Vision 3
Presented on: Saturday, January 16, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Vision Three and we're continuing our inquiry and it might be interesting to refresh just for a moment, what is it that we're doing? When we started this process last year, at the beginning of last year, we used to constantly bring up the question, why are we here? What are we doing? And ostensibly on one hand we could say that we're here to learn, but a deeper cut on that particular tack is that we don't know what it is that we are to learn. Yes we would like to learn more about ourselves, but what is that really. We'd like to learn more about what is real, but just what is that? And on the level of getting down to just what is that it turns out that just as important as the question what is that, is also how do we know, how do we get there? That the object of learning on a subtler level becomes illusive so that the method by which we learn that is just as important. It's like the very fundamental reality of dancing. You have to shift feet. I can't think of a single dance step where you move the left foot twice in a row. It's left and right. It's a syncopation. And that that universal structural requirement, it's not even a requirement, it's not even a necessity, it's just the way in which movement happens. That there is a syncopation between left foot and right foot. And all dance steps have that. And so learning also has a syncopation. It has a syncopation between the object, the thing that you're after and the method, the process by which you get there. And that when you take that colossal discovery of the balance of universal process that objectivity and non-objective flow go together. They always go together. That they form some kind of a basic atomic unit of what is real. Then you come into possession of an actuality which has its applicability, not only in this world but in any world on any level. You come into possession of the atomic structure of how reality works. That it does not work by just lining up objectivities without giving them a space of movement in between. You can't have the left foot positioned all the time in objectivity without having the right foot come in to give it spaces of movement. So that one of the most fundamental truths is the ancient Chinese understanding that it is not just the objectivity that is real, it's the objectivity and its movement together that make a set of what is real. But just as we in the West keep tending towards the mistake of wanting to only emphasize the things, only emphasize the left foot position, the Chinese, being only human, fall into the bad habit of wanting to emphasize just the process all the time. The right foot movement all the time. And the Chinese would get themselves into trouble because they would always emphasize the Tao and didn't pay sufficient attention to the Te. That the objectivity of the Te is just as important as the process of the Tao. So that when you find a really clear realistic Chinese, a clear realistic Chinese like Lao Tsu, the name of his book is the Tao Te Ching. Tao and Te together, the book of the Tao Te. The book of the movement of the Tao, the book of the objectivity of the Te together, that they form a set. We would say today, given our computer terminology, given our mathematical languaging capacity, we would say that the Tao and the Te together are a binary language. And that to be really clear about this, we can not be just clear about the objectivity, we have to be clear about the pairedness of objectivity and process together. That we can't just line up a bunch of ones and think that because we have the right sequence of those ones that this is what is real. Because all of those ones are set into a context of zeros. Of the non objective process, the movement. So we talked about airing out our egotistical objectivity with a lot of openness of the zeros. And that when you do this you begin to feel kinesthetically in your own self, In your own self and kinetically with your own self, you begin to feel a participation with nature. You begin to feel natural. Because nature works this way. Nature is not only existentially objective, nature is also mysteriously in change. For sure. And that zero and one binary of objectivity of existence and the change of movement, when it matures, when it integrates itself all the way like we did with our first year, it comes to rest in the realization that what is objectively there can be transformed. That it can be changed, not only in terms of movement within the form, but that the entirety of the form can be changed to a different form. That's called transformation. And that for some, as of yet not really specified reason, men and women of the human species are made to understand this. It's not only our objective quality, it's the truth of the process by which we are ourselves. And that what we're talking about now, in this section of our inquiry, a section called Vision, is that vision is being able to see into the world in such a way that there is a balance between the ones and the zeros. That the binary language of existence and mystery go together and form a choreography of a dance which is consciously real. And that consciousness, whatever else it is, or whatever else it does, choreographs the real. That consciousness has, within its capacity, a personal focus. That personal focus is not to be reduced to something else. It is its own objective presentational truthfulness. And the ancient way of talking about this is that there is an art of the Person. That the Person is a development from the existential objectivity of the body. That the Person, I think the traditional way of phrasing it, that the Person is a Spirit. And that the Spirit has some relationality to the body, absolutely, for sure. That the body, the existential body has a relationality to the Spirit and that if one considers this over a long time, over thousands of years, men and women have come to see that the way in which the Spirit and the body pair together, they pair together in such a way that there is a relationality between the two. And that relationality takes place within a realm that we call the mind. So that the mind in some way is made to bring the body and the Spirit together. And we discovered that the truthfulness of ancient wisdom traditions, whether it's Chinese or Egyptian or Greek or Jewish or Iranian or Mayan, it doesn't matter, Black Foot. That there's a harmony of insight everywhere on the planet that men and women brought a wisdom to maturity. That the body and the Spirit, when they're tuned together in terms of a certain quality of mind, they pair effortlessly together. And that when they're paired together in that effortless way, they are the fulcrum upon which transformation can happen. That the physical forms of the world can be transformed into other forms that were never seen before in nature. That those rocks which had been there for five and a half billion years can be selected for a certain type of rock and be fashioned into an arrowhead. So instead of just being a piece of flint, it's now an arrowhead that can improve life because it makes it a lot easier to hunt. Or that one can take the iron veins in a mountain and refine it and make steel and make a spaceship that can go to the moon. So that we are those spirits and those bodies paired together by a certain quality of mind that is able to transform nature into something further, a further expression which certainly begins with nature but just as certainly transcends the limitations of nature. So that Spirit always transcends the body and yet is willing, is able, is enjoyably effortlessly at home with the body. And the body, in a complementary fashion, at home with the spirit. That is when the mind has a certain quality. When the mind does not have that quality, when it's impaired, when it's injured, when it's crippled, when it's unknowing, when it's ignorant, then the body and the spirit are incommensurate. They really don't fit very easily and one has to really contort to get them into proximity but because they're not a pair, because they're quite dissimilar they repel each other and the ignorant, crippled, injured, regressed mind does its stuff just as well as the mind which has that capacity to bring them into a pair. It also easily has that capacity in the other sense to keep them apart. In fact emphasizes the enmity between them. Where the body is suspicious of transcendent things because they're not things and they belong to an invisible objectivity and that's very suspicious. Or the spirit is very critical of the body because it's like, it's worse than animal. It's like deceptive, you can't trust bodies. All of this deceptiveness, all of this enmity does not originate with the body and it doesn't originate with the spirit, it originates in the mind. So we saw in our education that the area of symbols is extraordinarily important because when the mind is matured to its objectivity, its nature, when it has its integral in terms of its own structure, its own functioning it easily brings body and spirit together into a pair. It's like the very basic universal gesture, back in Paleolithic times it was this (hand held up and apart), and as cultures realized that it could be expressed succinctly it became this (hands held in prayer fashion). It's a universal expression of the way in which body and spirit belong together effortlessly. There's no war at all. But the quality of mind that allows for that is that mind does not get in the way. That it doesn't make itself some third element. So that the mind when it refines itself, it must refine itself so that its objectivity is that of focus rather than thing. Of openness rather than of some other third list of qualities. And this is very difficult because there's a long tradition of error. Of egotistical projection, it goes back thousands of years, in fact it goes back tens of thousands of years. The mistake is almost concomitant with the way in which our species occurred in the first place. And it's still here. And one reason that the civilization, that we were fortunate or unfortunate enough to live at the end of came to an end, one reason why that civilization played out and ended, is no longer applicable, is dead, is that it was addicted to the mind being something. And the new, we have to learn all over again that ancient wisdom that the open mind lightly balances body and spirit together effortlessly, so that that pair then has a resonance. And that resonance is one of appreciating form and equally of appreciating transformed forms together. So that there is such a thing as nature and art having a balance. Now we're looking at, in Vision, in this series, this series of presentations, they're not really lectures, but a presentation which happens not only with the objectivity of a lecture on Saturday mornings, but with the process of absorption and of appreciation and of critical tussle and all of this during the rest of the week. That the objectivity is just two hours but all the rest of the week is an open time to forget it, to remember it, to criticize it, to understand it, to not understand it, to take it apart, to whatever you do. And the only emendation is that if you continue in this process of making an objectivity at least once every sevens days, on a Saturday morning, just show up, and just let the rest of the week happen in whatever way it's natural to you, you learn this dance of wisdom. Because it turns out that the dance of wisdom is an inherent structure in reality. It's not anything that anyone makes up, it's not anything that someone clever guesses or that someone learned is able to deliver or that someone cool can lay it on you. It's just, all of that is irrelevant. All of that is extraneous. All of us are real. And the patterns of reality, the syncopation of Tao and Te is not only universal, they are also consciously cosmic. Now we call this remembering, this remembering of how this goes together, of how this pairedness occurs, we call this in the West a renaissance outlook. And it's something that happened about five hundred years ago with such a pop, with such an energized dynamic snap, that that snap was heard eventually everywhere, radiating out from where it happened. And those resonances carried for a couple of hundred years. And that snap happened in a place called Florence in Northern Italy. And that for sure there were many pre-cursors to this. There were many preparations, many waves coming up and approximating this but there was one wave which was the biggest of all. Any surfer knows that waves come in sets. They have to wait for the right wave in the set. If you catch the right wave in the set, you get the big ride. If you don't know that, you miss it. I remember one time in San Francisco in 1964, they'd had this huge earth quake in Alaska, and they predicted these huge tidal waves that were going to come up against the San Francisco City coast, around where the Sutro Cliffs were. And some of us saw the first couple of waves and they were big but we thought this is a disappointment they're really fooling us. So we walked down by Playland at the beach and suddenly the whole Pacific Ocean rose up. We ran like hell and this wave that was about fifteen feet high went over the Great Highway and into the Playland at the beach. We were lucky to get out because the undertow was really something. Waves in reality come in sets. So that focuses in reality always have a resonant wave context so there are always precursor to what's going to happen and there are always resonances after. And if you live long enough and because wisdom can be passed on and we can accumulate hundred thousand years of wisdom, we have lived long enough to understand that there are these resonant patterns that always occur in reality. And if you get experienced you can tell which resonances are of things yet to come and which are resonances of things that have happened. So that one becomes wise. Not just knowing, not clever, not important, but wise. And you can tell the difference between a resonance of something that has happened in the past and a resonance of something that will happen in the future. And you can read the patterns of resonance. Because the real discloses itself at every moment all the time everywhere. And so if you're like an old trail guide in the real, Hermes was the trail guide of the Greek Mythological pattern of mythic feeling toned intelligence. Hermes was the guide of the Gods. But he also had a relationship with man. He was the guide of man, but initially he was the guide of a man or a woman after they died. He was a guide for their souls that left their bodies after death and guided you through the netherworld. Hermes was that guide souls, the Greek word was Psychopomp. Guide of souls after death. Because the ancient Greeks who made that mythology up lived about sixteen hundred B.C. They lived in an era that's archeology called the Minoan, Micenian Age. And Greek Mythology is a product of that age. Greek Mythology was not made up in the time of Paraclese. It was made up in the time of King Minos when Crete was a fabulous place. So all the mythic archetypes of classical Greece are Minoan, Micenian. That's their structure that they had. But at that time, sixteen to eighteen hundred B.C., the Greek understanding, the Minoan, Micenian understanding was completely conditioned still by the Egyptian. And the Egyptian understanding went back more than a thousand years before that. So the Greek mythological archetype as Hermes as a guide of souls after death, actually goes back two thousand years, back of the Classical Greeks, goes back to the origins of Egyptian Civilization. And what those men and women, wise at the time knew is that you had to have a way to go through the netherworld. That was the only way that you could come back to life. But in the mean time, in the mean time the limitations of the body and the mind were improved so that those limitations went into what in three thousand B.C. was still the realm of something beyond this world, beyond life, the afterlife, the afterlife, the netherworld, the celestial world. In three thousand B.C. those realms were beyond the capacity of most men and women to explore, or acclimate to, to include in what they would consider real. There wasn't any way to deal with the afterlife five thousand years ago. There was no way to deal with the netherworld, no way to deal with the celestial world. Those were realms of Divinity, beyond man. But by the time of the Classical Greeks, by the time of Lao Tsu and Pythagoras and the Buddha, by about five hundred B.C. there was this deep capacity which became almost an everyday occurrence where human beings, men and women had learned that the conscious differential realms were available if you could transform while you were still alive. You didn't have to wait for death to transform. So that you could go through a symbolic death and you could symbolically make that transformation and go into that afterlife, that netherworld, that celestial world realm and explore it. There were astronaut of the transcendent. You get it? So that the image of Hermes as just being a guide for the dead had to be revised. He was now also a guide for the living who transformed symbolically. And so that Hermes became a completely different, a differential Hermes as opposed to the mythological Hermes of the past, because that differential Hermes understood that not only do we deal with something outside of nature when we're dead, but we deal with something which is supernatural while we're still alive. And that we have to incorporate all of that then. We have to recalibrate what is real to us because we've enlarged our scope. And so men and women, twenty five hundred years ago, everywhere on the planet, had to learn a new way of being, a larger way of being practical. Had to incorporate visionary consciousness into the pattern of life. And it was so difficult at the time because it was new. No one knew how to do this, one had to explore, one had to find out. There had to be pioneers, there had to be pathfinders. There's a section at the very beginning of one of James Fennimore Coopers novels in the Leather Stocking Saga, the novel is called The Pathfinder. And the man, the protagonist, pathfinder, climbs this huge tree because the forest covers everything from just a few dozen miles off the Atlantic coast all the way into the prairies. Two thousand miles of virgin forest. So he climbs this tree, he's the pathfinder, to see how to get to this certain lake, place and when he's up there, Cooper says, he looked up and he saw an unbroken virgin forest. He saw nature pristinely just what it was, that no one had been there. There were no roads, there were no places. And yet to his eye he knew that, like secret veins running through the floor of that forest, were the trails of the primordial peoples, the Indians. And that they lived there in such a way that they left no unnatural evidence. Their way of living absorbed themselves completely into nature so it didn't leave any trace. Because the excellence of wisdom in a natural way is to allow finally for the mystery of nature to absorb you completely so that you participate in the mystery. So the objectivity of your life is aired out by the uncommandeered, uncategorized mystery of nature. so that her zeros are within you every time you breath. So that one could say that breathing became a symbolic way of bringing the invisible mystery of nature into yourself. Every breath was airing out yourself. Even the metaphor is there. You have to air it out. Whereas the metaphor now is that if you get aired out, it means that you're dead. Notice the paradoxical regression. It's characteristic of the way in which the mind distorts. Because when the mind is not pure, that is to say when it's not integrated to the point of acceptance of the invisible, of the openness of the mystery, it has this kind of ritual confidence that it has the answer and by god everyone will learn it. In Moby Dick, what does Ahab say to Starbuck who has been challenging him that he's transgressing, he's going beyond what man can go. He says "man, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me". Will you? Will you hit the sun? It's almost nine hundred thousand miles of nuclear explosions in diameter. How big a fist do you have? It's like the absurdity is patent as soon as it's put into a focus which is realistic. But if you abstract it and the sun is only that circle up there in a two dimensional cardboard choreography of a stage setting of your importance, well maybe you can cuff the sun if it gets in your way. For Ahab in Moby Dick the sun becomes beautifully misshapenly focused when he takes a Spanish gold ounce, a gold Doubloon and nails it to the mast. And he says whoever spots Moby Dick first will have this gold coin. And the sun shines and illuminates and that gold coin becomes the paste board sun of Ahab's egotistical cosmos. The Pequod. And all of that will die. It must die because it is a form which even though it has the power of the mind, it has the symbolic structuring of the mind, does not transform into new life. It doesn't go into a quintessence, a fifth essence. Because the four essences that make up an integral for nature don't include in themselves any way to focus the process, the right foot movement. Because nature always puts in its path integral, always puts the emphasis on the left foot. Always puts its emphasis on existential stuff, the body. Or on mental objectivity, the idea, the thought. And one is lured into a false sense of knowing, into a limited sense of the real. When you think that because you have aligned your thoughts, very clear thoughts, with very poundable things, that somehow that's the working tandem and then you could do anything that you want. That's really becoming an Ahab. That's a duality. Then you not only have a mind body problem, you have the problem of pitting the mind and the body together against nature and against that other process like nature, language. Because we saw in our first year that not only is nature a process, but that there is a paired process to it called myth. And myth is all about language. There are no myths unless you tell them. But further the process of myth, the process of language has to do with feeling, it has to do with the heart. It has to do with the feeling intelligence about experience. That's why one tells, that's why language comes into play, is to express how one feels. Not only in words but in very sounds. Oh, Ah. The interjection is just as important as the noun at the primordial molecular basis of language. Om is different from Om! The exclamation mark is put there because it carries an extra quintessential conscious inflection which was not there possible in nature and is put there because some conscious visionary quality is added to it. But the Om, if you notice, if you look at any early Upanishadic use, is always followed by a phrasing litany, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, peace, peace, peace. Not the kind of sentimental peace that you would get, in the early fifties there was a television personality named Dave Garaway who would always hold up a hand and say peace. It's not that peace. It's the peace that surpasses understanding. It's like an equanimity whose resonance is infinite. Because that Om, that interjection, that language given an exclamation mark is maybe dramatically there in spoken language but becomes operative best and consciously when one sees the written exclamation mark after the word. When one sees the exclamation mark visually written, it hieroglyphically now has become a talisman and works in a differential resonation. This resonance goes into the future and so the future becomes as real as the past and it makes the present moment fertile because then it not only sums up the past, but it also has its expressiveness in the future and that that future expressiveness comes back through the present moment and it changes it transforms the past. It recalibrates it. So that the past is new. And the great discovery twenty-five hundred years ago, by men and women of wisdom, was that not only is the world transformable, but the past is transformable too. We don't have to We're talking about pairs and we're talking about how when two come together in that special open interface, it's really something. It's the difference between trying to measure things by a single rod and measuring things by a tuning fork. With one you get the demand of a specific measurement in terms of the body, and the other you get the musical calibration of the full octave possibilities. accept the past as if that's it. the popular phrase "that's history" is a stupid regression. It's perfect for the kind of demonic ignorance that passes as cool in 1999. Cool to the point of death, baby. The past is changeable, so that there is such a thing as the new past and it is a pair to the future. And that's a kind of a wisdom pair that you can generate a whole new civilization on, no problem at all. We're very good at it. Arnold Toynbee once took a tabulation, he said "we've made twenty-eight civilizations already on this planet". We have a lot of experience. We can do it. It's not going to take a thousand years or a hundred years but it takes doing. Because it's not going to happen automatically because civilization never happens in nature. It happens when consciousness transforms nature into something new so that that body and that mind are together with that spirit. Then you have something else. Let's take a break and come back.
We're talking about pairs and we're talking about how when two come together in that special open interface, it's really something. It's the difference between trying to measure things by a single rod and measuring things by a tuning fork. With one you get the demand of a specific measurement in terms of the body, and the other you get the musical calibration of the full octave possibilities. I'm reminded of the lyrics of one of the great revolutionary American songs of the fifties. Some of the lyrics, the song is Roll Over Beethoven, by Chuck Berry, and there's a sequence in there where he says something about, 'reel and rock with one and other, then move on in just a trifle further, roll over Beethoven, they're rockin in two by two'. The whole American Tao of 'Rock' and 'Roll'. Rock was the beat, it was the existential objectivity but Roll is the process pirouette that's not objective but is fluid. A lot of people miss that. I remember they had a riot at Princeton in 1955, Bill Haley And The Comets played Rock Around The Clock and they had a, they always had a saxophonist that would do an interval in the early Rock songs. Rudy Pompelli was Bill Haley's saxophonist and when the Princeton men and women on 1955 got it that they were participating in a revolution in consciousness, it was a Tao Te moment in history, that Rock and Roll was really something different, and presented it as such, there was a huge back lash of course. And then they had their response to the back lash, they had a riot. And so the Tigers and their ladies rioted against the community that was trying to squelch them. Rock and Roll. And out of that Roll Over Beethoven was probably one of the most insightful of all of the songs. That's why the Beatles, when they first were learning how to do Rock and Roll, they would do these kinds of primordial things. They would do Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven or they would do Elvis Presley's Ready Teddy because they were British and they had to get how you did this. Because the Rock and Roll went together and the only way to really understand it was to dance. And if you didn't dance, you didn't get it. It was the movement of roll that went with the objectivity of the sequence of rock that made it Rock and Roll. All of that incidentally was a white version of Rhythm and Blues. Blues were the objectivity, but Blues was an objectivity which was spiritual, not physical. And the rhythm was not the beat of the music, the rhythm was the choreography of the motion. And so in the earlier fifties when there was Black American Rhythm and Blues dancing, it was a whole different quality. To dance to Rhythm and Blues was like to bring into a secular situation the kind of discovery ecstacism of a holy roller black church service. And so it had a spiritual tone of disclosure of the mysteries of differential consciousness by people who wouldn't know how to describe it in this kind of university style language but who lived it very easily. And Rock and Roll was a development out of that. This bringing the two together so that they pair. They pair on the basis of an open mind. Each one of them has an open mind so when they come together in that pairedness, when they reel and rock with one and other, they share that openness. That shared openness is what I call, I've been working on a way to express this for quite a long time. I did some investigating about nine or ten years ago for a book eventually I'll do called Shared Presence. Because the maturity of interfacing the differential qualities of conscious persons and differential cosmos' of vision, art, history and science, with the integral path of nature - nature, ritual, myth, symbol. The way of dovetailing those together is to remember that this hand is not integral, this hand is differential. So that one has to use a relational jujitsu. You have to use a visual merging together of the visible and the invisible. And the old Paleolithic way of doing that was to make the stencil of the hand. Not just the hand dipped in the ferrous oxide or the manganese oxide to make red or black as an impress, that's an image, that's an image of the hand. But when the hand is held to the rock and you blow the emulsion, use your own saliva to emulsify the oxides and you blow that on the hand, then when you take that hand away from the rock, the stencil of the hand is there. That's a differential symbol, that's a talisman. And it's meant not to see with the physical eye, it's meant to see with the conscious I. It's meant to be a visionary, differential registering resonance so that man's sense of doing was no longer just in nature but that he could do in the supernatural. And we learned to do that about thirty-five thousand years ago. So it's been around a long time. Someone criticized Gandhi one time about his adaptation of the Bagavad Gita to British Empire politics, he said 'you know this learning, this technique is as old as the hills'. Because we've been around for geologic ages. Our forerunner resonances go back millions of years. We're not just recent, and we're not just Cartesian things who are real because we think. Thinking is a long ways down the line, it's the very last thing in nature. Everything happens before thought even comes into play. We're intelligent in our hearts integrally, Aeons before any thought is possible. Men and women were geniuses at feeling intelligence before anybody had any clear ideas about anything. So the wisdom of the heart is always more primordial than the clarity of the mind. In fact the clarity of the mind is not possible without the beautiful intelligence of the heart. Without a richness of context of subtle nuanced feeling intelligence, any kind of thought worthy of pursuing is just, it's not possible. It's integrally not possible because just as existence comes out of the mystery of nature, symbols come out of the process of feeling toned language experience. It's called meaning. And until you have some meaning to integrate, there's no stuff to make an idea out of. There's no fiber, there're no minerals, there's no calories, there's nothing to make symbols out of. So we're intelligent about feeling long before we're even able to begin thinking. It's only in deeply regressed nightmarish end of the age junk yards like the ones that we had to grow up in that think that thinking is first. Some kind of Cartesian cugeto ergo sum. And all of that was there, it was indelibly there in the best thinkers of the age. All of the most intelligent individuals in the earlier half of the Twentieth Century, Ernst Cassir, the teacher of Suzanne Langer and thousands of other not only European intellectuals but American intellectuals. He fled the Nazis and came to the United States and was at Yale. He wrote his last book, an essay on man, in English so that it could be expressed without translation. And his most famous book is called The Individual And The Cosmos In Renaissance Philosophy. And most of it is a waste of time. Most of it is subtly, without even understanding it, is propaganda on a figure named Nicholas of Cusa. Who was a kind of a mask of a Roman Catholic version of Hermeticism. And yet when one looks at Cassir, The Individual And The Cosmos In Renaissance Philosophy, even the title is exactly right, it's very accurate. Because renaissance, renaissance philosophy is all about exploring the transcendent, about what was in Paleolithic times, supernatural. And what was in early civilized times, the magical. But eventually became, understood to be the conscious differential dimension which complemented nature and came with nature. And just as the objectivities of nature were bodies and ideas or symbols, the body and the mind. There were also a pair of objectivities that were there in the supernatural, the spirit and the cosmos. The individual person and the inclusive cosmos are differential forms. They're differentially forms of objectivity that are supernatural. And so the person and the cosmos, they sing together. They have an alignment together, just like body and mind have an alignment. But whereas body and mind have an integral alignment, person and cosmos have a differentially resonant. . . . . . You can't even use the term alignment because that whole geometrical language referent is several orders below. Before one can even begin to talk, you have to mature not only out of geometry to trigonometry, but out of trigonometry into calculus and out of that into fabulous forms of twenty-first century mathematics. Then you can talk about it. You can write it out. There are men and women today who can write it out. Only you don't write out measurements. Anyone who trusts measurements to be the arbiter of the real is a sap. What you trust is an algorithmic improvement of your relationality which constantly refines itself. You cannot shoot a rocket from any Earth base and hit the Moon unless it has a self correcting trajectory. You'd never get there. Because everything is changing. It has to have a program that self corrects millions of times along the trajectory. That's the only way that it gets there in terms of the reality that actually happens. Even thirty year old computer visualizations of it show multiple frames of reference happening all the time, many times a second. Now they're billions of time per second. Self adjusting trajectories are differential conscious journeys. So if you want to go to another planet, you have to know how to go there. You can't go there by measurement. And the first time that measurement was challenged as an arbiter of intelligence was about twenty-four hundred years ago by a man named Plato. He just drew a line in the intellectual sand and he said you're an idiot if you are on the other side. You're still playing stupid childish games that are never going to be real. And he did it with a dialogue called, he wrote dialogues. Why dialogues? Because a monologue that tries to explore initially into conscious differentiation has no way to self correct itself and unknowingly can fall into a regression and never even know it. You fall into a devolution rather than an evolution. And where do you end up? You end up with dogmatically certain ritual actions that are unnatural. You remember in Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, little Sam Gamgee afraid of Gandalf the Wizard, says to Frodo "Oh please Mr. Frodo don't let him turn me into anything unnatural". That's exactly what happens to someone who tries to monologue their way into consciousness first. So that the dialogue is a way of self correcting the trajectory. To talk it over with someone, but to talk it over with someone, with whom one has a deep companionability. Not an agreement of ideas. Because you're trying to find out about ideas. But an agreement on the process, in the process of feeling toned intelligence. Socrates says many times in the dialogues, 'we can't expect to learn anything until we're companions together'. One of Ruth Montgomery's books was called Companions Along The Way. Very intelligent title. Until we are companions together, until we have a feeling toned harmony between each other, we can't learn anything in the mind that's trustworthy. Nothing. All of it is just me bouncing my monologue off you bouncing your monologue and all we get is this cacophony of egotistical demands that are the lowest form of argument. It doesn't even make for interesting dramatic episodes because you get dramatically tired and bored after the first two minutes of that kind of bickering. Whereas two people who are very close to establishing a heart connection and there is something still in the way and they're both trying to skirt around it to get to eachother and can't, is dramatically interesting from here to eternity. Wow. And someone who can cut through the resistance and just on the physiological, language gut level, demand that we put our differences aside and be together, like in Street Car. Stanley Kowalski simply yells "Stella!" Enough of all of this nicety of stuff, we belong together. Forget everyone else. It's that kind of demand that at a certain point of your education you have to make upon yourself. You have to demand of your ego that it stop fooling around and let you go.
Where are you going to go? Wherever you want to go. Wherever you do go. To explore the adventure of learning. Alfred North White had a good friend of Cassir called the adventure of ideas. It's as simple as what R.F.K. once said in a speech. He said "other men look at this world and ask why, I look at the world with new possibilities and ask why not". We don't know, let's try it and see. Let's go see. The worst that can happen is that we'll find out that the gate man to heaven is Cal Worthington and we have to buy a car. Unlikely. So let's just go, let's find out, let's play. And so play has an element. Play itself has an element that differential consciousness gets energy from. But on the mythic level the play is always braided into episodic narratives that more and more as you tell them, as you go through them, more and more become set so that they become traditional ways of telling this story. And you can make some variations, but they're always variations on this narrative line. And so there is this myth that not only stays with, but the language forms in myth enfold one into the story. That's how you get carried by the story. That's what should happen. Feeling has it's intelligence there. But consciousness is different from feeling. When it's enfolded into someone's story it becomes tyrannized. The conscious voice, instead of being enfolded in someone else's story, wants to tell your own story. And because it's a story of discovery, mostly you don't know how it's going to turn out and so you want to be free to start telling it and you will find out what it is as you go along. You can see from this that most university, let's just make it simple, ALL university learning in 1999 is dead. Because you can't get the degree, which is a certificate of doctrinaire agreement until you tow those lines. And those lines are all made on Protagoras type measurements. He's famous for the phrase "man is the measure of all thing", as if you somehow circumvent the limitation of measurement by not going to meters or inches or some other level, you say well Man is the measure of all things. Yeah, and the perfect voice for that is Descarte measuring everything by what he thinks. The response is No. Remember in the film The Right Stuff, where the reporters are trying
to get to the astronauts wives and Mrs. John Glenn, who has a speech impediment, is afraid of all these reporters trying to get her on world T.V. and she says no and her friend, another astronauts wife turns to the window and says to the reporter on the other side, she says no. He says well what do you mean no. She means no, no. Why? because there's no dialogue there. The dialogue is a way of the pairedness achieving tune, atunement. No at-one-ment but tuned. There's a beautiful old book, not very good, but the title was excellent, called In Tune With The Infinite, Ralph Waldo Turin. One wants to become not in tune with the infinite yet but in tune with the openness of mind that one could share together. Well, if you share an openness of mind then on what basis do you have any relationality? On the basis of companionable feeling intelligence. This is why myth is indispensable, because myth not only enfolds you in story but gives you a way of braiding together two integral paths, two narrative lines. Like the DNA double helix. It's a way of braiding yourselves together in feeling toned intelligence of exploring together what is it that we're trying to think of together. Not what you think and not what I think but together, what is there to think about. That the pro and the con are not two sides of an argument. That's childish. This is totally childish. Steven Tolman, the genius of the sixties and seventies wrote a book called The Uses Of Argument. It's a tool to be used to choreograph a discovery further along the integral path than what you could say individually or what could be said to involve you in some story line that to discover where is the fulcrum upon which this entire narrative line has its balance, has its formal positioning so that it becomes understandable, objectively to the mind as that idea. Then one is in possession of an objective symbolic form which is important. As is important as the body. Too many S's in that. Just as important as the body. The ideas that are objective, but the objectivity of the idea, even someone on the level, I mean famous, fantastic, intelligent, erroneous.
Ernst Cassir, The Individual And The Cosmos In Renaissance Philosophy. The idea of the individual is not the same as the individual. The idea of the cosmos is not the same as the cosmos. As long as you have an idea of the individual clearly in mind and an idea of the cosmos clearly in mind, you're still in Symbols. You haven't even gone to vision yet. You haven't even gone to the beginnings of conscious differentiation. And that's find because you have to, on the level of ideas at the level of symbols you have mature the mind so it has these clear ideas. Has them very objectively. But the kicker in the works is that you have to then, especially take on the responsibility to understand, to further, to do something with those ideas. What do you do? You make sure that they don't powerfully regress and tyrannize others. You allow them to transform, to open up to a conscious, discussion, and conscious analysis of them, an opening up to see, well, where do they go, what can you do with these. Infinite possibilities. But out of that infinity of possibilities there are several that immediately would recommend themselves to one and so look visionarily at the resonances of an idea to see, well, what is this going to do? With a proviso. Some of the first people to formalize this transcendent quality of thought. There was a thinker a couple of hundred years ago named Immanuel Kant. And he came up with a nice little Northern Germanic guideline that before you do anything you should ask yourself what if everyone did this? It was called the categorical imperative. Before you do anything you've got to ask yourself, now what if everyone did this? What would happen? An a lot of very intelligent fear based limitation came out of that. A Frenchman, leave it to the French, named Maurice Merlot Ponti said this is junk. Further it's Northern German junk. In Marseilles, not to say Paris, we ask a different question. No the categorical imperative, what if everyone did this? We ask, as viable Frenchmen, what if no one did this? The existential imperative. What if no one did this. And quite frequently what comes out of it is that the Universe would be minus that value, so give it a try with the conscientiousness of the quintessential dimension of consciousness added to time/space. Don't just try something stupid as if you murder all the squirrels in the forest are there going to be anybody to collect the nuts? That's not very good. But the existential imperative, what if no one did this, is an encouragement to explore. What do you explore? You explore the visionary phase that we're talking about right now. We're at Vision Three. The third lecture in Vision. We're going to talk about it for nine more weeks. We're going to have twelve lectures on Vision. Just like we had twelve on Symbols before because we've already gone through this. And before that we had twelve on Myth before that twelve on Ritual and before that twelve on Nature. We started in Nature. And how did we start? We started by recognizing that Nature is really mysterious. The old saying, the old Paleolithic conviction, it's mysterious not because we don't understand it, but because we do. We understand that nature is mysterious. Is a matrix of change. Has within that zeroness the capacity to birth and deliver existence whole. Things come out in nature whole. They could come out in smaller particles of wholes but those smaller particles are whole particles. All the way down to where particles dissolve into what? They dissolve into wave front sets of waves, of resonance. The photon, the particle of light is a photon when it's interacting with molecular atomic existence on level on oneness, then light is a photon. But when light is au natural, it's a wave. Not a particle at all. And mathematically operates very easily as a wave and mathematically very easily operates as a particle and has no problem. If light has no problem what's your problem with it. Suddenly you're an exemption? The ego's is always an exemption. "No it doesn't apply to me". Why? "Because I think". So we come to chapter four of Cassirer's wonderful book, The Individual And The Cosmos, two differential forms. The individual spiritual person, and the cosmos In Renaissance Philosophy. Why? Because the Renaissance was interested in the differential realm. The Middle Ages had done the integral realm to tiredness. Everyone did everything in the right way and was bored and unhappy. So then something new something refreshing. What refreshed them? They found that there was some kind of mysterious transformative cord to antiquity. That on the surface, antiquity looked to be the Roman Empire which led directly to the Middle Ages very comfortably. The people who were happy in the Middle Ages were good little quiet subjects of the Roman Empire, and all their previous incarnations. But there were men and women who were vibrantly, electrically energized and alive and alert in antiquity who loved transformation. Who loved being conscious. And the Renaissance was when the men and women of Florence discovered a thousand years after it had died out, the Roman Empire made it criminal to be conscious. It was very simple. They said to you if you carry these kinds of books around and talk this way we will kill you. And they did. Not only in a bad year, but for century after century. Called Heretics. The Renaissance was the rebirth of learning. Not of learning how to make Empires, people never forgot that, but how to transform. That men and women in antiquity, though not a large segment, still large enough, the transforming segment is probably somewhere around a third at optimum. But they rediscovered, how did they do that? And they rediscovered, we can do that too. And so men and women all of a sudden rediscovered that there is a way to learn how to learn. Not just learning stuff, but to learn in such a way that you can see stuff and their limitations and go beyond stuff into non stuff that has no tradition except what you discover, what you find out. And so transformation came back into play. In a very big way. And those men and women realized that there is a problem with this kind of duality. This kind of subject object duality and so the fourth chapter of Cassir in The Individual And The Cosmos In Renaissance Philosophy entitled the subject object problem in the philosophy of the Renaissance. Perfectly excellent beautifully written chapter. When you take the book as a whole, the title and everything seems fantastic and I've nothing but respect for it, but when you put it into play, it has a reductive effect and eventually X's out methodically all of the good that it does. How can this be. Is there some kind of inadvertent demonic level where the best that the best can do has a perverted quality within it and runs counter? A great many people in antiquity believed that this was the case. It's a fractured universe, it never works right, it always works up to a certain point and then regresses because of a flaw, because of a fracture. Because integration is limited, therefore it must be fractured because it's not perfect. Whereas any good Sumi artist knows you never close a circle. You never draw the ink so that it closes off the circle, you always leave an opening. Any good Navajo weaver never weaves every thread in the rug together. Always leaves a spirit trail of one thread that goes out of the composition. When a feast is set for a family in the right way, there's always an open place at the table. Because the mystery of reality may deliver an unknown guest that no one has planned for, so you have to leave it open. Any good transformational ritual always leaves an opening. Where is that opening? The opening is there in the space that makes the tuning fork so that, it's called Epiclesis in Greek, so that the spirit can lay something as yet unknown in there. One opens up to receive. And so Acceptance is the final stage of integration, not closure. If you dot the periods, dot the I's, cross the T's and say that this is finished closed because it is perfect, you've invited regression instantly. No way. No way at all. That's the architecture of tyranny. That's like Poe's story The Cast of Amontillado where the person seals themselves in because you've bricked up the entire enclosure. And you say to yourself now I'm safe. Well, now you're dead. Because subconsciously you wanted to be dead, because you thought that was the way in which you were going to transcend the limits of nature. The death wish. A clever way to be free in the universe? Well there have been living guides for thousands of years who can take you through in life. Because the purpose is not to die and then be free, but to bring freedom into play into life. That's what the Renaissance rediscovered. All of this is because life now has juice. Men and women explore together and they find that these kinds of paired shared presences tune in such a way that resonances not only explore the universe making more of the universe to explore with each time, but that the universe comes alive consciously alive and becomes thus a cosmos. So that the spiritually mature person looks out and sees a home. Not some fearful thing that you hope they're going to be good to you. Vision is consciousness. When we look at the way in which Protagoras, in Plato says man is the measure of all things, and that therefore this must be the arbiter of the Renaissance. And such people, man academics, will show you a sketch by Leonardo De Vinci of the circle around the figure of the man with the legs and arms spread, man is the measure of all things. It's from Protagoras, from Plato. Plato uses it to make a ridicule of a false idea that resemblance is real. That's what the whole dialogue is about. Protagoras is the most suave, beautifully spoken sophist of his day. His profession was wisdom mongering. Teaching people how to speak beautifully and to know what they were saying and then that's as much as you need, right? And Socrates says, 'Is that right? Is that the way it is Protagoras?' The most important part of a man's education is to become an authority on things that he knows about, and the highest thing that he can know about, poetry, to become an authority on poetry. And Socrates says, 'did you ever think about being a poet?' It's scrunch up time. That's copyrighted. The ego loves the perfect closed forms which it can put handles on and carry around and apply as measurements of its superiority. Walt Whitman, in one of his poems talks about how the most important things in life are not measurable. I wrote a poem about Whitman one time of saying that Whitman was a man who was never measured. Maybe I'll bring it next week. I hope to see some of you back. Thanks.