Vision 8

Transcript (PDF)

This is Vision Eight, and we're pursuing a very interesting occurrence. We're exchanging two texts. We're taking one text from Vision and putting it back into Myth, and taking one text from Myth and bringing it forward to Vision. So they're exchanging places. And we talked last week about how, in the progression of the trigrams of the I Ching, that the upward movement in archetypal symbols of place, has a certain stragetic geometry. So that at the very center, at the equinimity point of the geometry of a symbol, it has a place that could be called, and classically was called a resting place. A fulcrum upon which the balance rests. A focus with no movement whatsoever, so that it's characterized by a zero quality, which allows for any pair of these kinds of focuses to exchange place and work in each other's order, without upsetting the operative functioning of the order.

It's one of the most remarkable characteristics of reality, is that in pairs of operative existential integrals, the centers of those integrals can exchange places and operate within each other's continuum. It's most remarkable discovery, and the first people to discover it were the Chinese, about five thousand years ago actually, a long time ago.

The whole development of the Chinese Tai Chi symbol is based upon this exchange of centers. The Tai Chi which has the circle of darkness in the teardrop of light, or the circle of light in the teardrop of darkness is a symbol of this exchange of centers. Which means then that the two functional progressions are linked together in a transformation called a complementarity. And that eachother's centers work and function withing the whole existential integral of the other. So it produces a mutuality.

In the West when this became know, when it became apparent, was a classic jump, want to almost say a quantum jump, in the intelligence in the wisdom tradition of the West. And the figure who registered this first was Pythagoras. So that the Western tradition at the time of Pythagoras, about twenty five hundred years ago, suddenly had this infusion of the reality of a complementarity which involved a secret exchange of centers. And this was immediately apparent in the constituency of Pythagorean communities because the tradtion in the west was always that esoteric wisdom communities were masculine.

There are for instance illustrations of Egyptian monks going back to 1500BC with the shaved heads and the very ascetic manor, so that monkhood was always associated with wisdom.

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