Myth 3

Um, in fact, the mythological image, it's an image eternal. The mythological image of someone who is ready to begin anywhere is the same as someone who is ready to begin everywhere. And in the New Testament, this is called glossolalia, that one speaks in tongues and that ordinary people would never hear it. They couldn't hear it. It's inaccessible because it is saying everything at once, and it turns out to be in the hearing of those who are. They used to call it profane. We need to be that severe. But those who are not initiated here, Nothing. So they hear everything as nothing. And what happens in alchemy is that you add the slightest bit of impurity, and it constellates that, um, fractal scramble into a star, a scintillating star. In alchemy, if you add just a little bit of antinomy to a process, instead of getting, um, an incomprehensible awfulness, that little bit of antinomy, impurity, constellates what's called the star Regulus. And it is a multifaceted, um, mineralogical, transformed alchemical thing and actually shows, um, scintillation very much like a spiritual star in Nana. Whenever she was present in the sky. Above her would be the eight pointed star, which means that she, in her presence, brings into this world that scintillation. She brings everything that could be said, but it is graduated because of a slight impurity, down to where it can be said in sequence. And the very essence of a myth of the mythic horizon is that a language can be said. It can be delivered in a sequence, an articulate sequence, articulate because of the cadence and because of that cadence. One can dance the images in one's life and understand in that way so that a storyteller's cane like this, this one from West Africa, has the head of the old Egyptian sceptre some 5000 years ago. The Africans still remember. And this is storytellers cane. And it was also 5000 years ago. The royal scepter, not only of the pharaoh, but when Horus would come bearing the symbol of eternity. The Shen for the corpse, which is going to join the entourage of Rey and rise with the sun into the new day, the coming of forth by day, every day, all those years, Lord of millions of years, resurrected continuously into the eternal that bird would carry in one talon, the Shen symbol of eternity, and in the other the royal scepter. This scepter, the storyteller's cane, the way in which a cadence is established so that a myth delivered in a primordial way, is delivered with a cadence which one can get into the rhythmic energy, the rhythmic energy which would activate one's loins and one's feet. And recall that Hermes housed not only a winged cap, but he has winged feet, is able to dance lightly like the spirit of romance. She will stay where she is at home, and if it's to plot, if one gets into the representational Whereas she just lifts her skirts and goes elsewhere. She won't stay there. She doesn't want a molasses heavy viscosity of language. She wants a light. The first pressing of the maple syrup. That very light amber. That's almost as if like water. The difference between water and the neural fluid that allows for the electrolytic process of neural energy is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a thousandth of a percent. Neural fluid is almost water. It has just a slight impurity, which facilitates the communication of neural impulses in a sequence, so that it would be articulate. And thus we have such a thing as nerves and neurological systems And all living things can not only move, but they can feel. And myth is about feeling. It's about feeling toned wisdom. And we say in English, in the English language that it is a sentience. So before there's an intelligence of thinking, there's a sentience of feeling. The heart is wise before the mind knows to think. Now, in actual practice, it happens so contemporaneously. It's all part of that eight pointed star in the sky behind Anana. It's all part of the star Regulus. It happens all the time together. But when we're learning like we're learning here, we need the storyteller's cadence to allow us to appreciate, to have the experience of how that sequence of language discloses that words in myth do not represent, they reflect. And that's why there's imagery. Images are reflections, not stand in items. Representation is a function of mental activity. Reflection is the mythic process of language delivering feeling toned sentience about experience in life. Myth is about life. Just as ritual we found was about existence, about registering the objective real. Myth is about feeling life. And so the quality of the language that I'm using, it has a cadence. It has a cadence so that we can hear. And that that cadence could be, well, speeded up to its actual hypersonic quality, where you wouldn't hear a cadence, you wouldn't hear a mythology, you would have it all together at one time, in which case one has a transcendental vision and visionary language has a very peculiar quality. It is not about a storyline. It's not about a mythos, a plot line wherein we are secure and placed and would have our cycle, but a visionary. A magic language belongs to the storyteller. And we will see. There's a great deal of difference between being safe as a part of a mythological story sequence and being out in the complete open, the openness of wild consciousness in the magical realm of the storytellers. There's a great deal of difference between a myth and a fairy tale. Fairy tales belong to magic language, and they are forerunners of art and art. As we will see, next year is really radically different. Recall that each time that one of our stages, one of our phases, comes into play, it accumulates with the other phases that were there. Our first phase was nature. Our second phase was ritual, and our third phase now is myth. And they're accumulating. And there'll be a fourth phase symbol which completes this frame of reference, completes the picture within which we we live in a world, the world of the natural cycle, the world of integration. But vision will belong to something outside of that. Vision lifts off the page of the frame of reference and goes into the contextual wild openness. Like the sky, the sky where the sun and the moon are at home. The sky where the stars occur. That realm Of gods and goddesses. That visionary context which is supernatural. Supernatural is related to nature in some mysterious way. And of course, we began our education showing saying that nature is mysterious. Nature is not existential at all. It is ritual that is existential. Ritual objects, action, the ritual action, the doing of anything, the movements of electrons around a nucleus. That action makes the atoms. Otherwise you get a completely different quality. If you take helium as a gas and you cool it far enough down, it becomes Liquid. And as you take liquid helium almost to absolute zero, as you get approaching absolute zero, liquid helium undergoes a very peculiar alchemical transformation. It becomes what's known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Every individual atom loses its identity as a form, as a distinct, and the entirety of all those atoms become one singularity and absolute zero liquid helium becomes a mysterious thing that disappears from the objectivity of elements of atomic structure of electron orbital shells, and becomes something extremely mysterious. And nature is like that. Nature is mysterious. It's only in the ritual action that there's an objectivity and that that ritual action makes a foundation, an existential foundation out of which rises the vapors of language and feeling and that whole process of life, of livingness. And so when we come to some one, a goddess like Inanna, she presents for us the presence of life of Livingness. She's not a mythic figure that represents something else. She presents herself. And so the choreography of attentiveness in the old primordial mythology, the Greek term for that was therapy. It literally meant service to the god. Service to the goddess. What service? That one is attentive. One circles their temple homes. One fights by their side in their combat situations. There's a whole lineage in ecology of actions which we take ritual actions, ritual comportments. But the mythic saying of it is a cadenced respect for life, where the language in its primordiality is not the same as what later, through historical evolution and development, came to be. By the time of Plato already therapy meant cure and not service therapy. And it shows a radical marked difference. Plato's Greek is extraordinarily different from Solon's Greek just a century before. When Solon went to Egypt, the Egyptians sensed that he was an honorable man. He wanted to re found the city of Athens so that it could be a prize place in the Hellenic world, and the laws of Solon reformed Athens, and made it one of the great places in world history. But the Egyptians said, uh, Solon, you Greeks now are never more than just children. You don't remember? You don't even remember the major triumphs of your people and the Greek priests. The the Egyptian priests said to Solon. On the other hand, we recall your history some 9000 years ago when you were really great. So we will help you now in honor of that. Solon's Greek does not have therapy as cure. It has therapy as in the codes of Solon. It means service to the gods. It means doing the right thing in the worship of in the ritual comportment to the mythological figures, because they were still existentially scintillatingly present in the life. Whereas for Plato. The gods were mythological representations that needed to be questioned, and therapy was not service to those. Those might be graven images in someone's mind. And we better watch out for this, because those graven images get projected and get put into statues on hills like the Acropolis and in buildings like the Parthenon. And now those people ruling our lives are telling us that we cannot investigate philosophically the meaning of ourselves because we may be sabotaging by that action the gods of the state, and they will not allow that. And in fact, Plato's teacher, Socrates, was put to death. He was killed when Plato was 27 years old. For teaching young men to think in such a way that they no longer believed in the gods of the state, and hence in the power of our authority as political masters of the city. And so thought has a wild aspect. Bertrand Russell once said, men fear thought because thought is free. It is wild when you learn to think in a primordial way. Thought will go wherever it wants to go. No one can corral it. And so when we come to talk about myth today, the title of the lecture is image reflection riff. Image. Reflection. Riff. Image is not representing, but reflecting. Reflecting what? Reflecting in the sheen of the surface of a dynamics, a flow, a current which also has an energy. It's as if the quality of existentiality was put into process instead of things being existentially there. Wherever there is in space, wherever there is in time, there put into motion, there put into process, and as there put into motion, they lose the existential solidity that they had. It's not that they vanish and become phantoms, but they achieve something we call in physics today that state of matter. We call it a plasma, is neither a solid nor a liquid. And what a plasma carries is that the energetic quality of the stuff is equal to the stuff, so that a plasma state is an existential reality, and an energy mulched together so that when you get a flow of it, when you get a dynamic movement of it, the surface showing has the quality of having a sheen, and it reflects whatever it is that's going on. And those are the mythic images off the sheen of the plasma of living matter flowing as our life, so that mythic images are from life, from a life process. They're not static items representing something else Within a box called myth. That's rather stupid. It's rather puerile. So that there is a quality of radical challenge in language to that blocky ignorance. And it's a classic thing in. Inanna. One of our texts. Pairs of texts. The loud thundering storm, page 95. Proud Queen of the earth. God's supreme among the heaven gods. Loud thundering storm. You pour rain over all the lands. And all the people. You make the heavens tremble and the earth quake. Great priestess who can soothe your troubled heart. You flash like lightning over the highlands. You throw your firebrands across the earth, your deafening command whistling like the south wind splits apart. Great mountains. Your frightful cry descending from the heavens. Devours its victims. That thundering cry many thousands of years later. One runs across it in the New Testament. When Jesus is first returned back to Palestine, back to what becomes Israel first comes back and is picking his apostles, his disciples, and first meets the boy who would become Saint John and his brother. Uh, he says, uh, I call you. And the Greek word is Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, in the translations from Elizabethan times to the present, always translates that as sons of thunder, I call you, I will make you sons of thunder. And that's not what the Greek word means at all. It's very rare. It's not a regular Greek word. And incidentally, it shows that Jesus was not just able to speak Greek, but that he spoke very special Greek, because that word occurs in only one echelon of Greek language, and that is, it appears in Alexandria and Alexandrian literary criticism of only one author, and that author is Homer, and it occurs at a time around 270 BC, when the Great library, the Brooklyn, was finished and linked to the Great Palace of the Ptolemies by a high arcaded walkway. It was called the Royal Road. So that the library and the palace were a pair linked by the Royal Road. And on this Royal road there were places where in walking it was called an exedra, because it had a like canopy over it, not roof, but like canopied places where you could go in little truck stops, rest stops. And what would happen there is that you would have conversations there, you would have dialogues, you would have the interchange so that one's language was honed by the interplay of two or more. Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, I will be there. That's what that means. Bourgois was an Alexandrian rare Greek literary criticism term in the study of Homer, and it means the war cry of the victorious in battle. We don't have too much hand to hand combat anymore, but when it was so as a regular part of life, it was a fearful thing. To go physically to that brink of death all day, for days on end, and in order to come up to that like a Kurosawa samurai warrior, you had to Yell. You had to utter a war cry of victory to shatter the enemy and to constellate yourself. That's the meaning of that word. Jesus was saying to those two brothers, he was saying, I, I make you carriers of the war cry of victory because one of those brothers, the younger one, he was only 11 years old at the time, became Saint John. And it's not his gospel that's the war cry. He wrote the book of revelation. That's the war cry, the apocalypse. It shatters the old time form and constellates the new. And so there is a great depth here. So image, reflection, riff. It's a plasma of living material Of life, of organic matter flowing. And as it flows, it gains a reflective viscosity around its boundaries. And instead of the being boundaries that are defined statically, they're flowing, shifting, scintillating water or flame like scintillation, so that in the scintillation of sacred fires, in the flow of sacred waters, you see the way in which mythic images are reflectively present, like resonances of the real. And in that way an image reflection riff occurs. It's occurring today. It's occurring right now. I'm speaking that kind of language. I have my storytellers cadence going. It's like a thousand Saturdays in a row. Never have missed. Will not miss. It's my yoga. In order that this wisdom be brought back into play. You cannot find it in places that you expect. And so you have to go to wild places that are not on the map. A riff. This is from the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Riff. Riff. In jazz, a short melodic ostinato. That's a musical phrase. Form, usually 2 to 4 bars long and within a small compass, which may at times be varied to accommodate an underlying harmonic pattern. Its origins are said to lie in the repetitive call and response, the dialogue call and response patterns of West African music, and has appeared in jazz solo and ensemble playing from the earliest times. It's especially riffs are especially integrated, that is to say, they're integrable very, very easily with the blues form and became an essential structural feature of that kind of music. To suffer melancholia is an ignorance, but to sing the blues is very wise. This is a great difference. Somebody who's melancholy is because they cannot figure out the representations, because as you approach something realistically, the representations proliferate almost to a fractal jungle. You think that you know you want to identify something? Well, here's the zoo of subatomic particles. You try and figure it out. That blur in the sky that they used to call a cloud is the Andromeda Galaxy. It has 300 billion stars. You want the bottom line? Do you have time? Do you have space? Or as one writer, Ben Jonson, the famous Elizabethan playwright. When he did the First Folio of Shakespeare, he did an introduction and he said, be careful, dear reader. Shakespeare was a friend of ours, and he was quite a man. And in his place you may find more wit than you have mind to grind it upon. In Elizabethan English, when that great Shakespearean star, Regulus of the English language was reconstituted. That kind of language was here in the introduction to John North's translation of Plutarch. He wasn't a very good Greek scholar, so he translated his Plutarch out of a French edition of the translation from the Greek. But he dedicated it to Queen Elizabeth. And I don't know if you know much about Queen Elizabeth, but you did not lie to Queen Elizabeth, especially publicly. And so he told, as you would tell, a sovereign, a fearful sovereign. She was the Inanna of her day. Really? Someone told her the truth. He says in here. Who is fitter to give countenance to so many great states than such a high and mighty princess, who is fitter to revive the dead memory of their fame, than she that beareth the lively image of their virtues. She was called Gloriana Mythically not because she represented some meaning, but because she inhabited the life of the lively images which energized the entire realm. Better word than kingdom realm. This was the 16th of January, 1679, and he did another 15 sets of Plutarch's Lives, which came out in a second edition in 1603, so 1579 to 1603. Shakespeare was mature enough to write hamlet in 1604. So while Shakespeare was maturing, North's Plutarch was like one of the workbooks out of which he learned how myth works, how mythic language, how the horizon of the sheen of reflective plasma that is experience delivers to us, not the models by which we then imitate the correct ways to live, but the living images which disclose the actualities of life when it is in tune with mysterious nature, and how, when those two great processes of myth and nature are vivified together. The rich will comportement, the action becomes existentially quite real. And then all the world is indeed our stage. Let's take a little break. You can see how the. How the stasis with attention. Condenses energy. And that's where the dynamic becomes folded and achieves a kind of a charismatic solidity. That. In turn, has a resonance. And so a language that is mythic. Knows that it cannot express. The integral of nature. Because that's mysterious. We don't know. It's not that we don't know. It's that it's not knowable. But we can get the resonance that comes out. And so the mythic language will follow the rhythm of the resonance of the existential. So in this way, attentiveness doesn't show us the structuring layers of nature, but shows us the structuring sequence of resonance, the layers of Our experience. And so we can come to understand the articulation of our experience and myth discloses that does do that. If we have a mental conception about myth, we mistake the way in which language functions language as a reflective medium and its ability to mirror on the living, vibrant surface. The boundary in us of the flow of life creates a kind of an osmotic Interiority, which happens all by itself. It's that interiority of the living image surface that creates the space, that becomes the mind. And so the mind is not created by some kind of plan or according to an encoding of a doctrine, but occurs as the interior interiorization the interiority of mythic feeling, toned experience. So that next year, when we get to art and we'll get to one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Susanne Langer. She will say, I am scouting the possibility that thinking is an elaboration of feeling. So that if feeling is the primordiality in intelligence, we are sentient before we know exactly what that means, and our sentience is based upon an awareness of the body. And so being friends with the body we called it last week love of tissue fee feel plasm that the body, our body, others bodies, the bodies of plants, the bodies of herbs, the bodies of animals, the bodies of the rocks of the metals, the bodies of the stars. They have in their existential constellation the foundations of holiness. And that holiness is not the mind ascribing to and assigning. The mind is very far along the line of welcomers to the sacred. And if that resonant entourage is there in good order, then the mind is clear and understands immediately, does not have to figure out what takes care in figuring out are the complexities of proportional possibility. But integrals in nature are not difficult to understand with a clear mind. So in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna evenness of mind is yoga. And that evenness of mind comes from the interiorized being of that distributed fullness of feeling toned, experienced understanding of the living process which includes us. And we are safe and real because we belong to that. And our being able to say so is proof enough. There is a line from one of Wallace Stevens poems, asides on ennoble, where he says, thou art not August unless I make these so and another couple of lines from that poem about a woman walking by the seashore and Stephen's poem says, the sea, whatever self it had was in her singing in her voice. It never had a self other than the one that she singing made. And then he says in the poem to his friend who's watching this, a man named Ramon Fernandez. He says, Ramon Fernandez, tell, tell y. Why? They plunge ings of the water, the walls, the anemone soaked pools, the broad Horizon of the sea to its horizon. Theatrical amplitudes tell why. Why? When the singing stopped and we beheld her standing there alone. Why when we turned and then saw the town at night. The fishing boats. With lights on their masts and lines. Emblazoned zones. Why, he says, we almost wept from the graciousness that swept over us. For they had understood. They had witnessed truth, that profundity. Where the resonant pacing sequence goes off the scale and one hears that there are different orders, different powers, different amplitudes to a set which is harmonic, but that there is an infinity of sets available, and so one becomes silent in a golden sense, not out of having nothing to say, but because one reaches that satiation of the fullness where language will sing on any given day, at any given time, but it will be punctuated by the massive silence of the eternal, which is also co-present there then. And so myth establishes this if we are not enfolded and Camaraderie and companyand together in a community of the real, in the flow of that sequenced narrative flow of the plasma glisten of the image base, then we are prone to superstition. And as Plutarch said so long ago, the superstitious man is always dreaming, but his fear is always awake. And so one becomes haunted by an endless Kafkaesque corridor of unknown torture rooms. And this indeed is very, very difficult to face. And just one more step is too much. To dispel that cluster of anxiety that would freeze dry us into nightmare permanently. The war cry of the thunder god of Inanna or of Zeus, that the voice of Jesus saying that all of this comes as a fracturing of the phony. And the phony can always be fractured, should be fractured, should be challenged to be perpetually nice. In witness of falsity and ignorance is to be a sap. Come to bring a sword, not peace, because it is deserving of being challenged. And so Inanna becomes very Eerie, terrifying and fearful for those who are wrapped up in the artificial world where they hold power and their egotistical kingdoms are secure because they hold the reins of finance and torture, they can pick you up any time she shatters that. And so her truth is an enemy of the state quite frequently. And of course, any duenna who wrote the classic form of the epic of Inanna's epic understood this very well. She understood the politics of empire very well. Her father was Sargon the Great. It was he who established the civilization of the Fertile Crescent about 2300 B.C.. And each city Ur and Uruk and Eridu and Akkad. Each city had its own gods, its own pantheons, its own setting. Those Mesopotamian city states had all been like the individual principalities that chopped up a Germany before it became united in the 19th century, 500 principalities. A very similar situation in sociological landscape was there in classical Greece. Each Greek city had its own power, its own gods, its own constitution. And Athens, because it was by far the largest Greek city, sought to bring its dominance over others. Whether it was Corinth or Thebes or Sparta, whatever. Athens was large, not so much just large because of its population. Athens and the classical Periclean times had a population of about 200,000 people. But it had sponsored a league of cities that owed homage to Athens. And it was the spread of this league getting more and more extended and tight and dominant, that caused the rest of the Greek cities to suddenly become fearful that this is getting to be a little bit too much. And the city that took the lead against that Athenian encroachment and hegemony was Sparta. And one of the classic writers was observing, saying, you know, in times to come, no one will believe that this town of Sparta challenged Athens on a par, because it looks like a village, because the Spartans do not build these beautiful, grand civic structures. They don't have a spread out, kind of an Acropolis centered grandeur. The men and women are all warriors, athletes. They all practice nude together from childhood, and they are all fighters together. And they have the respect of all the rest of Greece because of the purity of the way in which they respond, reflective of honoring life. And the Athenians are going too far and needed to be challenged. Now Thucydides is the one who says that when Jane Ellen Harrison with the companion book We Always Use Pairs. We always pair books together to sidestep many pitfalls of the text, to sidestep many pitfalls of being dominated by the book. Our minds and our civilization are full of the shrapnel of wars fought over this kind of things, so we pair them to sidestep all of those issues and come into something a little deeper, a new structure, one that's being presented here for the first time in paired to Inanna, the Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. We've talked about how great Jane Ellen Harrison is, and we need to mention how absolutely pedestrian she is. Exemplary as a classic scholar at Cambridge, She was. She held her own with anyone. In an era of the greatness of the Cambridge Don or the Oxford Don, she was at a plus level, there's no doubt about it. But all of them carried the ethos of the Victorian British Empire and into the Edwardian era of the British Empire. And the difference is maybe summarised in the Victorian British Empire. You began to have a constellation that was bifurcated on one aspect. You had someone like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, writing idols of the King of the Arthurian stories, beautifully presented in grand parlor reading, excellent Victorian English. And on the other side you had the novels of Charles Dickens that showed that other than those parlour's, life was getting rotten for almost everyone, even children, and especially the old, that it was a rickety, tattered kind of a society. That Victorian British Empire was morphing into the Edwardian British Empire just before the First World War. And what characterises that are the occult novels of Henry James. The turn of the screw, Daisy Miller the ghost stories that had begun to haunt the psyche at the time, and Jane Harrison writes in 1902, published this lived till 1928. She was at the core of this, and here she speaks glibly of the classical Greek religion, being cheerful and oblivious to the real difficult horrors of life. Let the Greeks were rather childlike, and that someone like a Plutarch is exemplary of this kind of parlor quality, which is not true of Plutarch at all. He was the in his time, the early second century A.D. he was the master of the Pythagorean mysteries of the world. He was the sacred secret magus of the whole classic Hermetic tradition at the time. It was very wise. And when we come to modern translations of Plutarch, which are shunted aside because there are still the tail ends, the covering of all of this Victorian Edwardian assessment of what's what. Still clinging, still here in the beginning of the 21st century. It's very difficult to come to realize that someone like a Plutarch is a very good source for a classic perspective on the way in which mythology was a vibrant, reflective disclosure of a scintillating boundary. And that myth was that kind of language, the kind of feeling, tone, experience that later interiorize us into the mind, able to hold a space of openness with equanimity so that it has sending no signals to the body to grab for things, to the psyche, to expect fearfulness, or expect ecstasy or to expect anything. And that quality of mind, which Plutarch was a master of in his day, was something that leapt into the classical Greek society like that. And it came with the figure of Pythagoras. Pythagoras comes just one generation after Solon Solon, famous for the laws of Athens. Pythagoras, famous because of a deep, radical insight that had to be presented in a graded way, a two stage way that it was so radical because everything was brought into a suspect Suspension. It needed to be looked at in a completely new way, but that looking at it in a completely new way was always obscured. If you still spoke worldly language, because the disclosure medium was a mythic language that was primordial and wasn't related to the habituated, categorized state mythologies that at that time were not new, but had been around for thousands of years and were well entrenched. Just like in, Nana struggled in her father's time to make a mythic language that was limpidly clear of showing the plasma reflections of life itself so that she spoke a living language, not a dead language, but a living language. So in classical Greece, the Pythagoreans struggled to try to find a living language. And so the very first acquaintance with that radical insight was a period where you were asked to be silent. The ancient Egyptian thing is the Horus to be silent for five years, not in your life, but when teachings were being delivered. Don't ask questions you don't understand enough to even ask something interesting. What's interesting is not a question answer form. It's not in that form at all. And those who were silent could hear. And so the name of that level, that stage of community, was called the Akousmatikoi. Those who could hear, those who learned to hear. Because part of the cadence of a wisdom teaching is to comb through the language, to comb through the way in which feeling toned experience reflects so that one learns to hear truthfulness, not a truth or the truth or some truth, but to hear truthfully that the process of language purifies itself by running itself over the rocks of existentiality long enough that it loses its impurities and it gains its purity. Not a confession, but an ongoingness, so that language loses the static compartmentalization of the false world and begins to reacquire its eternal flow. And this a kind of language, when one had learned to hear you graduated from the akousmatikoi to the inner circle, and they were called the mathematicae. They were those who then had, through their having heard in that extended way the cascade flow of truthfulness, they began to have a presence of mind, a space of mind where they could see form objectively. And they were the mathematicae. They could see the mathematical structure of true things, not representational at all, but the way in which reflective image bases interiorize and throw together like lightning bolts, a symbol which emerges whole. Emerson once said, we don't we don't have symbols. Very often symbols have us. And it takes a tremendous maturity to learn to use symbols as tools of the mind and not be overbowled by this, most charities are supported by the cudgel of symbolic systems. There's a great difference between the primordial Buddhist swastika and the Third Reich swastika. The tremendous difference. This quality, this quality of the mathematics to be able to see in the space of an open mind, the forms, shows itself in classical Greece in the way in which Plato's dialogues operate. Plato is a true inheritor. He is a grandson in terms of lineage, a grandson of Pythagoras, or one should say, maybe a great grandson. Plato's teacher, Socrates and Socrates's teacher, was a woman. Diotima and Diotima was a Pythagorean elder. She was a mathematician of the First Order. And part of Pythagoras lightning that he brought into Greek civilization to crack the pleasant, masterminded decrees of Solon was to open up something that was in danger of being a static, and that stasis of being needed to be protected at all costs, including any kind of experiment by anybody with openness of mind. And Socrates was a murdered casualty of that kind of thinking, a true forerunner of what we've experienced in this past century. Of the Nazis or of the Soviets or any other totalitarian state. Next year, when we get to history and we take a look at Hannah Arendt's, uh, volumes, uh, her Origins of totalitarianism as a great testimony to a clarity of mind. Incredibly beautiful, clear mind. The quality that Pythagoras brought in. He brought it into play about 500 BC. He had gone off to Egypt for 22 years. He'd gone off to Iran for 11 years. And after 33 years, an apocryphal time, he came back. And when he came back to Samuels, no one could hear him. There wasn't a single person that could hear him. And so Pythagoras, being a wisdom master, took one student. He took the most famous athlete of the day at that time, and he paid him to come to hear him. And so that one student came, and Pythagoras paid him for several years to come and hear him. And when he began to be able to hear, he then paid Pythagoras. And then others came and the communities were built. They didn't build schools. They built communities. And because they were not welcome in Greece, they went to southern Italy. Most of the you know, Italy is like a boot. Most of the instep of southern Italy's boot was all Pythagorean in Plato's day. If you wanted to learn the Pythagorean way of life, you went there. You didn't go anywhere in Greece at that time. It had become a tyranny. When Socrates was killed, he was killed under the orders of the 3030 men who decided if you lived or died and no one could question them. What Socrates was teaching was a way of understanding language in a process that was truly mythic, but that the mythos was not a single line of narrative, but was a braided line of joined narrative called the dialogue. The dialogue is not a ping pong game between two egos. It's a synergy between companions. And in that synergy, you get that flow, that ancient flow of the language plasma, showing images to be reflective and not representational. And every time someone seeks to make a representation stick, Socrates asks them another question. Why do you say this? What could this possibly lead to? On what basis do you believe this? And slowly. The Greek word for belief. Doxa. Opinions transformed into disgust, refined, educated opinions. And most people would like to stop there. And Socrates would continue to challenge because he said, there is a quality in this conversation together in the dialogue. There's a quality that has a different kind of a word for it. Diaresis. In Greek it means division. It means that as long as we can take an issue or a sub issue of an issue or any aspect of it, and have a pro and a con a divided standpoint, we have not reached the truth, and that we will know when we are no longer to find a pro and con of something that Alethea has been reached. That's the truth. It's an undivided truth. One of the great modern commentaries on Shakespeare, a woman entitled her book Shakespeare's Division of Experience. His plays in cycles show this platonic, diairesis based, Shakespeare based it because of understanding Plutarch. He was very close to John North and also Ovid. And when you come to Ovid's mythology, the Metamorphoses, you do not come to a catalogue of mythic images, he says, of bodies changed to other forms. I tell you gods who have yourselves wrought every change. The mythic horizon is a scintillating flow. It's not static, it's not objective. It is, in fact, a process in much the same way that nature is a process. And so they have an ability to have a platonic dialogue, synergy between them. You can have the process of the mystery of nature, join the process of the reflective disclosure of the plasma of experience, so that nature and experience can braid together. And when they do, the ridge of ritual objectivity gains a paced clarity. And what emerges out of that is a geometric city. And if you look at an archaeological history of Greek civilization, you see the great painted pots, the black figured and the red figured vases, and you go old enough and you see that there are vases that have no figures on them. They have geometric designs. The earliest Greek ceramics have geometric designs. Like Carl Jung noticed in the stages of the therapy, for tens of thousands of patients, that you get to the level of the mythic images of the mother and the father and the sister, the daughter, the brother, the son. And you get deep enough and they're not there anymore. What's there is a geometric city. That's where the alchemical star Regulus constellates itself at that foundation. And yet, if one is patient and persevering, you can go beneath the geometric city. There was a time about 1800 BC, when ceramics in the Mediterranean had no figures on them of gods or goddesses, and had no geometric deity. They were plain ware, plain ceramics, and you can find those plain figures in some of the old ancient tombs on Malta that go back to about 7000 B.C., because men and women have been wise for very long time. In fact, one can go way, way beyond Jane Ellen Harrison and even Inanna. And you can go back. Here's Rachel Levy's great book, The Gate of Horn a study of religious conceptions of the Stone age and its influence on European thought. You can go back several hundred thousand years, and you can find there that there are no images of gods and goddesses or even a geometric city. But there is that plain participation mystique of the way in which life, feeling, tone, experience, synergizes energetically with the mystery of nature. And as existence emerges out of the mystery of nature emerges pristinely. Fractions don't emerge. There's no such thing as two thirds of a of a proton. Yes, you can say, well, two thirds of a proton are two quarks, maybe two up quarks, or one up quark and one down quark. No one can say that they don't objectively occur. They occur as reflections on the dynamic flow of the surface of the mystery of nature. They occur as glints of images and not as things. So beneath the realm of things. Beneath the basement is the ground, and beneath the ground is an open space where the waters of creation. Disclose the face of God floating freely. The ego can goddamn well stand in line in terms of authority. More next week.