Vision 1
Presented on: Saturday, January 2, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is vision one. And this is the beginning of the Differential Cycle of our education. Our whole first year was about Integration. It's about the way in which nature works that nature however she explores likes to come back together and see what she has. And when nature has her openness, her freedom, when nature is natural, her forms not only register in such a way that they are real but the reality calibrates in such a way that they can change. So that Mother Nature loves reality but she also likes change. Walt Whitman once in the forward to his great book called Democratic Vistas which he had written after Abraham Lincoln was prematurely killed Whitman who was in the Bureau of Indian Affairs office was so taken by the fact that Lincoln was gone all of a sudden cause he'd seen Lincoln as a mystical great man of history and when Whitman began to age he realized that Lincoln had never lived long enough to write his great vision of the United States so Whitman wrote that book for Lincoln and it's called Democratic Vistas and in the very beginning Whitman says that the great American experiment is to find what is the largest size of natural man and that nature seems to love two qualities most of all she loves freedom and she loves variation and these of course are qualities that not only enrich integration but they encourage differentiation and that differentiation is distinctly different from integration yet related. Their relationship is like a complimentarity but once it comes together, once a complementarity comes together and cinches itself you have something more than you would have had in an ordinary sense. So that the wholeness of complimentarities is extraordinary. So when a man or a woman comes to develop not only their natural capacities their integral capacities but also their differential conscious capacities what happens is that you not only are real but you are extraordinarily real. And you have the capacities of freedom and variation in spades. And so all great wisdom traditions in every culture and every civilization on the planet have traditionally stressed that there is a point of transformation. There's a threshold of epochical change that happens and that on the other side of this threshold is a completely new woman, a completely new man, a new, some new kind of human being who has to be called, and the traditional word would be translated into our English term, spirit. That a spiritual person is someone who has passed through the threshold of transformation. Not just a transformation or some transformation or collectively a bouquet gathering of transformations, plural, but the very form transformation itself. The archetype, the transformation of transformations. And that once through that threshold then what happens is distinctly different from what had happened before yet has the capacity to make a relationality with it. And the traditional way in which the antecedents to our civilization used to style this is that differential consciousness works by memory whereas the most powerful integrating function is imagination. And that somehow memory and imagination when they work together, when they infuse eachother with each other's capacities what you get is an extraordinary capacity that's both memorable and imaginative. So that you would then say of this imagination that one has a creative imagination. Or one would say of this memory that this memory is integrating. It's synthesizing. Which is to say that the heart and center of the integral process gets exchanged with the heart and center of the differential process. That they send each other their centers. If you make in your imagination and circle, or a sphere if you have a trigonometric imagination, and you put in this large sphere, this large circle a black circle, a black center, that would be like the center for integration. If you abstracted the image which you have of this circle or sphere with the black littler sphere or little circle, if you abstracted that and made a snap shot of it, a two dimensional cut out, that symbol would be the astrological symbol for the sun. Very ancient symbol, long before there was any astrology. If you took the complement to that, what would be the visionary complement to that symbol, to that image, to that integral picture, to that hieroglyph of integration, what would be the complement to it, the visionary? That you would have a focus that is differential rather than integral so the integral focus was like a black dot so this would be no dot whatsoever. It would be just clear space. But in order to give it attentive focus and concentration you might put radiant lines coming out from it. So you would have an explosion of radiant lines that have only the space of the center there. Now if you have this differential symbol and you have this integral symbol and you have these two forms make an exchange of centers then the black dot from the integral shifts over and becomes a black dot in the midst of radiant lines coming out and the space of focus from the differential form comes into the circle. And you can symbolize it just by another clear circle or some way to show that there was an exchange of centers. This transformational energy is archetypal and in the Renaissance it was called love. That this is how love works. That love is the exchange, the mutual exchange of centered presences. And that on the one hand in integration, the Renaissance understood, came to understand, that there was an alignment of a pair that made this ultimate focus of the dot in the circle possible. And that alignment, that pair, that in alignment focused on that black dot in the center of the circle was the alignment of body and mind. And that body and mind together when they were really aligned. In geometry the alignment is so that the forms of one overlay the forms of the other perfectly. In geometry that's called congruence. So that one's mind and its capacities, and its defining cycle of comportment aligns congruently to the body and its cycles and its alignments then mind and body are not only aligned in a list or possible selection of things but in every conceivable dimension, every conceivable way. What would be the sum total of that, that the entire time space of the body and the mind become one. That their congruence has that perfection. And so one would say in an integrated way that when the body and the mind are integrated completely and perfectly then that center of the body and the center of the mind are the same. Or if it were difficult for one to imagine or to accept or to understand that they were the same, at least one could go far enough to understand that the center of the one is overlaid of the center of the other and at least there was a core relationship between the two. Sometimes that's called the soul core. All of that, all of that is a language, is a feeling toned intelligence, is a thought idea form that belongs in integration. All of it is natural. All of it belongs in nature. All of that is the circle with the black dot as the center. But the differential form is distinctly different. For the differential form not only has time space, it also has consciousness. It has a self consciousness which is not a property of time nor is it a property of space, it is itself a dimension. As protean as time itself, as protean as space itself. So that one has in differential forms conscious time space, at least five dimensions. But it also has a different energy. And because energy and dynamic are related together, 'energea' and 'dynamos' always related together. The energy is the oomph of something, the dynamos is the directiveness, the vectoring, where it goes. Its movement. One is dynamic when one moves. One is energized when one powers up. So that energy and dynamic are like a pair and they go together. But when they're in the integral mode they operate in such and such a way but when they're in the differential mode they operate differently. And when you first come into this differential conscious mode of how energy and dynamic work it seems that they are opposite. Because is only used to, only has experience with, in fact it's deeper than that, the capacities and forms of experience itself are only integral. One has no experience, no capacities for differentiation. That the differential conscious, when you first come upon it is like an undiscovered country, literally. An unknown realm. One doesn't know. And because you try to see the new in terms of the old the new seems right a way to be so distinctly different as to be opposite. And so the first mistake that's made by experience is thinking that consciousness is a polarity. And one tends to become a little suspect. On a tribal basis. On a ritual basis. On an existential basis. On an idea basis. And the very first phrase that one would utter is "Uh Oh". And in human experience there was no way not to make an identification. The very first identification that men and women made was that people who had crossed over from this world to the next were the dead. And so transformation for a long time was identified with death. I mean it made sense to life, it made sense to nature, it made sense to existence. It made sense to feeling, and what was the kicker, it made sense to thought. That the other side are the people who have died from this world. O.K. they've gone on to the next, but that next is completely in some way opposite to this. And when the earliest motifs for complicated ritual of protection are to guard the living against the incursions of the dead. And so one of the earliest registries of conscientious men and women is to protect the living from the dead which means to X out any kind of transformation into consciousness by rote law habit. And yet in the midst of all that was this tremendous calling. The living always found that the dead called to them. And were these dead not our loved ones in some cases and should there not be some propitiation, some kind of bridging over and so you got into this quandary that not only did you have to have protection from them, but you had to have bridges to them at the same time. And so very sophisticated rituals were made by men and women, hundred thousand years ago already where the protection was perforated. That by and large you were protected but under special circumstances there were thresholds that were holes through which there could be contact. But that these were very radioactive, they're very dangerous and so there were special people, a special woman, a holy woman, or special man, a holy man who was nominated sometimes by the tribe, sometimes self nominated because they accidentally got into a struggle with death and came through it and were marked as very special people and everyone knew that they were different from us. The shamaness or the shaman. These were the caretakers of the perforations. It was up to them not only to protect the living, but to allow for the penetration of those different energies, that different dynamic to occasionally come into play for the living. Because there were always crisis for the living that no one could solve. There were times when the climate changed radically and never went back. And so one had to move to a different place. And all of the qualities of certainty were usually grounded on a place - 'this is our valley. We've always lived in this valley, for as long as anyone could ever tell. And now we have to leave this valley, we have to go to some other valley. We never lived there. We don't know anything about how nature is there in this other valley. So we have to learn'. But the living have no way to learn initially because all of their grounding is on the known and here is something unknown, so we have to have some help. So this is where the ones from beyond come in to help us in these kinds of moments, these kinds of crisis. And so even a hundred thousand years ago, men and women had already developed this sensitivity to the fact that under very special circumstances one has to be able to open up, to a supernatural energy. To a supernatural dynamic. But open up in such a way that it doesn't swamp you, it doesn't inundate you but it comes in a small dose to immunize you from the danger, from the crisis. So a little bit of consciousness went a long way. Little tiny pin prick of consciousness that quickly was surrounded by very special rituals, by very tightly woven language, by powerful amulet symbols so that it wouldn't get out of hand. You're dealing with a nuclear reaction, you want to make sure that the shielding is in good shape, good order. And so for a very long time consciousness was let in one photon at a time. If they could do it that fine. Usually men and women were not that refined and whole shafts, whole ray of sunshine would come in. Then suddenly there would be this tremendous jump that this tribe that had done this life cycle in this way for a long time all of a sudden in one generation, all of a sudden in just a couple of years, a whole new capacity comes into play. When early forms, before Homo Sapiens were being found early in the twentieth century the arrowheads, the spear points, the best people at categorizing of these flint weapons were the French and one Frenchman finally after investigating for a whole lifetime, said that Homo Neanderthal, the species of man before us, made beautiful arrowheads stupidly. That they learned several hundred thousand years ago how to make fantastically beautiful arrowheads but they never changed. They made them exactly the same way for a quarter of a million years. They never learned any further than where they got to ritually originally. So they made beautiful arrowheads, stupidly. Whereas Homo Sapiens, our particular species is always modifying.
You can always tell even a little bit of difference from a district, they make them slightly different. And if you look at a time scale of a thousand years, it's amazing what kind of evolution there is. Whereas for Neanderthal, Homo Neanderthal, they're always the same. But a species like Homo Erectis who was around for two million years, before Homo Neanderthal even roamed, you find a completely different kind of a quality that's there. It's that they hadn't learned to make beautiful things stupidly. Not that they didn't have capacities but they did not have the integral push to find the final form. So that there is a long long tradition and further than the species Homo, there were whole eras. One can go back. Like we saw with Jane Goodall who spent forty years studying chimpanzees, patiently, day after day, night after night, year after year, decade after decade and she finally laid the basis where we can understand that even chimpanzees who split off evolutionarily from our line of development five, six millions years ago, they still, they use some tools. They fish for termites with bits of straw, bits of twig and use them purposely to do this but they don't get it. They don't make other tools. They don't have any way to get a further synthesis beyond the simple basic one time only unique but repeatable limited access. And so integration has its patient development, its proliferation of a wider and wider synthesis and that synthesis becomes wider and wider it not only extends but it enriches. So that the center, the focus of integration becomes more powerful at each extension at each enrichment and there comes a time, a threshold where the focus is powerful enough when it happens that it jumps out of nature and jumps immediately into consciousness. It goes into a differential energy, a differential dynamic. And what becomes operative is something that originally was associated with death now is associated with who knows what. Where did the dead go? They went, tradition says in nature, they went to a nether world. Or they went to an upper world. Not a Hell, like in a place of punishment but even something as recent as Homer. Homer's Hell, his Hades, is a place underground where the living fade and they become so faded that they don't have any substance. They don't have any way to have a body or a mind. They fade towards oblivion never quite to oblivion but always fading away to oblivion. So that when Odysseus has to go to the Nether World to find his way home, has to go to the dead to get some help to find his way out of an impasse in his life, a crisis made not only by the Trojan War and the fierce polarity of the classical Greek male mind gone completely mad, how to get out of that kind of a bind, had to go to the Nether World. And in order to get their advice to hear them Circe sends to Heaven because she's the shamaness, she understands. She understands that world and this. She said Odysseus you must offer a bowl of blood because they don't have any blood. They don't have any life sap and that's why they don't have any energy, that's why they're so faded. And if they are able to sip from that blood bowl they will get enough energy, they will get enough dynamic they will be able to talk with you for a little bit, as long as the effect of the blood lasts. And then you can question them and you can figure out, you can find out your way home. So all primitive altars dealt with blood. In this sense that it was some very clumsy way in which to contact the other realm. And it was an ineffectual ritual comportment, highly stylized by symbolic structured ideas that were out of place even three thousand years ago. And still hung on and still hang on today. Because for a lot of people, they still believe on an uneducated, unenriched stupid level that only some kind of massive end of history war will shed enough blood that there'll be some consciousness of some new realm. And it is just irrelevant. No one has to put a drop of blood on any altar to god to make any kind of transformation. It was never necessary ever in the first place. So that very developed consciousness that goes back and enriches and exchanges with the integral qualities of person in forms of body and mind now the differential form of person as a spirit, a spirit person is able to go back to their mind, go back to their body and bring a new dimension so that the mind gets it in a new way. Not just a new thing, not a new element on a list of things but a whole blank page, even more than a blank page, a new dimension is a new dimension. Consciousness is a powerful as adding the dimension of time to space. Everything changes. When you add time to space, spaciality becomes vibrant and alive. When you add consciousness to time/space it becomes scintillating. And there is all the difference in the world between consciousness and experience. Experience is always mythic, always. And true it integrates symbolically to ideas, but ideas are always integral and they have limitations. One of the most powerful insights for the twenty-first century is that the limitations of the mind are natural. It isn't because someone is stupid, or it isn't because they have a defective mind, or that they didn't use their mind in this optimum way. It's that the mind is a phase in integration. It has its place in an ecology. But that the spirit is completely different. Completely different. Not a whole other ball game, but not a game at all. And so when we get to vision, like we're starting with vision now, we have to back and we have to recalibrate. We have to look again at the way in which we habitually related by our actions, by our body, by our sensate existential certainty. We have to recalibrate the way in which the mind which thought itself, the very processes or integrating meaning into ideas. All of that is not now suspect but all of that is recalibrational. And one comes back and it changes. But all the resistances are there and the first resistance is the resistance of the mind that's used to a certain way of integrating so when somebody speaks a conscious time space language to that mind it doesn't hear. You play a tape of this lecture for anyone that you know, they won't hear it. He didn't say anything. And the next step, if they would listen three or four times they would say "oh well, that's not true". Play it a few more times so they really, comes through, from not hearing it to "it's not true", the next stage is "oh, that's not new, everyone knows that". And so mental resistances have that kind of tertiary way of sabotaging transformation. There is nothing there, it's not true, it's not new. And once you train yourself to slip out of those kinds of snares, you can walk through this world and you get shocked at how much reign of ignorance is happening all the time. It's like a blinding blizzard of ignorance. You hardly believe it. Which is probably why most Yogis stay in a cave. At least it's warm and limited in there. The mind is the best saboteur. The body has its own way of sabotaging. Its own way of not allowing for this to happen. But its ways are a little bit different. Its ways are to subtly insure that not enough traction is developed for anything to work.
Suddenly lights shut down in the room - power outage. Roger says I guess we'll take a break now.
Let's come back and reassemble our attention.
In order to give us traction we have to use a principle of leggier domain. If you saw any of the magic shows that were broadcast for New Year's Eve, a good magician knows not only to do sleight of hand but how to do sleight of mind. So we have to do a distractive episodic presentation for our bodies and our minds to help them get over the instinctual built in resistances to consciousness. If the material is pre-digested and presented as very powerful ideas, clearly specified so that you understand it, clearly and perfectly now, nothing will happen. On the level of wisdom it's a very bad teacher who makes it clear to you. Because then the teacher's mind pre-empts your ability to be conscious yourself. And the planet is full of glib, perfectly clear teachers, masters, gurus. It's a junk yard. If you understand now, there's no way that you overcome the resistances to know. And by pretending that they're not there does a great disservice. They're there not because of our inexperience or ignorance or our lack of discipline or whatever, they're there because structurally they need to be there. And one of the qualities later on retrospectively of remembering how you learned and how you came to this conscious time space maturity, this differential quality of being able to see through. Not only see through the mind but see through things. That ability is yours because you really did it. Because you really learned it. Because you yourself, functioning as a differential spiritual person, are it. And so a wisdom teaching is never clear first off. It's never understandable. One never knows. It is not the glib statement of thirty years ago that you have to unlearn before you can learn. That whole ecology of learning or unlearning, of knowing or not knowing, all belongs in the integral cycle. It doesn't have any effect whatsoever on consciousness. None whatsoever. So that there was a different quality, a qualitative difference to someone who could see consciously. Let's come back to the Renaissance for a moment. Let's go back five hundred years to Northern Italy. Let's come to one of the classic little tiny books, little statements, "Oration On The Dignity Of Man". Pico Della Mirandola. He writes here, English translation, "Only after they had been prepared in this way [the special way], did they receive [and then he puts the Greek word in here and they put it in italics] epopteia [epopteia, epopteia], that is by the immediate vision of Divine things by [and he uses the term, the phrase that was popular in Italy at that time] by the light of theology". As some kind of higher consciousness, a Divine consciousness, as opposed to man's mind. This epopteia was a very special faculty. There was a whole clan of ancient Greeks, the Epopteia, and they were in charge of the Eleusinian Mysteries, that family, they were the only ones that could put it on, that could sponsor it. But this phenomenon, this name, this idea is not Greek at all. One of the great images that comes from archeology, from investigating the great Harapin Civilization of India, twenty-five hundred B.C., that's forty-five hundred years ago, about the time that Stone Henge is being built in the South of England, there were two great cities on the Indus River, Wahengo Daro and Harapa. And there you find already, you find this quality of the seer. You find the Yogic position of a meditator already, who has positioned themselves to see through, to see beyond, through this world, beyond their mind. And that one does this. But even a thousand before Wahengo Daro and Harapa were great cities in the Indus Civilization, a millennia before then in Sumeria, you find archeologically these statues of figures who are standing patiently. They are covered with long flowing robes that have definitely an incised floral design. It's like cut velvet, floral design from neck down to feet and all one sees is the head and the head is dominated by two huge eyes, the dilated pupils take up the entire space of the eyes. They're owl's eyes. But ten millennia before Sumeria, you find in Paleolithic art, the eyes of the great Goddess engraved in stone megalithic sculptures, you see these great eyes that are like an hour glass put on its side, or like an infinity sign of the two large eyes that see beyond and see through. This is vision, Capital V. It's a vision which can use perception, can use seeing, can use conception, can use thinking, but brings a new dimension into play in the alignment of vision, of seeing of perception and conception. So that instead of there just being the pair, instead of there being this alignment of these two, instead of there being a tuning fork of two that are aligned, there's a third element. There's a third. So that the spirit, mind and body now are aligned and you get something else. You don't get a line. You don't get an integral line. Because the spirit is differential, is different. A different energy, a different way of dynamic manifesting itself. The spirit suffuses by resonance. And so instead of getting a line one gets a harmonic. It's a totally different, has completely different capacities. And while lines make rational forms on plane surfaces of a limited time/space, harmonics are cosmic. It doesn't matter how many dimensions further there are, a harmonic penetrates, suffuses all the way. And so one graduates by transformation out of a universe, out of a one place into a cosmos, an infinite place. The oneness of existence is necessary for bodies. They have to have this. But to insist that that oneness of existence also be stamped upon the spirit is a tyranny. It's a tyranny. And we find it again and again and we have lived through one of the darkest eras in the history of our species, the twentieth century. Infamous. In the far future looking back on this twentieth century, it is really an unbelievable nightmare. And we have survived. But we have survived at the price of having been brutalized. Our bodies and our minds are almost numbed from this kind of bludgeony. And the sensitivities of a more subtle, of a gentler, of a more realistic love are almost impossible for us to intuit, much less to live. So an education like this, a cycle like this, a double cycle like this is to give us a practical sense of at least massaging all of these areas and bringing them at least for awhile into play. For there is a felicity, there's a tremendous quality of direct vision that comes through us because it is us. Because our spirits do not take time delay triggers to work. The spirit is instantaneous, it doesn't have to depend on time. And it's cosmic, it doesn't have to depend on spatial coordinates in order to function. And this is a blessing, it's always a blessing. Now we're reminding ourselves, we're using something for five hundred years ago because five hundred years ago there was a monumental transformation that happened. And it happened exactly in the place where the lights went out a thousand years before then, in Italy. There is all the difference in the world between a figure like Mark Anthony and a figure like Michaelangelo. Michaelangelo was a Renaissance man is totally different from a would be Roman Emperor like Mark Anthony. The difference between a Roman, just the image that you have of a Roman, is that of a soldier. A professional killer, trained to link up with numbers of others of his kind to make a legion which was like a club lance of imperial power to smash anything. Whereas the Renaissance swordsman was a, had a rapier not the Roman short sword. He was someone who practiced the art of dueling for the honor of his love or himself individually. The Renaissance courtier was impossible in the Roman Empire. Had a differential consciousness. Where did it come from. How was it all of a sudden in the same place after millennium of it not being operative, not working, all of a sudden it works. What happened? Who did this? Who's responsible? And we find that there are places, there're little places, little city states where men and women became conscious and spread out from there and eventually, not only Italy but many other places that had been psychically dead for a thousand years, woke up. And we look at it because, not only have there been renaissances in China and India, even in the Americas. The American Indians have had several renaissances. But there is a quality in the Italian Renaissance that's so focused, so simplistic that it can be used as a great example because you could not ever miss it. While there were individual forerunners and geniuses to the Italian Renaissance, it never reached the man on the street. Whereas when you look at Vasari's Lives of the Artist and he's writing about Michaelangelo, he said that if you wandered around Florence the shop keepers paid very little attention to the genius of people like Michaelangelo. Their contention was, if I had time I could do the same thing. "Hey, you give me that money, I build for you. What do you want? You want a dome the city of Rome? O.K." It was the quality that the man and woman on the street felt they were alive again because they could do something. They had freedom and mobility of variation. They had this capacity. That was the Renaissance. If you look at a forerunner like Dante who individually was certainly someone who had poked through, had penetrated through, had come to understand that a conscious universe was a cosmos and was totally different from what the church doctrine said was there. That understood that the only way to get out of the levels of the netherworld, that had by then become, in Dante's time, had become the Inferno. The journey through the netherworld was an immersion in hell. In levels of torture. Eternal pain, suffering. Yet for Dante there was a journey that went through hell and came out. One was not condemned to hell forever, eternally. There was a way to go through it and come out. Where was the place? Where was that gate through which one could get out of hell? It was at the very center. Exactly the place that you would normally not go. Exactly the place that your body and your mind would tell you is the most perilous place. That's the only way to get out. Because at the pin point focus center of peril is the cure for it. The center of anything resolves it. The center of Inferno resolves it so that it becomes a passage out. It's as if there is great wheel with many levels of circumstantial, circumspectual, spoking, coming in, but there is, no matter how much that wheel turns, how fast, how massively, with what momentum, with what savagery, with what punishment, there is a place on that wheel that does not move and that's the exact center. It's axial point of focus of integration, the center, the pin point center of integration never moves. It's still. It's always quiet. And so one can leave that way. One goes to the center. You can leave by the rim, but the rim will throw you off to who knows where. What does Shakespeare say? When we have shuffled off this mortal quell what kinds of monstrous things are there. We would rather face the known sufferings than to incur who knows what kinds of unknown nightmares. Thus doth conscious make cowards of us all. And so there's a regressive cringing cowardice that comes with ignorance. And gets ingrained and becomes the very stuff that one trusts to get you through life and something that smacks of wisdom is of unsettling danger. Better not hear this. Better be absent from the lecture. It's getting too close. Better not hear this. And so the inattentiveness the incapacity to hear, to understand, to persevere, to follow through are all well known symptoms of sluggish, fearful ignorance. And it's this way for all of us. No one is exempt from this. Because it's in the very structure of the way in which integrals will protect themselves from what seems to experience, what seems to thought, what seems to the very heart of existence as to be imperfections to the point of fracture. And one would rather project out a fault on the entire universe than to deal with it in oneself. 'This whole universe is flawed, it's all cracked, it's all suspect, but not me'. What arrogance, what impossible unbelievable arrogance. But the Renaissance five hundred years ago woke up from that kind of arrogance and understood that there's something powerful about being able to get to the unmoving center and penetrate through, axially, at this plane. Because eventually it becomes experienced as being a very two dimensional massive complication. Hence the Renaissance fascination with labyrinths. And all that was connected with politics. All that was connected with a sociological structure of human power, which is what politics is about. Politics, yes, is the art of the possible of our group of doing other peoples groups before they get to that capacity. It's all about political parties. It's all about building state power. It's all about the gang on the size of an empire. It's all about Romans. But Michaelangelo was quite different. From Mark Anthony. Just as Julius The Second is quite remarkably similar to Julius Caesar yet different. So that the Italians of the Renaissance who got their encouragement from the classical era that was supposed to be the Roman Empire but when you look at their excitement, the excitement is not about Roman authors, Their excitement is about certain Greek authors that had been swallowed whole by the Romans so that it didn't do the Romans any good whatsoever. But the later Renaissance, Italians were able to bring out these elements that had never been digested and so they were never Romanized. They never went into the building of the Empire or those that did, it became easier and easier to see how they had been reduced and politicized and made into an ideology and projected politically and all of that was understandable so that you had a renaissance rather like Machiavelli who was able to express very clearly the pattern. And that's what The Prince is all about. The Prince. The Prince is a subtle tyrant. The first prince in that sense, not a king but a prince, was Augustus Caesar. Before it was called the Roman Empire it was called the Augustin Principate. It was based on The Prince. Who is the prince? The king is the mediator between heaven and earth. He puts heavens impress upon the earth. But the prince is somewhat subtler tyrant. The king is very powerful. Mythically very powerful. But the prince is symbolically insidious. Augustus said you can have any opinion that you want as long as you hear my opinion first. Princepts means first. Means I have the right to tell you what I think first, then you tell me what you think. You get it? And if we go round robin it gets more and more difficult for anyone to go against the prevailing consensus established by the first prime mover, the prince. And when you make it a theological statement, 'well there is a first mover, there's a prime mover', and the prince agrees with him, you get a very subtle kingship that's even more insidious. One can go against a king. There are instances of that kind of assassination of a king. Julius Caesar himself. But Augustus was never even thought about being assassinated. Because he had a political party called the Roman Empire that would avenge him and what chance would you have. Everyone that you know is co-opted, involved. And so Augustus was never even attempted to be assassinated for forty four years. Where as soon as Julius Caesar became not only the king but the dictator for life, the Pontifix Maximus, his best friends killed him. And so Augustus learned, do not be a king, just be the first. Be the prime mover in political opinion. And most people, because of their regressive capacities to just bear down and do it because the known at least you can struggle with and you can get somewhere in terms of it, this kind of cringing, amulet, preserving, meaningful cowardice is what makes an empire possible. It's what makes tyrannies possible. The power of the state is in fear, not in love. The power of an empire is in fear. Do you think Darth Vader loves? When he loves he falls out of being Darth Vader and becomes Anakin Skywalker. He becomes somebody's dad. Not only does love forgive but love transforms. Because it exchanges. It allows for exchange of centers. It allows for inter-relationalities of conscious time space to suffuse, by their resonance's, everything and the cosmos becomes alive. And so in the Renaissance you find again and again this attentiveness to the resonance's in the cosmos. And that if we are tuned, we tune the whole cosmos. Man is a microcosm. Not that he's little, but he's the entire range of possibility. Pico says in the Oration On The Dignity Of Man that when all of the creatures of existence were made: plants, animals, spirits (they were called in antiquity daemons), angels, when all of the levels of existence were made, then man was made last, not because he was made last as like an afterthought but that he was fashioned in such a way that he had all of the capacities. He could exchange qualities with the entire array of creation. So that man was a soul center core that had resonant affinity with every level of creation, every level of reality. And that man was so superior to angels that it isn't even funny. Because angels are only angels on an angelic level. Whereas man spans the entirety. The whole spinal column of creation including the transformative top that leads to spiritual realms far beyond angels. Angels are only messengers. Let's hear it. Angels are a postal service of the Divine. We're family. We belong to the family. We inherit the house, the estate, the grounds. It's a whole different thing. And to put man under the influence of angels or daemons is indeed a superstitious regression. And yet five hundred years ago in the Renaissance they were unsure about all this. Their insight saw that there were spiritual forms in conscious time space that were exceedingly realistic and complimented the body, complimented the mind. That there was such a thing as. . . . . They used an alchemical term sometimes. They called it the resolving third. What was the resolving third? It meant that instead of this and that, you brought this and that together into a ratio and the line that made the relationality, the ratio, was the resolving third. That line which is also a horizon of equanimity. That the center of the line is not some kind of pin point black dot, black hole thing, that's an image that is carried over from integration. It doesn't apply there. Instead there is an infinite horizon of equanimity which resolves all proportions. And so the Renaissance had this wonderful confidence that there is a proportionality to perception that leads one to be able to express depth, even on a two dimensional surface. And further, that there is a relationality, a ration-ality, a ratioed quality to conception as well as perception. So that you get depth in perception. You also get depth in conception. And it means then that there must be a depth to spirit differentially that complements those which goes even further and that awakened them completely. So that you find a little letter here, from one of the most powerful men in the Renaissance. A man who was exceedingly important. His name was Cosimo de' Medici. Here is a little letter, one paragraph, from the old Cosimo De' Medici to his, to his what? His personal, personally patronized, personally sponsored young man who headed an academy in Florence. His name was Marsilio Ficino. Marsilio was the son of Cosimo's physician. And he discovered when Marsilio was still a teenager that he was an extraordinarily, intellectually adept character. Full of life and vitality and talent. And so he had him specially trained. Cosimo was the head of the most powerful banking family in Europe at the time. Their Roman branch of the Bank De' Medici financed the Pope's projects. And they had about sixteen branches throughout Europe. But what Cosimo loved more than anything, because as a young man he'd been plotted against by another political faction called the Albizzi. Renaldo deglio Albizzi hated Cosimo because he had everything, so he would take everything from him, had him banished from Florence. He wanted to have him killed. Nobody would quite go that far because Cosimo was a pretty interesting character. And instead of being banished and moping Cosimo went off to some of the other cities and was lionized as a young interesting character. And so he partied for a year. And when he was in Venice he found that a lot of the Byzantine intellectuals and scholars that were fleeing because the city of Constantinople, the city of Byzantium was falling to Machled the Conqueror. In fact in 1453 it finally fell and there was no more Byzantine Empire ever again. It became a part of the Arabian world. And for a generation at the end all these great collections of things, books and things from antiquity were flowing out looking for a place to, in exile, to find themselves. And the exiled Cosimo said well, I plan to go back home next year. Why don't you come and be in my town, be in Florence. And so he had Ficino picked out as a teenager to be the one to translate from all these Greek classics that no one had seen the originals, and no one could read Greek well enough. So he had him trained. All these great Byzantine Greek scholars. How not only to read classical Greek, but how to read very refined classical Greek like Plato or Plotinus. That almost no one knew how to read. But with all the Byzantine commentaries and cribs of two thousand years, they were well able to teach him how to see into all of this. So he was the translator, he was the teacher. Cosimo gave him a house up in the hills just next to where Fieseli is, the Via Carreggi. A reproduction of it exists today and is owned by Lawrence Rockefeller. Cosimo gave this villa to Ficino, he said this will be our Florentine Platonic academy. And I want you to shine there. I want you to be radiant. So near the end of his life he wrote this little paragraph letter to Ficino. Cosimo de'Medici to Marsilio Ficino, Greetings, yesterday I went to my estate at Carreggi but for the sake of cultivating my mind and not the estate. Come to us Marsilio, as soon as possible. Bring with you Plato's book on the Highest Good (That's the philipus dialogue), which I suppose you have now translated from Greek into Latin as you promised. I want nothing more wholeheartedly than to know which way leads most surely to happiness. Farewell. Come and bring your Orphic lyre with you. The Renaissance. And Ficino translated all of the dialogues of Plato. In fact he translated all of the writings of Plotinus and a dozen other classics that had not been seen clearly for over a thousand years. But right the middle, when he was first energizing and first knew Greek well enough to translate the subtleties of Plato's dialogues, a very rare volume came into Cosimo's hands. It was called the Corpus Hermiticum. Corpus means the body. The body of Hermetic writings. Thirteen little dialogues that belonged not to the time of Plato but belonged to the end of the First Century A.D. Five hundred years after Plato. Five hundred years of refinement to that the Hermetic Dialogues were like the distilled quintessence of wisdom. Plato's dialogues were how to go from scratch and build an acquaintanceship with various questions about wisdom. The Hermetic Dialogues were the quintessence of how to find out to find out. How do you learn how to learn. Quintessential. And the very first of the Hermetic Dialogues is called The Mind Shepherd. someone who shepherds the mind to the point where it transforms into spiritual consciousness. And so Cosimo, when he paid a lot of money for this Corpus Hermeticum, he presented it to Ficino. He said I'm getting old, will you do this first. Put the Plato aside, do this first. And Ficino finished just a year before Cosimo died, less than a year, about six, seven months. Before Cosimo died, he finished translating the Corpus Hermeticum. And he would go down to the Plaza de Medici to Cosimo's room, and Cosimo would have his sons there and Piero and his grandson, the young Lorenzo de Medici, Il Magnifico, and various interesting people; the young Leonardo Da Vinci, the teenage Michelangelo, the young Botticelli, it was a room full of people. And Ficino would read for the first time in a thousand years what the quintessence of ancient wisdom was all about. And when they heard it, they said Ohh we, we, we didn't understand. We thought it was about this, or it was about that, we didn't realize that it's about being about everything. It's not about a lot or a whole lot, it's about everything infinitely. And so they had to recalibrate on the basis of infinity, comically. And all of a sudden you had a generation of men and women who started looking at each other and realizing that you were prisms of Divine infinity and not just who someone said you were. And all of a sudden men and women looked at each other and saw worlds within worlds within worlds. And that was a renaissance. Our first pair of texts that we're going to look at is Ficino's Book of Life and the Corpus Hermeticum translated into English. Try reading The Mind Shepherd. It's the first of the books, it's not very long, it's about ten, fifteen pages. And take a look in Ficino's Book of Life at the third book. It's three books, they're very short, all of them together are about 180 pages. But the third book has the title On Making Your Life Agree With The Heavens. Not that you twist and comport your life to fit what the influences of the stars are but that you have, when you transform, you have a radiant star instead of some kind of ritual mask. Instead of a personae you have a person. And your spiritual person is able, not only to be radiant in the cosmos but to come back harmonically and suffuse by calibrating resonance, your body and your mind. Then you have something.
More next week.