1 00:00:00,970 --> 00:00:07,900 So as you see from the abstract, there are two parts to my presentation. 2 00:00:07,900 --> 00:00:17,620 Firstly, a paper that I should get through in 40 minutes. And secondly, and more importantly, video that will last 20 minutes. 3 00:00:17,620 --> 00:00:24,310 The video is less polished than the paper because of the technical problems that always come up. 4 00:00:24,310 --> 00:00:29,770 But what it makes I mean, what it loses in Polish, it makes up for in freshness. 5 00:00:29,770 --> 00:00:34,810 Because I finished at last. About six hours ago. 6 00:00:34,810 --> 00:00:38,590 So. But. But good to have its debut. 7 00:00:38,590 --> 00:00:43,960 Rough as it is in this beautiful sepulchre. 8 00:00:43,960 --> 00:00:54,190 But ultimately, I think the video, once it's done properly, will be the more important contribution to the topic of soul and nature. 9 00:00:54,190 --> 00:01:06,040 That's cloud there. That mountain. What is real about those trying taking away the fantasy and the entire human contribution? 10 00:01:06,040 --> 00:01:11,800 You sober real? Yes. If only you could do that. 11 00:01:11,800 --> 00:01:18,080 If you could forget your heritage, your past and training your entire humanity. 12 00:01:18,080 --> 00:01:23,320 And animality for us. There is no reality. 13 00:01:23,320 --> 00:01:36,510 Nor for you either. You sober. Are we not hearing some feedback or is it just that, Douglas? 14 00:01:36,510 --> 00:01:42,690 Nature is saying to the realist's then that it's impossible to extract from our current awareness. 15 00:01:42,690 --> 00:01:50,250 The sedimentation is accumulated over millennia of previous animal as well as cultural experience, 16 00:01:50,250 --> 00:01:54,390 impossible to escape the ways in which some fantasy. 17 00:01:54,390 --> 00:01:58,380 Some prejudice. Some unreason. Some ignorance. 18 00:01:58,380 --> 00:02:06,360 Some fear. And who knows what else have woven their way into our every feeling and sense impression. 19 00:02:06,360 --> 00:02:12,120 And especially, it appears, when it comes to our experience of the natural world. 20 00:02:12,120 --> 00:02:21,840 However, one also finds passages in Nietzsche's work of works suggesting that it may, after all, be possible to cheque that ancient Positif, 21 00:02:21,840 --> 00:02:31,920 perhaps through some kind of phenomenological epoch and let us natural phenomena like clouds and mountains simply show themselves from themselves, 22 00:02:31,920 --> 00:02:39,300 perhaps even as they are in themselves. But if this sort of possible, what would it be like? 23 00:02:39,300 --> 00:02:49,860 How would nature look then? Behind these questions is, for me, a practical concern with the relentless devastation of the natural world. 24 00:02:49,860 --> 00:02:55,110 One reason I think it's so difficult to persuade people in the developed countries to care about the ongoing 25 00:02:55,110 --> 00:03:02,040 destruction of the planet and its climate is that they have so little direct experience of natural phenomenon. 26 00:03:02,040 --> 00:03:08,340 Given the extent to which contemporary urban life enables us to insulate ourselves from them, 27 00:03:08,340 --> 00:03:13,530 it would surely be helpful if one could escape or subvert the social construction of 28 00:03:13,530 --> 00:03:19,140 the natural world that some theorists claim must always condition our experience. 29 00:03:19,140 --> 00:03:24,710 In order to get back to the things of nature themselves, 30 00:03:24,710 --> 00:03:33,630 each is talk of the possibility of our experiencing the natural world as D anthropomorphised D devised or newly redeemed. 31 00:03:33,630 --> 00:03:39,300 Comes the question of exactly what we would encounter under such circumstances. 32 00:03:39,300 --> 00:03:49,830 The short answer will to power require some elaboration as to the methods whereby one might effect such a transformation of one's experience. 33 00:03:49,830 --> 00:03:55,080 To this end, I drawing some ideas and techniques from ballast and Zen Buddhist philosophy. 34 00:03:55,080 --> 00:04:03,570 The results allow us to see that the way to respond to Nietzsche's exhortation through the person that s ostrer to stay true to the Earth 35 00:04:03,570 --> 00:04:12,150 is to cleanse our experience of all the egocentric clutter that gets in the way of seeing what the Buddhists call our true nature, 36 00:04:12,150 --> 00:04:15,240 as well as the nature of the world around us. 37 00:04:15,240 --> 00:04:25,140 When does this by getting rid of consciousness, which Nietzsche calls not only superficial but ultimately superfluous and the language associated? 38 00:04:25,140 --> 00:04:32,550 I'm sorry to do away with consciousness and the language associated with and supportive of such consciousness. 39 00:04:32,550 --> 00:04:40,320 This undertaking does not preclude, but rather prompts a shift to a different kind of language that encourages behaviour 40 00:04:40,320 --> 00:04:46,500 that can juicers to more fulfilling lives and perhaps even to saving the planet. 41 00:04:46,500 --> 00:04:53,340 So very modest themes this morning as a way of showing the power of collective constructions of the natural world. 42 00:04:53,340 --> 00:05:00,960 Each emphasises in human, all too human. The vast difference between ancient and modern forms of this process. 43 00:05:00,960 --> 00:05:07,870 He discusses the relations of the first humans to nature in connexion with the origin of the religious cult. 44 00:05:07,870 --> 00:05:16,020 Quote, The whole of nature is for those early religionists, a sum of activities of conscious and volitional beings. 45 00:05:16,020 --> 00:05:27,450 An enormous complex of arbitrariness. This complex for nature lacks any kind of natural causality, but is rather infused with unpredictable wills, 46 00:05:27,450 --> 00:05:36,480 magical forces, demons and gods and inspirited things, all of which might be controlled or compelled through affection. 47 00:05:36,480 --> 00:05:48,000 Or that doesn't work through sorcery. A life in which quoting again things nature, tools, possessions of any kind where animate and then sold, 48 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:56,910 capable of injuring and evading human purposes, gave rise to an extraordinary feeling of impotence on the part of human agents. 49 00:05:56,910 --> 00:06:03,000 Such a lack of power eventually engendered desire for the opposite, for a feeling of power. 50 00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:07,620 And this was later granted when Western science formulated laws of nature, 51 00:06:07,620 --> 00:06:13,920 which enabled people to exercise unprecedented power over the natural world with a vengeance. 52 00:06:13,920 --> 00:06:21,330 By means of increasingly sophisticated technologies, modern humans for nature tend to be impressed. 53 00:06:21,330 --> 00:06:31,980 By contrast, by the uniformity of the laws of nature understood as utterly impersonal and completely devoid of any rational spirits. 54 00:06:31,980 --> 00:06:35,910 He suggests that this uniformity derives from a change in the notion. 55 00:06:35,910 --> 00:06:47,790 The subject, which is now richer and more polyphonic than before, such that the uniformity comes to some extent from a projection of human desires. 56 00:06:47,790 --> 00:06:57,030 Although most early societies practised various kinds of ritual ceremonies and magic in order to ensure success in the hunt or for agriculture, 57 00:06:57,030 --> 00:07:03,030 it was also clearly advantageous for our ancestors, especially when they were hunters and gatherers, 58 00:07:03,030 --> 00:07:13,360 to gain an accurate understanding of natural processes. But nature points out on grounds that we would today call evolutionary biological, 59 00:07:13,360 --> 00:07:20,430 that looseness in drawing certain kinds of conclusions also had considerable advantages. 60 00:07:20,430 --> 00:07:30,970 Quoting from the joyful science, whoever, for example, didn't know how to find the similar often enough in the context of food or dangerous animals, 61 00:07:30,970 --> 00:07:39,810 liver subsumed too slowly or too carefully would have a smaller probability of surviving than one who immediately assumed sameness. 62 00:07:39,810 --> 00:07:43,200 In the case of mere similarities. 63 00:07:43,200 --> 00:07:51,600 So these Redish very strong example may not be quite the same colour as those which make gathering companions so greedily devoured yesterday, 64 00:07:51,600 --> 00:07:56,970 just an hour before the stomach convulsions set in which killed him with gruesome rapidity. 65 00:07:56,970 --> 00:08:02,460 But they're similar enough in appearance for me to think twice about eating. 66 00:08:02,460 --> 00:08:08,940 And that slight rustling sound isn't quite the same as the sound I heard the day before. 67 00:08:08,940 --> 00:08:15,450 Just seconds before the sabre tooth tiger leapt upon my hunting companion and devoured him. 68 00:08:15,450 --> 00:08:21,330 But it sounds close enough for me to look for the nearest tree to climb to a height beyond the range 69 00:08:21,330 --> 00:08:28,560 of a tiger's output leap in order that for certain kinds of practical reasoning to take hold, 70 00:08:28,560 --> 00:08:36,510 it was necessary. Nature continues for a long time not to see or feel what is changing about things. 71 00:08:36,510 --> 00:08:44,160 Beings that didn't see precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything in flux in and for itself. 72 00:08:44,160 --> 00:08:58,610 Every high level of carefully the same drawing conclusions, every tendency toward scepticism miss in this regard posed a great danger for life. 73 00:08:58,610 --> 00:09:08,030 So to get on more efficiently with the business of living, it's better not to pay too close attention to what is really going on. 74 00:09:08,030 --> 00:09:15,500 Nature draws the analogy with the process of reading. Just as a reader skims quickly over the individual words on a page. 75 00:09:15,500 --> 00:09:25,340 This is beyond good and evil. So we scarcely see a tree exactly and completely with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape. 76 00:09:25,340 --> 00:09:30,170 It's so much easier for us to fantasise an approximation of a tree. 77 00:09:30,170 --> 00:09:34,610 Even in the midst of the strangest experiences, we still do the same thing. 78 00:09:34,610 --> 00:09:39,280 We make up the greater part of the experience. 79 00:09:39,280 --> 00:09:48,310 But this passage also suggests that we might be able to train ourselves to do what is less easy than fantasising the bulk of our experience, 80 00:09:48,310 --> 00:09:58,120 namely to see through, as it were, the persistent web of concepts and categories and linguistic labels to what is simply there, 81 00:09:58,120 --> 00:10:03,580 given the survival value that attaches to the tendency to fantasise approximations of things. 82 00:10:03,580 --> 00:10:10,990 The strategy would be to suspend this feature of what phenomenalist phenomenologists call the natural attitude, 83 00:10:10,990 --> 00:10:19,630 thereby effecting a switch from one what what one might call a life perspective to a death perspective. 84 00:10:19,630 --> 00:10:23,200 In an aphorism titled Midday in the Wonder and Its Shadow. 85 00:10:23,200 --> 00:10:33,010 Each year writes of how a strange longing for repose can overwhelm the soul of one who has reached the noontide of life. 86 00:10:33,010 --> 00:10:40,510 Quoting from that passage upon a meadow hidden amongst the woods, he sees the great God pan asleep. 87 00:10:40,510 --> 00:10:46,810 All the things of nature have fallen asleep with an expression of eternity on their faces. 88 00:10:46,810 --> 00:10:52,360 He wants nothing. He friends about nothing. His heart stands still. 89 00:10:52,360 --> 00:10:57,370 Only his eyes are alive. It is a death with open eyes. 90 00:10:57,370 --> 00:11:09,870 Then the man sees much that he has never seen before. And for as far as he can see, everything is spun into a net of light and as it were, buried in. 91 00:11:09,870 --> 00:11:18,590 In an unpublished note, nature calls this condition a means of procuring the advantages of one who is dead. 92 00:11:18,590 --> 00:11:24,020 This condition is not to be appreciated because of what he refers to as a 93 00:11:24,020 --> 00:11:30,870 fundamentally false evaluation of the dead world on the part of the sentient. 94 00:11:30,870 --> 00:11:38,570 That note goes on, the dead world eternally in motion and without every force against force, 95 00:11:38,570 --> 00:11:43,550 it is a festival to go from this world across to the dead world. 96 00:11:43,550 --> 00:11:48,710 Let us see through this comedy of Senti and being and thereby enjoy it. 97 00:11:48,710 --> 00:11:54,140 Let us not think of the return to the abandonment as a regression. We become quite true. 98 00:11:54,140 --> 00:12:07,520 Thereby we purrfect ourselves. Death has to be reinterpreted with, thereby reconcile ourselves with what is actually with the dead world. 99 00:12:07,520 --> 00:12:14,750 Furniture, this is also a way of getting beyond the human, all too human rights to think, to think oneself away, 100 00:12:14,750 --> 00:12:25,820 out of humanity, to unlearn desires of all kinds, and to employ the entire abundance of one part one's powers in looking. 101 00:12:25,820 --> 00:12:38,150 And yet what often happens is a few years later, in 1881, each year elaborates these ideas in a series of passages in his notebooks. 102 00:12:38,150 --> 00:12:47,720 He praises the will to know things as they are. For this, he writes, What is needed is practise in seeing with other eyes. 103 00:12:47,720 --> 00:13:00,350 Practise in seeing. Apart from human relations and thus seeing objectively exactly to cure this enormous delusion of human beings. 104 00:13:00,350 --> 00:13:04,340 Shortly after this, he presents a somewhat contrasting view. 105 00:13:04,340 --> 00:13:13,280 The task to see things as they are the means to be able to see with 100 eyes from many persons. 106 00:13:13,280 --> 00:13:19,100 It was a mistake to emphasise the impersonal and to character characterise seeing with the eye of 107 00:13:19,100 --> 00:13:26,150 one's neighbour as moral to see from the viewpoint of many neighbours and with purely personal eyes. 108 00:13:26,150 --> 00:13:36,090 That is the right thing. But the needn't be a contradiction here, as we can see if we move to the East Asian tradition, 109 00:13:36,090 --> 00:13:44,200 I'll begin with some brief remarks about the classical Chinese and how they look at this idea of seeing with the eyes of many neighbours. 110 00:13:44,200 --> 00:13:53,060 And the neighbours aren't just colour humans either. Confucius, for example, advocates the cultivation of reciprocal perspectives, 111 00:13:53,060 --> 00:13:57,650 putting oneself in the other person's position or seeing the situation from the other 112 00:13:57,650 --> 00:14:04,580 person's point of view as a way of reducing self centeredness and promoting social harmony. 113 00:14:04,580 --> 00:14:06,380 Not long after Confucius, 114 00:14:06,380 --> 00:14:17,030 the classical Daoist thinkers and drums set in particular recommend expanding the practise of experiential reciprocity beyond human beings to animals, 115 00:14:17,030 --> 00:14:23,390 birds, fishes and even trees. Drugs are famously lichens are normal, 116 00:14:23,390 --> 00:14:32,910 anthropocentric perspective to the situation of a frog at the bottom of a well who believes that he commands a view of the entire world. 117 00:14:32,910 --> 00:14:37,770 Some 15 years. Sorry. Fifteen hundred years after dancer. 118 00:14:37,770 --> 00:14:48,030 In Japan, the Zen master Gorgan similarly recommends going beyond what he calls looking through a bamboo tube at a corner of the sky. 119 00:14:48,030 --> 00:14:54,000 By entertaining the perspective, the perspectives of an even broader range of beings. 120 00:14:54,000 --> 00:15:02,910 I quote dragons, hungry ghosts, celestial beings, mountains and drops of water. 121 00:15:02,910 --> 00:15:09,800 For nature, this kind of understanding came easily in the Western tradition to at least in the old days, 122 00:15:09,800 --> 00:15:14,930 quoting from dawn of mourning during the great prehistoric age of humanity. 123 00:15:14,930 --> 00:15:22,070 What presupposed spirit everywhere and never thought to honour it as a privilege of the human being. 124 00:15:22,070 --> 00:15:26,390 There was thus no shame attached to being descended from animals or trees. 125 00:15:26,390 --> 00:15:34,550 And one saw spirit as that which connected us to the natural world, rather than that which separates us from it. 126 00:15:34,550 --> 00:15:41,370 Such a view is still possible in the modern age, at least for someone like Nature who writes in an aphorism with the title. 127 00:15:41,370 --> 00:15:45,040 Nature has stopped looking up. That's the ultimate joy. 128 00:15:45,040 --> 00:15:52,490 It's time, then, being able to save one's physical environment. This nature is intimate and familiar to me. 129 00:15:52,490 --> 00:15:57,800 Related by blood and even more than that. 130 00:15:57,800 --> 00:16:06,020 But what does he mean by saying that the landscape of the upper angered and is related to him even more than by blood? 131 00:16:06,020 --> 00:16:12,260 Well, for one thing, from the death perspective mentioned earlier, he appreciates the contribution to our lives. 132 00:16:12,260 --> 00:16:15,140 That comes from the inorganic realm. 133 00:16:15,140 --> 00:16:27,080 Quoting from a note of the 18th, 18th of 1881, the inorganic traditions us through and through water, air, birth, the shape of the ground. 134 00:16:27,080 --> 00:16:32,240 How distant and superior does our attitude towards what is dead to an organic? 135 00:16:32,240 --> 00:16:37,100 And all the while we are three quarters water and have an organic minerals in us 136 00:16:37,100 --> 00:16:44,800 that perhaps do more for our well until being than the whole of living society. 137 00:16:44,800 --> 00:16:50,560 Nature was fascinated by what he knew, which was quite a lot about the biology of his day. 138 00:16:50,560 --> 00:16:54,930 But he would have been truly delighted. Had he been capable of registering it. 139 00:16:54,930 --> 00:17:01,240 At Discovery by Carl Bender in 1897 of mitochondria. 140 00:17:01,240 --> 00:17:10,750 Mitochondria are organelles that reside within all cells in the human body and generated in assessing the energy necessary for the cells, 141 00:17:10,750 --> 00:17:20,410 activities and the body's life. There are some 10 million billion mitochondria in the body of the average adult, 142 00:17:20,410 --> 00:17:27,760 and they constitute almost half its dry weight, which is what remains after all, the H2O was extracted. 143 00:17:27,760 --> 00:17:36,010 What is remarkable, however, about the mitochondria is that their DNA is quite different from the DNA of the body's own cells and quite 144 00:17:36,010 --> 00:17:43,630 similar to the DNA of the mitochondria that power the cells of all multi cell report multicellular organisms, 145 00:17:43,630 --> 00:17:46,120 whether animals or plants. 146 00:17:46,120 --> 00:17:56,260 One implication of this is that if ICE attempt to assert my identity by pointing here to myself, to my body saying This is me. 147 00:17:56,260 --> 00:18:06,460 Well, two thirds of what I'm pointing to is water and almost half the rest consists of mitochondria, which are very definitely not me. 148 00:18:06,460 --> 00:18:19,660 And it's this substantial, not me in the form of mitochondrial DNA, even more than blood that relates my body physically to all other living bodies. 149 00:18:19,660 --> 00:18:24,250 For nature, if one is going to understand the natural world properly and aside from the 150 00:18:24,250 --> 00:18:30,040 various human projections onto it and appropriate research method is called for. 151 00:18:30,040 --> 00:18:33,520 From the joyful science as a researcher into nature, 152 00:18:33,520 --> 00:18:41,080 once you get out of one's human corner and thereby realise that what reigns in nature is abundance, 153 00:18:41,080 --> 00:18:47,830 extravagance in accordance with the will to power, which is precisely the way of life. 154 00:18:47,830 --> 00:18:55,180 One factor that allows us to get out of our human corner would be our intimate mitochondrial relationship to the natural world 155 00:18:55,180 --> 00:19:03,460 on the basis of which we can learn to entertain the perspectives of any other lifeforms in the physical but the joyful science. 156 00:19:03,460 --> 00:19:08,290 Each offers this advice to the natural scientists of his day. 157 00:19:08,290 --> 00:19:14,910 Above all, one should not want to divest existence of its polycentric character. 158 00:19:14,910 --> 00:19:18,910 That's what that is, what good taste demands. 159 00:19:18,910 --> 00:19:29,410 Gentlemen, the taste of reverence in the face of everything that goes beyond your horizon and in the next aphorism, our new infinite. 160 00:19:29,410 --> 00:19:39,400 He goes on to argue that the human intellect being perspectival at first in its view of itself, and the world is incapable of determining, 161 00:19:39,400 --> 00:19:47,320 quote, how far the prospect type of character of existence reaches or whether it even has any other character, 162 00:19:47,320 --> 00:19:56,170 whether an existence lacking interpretation loses its sense to the point of becoming nonsense, whether, on the contrary, 163 00:19:56,170 --> 00:20:06,940 all existence is not essentially existence that interprets the stop sign that is interpreting in this. 164 00:20:06,940 --> 00:20:14,590 Leaving aside the question of whether something other than the intellect may be capable of determining such a thing, each year continues. 165 00:20:14,590 --> 00:20:17,650 But I do think that today, at least, we are far enough. 166 00:20:17,650 --> 00:20:27,400 We are far from the laughable immodesty of decreeing from our own little corner that it is permissible to have perspectives only from this corner. 167 00:20:27,400 --> 00:20:30,910 Rather, the world has become infinite for us again, 168 00:20:30,910 --> 00:20:39,640 insofar as we cannot dismiss the possibility that it includes within itself an infinity of interpretations, 169 00:20:39,640 --> 00:20:46,150 not only multiple interpretations then from each human being, but also from all other living. 170 00:20:46,150 --> 00:20:58,310 And ultimately, as we'll see, non-living beings. You could call this scientist. 171 00:20:58,310 --> 00:21:04,410 This from another angle. From the angle of what nature calls the drives the tree, 172 00:21:04,410 --> 00:21:12,020 but one of his most important statements about the drives makes the remarkable claim largely ignored by the 173 00:21:12,020 --> 00:21:19,430 secondary literature that the forces driving our psychical life do so with almost no awareness on our part. 174 00:21:19,430 --> 00:21:24,470 From dawn of mourning, however far we may drive our self-knowledge. 175 00:21:24,470 --> 00:21:31,460 Nothing can be more incomplete than the picture we have of the totality of drives that constitute our being. 176 00:21:31,460 --> 00:21:34,250 We can scarcely even name the crudo ones. 177 00:21:34,250 --> 00:21:45,330 Their number one strength at the flood plain and counterplay and above all, the laws of their nourishment remain quite unknown to us. 178 00:21:45,330 --> 00:21:48,930 Whether we are awake or dreaming. Nature continues. 179 00:21:48,930 --> 00:21:57,930 Our drivers do nothing other than interpret nerve impulses and posit causes for them according to their own needs. 180 00:21:57,930 --> 00:22:02,520 Since the patterns of stimulation received by the body during sleep are minimal, 181 00:22:02,520 --> 00:22:10,800 the drives have much more freedom and freedom of interpretation in their imagined and the fantastic nature of the dream. 182 00:22:10,800 --> 00:22:17,610 They are more constrained while we are awake and active, since the patterns of neurostimulation end are much denser. 183 00:22:17,610 --> 00:22:24,030 But nature emphasises that, quote, There is no essential difference between waking and dreaming. 184 00:22:24,030 --> 00:22:33,370 Insofar as the drives continue their interpretations during the day, dreaming and fantasising occasions for their own fulfilment. 185 00:22:33,370 --> 00:22:42,670 So in so far as all existence interprets and drives, in particular interpret and will to power interprets. 186 00:22:42,670 --> 00:22:47,630 So that interpretation is itself a form of world power. This gives us the picture. 187 00:22:47,630 --> 00:22:53,420 Nature proposes in Beyond Good and Evil 36 of the world as water, power and nothing. 188 00:22:53,420 --> 00:22:58,870 Besides, they are on the basis of the assumption that we can't get to any other reality. 189 00:22:58,870 --> 00:23:06,700 Other other than the reality of our drives. He asks, is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether this 190 00:23:06,700 --> 00:23:12,040 given doesn't suffice for understanding on the basis of things like itself, 191 00:23:12,040 --> 00:23:14,710 the so-called mechanistic or material world, 192 00:23:14,710 --> 00:23:26,620 as well as a kind of drive life in which organic functions are still synthetically bound up with each other as a prefill of life. 193 00:23:26,620 --> 00:23:29,620 It surely is permitted to make that experiment, 194 00:23:29,620 --> 00:23:36,400 and the results will be the realisation that as the drys interpret the interpretively project our waking world, 195 00:23:36,400 --> 00:23:41,470 what they encounter is will to power, as Nietzsche puts it, will of course work. 196 00:23:41,470 --> 00:23:44,940 Only one will and not a matter of nervous. 197 00:23:44,940 --> 00:23:53,740 For example, thus the driver's encounter will in the form of other interpreting drives not only those of our fellow human beings, 198 00:23:53,740 --> 00:24:01,350 but also the drives, the time made animals, plants and all other natural phenomena. 199 00:24:01,350 --> 00:24:10,650 So what is ultimately going on according to nature, if we manage to anthropomorphise the natural world and naturalise ourselves, 200 00:24:10,650 --> 00:24:16,350 as he puts it, with pure new-Found newly redeemed nature? 201 00:24:16,350 --> 00:24:25,320 It sure doesn't evaporate. But it's helpful to consider here the traditional East Asian practise of what they call emptying the heart mind. 202 00:24:25,320 --> 00:24:31,020 This is referred to by both the classical Dow as thinkers and followed to this day by chance. 203 00:24:31,020 --> 00:24:37,770 And what is practitioners, all of whom are engaged in a similar enterprise? 204 00:24:37,770 --> 00:24:49,410 As one simply sits in the prescribed upright posture following the inhalations and exhalations of one's reach over time, the internal dialogue, 205 00:24:49,410 --> 00:24:54,450 the incessant conversations and commentary's thoughts and feelings, memories and fantasies, 206 00:24:54,450 --> 00:24:59,340 fears and anticipations that occupy our minds for so much of our waking lives. 207 00:24:59,340 --> 00:25:06,720 Gradually quietens down. What supervene is, is a calm, openness and clarity. 208 00:25:06,720 --> 00:25:14,700 The Dow is, to Buddhist thinkers, account for this in terms of a falling away of the conceptual frameworks in great thought patterns and emotional 209 00:25:14,700 --> 00:25:23,220 overlays and underpinnings that usually condition and so preclude our immediate experience of what is going on. 210 00:25:23,220 --> 00:25:31,150 Along with this comes a fading of the egocentric self that is generating all of this cyclical clutter. 211 00:25:31,150 --> 00:25:37,220 Each describes this kind of self as from dawn of mourning, a phantom of ego, 212 00:25:37,220 --> 00:25:43,130 which for most people has been formed in the heads of those around them and then communicated back to them. 213 00:25:43,130 --> 00:25:50,360 As a result of which, they all live together in a fog of impersonal and semi personal opinions and arbitrary, 214 00:25:50,360 --> 00:25:55,790 almost poetical value evaluations, each one in the head of the other. 215 00:25:55,790 --> 00:26:01,280 And this head in other heads, again, a wondrous world of Fantastics. 216 00:26:01,280 --> 00:26:07,160 This fog of opinions and habits grows and thrives more or less independently of the people. 217 00:26:07,160 --> 00:26:15,500 It involves the Buddhists. Call this karma. This General Khail fiction of the ego, as nature calls it, 218 00:26:15,500 --> 00:26:23,000 has internal as well as external origins insofar as it also derives from the plurality of the drives. 219 00:26:23,000 --> 00:26:27,920 A note from the same time as that passage from Dawn of Mourning reads as follows. 220 00:26:27,920 --> 00:26:33,050 The eye is not the attitude of one being to several drys, thoughts and so on. 221 00:26:33,050 --> 00:26:37,760 But the ego is a plurality of person like forces of which now this one, 222 00:26:37,760 --> 00:26:43,430 now that one stands in the foreground and has ego and regards others as a subject, 223 00:26:43,430 --> 00:26:49,550 regards and influential and determining external world as the drives are in conflict. 224 00:26:49,550 --> 00:26:59,630 The feeling of the eye is always strongest, precisely where the preponderance is human reason, according to Twilight of the Idols. 225 00:26:59,630 --> 00:27:08,540 Paul believes in the eye, in the eye as being the substance and projects its belief in the eye substance onto all things, 226 00:27:08,540 --> 00:27:18,200 thereby creating the concept of thing. But when this belief in the eye is undermined, the concept of the thing is correspondingly weakened. 227 00:27:18,200 --> 00:27:24,290 And what comes to the fore as substance recedes is relationships. 228 00:27:24,290 --> 00:27:32,720 Just as the Buddhists teach, as we free ourselves from what nature calls the error of the eye, we come to recognise, 229 00:27:32,720 --> 00:27:42,200 quote, the affinities, the fervent Schuffman and antagonisms amongst things multiplicities, therefore, and their loss. 230 00:27:42,200 --> 00:27:47,300 This corresponds perfectly to the idea of no self, which is basic Buddhism, 231 00:27:47,300 --> 00:27:54,980 and that applies equally to the eye, to things and dissolves them all into a network of relationships. 232 00:27:54,980 --> 00:28:04,070 So the practise of meditation has one simply sit waiting for the words to subside and the language to decline and fall away together. 233 00:28:04,070 --> 00:28:08,870 Not something one can do when driven by the instinct for self-preservation, 234 00:28:08,870 --> 00:28:15,350 but rather in some temporary disengagement from the business of making a living in society. 235 00:28:15,350 --> 00:28:16,610 When this is working, 236 00:28:16,610 --> 00:28:27,860 a field opens up that can remain through rising from the meditation cushion and returning to the opposite pole of four dynamic activity. 237 00:28:27,860 --> 00:28:35,880 With a diminishing of the thoughts flow and the falling silent of language comes a dying down of consciousness, which is for each. 238 00:28:35,880 --> 00:28:43,460 In any cases we saw something that is, for the most part, superfluous. 239 00:28:43,460 --> 00:28:50,560 I'm going to quote from the passage that Larry discussed at length yesterday, but I don't think you put it this far. 240 00:28:50,560 --> 00:28:54,380 The human being, like every living being, is thinking constantly, 241 00:28:54,380 --> 00:28:59,330 but without knowing it, the thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part. 242 00:28:59,330 --> 00:29:05,480 The soup, both superficial and the worst part is suddenly this conscious thinking that takes place in words, 243 00:29:05,480 --> 00:29:15,620 in signs that communicate our thoughts are constantly generalised by the character of consciousness and translated into the perspective of the herd. 244 00:29:15,620 --> 00:29:26,130 An increase in consciousness is thus a danger. And whoever lives amongst the conscious Europeans knows that it is even an illness. 245 00:29:26,130 --> 00:29:36,610 A less sick way to live then would be to let the drives that give rise to everyday consciousness and its thinking and words become quiescent. 246 00:29:36,610 --> 00:29:41,680 No longer interpreting the situation from their own perspectives and to thereby allow what 247 00:29:41,680 --> 00:29:48,130 is going on beneath thinking to flow through the body in silence and without commentary. 248 00:29:48,130 --> 00:29:55,390 What's going on is basically drys not exfoliating into consciousness or commenting on the text of experience, 249 00:29:55,390 --> 00:29:59,320 not the egocentric drives that keep the illusion of the eye going. 250 00:29:59,320 --> 00:30:04,990 But now only the more each ancient deeper level drives that through millennia 251 00:30:04,990 --> 00:30:10,690 of adaptation have kept the human body attuned to its physical environment. 252 00:30:10,690 --> 00:30:18,370 Paradoxically, it's by putting ourselves in a situation where we don't need to be concerned with preserving ourselves, 253 00:30:18,370 --> 00:30:24,790 that we can get to a condition in which it is only those original natural environmental, 254 00:30:24,790 --> 00:30:30,070 environment related and life preserving drives that are operative. 255 00:30:30,070 --> 00:30:35,140 Under such conditions, wonderous responses to the world are naturally spontaneous, 256 00:30:35,140 --> 00:30:39,610 and one's actions stem not from the narrow confines of the small self, 257 00:30:39,610 --> 00:30:44,950 but from the forces of heaven on earth as they operate through the world trade body. 258 00:30:44,950 --> 00:30:51,010 Its great reason. One thinks of Nietzsche's praise of go to the twilight of the idols, 259 00:30:51,010 --> 00:30:57,580 go to conceive of a strong, highly cultured human being, adept in a range of physical skills, 260 00:30:57,580 --> 00:31:04,360 lively piety, self-control and with reverence for himself who can dare to grant himself the 261 00:31:04,360 --> 00:31:10,330 full range and richness of naturalness and who is strong enough for this. 262 00:31:10,330 --> 00:31:16,510 And whatever thoughts may come when the chapter of consciousness and quieten down will then be 263 00:31:16,510 --> 00:31:26,180 genuinely results of Nietzsche's famous instinct rather than mere opinions of the egocentric self. 264 00:31:26,180 --> 00:31:30,830 But since they apparently didn't engage in any formal meditation practise, 265 00:31:30,830 --> 00:31:40,070 how did he arrive at such experiences and ideas, such ideas so that are so similar to autism? 266 00:31:40,070 --> 00:31:48,590 Well, he arrived there by walking or as he often puts it, Marciel March six to eight hours a day. 267 00:31:48,590 --> 00:31:52,940 One can still the body's locomotion is by sitting and following the breath, 268 00:31:52,940 --> 00:32:01,050 or else one can put it into energetically sustained movement by walking or running or climbing or swimming. 269 00:32:01,050 --> 00:32:04,670 Wendy Cho was in the accident and hiking paths around this area. 270 00:32:04,670 --> 00:32:14,510 He kept to the well trodden ones, avoiding dangerous terrain in which he would have to slow down and pay attention to where he was putting his feet. 271 00:32:14,510 --> 00:32:21,470 Many of his letters expressed gratitude for the successful efforts of the local kaufer to keep the paths around 272 00:32:21,470 --> 00:32:29,780 town smooth and even and clear obstructions so that he could march along with them without any fear of stumbling. 273 00:32:29,780 --> 00:32:36,490 By keeping to safe and secure paths, whether Aransas, Maria or amongst the lanes of Venice or the streets of Genoa, 274 00:32:36,490 --> 00:32:43,700 he too was able to practise a vigorous form of walking meditation known as King Zen tradition that 275 00:32:43,700 --> 00:32:51,310 allowed him to hear the innermost voices of his thoughts rather than the superficial chatter of his eye. 276 00:32:51,310 --> 00:32:57,470 No wonder he reports that his creativity was always at its highest when the muscles were working 277 00:32:57,470 --> 00:33:03,500 at their most subtle pitch such that the body is experienced not as recalcitrant matter, 278 00:33:03,500 --> 00:33:08,570 but as energetic flow. One can also do this. 279 00:33:08,570 --> 00:33:18,710 It's clear, at least it's clear to me, that by means of his marching nature became able to see what was going on around him. 280 00:33:18,710 --> 00:33:23,090 Insofar as this description of learning to see from Twilight of the Idols could 281 00:33:23,090 --> 00:33:30,100 certainly have been written in different language by a Darwich sage or a Zen master. 282 00:33:30,100 --> 00:33:39,100 To learn, seeing too accustomed the eye to rested patients, letting things approach to postpone judgement, 283 00:33:39,100 --> 00:33:44,320 learning to go around and comprehend each unique case from all sides. 284 00:33:44,320 --> 00:33:51,040 That is the first preschooling in spirituality not to react to a stimulus immediately, 285 00:33:51,040 --> 00:33:55,600 but to get hold of the instincts that inhibit and cheque to learn. 286 00:33:55,600 --> 00:34:02,050 Seeing as I understand it is almost what the other philosophical way of speaking calls a strong will. 287 00:34:02,050 --> 00:34:12,020 But the essential thing here is precisely not to will, to be able to defer decision. 288 00:34:12,020 --> 00:34:20,930 To conclude with a return to the things of nature. How are things then when the body flow is fully and vibrantly under way? 289 00:34:20,930 --> 00:34:27,140 The language of south of the strip is helpful here. Redeemed from their bondage under purpose. 290 00:34:27,140 --> 00:34:34,490 The things of nature does on the feet of chance and above each one that has an accident to heaven. 291 00:34:34,490 --> 00:34:39,810 Innocence, the heaven contingency. The Heaven exuberance. 292 00:34:39,810 --> 00:34:40,790 Sorrowful stress. 293 00:34:40,790 --> 00:34:54,050 Now tree at midday, while crowned by the love of defying the world, become perfect and we ourselves falling still into the well of eternity, 294 00:34:54,050 --> 00:35:17,256 up into the abyss of the heavens from whence soul falls, as do you, baptising all things in the vast, incessant process of earthly becoming.