Symbol 1

Today we come to symbols. And symbols are the. They're the fulcrum upon which everything will be able to rest and rest in a way that there is a kind of a teeter totter effect. And the teeter totter is between integrals and differentials and integrals come together and differentials go apart. So that sometimes in very ancient wisdom iconography, when you would have a teacher in a wisdom tradition, and it would come to a threshold of telling you something profound. They would do this, which is a sign of the balance between integration and differentiation. It's worldwide. And for some reason, when, um. When deep monastic warriors in China got to a point where they had to learn to fight to stay afloat in the changing conditions of Chinese dynastic China, in the middle of the eight hundreds, um, a regime came into play where um, Buddhist monks were accused of sopping up all of the money of the empire and living these beautifully luxuriant monastic lives. And so about 200,000 Buddhist monks were thrown out of the monasteries, and the wealth was taken away, and they had to learn to fight. And a lot of the Chinese martial arts things would begin with that sort of thing, so that you would see in the iconography of guarding images, you would see this kind of a of a thing, which is the opening movement of a lot of martial art, um, uh, episodes of, of defense and offense. But in ancient times, this was always given the sense of the sun and the moon that the the symbols of the sun and the moon, the sun, the unchanging universal constant, and the moon the always changing. But that the always changing was not an irrational changing, but was a changing according to phase, so that the phases of the moon were the symbol for change. And change always in nature had a periodicity, so that for very early wisdom traditions, the moon's periodicity was an energy wave of the way in which natural energy transforms, and the sun's constancy was the symbol for the eternal equanimity of the way in which light was a constant, so that the sun and the moon were a pair. They formed a set, and the integral and the differential form a set. And the mind has a very strange capacity. The mind can equally balance integration and differentiation so that it has a point. A point that was called 2000 years ago. The English word that would translate that Greek word is rest. Rest. The Greek term is sophrosyne. And sophrosyne was the philosophic calm of equanimity, which can be then applied, and the Greek term in Plato's time underwent some transformations and metamorphoses, and when there was such a thing as Greek Buddhists. Around the turn of the 80s B.C., around zero BC, there were the Buddhist images that came into play were Greek. The first Buddhas were Greek. They were moustached, mustachioed Greek figures. They were not Indian. They were not Chinese. They were not Japanese. They were not abstract. They were. They were Greek. And so Sophrosune came into play in such a way that it entered into yoga, So that by the time of the Great Yoga Sutras sutras of Patanjali, there is such a thing as the application of equanimity through a symbol, like a language, that one could make a transformation on anything in nature. In Patanjali, the focus of this is called pranayama prana, prana as in breath, nama as in name. But pranayama was the magic name of something that could be applied, and one could change something by saying it, and that if there was the oomph of equanimity behind it, that language not only stuck to whatever you were applying it to, but it would change it from what it had been to whatever you could do with. It's not a magic or a black magic sort of thing. It's actually a symbol transform. And it's the use of the word as a talisman, as a talisman, so that there is such a thing as the conscious application of a symbol tells mechanically, which induces or encourages change transformation. But the change and the transform are not just chaotic or wild. It always must occur according to a periodicity, so that transformation was always the equanimity between the integral and the differential, between the sun and the moon where you brought the periodicity of change in nature, and you brought it through the transform, and you applied it to the conscious forms of human life. And that this was so great a task that the accomplishment of that was called art. So that art was bringing the periodicity of natural change into human life in such a beautiful, measured way that one created art by it. And so something like alchemy, which was the science of change, was called an art, and the achievements of accomplished differential consciousness was always called the arts and the sciences, and even today it still holds in universities around the world. You always have schools of the arts and sciences and they were always brought together. The reason for it has been forgotten in academic circles for so many generations now, that the wisdom of this literally is almost unknown, and yet it's just barely recoverable. And so what I'm presenting for you is a context and a background to be able to understand why these things exist, what they were used for, and how they're brought back into play. We have two books. We're always working with pairs of books not to be book toting, but to be. How can I say it? Pair mongering. We want to be mongers of As we want to know, because the singularity of something dupes us into expecting that there is an existential thing. There's an identity which we have to achieve and have to have and so forth. This is elusive. The paradox, in a very deep way, acclimates us not to try to identify something, but to have like a tuning fork where we try to pick up what are the total resonances, or what is the periodicity of the energy, which is what the resonance is. And so to appreciate something, as we would say in physics, appreciate the energetic potential of something as well as what it is existentially a symbol which has its Is ready to apply is a talisman. Whereas a symbol which still integrates and holds locked and sealed its potential, its energy in a potential is called an amulet. And so there are two distinct modes of a symbol. And in order to appreciate this, we're going to make two kinds of symbols as a pair. As a set, we're going to make an amulet, which is meant to seal some meaning, so that that sealed meaning protects is a symbol of protection. And that symbol of protection then will be followed about a month later. We'll make the amulet, say within a month. And by symbols. Five all of you just bring your amulet with you, and we'll do that simple show and tell that we did with the masks. And as we did a pair of masks, we're going to do this pair of symbols. So the first symbol will be an amulet. And then a month later around symbols nine will all bring our talismans. A talisman is meant to apply that energy resonance, that energy, so that it's not to protect meaning, but to apply meaning. And this is a tremendous achievement to be able to do both as a set. An equation, a mathematical equation, when it's written in a mathematical text is an amulet. It's meant to preserve the meaning and to seal that meaning. But one can take that equation and through consciousness, can learn to apply that to nature. And you can change nature. E equals MC squared is very, very powerful amulet as an equation. And when I was a little boy, there were a handful of people in the world who knew how to take that equation and make a talisman out of it and apply it. And it released something which was so startling, not so much the first atomic bomb, but it Released a new order of potential in human beings that we learned that our old talismanic capacity had gone all the way to the roots of nature and had released something eternal. And we need to appreciate in our education here in ourselves that we have that fundamental capacity. We can protect meaning by an integral symbol, and we can transform that amulet integral symbol into a talisman and apply it consciously in our lives, in the world in which we live. And actual changes will occur not because we hope to, but because those changes are choreographed and there's a great art to this. So the lecture for symbols one today is called meaning mind integral, because we're going to try to stress in the first part of the symbols how language and feeling and experience through a quality which we've come to call sentience. Being wise about feeling, being integral about our experience. Because being wise about feeling helps us to extend feeling areas that we want to explore and to prune, feeling areas that we don't want to further. And through this kind of selective process, we have the experience of refining Finding, and one of the qualities that refines most is language feeling, tone, sentence in language, so that the words of a feeling toned language that have been refined have a capacity of penetration penetrating through the surface into a depth, penetrating into an interior, and creating by that penetration an interior to our body, which is the space of the mind, so that interior izing meaning creates the mind, and the mind is a very objective occurrence, as objective as the body is. And so minds can be structured. They can be formed just like bodies and achieve an objectivity, a reality on the integral level, not only equal to a body, they're capable of being aligned. Mind and body can be aligned, but the mind is a deeper order. And so the mind's structure, when it's ordered tends to index the existentiality. And so the existentials that are made by action, by activity are indexable by the mind. And so symbols are extraordinarily powerful and they're integral energy mode is the interiorization of imagery of images. And this play of images called the imagination. And when imagination begins to play, when the images of experience begin to play within, one is able to have a mind that can form the pictures on the basis of oral language and not needing to have existentials move. That is a very simple process. When children get to a certain age, you can tell them stories and they will see the stories is that they were being acted out. One of the great developments in the 1930s was the universal spread of radio, and the children who were raised on radio had tremendous capacities of imagination. They could hear. And if you were a child in the 30s and early 40s, you usually watched the radio. They were rather large things, and they usually had a red dot to tell that they were on. And you would watch this radio while the stories were being told. And it was a great experience. This quality of being able to use the mind in imagination to play out and further experience is a great discovery and a great treasury, and we need to look at that more and more. And so we're going to, in our pair of books, use two novels, one by a man and one by a woman. Faulkner, William Faulkner as I Lay Dying, and Virginia Woolf to the lighthouse. Both of these writers are masters of storytelling language. They both were able to use language in a storyteller mode. I brought in during myth. This storyteller came from West Africa, from Cameroon, and it's pliable out of shell and bone and wood because it was used to mark the cadence of the narrative, the mythology, the mythic horizon has an energy wave, which is composed of both a carrier wave, which is the cadence of the telling, and another wave which creates the images so that there's like a Bass, percussion that carries the energy line, the narrative line, the dynamics of the language, and then the energy collects into images so that you have images occurring as swirls within the dynamics of the narrative line. And this very, very powerful, this braiding of swirls of images with the ongoing cadence or rhythm shows up in a version of action, of ritual, wherein a ritual dance, the dance movements itself, will carry the rhythm, the dynamics of that experience line, that percussive bass line, but the ceremonial images, the feathers, the stones, the crystals, the bones, whatever it is, are the images that are embedded in that, so that when one is dancing with all of these images brought into play, it creates an interiority, much like listening to the radio did for people in the 30s and 40s. It's a way in which there is a mind of the people, not just an individual mind, but a shared mind, so that there is such a thing as a tribal mind. There is such a thing as a clan mind. There's such a thing as a feminine mind, as a masculine mind. There are many Variations, many qualities and variables. And so when we talk about mind, we can't be reductive and think that it's this as the identifier, but rather to be aware that there's a whole spectrum of possibilities and potentials. And the mind of the tribe is extremely important, because the symbols that are made in the mind of the tribe tend to be the dominance in the natural cycle. Those collective images, those collective indexes of that collective image base, the collective symbols tend to be the dominant. Whereas when transformation comes into play, when the mind learns the power of transform has the ability to pass through the thresholds of equanimity. Through the capacities of rest and balance and distribution through the threshold of sophrosyne, one comes into a play where consciousness and individual symbols begin to take the lead, and an individual is able to make a symbol consciously in conscious vision that is so powerful that it could index all of the symbols of a tribe and change them and transform them. And because it is possible for an individual to be that powerful tribal man, Always limited the access to transforming consciousness judiciously. It was not encouraged. It was rarely countenanced. And so it was quite rare. Not only because it's very hard to do initially unless you have a lineage, or you have a teacher, or you have a wild mutation capacity. Not only because it was hard to do was it rare, but also because it was largely forbidden. So that there is a natural avoidance between someone who is very good at conscious transformation, like a major artist, and the ritual level of society which tries to preserve the status quo. And so the artist and the status quo of a social order are from the integral point, natural enemies. Whereas from the differential standpoint, um, natural cultures are fertile ground for making huge changes. All of this is very difficult to keep track of without a particular technique idea, which I've brought into play, and I'll bring back into play again. That is our way of looking and ordering centers around the visual sense of a picture, of a frame of reference, which is literally like a picture frame. And to get away from the habitual iconography of that kind of a thing frame or picture? I don't want to use the term frame. I don't want to use the term picture. So I use the phrase square of attention. Square of attention. And I use the term square because it has an ancient quality where a square in terms of symbol, depth and understanding. A square is two times two. A pair of pairs brought together make a square two squared. And so the whole idea of squares that one could have a number, any number squared gives you a power of that number. The square is a power of that number related to a particular quality of existence, and that square is related to the way in which the plane which can cut through any point. Any existential point. Any existential line between two points will give you a plane. So it's just such a thing as plane geometry. Plane. The plane is the indefinite context out of which one makes the picture, out of which one has a frame of reference. So if you extended any kind of a frame beyond the edges of its provisional frame, you would then encounter the extension as a plane. The first surface Symbolically in the mind, takes on the appearance psychologically of a plane of such a plane, of literally a plane which has a frame around it, so that the earliest naive supposition about the structure of the mind was that it was a blank tablet upon which one could write images, and this was the pretence that became formulated in this particular kind of symbolic iconography. It became formulated about the time that the Roman Empire was first being mooted among the Roman Republic generals like. Those following the civil wars. The great civil wars about two generations between before Julius Caesar, Marius and Sulla, and that time period. So that the phrase for this blank tablet comes down in Western civilization in the Latin tabula rasa, a blank tablet. And the classic Roman version of the Art of Memory by Cicero, a Roman, was that on this tabula rasa one could inscribe anything, and if you inscribed it in certain kinds of order, that's what memory was. And that with the egg crate grids of categories having two different kinds of categories, having a category going down one side and a category Going down the bottom side and the intersection of these categories that one could organize. And that memory was the organization of images according to this kind of egg crate embossed upon the tabula rasa of the mind, so that the mind was the repository of these ordered images. Cross-indexed. And out of this you get still the idea of graphing something of a diagram that holds a graph that shows the progression and order, and the way in which information then is codified according to this kind of a graph. All of this, surprisingly, is of a very limited mind. The fact that it is almost universally used on this planet at this time is just an artifact of the incredible naiveté. There are so many possibilities beyond this that one is staggered to tell. Memory has nothing to do with that limitation whatsoever, and the mind is certainly not a tabula rasa. It's not even a plane, because all of that is an inculcated, habitual interiorization of ritual. In this case, according to the Roman cultural ethos, their habits, their ritual, and the reason why it's been kept alive for over 2000 years is that power structures everywhere that have authority based themselves on keeping that intact. Because if you are freed from that, you will never again be collectible very easily into manipulable groups. So we're talking about something which has to do profoundly with the reality of freedom. Freedom not just from something or freedom among choices, but freedom with no limitations whatsoever. A mind for which 10,000 frames of reference would be but a small deck of cards that it could manipulate in a game and dispense with immediately, if necessary, and many other qualities. So that when it came time to understand that our capacities had gone from making an equation like e equals MC square to being able not only to split the atom, but to make bombs to. Make nuclear power stations, to do all kinds of things. The physics that it was founded upon. Had a dictum, had a saying which was put there more and more and more and widespread. And that is, in order to understand this, you must have a mind that does not make images. If you have a mind that makes images, you will not understand how this works. You cannot understand the quantum physical applications of conscious talismans. If you continue to have an imagery base in your mind. One has to have a mind of greater freedom than that. To be able to understand the fact that less than 1,000th of 1% of the human beings today. Know how science works, is a very fragile base, and cannot sustain the kind of technological reality that's here, much less the great one that's coming. Within 20 years, the technological world of 2000 will seem like cave days. There needs to be a way to educate a half billion people in the next 20 years, to be able to have minds that are free from this kind of tabula rasa mythology. And that's what this is about. This is an essay towards those steps of teaching freedom on that kind of a scale, so that our species can be everything it needs to be, so that Homo sapiens occupy not only the freedom of their Our planet in its whole heritage, but are able to understand that we are at home, wherever we are, in whatever planetary system we happen to be. And that's a very necessary now, so that our quality of frame of reference, our square of attention, has a symbolic transform mode. And the very beginning of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying presents in one of the most pristine, beautiful ways, written without any corrections. Written in the basement of the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss, in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner's job at that time was shoveling coal into the furnaces and keeping the school warm. And with the Pumps of the machinery, heating the campus about a mile from town square of Oxford, all alone. Faulkner, who had written 2 or 3 novels before that, suddenly found his energy pace to be able to present images that were not bound to a particular tabula Rosa, a particular frame of reference. And he wrote as I lay dying in six weeks and sent it off to a publisher with no corrections, and as one of the most unbelievable tour de forces of creative genius that the world has ever had. There is no narrative encasing the characters. The characters are presented one by one, by one by one, and they're presented in the way in which their minds are thinking. And all you get are these suspended characters and you as a reader, put them together to tell yourself the story, and it's different every time you read it. When Virginia Woolf had to. The lighthouse published in May. Cinco de Mayo, 1927 5th of May. It was published simultaneously in England and in America, in London and New York. And those two first editions are different, the languages are different, the phrasings are different. And she never collated the two. Why? Why would someone this careful not do that? Because there is a veracity of the present where a consciousness presents exactly what it is doing. And to tinker with it and change it is to give in to an editing process that belongs to integration, whereas sometimes great art is meant to be purely differential in order to convey the freedom of the appreciation. It's the appreciator, it's the reader, it's the listener. It's the viewer who's spectacular range of capacity makes the work of art different every single time. Listening to Mozart's Jupiter Symphony when you're 12 is different from listening to it. When you're 60, it's a totally different symphony. Here's how. As I Lay Dying begins, and then we'll take a break. This is from the voice of Dahl. He's one of the sons who drifts so close to pure sensitivity that they later commit him to an asylum, because they don't know how to deal with him. This poor white Trash. They don't know how to deal with someone like that. Jewel and I come up from the field following the path in single file. Although I am 15ft ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton House can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat. A full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb line. Worn smooth by feet. Baked brick hard by July. Between the green rows of laid by cotton to the cotton house in the center of the field. Where it turns and circles the cotton house at four soft right angles, and goes on across the field, again worn so by feet and fading precision. The cotton houses of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen Square with a broken roof set at a single pitch. It leaves an empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight. A single broad window in two opposite walls. Giving unto the approaches of the path. When I reach it, I turn and follow the path. Which circles the house. Jewel. 15ft behind me, looking straight ahead. Steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like would set into his wooden face. He crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian, dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and onto the path again just as I come round the corner. In single file and five feet apart. And Jewel now in front. We go on up the path towards the foot of the bluff. Let's take a break. So let's come back. Thank you for all showing up. I know it's a holiday for many of you. Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah, in standard Judaism is the day when you blow the shofar. Day of remembrance. Not for us to remember, but for God to remember us. And in the in the classic sense, your name was inscribed in this day. And there were three books. One was the Book of Life, and if you got inscribed in the Book of Life, then this is going to be a good year. The other was the Book of Death. But most people didn't go into that distribution. Most people went into the middle book, which is the book of maybe. And your name was inscribed on accounts receivable, and you had until the Day of Atonement, till Yom Kippur to make good, in which case you would be taken out of the limbo and put into the book of life. And so the chauffeur was to remind you that he was reminded to write your name and make sure that you do the right stuff so it gets in the right book. But in ancient Judaism, it was different. The chauffeur was not that kind of ledger keeping, but it comes from Joshua, who is not a ledger keeper. He was a general, and he explained to this generation of men who had come out of the desert, out of the Sinai, out of 40 years of exile, that the only way to get this land back was to fight for it, and that it would belong to those who would win those battles. And the sound of that shofar was the call to battle. And what's the old song? The walls of Jericho came tumbling down because of the horns. Because of the shofar. So it was a that sort of a thing in ancient times. The victor of a battle was though, those who could keep their energy intact in the face of terror in the face of fear, because the the fighting was face to face and iron to iron, steel to steel. And it was a carnage. And so the, um, the battle cry, the trumpet, the horn was always the symbol in sound whereby you could keep your integrity of your energy so that your body would not, in quivering with fear, give place to the doubts in the mind. Because in a battle like that, the mind always has doubts. It's inevitable. The imagery is rather horrific, but it's only when the body holds that one could win a battle. And so the battle cry was to shatter the other opponent's nerve or the chauffeur. The sound of that horn. In India, it was always a conch shell that you blew someone from the back of a war elephant would blast the conch shell sound and that kind of piercing thing. It's like the cry of the eagle swooping down on the rabbit. And whoever would be the eagle at that moment would win that battle, would win that fight. So thanks for coming out. On a day when I'm blowing the shofar in a rather archaic way, because the battle lines are very clear to some of us, ignorance must not win. Let's come back to Faulkner. Let's come back to as I Lay Dying. Let's come back to this kind of symbolic language, a language which is no longer mythic, but a language which has interiorized and become symbolic. And its symbol quality can increase in transform as the reader becomes more sophisticated. As we bring more and more to this text, the symbol changes from amulet to talisman. And if you bring a lot to this, then this is no longer a magic language laden with symbols, but becomes a work of art. And it's only the reader who can raise it to its full level of the appreciation as a work of art. Here's just a couple of paragraphs so that you can hear a masterful symbolic language. Which so integrates the experience, the multidimensional qualities of possible experience, that the mythic line has become so convoluted that by now it's a shimmering nest of radiant possibility of meaning. The air smells like sulfur upon the impalpable plane of it. Their shadows form as upon a wall, as though like sound. They had not gone very far away in falling, but had merely congealed for a moment immediate and musing. Cash works on half turned into the feeble light, one thigh and one pole thin arm braced, his face sloped into the light with a rapt dynamic immobility above his tireless elbow. Below the sky sheet, lightning slumbers. His Cassius sawing wood to make a coffin for his dying mother. Sheet lightning slumbers lightly against it. The trees, motionless, are roughed out to the last twig swollen, increased as though quick. With young it begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun. They sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing. Pa lifts his face, slack mouthed the wet black rim. Of snuff plastered close along the base of his gums from behind his slack faced astonishment. He muses, as though from beyond time upon the ultimate outrage. What is the ultimate outrage? His wife, that he's depended upon all his life is dying. And she's not going to be there to carry the family. And he knows he can't do it. Upon the ultimate outrage, cash looks once at the sky, then at the lantern. The saw has not faltered, the running gleam of its piston edge Unbroken, get something to cover the lantern, he said. So the father stands there, slack mouthed, absolutely guaranteed by the outrage that, well, she's dying. How dare she? How can she? What in the hell is going to happen to me and the sons? The sons and the single daughter? Each one of them are narratives in this. And so what this is all about as I lay dying, is that this mother. Her name is Addy. Addy Bundren is dying. And she was the center of that whole family. And because she's dying, it's going to leave a vacuous, open quality. And each one of the members of that family are going to spin off. And ants will, as quick as he can, try to find another wife to replace. But for the children, their mother will be gone. And she's not replaceable. And so each of the children faces a transformation out of the security of the tribe into the perils that they have to make their own way personally in the world. And some of them can, and some of them just can't. This whole thing of the mother is the center is exactly the theme also of of To the Lighthouse. So both these novels are novels where the mother is the center of the family, guarantees that that family was coherent, was woven into the fabric of feeling tone safety into the sense that life makes sense and it's okay, and that without them, the entirety of the family is up for grabs. Now, Virginia Woolf is not from Mississippi. She's from England, she's from London, born and raised in a place in Kensington called Hyde Park Gate. Her father was one of the most erudite men in the British Empire. Her father's name? Leslie. Stephen. Sir Leslie. Stephen. And he was the author of many recondite books, but he was mostly known and is known now. He was the founder and senior editor of the Dictionary of National Biography as big as the Oxford English Dictionary. It's still ongoing and maybe 20 or 30 volumes. And it was the listing, in short, biographies of every major figure in English history. Every one was included. And so it was a work of unbelievable, astonishing, monumental scholarship. So she grew up in a home where this kind of scholarship was dinner table talk. And in a way, if you look at Virginia Woolf's writings, whether fiction or non-fiction, a lot of them are biographies. She's famous, for instance, of writing a biography of a made up character named Orlando, who lives many different times, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, and the biography takes over. The time period of Orlando's reincarnation. To the lighthouse followed her magisterial novel called Mrs. Dalloway, and in quick succession it seemed like every year for a few years, Virginia Woolf churned out masterpiece after masterpiece. She wrote to The Lighthouse when she was 45. She had not only come from this distinguished family, but when the father died, her mother died when she was just 13. 1895. She was born in 1882, and when the father died finally in 1904, she and her sister. Her sister's name was Vanessa and their two brothers. Moved to a house that became the centre of London literary cultural life. They moved to a part of London called Bloomsbury, and they were the fount of the Bloomsbury Group. People that included poets like T.S. Eliot or economists like John Maynard Keynes. All the brilliant people in London of the time all came to their house, and Virginia Woolf was the head. She was the centre. She had become the feminine version of what her father, Leslie Stephen Sir Leslie, had been. She was. She was the endearing consciousness of appreciation for the qualities of excellence in every sphere of life, because she had grown up not just in a family where people read novelists or were people read histories. The Dictionary of National Biography was about everybody, so she grew up appreciating every single aspect of learned civilized life, whether they were mathematicians or they were politicians. And as she became magisterial in that sense, and when she was 30, finally, fearfully, somewhat reluctantly, she married. She married a man named Leonard Wolfe. And that's how she got to be Virginia Wolf instead of Virginia. Stephen and Leonard Wolf married her because Virginia Wolf began to realize that there was an unstable quality to the infinite spread of her consciousness, and that she feared she might go mad. And she was afraid of this. From then on for the rest of her life, and her life ended by a suicide. The Second World War had taken a vengeance turn and their London house, not the Bloomsbury House. They had moved from Bloomsbury after she got married to Leonard Woolf. They moved outside of London, what was then outside London. Richmond upon Thames. Um. And their house that they moved to was called Hogarth House. And they founded a press there called Hogarth Press. And they're the first ones to publish T.S. Eliot. The first ones to publish Virginia Woolf. And the list was extraordinary. It was so refined. Her sister married Clive Bell, the great art historian, so that all of the most refined things being published in the England of that day were published by them out of their own house and their own press, so that they were the they were the indexing high water mark of the transition of England from the Victorian period to the Edwardian period and beyond. And one of the curious things about Edwardian London. It didn't last very long, but Edwardian London was haunted by occult power. One of the great writers of that time, an American expatriate, Henry James. All of his major works at that time in Edwardian London all have an occult flavour to them. Ghost stories and beyond. Because there was an impending sense that there was something titanically mysterious about life that had been called out some Sacred, terrifyingly sacred energies had been awakened and who knew what would happen? And of course, the First World War was like a fulfillment of prophecy, that it was horrible beyond belief. And then they recovered somewhat. And during the 20s and 30s, it seemed that England came back together, that Europe came back together, that the world of recognizable safety had been somehow bridged. And then the Second World War came and completely blew it out. And Virginia Woolf and her husband and their entourage of people had moved from Hogarth House back into London to Tavistock Square. And in 1940, late 1940, a V-2 rocket completely demolished not only the house, but the entire neighborhood. And so they fled to a little cottage they had down in Sussex. South of London. And because of the extraordinary anxiety, monumental anxiety that this nightmare of the First World War had returned in an even more vicious form, Virginia Woolf felt that she was never going to recover. And so she drowned herself in the stream, the stream, the river there, alongside other carnage. This was in 1941, when it looked bleak indeed. It's difficult unless you have lived in wartime to understand the inexorable pressure, not of individual death, but of the massive terror that threatens life itself that everyone that one would know are just caved in by this. And if you've lived in that kind of environment, you know how devastating it can be. Psychologically, it's corrosive. And the more that it goes on, month after month and year after year, the more it settles in as a pernicious form of terror. And it's like a plague of neurotic fearfulness that deepens into a psychotic conviction that there's no hope and despair comes out of that. It's against that kind of massive backdrop that Virginia Woolf's works have come to be, along with Faulkner, one of the high water marks of the 20th century. One of the most terrific terrorized centuries on record. Absolutely. Not only cruel, but brutal beyond belief. To the lighthouse and As I Lay Dying. Both are about death. They're about deaths of the mother, deaths of the center of the family, deaths of that particular kind of human being who knit together by relationalities everyone, no matter who they are. And so, Mrs. Ramsey, into the lighthouse is the figure of Virginia Woolf's mother, and Mr. Ramsey is the figure of her father. And in To the Lighthouse. Mr. Ramsey is a philosopher, and he's convinced in the powers of the mind. If only the mind can keep extending itself and the powers of rationality. And this is how she writes into the lighthouse of Mr. Ramsay. It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is arranged in 26 letters, all in order. Then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters, one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q, he had reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums he saw, but now far, far away, like children, picking up shells divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet, and somehow entirely defenseless against a doom which he perceived his wife and son together in the window. They needed his protection. He gave it them. But after Q what comes next? After Q? There are a number of letters, the last of which scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R, it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. He could demonstrate. If Q, then is Q. R Here. He knocked his pipe out with 2 or 3 resonant taps on the handle of the urn and proceeded. Then. Ah! He braced himself. He clenched himself, qualities that would have saved a ship's company, exposed in a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water. Endurance and justice, foresight, devotion. Skill came to his help. Ah! Is then what is ah! A shudder like the earthen eyelid of a lizard flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R, and in a flash of darkness he heard people saying he was a failure, that R was beyond him. He would never reach our Onto R. Once more R. Qualities that, in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counselor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what it is to be. And faces it came to his help again. R. The lizard's eye flickered once more, the veins on his forehead bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and displayed among its leaves. He could see without wishing it that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men. On the one hand, the steady goers of superhuman strength, who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order. 26 letters in all from start to finish. On the other hand, the gifted, the inspired who miraculously lump all the letters together in one flash. The way of genius. He had not genius. He laid no claim to that. But he had, or might have had the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he was stuck at Q. The linearity, the the narrative line that allows for the alphabet to be organized in that way is a ritual objectivity. It's an existential certainty that B follows A, because that's the way it is. It's been assigned that way, and C follows B, one of the apocryphal stories of. Of the five year old Jesus, squelched for centuries and found in some kind of Middle Eastern monastery in the early 19th century. The apocryphal story that he was a very poor student because he didn't trust the teachers, and in one he was having to learn his letters for the alphabet then, and he badmouthed the teacher, and he said, you're not capable of teaching us the alphabet. You don't know what an alphabet is. You don't know what God means. But if you could tell me precisely what Alpha is, I will tell you what Omega is. The Alpha and the Omega. The beginning and end of the Greek alphabet. It's this kind of equality where if you have a ritual based objectivity, you can only move in that line, that narrative line. And the more that you're certain, the more the possibilities narrow. And there is only that line. And so the line of certainty becomes a single case, which is the most precise of all. And it cannot it must not be changed. This is called ossified. This is called petrifying. It's a form of death. The life cannot go on if it has only one step after that. If there is only r after this, q that r after this q, you must go this way. And so ritual, instead of being a secure foundation, becomes a compulsive limitation. Instead of being a foundation, it becomes a limitation and it funnels more and more until there is only the tyrannical precision of this next step and no other. And if this is a process applied to oneself, you get on very thin ice of making the next discovery of who you are. It must be precise. You better not make a mistake and you can say Mr. Ramsey gets in this way. What mitigates it for him is that Mrs. Ramsey is not phased by these limitations at all, because she doesn't work on that foundation. Her foundation is not on the basis of ritual, but her foundation is on the basis of symbol. She has the ability to integrate without having to follow the steps. She can bring in almost every kind of instant situation. She can bring a creativity to bear. And at the very beginning she is in this window with her, one of her sons, James, and they're looking out there on one of these coastal rocky shores in Scotland, up in the northern part, looking out towards one of the islands of the New Hebrides. And there's a lighthouse out on one of these rocky promontories out on this island, and they would like to go out there. The children have not ever been out there, and they want to go to the lighthouse. And she is in the window. She's in the square of attention. She's in the frame of reference where Mr. Ramsay sees them from without trying to get to R, and she's enjoying one of her sons, James. Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added to her son. These words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled. The expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward for years and years, it seemed, was after a night's darkness and a day's sail within touch. Notice Virginia Woolf doesn't say within reach, within touch. There's a veracity. Mrs. Ramsay creates an ambience of veracity for everyone that is around her, not only for her family, but for her guests, for everyone, she is a life giver. She makes a quality of veracity where everything is interesting. Whatever is happening is a great adventure. Not that she guarantees it, but she makes an openness of context where the energy waves of possibility are free to play. Since he belonged James, the little boy, since he belonged even at the age of six, to that great clan, which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand to such people. Even in earliest childhood, any turn of the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom and radiance rests. In the clouds that the mythic quality of experience. If it is weaned from this foundation of the certainty of existentials arranged in their order, but one is not yet mature enough to have a symbolic order, then experience becomes like clouds, clouds that obscure the existential foundation but have not dispersed enough to let a symbolic order come into play. And so the young and inexperienced, who do not give in to the inculcation of the ritual lines, are often at a great disadvantage because they are suspended in this experiential cloud where everything is wrapped up together, joys and sorrows together. James. And now we see this from Mrs. Ramsay's appreciative soul, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures. Notice that these are images on a plane, the plane of paper. And he's cutting out these images on the floor, cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing brooms, Knocking, dresses rustling. All these were so colored and distinguished in his mind that he already had his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure. Frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the bench. A judge discerning a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs. My son will grow up from this to this. But said his father coming in from the garden, stopping in front of the drawing room window. It won't be fine. In the structure of existence, in order to sense existentials so that they stay so that they're firm, so that they're stable, somewhat stable energy needs to register in polarities. You can't have electricity without positive and negative pole. You can't even have energy without polarity. And there's a further polarizing where energy solidifies into matter. E equals MC squared, E energy equals the mass. Times the speed of light squared. Why would the speed of light squared be in such an equation? What? All right. We understand how energy and mass are convertible in our time. We've gotten what Einstein said so brilliantly in 1913. It was beyond belief. There were only a handful of people in the world who understood what had been said with that equation. One of them, Max Planck. Recommending Einstein for membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1913, said we do not have the capacity, nor technology, nor mathematical brilliance to know what ramifications will come out of this. Not only that, energy and mass transform into each other, but that time and space are coextensive. Time and space are coextensive. That is, plank says in his recommendation. He says it is a startling, brilliant intuition to know that the one dimension of time is coextensive with the three dimensions of space. And of course, at that time it was understood that time was a fourth dimension because of the geometrical spatial foundation of Greek thought, which had come to Tyrannize in this mode it was a tyranny to tyrannize Western thought. That time was somehow the fourth dimension, whereas it makes an enormous difference. You get a rather different physics and a different math if you understand that time is the first dimension. But the extensiveness of time with space means that as a time duration occurs, a spatiality occurs with it as a narrative line of experience is imaged. And those images, say, are put into a language and one is told the story in oral language. One is given the mythic line, a horizon of three dimensional space which harbors existentials occurs also so that one as one is telling a story is creating an emotional space. And this is the seed of the mind. The mind begins in feeling, not in thought. And it begins because of the ongoingness of a temporality. It isn't the sequence of images, but it's the dynamics of time that creates the essential stem out of which the mind develops, so that the mind is a spatial theater, indexed by time, by temporality, so that the mind in its symbolic mode is time bound always. Whereas the point that Virginia Woolf makes again and again is that in art, the time bound can be punctuated by intervals of openness, where flashes of eternity occur and one is freed momentarily from time. Freed momentarily from your mind. And what occurs then is the split second flash that you are not limited to your mind. That you have a spirit which is at home in eternity. And that means that the entire world of mental constructs is rather a special case, and only a special case of what is possibly real. More next week.