Presentation 22

Transcript (PDF)

The Future and The New Past
Presentation 22 of 52

Presentation 2-9
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, May 30, 2015

Transcript:

We come to the 22nd presentation in this year of preparation, a preparation for 2016, which is an ethical year. And time forms of civilization are quite accurate, actually. We're building a discovery scaler of open inquiry. And as we do so, we keep curling back occasionally to motifs and themes, to exemplars and examples. And we're expanding as well as building, so that while we're expanding in time, we're building in space. And our metronome is to use a spoken language to lift a written language off the page. Off the screen into a discourse which has a mythic horizon tone to it.

So that the experience is one of an integral time dynamic, which in literary theory, the last generation or two is called narrative. The story line is how it used to be called. And it is that story, the line developing that is the core of myth with the caveat that that core is all about the complexity of the hierarchy of integration between genders, between Gods and Goddesses, between men and women. Or between men and men and women and women, Goddesses and Goddesses, Gods and Gods, so forth. So that the storyline of a myth has a family thematic in many kinds, which then develops experience through the medium of an oral language, a spoken language, which must be heard.

And this carries over in the integral cycle where the ritual base and the mythic development of experience making images and feeling tones come together in correspondences and all of this integrated as symbolic structure of thought. The mind. And that symbolic structure transforms oral language into written language. So that an oral language that must be heard to be understood otherwise, nothing occurs in experience. If you can't hear it, it doesn't occur. The images and the feeling tones no matter how amazingly strong, do not register. They fail to register. Experience does not occur, and so they have nowhere to occur.

Similarly, as oral language must be heard for the mythos to have a horizon of experience, a written language must be read. For the integral of that entire cycle to occur. Otherwise, there is no meaning. And being able to read a written language is just as important. In fact, it's a concomitant of being able to write it. So that a written language by itself is a misnomer. It is a written read language which generates the integration, the integral of meaning. Which means that the images come together integrally as an imagination. And the feeling tones come together integrally as a sense of me. Of my identity, my individuality. Then being an integral of this imagination and its image base with the way in which our feeling tones correspond to them comes a sense of identity, of individuality as a structure of thought in its architecture.

Central across these layers, these phases of the natural cycle of integral, is the increasing dawning that there is something that is beyond the meaning that was there in the mythos, in the images, the imagination, in the feeling tones, in the way in which the meaning feels right for me, true for me, and I with it. Something beyond.

The earliest mythic quality in the storyline, in the narrative, in the mythology, is that dreaming is thoroughly natural. Dreaming is a part of experience. And so, when one gets to the integral structure of the mind and meaning begins to become quite clear, because one can see the structure and understand how this came to be. And you feel in possession of not only the driver's seat because you can write it, but equally because you can read it. All of this is challenged because the dreams don't quite fit in. The imagination has a tendency to keep imagining beyond the myth. Beyond the storyline. Beyond the narrative. Beyond the linearity. The imagination keeps quote daydreaming of other possibilities.

The feeling tones go beyond that kind of identified individuality, one's identity. And out of this become possibilities of different aspects of oneself. The one meets the other in play. So that there is a mythic line that incorporates play, and we call them plays. Where there's not just one's own protagonist in the storyline. And one's own identification of the meaning in one's individuality. But there is that quality of play like, like similar to dreaming, but not really dreaming. And a cursorial way of talking about this is that it's daydreaming. And when you're daydreaming while your head is in the clouds. It's atmospheric. And this way it at least has a way of being folded into and encased into that cycle of the integral.

But there are moments. There are flashes of insight. There are moments of seeing through to something beyond. And all mythic cultures have, in addition to respecting and having dreams, they have a sense of the supernatural. The supernatural. They have a sense that there are spirits. Didn't our myths have Gods and Goddesses, etc., etc., etc. Well, maybe they're images. Maybe they're feeling tones of something beyond.

What does that mean for us? It means that a comportment towards the time dynamic is not really exclusively linear. One hedges on it and says, well, it must be then nonlinear and it's a category. And oh yes, well it's nonlinear. That's not enough. That's stuffing the puppet that is sprang from the box, that has popped up, cramming it back in the box that doesn't quite go. Or if it does and it pops up, it just becomes a mechanical thing. It's no longer an emergence. Many ways of coping to de-cope with it. And the more that that occurs, the more that one falls back on trying to go back to basics.

And the basic of a mythos, of myths as a mythology, is the ritual comportment. We're going to go back to what we do and make sure that what we do is according to how it should be, given the impress of our culture and our customs and all of the stories and the meaning out of them. This way we can stabilize everything by going back. And that going back tries to stuff what has popped up out of the box, back into a box and won't go without damaging. And thus, the attempt becomes almost addictive in its appeal. And one doesn't just go back, one regresses. And the deepest form of regression is in terms of time. Because time is the dynamic and space collapses because the time dimension occurs as the calibration of how a spatial integral occurs. And this is real. That the dimensions of space blossom out of the primal dimension of time. Yes, they do it instantly, but they couldn't even be much less instantly without time. Primordially. Primally.

And so, the whole issue of the supernatural and of spirits and of not daydreaming one's head is in the clouds, but one goes above the clouds into the, yes where the sun is. Or in its cycle where the stars and the moon are the same place that the sun is.

And out of all of this, cultures, a long time ago, seemingly transformed and evolved into civilization. Because the development of a written language that can be read, engendered a population of men and women of all types into a population that was able to understand that the beyond can be beheld, just like you can hold identity, you can behold that trans identity. And that's a larger person than you were as an individual of whatever kind, ilk, etc. And that person is prismatic because having gone beyond into beholding has another source other than nature as the field within which the integral has its cycle.

And the ancient now time-honored excellent use is the word, and it can be written or said, is vision. And that field of vision has a particular quality to it, which is affine to the field of nature, which doesn't interfere with the way in which the various integrals work out. They will work out exactly as they are working out given themselves developing. The field of vision is not that natural zero field that allows for all numberings of whatever kind to have their integral of calculation. They are numerable. But what is innumerable or better un-numerable, as was first posited, is that the infinite field of vision sources a transform of the individual to the prismatic person. Of the identity to possibilities of many facets. Not of an identity, but of or an identification, but freeing out the idea from identity and identification to become an open mind. A discovery idea.

And one can say it entirely the idea of discovery or one can say it visionary, the idea freed to discover. One is a, an education based on instruction. The other is a learning that is catapulted into new realms, new possibilities. The science fiction phrase when I was a little boy was of all possible worlds. They are populated, beyond belief into beholding by discovery.

The man who discovered that there are more real numbers that are un-numerable than there are algebraic numbers, which are numerable in a integral. He discovered that you can put mathematics into not only numbers, arithmetic, which add and subtract, multiply and divide. But that one can go beyond the arithmetic. One can go, in fact, into whole sets of possibility that were not there in the numerable initial algebraic integral. But are not only viable and discoverable as possible, but they develop as well towards what is real.

The man's name was Georg Cantor. Born in 1845. He lived until the almost the end of World War one, 1918. He's the inventor of set theory, which has become one of the fundamental theories of higher mathematics. Um, arithmetic is what can be counted, numerable numbers. The word mathematics in Greek does not come from that countability. It doesn't come from that algebraic enumerability. The mathematics, the word for it originally, 2500 years ago, someone a male or a female who can do a mathematic was called a mathematiki. And they were the transform of someone who had learned to hear what was being said and bring them together in meaning of the culmination and completion of a certain cycle that opened into a beholding of a whole new field of inquiry, discovery, and further development.

And those who were able to complete that cycle in the Pythagorean term as a concomitant to the mathematics were the acousmatiki those who had learned to hear. Those who had ears to hear. Which was one of the famous favorite refrains of Jesus in The New Testament. Let those who have ears to hear, hear. In Sanskrit the term Śrota is the primordial reality. Un-hearable of sound. Whatever the sound is will have its calibration. But the source of sound itself in space is a time signature, which comes spontaneously, not instantly, because without it there would be no instantaneous at all even. Occurs spontaneously out of a meeting of a zero infinite larger field, the field of the real. And so, the Śrota is the on hearable origin of all sound, which will have its structure. And its structure is finite. It's very complex.

And the development of music in the Sanskrit language area of the world, largely greater India, was able to understand that musical composition and to build instruments to be able to play that music generally called now, ragas. That there are a is a finite but very large set of sounds. And there is a way in order to compose and, but out of those 22 possible keys of sound and the various sounds within them. Only about half of them can be heard. The other side of that is those that can be beheld beyond hearing.

And so, the ancient wisdom in Sanskrit, in that form, there was a similar understanding in Greek and Chinese. In many other languages, Celtic, etc. Even in the original Avestan, in the West. What can be heard must come into a complementarity with what cannot be heard yet as real. And the contemporary, Chinese contemporary of Pythagoras, with his acousmatiki becoming mathematiki. Those who can hear, to those who can see. Those who can vision. And what one can vision, the hearing becomes not only acute specifically, but becomes astute in terms of meaning, and it becomes free in terms of beholding.

This is called a triple refinement because of a double transform. And it is characteristic of life, of the structure of life. The double helix of life forms only when brought into a complementarity with a creating, resolving, exploring third, a ribonucleic acid, an RNA, is it possible then to generate a family of keys to life. Amino acids. There are 22. Just like the 22 of the raga Śrota and only half of those can be heard. The messenger RNA especially has its refinement in the, it's written as MRNA, as its refinement in the MTRNA. The messenger RNA has its refinement in the mitochondrial RNA, which is feminine. Not just in our kind, in all kinds. Because cells are sexual. They are gender. And it is the cell that comes into play that has the quality of being able not just to balance, but to creatively play with, not only having a membrane to have shape. All cells have membranes, but those membranes all have gates. Four channels. And those ionic channels largely of calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium, so forth. Various kinds. Allow for energy to come into a cell and leave the cell so that there's a concourse. So that life now is able to achieve further evolution beyond what it was, which is already beyond simply organic. So that there is a quality where one comes even scientifically, even anciently, to an hourglass of opening of freedom of play.

For Cantor, the beholding that led to him pulling the trigger on all of the developments. What were his developments? The inventor of set theory defining infinite and well-ordered sets prove that real numbers are more numerous than natural numbers. The existence of an infinity of infinities. He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers and developed trans finite numbers. Which by the time of the turn of the 20th century, was leading to a jump, a punctuated equilibrium jump, in the evolution of civilization.
We're going to take a little break and come back to it. The key to it is to understand that wisdom also has keys and tones in its integral, but it has surprises in its differential field.

And we'll come back to that.

END OF SIDE ONE

Let's come back to a current that is complex, nevertheless, even though it is complex and fans out into a whole delta and it's no longer a mighty single stream of integral. Those complexity streams and their delta are a part of that major river that the transition is from the river to the ocean. Ocean is a good symbol of the mystery and the magic of life.

The latest issue of Science, the international weekly comes out every week of the American Association of Scientists has a cover illustration of plankton all the various kinds. Well, an excerpt of all the various kinds. And one can see that they're not uniform. They're almost every variation creatively imaginable. So that lumping them under the word plankton obscures the reality and regresses the actuality to a stereotype. Plankton. Oh, well, it's the basis of life in the ocean, plankton. Whales do not eat fish, they eat plankton. They don't chew them. They filter them through a whole quality of baleen that filters the plankton out. And so, this huge array of plankton. The extended article is A World of Plankton: Marine Biodiversity Surveyed by a Schooner. The schooner's name is Tara. And there they've for about four years began in 2011, going around the world to understand that the food chain of the oceans as plankton for higher forms of life. And that the plankton themselves have their own highly differentiated sourcing and even more fundamental food chains and so forth.

The key that we were using in the first half before the break, that of a written language that must be read as the metronome of civilization. You have to have readers who can write in order to have the complexity of civilization. Not just as a phenomenon, but as a noumenon. That is to say that it has not fictive, but in numerable invisible, unidentifiable aspects that dimension a whole ecology of consciousness. So that the prismatic person that emerges from vision is a spirit. The Chinese name term for such a person is a Shen. Shen. Who are free to journey in all of the realms, including the celestial.

So that the Chinese cycle, beginning with Dao, the zero field of nature. To stay Tae, has the phenomenal actual quality of something that has become something. The power to be something.

One of the early great translators of Chinese into English Arthur Whaley when he translated the Tao Te Ching uses the title The Way and its Power. But the reading of Tao Te has a quality of engendering a third. The Chinese term for that third is gen, human heartedness. Just like the Sanskrit hṛdaya means heart. But it means heart, not just a heart, but metaphorically heartedness to nurse. And even beyond beholding the mystery of heart of heartfulness as in The Hṛdaya Sūtra. Sūtra being Sanskrit for thread. Daya being the way in which it is chanted from a written text list, lifting The Heart Sūtra off the page into the voices, not just the voice, but the voices of that community, of those who can behold. So that The Hṛdaya Sūtra has The Heart Sūtra, a quality of being the very first thing when one wakens that the large trans age community of those who can read it and understand it can chant it so it can be heard.

That community is called the Sangha. And when monks in the Sangha, in the Mahayana rise out of sleep first thing is to collect together before any kind of nourishment, before any kind of bathing to hold in more classic ways between the thumb and the middle finger, to hold very lightly a thread. In Royal times it used to be a golden thread. That strings all of them together into this necklace of voices that choir, The Heart Sūtra together. And it is the hearing of such an event that opens the final completed chakra, the Anahata chakra, to the infinite sphere of beholding that meaning is beyond numbering. And that it is told in every sutra that is written, the very first thing written, thus I have heard. And now read goes without saying.

In Tibetan, the word that translates is thus. The beginning of every sutra is **inaudible word**. The thusness of being able to hear transforms quite easily into the vastness of beholding what one is reading. And when one can lift the written words off the page into the voice this is called poetry. A poetic is being able to intone what the poet has written, because if the poet has written in such a way that it intones beholding openly, that's a poet. That's a poetic.
When he was traveling all over Europe for the King of England, Chaucer, who was the king's wine merchant. And on the side, he also dealt with garnering very expensive wools and materials for expensive cloths and weavings and so forth. But wine. He would go to the various courts in Italy or France especially. Really fine wines. And he would be at court because he was the buyer for the King of England, and he would take his latest writing poetry and read it out loud to the ladies and gentlemen of the courts of Europe. And very soon, word spread and was confirmed every time he showed up that Chaucer was the poet of the age. No matter where he went and could be heard. And lots of themes in Chaucer, which are French or Italian, not necessarily English, expanded the quality so that there was a humanness, not a Englishness to Chaucer's poetic to his writings. And so, the phrase in The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer uses in the prologue that he writes not of ideas, but of a fair field full of folk.

In that classic use of the play of a spoken language which can be written and thus read, but lifted off the page into a dialogue that now becomes the play. The third resolving quality that was the double helix DNA pair of the quality of tragedy and comedy became able to be braided together into a higher third, the RNA of Plato's Dialogues. And the dramatic, playful protagonist of the dialogues is Socrates. But it is Socrates, not as part tragedian and part comedian, but as lover of wisdom, philosopher. Pythagoras was the first to use the term in Greek. A Philo Sophia. A lover of wisdom. Plato's Socrates, as a lover of wisdom in the most intense confessional dialogue of Plato, is actually not another man or just himself. Because love to other men and himself, he would have become a sophist. Very successful. Lots of kudos. Lots of moolah. But he became a thorn in the side of authority in Athens, and finally, because of it, was put to death. Forced to drink the hemlock. Almost 80. What were the charges? He was leading young men astray. Teaching them not to be corralled by the Gods of the state. You mean our whole mythology making our doctrine of our masculine group of 30 who are the tyrants, making sure that the Athens obeys, and that the Greek genius is ours to control, that all of this is challengeable and wrong?

Socrates in the dialogue The Symposium reveals that he learned his wisdom from an old woman whose name was Diatomea. She was from the Arcadian coast of the Peloponnese, bordering the large Bay of Corinth. It ends at Corinth and begins out in the Adriatic Sea. The South Shore is where Arcadia was. And she was from Manzanilla, one of the cities along that way. Very, very close to the tiny city in Arcadia, where the apostle St. Andrew finally died and was buried not too far from there.

One of the reasons why Andrew was sent from Jerusalem to Antioch and then from Antioch to Greece was to bring the word of the way to that beholding of discovery, which Socrates had discovered being able to listen to Diatomea talk about love.

One of the most interesting translations of The Symposium of Plato is by Percy Shelley. The great poet, romantic poet. He did the translation. He let go of all of his writings that he was engaged in, and one of them was the most colossal of his writings Prometheus Unbound. A new past future vision beheld that the trilogy of Aeschylus of Prometheus because tragedies came in threes. Why? Because time forms in civilization come in triplet. They not only have a past, present and future, which is the tragedy of keeping the narrative all the way to the dead end. They have a mythos which has a beginning, a middle, and then an end. That beginning leads to death through complications that weigh it down onto death. If you remain in the mythos, in the story narratives, you will reap what you have sown. The escape is to have the understanding of the meaning of a tragic pulling of the trigger that creates that suicide. In Greek, it's called the Aristotelian employment of the Greek danuma. It means the moment of realizing the tragedy. Of recognizing that you yourself engendered that tragic death that you are headed for. By now, you are already plunging towards it.

The philosophic dialogue of Plato with Socrates using the Socratic method, which is immethodical. That's the phrase that Coleridge used and Laurence Sterne, a writer of great symbolic surrealism back in the 1700's. Immethodical doesn't mean unmethodical, which would be the polarity to methodical. Immethodical sidesteps completely the issue of method as the be all or end all, as the beginning or the middle or the end, of what is effective in understanding.

In Shelley's translation, 1818. He stopped writing on Prometheus Unbound that was to replace the third of the Aeschylusian trilogy and Prometheus. They had been lost in antiquity. Everyone saved Prometheus Bound and eventually the other two were let go through an unappreciation, through a misunderstanding, through an educatedness. That tragedy comes in trilogies because it's a civilized art form. Comedies come by themselves. They stick out like a sore thumb. That's the Aristophanic comedy. You think that this is it? What fools these mortals be. That you can wag this little drama and not understand it's a comedy because it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't need to go to trilogies. It doesn't need to go tragically.

Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, was writing her Frankenstein creatively and being in shared presents with her was appreciating that this is immense. More immense than he could do and different but differentially beholding. Not just different in kind or ilk.

And so, he went back to Plato's Symposium and did a translation of it. And a few lines from Socrates, talking about Diatomea teaching him about how love is a spirit beholding.
Attempt, I treat you to mark what I say with as keen an observation as you can. He who has been disciplined to this point in love by contemplating beautiful objects gradually and in their order. Now arriving at the end of all that concerns love on a sudden beholds a beauty wonderful in its nature. This it is, oh Socrates. For the sake of which all the former labors were endured. It is eternal, unproduced, indestructible. Neither subject to increase nor decay. Not like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed. Not like at one time beautiful and at another time not. Not beautiful in relation to one thing and deformed in relation to another. Not here, beautiful, and there, deformed. Not beautiful in the estimation of one. And therefore, one person and then deformed in that of another person. Nor can the supreme beauty be figured to the imagination like a beautiful face or beautiful hands or any portion of the body. Not like any discourse or any science. Nor does it subsist in any other thing that lives or is either in Earth or in Heaven or in any other place. But it is eternally uniform and consistent and mano eidetic with itself. It beholds beholding in presence.

This quality has its concourse so that in the 20th century, right at the very beginning of the 20th century, when it was coming to its integral summation through the most incredibly refined, detailed, educated refinement of men. That a work was published by Cambridge University Press from 1910 to 1913 in three huge volumes. Principia Mathematica to update the Principia Mathematica of Newton that had been the key to usher in this whole new era that in between had been called the Enlightenment. And then an enlightenment that was punctured by a punctuated equilibrium by the romantic revolution that said, this enlightenment is mechanical. Largely masculine only. Oh, yes, the feminine has a part. They can be a very knowledgeable ladies who collect wonderful, intelligent men in their home and salons. That's the extent of it. They look very nice. They set out flowers. They have other very nice ladies so that those men can discuss. And those kinds of salon discussions were to be the Enlightenment beyond the Socratic method, which is, well, that's old, old stuff.

But for that generation like Coleridge, who was immethodical. Or Shelley who was romanti visionary with his wife. The whole quality of renewing that what you have codified, classified, structured, commented, indexed, encyclopedia-d as an enlightened emergence, and that we are, after all, like the British Empire, exempt from evolution. Those romantic outlaws, like the immethodical Coleridge and visionary Diatomea, taught Shelley, etc. Blake, Wordsworth, etc. Understood a penetration of writing may have a masculine tone, but the reading of the writing has a feminine wisdom. And without readers, the writing lies fallow and as soon replaced by other writing which is newer. Or it must be in advance. It's, it's more refined in our way. Well, that article is not only last generations or last decade, but that was yesterday. This is new. This has all of the advantages, doesn't it? And must be a better right. And that's where we're at. For those who can both read and write this is indeed something that emerged.

Right at 1910 as the first volume of Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead came out. One had the old William James giving his last public lecture. His last oral presentation of his last writing. Interestingly enough, not at Harvard, where he had been almost all of his life. He was born on the campus. But he gave that at Stanford University, which was new. Here in California. And it was collected with other last writings centered around it. And that posthumous published volume is called A Pluralistic Universe. There is much more than you have supposed. Or even more tragically, could have supposed. Or death dealing supposed that you could suppose. It's that terminal. Just as Shelly was able to go back to Plato, Coleridge was able to go back to Shakespeare. And two volumes of Coleridge on Shakespeare are part of his collected works.

There is a quality not only of comedy and tragedy and philosophy, but that the philosophy has a prelude in history. And so, unlike the Greek dramatist, there are Shakespearean comedies, Shakespearean tragedies, and Shakespearean histories. And where those three laser beams gain that beholding of mostly invisible radiation are two plays that are neither comedies nor tragedies nor histories. One takes a mythology, and through a comedic aversion of tragedies, leads into a vision. That was called A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's about summer solstice visioning. All night long into dawn. And the other was The Tempest. About a new world that was on the verge of becoming an extension of not just colonies of the old, but of very powerful nascent corporations, associations, groups of very wealthy men getting together, saying we are going to have such and such a colony that develops and opens this and that. We're going to get a stranglehold on the products of the new world and bring it here and be super wealthy.

And the number one product was gold. And the number one searcher for the original colony combined corporation to look for El Dorado was Sir Walter Raleigh, who when he realized in a Shakespearean way, this is leading to a beginning of a tragedy. The treatment of those living in the new world and the regression of those of us living in the old world.

So, he was nabbed. He was stopped from continuing. He was thrown into the Tower of London. And while he was there, he realized being Elizabethan on a level of a Shakespeare, wrote History of the World. Many, many hundreds of pages. I'll bring a first edition next week. You can see. About 400 years ago.

It is important to recognize that civilization in its time forms has an energy dynamic rhythm which has aspects to it, which are not only natural but visionary. So that its it isn't rising and falling into like just crests and troughs, but these are phase form of the way in which transforms braid together in a triple time form. In a referential way. In a carrier way. In a pilot way of being able to go in and out of the harbors safely. Its original pilot navigation talk.

More next week.

END OF RECORDING