Art 11

Transcript (PDF)

This is Art Eleven, and we're approaching a threshold which is very difficult to pass through. It's a threshold of History and in order to help you, I'm going to give a little more guidance than usual. What you need to do to prepare for the History section is to take nine sheets of paper, blank paper, and staple them together. On the first eight pages, you need to label them. On the first page label it History. On the second page label it Art. On the third page label it Vision. On the fourth page label it Symbols. On the fifth page label it Myth. On the sixth page label it Ritual. On the seventh page label it Nature. On the eighth page label it Pre-Differential Consciousness Course. And on the ninth page label it Page One of Your History. In other words, History is such a difficult medium, it's a medium. Like a swimmer swims in water, water is medium. History is a medium that is very unlike water. Very unlike fire. If you were to look for a word that would describe the medium of History best, it would be space, outer space. Moving through History is like moving through outer space, through interplanetary space, or through interstellar space, or intergalactic space. Though History is not there in any integral way, it doesn't have any identification marks of a thing. Just like space, pure space, outer space. Yet it is filled. Filled with radiation, filled with energies, filled with photons, filled with radio waves, filled with the entire electro-magnetic spectrum in flux, filled with a three degree Kelvin background temperature, filled with a woven time element that makes space-time like an invisible fabric which bends under gravity. And space is filled with gravity waves.

So History is like space. It's chock-full of energies and reverberations, but gives no indication that there's anything there To the body or to the mind. And so History is the most baffling medium that we face. And consequently, the human race that we all belong to, Homo sapien-sapiens, is on the verge of extinction, because it cannot deal with History. And it's become chronic, and in the last two hundred years it's become apparent that unless there is a transformation, a radical transformation, we'll not survive, we'll not make it.

One of the most poignant of the great historians of History was an American named Henry Adams. You may never have heard of Henry Adams. Henry Adams father was Charles Francis Adams who was the ambassador to England during the Civil War. He was Lincoln's ambassador to England. Henry Adams grandfather was John Quincy Adams who was the sixth president of the United States, and his great grandfather was John Adams who was the second president. So Henry Adams came from a family very distinguished. They held powerful world level offices for generations.

Henry Adams was designated in study about forty, fifty, sixty years ago as the first scientific historian. That is he was a historian who brought in the laws of physics into play as a scientific way. And he saw that historical forms have, not only a life time, a life expectancy, that they are born, they live and flourish, they grow decadent, and they die. Not only are historical forms evolutionary in terms of a life sequence and actually die, but that they have a physics calibration of energy to them. So that you could gauge by the art at any period in the life time of an historical form, the art gauges where it is in terms of its energy. And Henry Adams, in order to express his historical acumen, wrote one of the worlds great books called 'Mont St. Michel and Chartres'. Which was the way that he artistically expressed his historical understanding. Because he saw that the civilization that he was involved in was coming to an end. It was coming to a close. And that the high point of that civilization had been at the time of the building of Chartres Cathedral, a thousand years before. That Mont St. Michel and Chartres were built at the apex of the energy of the health of a civilization which, when he wrote that book, had come very close to the end. And he took the physics of gas, pressure, energy and applied it to the historical form of Western Civilization. And he showed that there was a range of endings beginning with 1918. And that the longest that that civilization could go, depending on the play of things, was about a decade or so into the twenty-first century and then it was finished. It was finished not because of bad errors in judgment of anyone, but because the historical form was dead. That it would have no more energy.

There was a great sociologist who left Russia over the frozen ice of the River Neva, out of Saint Petersburg, named Sirocan, Petram Sirocan, who later wrote a great study from a sociological standpoint of the development of human societies, and of the forms. And he listed a time table for what he called the death of the culture in which he lived. And while he didn't put time lines like Henry Adams did, he listed the kinds of events and phenomenon that accompanied the death of that particular society. And the last item on that list is when beer cans are decorated with Rembrandts.

You can notice again that art is an index to the health of civilization. Art is not a phenomenon that is cultural. It's not a phenomenon that is mental. But it has a different venue within which it flourishes. And we've seen in our education that art does not occur anywhere in the natural ecology. This is not to denigrate nature at all. In fact nature is understood in a much more deep regard. That the natural ecology is always integral. It comes to rest in things. Or as Schiller in his great 'On The Aesthetic Education of Man', written about two hundred years ago. At the beginning of the seventeenth letter, it's very clear, it's a series of twenty-seven letters, published in 1795, written in the winter of 1794-95, Schiller was in his early thirties. He'd been blessed with a fantastic physique, a fantastic mind, a poetic ability that was almost unbounded. And he had a severe case of pneumonia and almost died. And out of that death, near death experience he became almost somberly, almost seriously interested in the greatest philosophic mind of that time, Immanuel Kant.

And so he began reading Kant day and night. Because he felt impelled that there must be some way to understand what is real. And the vehicle by which we understand what is real is the mind. And the function of the mind, by which we understand what is real, is reason. And the event within reason that is the anvil of deciding what is real, is the phenomenon of the event called a judgment. And that one of the most powerful judgments that we can make is the judgment on aesthetic excellence. And so all of these concerns from Kant went through this brilliant but crippled now for life, not crippled in a bodily way but crippled metabolically. He died very young. And he knew that he had been dealt a mortal blow. And his ideal at the time for himself, as a youngish man in his early thirties, a very cavalier excellent kind of an individual, was that he would accept this kind of romantic heroic ideal for himself, that he would dedicate all of his powers to find out the meaning of the real. The meaning of truth. And that somehow bound up with this was the ideal of beauty, which comes out expressively in art.

And so for Schiller aesthetics was not at all an academic subject, it was a matter of dearer than life blood. It was a matter of spiritual consciousness and it had to be resolved as precisely and quickly as possible, he didn't have that long to live. And after two years of studying Kant on his own assiduously, he had a run in with an older man, a genius, not too much older than him, a man named Goethe, that you may have heard of. Goethe is the Dante of Germany. Goethe's 'Faust' is one of the world's great achievements.

Goethe, in the summer of 1794, and Schiller became such great friends that the two volumes of their correspondence is one of the world's great exchange of letters, between geniuses. Schiller probably with an IQ of about 175 and Goethe with an IQ of about 275. And in this relationship with Goethe, it became apparent to the young mortally wounded spiritually distraught Schiller, that Goethe novel 'The Sorrows Of Young Werthe', about a young man who is struggling to find his way out of an entrapment which has been made exclusively on the basis of arbitrary judgments and decisions by generations, maybe centuries of men and women who were almost all dead now. That one had to break out of this invisible mummification, out of the bounds. And so that whole era of European literature is called sterm und drong, storm and stress.

And out of this the struggle for freedom became the pivot point upon which a whole romantic ideal was pivoted. And in that romantic ideal, at dead center of the pivot, is a point that Kant makes, that reason in its purity is transcendental. It's a very paradoxical quality. That the ace perfect balance upon which reason and the mind pivot is some kind of jet of consciousness coming out of the center of the soul that creates a transcendent capacity.

Now two hundred years ago it wasn't very well understood and was taken, not slovenly, but taken in not its full puzzling kind of dimension. We, in our education, know that at the end of the cycle of integration is the beginning of a counter cycle, a counter movement which we would call differentiation.

Let's pause here for a minute. It's just more of Los Angeles. There are aspects to ourselves that are like that. There're are meandering aspects to ourselves that you have to guard against at moments like this when someone's telling you the truth. And if you cannot do that then you should leave. It's always a struggle at this point because everything is a distraction at this point. EVERY THING is a distraction at this point. This is why the shift, the transformation to consciousness is so unknowable to the mind. It never knows when it has shifted to a differential consciousness. It cannot know. Because at the center of its integral pivot, which it would call nothing, out of that nothing comes a whole array of differentiality that seems impossible to the body, it seems improbable to the mind, and all of this is tied up with the weird peculiar way in which logical form reduces reality. And one of the classic issues of that kind of reduction, a reduction which if believed in creates delusion. An illusion is mis-perception, a delusion mis-conception. And just as you act on illusions, you organize marching millions to kill others on the basis of delusions.

When Greek logic was first mooted to be applied to the actual rituals of life, from a little tiny town in Greece, came a great critic of all this. The little town was named Ulia and the critic was Parmenides. But it was his student Zeno that enunciated the ridiculousness of this kind of logical reduction of one of the primary qualities of the real, and that is motion. And Zeno's paradoxes were well known in classical Greece. That if you take the swiftest runner, Achilles, and he runs a race that stops half way, and then runs again and stops half way, and then runs again and stops half way, that logically Achilles, the fastest man alive, will never finish the race. He will never ever finish the race. And this holds up in logical form, was a great consternation at the time. Because it showed that the rational logical understanding of motion had a flaw someplace in the application of the conception. Later on there were other paradoxes. There were paradoxes not only of motion. The Pythagorean specialized in paradoxes of tone, because they were musicians. There were paradoxes also of time, and there are paradoxes of space. And when you have tone and time, space and motion, in that quaternary you have the matrix that comes to present the art of music, if you add an indexing exponential called the artist, the composer, the musician. That in that kind of five element, that kind of Hermetic star matrix, where motion, tone, time and space, indexed by a musician, that star has within it all the secrets that one needs to bring out about why a transcendental logic is an absurdity, and cannot possibly be used by consciousness in any kind of differential truth. And that the mind will never understand that. In fact the mind will, when pressed by having to address this, will increasingly resist it to the point of suicide. And that whole ensemble of dramatic peculiarity can be encapsulated in the concept called the absurd.

And in our century, the greatest of all of the absurd dramatists, Samuel Beckett, wrote play after play after play showing that this not only was true in the peculiarities of some pre-Socratic conundrum, but that we are forced to live like delusion prisoners, lives that constantly have little epicycles of this stupidity all the time. And that any kind of beauty that we once would have had has been long since dissolved by the reign of this kind of absurdity. This kind of acid absurdity that leached away any kind of truth or beauty long ago. Even two hundred years ago it was already gone. And that the grandeur of two hundred years ago was that men and women were still protesting. No we will not do this. Yes this is happening, yes this is happened, we will not accept it. And so out of this came the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Romantic Revolution. What were all these revolutions? What were all these revolutions? And yet all of these revolutions were flawed in the very same way. And that flaw was not apparent two hundred years ago. No one knew. Even someone with a 275 IQ didn't know, had no idea. Because they still protested against the delusion in terms of the mind. And you cannot cure a disease by contracting more of the disease. That's not the principle of inoculation. The principle is to take a little of the disease before you get the disease, so you don't get it. But when you have the disease, taking more of the bacillus doesn't cure you.

And so we have an oddity. We have minds that are so diseased that they cannot believe that they are diseased, and further that the cure of the disease seems to be a certain death to that mind. Now that estimate was not made in the twentieth century. It was made 50 BC by a man named Lucretius. He said our society is so rotten that we cannot any longer live, but we are not strong enough to endure the cure which would surely kill us also. And there was with this conundrum that Julius Caesar was killed by his best friends. Because he offered a cure which would have been worse than the disease. It would have been certain death, and was certain death. His cure was 'make me dictator for life and pontifex maximus at the same time. The head of the religion and the head of the state at the same time for life, and I will take care of everything for you'. And a generation later, Augustus Caesar took his uncle's place and became the founder of the Roman Empire. So that the Roman Republic which Lucretius was talking about, being in the throes of this, was not cured. It was just encoffined and the coffin encemented and the cemented thrown into the Tiber River and the Tiber River thrown into historical time and it's still sealed there. Nothing has changed. Because we're still living in the terminal moraine of that glacial form.

Terminal moraine is a geology simile. When a glacial grinds the rocks into powder and dust and then begins to recede it leaves a ridge of the rocks at the edge. We are stumbling over the terminal moraine of something called Western Civilization which died a long time ago. And the struggles that have happened during our lifetime are the struggles of various sociological fractal groups trying to parade themselves as holding the most of what's there. Not realizing that what's there is shrunk away to not worth while. To be king of this world is to be proprietor of a junk yard. Not even salvageable. There's nothing that can be used in it.

And so this education is like super serious surgery on the delusion that the mind is the arbiter, by judgment, especially aesthetically, on what is formally rational and real. It's an indictment. It's an accusation. It's a prosecution. That this mind was linked as the indexing core of a historical time form that could not survive its own limitation no matter what anyone did.

So when we have our nine pages. The first seven pages are in a retrospective order, going back through the course. What did you do during this three month period called history, which will be contemporaneous with the writing of this history. And the previous page will be the three months of now, Art, what did you do. And you can see that it goes back so that the eighth page is the three months before the course began. Now of course you have to pro-rate this if you came in before the beginning of the course. You have to figure out what you were doing at the time that the course was going on. So a year ago 1998, the summer of 1998, those who were in the course have a chance to look at their material that they were doing at that time. Ritual material, you were making a pair of masks. A mask of feeling, something from inside that comes out, and a mask of food, something from outside that goes in. So that the course, with its presentational assignments and its special matrix transformating sequencing, I'm making a word there. Transformating is a Joycean use of the English language. It's not related to tomato as a root. We're not talking about sauce. So that those eight pages then are the set up, they're the evidence upon which you will write your history. Now you can see that no one has ever successfully done this. No one has just sat down and done the hard work of figuring out, of remembering what it was that was going on that they did. And all of that is just the preliminary, a kind of a setting up of a chronology. And it's only after you set that up, that you have that sequencing in place, that you can then do a differential conscious transformation. And that that differential conscious transformation, when it is applied to the four pages that are from the integral cycle, that differential conscious transformation is going to complement, it's going to weave into. And as it weaves into those four pages from the integral cycle, we know now, that it will transform, it will do its stuff. That that past will become a new past. You will remember what you did then, but the act of now remembering what you did then, with who you are now will change the past. It will become the new past. And each time you go through that you will change and it will become a new past each time you review it. And then if you do that several times, you will begin to see that the past is not a static form, but has many facets to it. And that each time you go through it, you cut more facets and it becomes like a jewel. And so your integral cycle, instead of being stages of things, become strings of jewels that have so many multiple possibilities of relationality that you see that, even just on the basis of chronology, that the fundamental differential structure upon which the process of history gains its momentum, its dynamus in the Greek. Becomes like a flowing invisible current over a bed of jewels. And one becomes staggered then at the possibilities.

But this is only when the differential consciousness goes back into the integral. When the historical process of differential consciousness looks at vision, vision is not in the integral. It's already in the differential. A visionary process has a parallel to historical process. History and vision are related to each other. They're parallel. So that one looks to find some kind of way to deal with this uniqueness. The parallel in the integral, the two processes that were parallel in the integral are nature and myth. And we saw that it was very difficult to deal with those as a parallel because that quality of nature that was so illusive, we called it the mystery of nature, has a parallel in the process of myth, the process of experience. A feeling toned experience which is apparent there in language. That mythic language parallels the mystery of nature. And that both are integral processes, they both come to make the realm of things. The mystery of nature makes the things of existence, and the language, the protean language quality of myth makes the things of the mind. And one of the things of the mind that the vicissitudes of integral language in its protean capacities makes are powerful things in the mind known as symbols. And symbols tend to constellate by their indexing order very very powerful objective focuses called ideas. And that in the mind very sophisticated language makes very powerful ideas. And one of the most powerful ideas, so powerful that it almost in turn indexes all of the other ideas. A symbol so powerful that it indexes all of the other symbols, sometimes called a synthesizing symbol. Sometimes called an integrating idea. That an idea so powerful that it seems to apply beyond the individual's mind. It applies to all of the minds of all of the individuals who live at the same time. Who live at the same time. Who live in an historical form. So that the most powerful idea in the mind is a cork floating on a throe of something so powerful that it doesn't even seem powerful. Because it's off the scale everywhere. That's the power of history. One talks about the might of the Pacific Ocean, it's nothing compared to interstellar space. Not even there. Astronomers can compute that seventy light years away, there's a planet orbiting one of the stars in Ursa Major that is almost twelve times the size of Jupiter. All of the storms in that planet for four billions years are nothing compared to the seventy light years and that's not even getting one foot off the shore into what is, who knows how vast cosmic space really is.

so that the mind is like a player of toys in the smallest imaginable sand box and for it to suppose that its deepest held integral beliefs are measurements of the real is truly absurd, in a Samuel Beckett way. And Beckett, in one of his great dramas, has a stage that's barren. Looks like a janitor has swept everything, and the only thing on the stage are two trash cans. And there are two actors, one in each of the trash cans, who from time to time pop up out of the trash can and they jabber at each other. And the drama, the play is just this jabbering, this end game dialogue between two denizens of two trash cans on an empty stage in a cosmos so vast that no one even has any idea of how vast it is. Let's take a break.


What then can we do? If you are following, you are beginning to piece together the overlay of language, of phrasing of Saturday morning presentations and rather than just stringing along in a sequence, you're beginning to see that a different kind of form is taking place here. And that your participation in that form is the only indexing order there is. If you're not here no form will come. To the extent that you interrupt your continuity that form is sporadic. And frankly you have to be a genius to be able to follow something that leaves no traces whatsoever without continuity.

When we were truly tribal, hundred thousand years ago, everyone in the tribe had to participate together. If you didn't you were an outlaw, you were gone. You were not accepted into the life circle of the people. Even twenty-five hundred years ago, in the most sophisticated city in the world at the time, Athens, when the spring lenaen festival came to present Greek tragedies, every mature person in the city was compelled to go. Greek tragedy was not an entertainment, it was a state obligation. There were paid police who carried ropes and went up and down the streets of Athens, shepherding people out of their homes into the theater of Dionyseus. Because you had to see these plays, these Greek tragedies. Because they were on the brink of a crisis of history, where consciousness had got itself strung out into an impossibility and it was a matter of survival. Greek tragedy was an art form of surviving. The crisis of history. The Greek mind never made it.

By the time of Alexander the Great in the next century, Athens was a university town. It's all it was good for. It was a travel place that you came to see some buildings and you came to galk and then went with souvenirs back to wherever you'd come from. There was no historical energy left in the city at all. The most creative anvil, in one hundred years had become, how can I use a phrase that you might understand, it became like Palo Alto on a Sunday afternoon in the summer. A great place to have a cappuccino and walk around and then go somewhere else. Phenomenal, unbelievable.

The ancient wisdom tradition lines up in unanimity that men and women, when they face this crisis, and it's faced all the time by our species, every time a social form runs out of its energy, it faces this crisis. And a hundred thousand years ago, it ran out of its energy every season. So that during the course of a natural year, there are at least four times when everyone who constituted together the gestalt called the people, participated together to survive. Because what lay outside of the renewal of that form of the tribe, of the culture, what lay outside of that was something worse than the animals. It was a demonic aspect of human beings who are degradated below the animals. The animals won't touch them. The animals were sacred. The beasts were sacred compared to the decadence that human beings go to when regression is unchecked. They become a radioactive contaminant that even nature rejects. Extinction.

so that the old wisdom traditions were all about renewal, and we got very good at it so that renewal could be sometimes once a year. And when civilizations became very powerful, not just tribal, not just cultural, but held together by powerful ideas in a symbolic mind, that had transformational capacities to engender visionary consciousness that could be shared. And then art forms that brought that into differential prismatic objectivity, then you had civilizations. None of those civilizations ever survived the crisis of history. None of them. It's not only that no students in this course have ever done the history assignment right, it's that no human population up to this time has ever survived the crisis of history. Every form made has been bludgeoned into fragmented oblivion by the forces of history.

So then what are we to do? What is going on here? It means in the most simplistic radical way that you cannot rely upon the mind to be victorious in a differential fight. Because the mind, no matter how brilliant it is in the integral order, is not even a player in the most elemental differential mode. That's the meaning of humility. The very first thing that one learns, on the threshold of nascent childlike consciousness, is the humility in the face of the vast unknown. And it is unknown, not because you don't know it, it is unknown because it is unknowable in any integral sense. Therefore must be addressed with respect. The respect for the unknown is one of the earliest qualities of the sacred. And men a women world round, wherever there is any indication of consciousness, show this respect for the unknown. We live in such a decadent time that even facing the unknown, in such an easy situation as this course, that people cannot even muster the energy to come for several months in a row, minimally, just to get the tone of how daunting all of this really is, and how simple it is to do, but how impossible it is to think about doing.

That Zeno's paradox will come into play whether you want it to or not. But also, on the other side of it, the old inscription that Carl Jung incised in stone above the lintel of his back door going out into his garden at Kusnacht, the Bollingen tower, "called or not god will be there". That this quality that by participation, the mystique of consciousness works with the mystery of nature in such a way that something really does happen. Vision, consciousness really does happen. And it's out of the happeningness of consciousness, not consciousness so much but consciousing. Consciousning. I can hardly make up a phrase that says it. It's the gerund verbal form of what we thought was an object, consciousness. It's not, it's a process. And in like manner, in parallel differential like manner, there's no future as an object but there is a futuring as a gerund verbal process. And it's the futuring that is devastating so far to our kind. We've never crossed that ocean. Never.

When Arnold Toynbee took seriously the study of history, he took for his study, not a history of this or that, but history. He studied history. And he found that the large forms that inhabit characteristically the study of history, are civilization. Forms called civilizations. He identified twenty-eight different civilizations that qualified. Twenty-seven of which were dead. And the one that was still alive was dyeing. And he was asked one time, I was there when he was in San Francisco for a week with KQED, the educational, PBS television station in San Francisco, in the Sixties. Toynbee was very tall physically and had pale blue Paul Newman eyes and a kind of a gentle learned English gentleman's demeanor. And his wife wore print dresses and little hats with flowers and carried her purse, and black patent shoes, and was just a very nice English housewife, surprisingly. And he was being interviewed. I think the man's name was James Day, he was the chairman of the PBS station. For a week, and they videod it, it is probably available somewhere. And he was asked, he said why have they all died then Dr. Toynbee? He said they could not meet the challenge. And of course one of his primary themes was challenge and response. That there is a dialogue in the historical process very similar to the dialogue in the philosophic process. But where as philosophy is the process of vision, the process of history in its dialogue is not a conversational dialogue, based on consciousness, but it's a challenge response dialogue based on a powered reality. And he, in challenge and response, pursued by the questioner said well what is it Dr. Toynbee that is not there in meeting the challenge? He said failure of nerve. Every civilization in history on this planet has died because of a failure of nerve. Not a failure of nerve to meet the challenge of history, the failure of nerve to meet the challenge of transformation.

There are many men and women who within historical forms met the challenge of incredible circumstances with responses that worked because they were within the historical form. Men and women are not dumb, they're not stupid. They've never been stupid. Our species has been wise beyond belief for hundreds of thousands of years. That's not the problem. The problem is the problem of transformation when nothing in that form will work and you have to have something new all time everywhere. Where do you get that? Where does that come from? On the deep Yogic answer is that it comes from what we mentally identify mis-identify in our delusion as nothing. Chapter O is quite real. Without the Tao there most certainly is no traction for Te. Absolutely not traction. And we live in a time where the Tao is so pure it doesn't register in any kind of Te. Any kind of traction. So one has to be a phantom acrobat pirouetting in pure consciousness in order to even have any movement, any dynamic. And this of course to the mind looks completely stupid, ungainly, absurd ridiculous. And this is exactly what Cervantes said about Don Quixote. That the knight errant seeking to defend the chivalric ideal of going to the holy land and bringing its ideal back into play in our neighborhood, because of a very strange kind of a contortment, the noble looks ridiculous to the over-conditioned mind. It's going to be damned ungainly, we're going to look stupid. We're going to feel absurd. And all of that is true. If you don't feel absurd, then you're not really engaged with the unknown. If you don't look ridiculous, it's not new. So that the number one criteria for not relevant is that you identify on some weekend retreat, oh those ideas are great. Oh those actions feel good. Those are exactly irrelevant. The fact that an identification can be made is a poison sign. When the criteria is that of transformation of everything. And the first thing to look for is the long queues of fame and success, and stay away from that. What the hell do you think the whole tradition of recluse means. Not recluse in the sense of getting away from the town, the society, the civilization. Getting away from your delusionary necessity of participating in that at any place. You can grind it up when you're out on the middle of the Pacific Ocean alone. You can still be grinding it up into radioactive hamburger, so that you learn nothing from that experience.

This quality of patiently, strategically bringing out of no- where in particular the energies of a free wild consciousness that allows for a prismatic differential form called the spiritual person to constellate is not in the integral cycle at all. Has nothing to do with the body, has nothing to do with the mind. It has everything to do with the body, everything to do with the mind once constellated, once brought into play, then that person goes to the body, goes to the mind and weaves an articulate spacing into the integral processes. So that the mind no longer identifies in terms of one two three, but rationally sees the proportions of one over zero to two over zero to three over zero to four over zero and understands that in this kind of fractal infinity there is a cycle of discovery that can be understood, and that's called wisdom. And it's totally different from instruction. The long queues are because of successful teaching of instruction. It's animals who are self aligned for the slaughter. There is nothing but death in those lines. Oblivion. The way out is a way that cannot be identified. You don't know that it's a way out, there is no way to know. And so all one can do is back away from the known identifications and increasingly keep the dynamic flowing so that it goes unknowingly along its mysterious way. And in retrospect is when you discover this was the way out. You have no way of knowing. Yeah, the guide was saying keep not knowing. What is the, the Vajra Chadika Sutra, the Diamond Cutter Sutra says that the apex of repeats and repeats and repeats it changes one word in each stanza and finally comes to an apex and then goes down from that exactly the way that it went up and at the very center of the Diamond Cutter Sutra is the sentence "Awaken the mind by not letting it rest on anything". Pop! Pulling the plug on delusion. And the peculiarity of it is that delusion once punctured vanishes without leaving a trace. Not even any kind of soot vapor. There's no hole, there's no tear, there's no collapsed bubble. That's what's called Moksha. That delusion vanishes without a trace. Not that the mind vanishes without a trace or the world vanishes without a trace. How egotistically absurd to think that you're enlightened and the world's going to vanish? That's really arrogant. What vanishes without a trace in Moksha, the extension is of the delusion.

Schiller, in the seventeenth letter, you can see we circle around. The wisdom way was circumambulation. You never go directly. If you can go directly, if you can put a straight edge and go directly, for so many thousands of dollars over Saturday and Sunday you can go straight to this, that's really trickery. Circumambulation, and you never know what nano second the traction kicks in. Only in retrospect you can recognize, you can re-member that from then on it was different, it was different. You are ratioing the real rather than identifying the phony. And that by ratioing the real you became suddenly, and the word has come to have a terrible weight with it, you've become rational. Not rational because you are able to identify many subtle variants of a particularity. That's not being rational at all. That's rationalist, which is a practitioner of rationalism. Rational comes from ratio. It comes from having that sense of proportion. And that proportion has a common denominator of articulate openness, which at the same time is logical infinity and allows for any kind of fractal futuring to have a constellation of certainty. There's such a thing as being certain in the unknown without being able to tell what it is. And that's an ear mark, it's a taste of wisdom.

In the seventeenth letter out of twenty-seven, Schiller, writing two-hundred and four years ago, about this time of the year. Two-hundred-four years ago. Listen to the language. It's translated out of the German, so this is English translated. But listen to the high level of intelligence. "As long as it was simply a question of deriving the generic idea of beauty from the concept of human nature, as such, there was no need to recall any limitations of this latter (the concept of human nature). There was no need to recall any limitations of this latter other than those which derived directly from the essence of it and are inseparable from the concept of finiteness. Unconcerned with any of the contingent limitations to which human nature may in actual experience be subject, we derived our notion of it directly from reason as the source of all necessity. And with the ideal of human nature, the ideal of beauty was automatically given to. Now, by contrast, we descend from this region of ideas onto the stage of reality in order to encounter man in a definite and determinate state. That is to say among limitations which are not inherent in the very notion of man, but derive from outward circumstances and from the contingent use of his freedom." In other words the stage is set in a contingency which is going to be obviated by history as a process and was already obviated by consciousness as a visionary process only we didn't recognize it because the visionary process was not objective. There was no chance to recognize it because there was no objectivity. That was just the visionary process of consciousness as such. And at the very first opportunity, objectively to suddenly remember what all this is about is the threshold at which art comes into play. Which makes aesthetics not at all a goody goody ephemeral kind of activity, but makes it the fundamental discipline of civilization. It's a tremendous problem.

Now someone like Schiller is standing on the shoulders of giants in order to see this. One of the giants that's there was not an aesthetician at all. His name was Rousseau. Jean Jacque Rousseau, who rowing a boat one time, out I believe in lake Geneva, in a light kind of a haze, suddenly stopped rowing, and says, in his confessions, his autobiography, he said the entire lake disappeared and so did I. He didn't know where he was, but that he was real was a certainty. But his location in terms of any kind of integral order was completely suspended for some moment that was not temporal. It had no time element. Now he didn't stay there. And because of that kind of wild freakish quality, he stopped being a revolutionary rake and started to really get it that this is god damn peculiar. That life and me and the society and the whole situ. . . . .all of this is peculiar. And it belongs in some way to an open scenario that has never been talked about correctly, because there is no correct way to talk about it. So that language has to become creative searching to find new words, new phrases to throw up, that are not going to register in an identification way but are going to reverberate in an exploring temporary syntax. And that this is the only way that men and women can talk about what's going on. And yet, and yet it is exactly this process that is the process by which music is made. In the generations that followed Rousseau, in the very generation of Schiller, it became the most poignant example of the wild freedom that human beings have in an unknown cosmos.

Three individuals progressively took it to heart. The first one noticed it now and again incidentally in his composing duties and understood it and occasionally showed it, but didn't do much about it, his name was Papa Hayden. And his young radical genius pupil, Mozart understood it and put it into play in such a mysterious way, that feeling was liberated to explore realms that had never been felt before. Enlarged the exploratory landscape of human feeling onto interstellar levels that no one had ever felt feelings, and those regards before, and then comes Beethoven who rolled up his sleeves to make forms that would present. Not forms that would coral and represent, but forms of differential personal artistic consciousness, that would present the unlimited scope of the constellation of infinite freedom. And struggled all his life and got a fantastic insight in 1815. It was the end of the career of Napoleon. All through the 1790's and up until 1814 became increasingly the Roman Empire of a new Europe. And when they carted him away and put him on Elba, little island, they told him got the idea for a musical form which he struggled to bring into play. He struggled for nine years. And in 1824 on the seventh of May, in Vienna, he conducted the Ninth Symphony. He took the four seasons of the natural world and put them into four phases of that symphony. And for the final fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, he took one of Schiller's poems. It's usually called Ode To Joy. Actually it translates as Ode To Freedom. And made that the text for a choral ensemble that would weave together with the orchestra. The Choral part singing Schiller's Ode To Joy, transforms the orchestra of the first three movements into a Cosmic population. We have the testimony of an aged violinist who was there at the performance, May 7th, 1824. Beethoven himself conducted. Now he wasn't the conductor. The conductor was a man named Louis Dupont. But Beethoven stood in front of him on the floor of the concert stage. Beethoven himself conducted, that is he stood in front of a conductor stand and threw himself back and forth like a mad man. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor, he foiled about with his hands and feet, as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts. He was like one of those sculptures at the end of Michelangelo's career that were unfinished, struggling to get free of the stone. He never really made it. The Ode To Joy became the highest that that symphonic musical form, the revolutionary musical form of the Beethoven Symphony could reach. He never quite got that in his movements, like a mad man, the cue was to take it one step further into ballet. And the man who did it was Stravinsky with The Rite Of Spring.

Like Berkeley Uh!

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