Interval 6
Presented on: Saturday, June 26, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Interval 6 which means that as we go in our curving arcs of phases, as we take not subject matter so much but phases of development which have overlays, if the overlays touch directly, you get a closed circle and you get, without intending it, a rut. It's like a subconscious rut. So in wisdom education, there's always the emphasis on articulation, meaning that contiguous elements should not touch. The difference between instruction and wisdom is that in instruction all the things are connected, and in wisdom everything is articulated, they don't touch, nothing touches. So that there is an articulate space as a context for all wisdom forms. And as an example physiologically, the brain is a wisdom form because none of the neurons touch. The neuron, the neural cell sends out its axioms and dendrites but they do not touch physiologically, no brain cells touch. And the space in between the dendrite of one and the axiom of another, that space is called a synapse gap. So that the only way that the brain works is for impulses to leap from one neural cell to another, and because they don't touch it's not that one neural cell has an impulse that leads to one other, that would be linearity. It's that clouds of neural cells, neuronal clouds have a wave of impulses that leap to other clouds. So that thought is actually a thunderstorm of insight in the physiological structure of our being and it's a certain Hermetic sign that we are wisdom creatures. We don't belong in the cut and dried instructural level of the universe, we belong in the higher cloud wrapped echelons of heaven. We are children of heaven and it's that kind of a quality that the intervals in the course give an articulation so that the excursions into what, in instruction would be subject matter, are for us arcs of investigation that form phases and the phases come together, but they come together like neuronal clouds. They don't quite touch. And in order to express that, to manifest that, make it apparent, there are interval lectures at the end of every twelve. Every twelve presentations, the thirteenth is an interval. And so this is the sixth interval. This is the sixth presentation. You can't really call them lectures, lectures are a part of instruction. This is a presentation of a bouquet of language. Not just from me to you, but from me as the intermediary of a whole population of people, one of whom is selected today to give me the tonic for the bouquet of language, and that is Emily Dickinson. It's her music that I'm trying to express to you in today's interval.
As an example I'd like to begin with one of her poems which read like this - it's a little long but let's come into Emily Dickinson's language, and through that language into her world, and in that world, in the way that I'm presenting, into the interval between Art and History:
Because that you are going and never coming back
And I however absolute may overlook your track
Because that death is final however first it be
This instant be suspended above mortality
Significant that each has lived the other to detect
Discover not God himself could now annihilate
Eternity presumption the instant I perceive
That you who were existence yourself forgot to live
The life that is will then have been a thing I never knew
As paradise fictitious until the realm of you
The life that is to be to me a residence to plain
Unless in my redeemer's face I recognize your own
Of immortality who doubts he may exchange with me
Curtailed by your obscuring face of everything but he
Of heaven and hell I also yield the right to reprehend
To who so would commute this face for his less priceless friend
If God is love as he admits we think that he must be
Because he is a jealous god he tells us certainly
If all is possible with him as he besides concedes
He will refund us finally our confiscated gods
Emily Dickinson is a vast mystery, she is a puzzle. She is a female Henry David Thoreau. She has a feminine mystery about her which is ongoing even till 1999, still today. Just a few years ago a volume was published, University of North Carolina Press, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1993. She died in 1886. Her work has oddly enough suffered as much as the great female mystic of 800 years ago. 800 years ago there were a large number of women mystic poet geniuses, many of whom were never published, never known. And it wasn't until our time, our generations that their work came out, has come out is now, just now coming out. And some of those women mystics were extraordinary in their ability to show that language is malleable and also ductile. These are metallurgical terms. Something that is malleable means that it can change its shape, and something that is ductile means that it can be narrowed down to thin threads, like copper. Copper is ductile and because copper is ductile, thin copper wires can be made that carry electricity that light the world. And the language of feminine mystic poets is ductile in that way. More than masculine language, more than masculine mystical poetry, feminine mystical poetry is the most ductile medium in the expression of feeling that we know. And Emily Dickinson is about the best that ever lived. Her work in some way is totally mysterious because she never published during her lifetime. There were a couple of poems that were sent to friends and they in turn, just a handful, two or three, three or four, that's it, were published without her permission in a newspaper called The Springfield Republican.
Now imaging Massachusetts here and Boston's on the coast, Springfield's about halfway back, the southern part of the state. Springfield and its big suburb Holy Oak have about a quarter of a million people today. And running through Springfield Massachusetts is the Connecticut River, because just south of it is Connecticut. And if you went north on the Connecticut River, you would come eventually, in not too much space, to Vermont. And right in the middle between Connecticut and Vermont, on that river just to the east of it, is Amherst Massachusetts, where Emily Dickinson spent all of her life. It was her oasis, her transcendental oasis. Not in a desert, her oasis, in the most beautiful burgeoning America. The America of the mid-nineteenth century.
The puzzle is, why did she have an oasis life. What was it with her. And we'll try and illuminate that today. The reason those four poems were published in the Springfield Republican is that its editor was a man that she was secretly in love with, Samuel Bowls. But Bowls was already married and so she could never express her love and she was always enraptured and entrapped in this high Dharma glide resonance of deep love with this individual. She said once his face was a part of paradise. The look of the person was real to her and she felt it and could express it. Other than those few poems, nothing was published in her life. She was somebody who published herself in editions of one. She took to writing her poems on to sheets of paper, where she would gather the sheets of paper and then stitch these folded choirs of paper into little fascicles and she would carefully put those fascicles into her drawer in her bedroom. And so the library of the works of Emily Dickinson existed in hand printed editions of one during her lifetime. And it was a huge problem. When she died, her literary executor was her older sister who burned a lot of her letters, but kept the poems, and got someone to make a selection and they published, four years later in 1890, 116 pages of the poems of Emily Dickinson. They completely changed the punctuation, her spelling. She had wonderfully unique punctuation and spelling. But even in this butchered bulderized selection, the publication in 1890 caused a sensation. And the following year another selection, another hundred pages or so came out. And then poems would dribble out and in 1945 someone discovered that there had been a fight in the literary executors, between two women, and that half of Emily Dickinson's poems were never ever seen, and belonged in someone else's trunk, and in 1945 six hundred and fifty poems of Emily Dickinson were published that no one had ever seen for almost a century. And it knocked everyone out.
And so the critical appreciative world of poetry began to ask is there more. And so a man named Thomas H. Johnson set out to edit the poems of Emily Dickinson and finally Harvard University Press, published in 1955, the three volume edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson. And in the forty years plus since then many people have noticed that this isn't all of the poems of Emily Dickinson at all. The letters that did survive were collected by Johnson, again in three volumes from Harvard. But Johnson, being a masculine view of poetry, missed an essential blurring of masculine form which the feminine readers and critics of Emily Dickinson, over the decades, finally made the case that she has many poems that are woven into her letters, and that one could extract these poems from the letters, like taking the gold out of the ore. Because she lived poetry as a transcendental mystic and there was no fine genre line between letters and poetry for her. Poetry, the poetic language, was a little bit higher temperature than her prose, that was all. But there were times when the prose got enough dynamic that the energy and temperature rose enough to become poetry. And so this volume, 1993 New Poems of Emily Dickinson, comes out of the letters extracted. And there may be more, we don't know.
Her language, being ductile, being malleable, is so refin-ed (I have to use the Elizabethan pronunciation of refined), so refin-ed that, perhaps the best way to characterize her is that, she is an alchemist of language. She takes the language which normal mediocre sociologically shaped people speak and she distills this language. In other words the process of transformation is not just changing form, that's a rather obvious kind of a reduction, but the higher alchemy was always a distillation. The lower alchemy was a fermentation which is a natural, from the natural side. Fermentation changes grapes, by the sugar content, into wine. But if you distill wine, you can make cognac, you can make liquors. And so the liquor is different from the wine. The wine is a natural transformation, the liquor is a conscious transformation, it's different.
In ancient times, there never were liquors. In ancient China, in ancient Greece, in ancient Egypt, you had beers, you had wines, because fermentation was know for who knows how long. But the distillation of liquors is something that came with the past millennium. The first liquor ever made is still for sale, it's called Chartreuse, named for the monastery at which it was first discovered that one could do this. There are actually two Chartreuses, one green and one yellow. The green Chartreuse is the original liquor and very strong. You think wheat grass is strong? Try a little Green Chartreuse. Be careful. They didn't pull punches a thousand years ago. It's not a gentleman's drink. It's made to (snap) penetrate, to get you out of the ordinary, to realize that just as wine is different from water, liquor is different from wine. It is a conscious alchemy, it is a high Dharma transformation, and it's done by distilling. And the distillation process is that you take the essence from nature and then you take the essence of the essence, which is the quintessence and then the quintessence you proliferate by the technique, in alchemy it used to be called projection. The way an alchemist used to talk about the gold and the effectiveness of their transformation is how many times you could project it. You could project this gold a thousand times, a very good alchemist. You could project this gold fifty times, not a very good alchemist. Whereas someone who was an ace perfect alchemist could project it infinitely, their gold. Emily Dickinson is that kind of alchemist of language, you can project it infinitely. It has that kind of power. It has the power to go from here to the cosmos because the hidden quality in distillation, in that kind of high Dharma alchemy, is not the mythic, symbolic, integral combine, but is its hidden complement which is much more powerful, which is the Vision/Art tandem. If you ferment by myth and symbol you get a certain kind of a wine, there's no doubt. But if you take the conscious radicality of Vision and the super quintessential projection of Art, you get a liquor of language that becomes high poetry, and that's what Emily Dickinson is all about.
Here is an excerpt from one of her poems written about Samuel Bowls, the man she couldn't physically approach:
Again his voice at the door
I feel the old degree
I hear him ask the servant
For such a one as me
I take a flower as I go
My face to justify
He never saw me in this life
I might surprise his eye
I cross the hall with mingled steps
I silent past the door
I look on all this world contains
Just his face, nothing more
We talk in careless and in toss
A kind of plummet strain
Each sounding shyly just how deep
The other's one has been
We walk, I leave my dog at home
A tender thoughtful moon
Gone with us just a little way
And then we are alone
Alone if angels are alone
First time they try the sky
Alone if those veiled faces be
We cannot count on high
I'd give to live that hour again
The purple in my vein
But he must count the drops himself
My price for every stain
So you can see the elegant delicate quality, the ductility raised almost to an nth power of Emily Dickinson.
I brought six studies of Emily Dickinson, just to read you their titles. Recent Studies of Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's Imagery, Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language, The Language of Exclusion, Emily Dickinson's Poetry - Stairway of Surprise, The Landscape of Absence, The Dickinson Sublime. So you get the feel here that over the hundred plus years that her poetry has been out it's been transforming, as a good alchemy would, an audience which is now planetary. Her poetry went from single hand copies in a hidden drawer, in Amherst Massachusetts, into the planetary parlance of a whole new kind of humanity. Men and women who appreciate that there is not only a refined alchemical quintessence of their essence, which radiates on the energy waves of consciousness, but that this is shareable. That presence, spiritual presence is shareable. There is such a thing finally, I call it (and I've written a book to be published in the next century on it), Shared Presence.
Emily Dickinson is the apostle of Shared Presence in a very realistic way. Now the curious thing; you read a book like The World of Emily Dickinson, with all kind of pictures and photographs, you come to a description, an ordinary description of the Dickinson household. And they talk about how the kitchen table would be filled with foods being prepared and also with books. And predominant among the books on the table is Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, the big Webster's. It first came out in 1828. There was a prelude to it in 1806, he brought out a sort of an essay towards this dictionary, but in 1828, the old Noah Webster, near the end of his life, came out with a dictionary which has become probably the beacon of the way in which language can be, not catalogued but appreciated in its calculus of meaning.
When Noah Webster brought out his Dictionary of the English Language, it was a complete shock at what a range a vocabulary there was in the English language. We today are just beginning to appreciate what an ocean of capacity is there in the English language. For instance the English language is very ancient. The venerable Bead wrote in English almost fourteen hundred years ago. That's longer than all the time between Homer and Plotinus. So the English language has been around for a long time, almost fifteen hundred years in great usage. So that the English language is very very ancient and its roots, its old English roots go back several millenium before then. All the way back to the kind of shared roots that Sanskrit and Greek, ancient archaic Greek, middle eastern Greek, linear A Greek, which oddly enough is cognate with Egyptian and many other languages of that time. So that the roots go back in a written form many many thousands of years. But the English language especially has been, as we have seen in our education, it has been refined several times by world class geniuses. One of the great establishments of English as a poetic language was done about thirteen hundred years ago. The English national poem, Beowulf, was written about 700 AD. And Beowulf is like the Bhagavad Gita, it takes two incommensurates and weaves them together. You cannot weave incommensurates together without doing a transformation of these incommensurates so that they make a complementarity. And when you weave a transformed subject matter into a complementarity, the only way that you can do that is through an alchemy of language. You have to have some One who artistically distills it to its quintessence and then projects that out again into an inform. Whoever wrote Beowulf was a genius and created the language known as Old English. And that language served for seven centuries until it was alchemically changed again by a poet named Chaucer. And after Chaucer we can no longer call it the same language, it's no longer descended from Old English but it becomes, in the Thirteen hundreds, it becomes Middle English. So that there are dictionaries of Middle English that are radically different from dictionaries of Old English. And Middle English has a mystical genius about it, not to talk about high things out there, but to talk about high things we are. Middle English is a mystical language of human character. Chaucer is all about personality, human character. And all the great productions of Middle English have to do with character. And the next great transformation of the language was Shakespeare. Shakespeare, who brings the transformation, distilling further, not just about heroes, mythically and symbolically, like Beowulf, transformed to the Canterbury Tales and Troilus And Criseyde, transformed from heroes to character, but Shakespeare takes it a step further, a very good alchemist of language, he transforms character into consciousness, which is cosmic. Shakespeare's language is English made quintessential out of the essence of Chaucer. So that one now talks about, instead of character in a humane field of folk, one talks about the individual person able to be a whole tribe unto themselves, having so many facets of capacity. That a single Shakespearean character can be a cosmos unto himself like Lear or Hamlet, as complex as a whole landscape of people in Chaucer's time. As complex perhaps as the whole planet's population in Old English time.
So that one now has the capacity for a protagonist of this quintessential Shakespearean language who can take on the universe by himself. And that's where English got to at the time of the next radical change, a third distillation. Just as Chaucer had made a distillation, and Shakespeare, a third distillation was made about two hundred years ago. And when you look at this collection of English poets, William Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, you begin to see the high quality of the language change at that time. One of the most profound figures in that change was Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And Emerson fed back into that third transformation of the English language, a quality of transcendental high-falutin German, that hadn't been seen in the language since the days of Beowulf in Old English. Old English is very close to German. If you look at a list of Emerson's library, the most books in his library are about Goethe. A hundred and thirty five volumes of Emerson's library were by or about Goethe. A whole book shelf. All of his correspondence with people like Carlyle and so forth are about the ways in which the Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Goethe, raising of German into a transcendental refined capacity was fed into the transcendental English of Emerson's day. But Emerson, great as he is, is completely pinpointed and outmatched by the genius of Thoreau. Thoreau, who took the bulls eye center of Emerson, and made a complete penetrative language insight out of it. Emily Dickinson is the feminine Shared Presence companion to that Thoreau.
But whereas Thoreau wove the quintessence of his language to be a kind of (how can I say it); the fabric of Thoreau's writing is like a very exquisite French Jacquard fabric that as you move it, it's almost like the design is holographic. It shimmers with different meanings every time you read it. Emily Dickinson goes one radical step beyond that. She makes a holographic mural of figures by letting the warp and woof dissolve away so they're completely suspended in air. Completely suspended in the space of consciousness without any kind of contextualizing which is still there in Thoreau. Which is radically still there in Emerson. And in this sense Emily Dickinson fulfills the promise of the romantic hero of Blake trying to redo mythology. All mythologies are out of date, we will have a new mythology. Blake's works are all about that. Or Shelley, who wanted to have a new Promethean gift of a new English poetic syntax. Or Wordsworth, who wanted to bring the sense of meaning into sublimity, sublime is an alchemical term. When you sublimate it means you take it away from the material realm.
It's very dangerous, it's very perilous. One of the powerful lines in one of the films that we do for history, Apocalypse Now, John Milious put the lines in about Captain Kurtz, Brando's character. He said no one had realized just how far he had gone. That he had broke away from them and then he had broke away from himself after that. If you do not have a spiritual presence at that point, you are insane. In the Perennial Philosophy, one of his great little books, Aldous Huxley said "the mystic swims in the same water that the madman drowns in". There's no difference at all, it's just one knows how to swim, the other doesn't. One knows how to swim in pure presence without any materiality. We usually say not swims but flies, because the kinesthetic quality of that freedom is that one is flying. Or as I used to put it thirty years, thirty-five years ago, it's like a high Dharma glide. It's an effortless quality. Emily Dickinson brings the person to that take off and lets you go. We're going to take a break and we'll come back.
INTERVAL 6: SECOND HALF
Picture Emily Dickinson living in this enormous house, huge, multi-storied, many bays, enormous. Her father was the treasurer of Amherst College. And in their day Amherst College was as big as Yale College, same number of buildings, amazing. Her uncle, her father's brother, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College. Amherst Academy was founded, I think, about in the early 1800's, reads here 1814 and Amherst College a few years later, 1821. So her uncle was one of the founders of Amherst College. The other founder was Noah Webster, the author of the dictionary of the English language. I want you to understand that when Emily Dickinson was born in 1830, she was born into the clear pure center of intelligence about the English language. It was her father's co-founder of the college that dominated the town that she lived, her father was the treasurer of the college. So it wasn't just Webster's Dictionary on her table. It was a part of the immediate family heritage, and she got it completely, she absorbed it completely.
Noah Webster was concerned about all the historical illusions of Europe that clouded the free use of the English language for Americans. He wrote a book in the 1790's which was an American spelling of the English language, which was the school book used in the early United States, so that they could get away from British spelling and use American spelling of English to give it a rudder of control so that the new world usage of the language would be increasingly markedly different from the old. We need to free ourselves from the old history. The last poem that Goethe wrote, he wrote to the poets of the new world. He said Europe is haunted by all the ghost stories we have lived through in our history. Use new ears, use new language. Don't go in our tracks.
The generation of Emily Dickinson included a maturation of American usage of the English language. It was a maturation. When you read someone who was exquisitely great like Thomas Jefferson, his use of the English language is still English, heavily modified by French literature. But when you read the next generation from Jefferson, when you read Emerson or Thoreau or Melville or Whitman, they're not English at all. They're different, it's a different thing. It's called the American Renaissance. But the core of the American Renaissance, in retrospect now is seen to be Thoreau. Thoreau understood that until you vanish the integral of the European persona, there's not the appearance of the new. You can't erase the old, but you can transform the old. But if you transform the old only by integral transformations, you get a different flavored wine, but it's still has the taste of the old. Whereas if you distill it, it's completely new. A personality which is distilled by a high Dharma alchemy has no trace of the old at all because it's a molecular change. It has nothing to do with fermentation of the old, it has to do with distillation of the new, it's radical. It's a completely different thing. And then freedom is no longer a adjectival decoration, it's no longer a property of the old personae. It's now not an it, but some completely new, unseen as of this instant focus, that has every potential. It's a Zen instead of a sect.
As long as experience is still within some sect of the old, it's recognizable, you can still pick up the flavor. And eventually, because it has an integral substrate, it always tends to go back to the old. Someone who is not transform-ed, when they age they go back to the old eventually. They go back to the tried and true, and they call it that, the tried and the true. When you live in a life, in a world where the tried and true is certain poison, absolute death, you can not do that, you have to transform. And we know now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that the history that was tried and trued is a certain death for all of us. There's no way that it will not happen. So we have to distill ourselves away from it. And if you just instruct yourself into adjusting to the tried and true, then we'll die. So an education like this is a distillation. It's different. It's radical. It sounds initially and immediately as if it is some kind of a version or variant. It's completely new, it's radical. And the more that you go into it, the more it is not only different, it is differential.
When Emily Dickinson wanted to bring this kind of a quality to herself, she, in one of her poems wrote, "internal-difference-where-the meanings-are". And she put dashes. In the same poem she had a phrase "my lexicon is my only companion". Meaning that the language now becomes a personal field, a personal field of energy. The culture is no longer the context by which meaning is established. The spiritual person in their free exploring of their relationality to the world is the realm, is the energy realm. It's where the registry of contextual meaning resides. And so everything is new. It is not only a new world, it is a new person in a new world. But it amounts to initially becoming a stranger in a strange land. Because as soon as you are new, you are a stranger to yourself. And as soon as you are a stranger to yourself, free, you are a stranger in a strange world.
So where is the relationality? Where is the meaning going to come from. The old habitual response is to find the relationality in the world, especially the world of culture, especially the world of myths, quintessentially the world of symbols and all of that temporarily is a danger area because it's full of regressive snares. Everything in it is a snare and the king, the queen, the royal center of all of that is the worldly sense of self embodied in the mind. And so the personal spiritual sensibility temporarily is an adversary to ones own mind. It can't be helped. The mind can be re-educated, it can be re-parented, it can be transformed, it can be brought along into maturity, but initially the mind is really an enemy of the spiritual person. And the mind being very capable at deception, creates conditions wherein the spiritual person is infective and then says well this is useless. To be free to be able to do nothing? This is exactly where Emily Dickinson comes in a writes a poem like this (doesn't even have a title, just has some editors number, poem 276):
Many a phrase has the English language
I have heard but one
Low as the laughter of the cricket
Loud as the thunder's tongue
Murmuring like old Caspian choirs
When the tides alull
Saying itself in new inflection
Like a whippoorwill
Breaking in bright orthography
On my simple sleep
Thundering its prospective
Till I stir and weep
Not for the sorrow done me
But the push of joy
Say it again Saxon
Hush only to me
So that the sociological context of the entire mythographic landscape of the world shrinks to a singular figure on a bare stage. The alone figure of the spiritual person just now emerged who has no context whatsoever, and the mind mistakes that for an abstraction. So that the mind, in order to be disarmed from its dealing with the nascent spiritual person in an adversarial way, the mind's capacity at abstraction has to be distilled first. And that's what Yoga, high Jana Yoga is all about. To take the mind's capacity to abstract, and distill it so that you abstract abstraction itself. I don't have a word for it but I have a sound - PoP -. Did you hear it? How would Gregory Peck say it? "Did you hear it?"
When the mind's capacity to abstract, is itself abstracted, it leaves a negativity which is pure. A negativity which is pure, the mind cannot help but mistake that for a form. It doesn't have any choice. Mind is like a genius teenager, it doesn't have any choice. It's hormone driven. It likes its fluid. You know the brain sits in a fluid that's only one ten thousandth of a percent different from water. Neural fluid is almost exactly like water, but it's that little smidgen that creates it as a neural fluid rather than water. And what you have to do is you have to distill that last little iota of that neural fluid back into pure water so that it registers as no different from water. It's like water within water, white within white, black within black. But the mind, because of its habit, does not see it as nothing, even though it is nothing, it sees it; the best phrase that we have is the English translation of Jean Paul Sartre's word for it, English translation is "hole". The mind sees it as a hole, as A nothingness. That's why Sartre's big book is called Being And Nothingness. And the operative chapter in it is called The Hole. When the mind becomes existentially alerted, ultimately it sees the center of itself as a hole and quickly tries to fill that hole with anything it can get. And what can it get? The fastest thing it can get, Sartre's very clear about this, he's very accurate, it tries to fill it with images. Anything! It's like an addict. Anything! So it will not be blank at the center. No black hole at the center of the mind's galaxy. And tries to fill that blankness with the stuff of the world which is not these things (holds a book to head), they don't go in, but the images go in, and super slick are the integrated images as symbols. And the first thing that goes in there is a symbol of oneself, which someone like Jung mistakes for the real. The symbol of the self is not real. It's just a hole filler. The only difference between the ego and the self is the self is super distilled. Big deal, it's that much more of a problem. The phrase in Zen is "no self". How is that? How does that happen? It happens because the distillation of abstraction itself becomes an abstraction, leaving a blankness which is intuited as a form and it takes a discipline to let realization occur without form. The Koan in Zen is "emptiness with form". "Emptiness is form, form is emptiness". That there is no difference at all between content and context, at all. No difference. That the difference is only contingent on a provisional assignment, a delegation of value, a projection of shape. And because that is what is true, integration is possible, polarity is possible, images are possible. But all of that comes under the heading of Maya, of Samsara, of illusion. And if you believe it then it comes under the heading of delusion.
But what is a person to do? What is a spiritual person to do? A spiritual person who is at home nowhere, anywhere, everywhere, also would like to live in this world. And so it transforms 'illusion' into 'allusion'. The language gains a poetique, and the poetique gives it the dynamic power to create a reality which weaves conscious vision back into the symbols, back into the myths. And so the world occurs again, only this time the world, instead of being raw illusion represented by images, is a composition of allusion which can be modified by art. And so the person, essentially is an artist. That most people are not very good artists is inconsequential. It means a great deal to the mess in the world but everyone is an artist in life.
And so this quality here, in Emily Dickinson, poem 272:
I breathed enough to take the trick
And now removed from air
I simulate the breath so well
That one to be quite sure
The lungs are stirless must descend
Among the cunning cells
And touch the pantomime himself
How numb the bellows feels
You will never find a quatrain by Ikeu or Basho that goes better than that. That's the old way of; in the thirties, when they said they wanted a dry martini, they would pass the cork over the glass. It's that dry.
There's a quality here which is indelible, which becomes peculiar when one considers that Emily Dickinson was never really published, and even to this day, who knows. This is how I first read Emily Dickinson in 1959: a little Doubleday and Anchor original. In those days paperbacks in university books stores were always by publisher. So you had to know what's what before you could find anything. And you had to browse a whole publisher just to find something. This in 1959 was the first selection from the three volumes of poems from 1955 and the three volumes of letters. Those six volumes were distilled into this single volume. And it is the first time that anybody was able to have enough of the gestalt of Emily Dickinson in their hand to be able to begin understanding that this was an amazing figure. Planetary shepherd who wrote about the spiritual distilling of the person out of consciousness. That just as the mind has its emergence out of experience, and just as the body has its emergence out of nature, the person has emergence out of consciousness. The context of the person is consciousness and the mistake of identification and old habits and old integral errors infinitum, is the fact of mis-identifying consciousness as a thing. There's no such 'thing' as consciousness. First of all it's a process. But it's a process which is complementary to the mystery of nature. The very essence in the old Chinese artistic aesthetic, the old six rules of good painting in China, that came from Cukachi fourteen hundred years ago, the very first of the six rules is that there should be a life energy presentational movement. Each stroke of the brush should have this voracity. Life presence, vital movement; that kind of a translation.
So that what's being distilled here is the very existence that is the bedrock of integral sense of the real. We have learned to address that as ritual. And we saw, when we went for twelve weeks, twelve lectures into ritual, that this is the level of existence. It certainly is there. But one of the qualities of existence, of existentiality, is that it is active. Existence does not occur statically, but occurs, as it were, actively, so that the phrase which early anthropologists, mainly genius women like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead and Gladys Reichard and Ruth Underhill and a whole rapt of them, the early anthropological characterization of it is that ritual comportment characterizes existence. It's the comportment, it's the active, it's the action. The action in a posture stylized to do along a line of life, a line of development that gives life. It's doing something life giving, like breathing, digesting, whatever. So that existence is objective, but it's a dynamic objective. It's objectivity is dynamic and has a kind of an umph to it. And it's that umph that gives amperage to the current which existence makes possible. So that the early characterization of existentials is that they emerge. The existential world is not a static world there, but is a realm which is emerging. Emergence is the ritual comportment of existence.
When Moses composed the basis of the Torah, he called Genesis, titled Genesis, by the word that begins the whole epic. All fifty chapters begin with a single word. The word is Beresheth, which is a gerund, which means while emerging. While this emergence is emerging and happening, al of this is going on. Otherwise, without that dynamic, nothing real occurs, it doesn't have any umph, there's no amperage to it. So that the ancient idea of death was a fading away into stasis. Homer's netherworld (Homer is a contemporary of Moses), is the fading fields of Asphodel; a pale yellow flower that gets paler and paler and finally just wilts and just. . . . . . . So that the netherworld was a frozen faded quality of life that could not move.
So that death or the netherworld, hell, hell was a frozen place, not cold but static, does not change. So that the lubrication of the mystery of nature is to keep life emerging all the time. So that the ritual voracity of existence is its comportment to a dynamic of continuing, continuance. Which in consciousness, because consciousness is also a dynamic. But instead of being a dynamos, an amperage of movement, consciousness is an energy. So that ritual is a dynamic and consciousness is an energy and energy and dynamos are both forces. They both go together very well. It's just that energy can leap orders, so that consciousness can make, not just an ordering, but orders of power of ordering. Existence is what it is, consciousness can make existence ten to the ninetieth if it wants to. So that the levels of possibility grow asymptotically. That's called freedom.
So existence and consciousness are not antithetical really, but the mind, used to existence being polarized, thinks immediately that consciousness is a polarity, is a death to existence. And the sharper the mind, the more experience it has in making abstractions, the more it is convinced that this is a jeopardy to life. Consciousness is falling off the edge of the world. It's a real nightmare, it's worse than death. And so the mind, in a regressive way, breeds a whole stuffy cultural milieu, out of which the radical transformation to conscious vision is seen as a jeopardy, for sure. And anyone who exercises that is immediately suspect. And if you continue, you're excused. You're trying to do something different. You're not like us, you're being different. And this, of course is the beginning of a politic, that eventually, down the line, ends up to being a Nazi state. That's what it ends up to be. Not the messy thing that we had to deal with in the 1940's, but it can get really severe, it can get really bad. Because the prophylactic measures taken to protect the status quo against these threats, can in a scientific situation, extend to molecular editing. To atomic level censorship. Then you really have a nazi state that's a big problem. And in some star systems, revolutionaries have a hell of a time literally.
We have a chance not to go down that road. That road for sure falls off the edge of the world. But it takes the spiritual person to be mobile in that transformation. Because that transformation belongs, as we will see, to the realm of history. And the only protagonist able to withstand the acids of history, the acids of that high conscious medium of transformation called history, is the person. Because the person is not there as something which can be dissolved. The person is there as a relational focus like a transcendental jewel that can reflect all kinds of possibilities all the time. And can always find a way to relate to someone else who jewel like is with them. And to many others who are with them. And so a hunting party in the wild jungles of history of a group of spiritually conscious persons are not susceptible to the decay that would be there if they were just personas, if they were just identities, if they were just individuals.
So that all of the so called 'new age' leaders who train people, who instruct people to become this that and the other, are setting up fodder for processes that they don't understand at all. Could not even imagine, because imagination doesn't even work on those levels. The only capacity that differentiates and continues to work in history is memory. Because memory is a differential way of operating. It is memory who is the mother of the muses. Not imagination. Beautiful as imagination is, and it is beautiful, and excellent, it belongs in the realm of myths and symbols. It is useless, less than useless, when it comes to art and history.
Which is why in Emily Dickinson, when you look to try to find the kind of imagery that you might be expecting, she's always unexpected, because she erases the expected imagery and leaves in its place, nothing. Leaves in its wake, no tendencies. So that you have to get used to re-positioning yourself to not experience the poem as the shape that it is, but to let the language course through you. And in a mnemonic cadence it occurs to you that the meaning is emerging in new ways all the time. She writes a double quatrain, and eight line poem. It's like an octave, this poem (doesn't even have a number. No, no number, sorry. The ultimate operator, right. Instead of sorry wrong number; sorry, no number, you've dialed through):
I sing to use the waiting
My bonnet but to tie
And shut the door unto my house
No more to do have I
Till his best step approaching
We journey to the day
And tell each other how we sang
To keep the dark away
So that the spiritual person, presencing in history is always a shared presencing. Else there would be infinite separate universes for each. The only way cosmos occurs is because it's shared. And the problem with history is that it's not amenable to an individual, to a spiritual personality alone but must be shared. So the problem of others is the fundamental problem of history. And that problem is how to share a world. Especially in view of the fact that each one of us is actually infinitely free. So that the sharing begins in the most peculiar way. She writes:
Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee
Ajar across the flower goes
Their velvet masonry
Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry costumes
While he victorious tilts away
To vanquish other blooms
His feet are shod with gauze
His helmet is of gold
His breast a single onyx
With Chrysophrase inlaid
His labor is a chant
His idleness a tune
Oh for a bee's experience
Of clovers and of noon
One of the peculiarities of Amherst College was the fact that is was deceptively in the most bucolic of American settings in the nineteenth century. If you see photographs, or sketches, it looks like the most ordinary, bland, our town, middle class, middle, middle, middle of nowhere. And yet if you went into one of the largest of Amherst College buildings, it's where the sciences were. And down on the ground floor, one wall had all of these glass shelved cases, and there was a railing about waist high and on the other side of the railing were huge slabs of dinosaur tracks, cut out from the landscape, because just south of Amherst is where dinosaur tracks were first found. And the geology department saw them out and brought them in and put them there in the basement. One of the first school observatories was there at Amherst. They built an eight sided, octagonal structure, with the telescope on top. But the favorite science of Emily Dickinson was botany. She knew botany like a nineteenth century scientist. Very well. Botany was very well developed at that time. When you think of Thoreau, you think of a philosophic naturalist, and indeed he was. The surveyor of snow storms, standing in the forest. Think of Emily Dickinson as a spiritual Thoreau with a microscope and a telescope. She went into the mysteries of the very small and the very large. A Thoreau with a microscope and a Thoreau with a telescope. And then you are starting to get the quality that's here. So that she writes, this poem is numbered, 1263. Poem number one thousand, two hundred, sixty three:
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry
This travel may the poorest take
Without offense of toll
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the human soul
More next week.