I feel very happy tonight, despite everything. Despite the rain that is flooding our basement, despite my physical decrepitude, osteoporosis, fracture in my back, despite my miserable hearing that my friend Phil will have to help me with. By the way, on hearing, some of you may not have heard, there is a breakthrough that is almost equivalent to, at least I think of it that way, glasses to vision. Within a month, I will be having a surgical implant behind my ear, and by the end of the year, it is expected that my hearing will be 95% of normal without hearing aids, which I'm going to throw all the way across the bay when I'm free from those.

[01:26]

So I say that. I'm going to tell you so you can ask your primary physician or audiologist if you are interested. So enough of that. Despite all these things, and I could mention more and more and more, I'm happy. I'm happy. Several lines come to my mind. I am so filled with ghosts of loveliness that I could furbish out and populate a distant star so the gods would congregate to gaze and memorize and duplicate. Okay, that's how happy I am. Now, why?

[02:29]

Why am I so happy? And the answer is that I'm surrounded with good people, with compassionate people. I know the Zen people. I have been in Zen practice. Now it's not my primary. For about 30 years it was, and culminating in 10 weeks in Kyoto, Mio Shinji Monastery. The Temple of the Marvelous Mind. Isn't that a wonderful title? the temple of the marvelous mind.

[03:31]

And I know Zen people are dedicated and good and helpful to other people. Someone is said to have remarked to Mahatma Gandhi, oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if compassion were as contagious as the common cold. And Mahatma Gandhi is said to have responded, when will we ever learn that compassion is as contagious as the common cold? And I believe that. And I intend and I hope many of us can leave this evening gathering with the compassion, contagious compassion of other people having rubbed off on us.

[04:47]

Now I'm going to turn to my assigned topic. And I want to dedicate this lecture to the one Native American student that I have had. I was at Syracuse. Syracuse adjoins the Onondaga Reservation. And the first, those people, Native Americans on those reservations aren't much interested in college. And the first one who went through college was in one of my classes. And during that semester, history of philosophy, during that semester, one morning, the telephone rang.

[05:51]

And my younger brother said, hold on to yourself, Houston. Our older brother died last night. Okay, 6 a.m., class at 10. I wavered for four hours should I call the secretary and ask her to post a notice on the door. Class canceled. I finally decided to go through with it, but I decided to be upfront. And I told them what had happened. I said, not for your commiseration, but because if I'm a little more distracted and disjointed and spacey at times, you will know what happened. I got through the hour. As I went to the door, One student was waiting, and together he fell into step with me, went to my office with me.

[07:01]

I unlocked the door. We sat down. It was the Native American student. And after we were seated, we hadn't spoken a word. raised his eyes and said, when this kind of thing happens with our people, we sit together. And for about 15 minutes, we sat in silence. And then his name was Douglas George. He raised his eyes and said, I'm sorry it happened and left. And you know, I think that's the most eloquent commiseration I have ever received.

[08:07]

And it bonded us in a lifelong friendship. All right, now what shall I say? in my dedicated speech. Well, I have a title. And it's so good that I even wonder if I suggested it. It seems better than anything I could have come up with. And you probably know placed, P-L-A-C-E-D, period. And then it has a kind of a subtitle, The Native American View of Our Place on Earth.

[09:09]

It's wonderful. Wonderful. And... I'm going to make two clarifications before I proceed. By Native American, everything I'm saying will refer to all indigenous people. The Native Americans are the ones that are here with us in North America, but their worldview and their view on place, and the worldview is basically the same. A second clarification in the phrase, Native American view of our place on earth. All right, that's good, but do not think

[10:14]

that they think that the earth is all there is. Like all traditional peoples, they believed in a transcendental world which was universal in all humanity until modern science in the 16th and 17th century dismantled that two-story world, earth and what's above the world. As Confucius put it, heaven and earth, only heaven. is great. This world and a transcendental world.

[11:19]

And as Peter Berger, one of the two best sociologists of religion has said, if anything characterizes modernity, that means 16th, 17th century on discovery of science, it is the loss of the sense of transcendence. And he goes on to say what he means by transcendence, of a reality that envelops and surpasses our everyday world. That's a very striking thing. sentence underscoring what modernity has lost but which all traditional people had.

[12:23]

Now I'm going to begin with that transcendental world and then I'm going to come back to earth which figures in My example of the transcendental world is the Australian Aborigines. Now, of course, they've been largely assimilated, but historians, Victor Steiner, the best scholar, appealed back to what their worldview was. Said it's centered in, now this is a curious word, dreaming, the dreaming. And for the Aborigines, the real world was the dreaming world.

[13:34]

And that was the world in which the archetypal figures of yore live are the ones who invented agriculture, who discovered hunting, who discovered mating, and, you know, the borderline between what we would call fantasy and art. Reality was a little bit, was more than a little bit poor. But with the other side, that's the real world. And whenever they could move in with their minds to that world, they were really living. And then when they lost it, why then? Well, this is just a

[14:38]

spillover from that, but doesn't have the reality of that.

[14:48]

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