Vision 11
Presented on: Saturday, March 13, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Vision 11 and I'm going to try to make a differentiation for us between the way in which language tells a story, that it its narrative, that is it has a Mythic line, to a language which is magical, which does not have a narrative line but has a resonant quality of consciousness. So that Mythic language and Magic language are radically different. A Mythic language always works by images which integrate in the mind, a Magic language proceeds differentially and differentiates in the person. So that a Magic language leads to a person whereas a Mythic language leads to a symbolic presence in the mind. Myths come together in the mind but Magic finds its focus in a transcendental form called the Spiritual Person. So that the Spiritual Person is radically different from the mind. So that one of the most difficult and pernicious of all sand traps in life is to mistake an idea of the person for oneself; to mistake one's identity for your actuality. And to search for an identity is very often the only way in which the ego can maintain itself. And so the ego becomes the chief investor, the bank roller, the financier of ideas of ourselves and is the main drawback forbidding us to discover elsewise, whatever else there is. And that that energy that helps us to get over this egotistical barrier of our ego forbidding us to discover that there's more to us than our identity, more to us than our idea of ourselves. The energy that flows over this cupped shape of integral balance which the ego prizes and warns us 'now don't upset this cart, don't upset this cup, don't go beyond these limits, you'll go mad, you'll die'. And the ego has its ways like that. Whereas the Spiritual Person only occurs after there is an overflowing, after there is some kind of a radical change, a transformation. And generally that energy we would know, we would use the word love, that love overflows. Love not as an ideal, but love as a passionate actuality.
So that transformation has to do with a passionate presencing, like one of the things that we're looking at, one of the books that we're looking at, Shakespeare's Tempest. Shakespeare's Tempest which has five acts, the first act has two parts, the second act has two parts, the third act has three parts, but acts four and five have only one part each. Shakespeare generally didn't write in scenes and acts. Usually his style of composition was to make a cascade, a waterfall of language and repartee of characters in this dynamic swirl thrown whole, and it was only later editors, his acting friends, his dramatic friends who, when they would try to articulate this cascade of language so that it could be played out on the stage or it could be read out in a book, they placed the scenes and acts.
Now if you look at the structure of the Tempest, it has five acts which is a very Hermetic structure. The Hermetic star is that five quality, like the hand is also a Hermetic structure. While the hand is a Hermetic structure in existence and five is usually an esoteric number or shape for the body, that becomes a nine in the mind, because the mind not only sees the five fingers but it sees the four spaces between the fingers and integrates all of it together.
And so while there are five acts to the Tempest, there are nine scenes. So those friends of his, those actors, those other dramatists, actors like James Burbage, dramatists like Ben Johnson, who edited Shakespeare for the First Folio - it came out about seven years after he died - they're the ones who put the scenes and acts together, and you can see that they understood because they had performed the plays, they knew the man, they knew his style, they knew his language and they knew how these plays play, how this language cascade played itself out on the stage.
And something like The Tempest was indeed the last great production of Shakespeare's career. Faulkner once said that when Shakespeare finished The Tempest finally he broke his pencil, so to speak. Because when you've done something like this, that's it. It's like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The artist has gone into a new realm of objectivity where his work of art has gone more differential than his person and that that work of art then has become Cosmic. Like Beethoven's Ninth, Shakespeare's Tempest is a Cosmic work of art. It is so huge in its resonances, in its possibilities, it's such an enormous tapestry of openness that it's like one of the heavens. It's like a veil over all of the heavens and if one could only explore the complete matrix, the great net of constellations, of possibilities in something like The Tempest, you would become so wise as to transcend even the Spiritual Person and come into view of the Divine, come into appreciation for the Cosmos.
And just like there are two forms in Nature, there's the form of the body and the form of the mind. Whatever exists has a material stuff, thingness, a physical body, but there's also an interior objectivity. And so body and mind are integral forms, but Person and Cosmos are differential forms. And they are the play of the way in which consciousness fans out resonantly and from time to time comes into a constellated form, rather than an integral form, it comes into a differential form like a constellation. So that the very language that we use is the language of say astronomy. Where if you look to see the stars, naively, at night, one just sees a random sweep of unbelievable complexity, and only when you begin to excerpt certain stars and bunch them together in constellations, does the Cosmos begin to have, instead of just a complexity, it begins to have a formal tapestry of possible facets. And once the night sky is able to be seen in terms of an array of constellations, then the conscious appreciation of reality comes to its full mature span of entertaining all the possibilities of being able to take into your sense of what is, the further sense of what might be. And so this complete Cosmic range of possibility joins to the limited forms of necessity, the limitations which the body has, and the limitations which the mind has, to the unlimited capacities of the Spiritual Person and the unlimited possibilities of the objective Cosmos.
So that at the very center of a Tempest, of The Tempest, at the beginning of act three, the middle of the five acts, the beginning of act three, and if you look at the beginning of act three, it not only is the third of five acts, the middle one, but there are two acts that have two scenes each before it, so there are four scenes before it, and there are four scenes after it. So the first scene of act three of The Tempest is the exact center, is the fulcrum upon which the entire structure of the Cosmos of that play is balanced. And in that balance there are two figures, there's a young woman, Miranda and a young prince, Ferdinand, who discover mutually that they love each other, and that that's the fulcrum of the entire play. In fact Miranda asks him, ' do you love me?'. And he replies with a language which is enormously interesting, he says to her "Oh heaven, Oh Earth, bear witness to this sound and crown what I profess with kind event if I speak true if hollowly invert what best is boded me into mischief. I beyond all limit of whatever else there is in the world do love, prize, honor you". That they're love is not Ferdinand's ego wanting this thing, her, for this identity, him, to have or vice versa of her ego, etc. etc., but their mutuality of giving creates an exchange that transforms. And right at the very center of The Tempest is this transformation that love in its exchange, its secret exchange of selves, allows for both to be each renewed in each other.
And in this way a pair becomes a complementarity. A polarity, which was necessary in Nature, because we saw last week that there is no possibility of stuff to exist without the polarity that cements and hold that structure. Existence is posited by polarity - or as the Elizabethans would use the English language, contrarities - contrarities are what makes this world of stuff and things, of bodies, be. It's the energy of the tension between contrarities that is the glue that holds stuff together. And so when it comes to transformation, you're jeopardizing the entire world, you're jeopardizing Nature and your jeopardizing especially your ego, because your ego knows, if something else comes in, I have to go. And by God and by golly no one's going to get me off my throne.
And so the issue of Spiritual transformation becomes, for the ego, the political theme of usurpation. And The Tempest has usurpation as plot B very strongly. It's the sub-plot throughout the entire play because Prospero has been usurped from his kingdom - he was the Duke of Milan. But he got interested in books, he got interested especially - they have an image of a big book - he got into these secret books of occult lore, magic books. And he got taken into the realm of magic books and he left the day to day concerns of running his kingdom to his brother. And his brother who got used to appointing people, paying people and paying people off, which is sometimes not two distinct things, so that they got used to coming to him. He finally arranged to have his brother kidnapped and put on a ship and sent out to sea and dismissed to the waves. And his little daughter, three year old daughter Miranda, so there would be no one to compete against the brother, was included. So he kidnapped and set adrift Prospero and Miranda twelve years before. But the old counselor Gonzalo, who sort of felt for him, felt that in his last hours or last days, he should have a little comfort, packed some belongings and packed his magic book. And so Prospero, with that magical capacity was able to shipwreck his ruin on some island on the edge of the new world. We're not sure just where it was, in Shakespeare's time geography of the West Indies was not so precise, but he says in the play that they're somewhat south of Bermuda.
So that you have this idea that the play takes place somewhere in the Bahamas. Now the Bahamas, when this play was written in 1611, and it was finally revised in 1613, it was played before a royal wedding. It was written to be the seal, the magic language seal by the founding poet of the English maritime empire, the English civilization. They were convinced in the Renaissance that civilizations were founded by great poets; Homer had founded the Greeks, Virgil had founded the Romans, Dante had founded the Italian Renaissance, and so their Shakespeare was founding a new civilization, that of the British Empire of the entire globe. And that while the Greeks and the Romans and the Italians in their successive times had been powerful and had very large kingdoms, that England in the Elizabethan times is going to be the first global power. Because it had an esoteric leg up on everyone else. It had a esoteric understanding of mathematics as applied to navigation that coordinated the oceans of the world with the stars of the entire planet surrounding the entire globe. That English navigation paired up with Renaissance astronomy that had become truly global, and that this was indicated by wondrous events that had happened in the heavens.
There was a man named Tycho Brahe, he was a Dane who got into a fight one time and lost his nose. So he had this metal nose. He was one of the richest men in Denmark at the time and his passion was astronomy. And he wanted to be better than anyone else, and he realized that he wasn't quite the mathematical genius that he should be but he was rich enough that he could build the largest equipment. And he thought, I will make a map of the heavens better than anyone has ever made, including Ptolemy in antiquity, I will make a star map that's accurate, not just to the angles of the heavens, but to the minutes of the angles, 1/60 of an angle. And so he spent his influence and his money, he was finally given an island called Hven, off the coast of Helsinger, in between Sweden and Denmark, in that strait. And he set up a utopian community based upon his astronomical observatory. He was great at building instruments and he built an observation sextant so large that it took up a whole building, and he could sit in it and he could make these minute observations of stars. And just as he was setting himself to do this, there was a phenomenon of a super nova, the first in almost 600 years. And the first that was ever recorded with any kind of scientific accuracy. There had been a couple of super novas in History, the crab nebula was observed in China and Babylon around the 1000 mark. In China they just thought that this was a peculiarity, and of course they thought it was millennial fever in the Medieval Middle East. But by Tycho time, 1572, they realized that a new star in heaven meant that creation was still happening; that the Universe was not finished and therefore the existing Universe probably wasn't perfect yet, which meant that there was room for something new in heaven, which meant that man had to learn to integrate newness with his ideas of what was perfect.
Now Tycho didn't have the intellectual acumen and the mathematics to really profoundly understand this, but his student did, his student named Kepler, Johannes Kepler, he was the father of modern astronomy. He had the math to be able to figure out the relationships, trigonometrically, and he realized, not only were there new stars in heaven, but that the orbits of the planets were not perfect circles; that the planets orbit's were ellipses, the math showed it very clearly. So that God's idea of perfection was not man's egotistical idea of identifying perfection of perfect circles. That obviously ellipses, in order to be real meant that the center of the ellipse was not an object but was the shared gravitational focus between two objects at least. In order for the Earth moving around the Sun not to have a circular orbit but to have an elliptical orbit means that the center of that system is neither on the Earth nor the Sun but is in the point in space that is shared by the gravity of the two.
It's a fine point which very few people at the time appreciated, but one of the people who appreciated it was Shakespeare. That the center of reality is not in some one or something but in a shared presence focus. And by the time Shakespeare wrote The Tempest Kepler had long since published, ten years before, a book called The New Astronomy. Another edition came out in 1609 where he patiently showed, and put the math in and put the trigonometry in, and he had everything solved up to a point where he just simply couldn't go beyond. And it would take almost another century for the next person to go beyond. Because one step beyond where Kepler left it in 1609 was for Sir Isaac Newton to discover the universal laws of gravitation and to write the Principia Mathematica. It was only one step beyond Kepler.
So that Shakespeare was on the cusp, he was on the edge, he was on the conscious edge of the world, understanding that a completely new world and a completely new Cosmos was open to man. And so he set The Tempest on the edge of the known world, on the edge of the beginning of the New World. So that The Tempest is set on the cusp of the edges of the old and the new. And on the balance of the old and the new, a transformation would take place that would not only bring the old into the new, but would exchange the old and the new in such a way that the new would come back and revivify the old. Because Alchemy is all about, not only transmuting something into something else and it becomes something else, that something else reaches back and changes the whole way in which Nature is seen. Because Nature now is not just a stable static position of things, but everything is available for its own kind of transformation, and the world is new, everything in it is new because it can be something yet different.
And so Shakespeare in The Tempest, his great theme is that we not only renew ourselves through love, but we change the nature of what was into what it could possibly be. And possibility replaces the kind of causality that reigned before. Which is doom to the ego because the ego has long since paid off in causal terms to keep the structure frozen. It likes it this way, it's king of the world this way, and if anything changes then the whole thing's going to be changed and that's why ultimate authority feels threatened by the slightest newness, the slightest change. Because the slightest change is a reminder that there may be a radical change like a transformation. Shakespeare calls it a Sea Change; a change so vast that the entire ocean is different. The ocean which is 2/3 of the planet is all of a sudden different. There was a French utopian revolutionary named Fourier, Charles Fourier, who once proposed to end the kind of tyranny that poverty brings. He said let's turn the oceans of the world to lemonade so people will have free drinks forever. Let's take the power away from these power mongers, they want to keep the old the way it is. Now we want to change everything. Shakespeare lived at this kind of time, and The Tempest is his document.
We're pairing with The Tempest Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, because Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a couple of hundred years later, is the culmination of a great deal of that energy released. Released at the time of this Renaissance. Not just in England, the great contemporary of Shakespeare in Spain is Cervantes. And there's a great power of differential personality that comes to play. And so you find Spiritual Persons in Cervantes and Shakespeare who are now more real than anyone who lived at that time. Don Quixote and King Lear are much more real to us than anyone who lived in the late 1500's, early 1600's.
One of the great existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century, a Spaniard, his name means one world, Unamuno, Don Miguel de Unamuno [Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo] wrote these little existential stories, and then when he finished these existential novels he had an appendix where the characters came in demanding from the writer that he write more stories - now that you have created us you are ethically responsible to give us more life. It was an interesting kind of a play; it's an indication that when existentiality is taken to a radical depth it transforms into almost a fairytale like objectivity where literary characters cast shadows. That's a play, in one of Faulkner's interviews one time someone asked him why he stopped writing pot boilers just to get published and started writing incredibly complex literature - became classics of a new stream of consciousness writing. He said, my dear, I discovered that characters cast shadows - that literary figures are a part of reality and that once you create in this magical way those characters are free and they inhabit the Earth and wherever else, just like we do.
So that in a differential universe, imaginative creations transform and become conscious possibilities. What's the difference? Conscious possibilities effect memory and memory is the activity of differentiation. Whereas imagination is the activity of integration. It is all the difference in the Cosmos between memory and imagination. If you don't know that then you have to go back to go, you have to start all over. Because if you don't know that you have to go all the way back to the mysterious origins and come forward in a new way. Because there's no way to get from imagination to memory differentially without going back before one, going back to zero.
And so our education, when our education began with Nature, we talked about how Nature is a zero based mystery. It isn't a mystery because we don't know, it's a mystery because we do know. The more that one understands Nature, participates with Nature, even millions of years ago, our forunners as a species already were participating in the mystery of Nature and were changing. And as they changed Nature changed also. Because there's a mutuality of that kind of radical change which is indelible. When you look at the ancient record of evolution flowers and insects come into being at the same time. Without insects to pollinate flowers, flowers would never survive. So there's a kind of a symbiosis. But even using that kind of language is misleading, you have to be careful about your language, because symbiosis is already an integral weighted term and holds you back from a deeper realization that it's not symbiosis but, there's not even a word for it in English as a thing, it's an exchanging. It's an exchanging where both are different from what they were. And geology comes closest, it has a term where a hot magma coming into a rock mineral extrusion, both the extrusion and the magma transform, they both change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Tape is silent]
Can you see how carefulness is the biggest interruption, it's interesting isn't it?
Do you see how we're creating a form here that is purely attentive. It isn't a form where you're focused on me, but all of us together are focused on a magic language which is out there in the center. This is Paizzano style lecturing. The bowl of language is there and I'm like you, I'm in wonder participating. I'm getting nourishment from that language too. You're not listening to me, there's no ego here, but there is a magical presencing that's in the language, because the language is just spontaneously coming out. There aren't notes and things, I'm not looking at them, I don't know what I'm going to say. And it isn't channeling, that's a cop-out, that's Mythos stuff, it's like eeuh sixties stuff.
When they come upon Caliban they say what's that odor of dead fish and it's this creature Caliban who was on this island, one of these Bahama uninhabited islands, and there were only two things left on the island, this Caliban who was part human and part devil that grumbles around and gnashes itself. It reminds one of the Gollum in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Caliban who was left on the island, his mother was this witch, Sycorax, and Sycorax when she died she left this sheep and whelp of a son Caliban. But she also left an imprisoned spirit named Ariel - imprisoned in the knot of a pine tree. He was an air spirit and he was used to open space and an air spirit like that - an elemental of air and fire would not be able to figure out how to get out of a knot of wood. And so by being put into a knot of wood whatever way that he would fly he'd find chaos and he wouldn't be able to get out. And so when Prospero came with his magic he freed Ariel, brought him out of the knot of the pine tree and then made him his messenger servant. And he also took care to bring Caliban up to teach him language, and as soon as Caliban got language he was interested in cursing. And as soon as Miranda got of a certain age he was interested in her. And Prospero jails him in this kind of rocky prison. He says you'd attacked by daughter. And Caliban says oh oh I'd have populated the whole island with little Calibans if you hadn't caught me. So there is this polarity on this island, there's an earth/water demonic spirit that wants only for itself and there's a fire/air spirit that doesn't want anything for itself, just to play free. And Prosper is the quintessence, he's the fifth essence, he's the magical ether that holds both those polarities and allows them to play together. And during The Tempest, during the playing of the play, these two fairy tale figures are triggers for a certain pair of qualities that are antithetical in Nature and also disjunctive in consciousness. Caliban can never become an Ariel and Ariel could never become a Caliban.
But what can change are the human beings, especially the young human beings, Miranda and Ferdinand. The young prince and the young magician's daughter are not limited to the fairytale qualities of the elementals. It seems to ordinary human sensibility that the elementals must be very powerful spirits, and indeed they are very powerful, they can do many things, but they cannot change. An Air spirit can never become a Water spirit, a Fire spirit can never become an Earth spirit, and on and on and on. They are only what they are and cannot be something else, whereas we can be not only something else, we can be anything, or even non things.
And so our spiritual reality is that of total open freedom of Cosmic possibilities without end. Let's take a break.
BREAK
I want to bring us back with some Visionary language. Here's the way in which, in one part of the country, in San Francisco in 1960, this is the kind of Visionary language you would have found in San Francisco in 1960.
Wandering together on vague Sierra paths
Dramatic parapets bleak amid canyon spaces
Far above the plunge, clear water
Outer edges, green and granite tarry a moment
Those windy places, those long moments
Bent, stooped as it were in the rushing updraft fluttering hoods
Ever hooded with hickory staff, anomalies
Twentieth century beings in the world, way out there in September Sierras
And we gnarled, weathered, ever quiet
Ancient pines rooted in shear granite
Hokosai
Vigilence and vistas and visions dynamic History
That primordial push that tears up and walks with big steps
Or makes us attentive impassionate apprehension...