Vision 12
Presented on: Saturday, March 20, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Vision Twelve, which means that our next phase is Art, and what we're discovering here is that there is an unfolding, there's a progression, just like there was in nature, that consciousness is not a thing but is an unfolding process. Consciousness is a gerund without the "i-n-g". So that consciousness is not a 'ness' but a consciousing. So that consciousness is mis-named. To be conscious is to be in the resonant outflow of an exploration of awareness that has been transformed into self awareness. Or to put it more exactly is in the process of being transformed into self awareness. If someone could perfect themselves, their practice, in a yoga long enough and deep enough, that concentration, the original word for meditation in Sanskrit, Dhyana, means concentration. It means that the field of experience becomes folded in, becomes condensed, becomes complicated and that this complexity becomes more and more dense so that as a yoga is applied more and more, you developed a tremendous power, but the power is not the power of muscles or the power of money, but in Sanskrit it's called tapas, tapas. The power to concentrate, and it becomes a power which gains, it's like an exponentiality. You finally get to understand that you can concentrate concentration, that to just concentrate experience brings you into a focus, but if you up the ante in a radical way, and you concentrate concentration, you begin to get exponential tapas. Not just more psychic power, but exponential psychic powers. And so the annals of very high yoga are full of developing special powers, telepathy, clairvoyance, incredible abilities, wild talents. And finally the ability to recall past lives. But all of this are simply artifacts of the ability to concentrate concentration. So that a mind that's able to focus and concentrate experience gains a self awareness in a very peculiar limited sense. It becomes self aware of itself as mind. And so the mind learns that it has a shape. It's the shape of this experiencer but does not know who this is. The mind doesn't know the who. The mind only is, and so yoga which takes natural concentration to its ultimate, finds a finality and exclamatory finality in realization. And what the mind realizes, it realizes itself as an 'is'. But when it applies further concentration to that concentration, you get an exponentiality of further folding. And it becomes rather like the situation in astro-physics. A star has its physical liminality, has its shape, has its surface, and though the surface undulates somewhat by the nuclear energies bubbling up in it, and there are prominences and coronas and solar winds, and all stars have that more or less, there's a state at which a star gains through a special transformative process, the ability to concentrate itself beyond normal matter, beyond nature. And such a star which goes beyond the natural cycle, we now would call such an object, an astro-physical object, we would call them a neutron star. A neutron star is where ordinary matter has lost its space in between the protons and the electrons, between the nucleus and the orbits and shells of the electrons, and the electrons not only come into physical contact with the protons and neutrons of the nucleus, it's as if the cloud of electrons suddenly gloms onto the nucleus of the atom, and the star will shrink in size, our star is eight hundred sixty eight thousand miles in diameter, were to become a neutron star, it would be just a few dozen miles in diameter. And neutron stars are so compacted, so supranaturally compacted, that their magnetic fields lie plastered on their surface. So the super yogi comes into possession of this kind of super-realization. Not that the mind is, but that there is an exponential power to the mind, where it goes concentrated beyond nature. It becomes like a neutron star. So that the ordinary field of experience lies plastered on its surface and doesn't rise. This kind of super yogi is, we would say, absorbed into isness perfectly. And were the common man or woman to realize that this is actually the state of realization, they probably wouldn't do it. Not only do you loose interest in going to Neimans for the sales, you loose interest in whoever it was that was going to go to Neimans. It's no longer of concern. And in the ordinary range of experience we say of such an activity, that that's abstract. And to abstract means to pull away from nature. And that the mind can be brought into a concentration where it has awareness of its isness, and that seems to be beneficial, any further concentration seems to be a loosing of that gain, of that victory. So that the ordinary sense of natural life is that men and women have, for many tens of thousands of years, been reluctant to carry concentration, mental effectiveness beyond a certain limit. And the limit more or less is the ability still to appreciate existentials. To appreciate things. That the concentration of the mind is O.K. up to the point to where you can really clearly appreciate the things of this world. That beyond that is a no no realm where you begin to pull away from life, to abstract yourself from life. And so largely the wisdom of experience, the wisdom of experience put into the form, the ritual form of tradition, tradition encourages us to concentrate up to a certain point and then to let it go. And that this further concentration, this neutron star capacity becomes stereotyped as something which only rare talented genius individuals will do under extraordinary circumstances. Facing some kind of traumatic crisis of death or destruction or supernatural illness or something like that, then someone will have to go to that realm, will have to try to go to that realm. But we know from astro-physics that neutron stars are not the final integration, that though they're very peculiar and super dense, to be just a couple of miles in diameter and to have their magnetic fields plastered on their surface, one would think that that's the ultimate, but it isn't. Because a neutron star under special circumstance can collapse into a black hole, and it abstracts itself, not only from nature, but it abstracts itself from itself. And so a yogi on that level is extraordinary rare, hardly ever would not only a generation find one, but in a millennium, you would hardly ever find anyone who did that. maybe in a couple thousand years. Someone who abstracts themself from abstraction, who becomes a Yogic tapas capable of infinite exponentiality, like a psychic black hole, discovers that that also is not the end. Though the Sanskrit word for that condition is "moksha". Moksha meaning extinction. In the pleasant language of tribal tradition, moksha is likened to blowing a candle out. That the candle is extinguished when the flame is blown out. But true Yogic moksha is not only when the flame is blown out, but when the candle is blown out of existence and when the experiencer of the candle is blown out of existence, and when existence is blown out of existence. That's moksha. And the most curious quality occurs. An unexpected quality occurs, that out of that moksha, everything reoccurs. But it reoccurs with a substrate of apparent zeroness everywhere. So that any thing is not only what it is existentially, it is a ratio of its existentiality over its zeroness. And that quality of regard that is able to make this constant ratioed existence over zeroness, is consciousness. And the peculiar thing is that men and women do it all the time. It's completely natural, it's completely normal, they do it all the time. It's only when it's done with neon lights as in a super yogi trying to make sure that the detailed following of it all the way, then it seems super human. Whereas if one asks, as these individuals in history were asked, what is this? They reply, they say it is very ordinary. Only you don't realize that you have done this. You don't realize because you don't have self reflective access, you don't remember in detail what it was that you did, how it was that you became conscious. And yet the most undisciplined conscious person is a supernatural figure in an inorganic universe. Not only in an inorganic universe, but in a population of so called natural tribal people, untransformed, unconscious people. There was a saying that the first time that men learned to tame horses so that they could ride horses, this happened in the Sivian step lands of central Asia, Samarkand, in that area, about somewhere around four to five thousand years ago. The first men to tame horses and ride horses, other people who had never seen something like this, saw the man and the horse as a creature, not as a man on a horse. And were shocked when they shot arrows and killed such a creature, that it was a man who fell off this other part which was now a horse and the dead figure was not a centaur but was a man. Because traditional imagery does not allow for identification of ratios as existentials. That takes an abstraction familiarity to even do.
There was a famous film, the Canada Council once did a film on the Inuit People, the Eskimos. The film was done in the early forties. They went up to some area above the arctic circle. And they had a film on the audience of the Inuit People who had no contact with urban civilization whatsoever, and this audience of Inuits were watching a film, film footage of New York City taken from an airplane. And the film showed on the faces of the men and women and children that nothing was registering. They had no way to identify, they had no abstraction basis to even see what it was that they were seeing. All they saw were the flickering lights of the existential projector on a screen, they didn't see any objects. To see existential objects with a zero based ratioality takes an abstracted radical experience, takes a transformation, takes consciousness. And this is very peculiar, it's extraordinarily peculiar, and yet it is the most common event, not only for adult men and women, but almost all children beyond a certain basic age become conscious. How can you tell when a child has become conscious? They begin to play. And a child's play right away indicates that they are creating their own worlds in that play, and they enjoy exploring in that world, they are not afraid of that world, it's their play.
And so plays are well named. Plays are excursions into conscious realms of exploration which are not natural. And where do they lead? They lead to an appreciation of the personal. The whole purpose of all of this ensemble is to discover character, is to pull out of this play an appreciation not only for these characters in that play but our character playing in that play. And so it is in drama that we discover ourselves. And when drama was first discovered, when it was first brought into play, when that abstraction was first done, it was so peculiar, it was so radical, that the first dramatic actions were surreal. Greek Tragedy was based upon an erotic goat dance of men impersonating goats in rutting season, and how ridiculous it was for men to pretend that they were goats in rutting season, having this conversation about human things. So that the first actions dramatically were old comedies, old comedies, forerunners of Aristophanes. And the male figures in these dramas wore strapped on artificially huge penises that were always present and they were trying to talk sense to each other and it was totally ridiculous, it was absolutely surreal and that comedy then as the first dramatic action showed how peculiar consciousness is. Not in specifics but all the time everywhere. And how abstracted one is. And it wasn't long before comedy showed that it had a profound serious side. Because when you unstrapped these artificial stage projections and just acted the characters, not in comic situations but in serious situations, you had the birth of tragedy. And so early drama had two faces. It had a smiling face for comedy and it had a frowning face for tragedy. And so drama came in a pair, tragedy-comedy.
One of the qualities that is forever in the genius of Shakespeare is that he discovered that there is a third form that is not comedy and not tragedy, is not tragic-comedy, but is the revelation of personality through drama called a history. That there is a dramatic action called a history. There were attempts before him, or course, to do various histories, he's the one who appreciated that an insight was gained by a young university rowdy named Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe who'd been born in Canterbury, quite different from Stratford on Avon, Marlowe who'd been an intellectual genius, he'd gone to Cambridge at a time when Corpus Christi College at Cambridge had twelve students. And Marlowe just shown, and while he was a student still, he got interested in the historical figure, Tamberlain who in Irani history is remembered as the most ghoulish sadistic demonic terror. Tamberlain took up where Genghis Khan left off, piling up sculls by the hundreds of thousands. But Marlowe being an Elizabethan dramatist discovered that there was a personality in Tamberlain that was put into motion in a medium that overtaxed him. That he was larger than life vis a vis other men, but that he was shrunk to incredible size and only survived because of extreme mobility when he was put into the context of history. And Marlowe's "Tamberlain The Great" is the initial English Renaissance drama that explores a new mode, not comedy not tragedy, but a history. And it was Shakespeare, who was the very same age as Marlowe but about six or seven years behind him in maturity, until Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern outside of London, Deptford, and Shakespeare took up where he left off, and the rest is history. Literally history. And Shakespeare's histories became explorations of a conscious personality, not fighting the transformational absurdities which comedy and tragedy have, but struggling with the further development of man as himself as a self conscious person trying to establish a relationship with the cosmos. That comedy and tragedy are filled with the absurdity of the person trying to establish a relationship with the mind or with the body, with the objectivity of a ritual body or the objectivity of a symbolic mind, whereas a history is the person struggling to have a relationship with the objective cosmos. And so history is a differential process that's radically different from any of the natural processes.
And we saw that there are two natural processes, one natural process is nature itself, and the other natural process is myth. The realm of experience, the realm of feelings, the realm of images, the realm of dealing with things that are, in terms of nature and in terms of experience, and that feeling can become quite intelligent about this, long before the mind learns to think, long before the mind becomes good at anything, feelings become mature. And we call the matured feeling toned intelligence, we call that sentience, sentience. And human beings have long since discovered that certain individual animals also acquire sentience. There are dogs that feel, there are horses that feel, there are dolphins that feel, there're chimpanzees that feel and one gains a very close bond with them. It's the intelligence of shared feeling. But where feeling gains sentience, thinking gains intelligence only in terms that it braves the possibilities of abstraction. Thought only increases its ability to perform in proportion to how it is able to work abstraction in. And so it is very difficult to think. Not just because one is untrained, but because one on a gut level and on a feeling toned level fears thought, fears getting too good at thinking and who knows, no one knew what a neutron star was, but men and women for thousands, tens of thousands of years, have understood that this is very precarious. Thought is precarious. Bertrand Russell in one of his books said "men fear thought like the plague". Because thought is wild, it goes where you may not want to go. And so to deal with the perils of abstraction, techniques of allowing the mind to gain in abstraction in measured statements, measured increments, and this ability to do this was putting a yoke on thought and that's where yoga comes from, from the same word as yoke.
A yoga is putting a yoke on the mind so that you think only to the extent that you are able to control it and not more. And this is a very precarious situation. And yet on the other hand it's not only precarious, it has its own discovery. And the classic statement about twenty-three hundred years ago of the way in which a yoga which is distributed equally over the mind allows for an excursion deeper, faster than any other technique. And that document was the Bhagavad Gita. And the Bhagavad Gita says, Krishna in talking with Arjuna, it's a conversation, the Bhagavad Gita is a drama. It's not a tragedy it's not a comedy, but it's like a pre-history. It's like an essay into the realm of consciousness, but pure consciousness not personal consciousness. Like a history deals with the person vis a vis the cosmos, the Bhagavad Gita is one of those pre-history histories which deals with the mind vis a vis the cosmos. And the Bhagavad Gita has Krishna telling Arjuna at one point, he says evenness of mind is yoga. That the yoga is not to yoke the mind so it only goes like a horse where you lead it along the furrows that you want it to go, but that if you yoke the horse in such a way that anyway that the horse goes you are in control, you become a rider of the horse of the mind in all of its spontaneous movements. Then the mind is tamed, not tamed by yoking it to a furrow, but tamed because one is able to ride. And the rider of the mind as its meditative horse is because of the technique of distributing evenly over all the functions of the mind without any emphasis anywhere so that there's evenness everywhere.
I used to call it years ago, I used to call it the principle of the snow shoe. If you try to walk through deep snow, you never get anywhere. Whereas the Indian technique of making snow shoes is to distribute your weight over wide enough volume so that you don't sink down. I remember one time, a friend of mine, a Bengali who worked, I don't know if you know India or not, but Bengalis are always jovial good talkers. And he talked his way into working for a petroleum company in Northern Canada. And he'd never seen snow in his life, and he was flown into one of these camps. So he decided one day that he was going to walk out into snow, and so he walked out about a mile from camp and just enjoying himself, and then he started to get cold and so he turned to come back in and the snow was up to his waist. He didn't have snow shoes, and he'd exhausted himself walking out. And when he was trying to walk back, of course each step is like this plodding thing. And he realized that being unfamiliar with snow, he wasn't going to make it. He began shouting and shouting and shouting and shouting and finally someone heard him and he was out there exhausted in the field. So one of the guides showed him the snow shoe, the principle of the snow shoe. You can walk for dozens of miles, but you have to be able to have this kind of yoga of understanding where it is that you are.
And so the Bhagavad Gita has Krishna telling Arjuna that in this kind of life, where you're having to deal with consciousness as well as nature, you must have an evenness of mind, otherwise you're going to tire yourself out, there's no way you're going to make it to anyplace at all. You're certainly not going to make it back to safety. And so Arjuna learns that it's not a peril to abstract oneself and develop consciousness if there's a distribution of fullness of completeness and this comes through also in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare discovers that if you do not as a playwright, as a dramatist, if you do not write a bias into a play, the play will play itself completely. And so you have to take Shakespeare not so much as this theme or this character in a play but the play itself. The play is the evenness of mind. And of course it's sophomoric to say well Hamlet is such a great role, we want only to play Hamlet, when it's the play "Hamlet" that's important, not the character, whoever plays Hamlet. One of the great charms of the film that Mel Gibson did, is not only that he could play Hamlet, that the Road Warrior could be Hamlet, but that the film was the play "Hamlet" in a very full sense. It presented the play. So the words of Shakespeare are quite right, "The play's the thing". This quality of where the dramatic action has character essence all the time but the emphasis is not on a character but on the entire ensemble, on the play total. With the proviso that on deeper analysis, not synthesis but analysis, because consciousness works by analysis. It works by a critical ratio-ing, that's why it's called rational. It works on a critical ratio-ing, not only of all of the elements vis a vis each other in terms of the whole, but that all of these elements also have a zero denominator hidden within them. And that at a certain level of appreciation one can discover that the whole also has a zero denominator. That wholenesses are not just what they are as existentials but that they are ratios of the real. That they have a hidden nothingness, invisibly underneath them that could never be known if you only look to see what was there. That you have to look, not only to see what is there, but to appreciate what is not there at the same time.
It's like the aged Matisse, sitting in his wheel chair with his blanket and his glasses and his whitened whiskers and just a pair of scissors and plain construction paper, blue or green, he liked those colors, and he would just cut out shapes. Cut out stars and cut out various shapes and have those put on white walls. And then he would have them taken down, and the old Matisse would look to see the shapes that were no longer there, flowing into the spaces that the shapes had revealed. And so the wall became the undercurrent of the wholeness of whom? There were no shapes there. Of Matisse.
Or another example, when he was working on the ceiling mural of the Paris Opera, Marc Chagall, fabulously challenged by having to do a painting almost as large as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But in this case, not the barrel vault of the Sistine Chapel, but the big mandala, circle of the Paris Opera House. And Chagall's technique was to make wedges, to make pie shapes, huge pie shapes that were angles, angles of penetration to the center. And each one of those pie shapes, each one of those angles of penetration, he used a primary color. And against that primary color, he put on the image base of music. Against the yellow he had a Mozart dancer coming out, and so on. And he used yellow and green, red, blue, primary colors. And in order to make sure that it was real, Chagall would have these huge wedges put up against these large walls, thirty-five feet, and Chagall would hold his had up to colors and make sure that they were all alive. Because it wasn't in the brush stroke like Van Gogh that the life was there, it was in the reality that this was a resonance of Chagall, he's up there on the ceiling at the Paris Opera. And when the mandala is in place, one sees the quality that there is a zeroness underneath the whole, the zeroness being the abstracted perfection of Chagall the artist who is not there existentially, but who is hidden, not there, in the work. Let's take a break.
It's a long poem, it's called Saint Francis Matrix Sutra, and it was put out in an edition of a hundred copies at City Lights and sold out in a few days. But that was San Francisco in 1966.
"Oh city, oh gentle restlessness of my pulse verged on great and elegantly wild discoveries that unsettle permeation of my blood in motion a lingering liquid quality to my nerves. Pacing, pacing, alert to the wondering uneasiness of changing I, pacing, pacing. Nostalgic waves of familiarity shivers, ooze my hustling nervousness. Changing I, who must prime a direction in my pacing, there walks Pascal's fright and the enormous complexity of history wrangling its frayed endings in my nervous system. Oh city, oh trembling towards a certain eagerness nearing unknown sagas and interstellar epic sense I must burst into deep space with Apollo leaving this city of St. Francis below. Leaving the rooted ancestral planet behind. Leaving in the Atlantic blue morning, leaving we're leaving oh city, what can I tell you of my struggling ways. manifesting my particles from spirit waves in nuclear transformations still in progress. Becoming vitalized in primeval protein plasma and still jolting into process with night soft passion achieving consciousness and now even now burst. I am a holy structure built with diverse converging. I leave my pacing at sunrise but you must stay behind oh city."
Here's how Shakespeare did it at the end of the tempest in an epilogue spoken by Prospero the magician. And it's Shakespeare's tip of the hat to twenty years of audiences, twenty years of actors and fellow playwrights, he was leaving the stage, he would only return part time. He helped his young friend John Fletcher of Fletcher and Beaumont fame, co-authored a couple of plays with him, Henry VIII and a few other plays. But this was Shakespeare's final speech to the world on his retirement.
"Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's my 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.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free."
It's Shakespeare saying to the audience, you have it wrong, it's not that we enchant you, but you equally enchant us and keep us here on the stage by your, not just your applause and you pence in the coffers, but by your appreciation. Your appreciation is participatory in the drama. The audience and the actors together make the play. It's cooperative. It's the Paizzano theory of cooking. One big bowl in the center and everyone partakes together. This quality of the audience participating with the actors and that the play resounds throughout the entire playhouse was particularly the tone of the structure that they built. It was called The Globe. The Globe, the entirety of the world, the entirety of the planet. And it was by no accident that London was where this happened, this was built.
The most occult figure of the day was a man named John Dee. John Dee born about forty years before Shakespeare, was the great Elizabethan magus. But when he was younger he was a mathematical prodigy. When he was twenty-two years old, John Dee lectured to overflow audiences everywhere in Europe on mathematical difficulties made simple. He was a prodigy, he was an intellectual genius. And only later in life did he turn to occult matters, so called occult matters. His primary contribution to Elizabethan civilization was that he figured out the mathematics of navigating over thousands of miles of stretches of open global water. It was John Dee's mathematics of navigation that allowed for English mariners to gain ascendancy over the oceans of the world. And to back that up, it's John Dee who did the research into the old Arthurian Mythos that founded the English occult royal claim to being the right rulers of the planet, being the right inheritors of Roman power. And so Elizabethan England laid the seeds for the British Empire by John Dee's mathematics and by his metaphysics.
And Shakespeare at the end of his career brought these qualities together in 'The Tempest'. So that 'The Tempest' is not just a portrayal of himself in his enchanting way, as long as he has the play book and the actors robes, he has this power. He would have been a John Dee Magus, had he have been in that mode, but he was Shakespeare and not John Dee. Something John Dee never understood is that those who appreciate are a part of the reality of that process. That's the snow shoe effect, that's the distribution of wholeness, that's what makes all the world a stage, a oneness of a stage. And not only is it that a play, any play by Shakespeare has this fullness, and all of the plays taken together constitute a global body of work that is impossible to find the answer to a simple question, what religion did Shakespeare have? There is no way to know. There is never a bias, pro or con, anywhere in the surviving thirty-five plus plays. The equanimity of mind is almost perfect in Shakespeare's body of work.
The only other author that one finds in world literature that has a similar symmetry of universal equanimity is Homer. So that finally, in order to discover who Homer was, you have to take his two great epics and the Homeric hymns together as a body of work. And so too Shakespeare. This quality that the entirety of the work is the man, is the origin of the phrase 'body of work'. The man, his person, is hidden within the body of work, and the work must be experienced. And that experience must be internalized, and that internalization must then be expressed, re-expressed by you in a participation with the art. For our participation is a part of the art.
It used to be, a number of decades ago, that Shakespeare was a royal ground for psychologists to have a field day with. Here's a quotation from a collection of essays on 'The Tempest': "In older psychoanalytic paradigms, say that of Ernest Jones (he was a famous Freudian, he wrote a three volume biography of Freud), in the older psychoanalytic paradigms, the critic is the analyst. Shakespeare is the patient, and the plays his fantasies. The trouble with this paradigm is that it mis-represents the analytic situation in a fundamental way. The interpretation of analytic material is done in conjunction with and in large measure by the patient, not the analyst. What the analyst does in enable the patient, free the patient to interpret. An analysis done without the patient, like Freud's of Leonardo, will be revealing only about the analyst. A more recent paradigm in which the audience's response is the principle analytic material, also seems to me based on fundamental mis-conceptions. First because it treats an audience as an entity, a unit, and in addition a constant unit. And more problematically because it conceives of the play as an objective event (like a ritual). So that the critical question becomes, this is what happened, how do we respond to it. To take the psychoanalytic paradigm seriously, however, and treat the plays as case histories, is surely to treat them not as objective events, but as collaborative fantasies and to acknowledge thereby that we as analysts are implicated in the fantasy. But it is not only the patient who creates the shape of his history, and when Bruno Bettleheim observes that Freud's case histories read as well as the best novels, he's probably telling more of the truth than we would like to know."
So it isn't our response analytically in absentia, it isn't the artist in his intention, in absentia from the mutuality of the shared presencing of it, but it's the shared presencing itself, which is not a thing, but is a process of exploration called vision. So that consciousness is a metaphysical impossibility as a 'ness' as a thing. That conscious processing as vision, as visioning becomes a resonant unfolding opening up and in this energy, in this flow of opening and opening there is a spectrum and that full spectrum is able to be appreciated, not when it registers as a thing, but when it comes into a calibration as a spectrum within a prism.
So that the appreciation of Shakespeare, as soon as the Elizabethan age was more or less over the English temperament turned radically towards Puritanism, and the Puritans had a very severe suspicion about Shakespeare, 'just how Pagan was he. . . . .?' And so his plays were rewritten and rewritten to suit the audiences of those times and probably the most famous instances are those where Dryden so rewrote Shakespeare, he put in his own scenes and completely destroyed the Shakespeare quality of the plays, only to be rediscovered later on. And when Shakespeare was rediscovered later on, it was because the quality of the person, of that prism of the resonances of the spectrum of consciousness, had been brought back into play again, and the great figure of that was Shelley.
We call that era in terms of old fashion university subjects, when universities were completely blinded to think that subjects were real and that one should study subjects, you should major in subjects, that subject was called English Literature, sub-entitled Romanticism. As if an ism were the reality of the thing, and that Shelley was then a Romantic Poet. And indeed in later nineteenth century, the idea of Romance became crocheted lace defined, and Romantic meant somebody who had very sweet parlor precious images, that one could intone under just the right moonlight for other purposes.
What of Shelley? We heard Shakespeare's last soliloquy, here's Shelley's last soliloquy at the end of "Prometheus Unbound"
This is the Day which down the void Abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's Despotism,
And Conquest is dragged Captive through the Deep;
Love from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like Agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
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.
And so you see a radical quality in Shelley's language, much like Shakespeare's radical quality, only Shelley's language, his differential language has built upon Shakespeare. Just as, if we were able analytically to appreciate the way which Shakespeare's language builds upon his great contemporaries who were just a few years, five or six years, more mature than him in the application of his language.
Not only Christopher Marlowe, but Edmund Spencer, whose great epic "The Fairy Queen", and also the great poet Sir Philip Sydney, Sydney who had died about the time that Shakespeare first saw drama as a possibility, 1586, hadn't even thought of it until then. Shakespeare's language builds on Sydney and Spencer and Marlowe, but if one looks at their language, it's possible, their English Renaissance diction and vocabulary are only possible because they build upon Chaucer. And one goes back to Chaucer and finds another great age where art becomes a prism of an even broader spectrum of possibility than was there before. That before Chaucer, English as a language is extremely clumsy when it comes to expressing human feeling.
English as a language has a kind of a Germanic, an early Germanic quality that's there all the time from the late six hundreds. The time of Beowulf. Pre-Chaucerian English language is very good at sledge hammer blows, to tack something down in a big way, but Chaucer modifies by his art, the ability for the English language to talk about people to each other, so that human beings can share their humanity. And it's the great massive equanimity, the yoga of Chaucer's to make an English language where men and women can talk to each other about themselves in the most delicate nuances and appreciate the fantastic adventures that befall human characters without being sucked into the tragedy or being duped by the comedy of the episodes. It allows for someone to go outside of the story.
And so when we read the "Canterbury Tales", they're tales told by fellow travelers of fantastic events and fantastic people, fantastic situations, but the overlay is the awareness of this zero base of the ongoingness that this episode is not the totality of reality, it's just an episode in an ongoing flow. And what becomes apparent after five or six examples of this, is that there's an ongoingness that's invisible which is important. And after several hundreds of pages of Chaucer, one gets used to the fact that life imitates art. Whereas in nature, images must always be a representation of nature, it goes the other way when you come to art. Art is able to transform what is into what it might be. Art frees. What does it free? It frees the possibilities of unexplored resonances. It opens up the ground for possibilities that never existed before.
With Chaucer, like with Mozart, there are possibilities of refined feeling that were not there before. And after a couple of hundred years of Chaucer, you get the English Renaissance, with Marlowe and Sydney and Spencer, crowned by the young Shakespeare coming on full bore and holding himself like some Bhagavad Gita Spirit Warrior in complete equanimity all the time. A most incredible situation. And then Shelley a couple hundred years after that, enlarging the language so that its conscious dimension equaled the whole dimension of nature. In Shakespeare the equanimity is an equanimity of the mind, which is passed on to the person. In Shelley it's an equanimity of the person that is being offered to the cosmos. And in Shelley, two hundred years ago, you find this kind of language, not just in Shelley, but in his contemporaries, like William Blake. You find an English language that is poetically refined in built and based. As Shelley based himself on a further resonance of Shakespeare, Blake is a further resonance of Milton.
So that the Romantic is not some sweet laced parlor quality, but it's a revolution, a revolution of differential language that is meant to challenge, not the processes of myth, Shakespeare challenged the processes of myth with the achievements that were brought out of vision, which is a much higher power, but Shelley challenges the processes of history. And it's this kind of quality where the differential language has pivoted. Pivoted in such a way that human beings are able to stand up and say, 'our personal qualities must be made room for in the concourse of historical development'.
Shelley, who not only bases himself on Shakespeare, but whose mother-in-law was the author of perhaps the most radical statement of the time, Mary Wolstoncraft, "The Vindication of the Rights of Women". These are rights not given to her, but rights which are resonances of her large personal conscious reality. She does not have these rights because they were given to her, or that she had to earn them, but because they are resonances of her very defining liminality. It is she, who in motion, generates these rights. And history, in order to be real, must make room for those. Her rights as a conscious person are the very fabric and stuff out of which history is made.
And so history, we will discover, is radically different, radically different from myth. And hence radically different from tradition. And just as ritual fears art, even more so tradition fears history. Because history is like an acid which dissolves traditions, it melts it. And so the mythic imagery of someone who is tradition bound, who's certain that this is perilous, this is dangerous stuff, will promote an imagery which shows that we have nothing but fear ahead, nothing but nightmares ahead, that the future is the very definition of terror. And so you get great analytical characterizations in the middle of the twentieth century, like Mircea Eliade who has a book called "Cosmos and History", and one of the great sections is called 'The Terror of History'. And that it is a misconception to think that this is an existential problem.
There are existential problems. There are problems with existence. But those problems with existence can be combed through by refining feeling to its sentience, and interiorizing that so that the interior quality of the mind achieves equanimity. You can deal with the problems of existence in that way. Men and women have now for hundreds of thousands of years. But there's no amount of interiorization of experience that enables us to do one thing against a historical challenge. History is like an ocean of sulfuric acid that experience has no bearing on whatsoever. It takes consciousness. And this is part of the radical problem of appreciating why art is essential.
We'll take a break next week by looking at the selected poems of Emily Dickinson as an example of conscious language raised almost to a cosmic level. And then we'll go immediately the following week from Emily Dickinson to Georgia O'Keeffe. They are the mothers of personal acceptance of the challenge of history. They birth a language able to penetrate through and allow the person to come into play in such a way that they can swim in that sulfuric acid as if it were water.