. Or the right way. Or at least the major portion of it. Whereas a real philosopher, real knower of wisdom knows that what he's able to entertain is forever only a part of really what there is. And it's never going to be any other way. And so that one carries around with oneself, we would call a sense of humility. And I think Plato would say it's just knowing that we're ignorant of at least 99 percent of what there is. All the time. We just don't know. But it doesn't stop us from being.
And this is a peculiar thing. Because if we come to apply this. And we're talking about form of being of that quality of presence, that here we are, we know we're here. We can sense even on a very deep perceptive level that we have being. Well, does that mean then that this exists against some realm of not being? Some realm of nothing whatsoever? This is the problem.
And this is the problem that possibly two resolutions offered to us in human experience are worth noting. One is The I-Ching, The Chinese Book of Changes. The other is a great work of Buddhist poetry by Shantideva called The Bodhicaryavatara. Shantideva lived about the 8th century A.D. He was a Buddhist monk in the Madhyamaka tradition and is descended in thought from Nagarjuna who lived about 500 years roughly before him. And Nagarjuna had entertained one of the great perceptions of what human beings really are capable of. That was...the Sanskrit word for it was Shunyata, the void, the nothingness. That fantastic non-thing of non-being. That yes, in fact, we, let's call it Shunyata. Let's use that word. Let's say that the not there is there. Let's just do it for convenience.
Shantideva 500 years later, and that wonderful perception carries in The Bodhicaryavatara, the notion that once the awakening of the desire for enlightenment. Once the bodhisattva is awakened in a sentient being. And that little light, that little fire. That little spark of prajna, if you like, carried in one's being. In one's presence. In one's daily life. Can be guarded and nurtured and broadened **inaudible word**. And all that possible within this fantastic, difficult realm of balancing and interchanging and poetical perception.
Let me try and punctuate this with another poem by Wallace Stevens and then I want to show a few slides and then say some more things about The I-Ching. This is...I'm skipping over such poems in The Connoisseur of Chaos, and other poems to save us. This is a poem called, and there are three together, like three stanzas together, called The Poems of Our Climate. It comes right after two poems, one called Loneliness in Jersey City, and Poetry is a Destructive Force. It is a very interesting **inaudible word or two**. Three short stanzas that link together to become a poem called The Poems of Our Climate.
"Clear water in a brilliant bowl. Pink and white carnations. The light in the room more like a snowy air, reflecting snow. A newly fallen snow at the end of winter when afternoons return. Pink and white carnations. One desires so much more than that. The day itself is simplified. A bowl of white. Cold. A cold porcelain, low and round, with nothing more than the carnations there. Say even that this complete simplicity stripped one of all one's torments. Concealed the evilly compounded vital eye and made it fresh in a world of white. A world of clear water, brilliant-edged. Still, one would want more. One would need more. More than a world of white and snowy scenes. There would still remain the never-resting mind. So that one would want to escape, come back to what one had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness delight. Since the imperfect is so hot in us. Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds."
The imperfect world. We're at home with it. It needn't bother us. I'd like to break this up at this time and show some slides to illustrate visually some of the things I've been talking about. Also, to introduce a couple of corollary things. Allow me just to close this.
How about a small break first?
Do you want a small break?
**inaudible several words/people talking over each other**
The style is kind of esoteric.
Just a few notes and then I'll get to some visual images. We don't have a great deal of time, so I can't go into a lot of the detailing, as you must realize. I'm trying to hit highlights and get juices flowing. One thing that should be brought in is, and we'll see it here at the very bottom of the slide are the Bagua, the eight trigrams. This has happened to me for 20 years. The Bagua are the eight basic trigrams, and they are derivable from this. Much in the same way that, derivable, much in the same way that geometric axioms are derived from simple notions like point, line, and core. From very, very few axioms in geometry we can derive an enormous number of geometric axis from which we may construct a realm of ideas. And the same true for the Taoists.
And in fact, the Taoists in China were responsible for a great many innovations in what we would today would style as science and technology. It's simply that we know now that their genius was truncated by vindations and wars. And even at one time, in about the 8th century, a certain Taoist thinker had come up with a version of the differential calculus. But there was no way to apply it but use it as a mind game. All that was truncated, of course, by devastating wars and the entire development of the scientific mind in China was put in limbo.
But the fact for us to note is that we simply don't rest, are not content to rest, with some primordial mysterious statement. But we wish to extend it. We wish it to be become intelligible for us. Both to express things with a sense of comradery with kindred people, also to make it intelligible to ourselves.
Just briefly, a couple of notes about the Bagua. These trigrams make up the hexagrams of The I-Ching, as you must all know. And that the change, the patterns of change in Bagua is that on this side, on the creative side, as we delegate value to it the unbroken line is the yang, because we delegate that value to it. It could be the other way around. The yang line at the bottom of this trigram rises. And as it rises in the form, it occupies the second space, then the third space. And then finally the fullness of that form of motion **inaudible word or two** with the totally created trigram. The same is true on this side with the yin, or the broken line. It rises. We're dealing with The Book of Changes. What we're looking at are relational things and changes. And changing relational aspects of the unbroken line, this is this progression up to this. This trigram here, and this trigram here, are these phenomenon here. That is that fire and water. Water, calm, invisible. Fire, glee, the clanging, are the points of interchange in the Taoist system...
This kind of sophistication was just not available for casual discourse. At one time, for instance, the stylization of energy patterns was somewhat similar to this kind of mechanical distribution. And in fact, in the commentary, The Ta Chuan, The Great Treatise in The I-Ching, you'll find a map, very similar to this, the Yellow River map, in which the one becomes the two, and the three. And these are given directions and forms. And these symbolic elements eventually separate out and form eight trigrams around a center. This is just to give you an indication that things were not immediately perceptible like this. In this kind of sophistication. It had to go through a lot of machinations. And there are ways to spell these things out.
The Tao is not simply something which one says is there, isn't it mysterious? There are many, many things, huge tomes of statements that can be made about it, if we wish to. And yet, none of those tomes could get in the way of just carrying a sense of it with us. Even if you're in a supermarket pushing your cart, you can still have that sense of presence that there's an inner changeability going on, in a context that in and of itself is nothing at all.
Now a few slides to introduce a couple of other things, and also to give us a sense of imagery. I always like to keep our sense of imagery as close to a language as possible.
This, of course, is the old Fu Chi. He lived about 5,000 years ago. You notice the tortoise down below. When they were excavating at Anyang in the twenties and thirties, they found mounds and mounds of burnt, cracked tortoise shells, indicating that the early style of divination by The I-Ching had been going on for many, many hundreds of years.
This is the great stupa at Sanchi and is more in image in keeping with the style of the lines of Shantideva in The Bodhicaryavatara. Just to show you a graphic image, somewhat different from Fu Chi.
And here's the...this slide's in upside down. This a slide of Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon. And these are, this is much the way it looks today. This slide, I think was made about 1975. 74- 75, around in there. Just to provide some images for you, I don't want to elaborate too much.
This is a drawing of a little hut. And the form in the center at the top is a frond of a plant. And we here in Los Angeles recognize it somewhat as a banana plant. And this is a sumi-e drawing of Basho. Basho's hut. And Basho took his name from the banana plant. The banana plant is the Basho. And it tears easily in the wind and it waves around. It's not very strong, and yet it survived because it has subtleness to it, and it was able to endure. And the sumi-e style, again, you can see the inner penetration of form and formlessness. This is the place of residence of the great Matsuo Basho, who lived about 300 years ago. And he was responsible for one of the most delightful documents in The Tao of Journeying. He wrote a small book, a travel journal, called The Oku no Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
And in this travelogue Basho, coming about 2,500 years after Lao Tzu, gave us a mixture of prose, which is a certain kind of formal presentation, and poetry of a very specific kind. In fact, he invented it, called the haiku. And what the haiku does is it cautions us to stop our ordinary mind, our ordinary continuity of forming, and to pause. And in that pause, to see through a transparent frame of reference to the formless. And Basho invented the haiku in a very peculiar way. The haiku is a 17-syllable bit of language, which gives one image. But not to give the image, but to allow something to go through that image. It used to be that poets in Japan, like their predecessors in China, and we hope that it will gain fame in the United States, used to sit around and drink, and write poems together. And they would write one poem, and the haiku would be the first idea or image. And then everybody in round-robin style would add an image, until they had a linked verse, or a renga, as they used to call it. And that would be the poem. And the poem would be what all of us put together around this central form, which allowed us to see through it into the realm of, as a Chinese would style it, nothing whatsoever. And in that sense, our companionship was a companionship of the infinite. We were companions for all of time and everywhere. And just because it might be 1632, or 1795, or 1980, it makes no difference whatsoever. Just because this was the third planet in this particular star system or the fourth planet in some other star system, it made no difference. But beyond time and space, we have shared a companionship that transcended time and space. And that initial signal, that symbol of that capacity, that we can do that anytime we choose, together or by ourselves if we need to, was the haiku.
And Basho, whose lineage was from a family of samurai soldiers, who by the 1600's, the pistol put the samurai out of business. It didn't matter how fast you were with the sword, any punk with a gun could shoot you down before you could even see him. So, the samurai, by Basho's time, had already given up flashing their swords. But Basho in true samurai form, used language like a masterful samurai. All you could see is just the glint of the hint of an image, and not the thing itself. And that's what a haiku does.
And The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was, of course, presented many times and illustrated. These illustrations are by the great haiku poet Busan, who followed Basho by a couple of generations. And you can see here, the typical use of the sumi-e style of line. But also, Busan's wonderful handling of shades and volumes. And the subject matter is interesting, and the way in which it is presented, that is its line quality is interesting. And both those interests reside in the same perception.
Another page from that, also by Busan. Wonderful Matsuo Basho. I could not find my copy of The Oku no Hosomichi to bring. But one of the haiku extremely famous in there, was the one where Basho is walking with his companion Sora. And they get to a resting place, and he gives us the image that the sound of the cicada penetrates the granite stone before him. Another one, they're walking through an ancient battlefield, and in the very tall, grassy, weedy rubble, he sees the helmet of an old warrior, who perished some hundreds of years before. And a blade of grass is growing through the eyepiece of the helmet. Little things like that. And this universe really loves little things like that. Just those little things.
In contrast to Busan's lovely light handling this is one of the kinds of places that Basho would have visited. These are the pillars at Forugi. And the same principles at work here. The lines are drawn a little thicker. A little more formality. The object is the same. Give you a place in which the interchangeability of form and formlessness, attention to detail is given.
Just a series of slides now just to round out something from Basho. An approach up these steps, these are steps going up to the temple gate. This is one of the little side gardens in this temple. And this is one of those little places where water drips in, one drop at a time, to flow in its ripples over the side.
We can use any scale whatsoever. We can use huge colors of architecture. We can use little squiggly sumi-e lines. We can use great philosophies of Plato or The I-Ching. Or we can just carry a sense of presence with ourselves, any place, any time. The effect is the same. The intelligence is the same. And it's just a question of proportion.
Another example. This is a painting by Ma Yuan, one of the greatest of the Song landscape painters. He was often styled one-corner mob, because of his use of piling everything into one corner. The Tai Chi is here, almost graphically in the midst of the yang forming on the lower right. Is that poet-philosopher in whose self a little bit of the nothing resides. And out there in the nothing, what he's seeing, in the midst of that voided mist, a single solitary bird on the wing. One is reminded a little bit of Li Po's famous phrase of poem, very Taoist. He said, "I'd like a certain bird who, flying South so long retired, and I think I'll fly North." Complete, effortless interchange of form.
This is...it's in backwards. This is a slide from Sesshu's Long Scroll. I thought to bring the entire Long Scroll on slides. Again, apologies, I could not locate my set. This again, very much like the Ma Yuan. About 500 years later at the time. From the vantage of where we are, in a certain Gestate form, we always have a view towards the infinite. And it's always accessible to us. And while we can enjoy maneuvering around in what is, we should try to keep mind what is not. Because in that interchange and penetration is the full view.
And this just an image to give us a rest. A **inaudible word** Taoist painting of grove trees, much like you might find any place in the Sierra Nevada, at about 8,000- or 9,000-feet altitude. These pines look like they're a scruffy kind of trees that get up towards the end of the tree line.
Now some images from another realm entirely and yet paralleling almost exactly. These are images from the Blackfoot Indian reservation, obtained from the tribe in Canada. One of the great ways in which we mark up the orderings of intelligence is to keep track of the year. To know where we are in terms of the motions of shared time. Even though we can know that we are just designating these values, we could designate other ones. Let's agree that the year is a certain periodic duration. And that within that, there are certain forms, which we would like to observe, commemorate, to mark out our intelligence, and to celebrate the fact that we have done it, and we share it, and we can communicate it, pass it on, cherish it, write a poem about it, if need be. One of the great ways in which our kind, that is humankind, has always marked out the year, is to celebrate the solstices and the equinoxes. That is the positions of our planet visa-vee our star, as being the two most high marginal celestial elements available to us. I know it comes as kind of a shock if you've never entertained the idea, especially to those astrologers who like to think of Venus and Jupiter being very powerful, and the moon, and so forth. But this very planet itself, and the star itself, and their positions are the most primordial relationship. And so, solstices and equinoxes of common interest to man throughout the ages. And especially the solstices, either the winter or the summer. And to these people, might feel great akin to the summer solstice was the great moment. It was the time at which the day, of course, was the longest, and the night was shortest. That didn't bother them. They were not afraid of the night. They did not differentiate out good and evil in terms of night and day. And that wasn't the point at all. The point was is that the sun, quite visibly, the most influential form that they could designate, and they had a real relationship with the earth. And so, the summer solstice, and in fact today is the summer solstice for this year.
It was a great day of celebration for these people. And the celebration was not limited to the Blackfoot people. In fact, all the Algonquin-speaking tribes utilized the summer solstice for what they called the Sun Dance. In fact, all of the Plains Indians across this whole continent shared that celebration. It was the great day of the year. It was the great symbolic ceremony of their ritual cycle. And this was true all the way down through the Hopi reservations and even further than that. Part of the commitment of doing a Sun Dance was to vow to do that sometime in the wintertime. When things were cold or tough, sometime in early February, would be just about right. In fact, I was asked to do this lecture about February 2nd. When I was asked, it occurred to me, since the day it was going to be on the solstice, that this was a kind of a form of Sun Dance. And that I am almost glad the fact that I have a terrible cold, and I'm feeling bad. Because part of the Sun Dance is to reverse suffering. Not to shirk it. To stay in contact with it, closely, intimately, and work with it, and interchange with it, so as to transform it. And that was really important to remember. So important, that all these people, I think you can see it in their faces. These were fine people. I know a lot of these people. And they are fine people. There was nothing primitive about these people at all. And if you've got a few days to sit and wait, you can hear things that you never thought you would hear from human beings. You never thought that Lao Tzu could have written that 3,000 years ago. Or Homer. And somebody is telling you that over a cup of tea. It's really amazing. And like Basho says, the sound of the cicada penetrates those rocks, and you don't ever forget it.
In the Sun Dance, for these people, it was an eight-day ceremony. The first four days were just moving the camp again and again. They'd set up camp on one day, and then you'd move it the next. And then you'd move it the next. Now, on the fourth day you'd finally come to the site. Well, it wasn't that we couldn't find the right site, it was that this is the way things are done. Not just by forms, but that man approaches the sublime, not by leaping in all the time, but sometimes by taking his time, like taming a wild horse, or like getting a hold of that Bhadran energy. You get into it with a little humility.
And on the fifth day, these people, like all the Plains Indian people. And the best rendition that I know of in writing is Black Elk in his book The Sacred Pipe. His version of the Sun Dance in here. What they would do on the fifth day is they would build the Sun Dance lodge. And before that, you needed 28 poles around the outside, but you needed one center pole, which was a whole tree, on the inside. And usually in this part of the world, they would use a kind of an aspen, a poplar tree, we used to call in the Midwest, for two reasons. Black Elk says, one is that if you cut a cross-section of that tree in a certain way, you get a five-pointed star in the pith of that tree. Just as if the great spirit had put the imprint and the secret right in the center of the thing itself. And that if you knew how to cut through, and get a cross section of reality, there it was to confirm the fact that yes, indeed, not only that it was there, but also that you learned how to cut through it just right to see that it was there for yourself. And you can tell your children or your grandchildren to go and do likewise, and they can do it for themselves. That the order of patterning is right there.
And the second reason, is that that style of tree has a kind of a leaf that shimmers in the wind. It isn't just a visual shimmering, but it's a sound. And it's the sound of almost like a ceremonial rattling. And our humankind have always loved to dance. And we've always loved to put on the bangles, and the sparkles, and the fringes. And in our moments of great joy and ecstasy, to shake those things. And that tree does that in the wind. And especially in the summer, sometimes a grove of poplars. I've meditated under a grove of poplars and have thought that I was on a jet plane. It's just an apprehension of space that you just can hardly believe possible.
So, the tree that these people usually chose was one of these poplars. It would be fetched by the men of the camp. And usually, only those men who had proven themselves in courage, either in battle as in ancient times, or in living. It takes a lot of courage to live sometimes in this world. Those men who had proved themselves in courage could go out and get that tree. There was a whole ritual about obtaining that tree. And they would sit around it, and sing songs to that tree, and select it out, because it was the world tree for them, at that moment when they selected it. And they made sure that it never touched the ground, until it was brought into the camp in a great ceremony. And then after the women, and especially the holy woman had anointed that tree and made it sacred, was it raised as the center pole of the Sun Dance lodge. And in raising that tree, the prayers of the people in certain symbolical ways, sometimes they mixed colors like red or blue to signify the primordial elements of the universe. Or sometimes later on when somebody had a sick relative, and they would write a prayer to the Holy Spirit, to **inaudible word** it would-be put-on parchment and tied to all the cosmic prayers, because the individual was always fitted into the cosmos. It was never left out. It was never out of place. And all that would be raised. And the center pole would be there.
And in the succeeding days, each day, a sweat lodge of 100 willows would be built. Brand-new every day. 100 willow saplings inter-woven, the skin was put over it. And in one of the teepees, the holy woman who had made the vow to sponsor, to give this Sun Dance in the wintertime, February. She would be fasting all this time. And in this 100-willow sweat lodge, the men who would be participating in this ceremony would purify themselves every day by steam. And in that part of the world as in Finland or other areas, a steam bath every day is a way of healthful living, as well as purifying. But there is the element then steam is sort of like fire and water together. Using both of those elements together.
And one thing that the holy woman would do, in her fast day, is with other people, would cut the tongues of buffaloes that had been collected through the hunting season in the spring. They might use two or 300 tons of buffalo, dried buffalo tongues. The voice of the buffalo. They'd cut those into strips, which she would pass out during the high point of that ceremony to everybody in the tribe. Everybody participated. Everybody got to share the tongues from the holy woman. And that was their linking-in to this great ceremony.
And then, some young male in the tribe who went in connection with the holy woman, on the last day of the ceremony, would link himself by rawhide thongs, to the top of that Sun pole, and on the other, he would be skewered. The flesh and the shoulders would actually be pulled out a little bit, and little skewers put in. And he was given an eagle bone whistle to hold in his mouth, and this was the only exclamation of sound allowed to him. These thongs were always cut in spirals, because they thought the form of the double helix, before Watson and Crick made it clear. And these two spirals made up the same central point on the Sun Dance pole. This young man would dare out the fact that the holy woman's vow to consecrate the tribe again to the Holy Spirit was, in fact, possible all the time because some young people in the tribe are willing to also sacrifice and endure suffering. Endure that contact of suffering. And in this case, to dance around that pole until he had pulled himself free. Had gotten himself born again of that suffering and was capable of standing free. The I-Ching says, "Heaven suspends its emblems." And man, sometimes has to prove that he can be suspended in the universe absolutely without any ties whatsoever.
I remember that time when Edward White was doing the first EVA from that space shot, and his temptation was to unbuckle that umbilical cord. And I thought, "Isn't that interesting?" It's like, it's in our genes. But what's free, and independent, and floating, just like heaven suspending its prized emblem. And man returns home, again, because he knows things have to go on. There's others that have to grow up. And we have to continue ourselves. And so, the Sun Dancer would go to the center pole and sit down on a mat of sage and have his dream about having done this. And the holy woman, having passed out the food, and the tribe having witnessed this, was refreshed and renewed. And their sense of the interpenetration of form was verified. And their homecoming was verified. And their sense of the sublime presence of the spirit within themselves verified.
Now I have a series of images about the Sun Dance, and I'll just show them to you, and then we'll close with one other poem. This is the Sun Dance pole. There it is up there at the top. These are not in any particular order.
This is a game, the sidelight of the ceremony. It was a hand game. Guess how many sticks in which hand? A form of gambling.
Here, the room being fixed up.
One of the societies. There are all sorts of societies within the tribe. There might be 12, 15 people. One of the great societies of the Blackfoot is called the Horn society. And men who have proven themselves over many, many years, are allowed into the Horn society, and they dance with great curved poles that looked like crosiers of ancient Egypt **inaudible word or two**. It's quite interesting. And some are being made up. Everything you see has a symbolic nature to be explicated at length.
This is a procession, the holy woman is the one, and the third one from the front there. No, there she is. There she is in white.
This is a view of the, of the last Blackfoot Sun Dance ceremony. The last photo was given in 1961. There will never be another one for the Blackfeet. The national museum in Ottawa took all the implements and put them in glass cases, because these primitive people needed to be remembered. And the best way to remember them of course, was to freeze their symbols in glass cases, so that they can be seen by millions.
And here's a man in 1961. This is a man with his eagle bone whistle pulling away. This is not an easy thing to do, as you might imagine. When this man here, very tough, sympathetic hombre went from time to time to grab the shoulders of this man and shake him. Not only to let him know that they were in some kind of a delirium, that they were all still there with him, but also to keep that sense of tautness. Forms are effective if the lines are taut. When they have the shape that they should have, and they are usable for us.
A few more images. There is the lodge being made.
Of course, the great circular teepee ground.
Here's all the accoutrements in one of the woman's tents.
Family life incidentally in all these timeless ceremonies always went on around you. There were always babies to change, and kids to feed, and people had to go to the bathroom. Right in the midst of sacrificing, to return to the sacred daily life went on. Always has, always will.
They're making up some poles.
This is **inaudible few words**. Two more slides, and then I'll ...
And here's a ladder going up to fix the center pole. And we'll stop there.
I'd Like to read a closing poem, to try to bring this together. This was a poem that was written in 1960. Was written in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And I originally brought it here to juxtapose against the Blackfoot Sun Dance, some of the music of Allen Hovhaness. Who writes a very ... He's an American composer, who just died a couple of years ago. But I have a series of his albums up here. He's written about 250 pieces. The **inaudible word** symphony. Here is something on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, set to music, and so forth. What I had wanted to play in connection with this, was Hovhaness's Meditation on Orpheus, which is a very special handling of music. It's not just this piece, but Hovhaness's whole style. It's a music without crescendo, without coda, without any of the normal form that music has had since the time of the Gregorian ... well, just past the Gregorian age, from Bach on. Say, Bach through Von **inaudible word**. There have been certain musical forms which everyone understands and knows.
Hovhaness, at the end of the second world war, burnt all of his music. Realized that he had finally understood what sound and silence were and wrote 250 or so compositions utilizing this new old intelligence. And in is music itself, you can hear, play it for ourselves, a sense of feeling, very much like the poems of Stevens. Very much like a musing of The I-Ching. Very much, I hope, like what I've been able to present somewhat to you today. But the music is there. All of these things are there. They're all accessible for you. You can come out and get them anytime you want to.
Let me close with this poem, written about 20 years ago, in the Sierras. Apropos of midsummer. And this is a hike I made when I was 19, and it was a very difficult thing at the time. I had been an asthmatic child, and it was the first time I had ever hiked above 12,000 feet. The first time I'd ever been above tree line in my life, and I thought I was going to die. And yet I kept going. It was an amazing experience. That when you come to the end of your physical capacity, you are still there. Unbelievable. And you hardly know what to say. Except that later on, if you're 19, you write words like this.
"Behold your shadow on the rocks. Shadowy emotion **inaudible word** toward the summer. Detached sensation. Behold your own form moving. Formed from the sun's limits. Moving upon the mountain. Converging upon the teeth. Driving on. Stubborn. Make this turn. And all to this pyramid press. An old thunder looks his best and knows it. Welling up and recognizes the pause, the falter, and the fall behind him now, on the upper slopes. The feeling of physic played out to emptiness. The wilderness. Hollowness. This hallowed wildness. The tether of human strength taut. Make this journey."
Thank you very much.
END OF RECORDING