Vision 6
Presented on: Saturday, February 6, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come today to Symbols Six. (correction) Vision Six. When we come to the middle of a sequence we're always interested to see how there's going to be a shift in the quality of the way in which we're conceiving what we're doing. The first six presentations of a sequence look forward to the development so they have a dynamic quality. The second half of a sequence, lecture seven through twelve, have a different approach generally. Instead of looking dynamically forward, they begin to recursively look back and weave in. To weave in what we've developed, and as that re-weaving or that weaving happens, the dynamic acquire a different tone and in classical times that tone was called energy. so that when we talk today, if we use the English term power or we use the term force, we have actually scrunched together two very distinct qualities, dynamic and energy. In Greek dynamic is dynamus and energy is energia. That's where we get the words from. Dynamus in the original Greek sense of the vocabulary was the kind of force that you have that especially shows itself in two very widely different qualities of process. To the Greeks dynamus was the force that's there in nature but it is also the force that is there in history. So that later on when we do history, when we take a look at this phase of consciousness known as history, and we'll find that it's extremely difficult to appreciate the process, the dynamus of history. In fact it is the sabotage central of our whole species, especially the last two hundred years. We have not been able to deal with history. And consequently history is drowning us. But to the Greeks dynamus meant a force which is in nature so that we have the term in physics, thermo-dynamics. Thermo-dynamics is the way in which the force of the way in which nature moves, happens. And thermo-dynamics is cut and dried dynamics whereas history, the dynamus of history, the dynamics of history is anything but cut and dried. It's problematical. The other term for power in Greek, energia. Energy was always a collected force that's in a process that belongs to the Gods. The Gods have energy. Man thinks he has power but that's an appearance, that's an illusion. God has power. The Gods have power. So the Gods have energia, and it is by a gift of God, by a gift of the Gods that man has any energy to deal with at all. And so that kind of energy is different from the dynamics of nature, different from the dynamus of history, it is the energy of the Gods and it largely is operative in the realm that we know called Mythology. The process of myth has energy. Quite different from, could never be confused with the kind of force, the kind of power that thermo-dynamics have. And also very antithetical to history. Myth is very antithetical to history. So that someone who prides themselves on being accomplished in terms of handling history, scoffs at someone who is still working from the mythic level. Whereas to someone who is very proud of the way in which they command the energies of myth is very suspect of someone who is trying to deal historically. Vision is very close to myth in that its power comes from energia and not from dynamus. And when you arrange in a kind of, not so much a bar of measurement, but in a circle. When you arrange in a circle these four types of movement, nature, myth, vision and history. Like four fundamental processes that happen in reality. The outer two work dynamically, the inner two work energetically. So that one gets very interested, on this kind of a schemata, once it's put in this kind of terms. One would like to know if myth and vision, if their power works by energy rather than dynamus, instead of being dynamic like thermo-dynamics or like dynamic in history, well then vision and myth are very similar being energy processes, what's the difference between them. And immediately how can you tell between them, what's between them, and immediately you can see that the design of the phases of our education make it apparent that what is in-between myth and vision are symbols. So perhaps this lecture is Symbols Six after all. That's tricky huh. It's unfair.
So that when we try to puzzle out for ourselves if we're working from a mythic energy, we try to imagine. We try to imagine what is going on. Now what would symbols be? We try to use our imagination. And it's a very big error to think that vision, though it's related to myth, though both are forms of energia, that imagination works in vision. What works in vision is memory. And memory is radically different from imagination. The ancient world, the really classic high powered ancient world like the classical Greeks who came to understand dynamus and energia and somewhat how they worked, were baffled by this, they could never understand this, and because they could never completely, properly, perfectly, accurately, exactly understand this, the people that learned from them never got educated in the right way. And the primary people who learned from them were the Romans. And the Romans got it all wrong. In fact the Romans just simply bought Greek culture wholesale and put it into their forms without ever understanding what it was. They like swallowed the whole meal in one gulp and they never understood that they had compounded an ignorance which the Greeks had. None of the classical civilizations in the ancient world ever understood the difference between imagination and memory, the difference between myth and vision. Because none of them had a presence of mind accurate enough to balance two great energies, two great powers. The power of imagination which is the power of language and the power of vision which is also the power of language but different. In ancient times when it was first being talked about by just a few people and because it was just a few people in quiet guarded secret venues, like super intelligent scribes of some royal king who realized that a written language was somehow different from a spoken language. And that a myth is largely something that you tell orally, but a vision is something that you inscribe, that you write down. And one of the first great visions, as we have seen, one of the first great visions in the classical antiquity that was written down and became archetypal was the vision of Ezekiel, about twenty-five hundred, twenty-six hundred years ago. So that anyone looking to try to find an early example of a visionary language, that is to say a written language, which requires memory for its energies to be constellated eventually looks to trace back, well where does this come from where does that come from, and the vision of Ezekiel is one of the earliest if not the earliest complete written vision. And when you come to, as we have mentioned several times, when you come to the vision of Ezekiel you'll find that there is a curious quality that the Divine Image in Ezekiel, the image of God in Ezekiel is not at all a simple image but is complex. Is no image of some old man with flowing white beard and white hair, there's no image of that. God is not that. The oral injunctions early on in that tradition were not to make an image of God at all. Make not image. The very point of the Mosaic law was all graven images are profane. Why are they profane? They are profane because they put God into a mythic phase and this is below the capacities of man because man's capacities do not stop with mythic phases. Man's capacities in a natural way go on to symbols, to the mind. And if man is developed enough to have a symbolic mind, why would you stuff God into an inferior phase like myth. And it became a great problem. Moses, as you might know, had a great problem getting this across to his population. By the time of Ezekiel, which is some seven hundred years later, when Ezekiel inscribes his vision, he's told to write this down. He's told to inscribe this in a book. And it is profound because one understands that visions belong in books. You don't tell a vision like you tell a myth. Myths do not belong in books, myths are naturally occurring when a story teller tells the story. Myths are alive in an oral mode whereas visions are alive in a written mode. Now you can take a written vision and read it out loud, but what you're doing is a completely different process from speaking Mythically. One is then reading out the vision. Now this whole problem becomes exacerbated in antiquity because for lack of any kind of language, nobody had any language. No one had any way to talk about these things because if you were born into and grew up in and matured in a tradition, any tradition, you never ran across these problems. Because the traditions took care of everything. They were complete cycles. They had the rituals, they had the myths and they had the symbols all done for you. That's what made it a tradition. The only time that anyone would run against this is if you came to be matured in two or more different traditions at the same time. Then you had a problem because then you couldn't just naturally accept the tradition. What happened naturally is you began to question that tradition on this point or this tradition on that point. And so peoples who came into contact with at least two, maybe a variety of different traditions, wide ranging trading people, were always the first people to get it that visionary language has an energy similar to myth but radically different from it. What's the difference? The difference is that in myths the stories set models for you. You fit into those stories, you have to fit yourself in those stories. This is the model, this is how things are done and you have to put your life into sync with that. Whereas in vision, the whole thing is, is to recognize that the modeling is insufficient for the scope that you now have. You need a different kind of form. And the first thing that occurs in vision, in a visionary energy, is that there is no form anywhere capable of housing this new kind of energy. And so a vision is always a plaintive cry for a new form. We need a new form because we have new wine and we can't put it into old forms. That the energies of vision are always new, they're always radically new they have never been seen before and they require a new form that was never there before so there's a creative aspect about vision which is radically different from tradition. And the new forms that come out of vision are the forms of art. And all forms of art are forms which the artist makes, not by staying within mythic stories, but by making their own individual life path which leads to a person who is uniquely themselves and they then in that unique conscious created artistic form of their person are able to hold the energies of the vision. So that vision is tied up with person making, whereas myths are tied up with tradition making. A good mythology keeps the tradition alive, doesn't jeopardize it. Whereas every individual, every existential transformed person is always unique. They've come out of visionary energies. And to not know that is especially there because one mistakes imagination for memory, carries the old tried and true ways of using imagination sloppily over into vision and tries to make vision another form of imagination. And this is structurally a regression, because it doesn't happen. It just simply doesn't happen. And because it doesn't happen one is always a little squeamish about this and so we have to cover up the fact that it's not happening by going back even further to another objectivity, this time to ritual. So that these imagination processes are going to work in vision because we're going to do the rituals and we're gonna insure that they're well founded and god dammit they're going to work. And this is the fundamental atomic basis of all tyranny. And its time is over. Because this planet has suffered enough and this population of people are going to be free.
But this problem which was glimpsed in antiquity. The early trading peoples that you look to you find, for instance in north central Asia Minor, not in Iran proper but over the border to where now you would find Uzbekistan and places like that, the early Irani people of that venue were traders who traded along a route that went all the way from where pre-Samarkan was, all the way into what is today China. So their caravan routes went all the way from the Amugdaria River, all the way into China to were the Yang Tse River makes it great curves. And the Hwang Ho, the Yellow River makes it great curves. Another kind of early trading people, in India the trading people were always of an ilk, they come down to us as the Gypsies, the Romany Peoples. But in the Middle East, the trading people were the early Hebrews, the Jews. Because they ran the caravan routes that went from the Persian Gulf, up the Euphrates River and over down to the Mediterranean Sea. So that you find again, here are peoples who become exposed to multiple traditions and over long generations become acclimatized to the idea that it's done differently in different traditions and because of this juxtaposition, sometimes it's called in the later developments, gathering the sparks of light back into the single flame. So like the ancient Irani's, like the Medieval Romanies, the classical Jews understood that there were at least two major traditional ways to handle things. And one of the problems that was handed to the Jews that was not handed to any of the other caravan groups is that the two qualities, the two traditions that they had were Mythically opposite until they were resolved in a very special way. Because the Persian Gulf ethos, that cultural ethos, had a feminine quality to it, the mother. Whereas at the other end of the caravan route, the ethos was that of the father. The Egyptian ethos is that of a masculine patriarchal nature whereas the ancient Persian quality is that of the all inclusive mother. The Great Mother. Now if you get caught in a ping pong game between the Great Mother and the unrelenting Father, there's nothing but stress, there is nothing but hardship, there only an incommensurate, an incommensurality that cannot be dismissed because you're not going to get rid of either and so one lives in a shudder of incommensurates. And yet there is a way to resolve because the mother and the father, the Great Mother and the unrelenting Father resolve, they come together, they reconcile if there is a child. If there is a marriage. If there is a marriage and a shared life and children, then it begins to work.
Now when you come to the vision of Ezekiel, it's not a simple image because an image won't do. It wouldn't have done for at least seven hundred years. But the vision of Ezekiel sees that God is a symbol that has a constellation of four distinct qualities that are somehow brought together in a set, we would call today a set or a matrix. And that these four qualities are so powerful so potent because they are opposites of each other. But rather than there being a pair of opposites there are a pair of pairs where the opposites are transposed so that in the set of four you get a kind of complex wholeness that was never possible before. And so powerful is the vision of Ezekiel that six hundred plus years later, when the Christians looked to get a written symbol for their understanding of god they choose the same quaternary as in the vision of Ezekiel. The four authors of the four gospels in the Christian New Testament are a differential enlarged form of the vision of god in Ezekiel's vision. There's a lion, there's an ox, there's an eagle, there's a man. And when you look at high medieval powerful Christian symbols of the new testament you find, like in the book of Kels you find whole illustrated pages that show these four symbols being a set. You see the great eagle of St. John, you see all of the lion of St. Mark, you see these four, these four symbols brought together as a complex quaternary symbol and it all goes back thousands of years by that time to Ezekiel's vision. He was the first one to have it. No one saw that before. It was new.
So that a visionary energy is radically different and one of the qualities that we can say about it is that a visionary energy has a differential consciousness which requires being able to analyze images rather than just tell their stories. So that if someone is just repeating the stories, the books that surface the new story of the universe or something like that, it completely misses the point. It misses the point of even twenty-five hundred years ago, much less this crucial transformation. Because it is in symbols in-between mythic language and visionary language there's a paired quality to symbols so that right at the center of the symbolic objectivity, what is the symbolic objectivity? The mind. What's the ritual objectivity? The body. At the center of the mind is a transformation that goes from still working in the mythic energy to now working in the visionary energy. And yes they're both energies but they're radically different so that that transformation in the center of the mind is THE transformation. And so difficult is that that only very rare individuals were ever able to do this by themselves. It's just one in a million or one in ten million, one in a hundred million, who knows, it's a trace element. Never the less, so powerful were the results, so striking were the benefits, so charismatic were the effects, that there was a demand. We need to have some way to help us do this and that's where transforms were made, symbol transforms. And the title of Vision Six today is Symbol Transform. Yeah it is Vision Six instead of Symbol Six, for sure.
A transform is an operative symbol that works in the energies of differential consciousness. So that a symbol transform is all about differentiation. And the first form that is achieved in differential consciousness, the first stable state in reality is that of a person. The artist of their own life. Virginia Satyr once had a book entitled "The Art Of Person Making", "People Making". It's a very beautiful title.
The whole art of alchemy was all about transforming elements from the body through traditional mental objectivities of the imagination into a radically new form. And the Person, as we will see when we get to art, after Vision we do twelve lectures on Art. We'll see that the Person as a differential form is not a static thereness. The body tends to have a thereness to it. The mind eventually when it's really refined has a thereness to it. The Romans who always seem to try to find the right word for this said of a mature person that they had Grav Aetas. That they were mature in the sense that you had to watch out because they would sue you, something like that. But to think that the person is a static form like the body or even the mind is a very great error. Because the person is a differential form not an integral form at all. In fact someone who is able to display integral imaginative qualities is duping themselves and others. Is the very basis of the ego. The ego is a ritual mask parading itself as a differential person. And because it's able to extend its demands and its needs to everything the ego mistakes itself for who you really are and it stakes everything on the concept, on the ideological concept of identity. And everyone is encouraged to seek for your identity. Whereas thirty-three hundred years ago, Moses already said forget about identity when you're getting down to reality. If there's a graven image for it, that ain't it. That's a sure sign of the golden calf. You're not in the mode, you're not even in the range where the actuality can come into play, can come into reality. You're dealing with something that's a graven image. And an identity is always a graven image. So then the first question that comes up, well where does that leave us? It leaves us in a very deep quandary, because it's not just left in that simplistic level it's raised to an even more insidious level. We're told, well it isn't the ego it's the Self. That is one can get to the Self which is at the center of the mind then that's going to be it, that's a really powerful high energy. Instead of being like a dynamic center like the ego, which O.K., it wasn't all that good it did some really stupid bad things, but now the Self is going to be better. Well the Self is more insidious than the ego. There's a phrase for it from the U.S. Army and I'm not going to utter it publicly. It's phrase meaning absolute certainty that this is not it. There's a quality of super identity to the Self which is pernicious and is a real problem. And the Greeks had such a problem with it that they never got it right for centuries. The Romans never ever got it right. They never learned. To this day the Roman mind tradition is frozen in a super identification of Self which they suppose to be God and it is a projection of a very insidious kind of naivete.
We have two texts which focus for us this situation, this problem. One of them is Hildegard of Bingen who lived about eight-hundred years ago. And the other is Marie Louis Von France who was a contemporary of ours, died just a few years ago, "Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology". It's not so much that both or either have the answer. It would be a simplistic mis-identification, a kind of a falling for the pernicious expectation to look for an answer. They are not the answer at all, there is no answer. There is something better than an answer. There is a transformation which so radically matures questions that questions become fields of inquiry rather do or die identification seeking answer crusades. And once someone has matured to the point of being able to differentially consciously explore a whole field of inquiry, the need to match up this question with that answer is immediately seen as a false identification. In fact in logic it's called an equivocation. To find the only true answer for the only accurate question, if one could ever do that, would be to discover a perfect equivocation. The logical atomic unit of that kind of perfected identity is A = A. Where does that get you. O.K. A = A, what now? What about everything else. Are you going to take A = A as some kind of molecular little cudgel, and try to stamp it on every molecule in the universe so that everything will be an A = A? You can see it's a fool's gold game that becomes madness, absolute stupidity actually. And yet that's there at the operative level of the civilization which has died in our lifetime and is lying there rotting. And no one is making something new because they're still numbed out because they can't find some identity. Let's take a break and let's come back.
BREAK
Let's review for just a second. A year ago when we started in Nature, for the first seven or eight presentations, we would ask the question why are we here? What are we doing here? What is there that is going on here that we should give up so many other possibilities and come here. The version of the question that we could ask from the standpoint of Vision Six, if not even Symbol Six is what can we not do here. Because one of the qualities of consciousness is that it opens up possibilities. In the universe there definitely are mysteries, but the mysteries become masked by existence. Any thing that occurs existentially masks the mystery of its reality. So that all you see is the appearance, the surface of it. All you see are the existential things, the objects. And it's true that one can become more focused so that you can learn to see smaller and smaller objects, but they're always objects and the objective body level is that of Ritual. So existence is already a ritual. And it's very stable. Ritual bodily existence is very stable but it is not permanent. One of the most recent figures that astrophysics came up with is the life span of a proton. The most stable thing in existence is the proton. And eventually after one point six, with thirty one zeros after it, years, protons wink out of existence. Never mind where to they go, or more interestingly, where do they come from, but just to know that all things are impermanent is amazing, that existence is not the arbiter of the real. That existentiality, that ritual is not the foundation. What's the foundation then? The foundation is nature and not ritual. The foundation is a zero based mystery and not a unitary based existence. So that now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are very refined fellow beings who have come to see that you can't start with one, you have to start with the zeros. The greatest computer programmer of all time, he was a Dutchman named Dijkstra, Edsger Dijkstra. His great book, "A Discipline Of Programming", written already more than a generation ago, starts with chapter O. Entitled 'Executional Abstraction'. The most recent chapter O that I care to show you is in this book which is 1997, Cambridge University Press, it's a math book "On Fourier Series and Integral Transforms", which is what we're talking about today, and it begins with chapter O. 'Notation and Terminology'. It's as simple as Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu would never have been remembered at all, much less be one of the high points of human consciousness, if he had not started the Tao Te Ching with Tao. And in fact there's an interesting situations because some tombs were unearthed in China. Tombs that went back to like the two hundreds B.C., and in the manuscript of the Tao Te Ching, in those Hmong Wa Twe tombs, the two sections of the Tao Te Ching were reversed. They began with Te. And only after all the chapters on Te, then there were the chapters on Tao. And it takes a little bit of learning, a little bit of history to recognize that at the time that those tombs were dug there was a deep inversion of Chinese civilization, that resulted in fact in China being unified under one man, Chin Hwang Tee, from whom they take their name, Chinese, from Chin Hwan Tee. He's the one that built the Great Wall Of China. He liked building walls and saying 'this is mine, and what's yours is negotiable'. That era of China reversed Tao and Te. Whereas the natural order that was there for Lao Tzu is that Tao, zero comes first. You start with the zeros and then after acclimating yourself to non-things do you have a context that will not blur for you the ones that occur, because they have a space within which to occur. Because anytime you have a form, that form to be distinct has to have a context of not this form in order to be seen. So that form and background are a constant complementarity, otherwise vision, even on level of perception, doesn't work. You can't see any thing in this universe until you acclimate yourself to the space before seeing thing. That's why a language like I use is so difficult to hear at first, because it has a lot of space in it. And part of the reason for this is not only to make sure that the zeros, not only come first, but are the context for any kind of existentiality that one could focus on. So that instead of seeing this thing and only this thing, and that these two things when they're connected, that that's real, that's just falling for the game of appearance. That's no arbitration principle to live by at all. That's on level of like causality, and yet causality is based on something even more perniciously identificationable and that is on the basis of determinism. That everything is determined and this is the way that it is, it will never be any other way, and you better learn how it is, and we will tell you when you give us due obedience. Those, that's the kind of technique of an ideology. All tyrannies work with that kind of scenario. If you want to get anything done, you come to us and we'll show you how it's done. And it doesn't matter whether it's priests or lawyers, it's the same kind of scam, or anything in between. The archetypal modern magus of that whole deterministic way in which causality became the tradition of mind imposing itself on nature and babies and everything else, including the spectacular cosmos, comes in the form of a French Savant, a mathematician, no less, named La Place. We have Pierre Simon Marquis de La Place, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities". It's about a hundred fifty pages. This was the introductory chapter to a tome that was almost seven hundred pages, on the way in which mathematics had come into possession of something really profound, universal, permanent and that man had better grow up. La Place gave those lectures originally in 1795. Now what do you think was happening in France, in Paris of 1795? Yeah, the French Revolution. One of the most telling hours of the French Revolution is that they began getting rid of the calendar and they dated everything beginning with the year 1. Now if they began with the year 0, they might have had a chance. But by dating it starting with year 1, by having a La Placian, deterministic, mathematical arrogance, they laid the seed for someone who took advantage of that, who said 'all right, we need a beginning 1, so I will be the beginning 1'. He called himself First Counsel, he never called himself Napoleon. He always called himself First Counsel. And he did it because that's the way Augustus Caesar did it founding the Roman Empire. Augustus was never the Emperor, he was always the Principate, the Principle, he was always the first. 'You may think anything you want, after you hear me first. And after you hear me you can decide for yourself what you are going to say'. So this me firstism is egotism blown up to the level of Self and projected as if it's some archetypal universal truth and all it is is a large version, a very large version of ignorance. One of the most startling qualities that early Vedic India came to, they had come into possession, the Aryans who had come in from Central Asia, from that Samarkan to the Yellow River Caravan Route, had come over the Hindu Kush and came into Northern India about 1500 B.C., carrying with them the triumphal songs of the Rig Veda, and they re-arranged the Rig Veda to make sure that it set up the cast system and all of the traditions and that they had a very strong Vedic system by which to live. There was a tail end of that whole system, and that is a man had a chance, had a choice, when he finished with all of the phases of life, when he had been a child and he had been a husband and housekeeper, had been a merchant or a Brahman or a warrior or whatever, and got to be old enough, the tradition didn't cover really old age. When you had lived long enough, you lived beyond the tradition reach of the Vedic rules and so you had free time. You had retirement time. And so these old men who didn't belong anymore, there was no place in the tradition for them, went off to the mountains to die. And of course some of them didn't die right away. They had nothing to do except to reconsider for years on end, in the quiet of the Himalayas, what was this all about. How can I still be here when I have gone through all the phases of traditional reality and I'm supposed to be finished and yet I'm still here. What in the world is going on. And they discovered that something outside of that world was going on. That there was more to reality than what the tradition covered. And those old codgers became the teachers of something beyond what the system offered and held and protected and that beyondness became written down as the Upanishads. And Upanishadic India, after several hundred years, about four hundred years, all the time from Shakespeare to us. After about four hundred years of this there were vicissitudes, invasions and combat and so forth where not only old men but also younger men who were disenfranchised, they had no place to be, they went to learn. And women went to learn. And it became a population of men and women, after four hundred years, through all the vicissitudes of what happens, they became a population of wise people who understood that something radical was true about reality and was not operative in the Vedic system at all. And finally there came along some really special Yogi who made a breakthrough. He got it, what it was. And we call him, historically, The Buddha. The enlightened one. The enlightened in the sense that he said through about seventeen thousand sermons, in amazing variety of ways, nothing is permanent. Everything is a composition. And if you become very good at analyzing the composition, you can come to the point to where you can analyze the composition perfectly and that when all of the elements of the composition are together, something else is there, and when all the elements of the composition are taken away something else is still there. So that even though all things must pass, all things must pass, all things are composites including the Self. Not the ego. That's easy to see that that's a composite, that that's more or less phony. A little humility will show you that. A baby that needs to be fed will show you that. But when it's new it takes a Buddha to show that the Self also is a composition and that when it goes, it goes and no elements of it are left. No traces whatsoever. But the curious truth of that is that there are not even any little wispy dust particles anywhere in the universe because it never was anything in the first place but an artifact of a composition. The ego is a mask, but the Self is an artifact of the composition of the mind. And both of them are integral forms that pass. Whereas something else which is not a thing, which is completely beyond their reach persists. But not, does not persist as existence, on the ritual level, on the body level, does not persist in the mind as an artifact of composition, but occurs, the best that the Buddha said at his time, because this was radical, radical. He said it's better not to talk about that now because that's on the other shore. Don't worry about what that is, worry about being jailed, trapped, imprisoned in ignorance which is an artifact of a composition, and that the composition has a known number of phases. Though they're called by different names of different languages, these phases always occur and they always occur in a linked chain of causality. The Sanskrit word for it is Praditia Samudpaia, the chain of linked causation, of dependent causation. So the Buddha was the first analytical Yoga to be able to see through determinism. To see that there is no way that that could be real, that it only works in an episodic limited appearance way and that once those conditions are widened or deepened or raised, just a little bit beyond the tolerances that the crafted composition is made with, all of that falls apart. And falls apart in such a way that there's no trace of it left whatsoever. And that this twelve part, this twelve phase chain of dependent causation is the very archetype of the hubris, of the the pride, of the arrogance of power in this world. And someone who has gone through that several million times gets the feel that these compositions of twelves are very reminiscent of eachother. Let's take something secular and harmless like the twelve months of the year. Are the twelve months of the year, is that what time is? On what planet are you talking about? What month is it on Mars? There are at least two hundred billion stars in just our galaxy alone. What month is it on any planet in any of those star systems? Is there a February? So that the arrogance of the ego is overmatched by the arrogance of the Self, thinking that this is what is real and you better god damn well listen. That's on level of instruction and instruction on that level, that tutors the free spiritual person to conform to some ritual cycle of founding a mental conception is very pernicious. In order to transform those limitations, in the last couple hundred years, human beings have come up with things called transforms, symbol transforms. And the place that shows the developed differential ingenuity of consciousness most, is in mathematics. And oddly enough, one of the most powerful people in that whole realm of making transforms, was La Place. The very character who was the touch stone, the anchor of determinism, also used a method to prove that that turns out to be one of the great transformational techniques of modern mathematics. In fact there was a, at UCLA, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, called the Seminar, in 1967, here in Los Angeles, La Place is a Newtonian scientist. The gulf that separates La Place from his predecessors including Newton is perhaps more significant historically than the lengths that tie him to the past. His public glorification of Newton is rather typical of the techniques followed by revolutionary scientists. In the French Revolution, you never let anyone see the full cards that you were holding, you always did a little bit of costume and disguise. I think the French have a flair for that anyway. And in the revolution you had to do that because people were dying left and right for little nuances. So it's a salon game on a grand scale and La Place was very good at playing that game, he was one of the best. But this must not obscure the fact that La Place took the final a crucial step towards an ideology of total determinism. And the La Placian universal view came to dominate the nineteenth century. In fact the nineteenth century later on became a paradise for people looking for determinant facts and causal situations. In one of Dickens' novels "Bleak House", old Grad Grind keeps pounding the table and saying "facts, we want only facts". We don't want feelings. We especially don't want visions, we want facts. A kind of a legalism. In fact in ancient China they were called legalists because the lawyers used that kind of technique, always. They are always La Placians, they never learn.
But it's curious because the La Place transform takes away one of the major foundations upon which determinism could hold. And so when you come to a 1997 publication that starts with chapter 0, Fourier was also a mathematician at the same time in France, revolutionary France. They had a lot of them at that time, La Grange, Fourier, La Place. Why? because they were envisioning a completely new humanity. The tragedy of La Place is that he carried over the habits of the old ritual comportment into the new vision and dragged it back. Except when he dragged it back the old ritual tradition which was worn out got revivified by this new juice. But this new juice by being dragged back was no longer life affirming but became radio active. And so that radio active re-animation of the old became symbolized by one of the most brilliant women of the time, Mary Shelley in her novel "Frankenstein". That's how you make a superman, in man's imaginative mode you make a Frankenstein. You can't help but make this, that's the whole point of it, it is a tragedy. Because man's still addicted to ritual, still arrogant in his mental determinism, his ideological security that he has power, he'll always make a Frankenstein. Not that he intends to, he doesn't want to, but it always turns out that way. Faulkner in "As I Lay Dying" has the old man, old Bundran, whose wife has just died, and his hand is like a claw, Faulkner says, and he's trying to smooth the wrinkles out of the covers and sheets because he doesn't know what else to do because she just died and he's always been dependent on her to do everything and Faulkner says that his hand, this ineffectual claw, that was only good for grabbing things from her, was unused to helping her in any way and that his hand instead of smoothing the covers, made them wrinkle even more, he says, like some ubiquitous perverse ocean of resistance coming out.
We live in a time where the civilization that we grew up in died completely and is being kept in some moribund clumsy form where all that's happening is a ubiquitous convolution going on which is no progress at all, it's no maturing at all, it's no, it's all it is is just an increasing convolution that makes complexity out of the fractal resistances that are there. And in fact that's what La Place's whole transform is about. It's about convolutions and geometric space, which apply almost everywhere it turns out. Even more powerful, even more powerful than La Place, the Fourier transform in math is probably the most powerful of all the symbol transforms. There are even things like a hand book of Fourier symbols, theorems, done here in 1991 I believe. But the application here, Fourier optics, taking a two hundred year old, French Revolution mathematical symbol transform and applying it to optics in the late twentieth century, in the 1990's. So that you come up with some very interesting things. This is from the author's preface of a scientific textbook. Let's listen to it with new ears. This book is intended for students who seek a simple introduction to the Fourier principles of modern optics and an insight into the similar role they play in other branches of science and engineering. Fourier transforms associated with the operations of convolution and correlation (where have we heard that before, convolution and correlation), associated with the operations of convolution and correlation form the basis not only of image formation and processing with lens systems. . . .in other words all perception, all brain activities can be analyzed using this transform, Fourier optics. Not only that, not only form the basis of image formation and processing with lens systems, but also of studies ranging from the atomic structure of matter to the galactic structure of the universe. This is not Yeats. This is a normal little science book. But if you take a differential consciousness that's prepared, you can read the writing on the wall. That's from the book of Daniel.
They also apply, these transforms, these symbol transforms, this especially this symbol transform, they also apply to the communication and information sciences. Electrical engineering including the processing of information that is not optical in origin. It applies to all computer processes, all of them. As a supplement to the undergraduate mainstream textbooks on optics, this book bridges the gap to the more advanced treatises and the various specialized fields. Incoherent imaging, do you get it, incoherent imaging. It's like biased skewed perception, not biased and skewed because you're prejudiced but because the very activity is causally determinately appearance only, has no zeros in it, no reality, no Tao. Incoherent imaging is described from the point of view of convolution and transfer functions. As soon as you hear of transfer functions you think of Jungian psychology. Transfer functions, indeed. With emphasis on the features of linearity and invariance shared with many types of electrical network, non linear systems being outside the scope of this book. The double Fourier transformation process of coherent image formation is illustrated with particular reference to its application in xray crystallography. Well what's so important about xray crystallography? Well do you remember in the Nature series where we talked about the double helix, the discovery of DNA? The whole discovery, the whole visualizing of DNA in its analysis is based on xray crystallography. Is based on this and so when one comes, this book unfortunately is about seventeen years old, its very old, its very old, seventeen years in science now is very old. So you get books like this now, Cambridge University Press, "Optical Coherence In Quantum Optics".
This is an education like a quantum optics. This is like being coherent all the way through. Not an education to get some credit for some course for some degree that does this or that. This is about getting real. And if it doesn't appeal to you now, you have lost that chance. I think we need to stop here and we will. Thank you.
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