Norgard

Keith

 When Keith grows up, he wants to stroll through the streets 

 of Burgundy with a beautiful wooden cane and a stack of books.

 He mentioned those books to me today, but 

 perhaps he could share them with all of you.

 gonna read that Isaacson book about Haiku

 and Woodhouse and Spencer and the City. Harold J. Isaacson was the mentor to a man

 named David Landman and he mentored him in two ways. English literature, in

 particular Spenserian poetry, Edmund Spenser, and Mahayana Buddhism. He,

 I won't say indoctrinated because that's not the right word, but he mentored David

 into a love of those two topics and about 30 years later David Landman

 mentored my father into a love of those two topics and my father mentored me

 into, in particular, a love of Mahayana Buddhism which led to my journey into

 Arthur Avalon which led many long years later to my liberation and my conclusion

 that Avalon was right. All this stuff is directly perceivable to the human animal and Avalon

 So, Avalon was how Jung learned about Eastern mysticism.

 Arthur Avalon was born John Woodruff and raised as an Englishman with a Western mind.

 He, as many English families did at that time, 

 they were in the British Raj. He lived in India.

 And he fell intellectually in love with, in particular, Tantric Vedic metaphysical knowledge.

 monasteries for the better part of 10 or 15 years.

 Now, for air chatters and for effortless meditation folks, Shaktipat, Guruji's system of metaphysical

 knowledge is Avalon's system. They're drawing from the same roots, absolutely.

 So but what's interesting is that I keep, so he was born Woodruff.

 He kept disappearing into these monasteries. Out of nowhere, 

 someone named Arthur Avalon appears writing translations for the Western

 mind to understand ancient Vedic texts and manuscripts.

 So it is a particularly useful and unique way in for the Western mind to understand

 these concepts, which I can tell you now, 

 doubt, are true and directly perceivable by you.

 So when I grew up, there were only two books that I 

 was never allowed to take out of my father's library.

 One was The Buddhist Theory of Universal Flux, which is a great book, actually.

 And the other was Arthur Avalon's Serpent Power.

 Serpent Power was out of print. So when I was reading 

 about Jung, and it mentioned Avalon, my world exploded.

 And so I moved to Arizona to read these 

 books that were out of print in the ASU library

 when I was like 23 years old or something like that.

 He also did The Word is Power, Shakti and Shakta.

 And so those books, Avalon never adopts, Avalon 

 never adopts English translations for the Sanskrit words

 for the very correct reason that they do not mean the same thing.

 And for the Western mind, it is far easier 

 take in a concept intact with a foreign name

 so they don't start making too many analogies.

 So basically, ever since I was 23 years old, I've known that when I retire, I'm

 gonna spend all my time reading these books by Avalon. I've read a lot of them,

 but they are hard concepts. They are hard concepts that intellectually hold in

 your head. There's nothing wrong with hard things. Now, that's somewhat been

 mitigated by liberation. That's somewhat been mitigated by Guruji's more direct

 path, but I still plan to do it. And I just cannot recommend this

 avenue of discovery highly enough. So my plan was always to just do nothing but

 read these books in retirement and walk around with Burgundy, with a cane because

 I had the skydiving accident, and drink great 

 wine because I grew up the son of a sommelier.

 suppose caused me to overcome my throat issues. Harold J. Isaacson was

 mentor to David Landman who's a mentor to my father who will always be a mentor

 to me and without Isaacson I just don't have this direct sight on things. But

 about nine years old, he brought me a book and

 it was Plato's Republic which I've had for 40 years. So it was a fun trip

 down memory lane reading about Isaacson and his haiku and

 Woodhouse connections and you know there's a sense of

 synchronicity that comes into place. So when I talked to Brian and we do books

 and my throat's hurting and then all of a sudden philosophy comes up on the

 other side and Isaacson it just all comes together. So that is my story of

 Isaacson and P.G. Woodhouse and Arthur Avalon and John Woodruff and my

 recommendation to everyone to take the deep path inward to reality because it

 is extraordinarily, extraordinarily powerful. Get your chip. Love yourselves.

 So, this is a series called The Ocean of Story, 

 and it was originally published in 1923, limited run.

 It was reprinted in 1968, and I'm pretty 

 confident it's out of print now and hard to find.

 But basically, it's a translation of a work that was 

 written around 1075 A.D. by someone named, I think it's Somadeva?

 But basically, Somadeva had collected, tried to collect every piece of narrative 

 and fictional work by category in the known world in India in the late 11th century.

 But the collection goes back 300 or 400 years before that.

 And so, basically, it's a complete translation and transmission of the kind of 

 mimetic environment of what was probably pretty much the most modern part of the world then.

 So, I think it's fascinating. This is another one on the 

 long list of things that in my retirement I'll just read.

 I love that it has a lot of Sanskrit in it, and these stories 

 are very common. I mean, not common, but it does cover everything.

 There's vampires and werewolves and goblins and pretty much 

 everything under the sun. It's in here. It's the ocean of story.

 retirement would be the complete work of Arthur Avalon,

 John Woodruff, starting with The Serpent Power, with a pen in hand and learning Sanskrit as

 you go, or as I go, which is essentially what happened back in the day.

 Ocean of Story, really terrific, and I think if you don't understand the concept of narratives

 and sort of their archetypes, you have a 

 time kind of having perspective on the world.

 There's so much deep kind of knowledge there, and all the stories are the same.

 You open up Ocean of Story, any chapter, it's 

 just like they're all the same stories, recycled.

 I'm not saying there's nothing new under the sun, but 

 not much new under the human's ability to construct stories.

 So these books came out much more recently and they are The Matter with

 Things by Dr. Ian McGilchrist. Ian McGilchrist is known for his early work

 The Master and His Emissary which are about sort of left brain right brain

 combination of like anatomically and then also what they phenomenologically

 tend to do. However these books are so much more than that the left brain right

 brain divide and it all frankly relates to the same thing. So much like David

 Deutsch he is... let me go down here... 

 much like David Deutsch he is so smart and

 erudite and likes to talk that these books are incredible reads. I haven't

 gotten all the way through them they're really dense but he does like he's

 throwing like the kitchen sink at everything. He's not a good like sort of

 distiller. That being said I have a suspicion that these works cap up, cap

 off a lot of the work of human civilization starting from let's say

 Euclid and Plato's time until the sort of larger knowledge that also existed

 before Euclid and Plato on the other side of the world. All these dualities are

 here. Now speaking of dualities like it's the left brain that creates the duality

 that's what rational means like being able to make a ratio of two different

 things. It's the right brain that sees everything all at once is you know the

 big-picture thinker it pulls in the gestalt and you know analogies are

 gonna fail us but essentially the left brain is you know how humans operate and

 then the right brain that larger picture that is enlightenment that is you know

 unitary bliss and consciousness. So I imagine I think these I think a thousand

 years from now some version of these books are still in existence and I think

 they are like the canon for some new thing going forward but they're dense

 they require a lot of hard work and then

 again like Deutsch you kind of got to go through and feel your way and decide

 which stuff you should really you know put into sort of a pantheonic

 understanding of it and which stuff is just sort of analogizing to bring it

 along for that common person the way one would do in conversation.

 And last but not least would be the work of Alexander Grotendieck. Grotendieck is

 he's quoted everywhere in advanced mathematical texts. He came up with

 category theory which pulls together the disciplines of arithmetic, algebra,

 calculus, differential equations, number theory, literally pulls it all together.

 Now Grotendieck underpins almost all of the most modern and advanced mathematics

 in our day and ever in the history of human thought. Interestingly he was a

 peacenik in a time of war. The only book 

 he ever published was called I think it's

 Recoltes et Sémillons, which is like sowing and reaping or harvesting and reaping or

 seeding and harvesting or sowing and reaping. That's written in French. There's no English

 translations available. I'm going to have 

 to go back and do that at some point. He also

 interestingly has about 30,000 pages of handwritten mathematical notes because he

 withdrew from society. He withdrew from 

 society. He went to live in this crazy village in like

 eastern France. He tried to get all his books unpublished. And hold on.

 Grotendieck, if you are able to get some insight into geometry and number theory,

 Riemann surfaces in particular, which is kind of the functional apex of or functional

 intellectual apex of modern mathematics filled in quite a bit in the 

 70 or 80 years after that. A Riemann surface is that it's at the base of

 the standard model. But Grotendieck managed to make it even 

 simpler. And so on the far end of analytical mathematical thought,

 which can only ever hope to compare two things, which 

 why it is like the very definition of dualistic thought,

 is a deep unity. I mean the reason the reason we 

 can solve everything on a closed surface is because

 we evolved on one. We're on a sphere with 

 multiple forces in different frames of reference and

 it, you know, there's only one thing. Once you know 

 something's closed surface, like it is significantly easier to solve.

 So Grotendieck's work starts to point back to

 at the same time lays bare all of the power of modern mathematics 

 of mathematics by comparisons and then shows that they all tie back

 together into one thing, into a unitary view, a unitarily conscious view of mathematics.

 I believe that Grotendieck saw through to the depths of 

 mathematics and knew what it could be used for at the time and was

 influenced by, you know, his legitimate fear about the state of humanity and

 destruction and thermonuclear war. I think that he 

 saw through to everything and he stopped working on it.

 For everyone, I mean for everyone else, I think he 

 knew that his contribution was dangerously close to

 mmm, just yeah, solving math. So I think he saw that. 

 I think maybe there's someone else who saw it as well.

 A little further back. I mean number theorists have a long history of going insane.

 Grotendieck might have gone insane a little bit, but I think 

 the man solved math. I think he saw through to everything and

 I have some interest in that area as well and have 

 had some special insights in the wake of liberation.

 So that would be the other thing is to go through and

 really chew through the collective works of Alexander Grotendieck. And they're all the same thing.

 I mean, this has always been I suppose where I 

 was headed, but they all relate to this, you know,

 the importance of rational comparative thought in order to make 

 a difference and affect change in the world and the importance of

 unitary non-dualistic thought in order to appreciate the fucking glamour and 

 of it all. So as of right now, those are all the books I would read in retirement.

 Why retirement? Because I'm a husband. I'm very much in the householding phase.

 So I can't just, you know, I can't just 

 walk off into the sunset and do this stuff.

 I want to see things clearly and I think

 those readings, if I can survive to them and through them,

 I think it's really incredible stuff. So those are my plans for walking around and

 with a cane, drinking great wine and just reading these 

 books over and over and over again for the rest of my life.

 I think that would be charming. Anyway, happy Thursday.

 Get your chat, fly air chat. Let's fuck it up and live to serve.