Vision 5
Presented on: Saturday, January 30, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Vision Five and that means that this is the fifth in a sequence. There is something about a sequence that when it reaches a four fold quality there is something archetypally full about that and that a fifth phase or a fifth element always changes the mix. In theater jargon a fifth business is something that happens outside the plan, it's the magic juice that happens. In the English language we have the word quintessence which means fifth essence. The quintessence is not there until the form is finished. And when the form is finished something about the entirety of the form emerges that could not have emerged until then and it is the essence of the entirety of the form. The quintessence. A quintessence is never a part of the form in terms of its shape, in terms of its boundaries, but is rather the perfume of the entirety of the form. So that in very disparate kinds of examples of wisdom on this planet you will find an allusion in the language to something different from what was expected. Something beyond the integral capacities of shaping. Like in the early Prajna Parameta text of central Asia, Northern India, they speak of a Bodhi Satva whose actions are perfuming the emptiness, the shinyata. Because they do not have any causal attachments and they do not participate in the kinds of karmic ties that Maya must have. Or in an alchemical sense, both East and West incidentally, both Chinese and Greco-Egyptian alchemy, a quintessence only emerges not because of something which we do but because what we have done makes an opening through which something else is able to arrive, able to be in the world. So that the time honored sense of wisdom is that what we can do, what we can make, what integrations we can design and carry through, have an achievement which is a limitation but the achievement and the limitation of what we can do does not exhaust the possibilities of reality. That there is more in heaven and earth and in ourselves than what we can achieve in what we can delimit. So that the wisdom was always involving a fifth quality. And so in a set of eight notes, the octave, a musical fifth was not so much the fifth note but was a proportional relationality. So that we have to refine our sense of what a quintessence is. That a quintessence is not just a fifth element. It's not a fifth thing in a series of four or in a group of four, it's the fifth, it's not. It is not an it. That quintessence is somehow a new quality of the real which participates in our integral forms but is not of it. Being In the world but not Of it. Functions yes, but functions not as an element but functions as a wind that goes freely between all of the elements and only is when all of the elements are integral together as a form and that form is open or transparent or at least translucent to this other. Allowing the beyond to come into play. And this is very difficult. It's almost impossible for the mind to understand this. Oddly enough the body understands it much quicker than the mind. Bodies because of graphic limitations learn very early that there is a whole world beyond itself. Bodies become very wise to this very early. But minds because they come late in the integral game do not learn this very well and they don't take the lesson with any kind of grace. So that mental forms are always a sticking point and they stick exactly where the issue of being open to let a quintessence, to let something which is not a thing from beyond come through. come through the entirety of the form. And one of the great archetypal limitations of the mind's reluctance to acknowledge this, or we have to make it stronger, it isn't just a reluctance, it's a refusal. Because the mind becomes imbued with its own self importance and refuses to countenance that there is something superior to it. Something so superior that this Beyond dwarfs the entirety of the capacity of the mind to make form. So that the mind rejects its own possibility of openness naturally. The mind becomes entrenched so that especially where forms of symbols are being made in the mind is the spot where the most arrogance is. It's the bruised archetypal place that one looks to if you are a doctor of civilization, you look to that right away. It's like an herbal doctor can tell by the pulse, a doctor of civilization looks to see where the symbols that are operative here and that's exactly where the diagnosis can be made.
We took for the first four of the Vision lectures, we took a pair of books, a pair of texts. One of them was about nineteen hundred years old, the other was just from 1966. But the book from 1966, The Art Of Memory by Francis Yeats was a book looking back retrospectively on the art of memory and how the art of memory had developed over a period of especially the last two thousand years. And so the art of memory is one of our pairs of books that we were holding up, not as part of a goal of understanding but more like a tuning fork to try to give us some ordination among a cacophony of resonances that would otherwise baffle us and so we hold up this pair of books like a tuning fork to give us some kind of a pitch pipe initial tone to find a way of getting ordinated to get coordinates in a mess of misunderstanding. And that mess of misunderstanding is exactly there because the mind projects it out. If the mind didn't project it out it wouldn't be there. Our confusion comes from an activity of the mind and not because there is A confusion which is conveniently external and which is a determinably a fracture somehow in nature. Well nature is wrong. And this is why vision five is a peculiar lecture, it's very difficult to give. Because it has a paradoxical quality where in order to move forward it has to move further back reflexively and it brings into an issue something which is so difficult to grasp that it can't really be grasped. It can't be grasped as a thing, it has to be grasped as a relationality as a proportion like a musical fifth. It has to be a gestalt form of proportions and this is why the quintessence of form was always held to be in conscious differentiation depended for its higher powers upon the ability to relate rationally to the proportions of things and not just the things themselves. Can it be said easier? Yeah. As long as one is in an existential level of referent you can point to things and arrange the things in a sequence and say that one two three four things are in this sequence, one two three four. And we can bring that sequence of things into a physical thing juxtaposition of four and then say that these four things constitute a square. What it would be, we would have to examine the things, we would have to examine the sequence of the things but not that once we got to that point of sophistication a whole new power has come into play because it's not just the four things or the sequence of the four things, it's now the matrix made by the four which is a pattern of inter-referential unity and that pattern gives us a quintessence. Something which only consciousness can appreciate. The body cannot appreciate that. And what's more, what's difficult to swallow is that the mind also cannot appreciate that. We're used to thinking through millennia of pride that the mind is what understands and this is a severe error. It's a limitation, and leaves us high and dry specifically where transformations from form to quintessences occur.
So that one of the qualities there East and West, one of the qualities of going through a transform is to be able to relinquish control of the resulting form and let the resulting form happen and then later appreciate what has occurred. Not so abstract as it sounds because this is exactly what occurs with a work of art. The work of art is in fact an archetype of how a quintessence achieves its own form. And which we then are able to come into a new proportional relationality. The reduction of art to aesthetics is a sabotage of the mind. It's a strategy, a mental symbolic strategy meant to rope in art so that it remains within the purview of the minds expertise. This is why real artists will never talk about ideas of art. Their interest is in art, in making the works of art, not in talking about ideas of art. They could care less, because they're immune to that kind of saboteur activity of the mind. Whereas in the last hundred years the field that is least immune to it is psychology. And one of the most difficult nonsequiturs to appreciate is psychology of art. It's very very difficult to appreciate why that's a nonsequitur.
Now paired with Francis Yeats' The Art Of Memory, we had a nineteen hundred year old little treatise, little seven or eight page, in translation, manuscript called the Mind Shepherd, the Poimandres, written in Alexandria somewhere around 90 A.D., 90 of the Common Era. And it was a dialogue that was very similar to the kind of philosophic dialogues that one would run across in Plato. Plato who had written his dialogues about five hundred years before. And even that kind of phrase, five hundred years before, was very meaningful to the men and women of about 90 A.D., 90 C.E. Alexandria's in Egypt. Alexandria is in fact the center of Hellenistic Egypt. Don't think of Egypt as Islamic, there was no Islam at that time. Don't think of it as ancient pyramids because that was long gone though there was still the tail end of the imitations of that. Alexandria is a conscious city. Probably the closest analogue to Alexandria in our time, a hundred years ago would have been San Francisco. And in our time would have been like Brasilia. It was there because someone consciously planned to put it there. It didn't grow from the ground up. It didn't grow from a long history of tradition, it was made initially to be a great city. San Francisco was never a village. Every San Franciscan knows that. It was always a city. Brasilia was never a collection of huts from some tribe, it was always meant to be that vast super sonic new metropolis. Alexandria was the first planned city like this in the world. And it was planned by a particular frame of mind. Notice the frame, the four sides. Notice the form, the four quality of the form, a frame of mind. It was a frame of mind that specifically was meant to let through something from the beyond that had never been let through before. Alexandria was a ceremonial form using the size and entirety of a classic city to form a portal a threshold through which a spirit could come that was so large that man had never made a form large enough to let that spirit through. That spirit was the spirit of the planet. The spirit of the whole world. The world spirit. That the quintessence of the Earth was a world spirit that had never been freed to play like a conscious wind in the life of humanity before and Alexandria was made to be that frame. And at the very moment where that framed form was complete enough was refined enough to let the beyond through, at that very point the men and women in Alexandria lost conscious mental control over keeping track of what was happening. They didn't know. They had made the form and something had come through but what came through and how it came through they did not know. And it was only three generations later that in retrospect the wisest men and women of Alexandria came to understand that something indelible had happened. That their forerunners had been successful. That a form large enough to let the beyond of the world spirit back through, back into play. That the world spirit had always been there at play in the mysteries of nature, and that men and women always had access to the spirit of the world through the ancient mysteries, but now something new had come into play. It was not access to the world spirit through ancient mysteries, through ancient nature mysteries, but now through some quintessence of a conscious mystery. And three generations later they were trying to work out between them what came through. What was it? What happened? What effect did the world spirit have when it was released and came back into play in the world in some new way. And the earliest record that we have of this conversation of trying to figure out what had come through, what had happened, is this seven page manuscript, The Poimandres, the dialogue called The Mind Shepherd. And in it the teacher Hermes Trismegistus, the archetypal sage of ancient Greco-Egyptian antiquity is attempting in a conversation to teach a student, to convey to this student a sense of both how to complete this kind of form in oneself and to participate then with the entirety of the city that had let the beyond through, to let that beyond also come through into oneself, into the individual. And in this philosophic dialogue there is a small difference between Platonic dialogues of five hundred years before. Platonic dialogues five hundred years before were always using Socrates as a guide for someone to come to a realization in their mind about something. The philosophic dialogues of Plato are always being hosted by Socrates as a guide to help whoever he's speaking with come to understand through examining their language and what they're saying and what they're really saying and what is really meant by what they're saying, to come to the understanding that they didn't know what they were talking about. And that in each case when they would come to that particular point in the Platonic dialogue where they realized themselves that they had exhausted their cleverness or their ingenuity or their intelligence and had come to a place where they really no longer understood what they were talking about, then Socrates would come into play and place in that openness a new idea. But in the Hermetic dialogue of The Poimandres, of The Mind Shepherd, five hundred years later, the technique is to not place anything new in that openness. It's a technique of withholding something new. And one would like to ask, one imagines right away, well, what happens then. What happens when we get to the limitations of the known and we're right at the threshold of the unknown and no one gives us anything new to put in the unknown? What happens then? What happens when we face the unknown completely and nothing is posited there? And in The Poimandres we saw that the student keeps almost addictively expecting and asking Hermes to give him something new. Give me something radical even. Give me something old, whatever, give me something. And Hermes Trismegistus in this instance does not comply. And he finally says look our language has reached such an intensity, such a participation mystically with the beyond that I don't know what I could give you, because I like you am swept up with the mystery just like you are. In the dialogue, in the Hermetic dialogue he says it in a very poetic way. He says 'the cascade of mutual language has honed itself to a point to where it's like a single waterfall that sweeps both teacher and student away at the same time'. And that all that we can do, we can do it together, is to open ourselves humbly (phone rings) and wait for the phone to ring. You can see that the 1990's are not very sophisticated. You know even two hundred years from now they'll look back upon this as like Neolithic still.
The quality of facing the unknown is a peculiar situation because it has no experiential quality whatsoever. It doesn't register in experience in any way, so that there's no feeling for it at all. And the mind is very experienced, not the body, but the mind is very experienced in forms that have no feeling. What are forms that have no feeling? The mind already has identified them because it's very good at identifying them as abstract, abstractions. And so the mind jumps to a conclusion. Its conclusion is that quintessences are abstractions from the world. And so in order to enjoy, notice how gleeful the mind gets into its own shtick. In order to experience quintessences we have to aesetic repress the world. If the body has the least bit of sensitivity we need to flagellate it until it stops being sensitive, until it's numbed out completely. Because it gets in the way of our abstractions. And in this way the mind is addicted to abstractions just like the body addicted pharmacalogically to certain substances. And just like an addict of the body, a mind that's addicted in this way will sacrifice anybody and anything to get what it wants, to get no interference with its abstractions. And that's how ideological tyrannies take over tens of millions of human beings without any remorse whatsoever. So it's a very big problem. It's a huge problem. But is a problem which is not only addressable, it's solvable. But the addressing of the problem and the solution of the problem is rather subtle, it takes a little bit of getting used to. You can't drop in on it for ten minutes and drop out. That's not going to do any good. And you can have the most prized weekend seminar of all time, it won't make any difference. Because all of those activities are extraneous. They're all like trips to the spa which the mind loves, whereas the quintessence from beyond doesn't need any of those seminar spas at all. There's a phrase in a science fiction story from the early forties, the phrase was "wind between the worlds". Because the imagination that's earthbound thinks of in-between the worlds as just empty space. And when one went even further say the space between the stars. Well that's like vacuous, I mean there's nothing there right. That imagination is medieval. There are two things that the medieval imagination feared most, not the devil, no. It feared infinity and the void. It was very fearful of those, because there's no way to deal with it. With the Devil you can deal. Or you can encourage the heavenly warriors to take them on. But there's no way to deal with infinity and void. It isn't that the space between the worlds does not have any wind. In reality there's so much going on in-between worlds that it would keep, it does keep, astrophysicists busy round the clock for millennia. There's all kinds of electromagnetic phenomena including light, including sound, including color, including all kinds of invisible frequencies. It turns out that the universe is so packed with activities that it constitutes an illuminated cosmos in actual fact. We see in something like the March 1999 edition of Sky And Telescope, a photograph made of a quasar that is more than twelve billions light years away. And in all that twelve billion years of the speed of light that form carries itself through so that it can be understood, it can be analyzed, it's a standard quasar, very early example of it. Yes there is a wind between the worlds. There're many things. We mentioned, about two months ago, of how when NASA was, fifteen years ago, working on bringing the public awareness of Voyager II to some kind of crescendo, when it was passing by Neptune, NASA, JPL had them, they put out these little whistles. And you could blow this little whistle and it was tuned to the sound that the earth makes in orbit around our sun. That the sun streams out light and many other kinds of radiation, a solar wind. Very sparse in terms of this stuff, but very formative, so that the talk now is of spaceships with sails to use the solar wind. And that as the earth with its magnetic field moves around the earth and its magnetic field moving through the solar wind makes a bowshock and that the bowshock has a sound. And that one fifteen years ago could already make a whistle that allows us to hear the sound of our planet in orbit around our star. And that in fact all the planets have their own sound so that if you tool the planets of our star system with the little whistles for each one and you put those whistles together you could sound them at the same time and you would have a harmonic of the star system. You could hear it. There is such a thing as music of the spheres after all. Now there is no way that the mind could ever have imagined that abstractly.
It takes an attentiveness which is beyond normal language to do this. Normal language is already pre-conditioned by the saboteur mind to baffle any of this realization from ever happening. It's as if the mind insulates itself from learning. Resists learning on level of addict ready to sabotage anything even themselves, so that it will not happen. So that the phenomenon puts itself in a very peculiar little existential vignette. If you take a tape of this lecture or any of the lectures and play them for someone who is very intelligent that you know, very few of those people will hear anything. Not because nothing is being said, but because the abstract saboteur quality of the mind in 1999 is so universal as to be almost solid cement and no beyond is going to come through that kind of cement. Why would she. Ezra Pound once said the spirit of romance is like a beautiful woman dancing and if there is not a place for her to be herself, why would she dance for you. She'll go elsewhere. The cosmos has many venues of beautiful dancing.
The quality of disengaging the abstract saboteur quality of the mind is always a concomitant with wisdom. The simple way of saying it is that you have to unlearn before you can learn something new. But that willingness to unlearn leaves one exposed and that exposure to openness is mistaken by the abstract mind, because the mind abstracts from the only source which it really has and that is from the world. The basis of the mind is the world, is our body. And the mind in abstracting from the bodies referential ritual comportment always mis-identifies and labels an instant of complete openness as a moment of abject loneliness. So that if you could carry yourself in a very very strong yoga into samadhis that last for months, and look at this whole ecology, this whole episodic ecology of how the mind sabotages, it finally comes down to something almost childlike, almost childish. The mind is afraid to be alone. It seems too much beyond belief. And the conceptual tie to perception that this is now entering into a void, entering into infinity, leaves the abstract mind to conclude that it's alone, it's abandoned, no hope. So that one sees classically on the portal to the threshold of the beyond. I think the most popular image of this, symbol of this in our time, is William Blake. William Blake has in his last great largest illustrated illuminated work, Jerusalem. A hundred plates of illuminated language and images. And at the very beginning is a self portrait. It's William Blake with a very curious lantern, the lantern is like a symbol of the atomic structure of an atom. It's not a lamp like an old medieval lamp, but when you look at it, it has the shimmer of the shells of electron clouds. He's holding a visionary atom, a visionary atom, photon of light and he's entering into a structure. It looks like a Gothic cathedral entrance, but the Gothic cathedral entrance goes into a cave, not into a cathedral. And inscribed over the entrance is "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here". To the extent that you take some kind of hope, to that extent you project a fear. And the trick, the knack is to go in naked, nude. Not just nude of these things, but completely bare of expectations and that gives one a cleanness from fear. But that whole quality, that whole quality of not having some kind of projection means also that you do not carry an expectation of recollection with you prematurely. That the void, the infinity is not going to be a blank nothing like some kind of abstract space between the worlds. Reality already is quite full and when you go through you will come into a new quintessential new dimension of fullness. You don't have to worry about it. It's already taken care of. Long before this whole universe was made. Because it's in the nature of the real for conscious time space to be even fuller than time space is. There are more things in conscious time space than there are in a universe of things that you could pound, of things that the mind could form identifyingly. And so the quality in antiquity, that five hundred years between Plato and the Mind Shepherd dialogue, they use to call that in Greco-Egyptian antiquity, the Age of the Phoenix. That every five hundred years, there was a new phase in civilization. And that the new phase was always heralded by seeing a Phoenix bird. That the seeing of the Phoenix flying was exactly the trigger for the archetypal change of the phase. And that those five hundred years of the Phoenix were arranged in such a way that they gestalted together into a four part quality, a two thousand year period. And that this double, this paired millennium, was then given a term. And the term in antiquity was Aeon. Let's pause here and we'll come back.
We talked about many months ago of how one of the oldest journeys on record, Inanna, that when Inanna must visit her sister, her twin, Ereshkigal, who is the queen of the netherworld and Inanna is the queen of heaven. Inanna as the queen of heaven has acquired seven symbols. Like the star with its seven planets, seven spheres. Inanna's seven symbols, her scepter, her robe, etc. And progressively as she goes below the horizon into the netherworld, into her opposite's realm, she must divest herself of each and every one of these symbols. So that when she arrives at the center of the antithetical netherworld, she arrives nude and has no more of the accumulations, no more of the resonances of her divinity. And at the time that this was written, by a woman, her name was Inhay Duanna. Her father was Sargon the Great of Akkad, the maker of the Fertile Crescent Empire. And Inhay Duanna in her wisdom forty-five hundred years ago understood that at this particular moment, Inanna is unprotected. She no longer has, not only the insignia of her station, of her royalty, of her achievement, but she is divested of any protection of herself as a woman and as a person and consequently she is unprotected from death. And this experience of transgressing the minds limitations is experienced initially as a death. And yet Inanna makes that journey and she not only recovers but she recovers all of her glory. And when that story was told in Alexandria two thousand years later, it comes down to us as the Gnostic Hymn of The Robe of Glory. Somewhat changed but essentially the same story. That Sophia, when she is entrapped in this stupid world, in this world of nightmarish chaos, she is trapped in a medium that is not commensurate with her nature at all. And that her essential reality is incommensurate with this world. She will never fit. But by the same token, she will never be absorbed completely to that degree. So that she is free to the extent that she is not absorbed by this world, that she doesn't fit in this world. So there's a paradox involved. And the paradox is that the death of the other side is also a new life. And so for this reason, later wisdom made available an announcement of crossing this threshold with a note of joy. The blowing of the Shofar, the Tibetan long horns, whatever. In ancient India it was the conch shell. It is this trumpet sound. I had a friend in the Sixties, a Black artist who made this beautiful painting, and it was reds and there was this note in brilliant uranium oxide yellow. And the title of the painting was Gabriel's High C. The ultimate jazz musician in his ultimate improvisation. He blows the high C. It is the note of release. It is the millennial apocalyptic release so that death no longer exists as a thing. Death and rebirth co-exist mutually together as a complementarity. And life has a new power. Because as long as someone was limited to the sequences of things, life was limited in its powers. Life could only exercise itself in terms of things and their causal sequenciality. And Karma was the law of the realm. But with a transformation new powers are there. The Karmic plane is no longer a limitation. But to achieve that transformation, that crossing of that threshold, one can't do it from standstill. You can't make that jump from standstill. So the time honored wisdom is to get a running start. So the time honored wisdom is to go back recursively, back to your beginnings, back to your origin. And when you get a running start from your origin and you get to that threshold, you can make it. Then instead of being a teeth gritting leap of faith, it is a dancers pieroet of accomplishment. And so one is a spiritual athlete. One is in the choreography of God. It is no difficulty to do this but there is an art to doing this.
We have two new pairs of books that are coming up. The immediate pair is the illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen and Marie Louis Von France's interesting little book on Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology. Two women. And we will follow them in one months time by a pair of books by two men. One of them is Shelley in his last great work the Prometheus Unbound. And the other man is Shakespeare in his last great play The Tempest. And Shelley and Shakespeare are a fitting pair to resonantly come with Hildegard and Marie Louis Von France. Hildegard lived about eight hundred years ago. She lived in a time when almost for five hundred years you did not hear of genius women. In fact you hardly heard of anyone that had any genius, men or women. Once in his History Of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell said looking back in philosophic history it looks like a gray flat plane for centuries, with only one little pinnacle sticking up. The single person of John Scotis Eriugina. And outside of that it was mediocre for centuries. All of a sudden in the eleven hundreds, all of a sudden after the first third of the eleven hundreds, around 1130, 1140, you get an explosion of genius, and the explosion of genius is in the women. You find more women than you could count on hands and toes of first class quality and most interesting to us is Hildegard. Why? One of the best reasons for this is an account by the great historian G.J. Colton, great medieval historian. And he points out that the terror that men felt at the millennium, around the year one thousand. They were expecting God's hammer to fall on the world and it didn't and then they began to realize that they better find something to do. That this lack of a millennial action, maybe they've computed the date wrong, maybe there is something not for God to do but for men to do and out of that came the idea that 'what is there for us to do for God'? 'We must recapture the Holy Land'. And the Crusades where this millennial apocalyptic feverish thing, we've got to do something in face of this infinity, this void. And the medieval solution for the men was to go and kill other men in the name of God. And it went on and on. It wasn't one Crusade, but it was a series of military adventures like a medieval Viet Nam. And all the best a brightest of the young men were siphoned off to be exiled, to be killed, to be embeggared, to never come home, to come home even as worse problems than anything they'd ever seen. And in the lacunae women learned to run the estates, they learned to manage all the affairs of life. They learned to educate the young. And by the time of Hildegard, it was the women who were the brightest, the most educated, the most sensitive. Who kept life going. And out of that population you had a sudden explosion. There was a woman who did a study of religious retreats on the British Isles. And up until 1135 there're only three places in all of England where women could go for religious retreats, to live a quiet inner life. Thirty years later there were hundreds of such places. It was like an explosion. And Hildegard is the great example of the genius of feminine wisdom that comes out, but comes out in face of a severe reluctance. She herself writes that she was reluctant, she refused to write. She was extremely educated, she was statuesque, probably 5'6" or 7' with red hair, very stylish, very, very educated. But she got caught in this dilemma where, yes she had a lot to say, but it was in a confused mans philosophic world that she refused to be drawn into this. And as her refusal built this kind of energy that when it was released, it explosively released. That she had the capacity to flow, her intelligence, her feeling. That her feeling could flow through her intelligence into vision. She had this capacity. Not only intelligent, she was a, what we would call colloquially, a mystical genius. Visions. Her whole book of Divine works are visions, ten visions. She uses the term vision all the time, just like we would use the term vision. A differential consciousness that flows through a transformational threshold, and that transformational threshold is at the far edge of the mind. Why do we not find many men who can do this? Because their minds were so abstractly clever by that time that the baffles almost impeded any flow of intelligent feeling to get through and to make a differential conscious vision. But Hildegard could do this. Yet she, having this capacity, went through a long phase where she refused to do this. And so the first thing that came out when there was the explosive release. She wrote two books which were about nonsense. She wrote a book which the title in Latin Lingua Ignota. Unknown language. It was a book that had definitions of nine hundred made up words. A glossary, a huge glossary. It was like a paradoxical attack on the scholastic male logical habit of defining your terms. So powerful was the indent of the nine hundred words of Hildegard of Bingen, that you find a resonance hundreds of years later in one of the Renaissance's great young heroes, Pico Della Mirandola, who tacked up nine hundred theses that he would argue anybody in the world on. Of course her was invited by the Pope of the time to come to Rome and discuss these theses, some of them are Heretical. Hildegard's archetypal nine hundred words, she used to use those words later on in her mystical writings, and work them in. But she had another book written at the same time, Literati, Literae Ignatae, unknown writing. So unknown language and unknown writing. In the unknown writing, she made up her own alphabet, twenty-three character alphabet. So she had her own alphabet and her own glossary and on that basis, she could speak, she would write. Because she had gone all the way back to her origin. She had her own personal alphabet. She had her own personal dictionary. And out of this she spoke. And as she spoke, her mystical, what can we call it, the theological term is glossolalia. That's sort of like a cop out. The psychological term is gibberish. And that also begs the question, because what happens when babies are speaking gibberish? Is they're learning to use the muscles that will end up in speech. But not only the muscles, they're learning to modulate their breath. They're breathing with the musculature so that the sounds modulated by an incredibly controlled breath control go with the movements of the larynx and the tongue and so forth so that one can speak. We talked about, several months ago, about how in examining the ancient skeletal structures of the forerunners of Homo Sapiens there was a noticeable change in development from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens. And one of the noticeable changes, is not so much in brain size. In fact Homo Sapiens Sapiens has somewhat less of an average brain size than Homo Sapiens Neanderthals. Neanderthals had a little bit more brain than we do. But what our species has more than them, and almost like the term, I think it's Quantum Jump, from the previous species, is that this thoracic area of the spinal column is much thicker and carries much more spinal gray matter. Why? The thoracic region governs only one thing and that's breathing. It means (It took a woman to figure this out), it means than our species, by having sever orders of better breath control had come into a need for that in evolutionary terms because we'd learned to speak. Because in order to speak you have to modulate your breath some sixty, seventy times per second in order to enunciate vowels and consonants and make words. So when babies are speaking gibberish, it's an exercise preparatory to their being able to speak. And so the Lingua Ignota and Literae Ignotae of Hildegard of Bingen was of a celestial baby. Somebody born into a Cosmos who was learning to speak that language. So she learned to speak very well.
But paired with Hildegard of Bingen's illuminations, Marie Louis Von France, her great little book on 'Projection And Recollection In Jung's Psychology'. And we use it here not to be Jungian but to point up a lot of limitations. But Marie Louis Von France is excellent because she is extremely refined, especially because she paid more attention than anybody to fairy tales. In the whole stable of Jungian greats, Marie Louis Von France is the best at understanding and appreciating fairy tales. That fairy tales are particularly different from myths. Because fairy tales take place in a language sphere that includes consciousness. Myths, as we have seen, we took twelve lectures on it, myths are a phase in the integral cycle. Whereas fairy tales are in the Vision. Fairy tales belong to Vision not to Myth. And it takes a lot to be able to tell fairy tales. Fairy tales, or wisdom stories. If you remember we told, I think it was about three or four months ago, sort of the archetypal little wisdom fairy tale, one of the Mullah Nastrodine stories. About how he came, Mullah Nastrodine comes before this audience, and he asks them 'do you know what I'm going to say'? And they shake their heads 'no Mullah, we don't'. And he gets up and he leaves. 'There's no use in me telling you if you don't know what I'm going to say'. And they bring him back and immediately he starts his little wisdom discourse, he says the very same thing, 'do you know what I'm going to say'? And they say 'yes Mullah, we do'. And of course he leaves. He says 'well there's no need for me to tell you'. They grab him out, they beseech him, there're various ways in the Middle East to beseech you, shekels put in your. . . . . .He comes back and doesn't even sit, he waits, they quiet down, he says 'do you know what I'm going to say'? And meantime they've been very clever and a spokesperson stand up and says ' Mullah, some of do and some of us don't'. And he says 'well those who know will tell those who don't know', and he leaves. That's it. So the threshold, you can see is not something morose but it's something so unbelievable that you would die laughing. That's why the Shofar is blown. To alert you. Maimonides once said the highest form of charity is that no one knows who gave and no one knows who received. The giving simply occurs. No one on either end knows. And on that level that charity is God's work. It's not man's work. You didn't do this, nor did you do this just for them. It's that it occurs and no ones keeping a ledger, no ones keeping a book.
So a fairy tale is one of the Visionary forms. Tolkein says it best in his little essay on fairy tales. He says it seems that the conditions become impossible and exactly at the moment where you realize that they're impossible a new possibility occurs. And he says that that, at that moment, he says the English language is so beggared that it doesn't even have a word for that moment. And so he made up a word. He said lets call that moment a Happy Catastrophe. And he used the Greek syllable for happy, EU. So he called this a Eucatastrophe. It's a catastrophe of happiness. And so he wrote the largest fairy tale in world history "Lord Of The Rings". Which gets more and more gloomy and pianissimo until you can hardly stand it and then it changes. The Ring is destroyed and everything changes. Everything changes because a possibility that did not exist before now comes into play and is the major dimension of this different world. Yeah. It's like that.
So that the neurological basis for psychology, even a hundred years ago was already matured. One of the little writings by Freud, a project for Scientific Psychology where he points out that there are two properties that occur in neurons. One yes is that they fire, they convey energy. And Freud at that time was very careful to say that this is a biochemical energy, not just simply an electrical energy. One of the properties of the neuron is yes that it does fire. Another is that it doesn't fire. So that the energy, instead of being communicated, instead of being conveyed, collects. So that neurons have a double function, they store and they transmit. And do you recognize, this is very simple, it's a binary isn't it. It's stillness and movement. It's a version, in fact of Tao and Te. And the genius of Freud, lets face it, he was a very smart character. Debilitated by having to grow up in Vienna, of that age. Why debilitated? Because the quality that was there in Vienna of genius was in the heritage of a musical consciousness which if you didn't have access to, you really didn't get the multidimensional quality that was there. In fact the way to understand Freud's Vienna is not to read Freud, but to read his compatriot Vitkenstein. And it's in Vitkenstein that you find someone who refuses any longer to talk about it because he knows enough to know that we're not ever going to say anything that's meaningful. His last book before he died, the "Philosophical Investigations", Vitkenstein counters what in his Cambridge youth had been an efflorescence of philosophic logical genius. He had written the most comprehensive philosophic logical tract. In fact it was called "Tractatus Logical Philosophicus". The first sentence is "The world is everything that is the case". How arrogant can you get? This was the time when Vitkenstein was a student at Cambridge and he was one of the first guys to get a motorcycle. Army fatigue clothes - can you imagine this back [be-uh] the first world war - I mean it's like a T.E. Lawrence or something. He once roared up to Bertrand Russell's place. Russell was a professor there at Cambridge. He roared up in the middle of the night - pounded - butler let him in - Lord Russell you see, and he said 'I've got something to tell you, I've discovered something about language'. And Russell, of course, had him thrown out. Vitkenstein, later in the "Philosophic Investigations", at the end of a long mature career writes "whereupon a man cannot speak, therefore must he remain silent". He had learned the value of silence. Don't pretend that you know. Don't keep spieling. Be smart enough to know that your smart's in here. It goes to this extent, that's as far as it goes. It's very difficult, you have to be very sophisticated to find the limit of the extent of the city of your control. And amazingly one finds that the sky scrapers and city cityscape and the suburbs finally, though huge and massive and extensive, they finally run out. And one can count whether in a dream vision or in a waking seeing that beyond this is open ground. You never populated that. That's not only terra incognita, but no one knows if it's even terra. It's the beyond. And so to come into possession of enough sensitivity to know when to quit. We say in the educational syllabus that the last stage of integration is acceptance. That at that point one accepts. Whatever comes or doesn't come after that is a gift. That consciousness is a gift. Even the Minoan Mycenean archetype of Greek Mythology, which we know now is just such a small slice of world mythology, but even there where does the gift of that spark of Divine fire come from? Prometheus steals it from the Gods and gives it to man. It's a gift. That spark of consciousness, though it is unique, has a curious conscious-time-space property. That it has infinite brothers and sisters everywhere. That though it's unique, it also has, is a part of a whole population. An infinite population of unique sparks which can be collected, which come together. Not because someone collects them but because they come together by themselves. That mathematically if you have the fractal equation, you can run any chaotic situation and if you run it long enough, the old double attractor infinity sign, the old Hermetic Caduceus comes back into play and you get this inherent pattern that's there even in chaos. No one has to put it there, it is there. Jung himself was much beyond Jung the psychologist. When he would leave the realm of his capacity to understand and control, he would go to Bollingen on the side of the lake and chop wood. And carved a stone, put it in the center of his courtyard garden. Put the genius, his genius spirit on that stone and then he realized that the door needed to have its insignia. So he put his version over the door. "Called or not, God will be there". So he would never forget it as a man. So when he would come into his own door, his own lakeside retreat place, he would see his own words right there, "called or not", it's not contingent upon you. You're indelibly important, but your indelible importance is in being open, not in grabbing it. But the mind is such a fantastic saboteur. It comes down to this almost CIA level where it projects a final image. It says well the open mind is like a mirror. What mirror? The old Zen Master Hui Neg addressed this specifically in his enlightenment verse. The head monk wrote this beautiful quatrain in order to get the robe and bowl from Tai Tsu the fifth patriarch. And everybody in the monastery thought this is it. His verse ended with the couplet "the mind is a perfect mirror where no dust can collect". Marie Louis Von France uses the very same language in the book later on, she says the mind is a mirror. But Hui Neg scrawled underneath, he was the kitchen boy, he wasn't even a monk. But he was a world class unbelievable genius. He was just seventeen years old. He scrawled on the wall underneath it, "the mind has no mirrorness, so where is there anyplace for dust to collect". And early in the morning, somebody saw this scrawl on the wall and ran to Tai Tsu and said, you know graffiti. And Tai Tsu came out and being the fifth patriarch he looked at it, traced down right away, found the kitchen boy, hustled him in just before breakfast, gave him the robe and the bowl and said you better clear out. Why? Because these symbolic hot shots will kill you. You're not in the pecking order of their arrogant importance. You're not even on the list of would be Zen masters. They're going to ignore you but if they can't ignore you, they'll for sure do you in. So he left. He left for decades. It was only later in life that things came together and he became the sixth patriarch.
But the wisdom point of the story is not that Hui Neg became the sixth patriarch, it's that there is no seventh patriarch. Well then what was the transmission? The transmission is recorded completely. The entire sermon, the sermon, the platform sermon of the sixth patriarch is recorded completely. Philip Yampalsky did a very good translation for Columbia. When it begins it says that the honorable, by now old Hui Neg, the sixth patriarch ascended the high seat in the great temple among assemble hundreds and hundreds of sophisticated enlightened Chinese. He sat, he arranged his robes and folded them and put one hand where it should be and with the other began and the first word out of his mouth is "friends. . . . . . . . please quiet your minds". And in that platform Sutra he broadcasts the enlightenment robe and bowl symboled tradition that then goes to anyone who will ever come to it by themselves so that anyone, whoever does come to it, they, you are the seventh patriarch. So he takes a lineage that goes through an electric wire and he hooks the electric wire up to a radio and then broadcasts it so that anybody, whoever hears it, is next. He takes it into differential consciousness, out of the integral sequence where it was trapped. Because as long as it's in that integral sequence it's on level of myth and its ultimate destination is the mind. But when it's able to be broadcast through the resistance of the mind it goes into the personal cosmos which is infinite. And we need to come back to this next week. Thanks.