Art 12
Presented on: Saturday, June 19, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Art Twelve, which means that next week will be an interval, and in two weeks we start History, which is the most difficult of all of the sections of this education. Why is it so difficult? In the ancient wisdom traditions, East and West, consciousness was always a high Dharma. Vision was always a way of truth that was higher than the terrestrial criteria could possibly be. No matter how refined man's mind becomes, he never exceeds his terrestrial origin integrally. The only way to step off this earth is to go beyond it and when you go beyond it, you have to go beyond the mind. So you can call it transcendental, or you can call it enlightenment, you can call it magic, you can call it supernatural. All of those words, that entire vocabulary of terms and descriptive qualities all indicate that there is something other than terrestrial at work, and the classic Greek way of speaking of it is that it is celestial.
So that there was for instance a watershed in heroes in Greek mythology. There were terrestrial heroes, and terrestrial heroes are those who stay here, who return to come back here. One of the motifs of a terrestrial hero is the return of a king. And this is the, one of the ancient options of this archetype, that of a universal king. The other side of that archetype, instead of a terrestrial hero, is a celestial hero. And a celestial hero does not come back. A celestial hero accomplishes the task and goes beyond, leaves, goes into the heavens. And this archetype is not just the ancient Greek. The ancient Greek, we're not talking about Classical Greece, Classical Greece is very recent, we're talking about two thousand years before Plato. Those more archaic Greek archetypes, where they came from, had great affinity with Egypt. And not only with Egypt but with India. And not only India but ancient Iran. So that about forty-five hundred years ago there was such a thing as an Egyptian, Iranian Indic archetypal pattern that was there in the language. It was wrapped in that ancient language. And the roots of that language go back probably three, four thousand years before that in a modification era when the Neolithic was maturing.
The celestial hero in India would be the Buddha. The Buddha was a celestial hero. He came, he did his task and then he left. His leaving was not a death which then one reincarnates from, but his passing was a Parinirvana. Not just a Nirvana. The Sutra is very clear that records his passing. The Parinirvana Sutra is very very clear. And there was always, in the classic Buddhist teaching, he always made clear that a Buddha has another option. That one who is born with all of these capacities and dimensions, will become a Buddha or will become, and the ancient Sanskrit term was Chakravartin. A Chakravartin is a universal king. Not just a king of kingdom, of a terrain, but as we would say in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, a king of kings. In fact the phrase king of kings comes from that ancient archetype of the terrestrial hero who comes back to help. He is a friend of life, is a friend of nature, whereas the celestial hero is a friend of the cosmos.
So that the cosmic dimension is an openness that goes out and has a tone of differentiality, whereas the terrestrial hero has a tone of integration, has an integral. Which is why the rebirth kicks in, because the rebirth is always because of an integral trigger. In terms of high Dharma you as a differentially conscious freed person must decide specifically to come back. You don't come back because of Karma, because you've exceeded Karma. Karma is only effective integrally. Karma has no effect whatsoever differentially, none whatsoever. It's only an integral glue.
There is a famous example of that in the Vimlakurty Sutra where Vimlakurty, who is a layman but who is differentially very advanced, has come down with an illness and he is laying on his bed, on his sick bed, dying of this disease. And the historical Buddha, knowing that Vimlakurty is one of the prizes of the earth, keeps sending monks to go and inquire how he is. And the monks come back and they say we can't understand him, we don't know what's wrong with him, we can't talk with him. And so finally the Buddha himself goes. And in the Vimlikurty Sutra he seats himself down and Vimlikurty says I am sick because the world is in ignorance of Dharma. And when the world is better then I'll be better. Well this was the origin, Vimlikurty's illness was the origin of the Bodhisatva Vow. And was the beginning of the Mahayana. And what Vimlikurty was saying is that I am a terrestrial hero and you are a celestial Buddha and there's a difference between us that is not resolvable because when you are finished you will leave. In fact you are of such a non terrestrial nature that you are a cosmic puzzlement to the integral sense of thing. In fact the classical name, when the Buddha would talk about himself, he wouldn't use the term Buddha, he used the term Tathigata. Tatheta in Sanskrit means stuff, it means suchness, it means the existential phenomenalness of things of whatever it is. Thatheta is the suchness of things. And Gata means gone. So when he referred to himself as the thathegata it means that my suchness is gone. What you address and what you see is but a remnant, an echo and that echo when it fades will be gone, because there's nothing there to sustain the echo any further. And what Vimlikurty was saying is that I am sick with the world. I empathize with the world and only when the world is healed will I be alright.
Anyway in the Sutra, there is constantly happening, while the Buddha is with Vimlikurty, there is constantly a rain of flower petals. And all the monks who are there, the flower petals are sticking to them and they're brushing them off. But on the Buddha they don't stick. They don't stick at all. And the reader, or the listener, it used to be that you would listen to Sutras, not to reader them. The listener of the Sutra would be aware that the cascade of the flowers is a cascade of celestial blessedness which sticks to terrestrial beings because of our graspingness. Which is not because we want this that or the other but because our integral nature is to be wanting. Wantingness is a structural characteristic of the earth, or of any planet, any beings, any sentient beings in any star system on any planetary, as long as you are limited to a life form that has never been off the planet. All those life forms are integrally limited, they have a ceiling. They don't know anything else. They can imagine, but the imagination is integral in itself and it projects a subconscious non-judgmental tone of integration to it. And so you get all sorts of things. You get people thinking that the nicest most beautiful god image must be very close to God when it is a graven image and it is irrelevant. It is nothing at all.
But this quality of the terrestrial and celestial coming together, and that they are bridged because they have a commonality in that they are one and the same. But what it takes in order to go from the one to the other is not a decision, it's not a judgement between two things, but it is a transformation. It's a turning around, as Plato says in his huge dialogue The Republic, which was about a century after the historical Buddha in India. Plato, learning from Pythagoras, who was a contemporary of the Buddha, says in the tenth book of The Republic that there comes a time when one realizes that the entire phenomenal world of things is a stage setting. Not that it is just a stage setting, but that you have matured to a point to where it now seems to you as a stage setting because of your maturation, because you are ready to transform. You are ready to be re-birthed. Not birthed again in an integral circle, but to be re-birthed out of the circularity itself.
And that this being birthed is a natural integral structural mode. It's deeper than a quality it's a mode. It's not only in the qualities of things, it's in the qualities of processes. And whether it's the process of nature or the process of myth, of language, of feeling, both those are integral processes and they glue. They're very good at gluing. Nature, when nature glues, existence stays put. And when myth glues, minds are operatively there. But Vision is differential. It's a high Dharma. It has nothing to do with integration. It has something to do with beyondness. But while Vision, while consciousness is a high Dharma, history is a higher Dharma. History is a really difficult medium. As difficult as consciousness is, as difficult as vision is, as difficult as the transformation from the whole skein of integral glue bound existence and mind, transforming out of that into the magical language of the consciousness of vision, that is only a high Dharma, whereas history is a higher Dharma. It's much much more challenging, much more difficult.
With the kind of talented language that a Buddha would have, one can set the stage for transformation so that people could transform out of their existence, out of their minds into the process of consciousness, into visionary openness, into the differential. And could even come as far as achieving the spiritual personhood. Which is not an existential form at all, is not a mental form, is not an idea, but is a differential jewel whose objectivity resides in the infinite diffraction of possibility. A spiritual person is able to infinitely be different objectively. So that a differential person lives in an objectivity that can be characterized by allusion. So that a differential poet packs a lot of meaning into her poetry because of the density of allusions. An allusion is a completely different process from delusion. Allusion can take illusion and transform it into art. That's the magic of art. An artist can take the illusory qualities of the integral capacities of phenomenon and existence and bring that transformatively through to art where the illusion never becomes delusion. It might be packed with allusion, but allusion, when one differentially explores it, the more that one explores it, the less is the possibility of a delusion and the more the possibilities of further possibilities. And that's the function of art.
But history is a higher Dharma. It's much more difficult. I guess we live in a time when people say "on a scale of one to ten". On the scale of one to ten vision is definitely a nine. History is like at three thousand. It's like an ocean of difficulty apart from consciousness. Why? Because the only effective protagonist in history is the spiritual person. Bodies don't count. Minds don't count. There are actually irrelevant to the process, to the challenge. So an historical challenge is unaffected by the most brilliant ideas of the most courageous fighter. It has no response whatsoever to that. So that there came, at the time of the classical Buddha, at the time of Pythagoras, and passed on down to those that came very soon after them, this interesting kind of appreciation. An appreciation of the peculiarity of the whole natural cycle, and that the whole natural cycle has woven within it a very peculiar thread. And the thread is that of limitation. And that nature is always limited so that the entire natural cycle is limited. Existence is limited, bodies are limited, myth is limited, symbols are limited and are only useful up to the point to where they commit to transformation and then they have to let it go. Minds are simply integral. And so the saying, for instance in the East Asia tradition is that wisdom is no mind. Zen is no mind.
This quality of learning the precarious freedom of consciousness is challenged in two weeks by the discovery that there is a cosmic freedom to history. That while consciousness was very wild, it found a diffractive jewel in the spiritual person. The spiritual person, as the artist, could find a way to make an artistic form to handle the infinite possibilities of a consciousness which wove itself back into the mind, back into the mythic cultural levels, back into the ritual comportments of existence. Even back in to the very roots of ritual comportment, that of existence. So that art reached all the way back to existence itself. But really great art, already like a tremendously prepared symbolic focus, is already verging on the threshold of an enormous change. The enormous change of integration brought to a perfection, is that one begins to let the mind's capacities rest easy and in that equanimity something wild happens. Not happens ritually, nor happens mythically, nor even happens symbolically but happens consciously. That the possibilities open up without limit. The phrase used in the Judeo-Christian tradition is "world without end".
But with history, something else opens up, a whole new level opens up and we will have to deal with that. We'll have to come to that threshold, that liminality of accepting the challenge. And we will discover that the jewel of the spiritual person is the only protagonist in the infinite ocean of the differential process known as history. But to cross that ocean, some unbelievable, massively huge, impossibility large, stupendously beyond objectivity likewise occurs. Not exists, because its powers goes so far beyond those of existence for objectivity that it's laughable. And not an idea, because the power of that further objectivity so dwarfs the capacities of the mind for objectivity that it's not even in the game. Only the spiritual person has enough scale and depth, enough complexity in ratiod proportion, to begin to appreciate that the cosmos is not only intelligent and alive, but real. And that the cosmos is also a differential form, which is the successful coming into being, because history as a process has been differentially opened up completely. This is why graven images of God are useless, totally useless. In fact they're negative useful because they make a conviction that somehow these images or these icons or these symbols or these ideas or these works of art even, these spiritual persons even, are capable of mediating, or modulating the possibilities of mediating enough so that one can at least get a picture of the cosmos, and it's not true at all. And it's like the high high achievement, the high Dharma achievement of a spiritual person must learn to dive into the infinite oceans of history and swim without a goal. Because to the extent that you posit a goal, or the need for a goal, or the hope of a goal, to that extend you drown. And the drowning is regression. The drowning is the grasping at, the brushing away of the petals of the flowers. Because history has a graciousness, it has a graciousness in its infinite rein. Because it's a rein of fractally open openness. That openness in every possibility of itself is also open. And that those opennesses are open infinitely in every fractal possibility.
So that history, we will see, is a higher Dharma, it's very difficult to deal with. Because you can't deal with it. And to rely upon the old models of ritual to deal with it, is the worst ignorance. And to rely on the old models of the mind to deal with it is the worst arrogance. And to rely upon the spiritual person models is a misplaced judgment. And so history is a great challenge. If we can use a simile, history is like an aqua regia which dissolves anything that's introduced into it. So you minimally need to learn not to introduce things to it and expect that anything will happen other than dissolution. And so spiritual persons, men and women, have for many thousand years now, understood that the vehicle that one makes, the differential vehicle that one makes, to course through the differential infinite seas of history, is not the spiritual person but the civilization. That the vehicle is of many spiritual persons shepherding countless others who are not yet spiritual persons; the children, the ignorant, the untutored, the uncaring. The list of uns is very long. And yet this entire ensemble can be brought into a differential play, in a form called civilization. And that the structure of that civilization is not a ritual comportment, it's not a mythic relatedness, it's not even a symbolic structure, though the symbolic structure is the beginning sketches by which one learns to appreciate, not the plan, but the building. And not the building so much, but the city.
So the form, the differential form, that comes out of art, that is used for several thousand years now by men and women, collectively together, in their exploration of this enormous ocean of infinite possibility called history, is the civilization, the heart of which is the city. And this is a monumental kind of an achievement. And the first cities go back about nine thousand years. And we'll see that at that time, at the beginnings of urban capacity some nine thousand years ago. One of the earliest cities was on the Anatolean Plateau, it's now Turkey, it was called Katalhuyec. And because of the fortress like quality of Katalhuyec and its location, and because it was like a, at the time some nine thousand years ago, it was like a lone ship on the higher levels, the highest levels achieved at that time. The quality of Katalhuyec for several thousand years was the symbolic archetypal impress of a ship of state afloat on the oceans of history. And that archetype later came into play in a mythic way when the experience of the great flood of the world left only one ship of state afloat, Noah's Ark. Where did Noah's Ark come to rest? Mount Ararat, which is exactly in the same location that Katalhuyec was some seven thousand years before that. So that there is a quality of indelibleness seemingly, of reoccurantness seemingly, which has to be held lightly, because if you grasp at it, you try to make it certain, you immediately spontaneously reduce it to a ritual identification, to a mythic image, to a mental symbol and you're back there again in that circle, and you've missed all of the possibilities of freedom, including being, not yourself, but being who you might be. Because the old definition, when Moses sees the burning bush and is told you go down and raise them back up and here's the list. He says well who should I say sent me. And the reply, mistranslated, the Elizabethan English is full of court propriety and so the translation is "tell them I am that I am", which is an air tight identification. It has nothing to do, the Hebrew translates as "I will be who I will be". It's wide open on both ends. So that you could only get to know me by you yourself getting to know that the possibilities of I will be who I will be are endless. And that's how you get to know me, by you growing also with that differential possibility and that this is the covenant. Not the old covenant of the integration. The old covenant of the integration was already a symbol of the liminality of this world and its possibilities of transformation to the beyond.
What was the symbol of the first covenant? No hands? The rainbow. In fact because he understood it so well, Moses puts it in Genesis. Genesis is the fifty chapter epic of the way in which all of this happened. And Abrahams covenant is sealed. He says I will put my bow in the sky as a sign of our covenant. And we have a meeting in Vision. And the rainbow was, after that, always the symbol of the full spectrum of the color of light in this world. But that there was something beyond this, that the rainbow was like the musical scale by which light plays in the phenomenal universe, but light comes from somewhere else and goes somewhere else. It is set in a context of otherness. All the possibilities of light in this world are in the rainbow but the rainbow's set in the sky, in the clouds. That reality is so vast that the full spectrum of this world is but an arch of singularity in comparison to it.
And it's important to the sense of history, because one gets in that little bit there, that little bow of complications, one gets the very essence that you need vision before you can even begin to appreciate. But you need a spiritual form of the person who embodies that vision but not existentially. That the embodiment is not a ritual embodiment, it's not an embodiment of polarity stuff, of things which are cinched by opposites. Anything cinched by opposites is doomed to be recycled. That's the nature of nature, that's the nature of existence. How does the classical Buddha say? Anything composite dissolves. Anything that is phenomenally there, because tensions have polarized it, there'll come a time when it dissolves. All composite things dissolve including the body, it's going to go. Including the mind, it is going to go. But not the person. Differential forms are not glued together by polarity. They're differentiated by proportion and possibility, and that doesn't dissolve. But it needs to grow, and that's why the nourishment in an education, we're talking about a wisdom education, not instruction. We're not talking about getting degrees to get credits to get a job, to, we're not talking about that. That's on the level of trap lines. That's like getting enough furs to get through the winter, it's only that. We're talking about the real, the real that you can step through the entire ensemble of this universe into an endless dimensiality of truth. That's religious language, but not really. It is historical language, it's the way history talks.
But when we come to this rein, this rain of blessedness. The rain of blessedness is the infinite possibilities, which to the monks in the Vimlikurty Sutra were sticking to them and they were brushing them off as if they were, the ancient word for it was Klasa, impurities. Why? Because they, in their monkishness didn't understand that the flower petals were a gift of blessedness. They were clinging to them and they were brushing off any clingingness because there was a projected identification that clingingness is a sign of tongha, of graspingness. And for monks, tongha is the wrong thing to have, it's a hidden desire. And so the misunderstanding was that the flower petals were sticking to you because you had the Klasa the impurity of tingha which meant that you had to clean yourself. When the whole quality is to accept blessedness when it's there because it's a part of the real. It doesn't mean that you're impure at all. This is why there comes a time when the monks must be taught, just like children, something new, something different, something differential.
The Vimlikurty Sutra dates back about twenty-two hundred years. That's when it was taught in India at that time, for that purpose. They had become the Sangha which had become like a very exclusive country club. We own the golf course, if you're going to play enlightenment you're going to visit us, we have the concessions. What concessions?
So there is this whole quality that's there where the terrestrial and the celestial, the two heroic watersheds are really the same. It's a matter of turning, and Plato in the tenth book of The Republic says, he uses the Greek term for that turning around within oneself, the turning around from the integral to the differential, he uses the term Metanoia. Metanoia. Noia comes from the Greek, Noia means mind, noos, noetic. Meta means above. A real Pythagorean would not have used Metanoia but Paranoia. But Plato had to learn second hand from Socrates, he never met Pythagoras. In fact Socrates had to learn second hand, his teacher was a woman, Diotema. But Diotema learned from Pythagoras directly. She didn't use bad grammer like Metanoia. She used good Greek, spiritual language like Pariana. Because it isn't like going beyond the mind, it's like going beyond wayness. The way of ways is not a way. What does Lao Tsu say? The way that can be named is not the Tao. The way that can be named is the mother of the ten thousand things, of multiplicity. There's not even a name for the no way and that's how you, who are not an identity, go when you're real. It doesn't matter what direction you are going a Tao. Let's take a break.
ART 12 - SECOND HALF
Page two of the notes to Art Seven read "The person, the work of art is a dynamic field". "The person, the work of art is a dynamic field". So there is such a thing as an objectivity, not in a form, like a thing, like a phenomenal object, or in a mental form like an idea, but there's an objectivity like a field. Like an Electro-magnetic field is an objectivity. The person is an objectivity like an Electro-magnetic field. The work of art is an objectivity like an Electro-magnetic field. It's a dynamic field. And there is an objective technique of understanding and appreciating all of the objective qualities. But the objective qualities of a field are the possibilities and not, you know the medieval logical term for the characteristics of a thing, the medieval term was accidents. So that if you wanted to have an appreciation for the complexity of an object, you understood all of its accidents, its necessities and its accidents. And it's a well paradoxical term. Because from the standpoint of consciousness, integral qualities are accidental. That is to say they're conditional. They're only true because of temporary conditions. Such and such a cup of tea is at such and such a temperature but it will change. It will cool off in time. So to say that the cup of tea is hot, even on that clumsy level, is just a temporary condition. To say that it's 92.3 degrees, that exactness doesn't change the conditional quality.
So a couple of hundred years ago it was realized that in order to talk realistically objectively about something in all of its range of possibilities, you had to have a different way of addressing it, and that was the way calculus was born. And now we teach it to tenth graders all over the planet. At one time it taxed the best minds on the planet. There were only two men, at one time, who could think that finely, Sir Isaac Newton and Leibnitz. And they invented calculus. Well that's what the history books say. Actually there was a Chinese version of calculus developed in the ninth century, but they used it as a mind training exercise in Taoist monasteries and it was never applied because they never had a tradition of applied mathematics.
If you appreciate the entire range of something, one way to keep it within an analyzable set is to give it universal provisional limitations. And in calculus the universal provisional limitations are one and zero. So that the range of infinite possibilities, though infinite, is confined to the set between one and zero and so you make your analysis on that range. You also go to negative one, negative one coming up to zero or zero to positive one. And you can go either way, from one to zero or zero to one. But within that range, within that set, one can very accurately describe almost any process and as of 1983, with a man named Mendlebrot, who extended the range of calculation to infinite fractals of details of a set, one can go into infinity. And modern mathematical analysis is very practical. (Someone enters the room). More practical than those who accidentally come into where they shouldn't be, and then on purpose leave. But that's the twentieth century.
So this whole quality of having a set, a conditional set, in order to characterize condition, is a sort of a mental, a sort of a consciousness jujitsu, where you take the limitation of the world and you use it to your advantage to transform it on the basis of a differential capacity within that limitation. It's called differential equations, partial differential equations even. And the analysis, though it is not exact to the point of high Dharma perfect truth, is exact enough to work in the material world. Even on the atomic structure, even on the sub-atomic structure. And we can now, beginning of the twenty-first century apply this to almost any kind of activity. But the activity which is missing from application is education. Nowhere, in the whole educational capacity, is there any kind of a practice which prepares someone to be prepared on the level of capacity which even tenth graders now have, but don't understand it applies everywhere all the time, infinitely so. And so the schools, of course, are in a very real way irrelevant. The drop out rate from high school in California is approaching 50%. In other words it'' a toss up whether someone stays or not. It's just shear probability. That's a failure. It's a failure of the society, it's a failure of the culture, but it is also a death of a civilization. And this condition has gone on now for a couple of generations really.
When it first began to surface in a very serious way, it surfaced about a third of a century ago. I was there with that really serious first wave of people in the early 1960's who being in graduate school, being alert to these kinds of challenges, saw that a regressive turn was mistaken for a transformational node. And what came into play was, the phrase at the time was modular education systems analysis style. We're going to educate by an engineering principle, and we're going to get everybody educated perfectly because they won't be able to go to the next step until they've done this step. And it sounds real good, and on an engineering flow plan it works. But it scrambles to the point of confusion the process of education. And we are today at a terminal moraine of the failure of thirty-five years of that kind of thinking.
So this kind of education is not recognizable because it's not identifiable. It's not something you ever saw before. And it isn't anything that you're thinking that it is. And the more that you practice this, the more that it will disclose its unlimited applicability. It's like a collection of all the possible algorithms for self correction imaginable, all at your beck and call whenever you, not decide to use them, but whenever you do use them.
We're looking at the way in which, by Art 12 we've been looking for, this is the fourth week, the way in which a pair of individuals who dealt with art, who dealt with the visioning of art, not just to make art as artists would do, but to make art consciously so that it's available for those who appreciate their art, to learn the art of appreciation of art. Stravinsky and Schiller are very good examples and that's why I use them at this juncture in the education.
Stravinsky for instance. Stravinsky, we've seen, was a quite radical individual, refused to be labeled revolutionary and ducked it all his life. Not fought against it, if you fight against something, in a very odd way you reinforce it. It's like one of those Chinese puzzles where you put the two fingers in, the more you pull the tighter it is. By fighting against something, you reinforce the principle of polarity which reduces whatever is there objectively to ritual. Happens like that. Fantastic high Dharma teachers get into conflict, nano second they're ritualized, and if you don't know that immediately, there's no way then to know it. If you don't have immediate spontaneous algorithm for correcting that course, and not fighting, so that polarity does not come into play instantly, so reduction, regression to ritual doesn't happen instantly, then you're trapped and you don't even know that you're trapped.
When this technique of working out this kind of non-polarization warfare, the manual for it was the Bhagavad Gita. And someone like Ghandi used the Bhagavad Gita in exactly that way, to try to train hundreds of millions of people at a time, at what he called Satya Graha, truth holding. But not truth holding in a grasping tangha way of desiring truth. I want truth is a ritual addiction. You can have truth but you cannot want to have truth. And truth has you as much as you have it. But when there's wanting in there, that's the desire. It's a trigger for regression instantly. And so Ghandi took fifty or sixty years of his life to try to train people to be Bhagavad Gita spirit warriors, so that you do not polarize a situation. You don't polarize yourself. Not only in the strategy of a Satya Graha campaign that might last several years or at least months, but in the nano second to nano second comportment of you yourself keeping open all the time. So that the Bhagavad Gita spirit warrior that took up where Ghandi had left it, because he was killed, Vinoba, Vinoba Bavay added the other side to Satya Graha, he called it Sarvo Daya. In Sanskrit Sarvo means service. Sarvo Daya is a social ideal service to all. But when it's a vision process like Satya Graha, with its differentiality, it's not an ideal at all but it is a visionary process that's in play as an energy of consciousness. And out of that energy of consciousness can be constellated a differential form known as a dynamic field called 'someone' as a spiritual person. So that the conducting of a Satya Graha Sarvadoya campaign is actually an exercise in differentially generating consciousness on a transpersonal scale so that it begins to dissolve the limitations of the polarized world, social, individual, political, whatever it is. And allow to come into play the objectivity of the dynamic field of the spiritual persons. That process is very refined. Ghandi and Vinoba together together worked at it for almost the entirety of the twentieth century and most of India just doesn't care.
The process has a quality where it comes into play best if the integral habituation is brought to some kind of a conclusion, even if it's just temporary. Not a conclusion as to an ending of integration but a satisfaction that the integral has achieved a distributive equanimity. So instead of having an integration come to an end, it comes to its perfect middle. And one learns not to push it any further than the equanimious perfect middle. And in this act of allowing attention to focus on the equanimious middle, you stop grabbing at the ends, the beginnings and the ends. And in doing so, it disarms the whole mythological compulsion. You no longer are concerned of any kind of story line, any kind of sequence as beginning, middle and an end. You allow the middle to fan out equanimiously as itself. This is the whole purpose of prayer, the whole purpose of meditation, and any other purposes are a delusion. All that they do is that. That's what they're for, that's what those processes are for, to dissolve the mythic sequencing that is compulsorily linked to a ritual addiction to do something to somebody, including yourself, to get something achieved for some purpose or other. And what equanimity does is it disarms that entire suppositional array of grasping.
Now when the classical Greeks faced this crisis at which they did not pass, there were three classic levels of solution. There are always three classic levels of solution that offer themselves. And there is a hidden fourth element that comes into play in kind of like a humorous completion later, but let's take the classical three. The classical three are in the three different styles of Greek Tragedy. The high Dharma style of Greek Tragedy, the conscious style, the visionary style is that of Aeschylus. That tragedy is a situation vis-à-vis the cosmos. Later on the genius in seeing the other side of that, that the tragedy is not vis-à-vis the cosmos but the tragedy is vis-à-vis man. The genius of that mode of Greek tragedy was Euripides. That the tragedy is tragic because of man doing this to himself. The Bacchae, Media. Whereas Aeschylus with Prometheus, it's a cosmic situation that's tragic. We're swept up. But there's a middle ground, and the middle ground was held by Sophocles. And Sophocles is famous, his language even, the classical Athenian Greek of Sophocles is famous for its equanimity. Not that he's calm, but that the balance of the language, the balance of the action, the balance of every aspect of a Sophoclean play is classically equanimious. So that the tragic mode of Sophocles is that someone becomes fretful that the equanimity is precarious and tries to nudge the cosmos or nudge themselves a little bit and it starts to produce a wobble. So doubt, especially self doubt is the tragic trigger in Sophoclean drama. I'm sure you can appreciate this.
The most precarious of all the situational tragedies in Sophocles is Oedipus Rex. Not because Oedipus marries his mother and that's a tragedy. That's just for openers. That would be on a Euripidean level. And it's not that the universe sets him up so that this happens, that's shit with a capital S. That's an Aeschylean tragedy. But the Sophoclean tragedy of Oedipus Rex is that he consciously from youth has trained himself not to go into this because this was told to him that this was his destiny. And he has prepared himself, exactly precisely perfectly to not do this, and that is exactly what he does. And that's the Sophoclean tragedy. So that in the twenty-four hundred years since Sophocles, Oedipus Rex first played on the stage, Theater Dionysius, in Athens, many people have, in a very deeply heart felt, highly conscious appreciative artistic way, sought to bring that Sophoclean quality out to living contemporary men and women, so that they, in their lives, in their conditions could appreciate this. And in the twentieth century, some of the most erudite artists of our time tried to do this. W. B. Yeats made his own translation of Oedipus Rex. Stravinsky produced an Oedipus Rex.
And what's interesting, taking a look at Stravinsky, when Stravinsky, who was very sophisticated, he's probably the most intellectual artist of the twentieth century, very cultivated, very very learned. He understood Oedipus Rex as a Sophoclean tragedy. He understood that. But in writing Oedipus Rex he got into a wobble despite all of his best efforts. He wanted to have the language able to be powerful on the stage in an equanimious way so that it delivered, so that the language and his music, he could compose the music, but the problem was to get the Sophocles language out of the Sophoclean classical Greek into a language that would hold the equanimity vis-à-vis the music so that the presentation would work. So it wouldn't go to the Euripidean side or the Aeschylean side but would be Sophoclean. So he looked for someone to translate Sophocles. And he found it in one of his closest friends, his best Jean Cocteau. And so Cocteau, the young Cocteau, extremely capable also, brilliant, he translates Sophocles Greek and puts it into a fantastic, very conscious, slightly surreal French. And Stravinsky wants it translated out of Cocteau's language. He wants to use Cocteau's translation but translated into Latin. So he had it translated into Latin. And someone asked him once, it's an interview which is in a book called Dialogues, here's a copy here, Dialogues. Why did you have Oedipus Rex, you went to all this trouble with Cocteau, your friend, and then you translate it out of his translation into Latin, why? And Stravinsky said I wanted to have a language that had no office. I didn't want cultural baggage, which for me French had, which is why, he says, I didn't use Russian, which is my native language, because it had baggage. And so too Italian or German. So he said I wanted to have Ciceronean Latin, because Latin, the Latin language, in the hands of Cicero, reached a cool equilibrium perfection. Later Latin is degenerate compared to Cicero's Latin. Earlier Latin is immature compared to Cicero's Latin.
But Stravinsky, as if he couldn't help himself, didn't get it that Ciceronean Latin was the Latin of the official Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps the most doctrinaire ancient language still used on the planet. So he finishes Oedipus Rex with his beautiful Sophoclean presentation expectation and something was not right. The performance was disastrous, it was flawed, it was terrible. It was twenty years before anybody even took it up again to try. So Stravinsky, being more of an artist whose trying new things, than somebody who weeps because one of his greatest works maybe his Magnum Opus didn't work, Stravinsky, looking for a new assignment for composition, something new to try again, receives a commission from the United States. His first commission from an American, a woman. A woman who had commissioned Bartok to do his fifth quartet. A woman who commissions Schoenburg to do his third and fourth quartets. And she commissions Stravinsky to write a ballet that will be performed at the Library Of Congress in 1928, and it's to be no more than thirty minutes. And Stravinsky, later in life, in his late eighties, is recounting, he said well, like a good twentieth century composer, in the era of film, I produced a thirty minute ballet. It was called Apollo.
Now in Greek mythology, Apollo is the apex of equanimity. So much the perfect apex that no extant Greek tragedy dealt with Apollo. Didn't even get close to him. They dealt with the Greek mythological figures that dealt with the excesses, the extravagances that flow above and beyond, below and outside of the forms of recognizable society and human nature and personality and possibility. And so most of the Greek tragedies have the energies of say Aphrodite gone wild. Ecstasy gone wild. Or Aries, terror, violence gone wild. And occasionally the principle of Athena gone wild, high wisdom, because wisdom also is a way of going outside of yourself. You go outside of yourself by ecstasy, you go outside of yourself by terror, and you can go outside of yourself by transcendental wisdom. But to the classical Greeks, who got it from thousands of years of civilization, shared it with Egypt and Iran and India, they all came out of the same kind of a mix.
The focus of Aphrodite and Aries and Athena is like a tripod of three ways that you go outside of yourself. Apollo was the focus of all three of those ways brought to a perfection of equanimity. Apollo was the Greek mythological God of the perfection of equanimity in all transcendental ways, ecstasy, terror and wisdom. And so when Stravinsky, having failed at the Sophoclean Oedipus Rex, gets this commission to do a ballet, immediately he does a ballet on the theme of Apollo. And in order to deal with it, he takes the ace perfect understanding symbolically of Apollo as an apex of the orders of possibility. Including these possibilities: Apollo was always the tenth in a series of nine muses summed up in himself. So the nine muses, count one two three four five six seven eight nine, and Apollo was then the tenth, the perfect Pythagorean tenth, which is not ten so much but it's one and zero put together as a set of a higher order of One. Ten is one on the next power higher, so the ten is the beginning of higher powers. So that's why perfect ten. And in order to emphasize that it's Apollo vis-à-vis the muses, Stravinsky cut the number of nine muses to three. So he took the square root of nine, three. So he took three of the muses to symbolically present the order of the muses, so that there'd be three of them, and then Apollo would be, not only the perfect tenth, but he'd be the fourth that holds those three muses. He took Calliope, the muse of poetry, he took Terpsichore, the muse of dance, and he took Polyhymnia, the muse of hymning and so forth. And so the ballet begins with a segment that comes into play, and this segment is the birth of Apollo. And when Apollo was born in the first of two tableaus, he's birthed because the three muses, in their focus, engender him. Calliope, Terpsichore, and Polyhymnia, who in the ballet, when their energies, when their postures, their gestures, when their capacities coalesce, then Apollo is born in that coalescing. So he's a differential form, a highly conscious form, the Greek God of consciousness. Apollo, the focus of going beyond the terrestrial. No wonder the space program to the moon was called Apollo. It's indelible, it's indelible.
We're talking about 1927,1928. He finished it in January of 1928, it was performed in the Library Of congress April of 1928. The first tableau is the birth of Apollo, the second tableau is a series of variations, each one of the muses has hers, then Apollo has a pas de deux with Terpsichore, and then they're all together. He could not find a way, though, to make sure that this was going to work for him completely. Apollo was performed in 1928, but it had a very curious effect psychologically on the audiences. This is early 1928, they associated Stravinsky with fairy tale romantic ballets like the Firebird, Petruschka, even The Rite Of Spring, The Nightingale, etc. Whereas Apollo, as a ballet, Stravinsky called it once a ballet blanc. He said it was more interesting and impressive because it had no colors whatsoever. It had pure kind of Homeric outline form, which is appropriate for Apollo. But the audiences couldn't relate to it. And Stravinsky, as an artist in the world, having failed, quote failed, with Oedipus Rex, having drawn, paradoxically, a blank with Apollo, what is his very next work. His very next work is called the Fairy's Kiss, a ballet. La Blazer de la Fai, the Fairy's Kiss. So that Apollo, in an interesting way, when you look at Stravinsky's work in retrospect, he wrote 109 different works, opuses, Apollo is opus 52, Oedipus Rex is 51 and Fairy's Kiss is 53, Apollo's exactly in between Oedipus Rex and the Fairy's Kiss. A very poignant arrangement in set, which somebody like Stravinsky could not miss later in life, especially when you have friends like Picasso and Cocteau reminding you.
So at the close of the Second World War, when everything was starting over again and Stravinsky had largely taken up to refining past works, he turned to Apollo again and re-wrote the ballet in 1947. So there're two different versions of that ballet. Two different Apollos by two different Stravinskys. And it's interesting because the 1947 Stravinsky is a watershed in Stravinsky's work. All of his works after that were heavily serial compositions. Not music paying any attention to melody, but paying attention to a complex geometrizing counting rhythma overlay, serial music, serial works. So it's interesting. If you look at the 1947 version of Apollo, you see that something new is stirring in Stravinsky vis-à-vis of twenty years before, where he'd struggles with this set, Oedipus Rex, Apollo and The Fairy's Kiss. And his friend Cocteau, 1947, obviously after thirty years of friendship, and both of them really artistic geniuses, Stravinsky writes a new ballet called Orpheus 1947. And within a year Cocteau makes his film Orpheus. They come out almost at the same time. In fact the two ballets Apollo and Orpheus are very often put together in the same CD.
Orpheus is a terrestrial hero. He is the first hero knight of love. He doesn't want to free his love to infinity, he wants to bring her back to life. He wants to come back to life. Orpheus is a terrestrial hero, whereas Apollo is a celestial hero. Homer always gave little short descriptions called epithets. Apollo was called in Homer the far darter. He's not interested in anything up close. He's interested in the far things like the cosmos, that's what he's interested in. He's interested in equanimity, not for equanimity but equanimity which is the launching springboard to the beyond. And that's why Apollo was the god of medicine, the god of prophecy, the god of art, the figure archetype for going beyond the earth to the moon first of all.
This whole thing about Orpheus then, that the ballet Orpheus is somehow related to the ballet Apollo. Well if Apollo as a ballet is in between the Oedipus Rex and the Fairy's Kiss, what two works bracket Orpheus. And on one side, Orpheus is 81, opus 80 is Concerto in D. It's interesting, he wrote it in 1946, it was the first composition that he wrote for Europe in almost a generation. The commission from United States to write Apollo came to him in Europe, he'd never written a work for the United States, and he hadn't written a work for Europe for almost twenty years when the commission for Concerto in D came from Europe to him, living here in Los Angeles. So Concerto in D is the turn around which is exactly the other direction from Apollo. And that's opus 80, what's opus 82? Stravinsky's great Mass. Not just a mass as a liturgical work, but Stravinsky's mass is a mass for mixed chorus and double wind quintet. A quintet made out of winds doubled to ten with a chorus. The Apollonean ten and the music, the instruments, and the chorus just like a Greek chorus, like a Greek tragic chorus, but not a tragedy but a mass is a transformation, a transformation. And in his mass he made five movements, again another five, the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dia.
So the Orpheus is bracketed by two very interesting works, just like the Apollo is bracketed by two different works, and these sets, these six compositions by Stravinsky are separated by twenty years, 1927-1947, twenty years in which the thirties and the Second World War happened. So that 1947 is on the other side historically of 1927. People who felt that 1927 was totally different from pre-1914, because the world was completely different, would never have recognized the world by all the changes that happened. Because it not only was a different world, it was a different kind of world completely. The world of the late 1940's was already a technological dissolution of all the social forms that historically had been operative up till then. Because you already had the atomic bomb, you already had the beginnings of computers, the space program, the whole thing, it's already in process then, already there. Probably the event that more than anything signaled that the old world had been punctured is the breaking of the sound barrier on October 12, 1947. Classical physics understood, up to that point that the sound barrier was a barrier. An object cannot go faster than the speed of sound, because the sound, it will. . .
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