Well, in a very obvious way, for example, external behavior may be regarded as inappropriate by the norms of various more dominant cultural groups. For the most part, there are many strictures against homosexuality. For the most part, there are many strictures against women driving trucks or men reading and writing poetry, things of that sort. Now, I'm not a sufficiently good theologian to say that the more you suffer, the better

[01:00]

off you are. I don't believe that there is any intrinsic, inherent value to needless suffering. Needless suffering. From my perspective, needless suffering is masochism, which by definition is a pattern of mental ill-health, just as to inflict suffering and enjoy it, sadism is mental ill-health. So I wouldn't, I know that people say very moralistically and very profoundly, the more that you suffer for your self-expression, the better you will enjoy it. Well, if you carry that to its conclusion, let's say that you are on the rack for expressing

[02:03]

your love of flowers and picking flowers in fields that the Inquisition monks don't approve of. Now, clearly if you spend 39 years on the rack, you won't have much time to pick flowers and enjoy their scent. So if you carry it to its absurd extreme, but logically consistent extreme, you have only suffering and no enjoyment. And so a person who, for healthy self-expressive reasons, follows a course of vocational choices or sexual preference choices or interest choices that some people disapprove of, will usually

[03:10]

find, first of all, that if he looks about himself, if she looks about herself, the person will find a good number of like-minded persons and be able to have a compassionate communal relatedness with some other people who are quite kindred to oneself. And if a person has a need to place a label that marks him as other than other people, as, for example, living and dying, a word like gay or a word like feminist or a word like whatever it may be, I question that the person involved is very liberated, is

[04:12]

very gay-liberated, is very feminist-liberated, is very black-liberated or whatever the case may be. A black who's always a black in a white world and never lets go of that is mighty lopsided and there isn't much way-ee-woo-way-ee involved in it. So I think that the affirmation of either one's values or one's patterns of life or one's preferences is something that all things equal should be done and done honestly and with pride. Maybe, excuse me, maybe the point of my inquiry is that if someone wants to fix their imbalance, that will be a suffering. If you don't want to say that, like...

[05:17]

Well, if a person feels that he or she is uncomfortable and unhappy with a set of values, practices, goals or whatever, I don't see anything wrong with altering the situation and becoming happy if this is the motivation of the individual and it isn't because this one or that one disapproves of it. Because I would find it hard to find any values or practices that carte blanche, apart from those that deny liberty and freedom to other human beings, that would universally hold as good or bad or right or wrong for anyone. But if a person is unhappy about a given state of affairs, then I think it would be appropriate

[06:23]

to take corrective measures about it if you feel out of harmony with a certain direction. A lot of people feel out of harmony, though not because of their own promptings, but because of a desire to be pleasing to an authority figure, parent or another significant figure or community group or whatever it may be. And the motivation for the change and the motivation for the unhappiness is external to the person's own inner being. In that case, the desire to change I would regard as ill. Question from the audience.

[07:31]

Question from the audience. Yeah. Well, you see, within the lieutenant, there was a component of the other element correspondingly within. Like it or not, females produce male hormones. Males produce female hormones. Biologically, these differentiate and vary from person to person. Psychologically, in the dream life of people, in the visionary experience of people. One of the interesting things about nature is that the closer you get in differentiation to intelligence, when you deal with creatures like dolphins and primates other than man, you find things like play, intentional play, games, innovation.

[08:39]

One of the characteristics of intelligent life above a certain level of development is differentiation. Accordingly then, from one perspective, the development of the human species historically, genetically, both, is along the lines of ever greater differentiation and individuation. The lower the form of life in terms of intelligent functioning, the more they herd, the more the uniformity of pattern of behavior. As a person who took biology in high school, as most all of you do,

[09:41]

to rephrase a terrible racist remark, which is not true of human beings, all amoebas look alike to me. Now, people have the capacity and the ability to further differentiate themselves in the ways that they are right now. This is creativity. This is innovation. And part of the very balance of nature in terms of the human species is the recognition of differentiation. So that we cannot make genus and species statements about men as well as we can about dolphins. We cannot make genus and species differentiations about dolphins as well as we can about ants or wasps

[10:49]

or what have you. Now, Teilhard de Chardin, for example, is one perspective very much along this line. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who died in 1940 in his creative evolution and the time of free will, has a similar perspective. Martin Buber, in a very poetic way, renders it in I Am Well with the personal world and the realm of freedom within that personal world as being the divine reality of the human life. Now, from my perspective as a...

[11:53]

Well, as a... I'm kidding, I'm jokingly calling myself a Buddhist Episcopalian, but when I wear my dog collar as an Episcopal priest, I consider this, if I were doing it in a context of traditional Christian language, which I would speak of this as the imago dei, the image of God in man. The divine reality is the mystery of being and becoming. And if this sounds intriguing, a fascinating person whom I would suggest for you to look into is Gabriel Marcel. And anywhere, all of his books are short. And they vary in point of view.

[12:55]

He started out anti-religious and wound up... but very spiritually oriented and wound up within a more traditional religious framework. But however it may be, I'm not pushing any brand of anything, but I would phrase this as the opportunity to express freedom, spiritual freedom and the imago dei in man. In traditional Christian terms, it would be the washing away of original sin, not being actions that one has done, but the finite to the frailty, the accumulation of tendencies towards instinctual, anti-social and anti-developmental behavior into a new life of development.

[13:57]

Well, that's one language system and one way of phrasing the perspective. But the dimensions of freedom, of the image of God in man, is in terms of moving into the nameless mystery of being, the miracle of being that is the divine reality itself. Moving into and within the divine human encounter. And that's something that... So in terms of what you're telling me, I'm telling you very well, you don't have to say no. It's one with you and people. We, naturally, we want to protect the family. We want to remove what's taken. Yes. But...

[15:04]

Maybe... Yes, well, the denial of anything, the denial of anything is... Okay, let me switch to Buddhism. Buddha says that the origin of our suffering is ignorance. Avidya. Now, the most rampant form of avidya that people have, at least psychologically, is the denial of their own wholeness. And unless and until you have an acceptance of yourself, which means an acceptance of all the components contained within yourself,

[16:13]

you are condemned to repeat ignorance and live through its consequences. This is Buddhist interpretation. Jack can switch hats or robes. But, on the other hand, the suffering entailed by ignorance is overcome when one yields over the ignorance to its overcoming, the acceptance of wholeness and integration. And so, a person who is a male, who is a brutal male because he cannot accept his feminine components, is condemned to repeatedly and repeatedly be a brutal male,

[17:18]

unless and until the ignorance is broken. A person who is a male who denies his masculine component at the expense of living out only the feminine component, is condemned to repeat and repeat and repeat sufferings because of the ignorance of his lopsidedness. A female who denies her feminine component is condemned to be hyper-aggressive, hyper-aggressive, hyper-aggressive, suffer, suffer, suffer correspondingly. A female who denies her masculine component is condemned to be

[18:22]

a self-denigrating, silly person who repeatedly is self-effacing and silly forever, unless and until there is an acceptance of one's total being, one's integration. So, the ignorance of the dimensions of one's realities is suffering. Okay? Now, a given integrated person will be at harmony with this being here, with this being here, at any given point, and always subject to change. One of the amazing things in life is that although there is a saying, the more it changes, the more it stays the same, so often you encounter deep and profound change

[19:24]

in people as well. So, being at harmony is not being in uniform with everyone else, like all amoebas, or all birds of a given genus and species look and act exactly as other members of that genus and species because we have differentiation, freedom, that is lacking. So, the harmony and balance, a balanced male who does not deny his feminine component, a balanced female who does not deny her masculine component, will not be look-alikes or act-alikes because they are each differentiated. What will be common to all is, and now here I put on my Anglo-Catholic hat again,

[20:25]

the imago Dei, that they are in harmony with their own nature and aspiring into greater self-expression and the mystery of being. Okay? So, you see, there isn't a contradiction What is it? It's very acute observation, very acute observation. And if this were a class in logic, I would say, oh, let me give you a checkmark of ten points for that one because, like classes in logic, always an ongoing struggle or battle of wits and sometimes I said it was very junior level, half-wit. Okay, so,

[21:27]

but, okay, so going back to the question, though, of a person's level of comfort or discomfort, I, to me, it isn't important only whether a person is comfortable or uncomfortable, but for what reason? Would it be all right if you started to take us to campus? Sure, I'm about to quit, and right now I quit. You can say the last part of your sentence. Well done. Thank you. Next, we'll move into representation.

[22:57]

Get to our count time. Are you putting the class together, sir? No, we're not going to read that. Presocratic. Well. No. It's painted over, isn't it? I think it's white. Is this pink at all, or is this... This fabric, this is from a robe. This is fabric from the time of the Emperor Kangxi, which was late 17th century.

[24:02]

And this one here? This one is, let's see, that one is from the well, the painting is from the early 17th century, and the fabric is from the late 18th century. This one, the painting is late 18th century. So life is not a chunk of a task. Thank you. Thank you.

[25:19]

Thank you. Thank you. It would be older if you take, you know, here and all the rest, all this. That's primitive. It could be earlier. I would have said it's older. But, you see, it's what we would call a jungling piece. Yeah. Yes, it has no bottom. Well, not Indian art, doesn't. It's only Tibetan and Nepalese. Even Nepalese often doesn't.

[26:59]

Unfortunately, this piece, it was opened. But, you see, here is a Nepalese piece that was made to be opened. It's dated. Nepalese. But it's Tibetan script. May tell me. No, this is Tibetan. This is Tibetan. What time is that? 16th century. I had one in the 10th century and one in the 12th century. Great. You give these times, to make a pronounced female figure. Because there was a time when all was male. And then only from a certain time on. Well, that was, yes. Yeah. But in, you mean in Buddhist terms? Yeah. The earliest, for example, the earliest Tara

[28:04]

is in literature is 13th and 17th century. And in culture 8th century. So, Blue Star existed for about 400 years before they showed female figures. A full figure. Now, it doesn't, we don't live 600. Yeah, it exists a thousand years. But no icons. No representations. But that could bring us to 6300. You see, from 600 to to the 4th century. So, there were no depictions. The first depictions took place in the far west of India, in Balochistan, Afghanistan. And and at first, they depicted a seat

[29:08]

that showed the imprint of the body on it. Or footprints. Footprints, yes. And only gradually did they show the full body of the Buddha. There are several wonderful books on the Buddha image. The development of the Buddha image. But that must have been Buddha himself who didn't permit it. Right. He didn't want to be made a god. Right. And there were Buddhists who were going to discuss the top knot. Try to make a god. Yeah. See, where Buddhists originated were Greco-Roman provinces. Hey, there we are. Hey. There were Greco-Roman provinces and they borrowed from the image of Apollo Apollo's top knot. It's higher wisdom. And so that's an example of the west influencing the east. So the top knot comes from the west.

[30:09]

Yeah. Second and third. Yeah, second and third. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that was as European European imagery. Yeah. Yeah, rather than an Asian representation. Asian representations came from China in the 6th century. Looks exactly like purgatory. It's a panic. There's a panic in relation to Europeanism. Yeah. Yeah, well I have in Europe a set of Japanese bohols from the 19th century that depict the Portuguese

[31:16]

Portuguese sailors in their European outfit and the faces are sort of half Japanese, half European. Half European. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[32:29]

Well. I have a note blocked off remembering Vasudhara's name. We'll get to Vasudhara in a little bit. Because I had two exceedingly fine statues of Vasudhara one from the 10th century and one from the 12th which I parted with and regretted doing so subsequently. They're among the rarest of Asian art pieces in the world

[34:01]

and they presently reside in Europe. So I block out the name. Thank you. The perspective that I've been giving you is one which I call in a positive way by a term that one of my professors in seminary used in a very negative way and the word is anthropocentric or anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism

[35:07]

Oh, I left out the poem. Poe me. Anthropocentrism man-centered. This was a term used by by theologians and still is to indicate that a concept or perspective is not that of God or God's truth but rather is related to the human predicament and not the realm way up yonder. And and so it was sort of bah humbug to anything that he could call anthropocentric. Now since I walk on the ground or on the floors of buildings

[36:09]

and I know that what I say in the English language bah humbug anyway, there's this ground under me and I don't float in the sky why, I know that the language that I speak its syntax its cultural form today other languages subcultural languages dialects the genetic limitations and advantages of being a human being being born at a certain time and place with certain capacities and certain limitations is a factor that's true of all of us and any concept anything that we can speak reflects an age, a time a place that's part of the human predicament and so the point of departure is that we cannot but be anthropocentric

[37:11]

including people who claim not to be because the very language that they use is a cultural product it's, let's say, English and not Sinhalese from Sri Lanka and the vocabulary concepts everything are those of a given time and place even when they say they are speaking the absolute and eternal truth with a capital T they are still speaking from within the framework of finitude of a given time and place and I also along these lines before I get into the culture object and the way in which they are used by people and then lastly meditative techniques and the use of images I'd like to clear up a point of view

[38:14]

it's to me more than passing interest as I made allusion to in January that in physics and in mathematics it has been axiomatic that any observation statements in physics include the viewer as part of what he sees when we look through a telescope what we see is what our constitution what the rods, the cones of our eyes the imprints of our experience render the blurs and the spaces that other creatures with other sensory apparati would receive in very different ways and likewise would be perceived differently

[39:22]

by other human beings from ourselves at other times people looked at Mars and saw canals with the early telescope it's the same Mars except you don't see canals anymore and so Heisenberg indicated that any and all observation statements include the observer as part of its own evidence likewise Gödel in mathematics shows with Gödel's proof that every mathematical statement, let's say begins with assumptions that themselves are unprovable but within another algebra for example the axioms of one system will not be axioms but that other system

[40:24]

itself will have to have arbitrary axioms as its starting point and so on and Gödel also in conversation made the comment well where did mathematics come from anyway? who invented it? we did it's our creature and one of the close buddies of Heisenberg the biologist Schrödinger made exactly that comment about the natural sciences essentially they were invented by Aristotle and other people and they say a lot more about us a lot about what they're supposed to describe so the point of view is that we are within the system we are within the world within a given perspective

[41:24]

and have no celestial point of view and we may wish to take comfort in you're my god to thee and that sort of stuff with somehow exempting ourselves from that but the paradox of it is that the very way in which we exempt ourselves from our anthropocentrism and finite to it itself proves that we're there because we do it with language we do it with argument we do it with human made tools now human made tools are very very broad human made tools include language gesture description demands and responses coercions and responses

[42:27]

affection and responses a lot of merely conditioned behavior a lot of our life is like Pavlovian dogs it includes things like how we sit how we eat as one or two of you know I endured a trip to the Caribbean in between the time of my last talk and now it was terrible suffering to be in the Caribbean where it was in the high 80s most of the days and frightfully sunny and just oh the sunshine in the eyes it was such a horrible horrible experience being in the Caribbean it was terrible suffering and glad it's over

[43:30]

but in the Caribbean at the dinner table at the hotel with clientele mainly from Europe you could tell who were the Americans and Canadians from the English, Germans, French and so on by the implements with which people ate their pie the Americans and Canadians went for the fork and the English and continental went for the spoon well there is a tool there is human invention and it has a different cultural definition of what is appropriately eaten with a fork or with a spoon just as in England your dessert is often served with what we would call a soup spoon and on the continent well on a type of dessert well all of these are

[44:32]

different human artifices, inventions devices techniques and in our language and our gesture and our activities and what we create and what we do are expressed our hopes and fears our anxieties our longings their own liberal attitude upon forebearers most all early religion and most contemporary religion is rooted in coercion in a projection of fears especially and in some cases hopes for what is unattainable in our own life so that we can receive it from the cosmos that we project

[45:33]

beyond ourselves the earliest prayers in the religions of the world are intercessory prayers please for help please to ward off the evil eye and things of that sort and although there is much that's of the highest nobility in the early literature of the Vedas, for example the Atharva Veda is a collection of thousands of magical incantations how to win at dice dice is as old as any man-made object among the oldest man-made objects are dice and you might tell that to some people when you drive by at the 500 block on

[46:34]

Haight and you see them playing dice, why you can praise them for maintaining ancient and prehistoric traditions so intercession has been the key to man's religious experience historically to get what he wants in a world of experience which does not give him all that he would like to have and so the origin of religion, if one looks to the earliest religious texts almost invariably are coercive magical asking for something there are no hymns of praise of the divine reality

[47:37]

for its own sake until quite late in man's religious experience and then when great spirits have done things like that, they are usually followed by centuries of preoccupation with demands and requests for goodies so the predicament of man is reflected in his religious art for example you will notice that the sexual pieces are very pronouncedly sexual and here is a jungly piece from the Kulu Valley which

[48:38]

is loaded with sexual symbolism and an emphasis upon the many heads that converge upon one male genital and at the base is the lingam yumi now among the earliest of religious objects is the lingam yumi which is the vagina and phallus worshipped as sacred objects for the generation of fertility as I mentioned the threshing floors of the Old Testament, the Canaanite sexual fertility cults things of that sort but right now in Japan in the rural areas there will hardly be an unsophisticated village in which there will not be phallic columns

[49:42]

in the field and offerings, especially milk will be poured over it and these will be immediately translated as sympathetic magic if we do this to this phallic column and presumably the fertilization process symbolically done to the phallus will fertilize the field why then it will have a good harvest you know most Japanese are not Zen Buddhists deeply inculcated in studying either the great masters koans or anything else they're interested in the life of their village the life of their family in a good harvest or job security

[50:44]

or winning in the betting pool and all over the orient well from the near east to Japan gambling is at a pace that we have no inkling of in the west now the elemental forces of everyday life sexuality fertility the winning of a bet the gaining of an advantage these are the sources then of religious experience and we see it reflected in the earliest objects of religious art here we have this piece is particularly

[51:44]

eventful to me since my ancestry is central Asian and I told him that the mountain lion here we have a sphinx from the Indus Valley that is a highly sexual piece that you can only tell in vestiges that have come down that's much older than the sphinx of Egypt and as a omorphic face it's about 4000 B.C. and so the elemental forces are represented in the deities well here too it depends upon where you live how you live and all the rest when the Indo-Europeans for example were in central Asia one of their key gods was Rudra

[52:45]

the storm god the red one in fact if you know Emerson's poem The Red Slayer Emerson translated the Vedic hymn to Rudra into English transliteration and published it as his poem The Red Slayer without letting it be known at the time in order to get it published that it was a Vedic hymn and all that he did was translate and transliterate it into American English verse and since it was published and well known and he gained his reputation he left out into public with a cross-cultural perspective that was incredible for his time but Rudra

[53:47]

the storm god, why? the red sandstorm was the menace in central Asia and of course Rudra was a terrifying god the red sandstorm is a terrifying reality but well think of the psalms, David the shepherd, the nomad is a singer has little instruments like he plays flutes, harps while tending the flocks and so sound song instrumental sound vocal sound I made mention of Vat, the goddess of speech and I made a mention letting the cat out of the bag of Ishtar Ishtarte the star goddess whose name in Sanskrit

[54:48]

the word for star being Tara so the elemental reality of the bright luminescent body the star elemental force again reflecting our experience where we are what we wish now we may not wish that supernatural realities accomplish things for us but I would doubt very much that if in our gathering tonight there is anyone here who doesn't wish for horizons beyond however they may be defined and that makes us a bit different from someone saying

[55:49]

okay Yahweh I want 100 G's and fast but it's not a totally different thing we all wish and objectify unattained or even unattainable realities beyond ourselves and so the anthropocentric predicament is always there now the fascinating thing about so much of the Asian artistic tradition to date is in so many ways an odd combination of puritanism and frank attention to and awareness of

[56:49]

the forces of human energy of sexuality of drive to attain goals and all the rest the caricature of the various Asian traditions is that they promote passivity this is a caricature of then all you do is sit and that's passive isn't it and of course one sits so that one can stand and do as well but the odd thing, well it's about the Japanese so polite, so puritanical and so explicitly sexual but in India as well here is a piece that could have come down from the earliest

[57:51]

days of ancient India which isn't all that old perhaps 200 years old, who knows being folk art it's hard to tell but this is an interesting piece here is Matagawa mother cow the sacred cow here is the coiled serpent in this case the cobra with inscribed serpents here coiling, rising up and out of the elementary nature of things we have the time we go into the levels of reality depicted, there's more to this or any piece I'm going to talk about but here in the base of the coiled serpent

[58:53]

in its slumbering aspect is lo and behold our friend the lingam or the phallus and the yuli well what this piece which is a Shaivite piece the cult of Shiva what this piece says any fact is that within us is the slumbering serpent power that can be awakened dwells within us and I assume that you know of the chakra of the points within the spiritual body that lead to one's awakening I'll put a little chart on the board of the chakras that relate in particular to the Taras but slumbering

[59:55]

in our nethermost region which physically in the sense of physical geography is located between the rectum and the genital is the kundalini power the serpent power that when awakened in the lower bowel moves to the upper moves to the neck moves to the mouth moves to the neck and the heart, the mouth and these centers until finally the topmost center which we'll go into in very short order so this speaks of the dormant slumbering vitality that was grasped

[60:57]

in yoga related literature in the earliest of days and in artistic depiction goes back to the Indus Valley to pictures of a horned god with an erect phallus who was considered the prototype of Shiva and there are equivalent representations of the god Bess in ancient Egyptian art if you went to the De Young Museum you would see without any specificity of what it is a little blue faience a flat far-released statue of Bess with an erect phallus that reaches the ground and the whole point to it is that it's a fertility piece

[61:59]

but needless to say the description doesn't state anything as to what it all means in fact they had rearranged the room that had it and one of the museum employees was polling people about the room and when I started to talk she took out a pad and began to write and forty minutes later we were through but needless to say they're too delicate to bring up the subject but you see the awareness that the direction of energy resources to levels far beyond their utilization in the human being and that these energy levels are closely related to sexual energy

[63:01]

and that the harnessing of sexual energy and its proper channeling and the harnessing of spiritual potential is a simultaneous job this was understood in the most ancient of times the Jungian psychoanalyst Esther Harding a woman who wrote many brilliant books in her life wrote about this in a book called Psychic Energy Its Source and Goal Eric Neumann who did The Great Mother again I keep picking up Hindu the Great Mother but Eric Neumann in The Origin and History of Consciousness likewise treats of it

[64:03]

the channeling of this energy is the yoga job that whether or not its called yoga relates to what is poured into religious art beyond the level of intercession for goodies it is the utilization of the representation as a projected means of one's own transformation you enter into and go through the representation to go beyond it now one of the things that very much surprises people either very sophisticated Asians from

[65:06]

traditions in which sexuality is de-emphasized and virtually all westerns is the range of representation and imagery in Asian art and especially Himalayan art in some cases Indian as well for example on the feminine we have we talked about the mother mother earth things of that sort and I talked in passing about how the mother image can have positive or negative meaning and representation for example here are two statues in depiction of Kali Kali one of the female personifications

[66:06]

of Shiva here for example with her fang teeth is dancing on the corpse of her husband whom she killed and is eating his intestines I don't know what seasonings and spices are used to accompany it and the statue doesn't show any of the various types of Hindu bread either but at any rate she's having a grand old time now the reality of human relations is such as we see in these negative representations that much if not most of life is unhappy and miserable many years ago when I took

[67:08]

very periodic retreats at the Roman Catholic Seminary where a friend of mine taught we'd go for long walks and I was having a lot of trouble at one particular point and this was before I met Nancy and I said why is it? I look around me and I see so many unhappily married people and the lecturer said well Arthur you know that most people are unhappy most of the time and it doesn't matter who they are or where they are

[68:09]

or what they're doing that's the way things are and that was a wow experience for me a wow experience very good Roman Catholic Buddhism and so most people project just all sorts of things because life is not storybook life has endless dimensions in which anything that can serve creative advantage is also usable and used to destroy bodies or minds the nature of our experience is such that most of the people that we have dealings with are either indifferent to our

[69:11]

needs or very negatively disposed like the story of the Nantucket sea captain who said don't tell other people your troubles because half of them don't give a damn and the other half are glad you have them well these gruesomely negative dimensions of life that we spend so much of our energy running away from running away from dealing with whether they be the demons well then of negativities that can range from self-hatred to just a thousand and one insecurities to an indifferent world indifference in relationships that the storybooks all say should be close and are not close and sometimes not only indifferent

[70:12]

but exploitive so here people depict the negative component and thereby get it out of their system by recognizing Kali the devourer one recognizes there is a deep dimension of reality in which we are consumed chopped up and furthermore a heck of a lot of that consumption and chopped up state of affairs has a flip side if there isn't destruction there can't be rebuilding you can't create a new building without leveling the ground first and so the flip

[71:13]

side of so much of negative experience is that it precisely cauterizes purifies, burns out so that a new building can take place and here too you see the western tradition from the ancient Persians onward they were the inventors of good versus evil the ancient Persians the Hebrews borrowed this from them in the 6th century B.C. and then it went into Christianity and so on that things are either good or they are not bad notice not good and bad, it's good and evil, contaminated corrupt now the very fact that destruction

[72:14]

sorrow pain or suffering may be the building block for rebuilding doesn't seem to have occurred to this whole we can call Zoroastrian Manichean tradition in its Persian form and its Judeo-Christian form, whatever that would state that the reason that things are bad or the reason that you have trouble is that you deserve it you have to make up for it by being a good little boy or a good little girl and then you'll get pie in the sky when you die, by and by it isn't that we live in a world that is incomplete we are limited

[73:16]

we are incomplete and that apart from things that destroy our bodies or minds there is always the possibility of feeding new entries into the data bank into our computers of feeding in and developing alternatives to situations as they are now, one of the horizons of the spiritual life that is rarely encouraged is precisely this feeding into circuitry of new alternatives beyond what people imagine and training them in disciplines and in ways of creating those

[74:18]

options so that not forgetting what I said about masochism and sadism we are thrown into a world that contains these components and by visualizing through them identifying with them there is a purge, a catharsis that occurs because we go through a drama with our own selves in our encounter with these elemental forces Aristotle thought so well in his treatises on poetry speaking of the catharsis of drama of participation

[75:19]

in drama that by identifying with the scenario with media with whatever is going on reenacting it within ourselves because those dimensions are within ourselves we go through what he called catharsis purging. Freud didn't invent the word Aristotle did 2300 years before him and so what this tradition which we may call the tantric tradition suggests is that any and all dimensions of life can be symbolized in artistic form or in projection from our psyche and lived

[76:20]

through and lived out in our psyches sometimes in our lives by confrontation and if there is not this confrontation with the forces be they of inadequacy of murder of whatever it may be within ourselves we cannot attain liberation the path to liberation so tantra suggests is non-denial of the realities of things as they are so that by denying nothing we can be liberated from everything on the other hand

[77:24]

if we deny what is in us and around us the denial will go into our unconscious and we will be like so many goody goody people in many a snide and insidious way commit murder by tone of voice by action in relationships and other nice ways of killing that people do that are very respectable but much more harmful than a knife now good old Freud in one of his last works civilization and its discontent says in his opening paragraphs within the breast of every person lies cannibalism incest and murder

[78:24]

now he said that in 1938 the world didn't look very nice in 1938 but in 1980 with campuchia and all sorts of things and all sorts of places I don't think that it is any less relevant than it was in 1938 and this is the point to ritual and enactment ritual and enactment is based upon a confrontation with elemental forces so that we may transcend them now so then the point at least within the tradition

[79:28]

from which I am speaking the point to directed meditation or visualization which I will get at more is to deny nothing so that everything can be transcended there is nothing hidden behind in the corner in the closet that can pop out unexpectedly and lo and behold the goody goody guy does a baddy baddy thing so then there is a reality in this type of encounter that for example took place in the in an incredible way among the Minoans who lived on the island of Crete before the

[80:29]

Greek culture displaced it and among the Greeks themselves and throughout all the world you'll find what Dorothy Norman in an art display many years ago called the heroic encounter of the hero or the heroine battling battling with a great beast whether it be a lion or a tiger or a dragon the story of the Minotaur in Crete the story in its Christian form of Saint George and the dragon the overcoming of the dragon is the overcoming of the elemental negativity resistance

[81:31]

of Vidya within us all and is the act of heroism that is an enactment that all of us can do and so well, you can look through it but here, for example, Saint George has tried the dragon in fact, in this particular icon he's really done double duty and should get overtime pay he has one foot on a dragon and one foot on a lion so he really did double duty here so the conquest of the great beast Jung would say Erik Neumann would say is essentially the beast within the confrontation with the realities of life as they are

[82:32]

identifying with them and going beyond them here is a form in Nathalie's depiction of the goddess Durga who is a prototype of one of the Taras later on in Tibetan and related art Durga is there with a sword and she is a counterpart of Shiva she has a trident weapon with which she subdues all the demons in the world who collectively have themselves represented in a dog-faced buffalo in a lot of the depiction a lot of it is very cute I wish that I could have taken some depictions from the Kulu Valley that I have where this comes from of Durga

[83:34]

destroying the demon god because it's so cute really, it's almost like cartoon, even though it's from the 9th century and the same thing here in a piece of sculpture which is Pala, 9th century India here is the heroic encounter the goddess is overcoming herself and thereby the world and so by meditation upon Durga identification with her and her struggle and conquest we enter into that reality and take all that we are

[84:37]

into it and go through it and beyond it into a liberated state of freedom encountering our elemental forces and doing what most people don't do acknowledging them harnessing their energy to other purposes so that self transcendence a going beyond of where we are can be attained so that the energy spent in defending ourselves from the existence of what we wouldn't like to own up to doesn't go that way anymore and so that energy creates new space now we have new options new horizons new life and so the

[85:40]

spiritual goal of the use of the representation of Durga is catharsis purging by purging new spaces created and all of the psychic energy directed at keeping a lid on a Pandora's box is gone from that area so it can be used in others having worked in mental hospitals and mental health clinics as a psychologist I rapidly found that unless I took a deeply personal interest in a client which is the exact opposite of

[86:42]

what professionalism says you're supposed to do you're supposed to be detached objective and so on I found myself getting so bored that it was unbelievable if I didn't put myself at stake because people would come in with their unique horror stories of their torments and their troubles and it would be a carbon copy of the horror stories and the unique troubles that nobody else in the world has ever had or conceived of that I heard dozens of times before and if I took it objectively at those times I found it gruesomely tedious because the shocking secret thoughts or feelings or experiences or whatever that one person has had, the chances

[87:43]

are that out of four and a half billion human beings no matter how way out it was there were thousands and thousands of people who had corresponding experiences being human there's only a certain variety of things that we can do or have done to us or it's inconceivable that anything totally unique could be done to us the only unique thing is what we can do about it utilization of freedom so the confrontation with a dragon with a lion or with the opening up of the Pandora's Box if anyone knew they would shun me almost as though you were the person in a TV commercial who didn't use the right underarm deodorant and people would be fleeing in every direction to the hills and to

[88:46]

the sea when you were around because of what you secretly have experienced or wish or fear that if everybody or anybody else knew would be so horrifying it's really so commonplace in a way so trivial trivial when it's diffused and so the turning about of psychic energy is the core in one way or another of meditation and visualization techniques and what I would call to use a value judgment term advanced religious ritual for example the mass the mass

[89:47]

puts within you a spark of the divine that may have been there before but was slumbering and unconscious by the reception of the elements in the mass it's in you awakened that's quite an analogy to Kundalini Yoga and the awakening of the serpent power which requires the discipline of the teacher transmitted to you and your utilization of it to awaken and so it is a catalyst

[90:33]

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