Vision 4
Presented on: Saturday, January 23, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come today to the fourth presentation in a phase of our investigation about things called Vision. And we've talked about how vision sometimes in the classic world was called magic. Not with a K but just magic. And that term magic carried over in the Medieval Millennium and still held its own during the long centuries of the Renaissance and finally passed out of preferred usage in an era called the Enlightenment, where people got smart about things. The ancient term magic came from the Iranian term magi and the Magi, I guess are famous in the West because of the three Magi who visit the new born child. The Magi were a secret order, they were a brotherhood order in ancient Iran. I don't mean classical Iran of the time of Plato and Pythagoras but several thousand years before Plato. And they were a devoted to the esoteric understanding of the structure of how reality works and what they took for reality was not the Earth but the sky, the stars. So that the original sense of magic was how does heaven work, how does heaven do it. And they found through strict observation over many centuries, even a millennia, that while there was an order to heaven, there were celestial patterns that repeated all the time. And that one could put patterns upon the re-occurring cycles of heaven and even link those patterns into a memorable imagery so that you had then constellations that were arrangements of stars that immediately queued in an image and the Zodiac comes as a truncated version of that. That even with all that there were still peculiarities that happened in heaven. There were meteors, there were comets, there were, what the Chinese used to call, guest stars. That is Novae or super Novae that occasionally happen. And there were also very odd situations vis a vis certain starts called wanderers, planets, that they would sometimes reverse their order in the heaven. That they would no longer move in the way in which they usually move but they would back track a little bit before going on again. All of these exigencies passed into ancient wisdom in the form of being careful not to close off your systemization. To leave a little room in there for the realistic unique happenings that could not be planned for according to the system. So that there was always the sense that, while you could systematize, never close your systems off. Keep them open for the unusual, for the unique, for the unexpected. Almost in every civilization in the ancient world you find a tendency to forget this. And the first people who forgot this were people that we know now as the Babylonians, the classical Babylonians. About 1800 B.C. And the document that comes down to us from the classic Babylonians of 1800 B.C., that's thirty eight centuries ago, is a book of law. The Code Of Hamarapi. And in the Code Of Hamarapi you find the strictures of legalities infringements upon which you will pay such and such a fine. And we recognize the Cod Of Hamarapi as being the origin of many law codes, the Lex Talonis of the Romans. Talonis means talon, the law of the talon. 'You do this, you suffer that'. Or the Sharia, Islamic law. There are three punishments - you lose a finger, you lose a hand, you lose a life. There are no other punishments. There are only these punishments. So that the codification of human life in terms of legalities, which is only supportable as long as you have an authoritarian structure, a pecking order, a hierarchy of authority was always a tendency in civilization to veer off into the direction of closing the form, closing the system. Of feeling confident that you have authority, that the pecking order is preserved, that the laws will be followed, that the system is logical, only if everything is closed off. You cannot leave any loophole. Notice that the loopholes occur in reality without our permission. You can pass a law unanimously banning comets, it won't do you any good. You can drive yourself crazy by saying there will be no more meteorites. You can look at the paths of the planets and try to justify why it is that they go through this motion. And in fact for a thousand years one of the greatest false rationalizations in the world, that of Ptolemy, was to account for why these wandering stars do this. Why do they zig zag in the sky? And it wasn't until about four hundred years ago that there was someone who could show the math, who could lay it on the damn table. His name was Kepler. And he said it's obvious from the observations that the reason that these things happen is that planetary orbits are not perfect circles. They're elliptical. And their ellipse is based not on the Earth as the center, but upon the Sun as the center. And if you have elliptical orbits of these planets going around the Sun, then you will have a very rational way of understanding why planets zig zag in the apparent incommensurate movement with heavenly order. And as if to give the kiss of love to him, in 1604 was one of the brightest Super Nova in human history. And this bright Super Nova led Kepler in that year to publish a monumental book, The New Astronomy. And there were a few people who really took it seriously. Shakespeare was one of those intellectual people. You don't have to be a university wit to be an intellectual person. Shakespeare's plays change after 1604. Before 1604 Shakespeare has the tone that comedies and histories are the backbone of good presentational entertainment. That theater is about this. And after 1604 you start to get play like Hamlet and King Lear and Othello, that there are tragic modes in reality that one needs to pay attention to. You have to include them. That yes you can still have comedies and you still have histories, but you must realistic and also include tragedy. You that you have really three modes, three modes of dramatic interchange within human life. So that vision for us, and the first person to use the term vision in English goes back to the time of Chaucer. In Middle English, vision had the connotation of a dream pilgrimage. That vision took you somewhere, and it took you somewhere in terms of transcendent imagery that no longer obeyed traditional story lines. Because dreams have their own logic. They do not have the logic of a narrative line. They have the peculiar property that in a dream, when a certain image that is more meaningful than other images, that image then serves as a pivot and changes the direction of the narrative development. That the dream images no longer follow this line but when they got to that image they went off on a tangent and followed the logic of that image and its influence. Until they got to another powerful image and they might go off on that image. So that the logic of dreams is that it has a fractal transcendent differential capacity which is recognizable in a classic other mode of vision. Someone who is a prophet. Who's being shown something not by Earth or by his own human mind, but that his mind is opened up beyond its capacity, beyond its Earthly capacity. Opened up to Divine levels and God is showing him something else. The Divine is giving him, not images which represent things but symbols which go beyond representation. Symbols which do not represent but they present. And what do they present? They present meaning. And especially they present meaning that is fluidly able to emphasize certain aspects above others and to then open up the narrative line. The excursion of imagery, the development of further symbolic meaning along the structural lines that give the presentational dramatic amplitude of some powerful symbol. And as many powerful symbols as one comes to, this is the zig zagging then of what develops in a Divine Prophetic Vision. And as we saw, one of the great recorded visions in history is the vision of Ezekial (Siren sounds outside) who lived at a time when fire engines were racing through Jerusalem. And they were sent not by the old Babylonians but by new Babylonians. Not by Hamarapi but a thousand years later by a fellow named Nebuchadnezer. Who wasn't as naive as Hamarapi. Who thought if you just promulgated a code of sever laws people will behave. Nebuchadnezer realized that you have to have very smart people to administer your empire so that you can check on the people who would like to fudge and get a piece of the action without you knowing it. And he found that the most intelligent population of men and women were not people that were hanging out on the Euphrates River and the Tigris River, but that they were men and women living in a city called Jerusalem. So he went there not to put them into bonds, as in hand cuffs, but to steal them away, to kidnap them, to be the intelligent functionaries of the Neo Babylonian, the New Babylonian Empire which he was setting up and running. He needed good administrative executives. And he found several thousand in one fell swoop and took them away. And the leader of that group of kidnapped talented people was Ezekial. And in his classic vision, if you remember we talked about this a couple of months ago, he saw that there is a four fold facet of the central pivotal symbol which acts as a mediator between God and man. That that pivot, that symbolic pivot has a four fold aspect to it. And it came in a visionary symbol. And that visionary symbol was so powerful that it left its impress, it left its resonances of impress so deeply that when it came time to organizing a new vision of God's revelation to man they use Ezekials archetype to set up the typology of the New Testament. Ezekial's vision saw that there is a four fold quality of the mediating symbol that serves as an interface between God and man. And that if you put images into that four foldness you get an eagle, an ox, a lion and a man. Notice that the man image of our deepest nature is only one fourth of our true scope of capacities. We have not only in us the man, as in like earthly animal man, but we have symbolic aspects of the ox, the Taurean aspect of long term stamina dedication narrowed focus bullish energy. We have the capacity of the lion, we have the capacity of the eagle. And that all four of those capacities together as a set, in Ezekial's symbolic vision, we're somehow the bow that ties the present between God and man of a relationship. That that relationship between God and man was tied up in this mysterious symbolic present and it was only able to be opened by someone who had the vision to see it all. That if you were but a man you couldn't open the vision. If you were just a lion you couldn't open the vision. Even if you were an eagle you couldn't open that vision. Not to say just an ox, you couldn't open that vision. You had to have a multi-dimensional, a completely faceted visionary capacity to open that symbol. And when you open that symbol what was in there was a revelation, not a narrative. A narrative follows a story line, beginning middle, end. Whereas a revelation is the universal resonances of truth. So that one has to be prepared, one has to be ready to receive the universal resonances of truth. And how can you be prepared if you're addicted to narrow story lines. If you can only follow something given in narrow story lines you get completely overwhelmed when someone tells you something truthful. You don't have any way to receive it. You're used to following little threads of narratives and someone's not only giving you the whole suit of clothing but is giving you the entire wardrobe of mankind. Of course you're overwhelmed. What single quality of mind enables you to receive resonances of the whole? The quality is openness. A mind must have its capacity to have openness and openness includes not only the entire system of the mind but the unique, once in a cosmos happenings of certain Novae or Super Novae that have to be worked in. So that the open mind is truly open. It's not a closed system of openness, no matter how ingenious you are. That there is always the tendency, it's like a bad golf swing, you're always going to slice unless you really get the art of driving that ball. And the slice always happens in the same way. One tries to cut corners by getting some quick system to teach yourself and others, very quickly, how to do and how to maintain an authority, a pecking order, a code of limitations which then can be promulgated and you have the certainty of power. And finally when all is said and done the whole reason for these skews is to preserve power. And the most clear eyed visionary, we're not used to thinking of him as a visionary, but the most clear eyed visionary of this, in the last fifteen hundred years, was a man named Machiavelli. Who suffered incredible liable because he told the truth. But Machiavelli, being a very good clear eyed Florentine banker hit man, he ran the city of Florence for about ten years. A very very tough character. His book The Prince is only one half of a pair of books which went together. The Prince was always paired with another book called The Discourses. And The Prince and The Discourses were always a pair that were meant to be read together. Anybody in Florence in Machiavelli's day knew that. Machiavelli himself knew that. But The Discourses are not taking The Prince and then making commentaries on it. The Discourses are not on Machiavelli's work, but they're on the work of a Roman historian named Livi. The first ten books of Livi's great history of Rome. Because Machiavelli knew like any good Italian that the ultimate authority power mongers were the Roman Empire boys. They really knew how to do it. The Babylonians, the Neo Babylonians, they were amateurs compared to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire understood how you lock up the world in such a way that they don't even know that there's a key. They don't even question that they're locked. It never occurs to them. Because the power structure, the code of laws, the systemization is so vast and you truncate their learning so severely that they live their whole lives and never know that there's something else. When he was a young student at USC, George Lucas made a beautiful film of this called THX1138. The young Robert Duvall and the young Donald Pleasance. And they live in this utopian computerized society. Kind of like a USC film school version of Alpha Viel, Goddard's film. And only one man manages to outdistance the robot police, who are not meant to arrest you, just to keep you in. Just to keep returning you and feeding you back in and using drugs and reconditioning and so forth so that you finally fit back in and would stay back in. And only one man gets out and discovers that in the outer reaches, that there are outer reaches of this urban empire authority power structure that one can actually climb out and that all of this has been taking place underground in some unimaginably vast cavern and that none of it happens on the surface of the planet. And the last frames of the film, Robert Duvall is climbing out and he's staggered that there is such a thing as sun light. He's never heard of sun light, he'd never seen it. It's a theme that was done many times, Logan's Run has the same thing. Michael York in Annie Gunther coming out of this huge domed paradise that they've been brought up in generations, and the sun is rising and Michael York says to Jenny, "what's that?" "I don't know but it's huge, it's bright, it's warm" The place where all of these myths, where the entire mythos of emerging from a cave of ignorance into the world of actuality is in the tenth book of Plato's Republic. The myth of the cave. But beyond even myths which would free us from an imprisonment so huge and so thorough that we don't even realize that we're in prison, beyond those myths is an entire universe transformed into a cosmos. A cosmos of consciousness that is so far beyond that, beyond the relief discovery that you've gotten free from an imprisonment. That's still, in terms of reality, just having backed away from something bad. And only having pivoted once and turned to find something new. That's as far as that goes. Reality is so indescribably rich that you can pivot to something new every second forever. It's called ultimate jewel, truth. And what is so insidious about the bad habit of systemization is that people who go through only one revelation, who go through only one waking up, slide unbeknownst to them back into system making, where they weave that discovery back into a meta system. And they're no longer in a physics prison but now they're in a metaphysics prison which is even more insidious because anyone who comes along to tell them that you can be free from this, they say we know. We've already figured that in. Take a seat. And when you tell them there are some people who have to place to lay their head, have no place to take a seat, because you're free, you're free from systems. Not free from systems period, but free from systems colon blank page forever. But someone who has that visionary journey beyond the dream of freedom. That there is such a thing a real freedom. Because only one instance of freedom happens in such a context that it eventually is only a dream compared to the reality of infinite freedom. And nowhere in the history of civilization is this more insidious than in education. One of the most poignant little discussions of education done about, I guess it's almost forty years ago now, David Reisman, Constraint And Variety In American Education. I remember when these first came out, it came out in 1958. In this little Anchor paperback. This one has the beautiful signature of David Reisman as an old man 1994 at Harvard. The most distinguished American Sociologist ever. Went to Harvard in 1958 from the University of Chicago. Reisman, who set a tone half a century ago in a classic book called The Lonely Crowd, and he writes in the preface "part two of The Lonely Crowd suggests that for the more privileged classes in America it is probably as important to feel free as to be free". And the progress that's been made in half a century is that's filtered down to every Joe and Jane on the street. As long as you feel free it's as good as being free. Isn't It? This problem with apparency is insidious. It goes back long before the Magi some five thousands years ago were already struggling with celestial systems to make sure that earthly people don't even question your authority. The first person in ancient Irani history to question the authority of the Magi was Zarathustra. He said I can look at the sky just as good as you and I see that the patterns do not account for everything real. And that instead of just being things, there are relationalities between things which are as important as any of the things. And in fact the movement of all the relationalities together forms a set with the listing of all the things. Even if you have a complete list of all the things, you must balance it by a paired quality of all the relationalities and when you bring those two together what you get is an infinite jewel like interpenetration between movement and things. Between existence and mystery. And the ancient songs, the spiritual hymns of Zarathustra are all about this. So instead of there being A God who has a name, even a name that cannot be said, there are a pair of qualities, one in fact a quality and one qualityless. No qualities whatsoever. Just mysterious movement. And so that there is a double named divinity, in his case Ahura Mazda. That the Mazda is the glorious sun, the most powerful celestial object that there is. The splendor of Mazda. But that the relationality of that sun in its splendor is a qualityless conscious guiding called Ahura. It's like an infinity sign tutor that is mysteriously there not only over human beings but over the sun also. And that we share a reality with the sun, not because of our thingness, we're not like that, but because of the common denominator of being in movement together in a mysterious composition call the real. So to say that Zoroastrians are sun worshipers is at best half right. And the worst tyrannies are people who have pecking orders and power structures and authorities on the basis of half truths. Because people with half truths can never be convinced by argument that they are wrong. Because the other half which they don't know is not knowable. It's not that you can't tell them, it's that there are no words to tell because there's nothing to tell. It has to be intuited by consciousness which is differential, which is a completely different mode of operativeness from integration. Part of the difficulty with memory is that the classic art of memory is always colored by, cast in terms of the known. Always promulgated in terms of images and the retention of images and the recall of images as if that were it. And in fact we have a perfect example in our computer age because memory is something that you buy by the gigabit. Isn't it? And plug in. Isn't it? I don't think so. That's an integral imaginative function that is apparent memory but has nothing to do with memory at all. Memory has to do with the magic of consciousness. With the differential mystery of reality in its wholeness, in its pairedness. And so one finds at the very basis, at the very basis of people who had confidence better than any people in their system making authority, the Romans, the Roman Empire. They were the best that there ever was at it. If they'd had a couple of centuries maybe Nazi Germany would have bettered that tyranny. The Romans were around forever. They're still around. But the Romans did a very interesting coup de grace when they made their empire. There was just a hand full of people who made the empire. Centered around a man named Augustus Caesar. And he was very careful. He didn't say I'm an empire builder. I'm not a Roman Emperor. He simply used the term that he was a Prince. That's why Machiavelli used the term prince. A prince is someone who is first. You make think anything that you want, say anything that you want, only I get to say first. And then if you want to contradict me it will be apparent to everyone that you're running up against me. Do you get it? So the Roman Empire was called the Principate, the Augustin Principate. That before anybody could deliver an opinion on anything conclusive, Augustus got the right to speak first. And anyone knows, if you know the math of any kind of realistic process, if you control the starting point, you control the form that will come out of it. It's a mythic truism. If you get to control the initial starting point of a myth, you pretty much have control, have authority over how that myth will play out, even with its variations. In fact you get to choreograph a lot of variations so it has the appearance of freedom. And if you truncate peoples education so that they never know better, they never do know better. And not only a whole life time be spent in this ignorance, but whole centuries and entire millennium can be spent in this ignorance. And no one knows except a few comets, a few meteors of Super Nova here and there and they're easily dispensed with because they're outlaws. They're weirdoes. They don't belong. And if they did belong it would upset the apple cart by which all of us earn a living and we can't have that. So it's an insidious kind of a problem and that's why one of the texts that we use at the beginning of Vision is The Are Of Memory by Francis Yeats. And we pair The Art Of Memory with The Mind Shepherd dialogue written about 90 A.D., about ninety of the common era in Alexandria. And that they link together because The Art Of Memory is all about the Renaissance art of memory and the frontispiece in her book, Dame Francis Yeats, is Hermetic silence. And it's interesting because what Hermes holds up generally, what Hermes will hold up in classic antiquity, if you look at any statue of Hermes, you look at any representation of Hermes or Mercury, the Roman version of Hermes is Mercury. What does Hermes hold up? He holds up a Caduceus, a staff with the double serpents coming up and going around a ball at the top but the Art of Memory Hermes, Hermetic Silence, hold up a candelabra. And if you count the candles, there are seven candles on the candelabra. And where does that symbol come from? Where does the Renaissance art of memory Hermes come from? A seven candle candelabra is called a menorah. It's a symbol of the sealed reality of Judaism. Why would a Renaissance Hermetic figure symbol hold up a menorah? Because of an interpenetration of vision that happened. And it happened in the Renaissance. It happened in the Renaissance because they rediscovered that it had happened in antiquity and they had rediscovered that it had happened in antiquity. So that by 90 A.D. in Alexandria there was already a melding and interchange between two different orders of symbolism. One of them Greek the other Jewish. But they had a common denominator because both of them related, not only to Egypt, both of them also related to ancient Iran to Persia. And so if one wants to really get into it, really understand the underpinnings of visionary wholeness as it comes to dominate a civilization that's become planetary, one has to go back to ancient Egypt and ancient Iran. One has to go back all that way and ask what's going on here? What function does memory play in ancient Iran and in ancient Egypt? And one finds in ancient Egypt that memory is the composing guide as you go through a pyramid structure reading the sacred language of hieroglyphs because they are telling you a symbolically delicate pattern of fractal failure that has a way, a thread of possibility that you can come through this fractal fissuring of the afterlife of the netherworld of the death experience and if you follow a particular way through this you can come back into life again. But that that way is not to follow any of the cracks but to keep on going despite the cracks in a way which retains the soundness of your uninterrupted movement and that soundness is not based on some preconceived design or plan but happens spontaneously as it happens. So that if you are free to remain conscious and not get distracted by any images of apparent promise you will be able to create your unique path and be reborn into life again. So that freedom from following any images no matter how good they look was the only seal and guarantee that you would come back into life again. That's why spiritual freedom was irreplaceable by any kind of system of images, no matter what they were. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back here. Where are we coming to when we come back here? Notice that attention has a focus and if we were naive we would think that the focus is in some physiological place. The identifying of the physiological place is never enough. And so the same habit that leads you to inculcate the addictive identification qualities of time and space of locus and focus in a physical sense carries over and has its backup where you reinforce that habit, that identification, that addictive necessity in a metaphysical sense of locus and focus. The old Roman art of memory was Loci et Foci. Loci as a locus, a place, foci as a focus. If you put a focus in the right place then you have the two ingredients, you have the coordinates of a memorable point. And if you arrange memorable points within a common place, a common locus then you have a constellation of points which you can make some kind of an image on so that you have a constellation of a memory unit. And if you learn to coordinate and categorize those memory units then you're supposed to have a good memory. And this is good Roman Empire logic. The prime person who codified this was a lawyer, as you might imagine. His name was Cicero. And Cicero was in the habit, as a really great trial lawyer would be, of winning his cases, and he wanted to be sure that he would win. And so he practiced this Roman version of the art of memory and twice in his collected writings that have survived he puts it down, writes it. In one classic location, it's in a book called To Herenius, Ad Herenium. The other is in a book on oratory, on orators, The Oratory. And these two references to Cicero, you can find right away in Francis Yeat's The Art Of Memory. Remember the frontispiece that had the Hermes urging silence holding up a menorah for light. And when you turn to her text, once you get by the preface and you come to the text, right away on the second page of the text you find she talks about the classical places where the art of memory is talked about and two of the places are in Cicero, the third is in a Roman grammarian named Quintilios. His institutes. So a grammarian and a lawyer. One of the classic problems with classic things is that people are uneducated now, when were they ever educated, and don't know the contextual picture so as to understand that there are limiting factors everywhere and that these are not authorities. And if somebody is really learned you can tear up all of this stuff. I mean tear it up, I mean shred it. There is no authority anywhere in any of this stuff. Just because you can trace your procedures back to the Roman Empire and you can go from there back to the Neo Babylonians and even back to the Babylonians. Tyranny is still tyranny. It doesn't matter. And when you go back far enough, when you go back to the origins of civilization, what do you find? You find that civilizations largely were made on rivers. The Egyptian on the Nile, in India they used the Indus. They were clever in Sumeria, they had two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates but really it was the Euphrates that was the synthesizing core. Civilizations are riverine constellations so that sights along the rivers are the perfect origins of the chakras along the neural system. Are there chakras? There are analogously chakras as long as you have a riverine river system section of sacred sights in certain ways as your metaphorical basis, but for someone who goes wide open in a yoga there are no chakras. Just like if you go wide open in real twenty-first century astronomy, there are no constellations. The zodiac is a coloring book for children. And even at that the coloring contains eighty-eight constellations not twelve. And if you go nine hundred light years in any direction, those star patterns change so much that there are no constellations left. And nine hundred light year, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing in this cosmos. There are places that are analyzable that are for billion light years away, when the moon was a little baby. And we still are not even halfway in what is the real cosmos. So lovely as these grade school coloring books are with all the associative memories, they're not going to do too much good unless you're going to stay in the sand box. And an education like this is for a population of men and women who are at home minimally in the whole star system. Their sand box is the whole star system. About one light year diameter. Because a sand box on that scale, you have to deal with a whole different way in which to be real. You have to be real about reality. And the language is condensed and folded and not crimped, not crinkled but jeweled so that it will be a fresh language for at least a couple hundred years so that it will be of use for all that time. It will take that much time. It will take two or three hundred years to get to a star system mankind. But as usual there are crisis nodes and right now is one of those crisis nodes. It's a threshold that getting over the addiction, for which there are a lot of withdrawal symbols of having something made perfectly clear to you so that the images in you mind link up in a pattern called logic. And that's a very debilitating limitation. That in itself, that limitation is a prison. Nixon was very adamant about make one thing perfectly clear. It's on that level. Now if you want to stay in Nixon's America you can stay there if you want to. It's not that interesting. The mind that makes something perfectly clear on the basis of imagery that comes out of a language is a very crippled psyche. It's actually a hospital case from future perspective. There's a very interesting science fiction writer, he's a surgeon whose name is James White. He's written for about forty years, a whole series of novels about the Sector General. This hospital located on the edge of the galaxy that has three hundred and eighty-four levels. And they have nurses and doctors and interns from all over the galaxy and they meet all kinds of environments because there are some forms of life that are just hard radiation. And you have to really know medicine to be able to deal with a hospital station like Sector General. The metaphor here, the symbol, the consciousness, the conscious vision is that we have so much unfoldable openable jewel like potential that to stay where we were is ridiculous. Especially because it's an imperiled locus, an imperiled focus, (fire engines) you can hear the fire engines coming already. I told you it was dangerous. Right, if it doesn't burn down, they'll arrest you. What kind of choices are those? Why stay in some kind of imperiled ignorance when it only takes a little while, it just takes a couple of months to get the tone, the flavor, the first flush of freedom. And it only takes a two year cycle to really get yourself, however it is that you're going to do it, because each journey through this is individual. There are no stylized authoritarian plans for steps which you must do to do this. You do it as you do it and it makes its own ordering as you go. The math for self ordering algorithmic systems is well known by 1999. And it's totally more than logical. Logic is a beggars level of proof. It's the way in which lawyers make cases of having facts marshaled as evidence so that one can make a case and be proven right and in a cosmos of infinite possibilities being right about one way is fools gold. That's not even useful at all. Because what's right on this planet then has no bearing at all on the moon of some other planet in some other star system. Who cares? So you're just painting yourself into a corner that never really existed anyway. The art of memory as it comes down through Cicero is the reduction by Roman lawyer to help teach people how to win law cases in Roman courts run by the Lex Talonis and many other variants of Roman law. And though he was on the side of republicans fighting against those bad guys who were trying to make an empire, the first generation of the really effective Roman Empire embraced Cicero and made his writings the required reading. Because so very often the naive champions of a position are used later on to fortify the very thing that they fought against because one shows later on, we have modified our previous faults to include the solutions that were put there. It's called a counter revolution. And there has never been a revolution that does not have a morning after counter revolution where they come in and they say we fixed everything up it's O.K. now. We've exchanged the pods for the human beings and everyone now is content. If everyone has been subject to the body snatcher transformation then it's all right. Then you're ready to really be a part of a community that is unified and you can move to the next valley. Let's get our cars a load em up. This kind of thinking, this kind of feeling, this kind of ritual action is only operative as long as you limit yourself to a reduced focus within an integral procedure. That whole scenario, every aspect of it is completely dismissable as soon as you bring consciousness into play. As soon as the dimension of consciousness is added to the dimensions of time/space you no longer just have a locus of time/space, but you have a conscious time space which has a multifaceted fractal possibility of many locus forms and so the idea of a focus becomes not a point which can be made legally but some kind of a synthesis which is malleable in terms of an algorithmic improvement. It becomes a pragmatic position which one is willing to refine and to modify as one learns better. So that in conscious time space, memory is not getting the points arranged and then image coded and then placed into categorical boxes. To think that that's rational is absolutely crazy. It is certifiably insane. Though it was the arbiter for Western Civilization for about two thousand years, it doesn't make it right. They were all crazy for two millennium. Because to think that that's rationality is completely even misusing the word. Rationality comes from ratio, it come from proportion. Not from categorization, but from proportional relationalities that modify as one goes through a phase form octave of calibration. That measurement by some fixed ruler only works on a very limited integral, and that calibration by improved resonance is a much more realistic way of operating. Instead of being fitted to fit into authority, it's better to know how to get into tune so that you can improvise your melody. And once put in that kind of a chose, only somebody very dull and very much truncated would choose to fit into pre-cut clothes. When you can design your own wardrobe and make your own fabrics why would you go in and buy store bought measurements of stuff that's inferior. There's no sense in it. This education is a designers paradise. It's made to work under all conditions or any conditions even unimaginable non conditions, it still operates. Still. And it will be good. The art of memory as it comes now largely bases itself on the way in which a spoken language rolls on the ball bearings of images. And where are those images? Those images are in the feathers, in the colors, in the shells, in the animal skins, in ritual. A ritual, an adorned costumed ritual becomes a ceremony. Yeah, those images are there in those ceremonies. How do they get there? They got there because they were stamped onto those animal tails, those abalone shells were taken from disparate places and brought together for this ceremony here because there was some kind of a symbolic synthesizing an integration of disparate images put together on the basis of a central symbol in the mind. So that those images which are there in experience, are there in feeling, are there in language come to rest in the mind. Mental. Mental images. And Cicero's art of memory is how to improve and categorize and train and get into really vigorous repeatable case winning athletic toned arranged mental images. And isn't that where the memory is? Is it in the mind? And one raises ones hand and ask the question is the mind in the brain? And you get to famous issue. And our Hermetic treatise, The Mind Shepherd, somebody who shepherds a mind, shepherds minds. Hermes Trismegistus in his shepherding of minds, he does not tell but he participates in a dialogue. And the dialogue is all about life and light and language. About a certain style of language that engenders not images but light. Illumination. Later on co-opted by very clever people who said oh, they mean illuminated images. As if a neon sign is somehow transcendentally different from a painted sign. Oh the street signs are in neon, it must be illuminated, this must be a. . . . . No. That's not it. Light. And in the Hemetic Poimander dialogue, it is said that light as in non image chained mind, but a light that has occurred because one is weaned away from images. No graven images at all. Well a mind that has no graven images at all, no remembered, trained memory images, as autonomic or automatic or trained response to experience, what happens to an open mind that has disconnected all of the addictive identifying habits. What kind of mind is that? Sri Urubindu said that's a mind of light. His classic phrase. It is a mind of light, not in the sense of like a light bulb, or of flood lights. In the Vajrayana it was called clear light. Vajra means diamond. The diamond way. In the diamond way, it's called clear light because what was seeable were not things or their images but one could look through things, one could look through images with a clear light mind and could appreciate the visible and the invisible choreographed in a gestalt that was real. And that when one looked out in this sense one did not only see stars, but one saw the spaces in-between the stars also. One of the first things that was apparent when EVA's were being done by the American astronauts in the Gemini Program. Starting with Ed White and going on. They all had the experience that when they went outside the capsule and they looked out they did not see blackness, they saw a velvet soft friendly warm infinity that was so vast that it registered as just purely openness. Not a threatening thing, openness, but a quality of invisible relationality that was like the velvet that sets the jewels of stars in this beautiful display. That the stars were jewels in a divine velvet of infinite openness. And that the cosmos really is that. It's not that there are stars pasted on a black matte surface, however complex. It's that there is no black surface whatsoever. There's not even any black velvet whatsoever. It's that the feeling toned experience of complete openness is a friendly velvety relationality which is equally real and that the stars and all other things in heaven occur suspended. The Chinese, in the I Ching, in one of the ten wings, written by Confucius as a matter of fact, Confucius said "heaven suspends its emblems". Man always looks for a way to categorize the emblem so that the emblems are then organized. But heaven suspends its emblems so that they're free, no strings attached. That if you could reach out with a celestial hand you would reach around a star, there are no strings at all. That in this openness, the openness is such that kinetic freedom self organizes into a choreography, that if you're dealing with a two dimensional diagram of it, it looks like it makes sense in terms of mechanical causality. But that's a property of the two dimensional diagram and not of reality. It's an artifact of representationality and not at all a quality of reality. And that the naive integral only mind cannot tell the difference between a diagram and reality. In fact it gets absorbed into the diagram, because the diagram has an abstract quality which the neophyte mind mistakes as itself. It says oh this is my diagram. Of course its right. It's the first step into a very dark world. Because there is the world where just feeling free or just having the appearance of freedom is enough. But to be free, that's a lot of work. Gees that means we have to come to a hundred and four lectures? How can that be? Isn't there a weekend version of it? Yeah, there sure are. There are lots of weekend versions. There have been for thousands of years. None of them work because structurally they cannot work beyond representation and appearance. That entire integral procedure is mythic and as long as you're pounding drums in a tribal way it's probably going to be O.K. But as soon as you start to link all of the sights along a river together in some kind of an ecology of a flow of a journey of civilization, whether it's the Niger River running through Northern Africa, or it's the Nile running through East Africa or the Euphrates, or the Indus, all of those great civilizing, synthesizing journey lines are made to flow finally into an ocean, into a sea, into an openness that transcends all of these limits. That's why the culmination always has this threshold beyond which one says no more. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The ancient Egyptian wisdom largely forgotten in the last thousand years in Egypt. You could hardly find anybody who has the ancient wisdom. But it's preserved perfectly in some place like Cameroon, or in some parts of Nigeria. You can find still, still in the villages. The Villages have wise people who tell the sacred stories that link together in such a way that it carries you to the threshold beyond which you learn your own freedom. And the story tellers still have a story telling cane. I'll bring one next week from Cameroon. And the story teller's cane in West Africa has a certain kind of a top to it that's recognizable because it comes from five thousand years ago. It was the staff of Thoth. It was the Hermetic staff of sacred languaging, because a sacred languaging does not sew you into the limitations of the myth but delivers you to an interiorization of the meaning of what you are being told in such a way that the images no longer just constellate along mythic narrative lines, but they interpenetrate and weave to make a fabric of realization that there's something even beyond this, beyond which we do not say. And the Cameroon story tellers cane also has a very interesting property, when you see it physiologically. I'll bring it next week. The whole length of the staff is flexible. It's not cut out of a single piece of wood. It's wood and shell linked together in such a way that it is always flexible, so that when you keep the cadence you don't pound with authority, but you deliver a rhythmic suppleness which also kinesthetically goes into the appreciation of the listeners. So Thoth still tells his wisdom in West African villages just like he used to do five thousand years ago at the beginnings of Egyptian Civilization. And you would think it's there in Egypt, but what you get are travel guides about sights as if that were it. That's not it at all. Not at all. The quality of all these river civilizations, whether it's the Niger River coming out of the Saharan wilds of the highlands, because in the central Sahara, nine, ten thousand years ago it was a very high civilization. So the Niger comes out of that and flows all the way down through a great turn at Timbuktu. It used to be the image of the farthest point in the world. Turns at Timbuktu because that's where all the caravan routes of the entire Sahara came together, was a jewel of inter-penetration of tribes where no one tribe held forth. Timbuktu was a place like Los Angeles used to be and probably still is. Like Alexandria used to be. Like Chang An used to be. It was a place where no one lineage was dominant. Where it was a inter-penetration of innumerable kinds of people so you had to always have a relationality, a proportioned relationality to be real there. No one tribe was dominant. No one mythic lineage was dominant. It was an inter-penetration of many. If you look at Los Angeles three hundred years ago, there was more linguistic diversity in the Indians of Los Angeles than the entirety of Europe. There were more than twenty language families spoken in the Los Angeles area three, four hundred years ago. There aren't that many language families in all of Europe. Because this place was never a point in somebody's reduced little imagery. It was always a multidimensional interchange focus, just like it is now, that's why it has the character. It has the character of not being some place but of being an interchange focus where any place has a quality of being something other than itself so it's a transformational nexus. That's why this is being given here, because this here is not just here. It's transformationally wherever it will go, and very quickly can move in that way. If you look at the ancient sense of memory in the Ciceronian view point, that the mind is like a wax tablet that will take impresses and you have to organize the points with image overlays like sugar coating the pill. And you get some nice memorable picture image and then you put those into categories, and this is training the memory. This is making fodder for authoritarian pecking orders to manipulate you without you even caring. Gandhi once said, the British Empire education is very good at making clerks to make the Empire run. And so he came up eventually, it took him about thirty years to develop what was called in India at that time, Ni Talem, it meant the New Education. And the first thing in the New Education, in Ni Talem was to teach children and middle aged people and old people that they can use their hands in a focus to make something for themselves. What did they make? They made a white cotton thread. They made their own, they spun their own cotton thread. And they wove their own cotton thread into a fabric called Caadi which was a white cotton cloth. And then they made their own clothes out of that white cotton cloth. And a nice little, a nice Nehru necked jacket, and nice pantaloons, and Caadi became the symbol for a transformational education. Because in order to make Caadi, in order to make that fabric yourself, the original fabric, you had to learn to spin. You had to take a carded bulb of cotton and to spin out of that a thread which was weavable for yourself. You yourself were doing it. It was not just a metaphor for learning how to be self reliant, not just a symbol but it was a reality. And instead of using a machine spinning, Gandhi had a program of search throughout India for about a year and a half to find an ancient spinning wheel. A spinning wheel from ancient India. India is one of those places that preserves everything from the past and everything from the future is already there. The Twenty-third century is there and the Third century is still there. And they found in the attic of a woman, I believe in Bombay, they found an ancient spinning wheel. It's called a charka. Called a charka because it comes from the same route as Chakra. And the thing about the ancient spinning wheel that modern spinning wheels didn't do is that when it spun it produced a very homey light hum. It produced a modulated sound that was so sophisticatedly perfect because it is the white sound of deep Samadhi. It's like the sound that was made in the early Twentieth Century for train horns. They spent a lot of money and a lot of research to make sure that the sound of a diesel train horn had a particular tone to it and anyone who hears it, it doesn't matter what culture you come from, you hear the very lightly perfumed nostalgic beckoning to somewhere else. And the charka makes that kind of sound. It beckons you to a transformational reality that's within journey just a ways away from where you are. And so the spinning of the charka to make the caadi linked together two, it's like a double attractor right? It makes an order out of chaos, out of social, historical, personal, psychological, economic chaos. And that double attractor makes that infinity sign, that Hermetic symbol of bringing the people out of complete chaos into, not a semblance of order but bringing them into a focusable conscious time space where they not are paying attention to the way in which categorical authoritarian delineated steps are logical, but they have a taste for the resonances of the real. And the principle of a village that's educated and raised on Ni Talim is that you don't make any kind of a decision until it's unanimous. You say well unanimous? Well that's not logical, you never get anything done. That's right. As long as you limit yourself to that old fractured, systematized, do it one step at a time as we told you, you will never have unanimity. But you know what? Sometimes unanimity is necessary for a certain quality to come out. If you have copper that's ninety-nine point five per cent pure, you can't use that copper. Because that copper with five tenths of a per cent of impurities will not be malleable, it will be brittle, and it won't hold any kind of a shape. You can't do any electrical wiring of copper or any plumbing, you can't even make pennies. You have to have copper that's a hundred per cent pure so that then its malleable atomic structure works. It's the only way that the lattices work in that whole thing. Because the atomic structure of elements is all crystalline lattice in terms of its atomic structure. All elements are crystals. They're crystals of a lattice structure, not just crystals as crystals but anything that is real has that lattice quality. The whole realm of physics that's involved in this. And Twenty-first century materials reflect this kind of chemical smarts. By educating someone long enough that they have run completely through a cycle of phase form opening whether they understood it intellectually or not, they begin to live openly. Because the mind is only at best one eighth of the whole scene. It's only one phase out of a whole array, a double array, a double attractor wholeness of reality. And when someone goes through that they discover that they're different. Because they respond not just to the bate that's put out there but they respond to the resonances of the invisible that no one put out there but they sense is equally attractive. And the bated things lose their compulsiveness. And one can still understand that they're nice, they're desirable, they're important, but they're not compulsive. The Bagavad Gita says you can have this world but you can't want to have this world and have this world. Because the want will always get addictively in the way of having the world. Because the world is to live in and not to want to live in. That apparency is an imprisonment of false semblance and it's called fools gold. More next week.