Vision 2

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This is Vision Two and I think it might be interesting for some of you to reconnoiter a process that we're operating with. This is the second year of a two year education. So this is a second cycle that fits with the first cycle. The first cycle is the way in which integration happens. And the second cycle is the way in which differentiation happens. And they're related, certainly. In fact they're related in every possible way. But they are distinct and we'll see today that there are radical watersheds of operative procedures and quite different objectivities that occur in the two cycles. There is a term in geometry of the old Euclidean geometry called congruence where one form fits over another. That term of congruence in geometry has a completely different meaning when carried into a dramatic scenario. Instead of having a congruence, you have a mask. So that in the kind of life dynamic activity which we find ourselves in, they often to mentally identify a congruence and to think that we need to tow the lines of that congruent alignment and that we'll O.K. then, is a completely insane specification. And only addicts us to the need for a perfect mask. The perfect mask would hide our true self exactly. So that we could be confident that the perfect mask is the exact expression that we should have and we will never find the wearer of the mask. Because in a dramatic situation the episode has a beginning, it has a development of complication, the middle, and it has an end. It always has a narrative line. It always has a mythos. It always has an integral story which unfolds, has a definite, has a definite complication, has a definite end. And in that scenario a mask is an essential part of the beginning. But for a conscious spiritual being to mistake even a perfect mask for themselves is sheer nonsense and a complete nightmare. And what we're trying to do in the second year is to wake up from any vestiges leftover of that kind of identification. So we're not looking for a congruence, we're not looking for geometrical alignments, we're not looking for forms that fit one on top of another. We're not looking for this kind of mirror opposite. So that one can say then, well this a perfect fit. This is a perfect identification. That kind of procedure is wonderful in integration, and necessary in nature. It's essential to existence. It is indispensable for the mind and yet carrying over those kinds of techniques, those kinds of certainties into the development of consciousness negates their usage. Reverses their effect. And they become regressive snares rather than the supports which we used to enjoy from them. And so there is a very odd quality when one begins to explore conscious time space. A conscious world is a radically transformed process of investigation. A radically different way of inquiry and yields a radically different objectivity. What comes out of vision is distinctly different from what comes out of nature. What comes out of nature are existential things. Objectivities which have ritual certainty, they have bodies. They are the atoms, they are the molecules, they are the species, they are the creatures, they are the things that one can pound. But what comes out of vision, you cannot pound. What comes out of vision, what comes out of conscious are objectivities which are like dynamic gestalts that have resonant properties rather than inherent poundability. And so conscious forms must be appreciated for their resonant wholeness rather than pointed to with some kind of dogmatic certainty in some ritual mental conformational way. Perhaps the most nonsensical thing that can happen to us is for someone to point at us and say "you". What are they pointing at? This body? This drivers license image match up? Honest officer, it's not even my universe. So we're [phone rings] Is that for me? It's the officer right? The long arm of ATT. I've been investigated by the best of them, it doesn't bother me anymore. Once about thirty years ago when my symbols course was, this was in Canada in 1970, my symbols course was getting hundreds of students into it. It was really becoming a phenomena. And so they called me into this little office and there were actually five guys seated in big chairs behind a long table and little chair in front of it. And I recognized the scenario. I was 29 years old and very full of San Francisco/Berkeley energy. And so I turned the chair around and I sat on it backwards like this and I leaned into it. And they said are you trying to take over this school? And of course my reply was "I've already done that". And I proceeded to outline to them what was like a quipping strategy which then I put into play because I'd opened my mouth. I said "not only am I offering these interdisciplinary courses to wake up the student population, but I'm going to offer evening sessions of these courses to the community at large, and take away your political base also". Surprisingly I lasted five years and got tenure at that job. And then I resigned because I saw that tenured university situations are integral episodic dramatic scenes, but they are not real. And what I wanted was something real. And so what's being offered here is something real. How can you tell the difference? Because something real starts from zero. It doesn't start from zero because you can't start at zero so it comes in as an ongoingness. Whereas something which is episodic always has a beginning point. It always has an initial point. And we know enough about mathematics and logic and structures by the beginning of the twenty-first century to know that if you can characterize an initial point you know that there is a game that matches the unfoldment of that in the full array of its possibilities. And we have the math now to work that out. Some twenty-five years ago the first great book on programming written by the Dutch genius, Edsger Dijkstra, called at that time A Discipline Of Programming, was wise enough to know that you do not start a book of instruction about programming, even by 1976, you don't start with chapter one. In order to be really intelligent you just start with the chapter zero. So something real always starts with zeroness. With a zero base. Which means that it has a quality of mystery, of mysteriousness. Not mysterious because you don't understand it, but mysterious because the more you do understand it, you understand that no one knows. Not that no one knows in an ignorant sense, but that specifically no one knows. No one will ever know. And yet what we're doing is quite real that the ongoingness has traction and it still happens and it still develops even though no one knows where it came from. This takes away a very important element which is necessary for game theory. It takes away the parenthetical phrasing that allows for identification, for labeling, for all kinds of list making activities and one has to deal with the Malaise of reality rather than the digested spec list of expectation. Really high powered logic long ago developed itself far enough to recognize that any logical system, expressive enough to deal with a reasonably realistic complexity cannot define its own axiomatic basis. It needs an other, an auxiliary, a second logical system to define its axiomatic basis. The early development of computers was plagued by what were known as bug lists. And the more complex the program, the longer the bug list. Until there was a point reached in the late 1950's where the bug lists were starting to be almost infinitely long. That was the time when you would find computer cartoons where there would be a mass of guys in white coats around a univac or something like that, and the captions would be "what did it say, what did it say? It said don't ask". This kind of limitation to logic is necessary for us because we have inherited a civilization. We've inherited life constraints that have been colored, have been tainted, have been dyed, have been tinted by a whole long series of complications which at one time or another were necessary and most of them have lost their necessity long ago and are still hanging around. And so we are trying to make our way through a veil of sticky irrelevancies that constantly get in our way and the more that we try to learn free form pirouetting to express some new kinesthetic quality of movement, the more we find ourselves entangled and enwrapped and the processes of the new just create for us a firmer form of mummification. And of course the great voice, two thirds through the twentieth century who pointed this out, with an accuracy that will probably never be exceeded, was Samuel Beckett. His short dramas pointed out again and again that we have reached a point where this civilization is absurd. And any further development within it produces an increasing sense of anxiety and absurdity. The absurdity is there in the ritual sense that nothing happens. Increasingly, specifically, and exactly, nothing happens. Nothing real happens. And yet at the same time the anxiety level, in terms of our interiority, rises faster and more complex with each complication. And so you get an asymtopic anxiety and a freeze point, freeze dried lack of traction for any kind of life. In this kind of condition ends up being, not, even worse than Waiting For Godot. Beckett wrote a little play called End Game. It is terminal. It ends up with two garbage cans on a stage and two guys in those garbage cans arguing with each other about nonsense. And That's all that will ever happen on that stage, in that scenario. Those kinds of limitations were rejected more than two generations ago completely, and yet the civilization has not changed. The conditions have not changed. It's just that the complexities have been frosted with new incentives, new expectations so that it seems more than ever, something that one could try harder and then you could have it. It's a fools gold's quest. So this education is largely a consideration to punctuate with as much silence anything that you would learn to say. One of our texts that we're using, Ficino's Book Of Life, written about five hundred years ago, is very good advice. He says in one of his letters to a friend of his. A man named Polizziano who was a fellow philosopher in the city of Florence. Also a man who enjoyed the beneficence of the patron Cosimo de Medici. He wrote to Polizziano and he said "you can always tell a legitimate letter of mine because I try to put in as much silence as language. I try to space what I say so that the hearer can sense me behind the words." It's a very similar situation to the advice that Louis Sullivan gave to Frank Lloyd Wright when he was a young draftsman and he was showing off. He said "Wright, behind every building that you see is a man that you don't see". And if that building is built right, you can walk through that building and feel the architect, because a building will have a personality. A work of art has a personality. This is pure Renaissance aesthetics. This comes back into play in civilization about five hundred years ago in the city of Florence. It was rebirthed then. Re nais sance. A rebirth of what? A rebirth of civilization. What had happened to it? Why did it need to have a renaissance? Why did it need to be reborn? Because for almost a thousand years, men and women lived out very logical limited dramatic scenarios that went nowhere and produced asimotopic anxiety. This was known as the Middle Ages. Or some times the beginning of it is known as the Dark Ages. Not that nothing happened. Plenty happened. There was pageantry galore. But it never went anywhere. There was no sense of evolving, of refining. There was only the cycle repeating itself again and again with slightly different variations. The same scenarios that one would have seen in the late five hundreds were still being played out a thousand years later. The Renaissance rediscovered, in Florence, with this character Ficino, rediscovered that there was a synthesizing core in the classical ages where men and women transformed themselves out of the limitations of the world. Transformed themselves out of the same dull round and entered into a consciousness about themselves. A consciousness about life. A consciousness about civilization. And the techniques for that were rediscovered. Why were they not rediscovered before then? Because nowhere were there any reminders that this had once been the prize, the pride, the crown jewels, the essential transforming wisdom of civilization. Why did it show up at this time in this place? Because most of the esoteric books had been hidden away in a place called Byzantium. Constantinople. A city. had been put into academic refined libraries into locked cases, put within jeweled covers so they were so expensive that no one was allowed to touch them and see them and eventually only just a handful of people knew how to read these. And then that entire city fell to the Moslem armies led by Machmed The Second, Machmed the Conqueror. And all of those treasures had to be carried away secretly in the dead of night and several of the best of them ended up in Florence. In Italy. Because the dynamic Cosimo de Medici made sure that it was his city where the fleeing intellectual refugees from the last vestiges of the antique world met the new power groups in Northern Italy that were banked by the Medici banking system. The Medici's had about sixteen branches of their banks and the Roman branch financed the Popes. You get an idea of how powerful they were. So Cosimo brought these two groups together. The Nouveau Riche Italians who prided themselves on being better than the old guys. Better than the ancient Romans. And meeting that population of people was a population of esoteric Greek language empire building academics, who wanted to mesh with these new rich Italians and make a new kind of a combine, a new kind of a contract. That meeting was the Renaissance, produced the Renaissance. And yet at the very core of the Renaissance was this character Marsilio Ficino. Cosimo had hand picked him out when he was an adolescent. He was just, I think thirteen, fourteen years old. He was the son of Cosimo's doctor. Cosimo said, "I will set you son up. He's a talented young man. I want him to learn to read Greek better than anyone in the world. And I will bring the best Greek scholars from Byzantium to teach him Greek. To teach him Classical Greek in such a refined way that he can translate for me into a language which I can read these treasured volumes". And of course his most treasured volume was a huge book of Plato's Dialogues that hadn't been seen complete for about a thousand years. And Ficino was trained to make this translation of Plato for Cosimo. In the midst of all this when Constantinople fell in 1453, the last remaining treasure was taken out of the city just before it fell, immediately brought to Florence, immediately brought to Cosimo's attention, because he had the money, he had the power, he had the operation already in business. He had set Ficino up in yellow and white estate in the hills outside of Florence called the Via Careggi and there was a Platonic academy that was busy, not only translating all of Plato, but Ficino was busy making sure that there were others who were educated like him who could translate other manuscripts that were being bought and found, and into this came a manuscript of the ancient Hermetic writings that no one had seen and almost no one had heard of for about a thousand years. In fact these writings were made so dangerous that if you possessed them after 365 A.D. you were killed. When the Nag Hammadi writings were found in Egypt after the second world war, some of the Hermetic writings that had never been seen since the ancient world, were found there and they were buried along with the other manuscripts. With the other wisdom books. Why were they buried? Why was it under pain of death that if you were found with any of this you would be killed? Because they dissolved the integrated basis of mental ideology. They dissolved mind forms and showed you that these mind forms were but temporary masks over intelligence and that they were not permanently real. And further they dissolved the confidence that anything poundable was the arbiter of what is real, of what is objective. That there are realities, like mathematical equations, which are not poundable but are translatable into refashioning nature. Something you can pound will never transform nature. But there are forms which cannot be pounded, which when applied to nature, change it. They make a transformation. These writings were buried, the Hermetic writings were buried, they were brought to Cosimo's attention and in 1453 Cosimo said to Ficino, "interrupt your Plato translations, I want you to translate these things for me first". And so in 1453 Ficino sat down in the hills above Florence and made a translation into Latin, which could be read at that time, of thirteen books of the ancient Hermetic writings. The first of those was called, the translation of the title is The Mind Shepherd. The image is that of a salvational shepherd of men who does not exist only in a body, but also exists in an interior form know as the Ultimate Mind. And that this shepherd of the mind can free the body to survive a transformation of death and recreate itself as a spiritual objectivity in heaven. And so The Mind Shepherd, The Poimandres Treatise, written in Alexandria in about 90 A.D. About the time that Saint John was writing the Book of Revelation. So that the Poimandres manuscript in Greek has an apocalyptic millennial pezzaz, just like the book of Revelation. Just like the Apocalypse, the book that ends the New Testament. The book that ends that whole era of Divinely inspired writing about the ultimate qualities of Reality, and what's important for man to know, to remember. Not just to know but to remember. For one of the essences, one of the distilled transformational qualities that comes out of this kind of Hermetic Wisdom is that memory is radically different from imagination. That imagination works all the way through the entire array of nature, everywhere that integration happens, imagination is the power. But that once one comes through a C change, a transformation into consciousness, the continued use of imagination becomes a regressive, reductive operative. And one has to shift over and use memory. And yet there's a curious kind of an exchange. There is always a mixed blessing with wisdom initially. There were many men and women who learned the new radical technique of transformative consciousness but learned it in sort of a partial way, in sort of a neophyte way. And immediately sought to find parallels back in the old tried and true logical realm of integral, comparative, associative, qualities. And memory was mis-identified as a form of imagination which one used a rote instruction process of making sure that the imagination was firm. That the imagination was really grounded. And the ultimate presentation of this, in the ancient world, is traced back to a Roman named Cicero. Cicero, who was the, he was the Clarence Darrow of his day. He was the greatest lawyer in the Roman Empire. He was a republican and so he was an enemy of people like Julius Caesar. And Cicero wrote a little book to a friend of his, Herenius, and the book is call To Herenius, in Latin Ad Herenium. And it contains the classic formulation of the art of memory. But it's a Roman version. It's a reductive version of the art of memory. It stylizes memory in integral terms. That memory is all about fixing in the mind, of bringing images together, synthesized by more powerful images and those synthesized by symbols eventually, so that you have this ability to remember supposedly by having this cascade of categorical, like a pyramid of categorical remembrances in your mind and it's this kind of memory that comes today to us when you go to the computer store to buy memory. You buy so many RAM, so many megabytes. Have you ever bought a single package of memory that was conscious? That's the trouble. Because an education that is stylized in that way eventually produces fantastically exact scholastic logical zombies. And that's what the middle ages were. We live in a time when we're being invited to inculcate and get ourselves used to a new middle ages. Whereas the reply of people like me, "we've done that. It was boring. You can have the third millennium if you want to have a thousand years again of that. I'm not interested. Want to do something else. Want to explore. There is something else to explore. Whole new infinitudes of possibility, of ourselves exchanging with each other in radical transformative ways that have never been explored. Let's go and do that. Let's find out about that. If you want to go back to a new Middle Ages, go ahead. But with the other hand, also sionara. That's it." So that there is quite a difference between consciousness and experience. Experience has always to it a kind of a story line, a narrative, a mythic quality. Whereas increasingly consciousness has to it a process known as vision, which when it matures to the point, to the prismatic interchange focus, to a nexus of tremendous explosive differential capacity, the person is not an object that you can pound, the person is like a new star on the planet, radiating as much as integrating. Differentiating equally with integrating. And that kind of a person, that kind of differential form brings vision together only to differentiate it further into another process, a second process known as history. And historical consciousness is very powerful indeed. Consciousness is able to dissolve the ritual quality of integration and bring it back into play as art. But History is able to dissolve the symbolic forms of integration and bring it back into play in the form of a cosmos. So that person and cosmos are differential forms quite radically different, transformed out of space time into conscious space time. At least a five dimensional continuum. They're quite different from body and mind. And it's true that body and mind, when they're aligned, when they're not made into some kind of polarity. When body and mind are aligned, one can proceed with integration much better, much faster, much more accurately, and that's true. And when all of that is done, when realization has happened to a perfect T, you've come exactly only half way in reality. You are then, only then ready for transformation. Which is the whole other side, which is the whole other complement to everything that body and mind could do in tandem together. so that an education like this takes one further, takes one deeper, takes one farther afield than just the traditional focuses. Let's come back to the Renaissance for a second. Let's go back to Ficino. A very interesting happy sort of a character. He used to celebrate Plato's Birthday on November 27th and he would have a lot of wine, have a lot of food, lot of vegetables, he was a vegetarian, and they would have songs. And they would have special kinds of songs that were recognizable from the Hermetic antiquity. They were always songs that came out of your own experience. They were always individual poems set to music. They were a special kind of a hymning. A poesis in Greek means a creating of a form, of an artistic form and part of the creating of an artistic form is to put something of yourself in there, something of the person in there. So that one would never use someone else's poem. You would always use your own poem which was written for that occasion. Which was drawn out of your own language, out of your own feeling toned experience and integrated and brought symbolically together in your own interiority, in you own mind. But then you did not speak in the old mythic sense of telling a story, you let a distillation, you let a transformation of that language form, of that mind, of that experience enriched interiority let that transform, let it ferment, let it go from water into wine. That this transformation, this new wine that would come out. The new wine of a visionary language, of a magic language, no longer a mythic language. What would be the difference, a mythic language always gives us forms within which we live. One is always involved in a story. In Tolkein's Lord Of The Rings Sam Gamgee at one desperate point says to Frodo "do adventures never end? Who is telling this story anyway? Always getting us into trouble." Whereas a magic language is different language. You do not live within the language forms but you become the story teller. And so a magic language form is the fairytale rather than the myth. The poem rather than the little episodic vignette. And so these Plato's Birthday poems would come out of a transformed conscious magical language and would be sung round robin at the table. A couple of the teenagers who were sitting at the table with Ficino about this time say in the 1470's, the sixteen year old Michelangelo, a young man who was a little older named Leonardo de Vinci, another man named Botticelli. The list was spectacular. This was Ficino's birthday table. He made a renaissance because he rediscovered, he rekindled the way in which the transformative spark is able to be passed on to men and women in such a way that they received and transformed in their own individual way. They do not become clones of some ideology, they become fresh new uniquenesses focuses of numinous infinite possibility in themselves. And a population of people like this is a community. The kind of community that used to be talked about in very very ancient times. Not Greco Roman times, but times going back a thousand years before their apex. Moses once said no man has seen the face of god. But the community, the community of the Divine discloses the face in their gestalt, in their wholeness. This is what makes a special people. Let's take a break and we'll come back.

Let's come back and let's look at what we're doing. We're exploring, we're investigating by exploring, we're going out to test a new kind of a process. It's a process which does not occur in nature. The process is consciousness. No way that consciousness is natural. But in the very same breath, no way that consciousness is not real. So one of the very first things that wisdom presents to a man or a woman is that we have been laboring under a false identification that somehow we assumed that what was natural was the entire scope of the real. And no disrespect to nature whatsoever. In fact greater respect to nature. That nature has a complement. And one of the traditional ways in which this was handled, one of the ways which was characteristic of the civilization that we have grown up in, was that nature is feminine and consciousness is masculine. Consciousness belongs to a heavenly realm of the father and nature belongs to an earthly realm of the mother. This is not ultimately a true typology at all, yet it's a convenient way and it informs the feeling toned experience level of our kind very very easily. So that mythologies almost always have a family structure to the gods. No matter where one looks in the world. Whatever heritage there is, their mythological figures tend to form a Divine family. There are variations, there are emendations. One of the most severe variations was in ancient Egypt. Or perhaps we should say, because we're going so far back, it isn't ancient Egypt but it's archaic Egypt. Egypt before the dynasties, back more than five thousand years ago. When you look at the standard mythological family, you find that there in Egyptian mythology. You find Osiris and Isis and Horace. You find that family typology. But in archaic Egypt, Isis and Osiris are only one pair of four pairs. And those four pairs formed an eight phase god emanation that came from some place. Not caused but emanated. And that place from which they emanated was very mysterious. Was named in archaic Egypt as Atom. From which in an odd way we get names like Adam or the Atom as in atomic. It still has phonetically that kind of archetypal archaic firstness. But the Egyptian Atom was a mysterious God Head that was never personifiable. Was always mysterious. And so qualifies for a kind of like a chapter zero for Egyptian mythology. And that Isis and Osiris as mother/father and the other pairs are also male/female, so they're also, they have their families. So there are four families of gods in ancient Egypt, but the archaic origin of them is a mysterious God Head that cannot be characterized and has, if one needs to give some kind of designation to it, has a zero quality. Has a complete non-registry of image. So that at the very beginnings of the kind of civilized tradition that Egypt founds, one finds that there is no way in which one can go back and put a face on the archaic original God Head. So that in every case the gods are masks. They are masks which make it easy for our kind to bridge and to relate to Divinity but one must always remember that this is not the face of God, this is only a mask in a play of emanation and not the complete thing. And so the Egyptian predilection to remember this was always to use combinations of masks. Juxtapositions of various gods brought together so that you would never mistake this for the real thing. So that very often you would find later on, after thousands of years of this, Egyptian Gods had many different attributes all jumbled into one. When the early Christian writers started to criticize the ancient religions, they said look at the Egyptian Gods. They're just a junk yard of incommensurate image qualities and who could ever believe in this kind of stuff. Not appreciating that originally it was exactly the composite, the fractions, the making of ratios of at least two or more god masks that reminded one that this was not God. You cannot put a human face on God. You cannot put an image of a face. There is no ultimate mask which will suffice. So that the Divine must always be remembered to be left open. Not assigned any designation whatsoever. So that one of the qualities that's there at the very beginnings of the Egyptian tradition is that when you built towards this integral threshold, where not only your rituals brought your bodily existence into a focus, and your mythologies brought your feeling tone stories into cycles that now wove together and made sense as a mythology, and that this existential ritual comportment of life, the things that you do over and over again, weaving together with the things you say about your experience weaving together and all of that interiorizing to an inner meaning, to an inner sense of symbol. And as that was more and more effective this old problem of anxiety coming up. This old problem of nothingness coming up. It became confused and always becomes confused and always enters into the picture where one becomes fearful the closer one comes to a transformational experience where the mind gives itself over to consciousness. Where the brain must yield itself to the mind. so this was always identified, we talked about this last week, this was always identified as an experience to end all experience. Or as death. That transformation was something that happened when you died. And that the supernatural, the beyond nature was an afterlife or a beyond this life or a beyond this world or a world underneath this world, a netherworld or a world above this world. And eventually the conviction was that this world that we relate to existentially and even mentally is a world of appearance, of appearances through which we must look or beyond which we must look or underneath which we must discover or up above which we can get a view. But the brain because it was made through the integration of experience and because experience always moves on the little ball bearings of images, the brain tried to use images in the form of imagination to imagine what the other world was like. To imagine what the netherworld was like, to imagine what the beyond death was. Not knowing not understanding that imagination is incapable of this. Cannot function. It's like a jet engine in space. There's nothing to function. A jet engine needs air coming through it in order for it to work and in space there's no air. You can take the best designed, mach 20 interceptor fighter, it won't work on the moon. There's no air. And so all metaphysical systems are like jets in space. They're beautifully designed, they're very powerfully designed. None of them work. They are all irrelevant, not because they are irrelevant one by one or any one or all of them one by one, it's that the entire structure of procedure has no reality. They have never worked. And so it is a very difficult crunch when it comes to men and women trying to find an imaginative modeling so that they have something to go on, to go into transformational experiences beyond experience. To transformational thinking beyond symbolic thought. so that vision was always a very electro-magnetic, radioactive danger ground. So that the tribal consensus on that level was always, 'well let's let special people do this and so we don't have to do this. We'll let people who are specially ill adapted to life do this. This woman has never gotten along with anyone, she's always exploring these occult things, let her do that and then she can tell us and we'll work in what we want from that.' And so there were such things a shamanesses, holy women, or holy men. And yet that quality is not there in primordial peoples. Nowhere, anywhere on the planet in primordial peoples do you find that the spiritually wisdomed transformationally radical conscious men and women are excised from life. They're essential part of life. In the Northern plains Indian Sundance, the Okan, which is as good a Paleolithic, symbolic ritual integration cycle as you will ever find, the entirety of the eight day ceremony is guaranteed by the holy woman who is a well known older woman of the tribe who's vow in midwinter is the sponsoring aegis under which the efficacy of that whole eight day ceremony takes place. The holy woman guarantees that the Sundance will be real. And so she excerpts herself for six months from tribal life so that she can do this. But when it's over, she goes back and she's a part of the tribe again. She's not a radioactive weirdo. She's grandma so and so. There was a film made of the last Black Foot Sundance in the early 1960's and I'd met the holy woman who was there in the film, with her nice silvery gray hair and really marvelous, old old old woman, a friend of my Spirit Mother's as a matter of fact. And there was always this kind of quality from tribal members that she was very venerable but she was venerable in a lovable familiar sense, not in some kind of weird occult sense. That weird occult sense is a mask which anxiety wears. It's for someone laboring under a mythological imagination of transcendence which is really a myth. But not a myth in the sense of linking ritual and symbol together, myths are necessary. The feeling toned forms of languaged experience in narrative lines are necessary. It's a necessary process which links together body and mind. but these kinds of mythologies are regressed, their reduced, they're anxiety given faces put into imaginative scenarios which sound O.K. and they're ideologically informed and they seem like they make sense and they become metaphysics and none of that is efficacious at all. Does nothing. And so primordial peoples don't touch that. They don't do that. They don't operate ever in that way. If the holy woman does not do this temporarily, there is no sacredness to what happens then. but as soon as it is finished, as soon the eighth day of the Sundance is over, she rejoins the tribe, she's back there again. And like in the Sundance the culmination of her activity is to cut the dried Buffalo tongues into the strips which will become the sacred jerky which is fed to the people of the tribe to bring them together. To make this communion, this Paleolithic communion that they have all felt from her transformative hands, the tongues of the Buffalo who were the staple and back bone of the whole life integration. The whole path integral was based on the Buffalo. And their dried tongues, the distilled essence of what they say, became the food in just it symbolically in that communion. To bring them together. She administers that. She in no way is a priestess of a Sundance religion. That's an ideology. But the other understanding of it is that this is the way in which a path integral approaches that threshold of transformation and because she guarantees that all of this, all of this is natural, all of this is existentially bodily real. All of this experientially Mythically trustable as a process. All of this. All of it integrates and becomes symbolically objectively real in the mind. And that that entire ecology of nature, ritual, myth and symbol is all transformationally carried through into a new vision. But she does not have that vision. Her temporarily adopted spiritual son has the vision. He has the vision. She is excerpted from the eight day ceremony. She doesn't take part in any dances. She doesn't take part in any societies any ceremonies. Her teepee is not among the circle of the teepees. She is outside the teepee circle because she's maintaining that zero based natural mystery element, keeping it in play. In a miniature the sweat lodge is the same way. The circle of the sweat lodge around the central fire. That central fire is placed in a cavity in the ground. That cavity in the ground in the center of that sweat lodge is taken outside, outside of the sweat lodge and put some distance away. Unbelievably about the same distance as a baseball mound from the batters plate. It's too much for words. And on that pitcher's mound is where the fire is built to heat the rocks that are then brought back on that same path back into the center of the sweat lodge and those heated rocks are put in that cavity and water poured on that is what makes the steam to sweat. No man can tend that fire. That fire must be tended by a woman. If she doesn't tend that fire there's no reality to that sweat. If that holy woman doesn't maintain herself in a concentration on the zeroness of the real, if she allows herself to get involved in any of the images of the Okan and all of its eight days, the whole thing is not efficacious. But because she has the experience, not the experience of purity in that she's like an inexperienced virginal, never participating in life, but that she is a virginal zero based concentrated yogi who maintains that purity because she knows how to recognize it and maintain it in her person. It is her spiritual person who maintains that. Not her as grandma so and so, in terms of the experience of the tribe. She's not available to be grandma so and so during that whole duration. She's the holy woman. She's there maintaining that zeroness. But her complement is her son. Not necessarily a young man, in fact usually a mature man, because in the ancient Paleolithic time men were tested with death. You either came through or you died. There was none of this convenient weekend shaman stuff. If you didn't come through, you were gone. You're dead. In the Sundance the center pole, a tree that had recently just been cut, usually a pine if they were around or cottonwood, whatever could be brought. Usually some kind of a conifer so it would be strong enough. That tree, that center pole of the Sundance Lodge, it's like a Paleolithic Christmas tree. Only notice the Paleolithic, hunter, masculine quality. The tree was hunted for by all of the warriors of the tribe. No one who had not fought in a battle was qualified to go along. Only men who had fought in a battle could go. And that group of the warriors of the tribe went out looking for this tree as if it were an enemy. What is it an enemy of? The tree in its existential oneness is an enemy of the zero mystery. Because potentially it would be an image that would displace the zeroness with some oneness, with some powerful unity, with some kind of image that would be the perfect symbolic mask covering and making us forget about the unknowness of the God Head. So the Sundance Lodge is centered around a tree which has been conquered by the warriors, killed by them, chopped down and brought in. They sing triumphal songs bringing it in. Usually on some kind of a buck board, in later times. And it's raised with all the whoops of raising this monument to the conquered enemy. And as soon as it's raised all kinds of long poles, slender saplings, on the tips of which are written prayers. Anyone who needs a prayer for someone, needs a prayer for something, during the entirety of the year or in past years or in future, all of the prayers of the people put on the ends, written and put on the ends of these poles and those poles are the struts that make the canopy of the Sundance Lodge. But nothing is spread on top of those poles. There are no skins that are put there, it is left open. Because the canopy is the structure of the reaching out with these prayers. And these saplings all link together to the cluster at the top of the Sundance pole. And from that pole two ribbons of rawhide are draped with two ends of antlers. And those antlers are buried into the flesh of the man. And he must pull himself free with those antlers gouged into him. And if he cries out with his voice, everything is lost. If he utters one word, one human sound it's finished. It breaks the Sundance. It breaks everything. It betrays the holy woman and her space. But because the pain is so excruciating he is allowed one, it's like a pressure cap, he's allowed one sound that he can make, which is not human. It's the sound of a hunting eagle. And so one of the bones of an eagle is placed as a plug in his mouth. And he can breath as hard as he needs to through that whistle. But he cannot shout as a man. He cannot cry out as a man. So he must adapt only the voice of the eagle's bone because that is in keeping with the guarantee of the zeroness of the holy mother outside the circle of teepees. And if he is able to pull free, under those conditions, than all those prayers are going to be answered, in fact are answered. That people, that ceremony are woven back into the reality of nature. Woven back into the reality of the existence. Woven back into the trustworthiness of the experience of the people. Woven back into the interior quality of inner mind symbolic meaning. And what is woven into that, what holds that all together is transcendental visionary wisdom. Not a glue that glues these things together, but a technique of spacing and of relationality of weavingness that now makes a basket out of these things, that will hold reality. So that vision is not a thing in itself it's a technique of weaving. So that sacred language was always a special kind of words. They were called, at one time in archaic Greece, they were called winged words. Words that when you say, fly through the differential spaces of consciousness, that carry their meanings with them like the sound of the eagle whistle carrying itself through this entire sound line. The eight Sundance Ceremony, the eight Gods in the Egyptian mythology. The Greek word for that eight part structure is taken from the old Egyptian called an ogdoad, means an eightfold. Yeah, just like the eightfold path. We get the musical octave from that. Music is a Hermetic art. The octave, the doh, re, mi, fah, soh, la, ti, doh. The first and the eighth are the same except that the eighth is one cut above the other. So that when you finish an octave is not a circle but is a slight spiral. So that when you sound the cord of an octave you not only sound the diameter of something that exists, but you include within it the interval space of moving one level higher. So that a musical cord is the sound of reality. Not just the diameter of what is, but the diameter of what is plus the transformational space of the next visionary step. This is not a metaphysic. It just is the way in which actual reality has developed over tens of thousands of years. And just because it's not taught in universities currently, reflects on the times not on the wisdom. If someone plays for you one of Bach's French suites on the piano and you can't hear it, it's because you can't hear musical form, not because Bach couldn't write it. It's the other way around. What happens here is that vision is not a part of the four parts of nature, but is a fifth part, is a quintessential part. It's the fifth part that fits together like the thumb with the four fingers and allows for something that could never happen with just four fingers. It allows for hand to emerge. Instead of there being one, two three, four fingers, when you add the quintessence to it, now you have a hand. And the very first symbol forty thousand years ago, a visionary symbol, a talisman of consciousness, was the hand. The hand that appears in two distinct modes together, two complementary modes together. One is an integral mode, the other is a differential mode. The integral mode is that the hand is coated with the manganese or iron oxide and just stamped onto the rock. So it's the impress of the hand. The other, the hand is put against the rock, but the pigment is taken into the mouth and mulched with your own saliva. And then with your own breath is 'whew' blown onto the hand so that what is there is a stencil. A stencil of the hand. The sunshield hand is a differential talisman. It's a Paleolithic way of writing 'kilroy was here'. Loud and dirty so they understand it. The old Patton thing. What is realistic about it is that both modes are interchangeable. They both fit together. But they fit together in such a way that they dovetail, not in terms of the body of things, not even in terms of the mind of things, but in terms of the full reality, the mysterious reality. So that one talks in differential consciousness not of things but of everything. That through that transformational portal a major change happens. That one is no longer interested in just pounding things, but one is now interested in offering all things. One of the best examples of it in the middle of the Twentieth Century, one of the greatest poets, the Russian Yvgeny Yvteshenko. Yvteshenko was the older man who stood next to Yeltsin when he stood on those tanks, in Moscow during the fall of the Soviet Union. Yvteshenko was the man right next to him. He motioned to Yvteshenko, now put your foot on the tank, this is a symbol that the people have won out over this tyranny. Well when Yvteshenko was younger, he was a Siberian, his ancestors had been exiled to Siberia. The prison without walls, cause you don't need walls, they just die there. But some tough people lived and Yvteshenko was born there, at a little place called Zima Junction. And whenever his poetry would get threatening to the Communist regime, they would exile him back to Siberia, and he would just go home. He'd go home and visit his friends and have a vacation. And he went there one time and they had built this new project, the big river there outside of Irkutsk, is the Angara River that just drains a lot of Siberia, and becomes like this torrent, like the Colorado, just a huge torrent. And they'd built this hydroelectric station and typical Party nomenclature, they named it brotherly station, Bratskoje. Only when Yvteshenko went through it, as he went through it, he began to realize that this was completely different, it was not a thing. Like he had been told that it was an everything like no one had seen yet. And so in his great long poem, Bratsk Station, Bratskoje Station, he has a dialogue between a pyramid which is an ultimate, by this time, a dead thing, built with slave labor for one person, the Pharaoh, to the hydroelectric station, that when it was finished it gave out light and heat to all the people. It gave back to them. So Bratsk Station was a dialogue between the Pyramid of tyranny and the hydroelectric station of community. And in it the supposed Atheist from Siberia comes to the very bowels, the very guts of the hydroelectric station underneath the Angara River, where the plunge goes all the way down to the turbines, and when he was there the thrumb of those eight turbines struck him as if this were some kind of mystical cord which the land, all of Siberia, had struck for him to hear. And that the Angara River was like this plectrum that had struck this cord and when he opened his ears, his mind, his hearing, he heard a visionary language that had only one word and that word was 'Everything'. He heard in the sound of all those hydro plants going together, he heard a hum that said to him, in the Russian language, 'Everything'. And so he came out of that and he wandered back up through the station and he couldn't hear anything else except 'Everything' 'Everything'. And he says in the poem, everyone that he meets says to him the same thing, 'Everything' 'Everything'. And he realized that he had come to a vision despite the state Atheism, they had built the perfect place to have that vision of visionary wholeness. And of course when he published the poem they exiled him back to Siberia again. They never learned. They never learn. You finally have to say good bye to them, good luck and you health, we'll see you and then leave. The mythological mental symbol, visionary figure that leads one out was Hermes. Hermes. The Greek word for such a guide is a psychopomp. A guider of souls. That as long as that figure is in the mind, in the integral cycle, in the cycle of nature, that figure then is a mind shepherd, but as soon as that figure takes one step into the transcendental beyond, into the visionary consciousness of differentiality, that figure no longer is a mind shepherd but now is a guide of souls. A psychopomp. Someone who guides you out of where you were to something else. What something else? Not some other thing out there, not some other state of mind out there, but guides you back into the entire cycle of nature, ritual, myth and symbol only this time woven together as a composition. The great American photographer Edward Weston said, in one of his Day Books, "composition is the strongest way of seeing". Vision is the strongest way of seeing because one sees not only into this world but sees how to transform and rearrange this world so it's better. So that something that could never have just happened there, now happens because someone makes it happen there. And that person who does that is the artist. That artist who makes that, like Frank Lloyd Wright, putting the house Falling Water, over the water fall. He said if you walk through the house, you will hear the music of the waterfall. Because the house is built in such a way that the sound of that river, like the Angara River in Siberia, will echo through the spaces of the house so that you will hear the complete cord of the nature of that site in that house. That's how you know that it's real, because it happens. It not happens to you in some tribal way or in some metaphysical way, or even in some symbolic way, but it happens in a personal way which links up and ties together with your mind, which links up and ties together with your body in such a way that your body and your mind now behave in completely transformed ways. I remember once coming out of the Gamble House in Pasadena, which is as good a place as falling water. I'd spent the whole day, this was about twenty years ago, photographing every detail of the whole thing and looking at it with powered insight, I was going to do a film on the Gamble House. I came out of the house and as soon as I came down the steps onto the grass, I could barely feel the grass. I realized that I had interiorized the house so much that it had exchanged with me and I had interiorized within and the Gamble House's structural motif is that of the cloud, the Japanese cloud. The horizon that has that kind of line. It's very much like an American Indian cloud symbol. It's very much the Japanese symbol of the transcendence. And when I came out, I recognized that I felt, my feet felt like they were scuffing clouds. I looked back at the house and it was like the house was not only there objectively, but it was kinesthetically in me, in my person. And I knew I had exchanged with that house. A work of art is like a person. You can get to know it. You can exchange with it. So that you together now make something called reality. More next week.