Art 1

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This is Art 1 and we're going to take Georgia O'Keeffe and Wassily Kandinsky and hold them lightly and let a process congeal. And that process that congeals is Vision. Art comes out of, it emerges out of Vision. And so Art is parallel to and very similar to the way in which existence emerges out of Nature. If we're convinced that Nature is things, objects, then the problem of emergence becomes complicated by an unnecessary metaphysics. If we consider Nature to be the things then what emerges out of things must be some kind of meta-thing, or a meta quality to things and this is the origin of all metaphysics and it is an error in perception. We're used to thinking of metaphysics being a conception but actually metaphysics in its origin is perceptual. This means that when Art, which is dealing with a radical transformation of perception, has more of a character than any other stage, any other phase in our education of going into a regression. That is to say when there is a process, when there's an energy in a dynamic movement, there's no guarantee anywhere in the Universe that that energy in that dynamic movement will not reverse itself. Because there's a universal principle of symmetry. Which means that regression is just as likely as progression. We would like to think that there is a moral weight, a balance, towards progression. But that emphasis on progression over regression is actually a contribution that is made by the successes of the previous progressions, and only when they are remembered is there an advantage towards progression. So not only is there the problem of perception in Art but there's the problem of memory. And you can go to a thousand courses on aesthetics and no one will ever mention this, initially at least. Although usually later perception will come in as an issue. But memory is just as important. Because Art is an objectivity. Art really Is. It's like the stuff of existence, it has an isness to it. A work of Art once made is just as real as any object in existence. So that we have the basis for an objective aesthetics. We have the basis for an objective differentiation. But the object in Art is different from an object in existence. An existential object, in order to have its tenacity in the Universe, must take advantage of the integral qualities of polarity. And so existence maintains polarity and maintains the polarity in the flow of an integration. If we try to make an understanding of Art on the basis of parallel, we will carry over integral modes into a differential process and inadvertently trigger a regression without even knowing it. If we try to maintain the natural polarity of existentials in the realm of works of Art we also trigger a regression. So that Art is one of the most precarious of all objectivities in reality. And the work of Art extends not only to painting like this by Kandinsky behind me, and other works of Art that we could display and point to, but something crucial happens for us when we realize that our Person is also a work of Art. Our Spirit, our Spiritual Person is a differential Art form; an objectivity that finds its objectiveness in a differential not an integral process. That the integral processes and the integral objectivities that most certainly do happen are a complement to and not a parallel to how we come to be who we are. An so Art is one of the most interesting activities and focuses that human beings can come to. Art gives us an opportunity to see ourselves as we realistically occur. And that occurrence, realistically as a personal, as a spiritual, as an artistic form requires a transformation of perception, a maturation of conception, an engendering of memory and a complementarity to existence which is radical. And so Art demands of us, in order to appreciate it, in order to participate with it, in order to understand it, Art demands of us a certain kind of maturity of spirit which is very difficult to come by. Early in the 20th Century; early in this time that is now slipping away and in nine months will be gone - is for all intents and purposes gone already. The 21st Century has a great problem area still unresolved. And that problem area is the regression of Art in its most pernicious form. And of course the most pernicious form of Art in regression is politics. It seems inconceivable that politics should be bound up with the world of Art and yet, as Kandinsky in one of his letters to Arnold Schoenberg pointed out, he said I am happily ensconced in Paris except that the art political scene is so corrosive that I keep away from everyone. Art politics is one of the most vicious circles of people in the world, and it's famous for that, infamous for that. And we need to come to some way of addressing this. And with Kandinsky and Georgia O'Keeffe we have a good chance. And as we go into Art further we will come to the next pair of Artists, Henry Moore and Frank Lloyd Wright, both of whom in their way dealt with the politics of Art in consummate ways. Frank Lloyd Wright as a fighting rebel and Henry Moore as someone who could deftly disappear from the fray and reappear in some other assignment, some other commission - almost seemingly oblivious to the pressures; never taking anyone on. And then the final pair that we will take, because we always take three pairs. We take three pairs of individuals or three pairs of books in a phase of our education, in order to give us some kind of a stability. So that the three pairs are a process; one, two, three, but that they also mount to a triad. And we'll see that a process that has a sequential structural form that also registers as a triangle - as a triad, gives us a chance to understand reality. It's like music which has its sequence of notes, its octave, but the arrangement of triads as the true structure of the ascendant of that octave gives music a quality to have, not only a process experiential body, but a form which registers in existence, in the mind and in the Person. And of course as we would now add - with our reminder in the Renaissance of the ancient Wisdom - that the objectivity also registers not only in the existential object - in the body and not only in the mind - in the symbolic mind and not only in the Spiritual Person, but it registers in the objective Cosmos. So that there is such a thing as man singing so beautifully that Heaven itself hears his song. That's called a prayer, it's called a hymn and there is in reality such a thing as being able to touch heaven with one's body through the alignment of body mind and spirit and Cosmos and that such an alignment actually occurs and actually exists objectively. Let's come back and reconnoiter for just a moment. We're talking about how Nature and Vision are similar; they both have something emerging out of them. Nature has existence that emerges out of it and Vision has Art that emerges out of it. But it's rather like instead of a parallel, Vision and Nature have a complementary relationship. It's like the two fishes in the sign of Pisces. Those two processes, the integral process which comes together and the differential process that was together but goes apart. That differential and integral happen at the same time and in reality if one could look at it in deep truthfulness, it's always going on together. Our education is making a separation into phases and stages so that we can learn, so that we can, under this microscope or with this telescope, understand how this happens. We need a microscope for the way in which integration happens, in which integration not only brings itself into form but forms join and condense and become something that Nature is capable of - super-forms; inner forms like an idea or a symbol in the mind are objective forms also, but they are super-forms. They are the condensation of integration taken to higher powers so that concentration itself is concentrated. This is why the mind then has powers. It has the kinds of powers that are hidden in existence but are revealed in the mind. So the mind is made to realize, because of its powers, it has this capacity not only to integrate integration itself and so to have these powers, but we saw when we looked at symbols, it has a peculiar quality of being able to integrate integration itself to its final threshold. And taking a cue from the Wisdom tradition of the past, the final stage of integration is an acceptance. Someone once made an issue out of Truth. The issue was phrased 'what is Truth?'. One really good answer to that is that Truth is meaning accepted. The acceptance, while not a thing in itself, cinches integration into certainty. And so in the mind, that cinching into certainty, that acceptance is one of the last qualities that's there in an integration. And so if there is a regression that sense of certainty, that sense of acceptance is the very first place where it shows up. So that a regression, rather than going to the lowest denominator generally begins at the highest capacity of the mind - its ability to accept meaning into Truth. And this is why it is said that the core of all regressions is the acceptance of a lie. And so in ancient Wisdom traditions; let's take Hellenistic Judaism. The quality of evil that traditionally had been ascribed to a neutered being - in more ancient Judaism 'The Satan' was a neutered being, neither masculine nor feminine but a neuter human, a human that had no sexuality whatsoever. So 'The Satan', like in the Book of Job, is always evil referred to as someone who has no sexuality whatsoever. And in their neuteredness has no respect for either men or women nor of life. And one always used, in the ancient Hebrew, the article 'The Satan' so as to show that it was a disenfranchised non life neutered quality. Whereas in Hellenistic Judaism there was a refinement of that, that 'The Satan' was no longer a neuter being that threatened us by blanking out life, but was a liar - Belial. That what was even more pernicious, that a neutered being that blanked out life, was a liar who's lies could not be detected and therefor one was enwrapped increasingly in a world of lies. Because the lies were pernicious that any response to the lies co-opted you into the realm of lying and that this was truly evil. And so in ancient Wisdom, at one time, men and women were sophisticated enough to understand that there must be some way to check certainty with a deeper certainty to make sure that what the mind accepted as true, was in fact true. And that was the alignment of the mind with the Person. That the integral mind and the differential Person, when they were aligned - and how would they be aligned? With a Vision that included both in a symmetry. That the Vision that made the mind and the Person into a complementarity, in perfect symmetry, was a Vision that one could trust. Because that alignment in Vision was inaccessible to the liar, the evil one. The Devil had no access to Vision because Vision is a Divine gift, is a heavenly process and not available for corruption. And so the purity of Vision was not on the basis of a metaphysical doctrine. The purity of Vision was not ascertained on the basis of logic, and certainly was not the purity of Vision founded on whether Rituals were right or not, but on that differential integral wholeness where the mind and the Person were a symmetry in a perfect complementarity. And so ones gets the saying at one point in that ethos, about 2,000 years ago, without Vision the people perish. And one is likely to find those words engraved, not so much on religious structures, as on political structures. There was a time when men and women, before the chaos of the 20th Century got spun out to the nightmarish proportions it is now, where they understood that this is the kind of language that you put on the lintels of buildings of law, of buildings of authority and power in controlling the lives of people. So when we come to someone, let's come now to Kandinsky, when we come to someone like Kandinsky, we should not be surprised to find one of the greatest artists in the 20th Century deeply involved with these kinds of issues. And deeply involved in such a way that he put his entire life on the line many times. And one of the most peculiar qualities of putting his life on the line was that in the early 1920's when an experiment with trying to bring a new Art Education into play in Europe, and not just in Europe but in the most problem oriented country in Europe - in Germany. And not just the most problem oriented country in European Germany but the very center of the political power of Germany, that is to say when the First World War ended in the defeat of Germany, the German capital was put in a city called Weimar. And it was exactly in Weimar at the end of the First World War that the Bauhaus was founded. Where Kandinsky eventually went to teach. It was put across the street from the Bund, from the German political center. So that when they came out of their buildings, they had to look at the Bauhaus' doors. Because the people at that time under Walter Gropius, who was the architect who was in charge of bringing this together, had come to understand that in the First World War Germany had come very close to a profound evil. Not just a nationalism with steel helmeted dictators wanting to take over more territory, but had come very close to a kind of a catastrophe which eventually did come to Europe from Germany; from exactly those issues that were never resolved. Because the Bauhaus did not take hold in any kind of larger cultural way. And so instead of there being an understanding through Art of the Person, there came to be a deep regression of a misunderstanding of the Person and turned into the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. And it was curious because when Kandinsky, who had had a very strange life, when he was invited to teach at the Bauhaus in 1922 - he and his wife Nina went there both full of promise and full of trepidation because Kandinsky by that time was in his later fifties and he knew very well what the issues were and what was at stake and for him, for Kandinsky, the closest person to him, who could have given him an understanding, an encouragement of the greatness of Art in this time of spiritual crisis, his closest friend that he wrote to was the music composer Arnold Schoenberg. That because of political circumstances of the First World War Kandinsky had not seen him for eight years. Because when the First World War came Kandinsky, living in Munich, even though he had tried to take out German citizenship, he was identified as a Russian - because he was Russian. And he was told to get out of town; you have twenty four hours, you have no time to pack, and he left everything. And he got involved with a law suit over his paintings that he never recovered. Four-five hundred works of Art were never recovered by him. And some quarter of a century later his Munich girlfriend donated the whole thing to the Schtats Museum. And in a paradoxical way Kandinsky's formative work, when he was making the origins of abstract Art, at a time when Einstein was making the formations of an abstract Cosmos, all of Kandinsky's work was paradoxically saved in toto because it had been stored in boxes in a cellar in a house outside of town and survived all the bombings and everything of the Second World War and all the vicissitudes of the Art market. And so it was donated en masse in the 1960's Kandinsky, who had been told to get out of town, not only out of town, out of the country - you're not wanted, you're an alien. The person he missed most was Arnold Schoenberg. Because Schoenberg had done in music what Kandinsky had done in painting and Einstein had done in physics. Schoenberg had understood that differential forms are potentially radically different from existential forms. Yes tonal music is beautiful and has made beautiful art forms but there is a whole Cosmos of music beyond those limitations and that Man has earned the right to have adventures beyond adventure beyond the tonal limitations of music, to discover possibilities without end. And Schoenberg had been the genius. And Schoenberg's theory of harmony was published in 1911, exactly the same time that Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published. And the two men corresponded and found a fantastic resonance between them until it built and Schoenberg and Kandinsky spent the entire summer of 1914 together until the First World War broke out and that's when Kandinsky got the announcement to get out of the country - when he was on vacation with Schoenberg and they were with their women and they were beside the lake and they were talking about Art and all of a sudden politics came in and tore them apart. And damaged both men to such an extent that they were not able to touch each other again. Because after eight years, when Kandinsky wrote to Schoenberg, Schoenberg wrote him a multi-page letter without spacing without indentation, almost without punctuation, angry at kandinsky's seeming indifference to the monstrous nightmarish threat that was appearing on the horizon. And in this 1923 letter by Schoenberg is the first time anyone in the world points the finger and the name at Adolph Hitler - 1923. And Schoenberg's saying you know as well as I do what's at stake here. This is an issue of evil. And because of the wretched turmoil of the times they never met again. Schoenberg, eventually driven from everything except his artistic integrity, limped his way to Los Angeles and lived here for almost a generation, teaching at UCLA, teaching at USC. Amazingly USC, which has the Schoenberg institute, not really taking care of it and eventually it's going to move somewhere else I hear. One can imagine. Schoenberg and other refugees, artists who were victims especially of political pogroms because they were seen to be the defenders, the first defenders of the acceptance of the Vision of mind and Spirit in a differential symmetry. And so evil always points to those people first; they're the first who have to go. And Schoenberg's deep friend here in Los Angeles, Thomas Mann - another artist in exile from the same cause. And one finds in the Los Angeles of the 1940's this tremendous emigre community; with Aldous Huxley and a number of other individuals and suddenly the Los Angeles of the 1940's becomes one of the spiritual centers of the world. I remember the tone of Los Angeles in the late 1940's and it was utterly magical, utterly other worldly. One could understand why so many science fiction films chose Los Angeles as the venue for supernatural extraterrestrial contact. Of course that's where the UFO's or that's where the Martians or whoever it was would come because Los Angeles was somehow spiritually an open part of the chakra system of the planet in the late 40's and early 50's - and it was. It was unbelievable. The L.A. of today is a shabby brittle shell rejected long since by that energy, that life. And while Schoenberg came here, Kandinsky was the first casualty of the Nazi exiles of artists. He was the first person - the Bauhaus which was in Weimar and then got into problems because the Nazis took over the city. So they moved out of Weimar, they moved to Dessau. And the Nazis took over the Anhalt province so they moved from there to Berlin - we're surely going to be O.K. in Berlin - and then the Nazis took over the entire country and there was nowhere else to go. And the first person told to leave was Kandinsky. Why? Because you are the most degenerate artist and we will not stand for you teaching the young and your paintings will be confiscated and just either destroyed or sold off. You will be erased, effaced from the Third Reich. Why would they choose Kandinsky? Because he was the foremost stalwart expresser of why art and the Spiritual Person were indelibly beyond the authoritarian control of political ideology, and has nothing whatsoever to say. And the Artist and the Spiritual Person are eternally freed from the need of ideological integral justification. And of course the way that the liar works is to turn that around and make it an accusation - they're just after Art for Art sake and that's destructive of morals, that's destructive of everything that we stand for and this is a complete perfect lie. And we'll come back after the break and take a further look at it. ART ONE PART TWO Let's come back to a fulcrum of attention with a poem by Kandinsky. In the reprint of Concerning The Spiritual in Art they left out a great many of the poems that were in the first edition, published in New York by the Museum of Modern Art. This poem is called seeing and it reads like this: Blue Blue arose and fell Sharp thin whistled and penetrated but did not pierce through Everywhere a rumbling Thick brown hovered seemingly for all eternity Seemingly Seemingly Spread your arms wider, wider, wider And cover your face with a red cloth And perhaps it is not yet displaced at all Only you have displaced yourself White chink after white chink And in this white chink another white chink In every white chink a white chink It is not good that you fail to see the turbid It is precisely in the turbid that it dwells And that is where everything begins There was a crash 1911. The quality of consciousness at that moment was extraordinary. It seemed as if in some kind of premonition of the horrors to come, the planet was squeezing the best refined juice out of human nature with Einstein and Kandinsky and Schoenberg and Picasso and whole raft of individuals, as if to get some kind of curative elixir out of humanity just in time, to inoculate them just in time so they would not have to go through with the 20th Century. And we who have been born and raised and lived completely in the 20th Century, here at its dregs, advisedly dregs, we can look back consciously and see what a tremendous brave courageous attempt there was to not do what was done and what became a century of terror and horror and beyond belief catastrophe. Here in the complement to Concerning The Spiritual In Art, Theory of Harmony by Schoenberg, this English translation which is just a cull of the best of the simpler chapters. But the beginning, the very first introduction is entitled the Diatonic Triads in the Major Scale. So here is a genius, Arnold Schoenberg really a genius. He was not supposed to be a musician. He was born into the kind of proper Vienna where he was supposed to be a lawyer. And he was trained and he went through everything and when he was in his early twenties he just couldn't stomach it any more. Not that career and that work but what he sensed he had become which was so false that he simply, he could not stand it. And he began to have an intensity, a loathing. Here are two portraits from 1910, one when he started to realize and one when he became conscious. And later that year when he became enveloped. Because it was a time of revolution in the Arts. The revolution was not a political revolution it was an artistic revolution. It's important to understand that an artistic revolution happens not in terms of geography, of nation states and empires and alliances, legal rights. That political scene happens in a time/space which in exacting terms is actually mental and projects itself out on experience which is mythic. So that politics is an ideological projection onto Myth. One of the most poignant intellects of this time wrote a book call The Myth of The State, Ernst Cassirer, who's book on Myth and Language we used in our Mythic section. Another of the most poignant distillations of an analytical drawing of lines so that one could appreciate the forms, the book called The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. All of this human genius pinned to the wall. These are mental ideological shapes which are regressively stamped onto experience, onto feeling toned Mythic realms and that is absorbed by the body, that is absorbed by existence. It is absorbed by the land as if the blood shed in the violence always goes back into the land and the death of those men and women who have been crushed by this finally are absorbed back into the mystery of Nature. But Art is not in that arena at all. Because Art does not belong on the map of anyone's geography or anyone's ideology whatsoever. It's familiar reality is in a conscious time/space, at least a five dimensional continuum. And it's not an intentionality of some kind of arrow, no matter how carefully drawn, not matter how accurately measured, it's not some kind of arrow of intentionality, it's a resonance of a complexity that has at least five dimensional foldings and unfoldings, and so its resonances are those of indefinite possibility. Which is why one of the great aesthetic judgements that one can come to in an analysis of a work of Art is that it beggars final analysis; that one could never analyze it completely; that it has an indefinite meaning, it has an infinite value. And this makes of Art, Spiritual. It makes of Art, personal as a personal form. Once someone asked William Faulkner what he read and he said every year I read some Shakespeare, I read some Cervantes, I read some Balzac, I visit my friends every year. It's keeping in touch with the Persons, the Artist. A Kandinsky is a Kandinsky. A forgery is an act of political terrorism. It's very serious. This particular work by Kandinsky, and I'll exit the chair just for a second to talk about it - this is actually a sketch, a color sketch that Kandinsky made and it belongs to The Art Curiel Gallery in Paris because they bought the original sketches. This sketch was not for a painting but it was for a wall of tile and this sketch is the left wall of a room that was built in Berlin - it was a music room. And the architect for that music room was Mies van der Rohe who had become the head of the Bauhaus. Gropius had left and a man named Hans Meyer came in, he disliked the whole idea of the Bauhaus, he disliked the people who were there, they were not obedient to the drum beat of the times, and finally Mies van der Rohe came in. When the Bauhaus, fleeing yet again, not just from Weimar but from Dessau and going to Berlin and renting an old brick warehouse and trying to set itself up. Two of the great artistic talents of the day, Mies van der Rohe and Kandinsky got together to make a music room where music like Schoenberg could be played. And this was the left wall. There was a back wall and there was a right wall. The dimensions of this wall were 500 centimeters by 295. The back wall was 700 centimeters. That's seven meters by three meters. So it was a huge setting and these tiles were specially made by Micen Porcelain Factory. And when this exhibition for the Bauhaus was over, word came simply to destroy it and it was destroyed. And the sketches were wholesaled out, Art Curiel in Paris bought the sketches and thank goodness many decades later, when Kandinsky became world famous, they rebuilt the music room, they re-did the tiles and it exists again in the world. Schoenberg's music belongs in a Kandinsky/Mies van der Rohe room because it is a part of a radical presentation of an ultimate abstraction which is revolutionary. Not that abstraction is revolutionary - we couldn't even think properly without abstraction. But this abstraction was made with a conscious time/space resonance to demonstrate an extraction from the integral mode of experience and ideation. Schoenberg and van der Rohe and Kandinsky were demonstrating that there are possibilities of Art beyond belief. That nowhere in the Natural course of human life had there ever been the ability to cross the threshold into a differential world that was completely unexplored. Perhaps not completely unexplored, it had been broached by genius mystic individuals from time to time on various places of the planet. One might find a little ancient foot trail in the abstracted differential dust; foot prints left by Lao Tsu 2,600 years ago when he went over the Pon Ku haunted pass into the wastes of paradise and left behind the Tao Te Ching - you might find a trail there. You might find one of the later Buddhist Bodhi Satvas like Nargajuna who brought the great conscious idea of Shunyata into play and formulated the beginnings of mathematical 0 as an idea. But there had never ever been a possibility of dozens and scores of hundreds and thousands and maybe millions of men and women together crossing this threshold that modern Art and modern Science were opening up - that Einstein and Kandinsky, at the very same time, were opening up. And Schoenberg's music was a part of the beauty of the expressiveness of a transcendental Person who was not a Wagnerian but who was able to ratio the real by factoring the zeros in all the time and to see form and background in the moving dancing ensemble of a fractal infinity. Never ever in the History of the planet anywhere was there that opportunity. And they had this. They had this exactly (notice the timing), exactly when the First World War broke out. As if the demons who haunt the planet could not stand that men and women were going to free on a grand scale. We're not going to let them go and we'll plunge the entire world into war to keep them occupied so that they will forget they have discovered this Promethean way out. And that's where we still are. We're still in the plate of spaghetti left by 1914. When Faulkner delivered his Nobel Prize speech in 1954 for A Fable, he set A Fable back in the False Peace of the First World War in 1918, when a whole brigade of French soldiers refused to fight. They said we have been fighting those men for years and we are no longer going to kill them because we do not hate them, nor do we believe any longer that this ground deserves any of our blood. And in his Nobel Prize speech Faulkner said one of the problems with History in our time is that we have become so used to war - this was 1954 - he said for two or three generations now. We've been born and bred in a war that promises to be increasingly unceasing and there is only one question: when will I be blown up. And thus man has become waterlogged with fear and that that fearfulness is the most dastardly nightmare of all. It is exactly what the evil would hope our future holds; unending nauseate fearfulness. Just at the moment when the promise was in reach. When you look at the diatonic triads of the major scale, one already hears - diatonic - you already hear the pairedness; di - two, triads - triangles. The scale, that there's a scale. There's an eight phase scale called the octave. Our education is an eight phase; our education takes place within an octave. It has a musical rationality to its proportions. But the proportions are always ratios. So that one has to learn not just the notes, one has to learn that the notes are articulate because of their place with intervals. That the sound and silence together form the materia out of which music can be made. But no music can be made unless there is a ratioing of the notes and intervals together. And that ratio is the seed of rationality; it's the beginnings of consciousness. And the very first intervaling is done by rhythm; by the cadence of the movement; by the drum beat of the shaman. It's done in that very primordial way. And a million years after that kind of drum beat first heard among our kind, somebody already showing on page nine how the octave has a Jacob's Ladder of triads that work together, and one works up from the bottom, and it's the bottom of the triad, that note, that gives it the cue of its place within the octave. It's just like the I Ching having eight trigrams which are built up from the bottom. And those eight trigrams that then ratio together, they make a proportion, a numerator and a denominator, a ratio, a proportion, a fraction of the whole which is not broken off but is held in exemplary suspension while differential consciousness learns to play with it, to get new possibilities of further ratios. And that's where music is made. And the first great question that comes out of that is: what does then the whole of it look like and you find it just a few pages later; you find Circle; called the Circle of the Fifths because when you put the Thirds together you get a musical Fifth and the Circle of the Fifths is one of the central Mandala ideas in Schoenberg's theory of harmony. It's all about freeing oneself so that if you want to compose within tonality you can and if you want to adventure beyond tonality, you can. Because it turns out that there are an infinite number of tones; there are in fact an infinite number of musical scales. We will never run out of the material to make music. No matter how super duper alien far out you get, there's always new music that you never heard before. Stay tuned. That's Berkeley talk. So this is a Kandinsky painting about a music room that he and van der Rohe put together so that Schoenberg's music could be heard, so that his different music could be heard. It was a music not based on the octave but on twelve tones distributed with the - have you ever heard of the snow shoe principle that we talked about in this education? So that the equanimity of mind, the Bhagavad Gita says: the mind in equanimity is yoga. And what comes out of that yoga? What do you get for that effort? You get Tapas. And Tapas is an energy, an energy that flows, not only all through Nature - like the Force - but transforms so that it flows also through conscious time/space. And if you have a twelve tone serial composing strata you are able to make a music which moves its melodic line by never having consonance twice or even consonance once; it moves by dissonance which also can be aligned. Later on the music - because the course also has music and films - I encourage you at the Science at the end of this year to listen to Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. Yes he could write beautiful music. His first composition called Transfigured Night, Verklarte Nacht, beautiful. He knew how to write beautiful music, he loved beauty. But he also loved freedom and that human freedom could be tutored to appreciate new kinds of beauty that had never been heard or seen before. And when you enlarge the realms of human appreciation of beauty you at the same time take away, you steal, the energy that could have gone regressively into politics. Because a human population with a healthy aesthetic are not too easily swayed by ideological rhetoric, it turns out. And when they become sensitized that their Spiritual Persons are free to be free, they become empowered in an asymptotic way. They learn that they not only have a power but they have a power of powers that's indefinite and that their freedom, their Spiritual freedom matches the form of the Cosmos. It's as wide as that will ever be. And that we are belonging, we are at home, not in a politics but in a Cosmos. It's an entirely different humanity. It's a matured freed humanity who listen to the political rhetoric of any ideology as if they were badly told tales for truant children. When you look at the Kandinsky piece - coming back - how can we look at it? How can we begin to see? And for that clue we go to one of Kandinsky's closest friends, Paul Klee. Paul Klee another great Artist, fantastic friend of Kandinsky who began to teach with him at the Bauhaus in the early 20's. And when they got together, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius and Kandinsky and Klee and a number of individuals, they decided that there must be, initially, some way to begin people to educate them - because the Bauhaus was a school. How can we educate people to be Spiritually free through the prism of appreciating Art, how then can we teach Art so that it's not regressive? And the person who came up with the initial textbook was Paul Klee. It's called Pedagogical Sketch Book published in 1925. And the lessons are arranged very similar to a publication that came out about the same period of time. The publication was the Tractatus Logical Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The ultimate logic textbook which has each section numbered and in Wittgenstein's book 1.1 is the statement: the world is everything that is the case. Klee also has these wonderful numerals and 1.1 the page looks like this. Does this sound familiar? 1.1 an active line, an active line on a walk moving freely. My god, didn't our education begin with a walk? And didn't we discover that there's a whole branch of modern mathematic called random walks? Were we not astounded that no intrusions can interrupt us at this moment whatsoever (someone opens door) because the discovery that maybe our education has some kind of thought behind it; some kind of incredible tradition. This is not some kind of off the cuff outlaw marginal thing but the synthesizing core of a differential transformation. Maybe it's that someone is saying the door is open, you are free to go anywhere you want, singly, in pairs, in groups, en masse. You are free. Klee, Pedagogical Sketch Books. The Bauhaus published fourteen books, this was number 2. Another one of the book published there was Laszlo Moholy-Nagy The New Vision. And many others. The whole reason that there was a Bauhaus though, the whole reason why Klee could do a Pedagogical Sketch Book and The New Vision and all these other things could come out is because Kandinsky in 1911 had established a water mark by this little book. And so when his friends were bringing out other books in the mid twenties, trying to put together some kind of a way that the curricula could constellate itself, not congeal around some educational theory that was dead on the god damned table, but to constellate around a live conscious fire that could be shared, Kandinsky wrote Point and Line to Plane. From Point to Line to Plane, and Kandinsky's sketchbook begins with the line. In Point and Line to Plane you have the ancient Pythagorean understanding derived from the old Egyptian Wisdom that when a point occurs it has no dimension. Well what is it then? It is specifically not a dot. It is just as exactly then a focus of presence. In the first textbook on geometry in the world, written in Alexandria at a time when it was revved up with Universal Wisdom, the way that Euclid's geometry begins is with a statement worthy of Wittgenstein, worthy of Kandinsky, the first statement in Euclid's geometry is "A point in a locus without dimension. And when that locus without dimension moves it describes a line. So that a line comes into being out of a focus of presence which is not a thing and therefore technically can be called a nothing, a No Thing. And all of that is here in Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook. You find again and again the statements that occur in the introduction by the widow of Laszlo, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, she writes: "Klee could confess to communication with Nature, he loved Nature", they all loved Nature. It's the essence of the work. But as we saw, as we saw, Nature is a mystery. It's the 0 based ocean of change - I used to say matrix of change but there's a film out now, we have to alter the language again. Commando language. O.K. we have communication with Nature, it's the essence of his work, but he could also say that all true creation is a thing born out of nothing. He says it in here, "the thing born out of nothing". So he does it at the beginning, because it's a text book to teach people who don't know yet. So they overlook the point and they come directly to the line: "A line, an active line on a walk moving freely without goal, a walk for a walks sake". At this point Paul Klee's writing reads exactly like Thoreau's little essay on walking that we began our course with. Thoreau says the charm of a transcendental presenced walk is that you do not have a goal. He says the technical term, sauntering, technical because it expresses exactly what's going on and he, Thoreau, says in his little essay on walking, 150 years ago, he says: our English word sauntering comes from the French. The French phrase a sauntier; towards the Holy land. When you are moving towards the Promised land, towards the Holy land, which can be anywhere and one can discover that it might be everywhere when you are moving casually in that mode on a pilgrimage to the Promise, that's sauntering and that's the way a walk should be taken. No should be taken so much, that's the way a walk becomes an active creative style. And the same line on the same page, the same line then can be accompanied by random squiggling and it factors in. Or you can have shaded factored in or you can have the line itself become curlicue or you can have no central line but just a pair of squiggles that have a relationship with each other that implicate that there is a synthesizing line. This is how the Bauhaus Art teaching began. Point and Line to Plane, the Pedagogical Sketchbook, and the whole realization was that there was an unfolding from Nature through Ritual to experience and language and feeling and that interiorized into mind, into symbols, into ideas. And that folded into a transformational, radical, beyond realization Vision. That one became Visionary and that Vision was the matrix out of which Art emerged. And so because Art emerges out of Vision, much like existence emerges out of Nature, but not so much but in a complement to it. So that as existence becomes definite by polarity, Art becomes infinite by complexity. And so Art is a real radical revolution, it's unbelievable revolution. It tears up ideological pamphlets by the millions in its spare time. That its power is so phenomenal that when we come to the third pair we must include someone who was as great a philosopher as they were artists. And so our third pair, after Kandinsky and Georgia O'Keeffe we have Henry Moore and Frank Lloyd Wright. And the third pair are Stravinsky and Friedrich Schiller. And Schiller is the person to write a conscious introduction to aesthetics. And his book is called On The Aesthetic Education of Man. It is not a textbook at all, it's a series of letters, 28 letters. If you want to get metaphysical it's one letter for each day of a Lunar cycle. And when we get to Schiller we'll be able to look at a conscious formulation of the way in which the aesthetic bomb that was called Romanticism, Transcendentalism, it had many names. But it came out of a realization that the revolutions, the political revolutions like the American Revolution, like the French Revolution; the most radical revolutions ever in human History had both misunderstood the nature of conscious time/space and both had to be revised. Jefferson revised the whole formulation of the United States in 1800 because it was inevitably subtly bound up with the intentionality that politically leads to monarchies and empires. The presidency was going to become a king in a matter of one generation; it was easy to see at that time. Whereas the French Revolution was taken exactly the opposite way and the First Council came along and said there are going to be no more kings because I'm going to take control of everything. There's going to be an emperor. And Napoleon and Jefferson are exactly diametrically opposed on the same axis of understanding. Two hundred years later come people like O'Keeffe and Kandinsky and Klee who understood at that time that the subtleties that were involved could not be overcome as long as people remained the same. That the complexities of freedom are so subtle and so massive. How massive are they? They are infinite. How Subtle are they? They disappear. Even from intuition. And that the only way a population of men and women can acclimate themselves to such a grand scale of possibility is to have a new education. And that's what all that was about. That's what all this is about. No one is going to be doing anything until there is a population of people who are free to do it. It's as practical as anything. That's right, the ground is fertile, the seeds exist, the implements to work the crop are there but no one knows how to do it. And so we have to find out by learning how to deal with infinite freedom as Spiritual Beings that are not integrally existential at all. And that it's nonsense to say that so and so found somebody by integrating consciousness. That's a complete misnomer. That's a knot of ignorance that is wrong on at least a dozen different counts. It's nonsense to talk that way. But no one can speak that way and learn the new. One has to learn patiently to disentangle one's arrogant assumption that you know damn well how to think and speak, because you do. Maybe you don't. And so let's come to Georgia O'Keeffe just for a minute and we'll start next week with Georgia. One of her wonderful late paintings, 1965, Sky Above Clouds. Absolutely pristine, beautiful, simple. Another old artist, Hokusai, something similar. He looked to see the center of Japanese traditional civilization, Mount Fuji, and he put Mount Fuji into a very peculiar redness. In fact the print is called Red Fuji. Or sometimes it's called Fuji On a Fine Day. This is a Fuji that never exists in Nature but exists at an aesthetic moment where a conscious time/space allows for us to go beyond the confines of the possibilities of Nature into the infinities of Art. And so too Georgia's wonderful 1965 painting. She gives us, this is 1965, she gives us a chance to go above the clouds, above the Earth and to get ready for launch. Forty, Fifty years before that Georgia O'Keeffe made this painting which is the center of a flower, The Jack in the Pulpit. You can see that we're using artists who are seminal. They're seminal because they focus for us all the myriad issues that we would like to explore. And yet if we try to explore them one by one we wouldn't live long enough to even get to the first level of understanding of them. So I use a special language; I use an Arabian Nights kind of syntax to enfold it all so that it will come out as you hear it, as you understand it in your own consciousness.