Vision 9

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This is Vision 9 and we're going to talk about 'talking about' today. We're going to use language to language about language because today our Vision material shifts into high gear and we have a pair of writers who will help us for the next month to bring our Visionary process into its prismatic focus. And the two authors are Shakespeare and Shelley, and there are no better guides to the innovative use of English as a creative artistic language, than Shakespeare and Shelley. The use of language in a sacred way goes back to, in our experience the earliest indications, are back to ancient Sumeria. The use of a sacred language had then an introduction of writing which gave it a peculiar kind of a turn. And oral language for as long as it had been spoken, which was for tens of thousands of years if not hundreds of thousands of years. Previous species of man could not speak very well; did not have the physiological capacity; did not have the neurological complexity to speak very well. And it's not having to do with the size of the brain - Homo Neanderthal, who preceded our species, could not speak as well as we do, and they had an on average a larger brain than we have. But they did not have the ability to use a spoken language within a great facility. And we've talked before about one of the great recoveries of physiological capacity. In the last couple of years a woman anthropologist, who when looking upon the skeletons of Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthal and Homo Erectus and back for about two million years, noticed that yes the brain size grows, the ability to stand upright and walk grows, but neither of these are the controlling factor when it comes to language. That Homo Erectus, two million years ago, was already standing upright and able to run at a gate that was probably as fast as anything on the African Savanna. Richard Leakey found in the African rift section of his explorations, a skeleton that goes back almost two million years. It was of a youth who was about 14 or 15 and he was almost 6 feet tall, he was athletic and was obviously able to walk as well as modern man, two million years ago. So it's not the ability to stand up that makes us counted as a wonder on the planet. The average brain size of Homo Neanderthal is several hundred cubic centimeters larger than ours. They're not the ignorant cave men that we would think, but they did not speak very well. The skeletons show that there's not the refined ability for the coordination of the tongue and the throat. But especially the spinal column of Homo Neanderthal has a kind of consistency through it which our spinal column does not. Our spinal column in the thoracic region is much thicker. It contains more gray matter in the spinal column than Homo Neanderthal does. And this woman anthropologist, trying to puzzle out why would a thicker spinal column in the thoracic region be characteristic of Homo Sapiens - what to we need that for. The complexity of neural tissue and commands in the thoracic region control only one thing, they control breathing. Now you don't have to have a very fine control simply to breath. The lungs of Homo species have been developed for millions of years, long before Homo Erectus even. But if you're going to speak like we are speaking, you need to control breath, you need to control breath to the ability to start and stop sometimes as much as 60 or 70 times per second. That the fine tuning of speech requires breath to have these most delicate kind of controls that allow for a rapid massing of a gestalt of complex activity of breath control. So that on the most deep level, long before there were Yogis of the Asanas to control breath to make it even, there were Paleolithic Yogis who controlled breath to modulate it dozens and dozens of times per second, to learn how to talk. And that the most primordial Yoga of our species is not to sit erect in attention, but to speak with delicacy and sensitivity. And so speech is the essence of man, not sitting quietly. It goes against our grain. We think someone wise is someone who sits quietly in a cave in some high mountain vastness and knows and won't say, when the most ancient tradition is someone who know, says it in a new way continuously. That's the Yogi. The Yogi is someone who can use a spontaneous creative language to bring a Visionary consciousness into being at any time and any place. That's what a Yogi is, in the oldest most ancient, in fact the archaic Paleolithic sense. So a Paleolithic Yogi is one who was able to tell the wisdom that would enrapture the hearers and bring them out of darkness into a light of being able to see into the world. So that the world was no longer the opaque imprisonment of stone and clay but became the transparency of process seen episode and Myth. And so when we have an artifact like this from West Africa, this is from Cameroon, this is a story tellers cane. This is to keep the cadence, this is to keep the rhythm. And the rhythm is the structure of the deep base of breath control, like a Yogi. But not to control the breath for controlling the breath, but to set a kind of a reservoir of air. And that reservoir of air, like a Scottish bagpipe, allows for the distribution of the breath to be modulated dozens and dozens of times per second so that one can use the labials and palatals and enunciate and make a language an oral flow where sound becomes sense, where the human voice becomes the first musical instrument. And we'll see how Shelley and his Defense of Poetry, when criticized and ignored and thrown away by his own generation, Shelley defended the poetry in the ancient Paleolithic wisdom of saying poetry is not the imagination working from Nature alone. Yes, man can be seen metaphorically, even allegorically, as some kind of - he uses the metaphor, the allegory, of a lyre. It's true that we're like a lyre and the winds of Nature, the winds of experience, play on us and create melody out of the very inherent structures that are there, and yet there is something more than melody in poetry, there is a setting of melody into its harmonic. And harmonic sets, the harmonies of a higher music come because there is a transformation of Nature, a transformation of experience into Vision. You don't need a compositional harmonic simply to sing in Nature. And you don't need a very complicated compositional structure to play tribal rhythms. But in order to play Mozart you have to have that, and the difference between the Pan flautist of 4,000 years ago and Jean Pierre Rampal playing a little Mozart today, is an enormous jump, a transformational capacity where Vision brings Art into being. Nature never did that, and Myth also never could do that. Something else has to happen, we have to change, and not in some little modification, we have to change as if we were turned inside out; as if some magnificently courageous act of opening allowed for some spirit to come to us and put the hand of Divine inspiration completely down our throats and grab our hearts and turn us inside out. And that in fact the earliest Shamanic indications that this is exactly what happens to experience, is that the Shamans, who were mostly women, wore their bones on the outside of their garments. They sewed the bones, the mobile structure of themselves onto the outside of their buckskin or their chewed skins. And it was a sign, it was a symbol, they had been turned inside out by Visionary transformation. So that when they looked to see, they did not see the outside of things but they saw the inside of the workings of beyond Nature. They saw the workings, the flow of supernatural in a consistent version. And they were the first artists. In fact at Lascaux, some 22,000 years ago, when you go through that great transformative, like a Paleolithic pyramid, and you go all the way through Lascaux to the very end, there you can see in this sudden drop, this sudden pit, the culmination of the transformation of turning inside out. Because there at the extremity of this deep underground chamber, covered with the images of the external animal life that allowed one to live in the world in a Mythic way, there was an experience that completely went beyond living with the animals in the exterior world. It was an experience of being turned inside out by an experience that went beyond life. Because the initiate was simply pushed off the edge and fell, seemingly to their death. And curiously were saved because of like a bungee cord that stopped them just short of being impaled at the bottom of this deep pit. And there they hung in the darkness until the light was brought and the torches brought and one could see on the face of the rock of that pit the great charging rhinoceros, the Paleolithic rhino, the wooly rhino, from when there were rhinos in France. And also underneath it this burnt out stick figure of a man so scared that he has lost all features of his face and has become like some kind of bird spirit. And that the stick like petrification of the Natural body is carried over into the erect penis drawn in cinder stick style so that the entire body is garroted with a fright to death but the face and head are transformed into a bird. So that when they were brought back up, they were no longer limited to the world of animals. They'd been initiated into the subterranean world where symbols transform talismanically into a Vision who's focus was the Artist. The Art is not the point on the walls of Lascaux, the point is the Artists who were there focussing, like prisms, that new supernatural spectrum of possibilities that's different. You could never get that with a Mythology. You could never get that, no matter how accurate you were with Nature, no matter how much you know about the lives of plants, the characteristics of animals, the landscape of thousands of miles, you cannot get that. Because this is something that goes beyond, it goes beyond Nature. It was always called supernatural. But what comes out of that, we acclimate ourselves to in such a way that it becomes not just a part of us but it becomes a dimension of us. We were born and brought up and raised in an external world of animals and plants and things where time and space are like a four dimensional way of coordinating, and all of a sudden, after a supernatural experience, there is a fifth dimension of consciousness, a quintessence of consciousness, a dimension. So that all time and all space are now conscious, and out of that process, which we call traditionally Vision, comes a new kind of object that was never seen before, comes the work of art, comes the Spiritual Person who does not exist as a thing. The Spiritual Person is not a thing, cannot be enumerated no matter how thick the telephone book catalogue of existential things, you will never find the Spiritual Person listed, because they're not things. They're not existent things like a material thing. But even in the larger encyclopedias of mental things, of mind things, you will never find the Spiritual Person. Not on the list. You have to be able to go beyond the objectivity of Ritual and Symbol, of body and mind to find the Spirit. The Spirit is a fermented distilled something else, a third form. And not just a third form in some sequence but a resolving third. Because the Spirit as a differential form is able to juxtapose body and mind in such a way that instead of them needing to be aligned, they can have all kinds of relationalities, all kinds of proportions. And that's why the Spirit is called super-rational. Because the mind already is rational, the mind already knows how to make proportions, knows how to make ratios. The body knows how to address itself to things, the mind already knows how to address itself to ratioed things, rationality. How to make proportions, that's already Symbol, and it's all a part of the integral cycle of Nature. But the Spiritual Person is different, a completely different case. In fact you can't try it in the same court. What was that great play that was turned into a film about the Scopes Trial, Inherit the Wind. Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan arguing about the teaching in Tennessee of the way in which man evolved from apes, and the school teacher is incarcerated because he's teaching blasphemy in the public school, he's teaching Darwin, 1926, that's just 70 some years ago, and is defended by Clarence Darrow. And the poignant part of the play, the poignant part of the film, I think in the film Spencer Tracy plays Clarence Darrow and Frederick March plays William Jennings Bryan, and Frederick March gets caught, William Jennings Bryan gets caught by Clarence Darrow who says 'You adhere to the fact that God made everything in six days, how long is God's day? How do you know how long God's day is? What kind of a watch does God carry? Does he punch a time clock? You don't know how long those days are, they could have been 25 hours, they could have been millions of years' - and demolishes the man. I knew the granddaughter of William Jennings Bryan, he was a super great man, ran for president three times, was surprisingly keyed into Chinese Oriental philosophy. I have two brass dragon book ends that belonged to William Jennings Bryan that were given to him by some Chinese. He was very acquainted with a wide swath of the world, but he could not ever learn beyond a kind of a fundamental inculcated traditional understanding of time and space and therefore religion and therefore all of this. He never could see through, beyond. And so it's not just a difficult problem for Paleolithic men and women, hundred thousand years ago, it's a problem today, 1999. The problem is not seeing through the body, the body is not foolish. The body is refined for billions of years, it's very refined. The body knows how to be spontaneously transparent long before that other object, which is really the culprit, and that's the mind. Because the mind doesn't want to see through itself. Its pride is in being able to see accurately, and no one can see seeing accurately, it doesn't happen. It gets into that area of mystic and it doesn't want to be touched. Deeper, we understand from our education, it gets into the whole question that integration is not enough. That the entire cycle of integration is not enough, Nature is not enough to carry the transcendental joy of reality. And so it comes as a surprise to Nature, it comes as a surprise to a human being who is refined in body and aligned in mind and refined in mind that that's not enough, that you have to go beyond. You have to see into the fact that the story teller's cane, though preserved in a traditional Ritual mode for the dissemination of a mythic cycle orally, nevertheless has a Symbol, a synthesizing controlling Symbol, the handle, and that if one can see into the object, one sees that the origin of this was not in the Cameroon but in Egypt. This is the ancient Egyptian staff of Thoth, the maker of language, 5,000 years ago before there were any Pyramids. The maker of sacred language who learned that at a certain point, oral language becomes transcended by a transformation that takes the voice from you so that it must be written. And when the language is written down, the earliest way in which it was written down is that Thoth made Hieroglyphics. The Hieroglyph, Hiero, like Hierophant, Hieroglyph, it means something of an order of a power above. That it's sacred, not because it's the best here, but because it's completely different. The classic ascription in antiquity is to the teaching Jesus who tells the disciples of John the Baptist, yes he is a very great man in terms of men. But in terms of the spirit, anyone in the spirit is much greater than John the Baptist. That at the top of men, he's there at the top of men, but the least in the Kingdom of God is much greater than he. Why? Because the transformation to spirit is a transformation out of limitation into reality where the working pair is no longer time and space but limits and unlimits, form and infinity. This kind of quality informs Shakespeare and Shelley's language to the point to where once you see it, it is so consistently mysteriously there that you wonder how it could not have been seen. And indeed it was seen. It's just forgotten from generation to generation and has to be rediscovered again. One of the great discoveries early in the 20th century is that in looking for the original Shakespeare text, it was discovered - A.W. Pollard and a man named Percy Simpson who wrote a wonderful book in Edwardian England called Shakespeare's Punctuation - found that the earliest Shakespeare is not necessarily in printed editions with the acts and the scenes and the line designations that we have, but that the first editions are largely actors prompt books, sometimes published as quartos. Like there's a quarto of Hamlet published in 1604, comes from a prompt book. And that the original Shakespeare written text does not have acts and scenes. He didn't write for acts and scenes. And that the wild peppering of punctuation is not because they were stupid way back then. How stupid is Shakespeare and his buddies? There isn't anybody today that has a vocabulary of ½ of Shakespeare. How stupid are they? The punctuation was not meant for an editorial constriction to a false form of acts and scenes, but it was an indication for the performance of Shakespeare so that the actors could deliver the lines, because they had to transform it out of a written into an oral way. And so you have to do a double transformation. Shakespeare had to transform it into a written language to bring it into a conscious/time/space, an artistic five dimensional form and then had to find someway to take that five dimensional form and let it feed back in a second transformation, a double transformation, to come back so that it could be delivered on stage orally. Because Shakespeare play is not a myth, it's a drama. But it's not a drama in acts and scenes, it's evident now that a Shakespearean play was meant to be played straight through, no divisions. What does it mean? It means a Shakespeare play is like a waterfall of language. It is a continuity of a flow out of eternity. It's a Cosmic language, not a tribal language. And when you get that you get smashed against the wall until you could - it's more than 100 g's. You cannot believe that 400 years ago, that someone could do this with language every damn day of the week. Now occasionally there is an exception. And the greatest exception is the play that we're taking from Shakespeare, The Tempest. There's no quarto of The Tempest. Its first edition is in the First Folio, the famous First Folio of Shakespeare, published in 1623, about 7 years after his death, published by his buddies, his friends, the great actors, the great dramatists and poets that survived him, that knew him and they published the First Folio. And The Tempest is the first play in the First Folio, given pride of place. They reproduced a facsimile in 1928. It's interesting because the First Folio of The Tempest has the acts and scenes in it which allow for someone who is reading it silently to produce the play in the mind. And one can see from this that Shakespeare knew very well how to put acts and scenes in, he doesn't have any trouble at all. That if you have a Visionary language become a work of Art and you want to play the drama in the mind, then you need acts and scenes. But if you're playing it on the stage with an oral language, you don't need acts and scenes. I learned that a long time ago. I learned that more than 30 years ago. That if you want to deliver a lecture to someone in their mind, then you write the lecture out. You write it in beautiful 17th century essay for if you want, 20th century glib magazine style if you want, there are lots of ways, but you write it out. But if you're going to deliver personally live language, you do not write the lecture out because live language is meant to be performed orally. It's not that the story teller's art is inferior, it's of a different order. The story teller's art is the mythic level of spoken language, and its sense of intelligence is in feeling. Oral language is meant to convey feeling. Feeling toned intelligence - in fact we have a word for it. We don't call it intelligence, the English language calls that sentience. And not only is man a sentient being, but if you talk to the animals, even Dr. Dolittle can show you, animals are also to some degree sentient. You can talk to horses, you can talk to birds, you can talk to dogs, you can talk to plants. They have a degree of sentience also, they have a feeling toned intelligence of experience. So that one of the most powerful processes, one of the most powerful integrals there is in Nature is for a shared common ground of experience between all living things, and that sentience is a quality of life. It's not a property of man, it's a quality of life. Anything that lives has a quality of sentience. And so one can have a feeling toned communion with all life. This was the highest, most comprehensive purpose of tradition. So that man's oral language was meant to be the pinnacle of the sentient sharing this communion of life. That's why Mother Nature loves us passionately, motherly, sisterly, she's got a lot of ways to put her arms around us and sustain us and be there with us. She loves that we can create, through the spontaneous telling of the shapes of feeling sentience, feeling toned experience brought into a quality of realizable communion, that this is important, it's important to all life. And it reached a high point, one of the great apexes in the reign of Elizabeth I. Despite a couple of the popular films that are out, she was never clumsy, she was never the bashful teenager wondering how she was going to speak with men, she never had any problem. Her father was Henry VIII. Do you get it? She never had any problem. The old musician, he was about 75 when he composed her coronation music, Thomas Tallis, because he realized how brilliant she was; she was unbelievably brilliant. He composed a coronation music that was a motet in 40 parts, the 40 part motet. So that would be more rational harmonies actually there than you could keep track of with your mind. Because she was that way even as a young woman, she was that way. So that when it comes to appreciating Shakespeare, his friend Ben Johnson writes this. This is the preface to Troilus and Cressida, 1606: "A newer writer to an even newer reader, news. Eternal reader you have here a new play never stale with the stage, never clapper clawed with the palms of the vulgar and yet passing full of the palm comical. For it is a birth of your brain that never undertook anything comical vainly". And a little later on he says, he writes, "All such dull and heavy witted worldlings as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations, have found that with their, that they never founded themselves. And having parted better witted than they came, feeling an edge of wit set upon them more than ever they dreamed or they had brain to grind it on. Let's take a break. VISION 9: SHAKESPEARE & SHELLEY PART TWO Here's a quotation from one of the great Gothic novels, horror novels, it's called Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock, who was a friend of Shelley's, and he is describing, this is published 1818, he's describing Shelley and the public response to Shelley: "To get a clear view of his own ideas and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote and published a treatise in which his meanings were carefully wrapped in the monkshood of transcendental technology, filled with hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set the whole nation in ferment. And he awaited the result in awful expectation as a miner who has fired a train, awaits the explosion a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing, for the explosion, if any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey, and some months afterwards he received a letter from his bookseller publisher informing him that only seven copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the balance." That's why frequently in the wisdom traditions, Hermes hold up a finger "don't tell them". This peculiar Hermes, instead of a caduceus, he holds up a Jewish menorah. So there is a lot of esoterica yet to be discussed. Shelley was a very peculiar character. As a youth he was one of the first people in the world to have a chemistry set of his own and to blow up things. And of course he was constantly being paraded before the elder Shelley patriarch of a very wealthy family and being criticized for being wild. And when he got older, when he got to be about 15, they called him mad. And he ended up passing out revolutionary pamphlets in Ireland on street corners. And the great illustration of Shelley's personality, you can see in the wide wild eyed revolutionary tone; wild eyed just like the sages of Sumerian antiquity who had learned to see in Visionary consciousness through the confines of both time and space. And so Shelley was not so much mad as he was real in an age that insisted on keeping itself unreal. And so Shelley, almost more than any other writer of his time, was a revolutionary. In fact he admired so much, in 1819 he wrote a philosophic view of reform and he quoted, he said "The system of government in the United States of America is the first practical illustration of the new philosophy". The new philosophy being that Vision which Benjamin Franklin had and was able to pass to Thomas Jefferson who was able to bring it into being. Because by 1819 the United States was clearly not at all the brokered constitutional house of card that had been made in the 1780's at the Constitutional Convention. Their president had been George Washington and his Vice President who had succeeded him, John Adams, and for 12 years that constitutional house of cards United States existed and then it was blown away by a Vision called the Election of 1800. And the revolution of 1800, which it's called now completely blew away the limiting confines of that house of cards and made of something that was tending to be more and more automatically some kind of feudal monarchy into a continent spanning openness, so vast and so wide that no one could keep track of it anymore. The only person that challenged it was Napoleon. And Napoleon, who saw as usual, the First Council was very good at seeing empire possibilities, he thought he would have a North American base for his French empire, until Thomas Jefferson sent James Monroe over with a little documentation. Monroe read to the First Council with Talleyrand standing next to him, he said, in Jefferson's own words, we have taken the trouble to make a count of able bodied men who can hold rifles for the French cause in North America and you have 15,000 men. We, on the other hand, are sending 25,000 men a month through the Cumberland Gap, and we can come to some arrangement. That's how the Louisiana Purchase happened. Within a few months two thirds of the entire continent were added; two thirds of the entire continent that were not there in the vision of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. So that what was there all of a sudden instead of being a new feudal empire on the Atlantic coast was an openness that stretched to the Pacific and beyond. And in this vastness, this openness was the kind of revolution that Shelley was admiring and envisioning. In 1819, which was just a few years, 3 years before he died, he began to change his sights, his focus on what he could make and do, and he wanted to find some way to create a revolution, a real revolution, and he knew that a real revolution happens, not in the politics or in the economics or even in the geography first, it happens first in human beings. It happens because their minds are enlarged beyond what they were able to satisfactorily accept and recognize before, and that the way to transform minds into consciousness is to change the language. You have to take language out of its Mythic mode and put it into its magic mode. While a Mythic language can tell the stories that refer back to Nature, a magic language is the language that transforms and changes Nature by supernatural dimension of consciousness into a Historical development, the object of which is not to have a reinforcement of tradition, but to open up the Cosmos further. So that the aims of someone who uses a conscious language is to look up into the night sky and to see a new program that's not limited to what conventions can determine. It doesn't matter if it's the 2000 democratic convention in Los Angeles or the Philadelphia convention of 1787 or some doctrinaire convention in Greece in 357, deciding that we're going to have a doctrine of one Christ and no two Jesuses. Or whatever; the Counsel of Jamnia that decided that the Jewish text of the Bible should not be changed one jot, one iota. Or many other conventions; I suppose the earliest record that we have of such a convention was the one gathered by Hammurabi in old Babylonia about 3800 years ago, where they came out with the Code of Hammurabi; the Code of Hammurabi which is the most powerful comprehensive legal code in world History. It's still the basis upon which all codes are made, whether it's the Lex Romana, whether it's the Rabbinical code of the Torah, whether it's the law code of Napoleon. They're all based on Hammurabi's code which 3800 years ago was a constricting, a limiting, a devolution, a reduction, a regression from a great international age. That first great international age; it was the first time that there was an international age, where there was human concourse and trading over such a vast swath of traditions, that someone could become acquainted with 100 different cultures in a single lifetime. That the Symbol of that great first international civilization - it used to be called in text books in the middle of the 20th century, it used to be called the Fertile Crescent, because that's what they called it, The Fertile Crescent. It referred not only to that swath of land from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, along the river courses of the Euphrates and Tigris and up over down into, well, that's how Palestine got to be where it was, because it was the anchor of the other side. One end of the Fertile Crescent was anchored where the Euphrates and Tigris run into the Persian Gulf, Where Bizerta is today. In fact the great sea port was not Bizerta, it was too swampy and too muddy. The land was under water quite a bit further up. In fact in Sumerian times it was all swamp land and the original cities of the world, the first cities of the world were all on the coast of an ancient Persian Gulf that went several hundred miles further in; cities like Ur. That was called Chaldea. And Ur is where Abraham was born. So the great crescent, the Fertile Crescent was not anchored on the sea coast of the Persian Gulf, but it was anchored on an island in the Persian Gulf. It's ancient name was Dilman. And Dilman was the original Garden of Eden. So that one end of the first Fertile Crescent civilization was Eden and the other was Palestine. It was a holy land, it was a promised land, it was related to Eden because it was the other end of the harmonic. Do you get it? The Fertile Crescent was a geography of sacredness that was a harmony of a conscious time space which man had brought out of Vision, of the Cosmos for something new. So that those generations that lived at that time, the king who made the Fertile Crescent was named Sargon. I think I brought in, we still have the great gold mask of Sargon's features, made while he was alive, not a death mask, but a life mask. I'll bring it again next week. And the first great writer in History was his daughter. His daughter was the author of the Inanna cycles. His daughter, Inhayduana was her name and she made an intelligent quart for the first time, and out of that quart came the literature of the epic of Gilgamesh and well as her Inanna cycle, the great epic of creation and the flood Atrahasis, and the whole origins of Western literature are there in that international age. And what synthesized that Fertile Crescent was the caravan route. The caravan route that started in Eden and came by ship to the land and went over land by the Euphrates all the way up over, linking the Persian Gulf, linking Eden, linking it with Palestine and the Mediterranean Coast. That caravan route had someone in charge of it and the first man to have the corporation that was in charge of the caravan route, his name was Terra. He was the father of Abraham. And while Abraham was born in Ur, he grew up in Haran. Haran is at the middle of the curve of the Fertile Crescent. Ancient Haran was a Sufi center thousands of years later. So that Abraham grew up in an international civilization; he was a world traveler at a time 4,000 years ago when most people had trouble even understanding what a tradition was of some little area, some little tribal area that never was more than 10 or 15 miles. He got the synthesizing tradition of one of the largest swaths of the civilized world at the time. So He became international, an being international he wanted to increase the market share. So he decided to extend the caravan route to the next stage, because the next stage was very profitable, it was the stage between Palestine and Egypt. And when he got to Egypt he realized that he was going to have a little bit of a difficulty with the Pharaohs because they had a completely opposite psyche to that kind of Mesopotamian psyche which they came out of. The Mesopotamian psyche was related to the great Goddess, to the Mother Goddess, whereas the Egyptians were related to the Father God. The Egyptians were a stern ascetic covert esoteric sacred Hierarchy that completely was opposite to the matriarchal great Goddess dancing love of life of Mesopotamia. So Abraham was the first to run across the intractable problem of how do you put fire and iron together. How do you put the passion for life together with this kind of masculine ascetic esotericism that scoffs at and does not like this kind of life. It's sloppy, it's slovenly. And of course we have read his story because it's told in Genesis of how this happens. This kind of Vision is the way in which Vision is related to History. Vision related to History, not in some kind of referential way of going back, but in a referential way of going forward. Further into consciousness, further into differentiation. So Vision and History, when they are aligned, they align out, they open out. Vision always opens further out. And midway or what appears to be midway in this opening out is that great prismatic lens called the Spiritual Person. It's the only form that's there in that infinitely opening out energy of Visionary consciousness, Visionary time/space. And because the lens of the person is objective, is quite real, just because it's a differential form doesn't make it any less real than an integral form. The Spiritual Person allows us to see the further objectivity, the further differential form of the Cosmos. And of course the more that one has experience, not only in Vision but in that furthering differential process, History, the further out does the Cosmos move and the further out the center, so that the Spiritual Person and the Cosmos are constantly exploring and moving further out in a relationality. Not in a fixed caliper but in a harmonic of proportion. So that the Spiritual Person and Cosmos are always proportionately related together and they expand together. Whereas a Mythic language, Mythic process is always related to Nature, it always has its alignment because it participates in the Natural cycle. So that a Mythic language is always checking itself for truth by looking back, whereas a Visionary language checks itself for truth by looking ahead. That's called prophecy. It's called poetry. And this is what Shakespeare and Shelley were doing. They were looking ahead to see what's the new shape of the Person. And consequently, what is the new harmonic of the Cosmos. That's what they were doing. And they were two of the greatest writers that ever lived in this particular respect. And they took the English language, which had already had a fantastic career of development, of maturation, of change. English had been a literate language for 1,000 years before Shakespeare ever wrote. But when Shakespeare was born, the English language world was shook to its roots by a completely new powerful Symbol; by a Symbol which harkened all the way back to the hieroglyphic beginnings of Western wisdom and shook the Tudor world of England, which was the cradle of the English language at that time. Because the very same year that Shakespeare was born, 1564, is when the great Elizabethan Magus, John Dee, publish a short little esoteric book called Monas Hieroglyphica, the secret sacred occult hieroglyph of all the harmonics of mathematical possibility. Not like a Champollion of Shelley's time, of learning to decipher the hieroglyphs, that one could read them. But Dee in his time was looking for the arch Symbol that was the esoteric key to open up all Symbols. Being practical Englishman, he didn't want to waste time. He knew it would take lifetimes to learn all the meanings of the various Symbols, so he wanted to crunch the numbers. He wanted to get it down, because if you have arch mastery key over all Symbols in a single mega-Symbol, then you are able to control everything. And that arch Symbol will also be the center of every mind that comes into learning, because we all share the same structure of Symbolic capacity. Though the content changes from Mythic tradition to Mythic tradition, when they interiorize they come into the same kind of brain. And we have a shared universal mind. And if you understand the key, the Symbol that's the key to all Symbols in the mind, then you will have a corner on the market of what is possible in this world, in terms of body and mind. And because that's the basis then of differential consciousness, it gives you a leg up on that realm also. This is the kind of thinking that was there in Tudor England in 1564 when Shakespeare was born. He was born into that kind of overwhelming ambition. Not to control the island of England, but to control the globe of the world. That's why Shakespeare was called the Globe; the entire world. And when you were on the stage of the Globe, which you can go on the stage of the Globe again because it's been reconstructed in London, been rebuilt exactly the way it was when Shakespeare was there. If you look up from anywhere on the stage of the Globe Theater you will see the 12 signs of the Zodiac, not in a circle but in a very sophisticated Keplerian ellipse. They were really up to date, because John Dee was the greatest mathematician of his day. He was a mathematical genius. When he was 23 he lectured to overflowing audiences at the University of Paris on Euclid's geometry, telling them things that nobody had heard since the days of Alexandria, 1500 years before. He dazzled them. He dazzled the English court of Elizabeth; she loved the fact that she had, in her own stable, the most incredible mathematical genius of her time. She had the Einstein. But she was convinced, because the Tudor mind ran towards authority, hierarchy, power, towards mind focusing, that the mind somehow not only controls the existential way in which Ritual will be shaped, but it also, being the medium, will control the way in which people will be formed. Because that Visionary energy comes out of the Symbol, doesn't it? It goes both ways, it's like the hour glass. The hour glass in time, the perfect Symbol of the way in which the Symbol at the center controls and synthesizes everything. And so one has to control that, it's the power point. There are books out now called Super Focusing. Get to the power point of the mind, then you have it. This is exactly how Tudor monarchical authority thought. It's typical. It's the way monarchies always think. It's the way those kind of power structures always think, they will always think that way because it's traditional. It was traditional in Sargon's time 4500 years ago already. Anyone who deals with a wisdom transformation and knows History, becomes familiar with hundreds if not thousands of examples of this. It's always that way. That's why now at the beginning of the 21st century, it's possible to work with that because it's so simplistic by this time that one can do end runs around all of that. You don't even have to do an end run. It is so sloppily unrealistic that it's permeable, and someone with the right language simply walks through it as if it were a shredded veil of stale old cheese cloth, it's nothing at all. Those resistances are only scary by report, they're nothing at all. They're shreds waiting to be brushed aside and walked through. That's why the 21st century is such a great era of promise and achievement. Because the stale old veils of the past are so rotten, that anyone at all that pushes on them will go immediately straight through. No one has to pay $200 and go to jail. This kind of a quality is there in Shelley, especially when he writes his great study of poetry A Defense of Poetry. It was written in 1821 in response to another one of his friends who published an article that sort of took from the classical author Ovid - that there are four ages of civilization, a golden age and then a silver age, then an age of brass and then an age of iron - and said well there are four ages of poetry. And there are many typologies like this that keep surfacing. In Shelley's case, he was adamant that this entire old rotten veil of stupidity be brushed aside; that it is a mythic imaginative metaphysical what-if-ism and has no place in reality whatsoever. So he wrote a defense of poetry and in it he writes: "Poetry in a general sense may be defined to be the expression of the imagination". You can start there, it's the expression of the imagination. But there's much more and the more, not only adds to it, but multiplies, not only adds and multiplies but finally transforms it so there is something else. "The expression of the imagination and poetry is connate [not cognate but connate] with the origin of man". That is to say it's not cognate with the limited factual origin of man there then, but it's in a connate, a connotative sympathy, because the actual origin of man is not fixed forever. It's very much a moveable feast and as man matures, his understanding of his origins matures and changes. This is called - I call it - the new past. And the new past is connate with the future. Because in reality, when you move into the future, the past is recalibrated and is also new. That's the good news. One is no longer real in terms of the dead past that jailed you before, you are free on every count, every threshold is a resonance of newness including your past. You are not only a new person, but you can recalibrate your past so that it is new - that's news. Shelley writes, in 1821, the magazine it was sent to folded and it was never published there. It was attempted to be published several times and every time it was sent someplace the magazine fell apart. Finally his wife, the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 20 years later, published an edition of Shelley and she included her manuscript copy of A Defense of Poetry. It was published for the first time in 1840. "Expression of the imagination and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven". External and internal impressions. This is two generations before Monet. When it was published it was three generations before Monet, when Shelley was [?]. "These external and internal" [the external impressions of Mythic experience relating to the physical world, the internal qualities of Vision that relate to the Spiritual Person, to Art. So that existence and Art both send impressions that come together] where man as an instrument has his focus [has his being, has his center] like the alternations of an ever changing wind, as if man were like an aeolian lyre, which moved by their motion to ever changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than simply in the lyre, and produces not melody alone but harmony; a determined proportion of sound." Or a determined proportioning of image, or determined proportion of whatever is functioning for the artist, whatever is functioning for the Spiritual Person. Because the Spiritual Person is a free creator who's venue is reality and not this world, not somebody's kingdom, not somebody's empire, not somebody's constitutional house of cards of any quality whatsoever. Not of some tradition, it doesn't matter how wonderful the stories are, and they're very wonderful, and they have their place. But their place is not the place where the freedom of conscious harmony making has its effectiveness. The Spiritual Person is always free to use what one needs to use. But not in some anarchic way, not in some "irresponsible" way, for that transformational experience sobers one up profoundly, that all of the integral cycle is necessary. One cannot throw away any of it; Nature, Ritual with existence and the body and its needs, Myth with its feeling and its experience, its kind of language, its traditions, Symbols with the power of forming ideas in the mind; that all of this is of an integral cycle and when that integral cycle is truly integrated, it's not a collection of phases but becomes a wholeness. A wholeness which distributes evenly, like an air reserve in some musical instrument, the undertone, the counterpoint of the freedom to strike out for new things, one has a complementary drone of the distributed application in the integral so that Nature receives it, Ritual receives it, the Mythic lever receives it, the Symbolic receives it also. The Buddha likened it to rain. In several sermons he observed realistically, when it rains in Nature it rains for everyone. There are no half drops that shun the wicked. It simply doesn't happen. So that there is a phrase, later on in the Vajrayana, some 2,000 years later, the phrase comes out of Sang Kapa, the founder of the Gelugpa sect, the Dalai Lama's. Sang Kapa called it the rain of wisdom. When it rains wisdom, it rains distributively, evenly for not only the entire Universe, but the entire Cosmos. Not only the entire four corners, four directions of the integral cycle, but for the complementary four directions and four corners of the differential cycle. It rains for the great eight part harmonic of reality, the rain of wisdom. And fructifies everything. So that there is a quality which is there for someone like Shelley. When he was doing Prometheus Unbound, he was in his late 20's which for someone like Shelley is a pretty mature period. He changed the three acts of Prometheus Bound to a four act drama. In the three act version of Prometheus Unbound the focus was on man. In the four act version of Prometheus Unbound the focus was on the Cosmos. He realized that Prometheus, being bound, was not Zeus punishing Prometheus because he had helped man. That his deeper problem was that Prometheus had challenged Zeus himself; had uncovered a quality in Zeus that Zeus himself did not know he had. Zeus was the Sky God, Father Sky as opposed to Mother Earth. Mother Earth has her integrity in the integral, embracing completeness, allowing for a focus of perfection, willing to accept interchange. The Sky God had to learn that he was included in the reality of the exchange and could not just lord it over the earth and earth things and Mother Nature, but had to cooperate. And that man coming out of the earth was not so much a beneficiary of a theft of Prometheus but was an indication of the truth of his own nature, which he hadn't known before. So that the masculine God had to wise up and learn that he had a realistic relationship with Mother Earth, with the feminine, and he couldn't just go about raping and reaping in his own way. That reality was quite extraordinarily different and required an exchange. That he had to learn to give up as much as she gave up; he had to learn the truth, the reality of sacrifice from himself. You just can't punish others all the time because you want to. Because the real punishment is due to Zeus himself, because he had been blocky, he hadn't leaned, he hadn't been realistic, he hadn't seen the bottom line. The bottom line was not some kind of a straight edge, making a pair of D shaped kingdoms, one of which he controlled and then lorded it over the other. But the line was sinuous, it bent, it was like when you pluck a musical string and it vibrates and it creates resonances which penetrate forward and backward. There's a great Haiku of Basho where he goes into a profound Zen moment. He's in the ruins of some old temple courtyard and the only thing that he hears in the stillness of the summer afternoon is a cricket singing in probably the only cool spot that was there. And the cricket singing, Basho says, penetrates the rock. Zeus had to learn that there are moments like that in him which he didn't know. And what brings that out in him is not Prometheus but man. Not that man humanizes the Father Sky God but that he evokes the reality that suffering transforms. And that in the exchange, Zeus must learn to accept suffering also. And that this, Shelley says, this is the hidden agenda which the Greeks of Aeschylus' time didn't want to face. And he says in our time, this time of fantastic revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, everything that is happening, we have to face this. Our Father God has to learn this humility, that it isn't just we who suffer, he must suffer with us to go through the transformation together, to go through to achieve the realistic ability to interface, and that God's consciousness must come back into Mother Nature's realm after all and be a dimension there. And even he is not exempt from his own reality. Shelley said this kind of talk is revolutionary. More next week. END OF RECORDING