Vision 7
Presented on: Saturday, February 13, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Vision Seven. We're about to make a change in two weeks. We're going to move from Hildegard of Bingen and Marie-Louise von Franz on "Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology" to move from this pair of books, this pair of texts to the third pair in Vision, and you might want to get them ahead of time. The third pair are Shakespeare and Shelley. Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound". And I thought that I would give you a preview to let you see the revolutionary resonances between Shakespeare and Shelley. You may not know this but Shakespeare and Shelley are very close and they have a great deal common. And this is the way Shakespeare ends "The Tempest", this is the epilogue spoken by the great protagonist of "The Tempest", Prospero. And he is given these lines to say, which closes the play:
"Now my charms are all overthrown, and what strength I have is mine own, which is most faint now tis true, I must be here confined by you, or sent to Naples. Let me not since I have my Dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver dwell in this bare Island by your spell, but release me from my bands with the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill or else my project fails, which was to please. Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant and my ending is despair unless I be relieved by prayer which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults".
And this is how Shelley ends "Prometheus (Unborn sic) Unbound":
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance,--
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length--
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled Doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent:
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
These two works are about two hundred years apart. Two hundred years in which the English language careened from this explosive conscious expansion by Shakespeare, an English language which at it origins was already literate. When English literature begins to first surface in old English, in the six hundreds, the six hundreds are a thousand years before Shakespeare. The very first productions that the English language make are like the venerable Bead's great "History of the Church in England" and "Beowulf", the English national epic. So that English as a literate language, even in old English, springs on the scene as if it were like fully made, already mature and energetic. And after about seven hundred years it goes through a sea change, a transformation, by Chaucer, whose "Canterbury Tales" we're using as one of the year long texts, one of the great annual journeys of reading which helps synthesize our whole fifty-two week year learning. Chaucer humanized the English language. So instead of it being able to talk in heroic or impersonal modes best, it became a language of people, a language able to talk about the personal humanity of people. And the "Canterbury Tales" are a series, a sequence of tales about people. Shakespeare took the personal art and made it cosmic. He enlarged Chaucer's personal artistic language to a cosmic language. Shakespeare's working vocabulary is about fifty thousand words. If you know five thousand words in a working way you can get through life. In fact in Chinese there is a famous little book, published by Harvard University Press, for the last seventy or eighty years, called "Fen's Five Thousand". Five thousand Chinese characters which gets you literate in Chinese. But to go beyond "Fen's Five Thousand" in Chinese is a very painstaking process. To add another thousand characters to that is very refined, and to double that one would have to be almost a universal genius. Shakespeare's fifty thousand words in English is like this unbelievable sky of possible utterance, of expressiveness that goes beyond horizons. So that very few people after Shakespeare were able to command the entire arena of the language. Shelley was one of those. Shelley who honed himself on the very roots that Shakespeare went to to learn how to use a creative renaissance diction for an English language that penetrates beyond the Latin base to the Greek. That the Latin basis of English, both Shakespeare's English and Chaucer's Middle English and Beowulf's Old English before that, the base that was there was Latin, but before Latin Greek was a more poignant kind of a language, a vocabulary, a syntax, much more refined. Greek is cosmic whereas the best that Latin can do is to be an Empire of man. But the Greek language goes back to the mysteries of the divine and of the transcendent. And so even though Shakespeare characterizes himself as having little Latin and less Greek, he means to say that his roots go down into that mysterious Greek language origin. Shelley, in order to tutor himself, learned classical Greek well enough to make his own translations of the Greek Tragedians. So that when he writes "Prometheus Unbound", he had made his own translation of Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound", and recognized that in antiquity, in the Greek classical age, five hundred years before the Roman Empire, all Greek Tragedies were done in triads. In fact not only triads but there was a fourth play called a satyr play, which was a semi comedy. Not a comedy of ha ha funny slapstick, but a comedy based upon satyrs, satiric. That there was an ironic quality of the juxtaposition of the transcendent human with the sub-human. That man when he gets to the satiric is wise enough to recognize that he's still carrying around animal baggage. So that to the satiric sense, man is part animal and part angel. That the emphasis is not on the man but on the bit of animal and the bit of angel that do not juxtapose very easily in him and hence something satiric is always paradoxical, always has a deep irony and is a relief. It is a relief and an antidote to the tragic view of life. And the tragic view is that too often the animal overtakes the angel in man, and that when they war the human shrinks to such a narrow uneasy wedge that it is a war between the animal and the angel, and the animal winning makes a tragedy of this. So that the satyr play was always like the sweet dessert to take away the stunning numbness of having three tragedies in a row. But in Roman times, the Romans never understood this. They were not refined in these ways. And so the two plays following "Prometheus Bound" were lost, they were let go, they didn't care. And so Shelley took it on himself to write the conclusion "Prometheus Unbound" because he lived in an age of revolution. He lived in an age where the American and French Revolutions had simply opened up all kinds of new possibilities and Shelley wanting to have a language which was so open that it would allow for man to speak in a new way, yet a new way. That large though Chaucer's English is, or even Beowulf's English, but especially Shakespeare's English, that it would not be large enough for the men and women to come. That the future population needed to have a language that was completely unbounded. A language that would carry the sense of syntactical irony, the conceptual penetration of paradoxical juxtaposition and transcendent possibilities, to carry all of this not just into rarefied ideas and specialized vocabulary in limited productions, but Shelley wanted to seed the entire language so that every time a man or woman spoke you had that option of bringing those strange distant beyond resonances into play. So that English would become a language freed once and for all and forever of the need to be contained by rules. So that it would be a syntax of complete differential consciousness and openness. And this was Shelley's program. And we've looked also at William Blake, who was a contemporary of Shelley, of how Blake sought to do very much the same thing, but on the basis not so much of Greek origins, of transcendent language, but of how to take the illumined images of vision and pair them up so that language becomes illumined in itself. So that language becomes a cooperative interpenetration with illumined visionary images. And Blake's works, his poetry are largely engraved plates that have the images and languages together. All this happened two hundred years ago. And in that two hundred years there's been a great long tradition, in English poetry especially, to carry out this program, to enlarge the cosmic range of the language. And in our own time we have seen, early in the twentieth century, a whole generation of genius that sought to make English the most far flung language that the planet has ever seen. The experiments of James Joyce, the language playful adventures of E.E. Cummings, the way in which Ezra Pound sought to take Chinese characters in their structure and make English language imagery rebound in a new way, the way in which T.S. Elliott sought to make language so reverberatory that phrases would key phrases infinitely. And Faulkner's experiments with trying to stretch out a prose poetry so that one could declaim it almost infinitely without end. We looked at Virginia Woolf and her way of making the stream of consciousness English language so that it had overflown the banks of what rhetorical rules or grammatical structures would allow us to do. And William Carlos Williams, and one can go on and on. So that by the beginning now of the twenty-first century, English as a language has brought itself to a threshold, a threshold only reached a few times in human history. Reached by Sanskrit, reached by Classical Greek, reached by the high Chinese of the Tong Dynasty. English in our time has reached one of these thresholds where it is about to launch itself into completely unknown territory. And that's what this language that I'm using is preparatory towards. It's a language which not only moves forward dynamically as you listen to it into the future, but as you listen to it going into the future, it also recalibrates the past, so that the more that you hear the more you're able to hear already. And so it develops both future and past at the same time. So that it enlarges the arena to be all time. That one could speak this kind of a language completely independent of time and place. It wouldn't matter what planet you were on, it wouldn't matter what star system one lived in. That men and women, sentient and intelligent and visionary and artistic, historically sensitive would have an entire cosmos available, and this kind of language would allow for its plastic development, for its creative furthering, all the while being available.
We know now for instance that music is always a function of a scale and that while the Chinese chose a pentatonic, a five note scale, our classic scale was an eight note, a octave. But these scales, the pentatonic or the octave or variations of it are only minute examples, and that we understand now that there are an infinite number of scales. So that the music possible in a cosmos is of unimaginable open ended array, because the scales are unnumbered, and each scale would have a possibility of a music and a development, a tradition. And so we're on a threshold where men and women need to be free to explore whatever interests them in whatever way they would like to play. And that's what this education is about, is to recalibrate us out of a dead past which was dead not because it was wrong but because it was limited. Because it was necessarily limited. That it came out of a misunderstanding, a misreading of reality. It came out of a sandbox that had its limitations in time and place, had its limitations in the traditions allowed, had its Roman like limitations in the puerile ambitions of power as if that were some arbiter of what is possible. Authority is always regressive in that mode and empire traditions are notorious for not only being closed minded but closed in more and more so that they end into suffocating dead end spaces. It is time for men and women to be freed from this permanently. And so this kind of language is like Shakespeare or Shelley, but two hundred years later. This is a language that takes Shakespeare and Shelley and Chaucer and Beowulf seriously but is far enough developed, there is as much time between me and Beowulf as there is between Homer and Plotinus. Plotinus' Greek is so staggeringly refined even compared to Homer that one can hardly believe that you're talking about the same kind of people. And yet the tradition is recognizable. It's just that he has opened so far that it's no longer part of the stem, it's no longer even a part of the flower, it's the fragrance of the field reaching into the sky and that's the kind of language I'm giving you. I'm giving you a language that when you get used to it, the sky is open. Not that the sky is the limit, the sky is open, that the perfume of meaning is able to go in whichever way, wherever, and play becomes truly creative.
If we look at a portrait of Shelley, by a friend of his, it was unearthed about sixty years, you can see the eyes of Shelley. These eyes are recognizable from five thousand years ago. This is a Sumerian visionary from about 3,000 B.C. And you see the same kind of eyes. We're looking at a vision which does not look to see things, but looks with consciousness, seeing seeing itself. So that one, in looking, looks to look rather than looks to things. You can look to things, but when you look to things, they divulge themselves to you, not only in their phenomenal thingness, but they give the full resonance of their pneuminal possibility. So that this is a kind of language that I'm using, a new kind of English. It's a new millennial English meant to open up so that one sees not the things that can be pounded as facts, but one sees the entire resonant possibility instantly available. It takes awhile to learn this, it takes awhile to build an ear for this, it takes awhile for the brain to renerve the synapse gaps, the neuronal networks, the clouds of impulses that make thought possible, the lightening from those clouds that makes insight real, and the art of holding an entire atmosphere of such weather in play. This is a new style, a new way of teaching, and it takes awhile to get used to. But getting used to it is not being inculcated into something old, but being introduced into a capacity which you have every right to have. And that's what the emphasis is here.
So today's lecture is entitled Magic Language Light, Magic Language Light. And in Magic Language one of the genres which we need to look at just briefly is that of fairy tales. Our author Marie-Louise von Franz spent the entire decade of the 1970's, every other year she put out a new book on fairy tales. She was perhaps the most intelligent and sensitive of all of Jung's confreres. I wouldn't say that she is so much a disciple of Jung but that she's someone who goes along side of Jung like Eric Neuman was. She began by bringing her first volume out "Interpretation Of Fairy Tales". Then two years later followed it with "The Feminine In Fairy Tales". And two years after that "Shadow And Evil In Fairy Tales". And two years after that "Individuation In Fairy Tales". And then followed that with the fifth book in the series "The Psychological Meaning Of Redemption Motifs In Fairy Tales". So that she became, in the 1970's, honed in on fairy tales as a medium, as a language form, which was crucial for conscious men and women to understand. And yet almost like a Greek Tragedy, she was hobbled by an idea, a misconception that in some paradoxical way worked very well until you came to apply the idea like a talisman and then it went into a regression without anyone even realizing it. One of the pitfalls of psychology is that psychology is a study of the psyche which by definition, by necessity makes the mind the center of concern. And we have learned in our education that the mind is a very major phase, but only a phase in maturity. And, to give it some perspective, the body is wiser sooner than the mind is intelligent. Not only is the body wiser sooner than the mind is intelligent but feelings become wise much more delicately than minds become intelligent. Human experience refines much faster in feeling toned intelligence, called sentience. Men and women become wiser in feeling toned experience than they do in symbolic meaning of ideas. It takes a long time to refine symbolic meaning in ideas, so that one understands that, in a spontaneous delicate way, one learns to feel intelligence much faster than to think it. Feeling is much more developed in people than is thinking. And that's why feeling allies itself naturally with the body. And it takes a great development to ally feeling with thought, to have a thought capacity that is informed and intelligent in feeling is very rare, extremely rare. But for the mind to ally itself with intuition is almost impossible. Because for thought to work thought must abstract itself, must go through an initiation of abstraction and that abstracting structure cuts it off both from feeling and from intuition. So that abstraction has to be cared for as a vintner would care for a rare vintage of wine, and lets it set and settle enough until the sediment quiets down and the wine matures in its fermentation. It takes a long time to be patient to let thought mature to its true wine, but when it does it discovers that it is a very natural very easy interface between feeling and intuition. That insight and sentience are of a single stream that has like a ribbon that is twisted once, like a mobius strip quality, and where feeling flows into this easy transformation and becomes insight is a quiet center of the mind, where the wine has settled for a long time and has become potable, drinkable. There is an art involved in that, that's the art of education. And so this is a practice, this every Saturday is a practice in the art of education.
Vision and Myth, Vision, the range is differentially of insight and Myth, the feeling toned sequencing of imagery which has a meaningfulness. A meaningfulness that has a beginning a middle and an end. That there is a story line to it, that the sequences make feeling tone sense, you begin from somewhere and you go somewhere. You begin as and end as, and in the developments of myth these fibers become woven into an insight fabric in vision. But the weaver, if the weaver is not calm, is not refined, the weaver puts an ideational impress on the way that that fabric turns out, and that ideational impress distorts the fibers themselves. It's like stamping a pattern on very delicate fabric, so that instead of the fabric being what it is in reality, it becomes simply the stuff that fits the mold of what has been stamped on it. This kind of ideological form always regresses. It cannot help but regress. It produces in itself a rebound and it's like food going down the wrong way, you always choke, you always cough, and cough it up. And in doing so, it aggravates the entire process so that the mind becomes confused by its own machinations and the entire load of meaning goes back to the only place where it can find stability, and that's in the body. So regression always end up in the body. It's always the body that gets ill. It's always the physiological existence that suffers. Not because existence is no damn good, but because the regressive landslide of meaning tied into knots, literally ties the stomach into knots, or ties the nerves into knots.
We want to take a break and come back to this, but I want to bring this idea through in this way. Fairy tales, which were the concern of Marie-Louise von Franz, were also the concern of two other individuals that we have had in our course. They were the concern of W.B. Yeats and they were the concern of J.R.R. Tolkien. And Yeats and Tolkien are two of the most refined feelers and thinkers about fairy tales. And with Marie-Louise von Franz, the three of them together give us a chance to understand that fairy tales occur in a realm that traditionally one would call magic. They belong to vision, they do not occur in the same way that myths occur. Fairy tales are not stories, they are not myths, they are differential conscious processes that are in a complementation to mythic processes. So that they work in a complementary fashion. If you cut the flow from one to the other, so that the complementation becomes severed, they immediately become dual, dualistic, antagonistic, and they work exactly the opposite ways in that way. So that when abstraction is carried over into consciousness, to whatever extent it's carried over, it's like cutting the ribbon so that vision becomes antithetical to myth. So that consciousness becomes an enemy to nature. And in this antagonism, the only recourse that someone within whom this is happening has, is to either flee back to the body, or to flee forward into fantasy. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
BREAK
We have two phases which are related and yet they must be kept distinct and yet the relationality between them has to be closer. The two phases are myth and vision. In our education we have a series of phases that occur. We have Nature, Ritual, Myth and Symbol. And then we have Vision, Art, History and Science. It's important to understand how Vision changes Myth. Whenever Vision really works Myth is recalibrated, it's changed. And in making that transformation of Myth, Vision teases something hidden out of Symbols that would never have been there unless that had happened. So we're going to do something graphic. One of the books in the middle of the Vision, we always use three pairs of books, so that you get used to there being phases within phases. So there are three phases to Nature, there're three phases to Ritual, three phases to Myth and just so three phases to Vision. It's like these three phases are like the three plays, they're like the trilogy of tragedy, classical tragedy. That when you make a three part, a tripartate phasing you bring into play a shape. The shape in Nature is very often what we might call a shape of experience. And on the plane of existence where shapes have traction and exist and take hold, the most primary shape that happens is that of a triangle. This why trinities or tripartate or threes or triads are so powerful, they're structurally powerful and in integration thirds are extremely powerful. Thirds are also the first opportunity that you get to make a set, to make a grouping which is rather universal. Unities by themselves are very mysterious. To come to existential awareness of a unity is really primordial and what happens is that you become absorbed into that unity so that there's, the awareness becomes coextensive and becomes mysterious. The two is always interesting because while there's this paired or twinned quality, it very quickly devolves into dualism or more naturally, instead of a devolution, it evolves into a polarity. Twos become polarity quite naturally. And to see that the polarity is on a deeper appreciation, that that polarity is really a complementarity, takes a transformation. You cannot see that a polarity has the realistic possibility of being a complementarity until one has really come into possession of visionary insight. But a triangle, a triad, a three, a set of three cuts a primary shape, cuts that triangle, or a set of three makes a shape in experience which is one of the earliest shapes that we have, and that's why when, for instance we're talking now about Greek Tragedy, why Greek Tragedy was always produced and presented in trilogies. And it's true that there was a fourth play, the satyr play, but the satyr play was like a little dessert. And it made a quaternary out of the entire ensemble for other purposes. The tragedy was there in trilogies. What we're looking at here is the way in which each of the phases of our education is itself a set of three sub-phases, three stages to that phase. And it's easy, in integration to think of, this is the beginning of the phase, this is the middle of the phase, this is the end of the phase, beginning, middle and end, that group, that set of three. And if you remember, when we started Nature a year ago, about this time a year ago. So a year ago at this time when you would look at, this is Vision Seven, if you would look at the tape for Nature Seven, one of the concerns in Nature Seven was to understand that in the mysteriousness of nature, polarities change, they don't remain what they are, but they exchange with eachother. Positives become negatives, negatives become positives, wholes become electrons, electrons become wholes, and it isn't just a simplistic kind of a polarity, but nature is like this mysterious stew, this soup of endless change always going on. In fact the reality of transformation comes because transformation in consciousness is a complementation of mystery in nature and that mystery in nature is nowhere more evident than in change. Nature is changing so much all the time that if one were able to graphically envision it, it would be like a flame. Existence, instead of being static is like a constantly alive flame. Which of course is the sacred flame, life is a sacred flame. That the coming into and the changing and the going out of existence of all things from God's eye is like a sacred flame. The universe is sacred fire, constantly scintillating, constantly going.
And in Nature Seven we were attentive to the fact that in the ancient Chinese, in the I Ching, the way in which the various phases operated, that there were three phases to the yang and there were three phases to the yin. That if one temporarily symbolizes the yang as an unbroken line, the beginning of the yang in the I Ching is always at the bottom so that the unbroken line is at the bottom of a trigram which has two broken lines on top of it. And to the Chinese the sense of change is always that it rises. So that first trigram of the yang has the unbroken line on the bottom, and it changes so that the middle trigram has the yang, the unbroken in the middle, and then the third trigram has it on top. And that same procedure, that same change motif happens with the yin. The broken line starts on the bottom of two yang lines, moves to the center in the middle, and then moves to the top at the third. So that if you were to group these and to pair these together, you would get the movement of yang and the movement of yin which is the entire range of its possibility. That yang is not simply yang, nor is yin simply yin, this would be a reductive ideology. But that in nature, in the change process that is nature itself, the yang has its movement and the easiest way to visualize it is the moving of it in these three positions, beginning, middle and end. And so too the yin, beginning, middle and end. And that if you want the completeness of the symbolization of it, you then extract the yang from the bottom, the yang from the middle and the yang from the top and put them all together and put that at the top, that that's the complete perfect yang. And the yin at the bottom, the yin in the middle, the yin at the top, and to abstract those and put those together, that's the perfect yin at the top, and so you have the eight trigrams. You have the two sets of four. But the movement is in the triads, that's why the trigrams are such perfect vehicles to convey, not the thing, but the thing in its complete ecology of movement. So poignant was the appreciation, that the complete movement of something is its reality. That when the I Ching was first brought to the West, amazingly, paradoxically it was first brought to the West in a Latin translation by Jesuit monks. And the first Westerner to read the Jesuit Latin I Ching and get it was the young Leibnitz who was a mathematical genius, like an IQ of 800. He got right away and developed calculus out of it. He got it right away that the objectivity is not in a static snapshot of something, but in the ecology of all of its possibilities. That when you take in the ecology of all of its possibilities as a set, then you have the phenomena in its completeness. Then you're mathematic, instead of being an arithmetical representation of something, that works in the mind, instead of it being arithmetical, it becomes mathematical and is able to be lifted out of the mind and applied to the world and the world would accept whatever functions you do with mathematically, you can apply that to the world. If you're limited to arithmetic, you can count in you mind or on your fingers, but that doesn't arrange the world. Whereas a mathematical equation can rearrange the world. E=MC2 makes nuclear energy, because math applies to the world and transforms the world. Why? Because the world is fundamentally within the very foundation of the mysterious change of nature and that mysterious change accepts visionary transformations. So the Chinese understood. And Leibnitz, because of that, understood, was the first Westerner to ever understand that you take all of the phase possibilities of something and that that set is what it is. Out of this comes the appraisal that a human being is never finished, not even with death, because they have other phases, other possibilities after life. So that you can never definitively define someone, they're always in process of changing. Not so much of becoming, but of emerging and if you enlarge their range of possibility, you enlarge their reality of what they could be or might be. And out of this comes the insight, it's a high Dharma insight, if you enlarge the possibility of someone into infinity, they will never die. Where is the death possible? They can change infinitely because they have possibility without limit. It's even in a credo like 'world without end'. That's what that means.
The Chinese understood in their Tao, in the appreciation of nature's mysterious Tao, they understood that if you take the middle of a transformational of a change continuum, if you take the middle of it and pair it up with the middle of its complement, of its polarity, if you pair the movement of the yang with the movement of the yin, you can take the middle of the yang and the middle of the yin and exchange them and they will work in each other's continuum without destructing the process of the real. Without muddying the purity of the mystery of nature, that Mother Nature goes for this. She goes for the exchange of centers. That the yang's not going to die because it's working with the yin's center and the yin's not going to cease because it's working with the yang's center, that they continue to work but now they exchange and they make like an infinity sign. In fact the Chinese Tai Chi comes out of this. The black circle in the white tear drop is the yang working in the yin continuum, and the white circle in the black tear drop is the center of the other working in that. So the Tai Chi symbol is the symbol of the exchange of centers. And because the centers exchange and create now not a twin polarity but an interfaced exchanged complementarity, it means then that you get out of the resonances of that wholeness every time there's a resonance. If you had a bell shaped in a Tai Chi form and you rang that, every vibration of that bell would be a Tai Chi. It's called in physics, the principle of the soliton. It's like the deep mystery that a thousand years ago, Robert Groseteste, trying to teach young Roger Bacon the truth about alchemy, and put his hand around his shoulder and he said look. He said you see that rainbow up there? Every drop of water in that rainbow is itself a rainbow. There is no drop of water that's just green and then further down they're red and so, every drop of water is a rainbow, so what you see is the rainbow, is the harmony of the whole, of all the drops of water that are rainbows. And that unless you can begin to artistically envision, to have the visionary capacity drawn up to the personal art of someone seeing, you will never know that, and you will never understand that there's a mathematique to reality and that once you know that and you can do that in your person, you can apply that to the world and the world will take that application and will change in that way. You can recalibrate nature to be something other than what it simply was. You can change it.
One of the most amazing examples, a hundred years ago, was here in California. A man who used to wear black three piece suits, with a string tie and a black hat, he lived up in Santa Rosa, his name was Luther Burbank. And he used to re-cut plants by vision. And he envisioned that all the vast thousands of square miles of American desert that were thrown away are perfectly good ground to grow cactus. And that if you could make a cactus that had no thorns, cattle could feed on cactus that had no thorns, you could turn the deserts into a pasture for herds of billions of animals. And so her perfected a cactus that had no thorns. There are still clumps of it here in Los Angeles cause this is were he began to experiment with clumps of cactus that have no thorns. Now it's true that after five or six generations, if you don't really keep the cultivation up, little tiny thorns will begin to appear again, but you can maintain it, you could have cactus without thorns indefinitely. It's this way that vision changes nature. It's not so much that it's supernatural, it's not supernatural as weird or odd, but it is supra natural as in consciousness. And this is why it's said, consciousness adds an entire dimension to space time. That conscious space time is more dimensional than space time and if you're working with a five dimensional conscious space time as you do in vision, it's much more potent. Not just more potent because it has more amperage, but it's much more potent infinitely, because it has the ability to go back and re-cut nature from what it always was into possibilities that it now can be and never was before. There's something new under the sun. And when someone conscious looks at themselves and realizes you can be different from what you were. Not only different in the future from what you were, but that you can go back into the past and re-cut that past into a new configuration, and you can be different from what you were, back then. Which is called freedom. Not freedom of choice, but freedom of possibility, open ended.
This is a whole different scale of education. This is not learning some instruction to pass some exam so you can get a degree, to get a job to get money, this is talking about reality. This is really bottom line. Why you would worry about the paycheck, when you have an infinite cosmos to play in, is astounding. So the quality that we're trying to bring out is that the center of the movement can be exchanged in such a way that it re-cuts the entirety of both processes, in fact, takes the entirety of the whole form.
So I want to take a book from the center, from the middle phase of Vision and put it back into Myth, and take a book from the center of Myth and bring it forward and put it in the middle of Vision. To exchange two texts is very simple, but the effect is, we have to find a happy word. We only have an English word for bad things like catastrophe. We have to find a word for a happy catastrophe. Tolkien struggled with this one time, he said well, if we go back to the Greek, the Greek "eu". So a "eucastrophe" is a happy catastrophe. This produces a happy catastrophe. And the two books we're going to exchange, Tolkien's own version of "Sir Gawain And The Green Knight", we're going to take it from Myth now and bring it up to Vision, and Marie-Louise Von Franz's book on Jung, we're going to take from Vision and put it back into Myth. So that if you go back and you take a look at the middle of the Myth presentations. If you divide twelve into three parts, you get four lectures. So if you look at Myth five, six, seven and eight and you now reconfigure Myth five, six, seven and eight, because it's formed now in a complementation with Vision five, six, seven and eight. It's interesting isn't it, because Myth eight is something that already happened in the past, but Vision eight won't happen until next week. So we're already bringing a future that supposedly has not yet happened into a complementation, into a reality that already is accepting it before it has happened. And it gives you a chance first hand, if you can do this this week, if you can look at the way in which Sir Gawain and The Green Night now is brought up to parallel Hildegard of Bingen with her illuminations. It's very interesting. And that Marie-Louise von Franz's book on Projection and Re-Collection (not memory so much but re-collection), Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology, and put that back with our text in the middle of Myth. The text that was there was Ruth Benedict's "Patterns of Culture". So that now you have a Jungian Psychology book paired up with an anthropologic look at primordial peoples. And one aspect about primordial peoples, in terms of Jung as Jung, not Jung as the psychologist, but Jung the man, Carl Gustav the man. Jung was extremely seduced by primordial peoples. When he came to the United States to give the Terry Lectures at Yale University, long long long time ago, he didn't stay around the east coast, he made a B-line for the American Southwest to go and talk with the Hopi, with the Taos Indians. He loved to get to get close to the Taos Pueblo peoples because he felt a kinship with them. And he said the high point of his visit to the United States was talking with the old elders of the tribe. He got it that these guys were his guys. He says in "Memories Dreams and Reflections" that he was always fearful when he went to Africa. He went to East Africa, he went to the Alongi Tribe along, I think, where Mt. Elgon and Kilimanjaro are in East Africa, and he felt trepidation, not because he didn't like it but because he liked it too much. He didn't want to leave. He said he had to wrench himself away. Not that he went native but that he was native and he never knew it until he was there. At the deepest level of Jung's security, where he felt the deepest anchor in his entire life, was when he was a young boy just coming into adolescence and he carved a little totem figure for himself. And he carved this totem figure, then when he finished it, he didn't know what to do with it because he was being raised in a kind of Swiss, German, proper Protestant Christian household and these primitive totems don't really fit in there. So he hid it in the attic of his Grandmother. He put it on top of a rafter. And later on, because he couldn't get out of his adolescence, because he had fallen into a regressive cacophony that is not only neurosis, but is a harbinger of psychosis. And he overheard that they were going to put him away because he was beyond hope, nobody could do anything for him. His parents had given up, the preacher father had given up, he felt absolutely desperate, what will help him. And immediately what came to him was the deep symbolic image of that totem that he'd completely forgotten about. And it was there as the amulet of his existential sanity. And he went back and he recovered that totem and that was the amulet that he kept with himself and he brought himself back into play. And that's when he says, he says it himself in "Memories, Dream and Reflections", he learned the truth about a neurosis. That you give up your existential tie to your person in favor of worry because someone else is not doing for you what you could do for yourself. But as soon as you take that right back, as soon as you take that privilege back and you do it, good, bad or indifferent, whether you did it sloppy or with grace, you yourself doing it does it. You don't need pills, you don't need this or that, all you need is to do it. And so he saw that the practicae that exists in the world has a complementation with the theoria. The contemplation within the mind that comes stable with the symbol. That symbols and bodies are both objective levels of reality that get along together. Bodies and symbols like each other. They like each other so much that they coexist on a flow of experience between them which is what myth is all about. Myth is all about keeping the flow of experience healthy. It's like a meridian concourse throughout the body. As long as that's healthy then bodies and minds get along beautifully. They like each other, their pals. Why shouldn't they be pals? They're at home in the same integral. But they forget, and that's the whole thing. It's not that the body forgets, the body doesn't forget. But the mind, when it gets to a certain point of abstraction, forgets and comes to consider the body animal and consider itself, well I'm better than animal. And when you're better than animal you're already projected out into some kind of angelic superiority which abstractly now is at war with this filthy body. And what can the body do, it's an abandon child. It's an instantaneous orphan.
So if we take the exchange here. If we take the center of the movement of Vision and exchange it with the center of the movement of Myth, we get an exchange that not only happens between Vision and Myth, but where they criss cross, where they flow back through eachother is somewhere in the mind, and because of the way in which the mind is set up by our education, it flows pretty close to the center of the mind. For an exchange like that to happen, the mind has never been prepared by any kind of misuse and mismanagement for this kind of energy and so it has no defense against this kind of wisdom. And so the exchange takes place very close, not to dead center, but to alive center of the mind. And it gives an opportunity, because it's the first time, it's like pioneering, it gives an opportunity for the brain to explore new neuronal relationships that it never had before. And if it's done with an enriched context, like this Saturday sequence is, this is an enrichment of that context. An enrichment to the point, you would say in chemistry that the point of enrichment here is super-saturating. I keep churning out dozens and scores and hundreds of things of making a language that baffles reductiveness, that will not be pigeon holed, you can't pre-guess or second guess or whatever it is, and so this enrichment becomes a level of super saturation which is the perfect medium for the precipitation of new forms. And so when that exchange happens, it happens in such a way that the very center of the mind is available all of a sudden, surprise to itself for something new to be precipitated there. And the Self, which had, it had commandeered for itself, the center of the mind, oh yes, I am I. Not just me but me myself and I. So the Self gets surprised by a guerrilla saboteur attack because what is being offered is not some other Self there, but just openness. And so the Self is disarmed because it doesn't know who to fight, because there's no one there to fight, there's no competition. Instead what's there is an openness, yeah. It's like being disarmed because you realize that your opponent is just your own possibilities. And it becomes, even on an abstracted neurotic level, completely unacceptable to fight your own open possibilities. It, even on the most desperate psychotic level, it just, it not only doesn't make sense, it doesn't make nonsense either. It's an unprecedented kind of a situation. It's called waking up, yeah.
So when this lecture, which is called Magic Language Light, when this presentation, this lecture, when Vision Seven carries Marie-Louise von Franz's book on Jungian Psychology back and posits it in the middle of Myth, we then are bringing Tolkien forward with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and now it's interesting to consider that Tolkien's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it's not about Myth at all, it's about Vision. And that the realm of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as Tolkien himself points out in his beautiful long extended essay on fairy stories, that perhaps the greatest fairy tale in the English language is Sir Gawain and the Green Night. In fact it's an archetypal fairy tale. That in actual reality, it doesn't have anything to do with myth at all, it has to do with fairy tales. It has to do with the realm of fairy, which is a realm, he says, because we don't have words for this, no one has talked about this, so that immediately when one says, well, what is the realm of fairy, the realm of fairy is a magic realm. But he says, if you look at it it includes not only elves and trolls and witches, but it also includes the sun and the moon and the earth. And as soon as you begin fleshing it out, what is there, that it also includes us, but it includes us in an enchanted mode. If we remained in a traditional mode, we would never be able to be real in that magical realm. But when we are enchanted, we inhabit that realm quite naturally. In fact children do that quite a bit because they are more enchanted than traditional, naturally. You have to really clip the wings of children to get them to conform to tradition, whereas they play enchanted games all the time. And they are not playing games, but they are playing themselves in enchanted modes. And Tolkien says this is who we really are. We really are that. And that we have been truncated in order to fit into the traditional box categories, whereas we have bright wings forever. And he says two things about fairy stories, two things that are very interesting if you take a look at what do fairy tales do. What happens in these enchanted realms. One thing is that it involves recovery, recovery. He says, which includes return and renewal, renewal of health, a regaining, a regaining of a clear view. In other words it's a recalibration. It's a transformation. We get refreshed, we get recovered, we get returned, the classic term was rebirthed. Renewed and not just renewed to again go through a traditional corkscrew, but renewed in the sense of exponential. That once that kind of renewal happens, you are renewed to be renewed. It becomes easier to be renewed again and again. That you get used to renewing yourself, you get used to opening new possibilities that were never there before and now that you know that you can do that, there's nothing that prevents you from doing it again and again. However much you would like to do. That your range of reality is expanded exponentially. It's like the difference between a music before Mozart and a music after Mozart, Mozart brings into range feeling tones that were never explored or expressed before. Personal nuances that were never there even though the music before was very sophisticated and the forms were very artistic, and yet Mozart brings something new into play, a nuance of feeling that has fabulously infinite possibilities. And in the last couple of hundred years it's just barely been explored.
Another thing Tolkien points out. Not only recovery, but fairy tales deal with death. They deal with the way in which death does not occur in the traditional way at all. That you can think of it as escape from death, but a deeper understanding is that one does not so much escape from death but that you open the context and enrich the way in which reality actually occurs so that death becomes a threshold of artifact of a traditional view which is no longer your limitation at all. And that both this enlargement beyond death and this recovery of life are shareable. Not only happens for an individual, but happens for men and women in large populations all at the same time, and it's very shareable.
So that to give you a little conclusion here, the Self at the center of the mind has a best friend. Its best friend is the Ego. But the no self interfaces best with the spiritual person. so one of the things that happens in the criss cross of bringing in openness, that in place of a Self, you get to experience, even for just a fraction of a second, a mind that's still there even though its center is not occupied by a Self. There is such a thing as a focus of meaning without personalizing it, without giving it a mask. And that when you take off all of the masks from the center of the mind, it doesn't crumple because it doesn't wear a mask. Wallace Stevens has in one of his poems, "The good man must discover that he has no face", and then he says, "and the world often says this as if it really knew". More next week.
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