1 00:00:06,270 --> 00:00:13,230 So as you see from the abstract, there are two parts to my presentation. 2 00:00:13,230 --> 00:00:22,920 Firstly, a paper that I should get through in 40 minutes. And secondly, and more importantly, video that will last 20 minutes. 3 00:00:22,920 --> 00:00:29,610 The video is less polished than the paper because of the technical problems that always come up. 4 00:00:29,610 --> 00:00:35,100 But what it makes I mean, what it loses in Polish, it makes up for in freshness. 5 00:00:35,100 --> 00:00:40,690 Because I finished at last about six hours ago. 6 00:00:40,690 --> 00:00:49,270 So but good to have its debut, rough as it is in this beautiful sepulchre. 7 00:00:49,270 --> 00:00:59,500 But ultimately, I think the video, once it's done properly, will be the more important contribution to the topic of soul and nature. 8 00:00:59,500 --> 00:01:11,350 That's cloud there. That mountain. What is real about those trying taking away the fantasy and the entire human contribution? 9 00:01:11,350 --> 00:01:17,110 You sober real? Yes. If only you could do that. 10 00:01:17,110 --> 00:01:26,380 If you could forget your heritage, your past and training your entire humanity and animality for us. 11 00:01:26,380 --> 00:01:34,140 There is no reality. Nor for you either. Someone's. 12 00:01:34,140 --> 00:01:41,820 I think are we not hearing some feedback or is it just that, Donald? 13 00:01:41,820 --> 00:01:48,000 Nature is saying to the realist's then that it's impossible to extract from our current awareness. 14 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:55,560 The sedimentation is accumulated over millennia of previous animal as well as cultural experience, 15 00:01:55,560 --> 00:01:59,700 impossible to escape the ways in which some fantasy. 16 00:01:59,700 --> 00:02:03,690 Some prejudice. Some unreason. Some ignorance. 17 00:02:03,690 --> 00:02:11,670 Some fear. And who knows what else have woven their way into our every feeling and sense impression. 18 00:02:11,670 --> 00:02:17,430 And especially, it appears, when it comes to our experience of the natural world. 19 00:02:17,430 --> 00:02:27,180 However, one also finds passages in Nietzsche's work works suggesting that it may, after all, be possible to cheque that ancient Positif, 20 00:02:27,180 --> 00:02:37,230 perhaps through some kind of phenomenological epoch and let us natural phenomena like clouds and mountains simply show themselves from themselves, 21 00:02:37,230 --> 00:02:44,610 perhaps even as they are in themselves. But if they're so possible, what would it be like? 22 00:02:44,610 --> 00:02:55,170 How would nature look then? Behind these questions is, for me, a practical concern with the relentless devastation of the natural world. 23 00:02:55,170 --> 00:03:00,420 One reason I think it's so difficult to persuade people in the developed countries to care about the ongoing 24 00:03:00,420 --> 00:03:07,350 destruction of the planet and its climate is that they have so little direct experience of natural phenomenon. 25 00:03:07,350 --> 00:03:13,650 Given the extent to which contemporary urban life enables us to insulate ourselves from them, 26 00:03:13,650 --> 00:03:18,840 it would surely be helpful if one could escape or subvert the social construction of 27 00:03:18,840 --> 00:03:24,450 the natural world that some theorists claim must always condition our experience. 28 00:03:24,450 --> 00:03:30,030 In order to get back to the things of nature themselves, 29 00:03:30,030 --> 00:03:38,940 each has talk of the possibility of our experiencing the natural world as D anthropomorphised D devised or newly redeemed. 30 00:03:38,940 --> 00:03:44,610 Comes the question of exactly what we would encounter under such circumstances. 31 00:03:44,610 --> 00:03:55,140 The short answer will to power require some elaboration as to the methods whereby one might effect such a transformation of one's experience. 32 00:03:55,140 --> 00:04:00,390 To this end, I drawing some ideas and techniques from ballast and Zen Buddhist philosophy. 33 00:04:00,390 --> 00:04:08,880 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 34 00:04:08,880 --> 00:04:17,460 is to cleanse our experience of all the egocentric clutter that gets in the way of seeing what the Buddhists call our true nature, 35 00:04:17,460 --> 00:04:20,550 as well as the nature of the world around us. 36 00:04:20,550 --> 00:04:30,450 When does this by getting rid of consciousness, which Nietzsche calls not only superficial but ultimately superfluous and the language associated? 37 00:04:30,450 --> 00:04:37,860 I'm sorry to do away with consciousness and the language associated with and supportive of such consciousness. 38 00:04:37,860 --> 00:04:45,630 This undertaking does not preclude, but rather prompts a shift to a different kind of language that encourages behaviour 39 00:04:45,630 --> 00:04:51,810 that can juicers to more fulfilling lives and perhaps even to saving the planet. 40 00:04:51,810 --> 00:04:58,650 So very modest themes this morning as a way of showing the power of collective constructions of the natural world. 41 00:04:58,650 --> 00:05:06,270 Each emphasises in human, all too human. The vast difference between ancient and modern forms of this process. 42 00:05:06,270 --> 00:05:13,170 He discusses the relations of the first humans to nature in connexion with the origin of the religious cult. 43 00:05:13,170 --> 00:05:21,330 Quote, The whole of nature is for those early religionists, a sum of activities of conscious and volitional beings. 44 00:05:21,330 --> 00:05:25,800 An enormous complex of arbitrariness. 45 00:05:25,800 --> 00:05:34,140 This complex for nature lacks any kind of natural causality, but is rather infused with unpredictable wills, magical forces, 46 00:05:34,140 --> 00:05:45,060 demons and gods and inspirited things, all of which might be controlled or compelled to affection or effect doesn't work through sorcery. 47 00:05:45,060 --> 00:05:53,310 A life in which quoting again things nature, tools, possessions of any kind where animate and then sold, 48 00:05:53,310 --> 00:06:02,220 capable of injuring and evading human purposes, gave rise to an extraordinary feeling of impotence on the part of human agents. 49 00:06:02,220 --> 00:06:08,310 Such a lack of power eventually engender desire for the opposite, for a feeling of power. 50 00:06:08,310 --> 00:06:12,900 And this was later granted when Western science formulated laws of nature, 51 00:06:12,900 --> 00:06:19,230 which enabled people to exercise unprecedented power over the natural world with a vengeance. 52 00:06:19,230 --> 00:06:26,640 By means of increasingly sophisticated technologies, modern humans for nature tend to be impressed. 53 00:06:26,640 --> 00:06:37,290 By contrast, by the uniformity of the laws of nature understood as utterly impersonal and completely devoid of any rational spirits. 54 00:06:37,290 --> 00:06:45,860 He suggests that this uniformity derives for a change. Notion of the subject, which is now richer and more polyphonic than before, 55 00:06:45,860 --> 00:06:53,100 such that the uniformity comes to some extent from a projection of human desires. 56 00:06:53,100 --> 00:07:02,340 Although most early societies practised various kinds of ritual ceremonies and magic in order to ensure success in the hunt or for agriculture, 57 00:07:02,340 --> 00:07:08,340 it was also clearly advantageous for our ancestors, especially when they were hunters and gatherers, 58 00:07:08,340 --> 00:07:18,680 to gain an accurate understanding of natural processes. But nature points out on grounds that we would today call evolutionary biological, 59 00:07:18,680 --> 00:07:25,750 that looseness in drawing certain kinds of conclusions also had considerable advantages. 60 00:07:25,750 --> 00:07:32,040 Quoting from the joyful science, whoever, for example, didn't know how to find the similar. 61 00:07:32,040 --> 00:07:36,360 Often enough in the context of food or dangerous animals, 62 00:07:36,360 --> 00:07:45,100 liver subsumed too slowly or too carefully would have a smaller probability of surviving than one who immediately assumed sameness. 63 00:07:45,100 --> 00:07:48,520 In the case of mere similarities. 64 00:07:48,520 --> 00:07:56,890 So these Redish very strong example may not be quite the same colour as those which might gather a companion so greedily devoured yesterday, 65 00:07:56,890 --> 00:08:02,290 just an hour before the stomach convulsions set in, which killed him with gruesome rapidity. 66 00:08:02,290 --> 00:08:07,750 But they're similar enough in appearance for me to think twice about eating. 67 00:08:07,750 --> 00:08:14,230 And that slight rustling sound isn't quite the same as the sound I heard the day before. 68 00:08:14,230 --> 00:08:20,770 Just seconds before the sabertooth tiger leapt upon my hunting companion and devoured him. 69 00:08:20,770 --> 00:08:26,230 But it sounds close enough for me to look for the nearest tree to climb to a height beyond the 70 00:08:26,230 --> 00:08:33,880 range of a tiger's leap in order then for certain kinds of practical reasoning to take hold. 71 00:08:33,880 --> 00:08:41,830 It was necessary. Each continues for a long time not to see or feel what is changing about things. 72 00:08:41,830 --> 00:08:49,450 Beings that didn't see precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything in flux in and for itself. 73 00:08:49,450 --> 00:09:03,910 Every high level of carefulness in drawing conclusions, every tendency toward scepticism miss in this regard posed a greater danger for life. 74 00:09:03,910 --> 00:09:13,360 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. 75 00:09:13,360 --> 00:09:20,800 Nature draws the analogy with the process of reading, just as a reader skims quickly over the individual words on the page. 76 00:09:20,800 --> 00:09:30,670 This is from beyond good and evil. So we scarcely see a tree exactly and completely with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape. 77 00:09:30,670 --> 00:09:35,470 It's so much easier for us to fantasise an approximation of a tree. 78 00:09:35,470 --> 00:09:39,910 Even in the midst of the strangest experiences, we still do the same thing. 79 00:09:39,910 --> 00:09:44,590 We make up the greater part of the experience. 80 00:09:44,590 --> 00:09:53,620 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, 81 00:09:53,620 --> 00:10:03,430 namely to see through, as it were, the persistent web of concepts and categories and linguistic labels to what is simply there, 82 00:10:03,430 --> 00:10:08,890 given the survival value that attaches to the tendency to fantasise approximations of things. 83 00:10:08,890 --> 00:10:16,300 The strategy would be to suspend this feature of what Phenomenalist phenomenologists called the natural attitude, 84 00:10:16,300 --> 00:10:24,940 thereby effecting a switch from one what what one might call a life perspective to a death perspective. 85 00:10:24,940 --> 00:10:28,510 In an aphorism titled Midday in the Wonder and Its Shadow. 86 00:10:28,510 --> 00:10:38,320 Each year writes of how a strange longing for repose can overwhelm the soul of one who has reached the noontide of life. 87 00:10:38,320 --> 00:10:45,820 Quoting from that passage upon a meadow hidden amongst the woods, he sees the great God pan asleep. 88 00:10:45,820 --> 00:10:52,120 All the things of nature have fallen asleep with an expression of eternity on their faces. 89 00:10:52,120 --> 00:10:57,680 He wants nothing. He friends about nothing. His heart stands still. 90 00:10:57,680 --> 00:11:02,680 Only his eyes are alive. It is a death with open eyes. 91 00:11:02,680 --> 00:11:15,200 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. 92 00:11:15,200 --> 00:11:23,910 In an unpublished note, nature calls this condition a means of procuring the advantages of one who is dead. 93 00:11:23,910 --> 00:11:32,970 This condition is not to be appreciated because of what he refers to as a fundamentally false evaluation of the dead world. 94 00:11:32,970 --> 00:11:43,870 On the part of the sentiment. That note goes on, the dead world eternally in motion and without every force against force, 95 00:11:43,870 --> 00:11:48,880 it is a festival to go from this world across to the dead world. 96 00:11:48,880 --> 00:11:54,010 Let us see through this comedy of Senti and being and thereby enjoy it. 97 00:11:54,010 --> 00:11:59,440 Let us not think of the return to the abandonment as a regression. We become quite true. 98 00:11:59,440 --> 00:12:13,300 Thereby we purrfect ourselves. Death has to be reinterpreted with, thereby reconcile ourselves with what is actually with the dead world furniture. 99 00:12:13,300 --> 00:12:21,520 This is also a way of getting beyond the human, all too human rights to think, to think oneself away, out of humanity, 100 00:12:21,520 --> 00:12:31,150 to unlearn desires of all kinds, and to employ the entire abundance of one part of one's powers in looking. 101 00:12:31,150 --> 00:12:43,450 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 00:12:43,450 --> 00:12:53,020 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 00:12:53,020 --> 00:13:05,680 Practise in seeing. Apart from human relations and thus seeing objectively Sakalys to cure this enormous delusion of human beings. 104 00:13:05,680 --> 00:13:09,640 Shortly after this, he presents a somewhat contrasting view. 105 00:13:09,640 --> 00:13:18,610 The task to see things as they are the means to be able to see with 100 eyes from many persons. 106 00:13:18,610 --> 00:13:24,400 It was a mistake to emphasise the impersonal and to character characterise seeing with the eye of 107 00:13:24,400 --> 00:13:31,450 one's neighbour as moral to see from the viewpoint of many neighbours and with purely personal eyes. 108 00:13:31,450 --> 00:13:41,400 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 00:13:41,400 --> 00:13:49,510 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 00:13:49,510 --> 00:13:58,370 And the neighbours aren't just colour humans either. Confucius, for example, advocates the cultivation of reciprocal perspectives, 111 00:13:58,370 --> 00:14:02,960 putting oneself in the other person's position or seeing the situation from the other 112 00:14:02,960 --> 00:14:09,890 person's point of view as a way of reducing self centeredness and promoting social harmony. 113 00:14:09,890 --> 00:14:16,520 Not long after Confucius, the classical DOWER'S thinkers and drums set in particular recommend expanding 114 00:14:16,520 --> 00:14:22,340 the practise of experiential reciprocity beyond human beings to animals, 115 00:14:22,340 --> 00:14:28,700 birds, fishes and even trees. Drugs are famously lichens are normal, 116 00:14:28,700 --> 00:14:38,210 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 00:14:38,210 --> 00:14:43,070 Some 15 years. Sorry. Fifteen hundred years after doing. 118 00:14:43,070 --> 00:14:53,330 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 00:14:53,330 --> 00:14:59,300 By entertaining the perspective, the perspectives of an even broader range of beings. 120 00:14:59,300 --> 00:15:09,110 I quote dragons, hungry ghosts, celestial beings, mountains and drops of water for nature. 121 00:15:09,110 --> 00:15:15,110 This kind of understanding came easily in the Western tradition to at least in the old days, 122 00:15:15,110 --> 00:15:20,240 quoting from dawn of mourning during the great prehistoric age of humanity. 123 00:15:20,240 --> 00:15:27,380 What presupposed spirit everywhere and never thought to wonder it as a privilege of the human being. 124 00:15:27,380 --> 00:15:31,700 There was thus no shame attached to being descended from animals or trees, 125 00:15:31,700 --> 00:15:39,860 and one saw spirit as that which connected us to the natural world, rather than that which separates us from it. 126 00:15:39,860 --> 00:15:46,670 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 00:15:46,670 --> 00:15:50,460 Nature has stopped looking up. That's the ultimate joy. 128 00:15:50,460 --> 00:15:57,800 Found in being able to save one's physical environment. This nature is intimate and familiar to me. 129 00:15:57,800 --> 00:16:03,120 Related by blood and even more than that. 130 00:16:03,120 --> 00:16:11,330 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 00:16:11,330 --> 00:16:17,570 Well, for one thing, from the death perspective mentioned earlier, he appreciates the contribution to our lives. 132 00:16:17,570 --> 00:16:20,450 That comes from the inorganic realm. 133 00:16:20,450 --> 00:16:32,390 Quoting from my notes of the 18 of 1881, the inorganic traditions us through and through water, air, birth, the shape of the ground. 134 00:16:32,390 --> 00:16:37,550 How distant and superior is our attitude towards what is dead to an organic? 135 00:16:37,550 --> 00:16:42,410 And all the while we are three Portia's water and have an organic minerals in us 136 00:16:42,410 --> 00:16:50,110 that perhaps do more for our well until being than the whole of living society. 137 00:16:50,110 --> 00:16:55,870 Nature was fascinated by what he knew, which was quite a lot about the biology of his day. 138 00:16:55,870 --> 00:17:00,240 But he would have been truly delighted. Had he been capable of registering it. 139 00:17:00,240 --> 00:17:06,550 At Discovery by Carl Bender in 1897 of mitochondria. 140 00:17:06,550 --> 00:17:13,810 Mitochondria are organelles that reside within all cells in the human body and generated the necessity, 141 00:17:13,810 --> 00:17:19,150 the energy necessary for the cells, activities and the body's life. 142 00:17:19,150 --> 00:17:25,720 There are some 10 million billion mitochondria in the body of the average adult, 143 00:17:25,720 --> 00:17:33,070 and they constitute almost half its dry weight, which is what remains after all, the H2O was extracted. 144 00:17:33,070 --> 00:17:41,320 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 145 00:17:41,320 --> 00:17:48,940 similar to the DNA of the mitochondria that power the cells of all multi cell report multicellular organisms, 146 00:17:48,940 --> 00:17:51,430 whether animals or plants. 147 00:17:51,430 --> 00:18:01,570 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. 148 00:18:01,570 --> 00:18:11,740 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. 149 00:18:11,740 --> 00:18:16,630 And it's this substantial, not to me in the form of mitochondrial DNA, 150 00:18:16,630 --> 00:18:24,930 even more than blood that relates my body physically to all other living bodies. 151 00:18:24,930 --> 00:18:30,280 For nature, if one is going to understand the natural world properly and aside from the various human 152 00:18:30,280 --> 00:18:37,030 projections onto it and appropriate research method is called for from joyful science. 153 00:18:37,030 --> 00:18:46,390 As a researcher into nature, once you get out of one's human corner and thereby realise that what reigns in nature is abundance, 154 00:18:46,390 --> 00:18:53,140 extravagance in accordance with the will to power, which is precisely the way of life. 155 00:18:53,140 --> 00:19:00,490 One factor that allows us to get out of our human corner would be our intimate mitochondrial relationship to the natural world 156 00:19:00,490 --> 00:19:08,770 on the basis of which we can learn to entertain the perspectives of any other lifeforms in the physical but the joyful science. 157 00:19:08,770 --> 00:19:13,600 Each offers this advice to the natural scientists of his day. 158 00:19:13,600 --> 00:19:20,250 Above all, one should not want to divest existence of its polycentric character. 159 00:19:20,250 --> 00:19:24,140 That's what that is, what good taste demands. 160 00:19:24,140 --> 00:19:34,720 Gentlemen, the taste of reverence in the face of everything that goes beyond your horizon and in the next aphorism, our new infinite. 161 00:19:34,720 --> 00:19:44,710 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, 162 00:19:44,710 --> 00:19:52,630 quote, how far the prospect type of character of existence reaches or whether it even has any other character, 163 00:19:52,630 --> 00:20:01,480 whether an existence lacking interpretation loses its sense to the point of becoming nonsense, whether, on the contrary, 164 00:20:01,480 --> 00:20:12,250 all existence is not essentially existence that interprets the stop sign that is interpreting in this. 165 00:20:12,250 --> 00:20:18,490 Leaving aside the question of whether something other than the intellect may be capable of determining such a thing. 166 00:20:18,490 --> 00:20:22,960 Beecher continues. But I do think that today, at least, we are far enough. 167 00:20:22,960 --> 00:20:32,710 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. 168 00:20:32,710 --> 00:20:36,220 Rather, the world has become infinite for us again, 169 00:20:36,220 --> 00:20:44,950 insofar as we cannot dismiss the possibility that it includes within itself an infinity of interpretations, 170 00:20:44,950 --> 00:20:55,180 not only multiple interpretations then from each human being, but also from all other living, and ultimately, as we'll see, non-living beings. 171 00:20:55,180 --> 00:21:10,080 You could call this scientist. This from another angle, from the angle of what nature calls the drives the treatment, 172 00:21:10,080 --> 00:21:17,320 but one of his most important statements about the drives makes the remarkable claim largely ignored by the 173 00:21:17,320 --> 00:21:24,730 secondary literature that the forces driving our cyclical life do so with almost no awareness on our part. 174 00:21:24,730 --> 00:21:29,800 From dawn of mourning, however far we may drive our self-knowledge. 175 00:21:29,800 --> 00:21:36,760 Nothing can be more incomplete than the picture we have of the totality of drives that constitute our being. 176 00:21:36,760 --> 00:21:39,590 We can scarcely even name the crudo ones. 177 00:21:39,590 --> 00:21:50,640 Their number one strength at the flood plain and counterplay and above all, the laws of their nourishment remained quite unknown to us. 178 00:21:50,640 --> 00:21:52,430 Whether we are awake or dreaming. 179 00:21:52,430 --> 00:22:03,240 Nature continues, our drives do nothing other than interpret nerve impulses and posit causes for them according to their own needs. 180 00:22:03,240 --> 00:22:07,830 Since the patterns of stimulation received by the body during sleep are minimal, 181 00:22:07,830 --> 00:22:16,110 the drives have much more freedom and freedom of interpretation in their imagined and the fantastic nature of the dream. 182 00:22:16,110 --> 00:22:22,920 They are more constrained while we are awake and active since the patterns of neurostimulation than are much denser. 183 00:22:22,920 --> 00:22:29,340 But nature emphasises that, quote, There is no essential difference between waking and dreaming. 184 00:22:29,340 --> 00:22:38,680 Insofar as the drives continue their interpretations during the day, dreaming and fantasising occasions for their own fulfilment. 185 00:22:38,680 --> 00:22:47,980 So in so far as all existence interprets and drives, in particular interpret and will to power interprets. 186 00:22:47,980 --> 00:22:52,940 So that interpretation is itself a form of world power. This gives us the picture. 187 00:22:52,940 --> 00:22:58,720 Nature proposes in Beyond Good and Evil 36 of the world as world power and nothing. 188 00:22:58,720 --> 00:23:04,180 Besides, they are on the basis of the assumption that we can't get to any other reality. 189 00:23:04,180 --> 00:23:12,010 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 00:23:12,010 --> 00:23:17,350 given doesn't suffice for understanding on the basis of things like itself, 191 00:23:17,350 --> 00:23:20,020 the so-called mechanistic or material world, 192 00:23:20,020 --> 00:23:31,930 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 00:23:31,930 --> 00:23:34,930 It surely is permitted to make that experiment, 194 00:23:34,930 --> 00:23:41,710 and the results will be the realisation that as the PRISE interpret the interpretively project our waking world, 195 00:23:41,710 --> 00:23:46,780 what they encounter is will to power, as Nietzsche puts it, will of course work. 196 00:23:46,780 --> 00:23:51,550 Only one will and not a matter of nerves, for example. 197 00:23:51,550 --> 00:23:59,050 Thus, the driver's encounter will in the form of other interpreting drives not only those of our fellow human beings, 198 00:23:59,050 --> 00:24:06,640 but also the drives that animate animals, plants and all other natural phenomena. 199 00:24:06,640 --> 00:24:15,940 So what is ultimately going on according to nature? If we manage to d anthropomorphise the natural world and naturalise ourselves, 200 00:24:15,940 --> 00:24:23,560 as he puts it, with pure new-Found newly redeemed nature, nature doesn't elaborate. 201 00:24:23,560 --> 00:24:30,640 But it's helpful to consider here the traditional East Asian practise of what they call emptying the heart mind. 202 00:24:30,640 --> 00:24:38,290 This is referred to by both the classical DOWER'S thinkers and followed to this day by Chinese and Buddhist practitioners, 203 00:24:38,290 --> 00:24:43,080 all of whom are engaged in a similar enterprise. 204 00:24:43,080 --> 00:24:54,720 As one simply sits in the prescribed upright posture following the inhalations and exhalations of one's screech over time, the internal dialogue, 205 00:24:54,720 --> 00:24:59,760 the incessant conversations and commentary's thoughts and feelings, memories and fantasies, 206 00:24:59,760 --> 00:25:04,650 fears and anticipations that occupy our minds for so much of our waking lives. 207 00:25:04,650 --> 00:25:12,030 Gradually quietens down. What supervene is, is a calm, openness and clarity. 208 00:25:12,030 --> 00:25:20,010 The Dow is, to Buddhist thinkers, account for this in terms of the falling away of the conceptual frameworks in great thought patterns and emotional 209 00:25:20,010 --> 00:25:28,530 overlays and underpinnings that usually condition and so preclude our immediate experience of what is going on. 210 00:25:28,530 --> 00:25:36,480 Along with this comes a fading of the egocentric self that is generating all of this cyclical clutter. 211 00:25:36,480 --> 00:25:42,510 Each year describes this kind of self as from dawn of mourning, a phantom of ego, 212 00:25:42,510 --> 00:25:48,450 which for most people has been formed in the heads of those around them and then communicated back to them. 213 00:25:48,450 --> 00:25:55,680 As a result of which, they all live together in a fog of impersonal and sending personal opinions and arbitrary, 214 00:25:55,680 --> 00:26:06,600 almost poetical value evaluations, each one in the head of the other and this head in other heads, again, a wondrous world of Fantastics. 215 00:26:06,600 --> 00:26:12,480 This fog of opinions and habits grows and thrives more or less independently of the people. 216 00:26:12,480 --> 00:26:20,790 It involves the Buddhists. Call this karma. This General Kayode fiction of the ego, as nature calls it, 217 00:26:20,790 --> 00:26:28,320 has internal as well as external origins insofar as it also derives from the plurality of the drives. 218 00:26:28,320 --> 00:26:33,210 A note from the same time as that passage from Dawn of Mourning reads as follows. 219 00:26:33,210 --> 00:26:38,370 The eye is not the attitude of one being to several drys, thoughts and so on. 220 00:26:38,370 --> 00:26:43,080 But the ego is a plurality of person like forces of which now this one. 221 00:26:43,080 --> 00:26:48,750 Now that one stands in the foreground, has the ego and regards others as a subject, 222 00:26:48,750 --> 00:26:54,840 regards and influential and determining external world as the drives are in conflict. 223 00:26:54,840 --> 00:27:04,810 The feeling of the eye is always strongest, precisely where the preponderance is human reason, according to Twilight of the Idols. 224 00:27:04,810 --> 00:27:13,830 Paul believes in the eye, in the eye as being the substance and projects its belief in the eyes substance onto all things, 225 00:27:13,830 --> 00:27:23,520 thereby creating the concept of thing. But when this belief in the eye is undermined, the concept of the thing is correspondingly weakened. 226 00:27:23,520 --> 00:27:29,580 And what comes to the fore as substance recedes is relationships. 227 00:27:29,580 --> 00:27:38,040 Just as the Buddhists teach, as we free ourselves from what nature calls the error of the eye, we come to recognise, 228 00:27:38,040 --> 00:27:47,520 quote, the affinities, the fervent shuff and antagonisms amongst things multiplicities, therefore, and their laws. 229 00:27:47,520 --> 00:27:52,620 This corresponds perfectly to the idea of no self, which is basic Buddhism, 230 00:27:52,620 --> 00:28:00,260 and that applies equally to the eye into things and dissolves them all into a network of relationships. 231 00:28:00,260 --> 00:28:09,390 So with the practise of meditation has one simply sit waiting for the words to subside and the language to decline and fall away together. 232 00:28:09,390 --> 00:28:14,190 Not something one can do when driven by the instinct for self-preservation, 233 00:28:14,190 --> 00:28:20,640 but rather in some temporary disengagement from the business of making a living in society. 234 00:28:20,640 --> 00:28:30,720 When this is working, a field opens up that can remain through rising from the meditation cushion and returning to the opposite pole of four dynamic 235 00:28:30,720 --> 00:28:40,260 activity with a diminishing of the thoughts flow and the falling silent of language comes of dying down of consciousness, 236 00:28:40,260 --> 00:28:48,770 which is for each and any cases we saw something that is, for the most part, superfluous. 237 00:28:48,770 --> 00:28:55,880 I'm going to quote from the passage that Larry discussed at length yesterday, but I don't think you it this part. 238 00:28:55,880 --> 00:29:01,360 The human being, like every living being, is thinking constantly, but without knowing it. 239 00:29:01,360 --> 00:29:04,640 The thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part. 240 00:29:04,640 --> 00:29:10,790 The soup most superficial and the worst for part, is suddenly this conscious thinking that takes place in words, 241 00:29:10,790 --> 00:29:20,930 in signs that communicate our thoughts are constantly generalised by the character of consciousness and translated into the perspective of the herd. 242 00:29:20,930 --> 00:29:31,400 An increase in consciousness is thus a danger. And whoever lives amongst the conscious Europeans knows that it is even an illness, 243 00:29:31,400 --> 00:29:41,930 a less sick way to live than would be to let the drives that give rise to our everyday consciousness and its thinking in words become quiescent. 244 00:29:41,930 --> 00:29:45,800 No longer interpreting the situation from their own perspectives, 245 00:29:45,800 --> 00:29:53,450 and to thereby allow what is going on beneath thinking to flow through the body in silence and without commentary. 246 00:29:53,450 --> 00:30:00,680 What's going on is basically drys not exfoliating into consciousness or commenting on the text of experience, 247 00:30:00,680 --> 00:30:04,640 not the egocentric drives that keep the illusion of the eye going. 248 00:30:04,640 --> 00:30:15,980 But now only the more each ancient, deeper level drives through millennia of adaptation have kept the human body attuned to its physical environment. 249 00:30:15,980 --> 00:30:23,690 Paradoxically, it's by putting ourselves in a situation where we don't need to be concerned with preserving ourselves, 250 00:30:23,690 --> 00:30:30,110 that we can get to a condition in which it is only those original natural environmental, 251 00:30:30,110 --> 00:30:35,360 environment related and life preserving drives that are operative. 252 00:30:35,360 --> 00:30:40,460 Under such conditions, wonderous responses to the world are naturally spontaneous, 253 00:30:40,460 --> 00:30:44,900 and one's actions stem not from the narrow confines of the small self, 254 00:30:44,900 --> 00:30:50,260 but from the forces of heaven and earth as they operate through the world trade body. 255 00:30:50,260 --> 00:30:58,190 Its great reason. One thinks of Nietzsche's praise of beauty in the twilight of the idols go to conceive of a strong, 256 00:30:58,190 --> 00:31:02,850 highly cultured human being, adept in a range of physical skills, 257 00:31:02,850 --> 00:31:07,460 lively, tighten self-control and with reverence for himself, 258 00:31:07,460 --> 00:31:15,650 who can dare to grant himself the full range and richness of naturalness, and who is strong enough for this. 259 00:31:15,650 --> 00:31:21,800 And whatever thoughts may come when the chatter of consciousness and quieten down will then be 260 00:31:21,800 --> 00:31:31,490 genuinely results of Nietzsche's famous as Descartes rather than mere opinions of the egocentric self. 261 00:31:31,490 --> 00:31:36,140 But since they apparently didn't engage in any formal meditation practise, 262 00:31:36,140 --> 00:31:45,380 how did he arrive at such experiences and ideas, such ideas so that are so similar to Buddhism? 263 00:31:45,380 --> 00:31:53,900 Well, he arrived there by walking or as he often puts it, Marciel March six to eight hours a day. 264 00:31:53,900 --> 00:31:58,250 One can still the body's locomotion is by sitting and following the breath, 265 00:31:58,250 --> 00:32:06,320 or else one can put it into energetically sustained movement by walking or running or climbing or swimming. 266 00:32:06,320 --> 00:32:09,980 Wendy Cho was in the accident at hiking paths around this area. 267 00:32:09,980 --> 00:32:19,820 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. 268 00:32:19,820 --> 00:32:26,780 Many of his letters expressed gratitude for the successful efforts of the local corps for AI to keep the paths around 269 00:32:26,780 --> 00:32:35,090 town smooth and even and clear obstructions so that he could march along with them without any fear of stumbling. 270 00:32:35,090 --> 00:32:41,760 By keeping to safe and secure paths, whether Aransas, Maria or amongst the lanes of Venice or the streets of Genoa, 271 00:32:41,760 --> 00:32:49,010 he too was able to practise a vigorous form of walking meditation known as King in the Zen tradition that 272 00:32:49,010 --> 00:32:56,630 allowed him to hear the innermost voices of his thoughts rather than the superficial chatter of his eye. 273 00:32:56,630 --> 00:33:02,400 No wonder he reports that his creativity was always at its highest when the muscles were working 274 00:33:02,400 --> 00:33:08,810 at its at their most subtle pitch such that the body is experienced not as recalcitrant matter, 275 00:33:08,810 --> 00:33:17,060 but as energetic flow. One can also do this, but it's clear, at least it's clear to me, 276 00:33:17,060 --> 00:33:26,060 that by means of his marching nature became able to see what was going on around him insofar as this description of learning to 277 00:33:26,060 --> 00:33:35,990 see from Twilight of the Idols could certainly have been written in different language by a sage or the Zen master to learn, 278 00:33:35,990 --> 00:33:44,420 seeing to accustomed the eye to resting patients, letting things approach to postpone judgement, 279 00:33:44,420 --> 00:33:49,640 learning to go around and comprehend each unique case from all sides. 280 00:33:49,640 --> 00:33:56,330 That is the first preschooling in spirituality not to react to a stimulus immediately, 281 00:33:56,330 --> 00:34:00,890 but to get hold of the instincts that inhibit and cheque to learn. 282 00:34:00,890 --> 00:34:07,370 Seeing as I understand it is almost what the other philosophical way of speaking calls a strong will. 283 00:34:07,370 --> 00:34:17,330 But the essential thing here is precisely not to will to be able to defer a decision. 284 00:34:17,330 --> 00:34:26,240 To conclude with a return to the things of nature. How are things then when the body flow is fully and vibrantly under way? 285 00:34:26,240 --> 00:34:32,450 The language of south of the strip is helpful here. Redeemed from their bondage under purpose. 286 00:34:32,450 --> 00:34:39,820 The things of nature does on the feet of chance and above each one that has an accident to heaven. 287 00:34:39,820 --> 00:34:44,980 Innocence. The Heaven contingency that heaven exuberance. 288 00:34:44,980 --> 00:34:46,110 Sorrowful stress. 289 00:34:46,110 --> 00:34:59,360 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, 290 00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:49,726 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.