Symbol 2

This is symbols two. And what we're doing is we're asking in such a way that we're coming round and going to approach having made a circle, having made a an ambit, a circumspection, as it were, of the way in which nature works. Unfortunately, this is not the entire story. And so our education can't stop with just one year's circumambulation. One of the most difficult things in a wisdom education, as opposed to an instruction as opposed to a cultural tradition is that you must be real and not just natural. And one of the qualities that's there in wisdom is that there is such a thing as going beyond. There is such a thing as supernatural or as transcendent. There is such a thing as magic, but not magic in a manipulative ritual way. There is such a phenomena as noumenon that the phenomenal basis, the existential basis of nature, extends all the way to our brain, all the way to our mind. And that the mind is a part of nature. It's a part of the integral way in which things occur. They have their career. They have their ecology of coming, emerging, coming into being, existing, decaying or being maintained, refurbished and finally dying or disappearing. And that deciduous cycle of nature is well known and occurs, apparently even on such large scales as civilizations that in the past century. In the 20th century, one of the deeper inquiries by Arnold Toynbee, a study of history, was a study of like a botanist would study plants or like a physicist, would study atoms. Toynbee studied civilizations and he found that they are born, they live, they become mature and powerful. They become enfeebled and they die. And one of the most surprising aspects of a study of history was the realization that all civilizations that have been made on this planet have died, and that the only one that was still viable, in a sense, was dying. And when that assessment was made in the late 30s and early 40s, the world was indeed in a dark place, and the civilization that was dying at the time was facing a traumatic crisis for which it was ill prepared, and since that time several generations have gone by and nothing has emerged to encourage the sense that things have changed. So this education is a preparation, a model, a working model to prepare a population who can develop things from scratch if need be, to transform whatever is needed as needed. And so this wisdom education doesn't just stop with the first year, but goes to a second year in which the natural cycle is not replaced, but complemented by a cycle of consciousness. And just as there are seasons of nature, developmental phases in the natural ecology of integration, Nature and ritual, myth and symbol. So too consciousness has its seasons. Oddly enough, not that consciousness changes so much, but the expressive expansion of its capacities continues to develop, so that the whole ecology of consciousness has a tone that we might call differentiation. That consciousness is differential. And this is an extremely difficult point to appreciate. Consciousness does not integrate. Nature integrates existentials integrate. Experience integrates. The mind integrates. But consciousness does not Integrate and we will find, to our great surprise next year that in the art of person, developing a person also does not integrate. There are integral qualities. Most of the qualities that are used by a person are integrals, but they themselves do not integrate. No one ever found their person by integration alone. It doesn't happen and it's not a function of limitations of culture. It just isn't in with within the parameters of nature. It just doesn't happen. And so one of the deeper convictions in wisdom is that the person is a spirit is a spirit in the sense that they are not in a naturally occurring variation range of water, but have come into a noumenal being because of a process of distillation. That if you take the juice of the grape from nature and you put it into a fermentation process, then you will get wine. If you take that wine and you distill it, then you will get a liqueur. And it turns out that vision consciousness is a fermentation of the mind, and the person is a distillation of the entire natural ecology. And this is a very difficult thing to appreciate, but it is a range Change of wise understanding that our forbearers always appreciated. And it's only in decadent times like our own that it's not a major part of our concern, of our education. It's like a dog walking outside senses there's a dog lying in here quietly listening and getting wise, and it barks out of jealousy. You see, the conscious person is always ready. We can work in even the impossible, even the improbable. And one of the great triumphs of consciousness is when mathematics found that it could work rationally with irrational numbers, even with imaginary numbers, and not destroy the intelligibility of mathematics. Is a great lesson in humility, and it's one that we're paying attention to now because by symbols, too, we are concerned with the compacting of experience into meaning and the compacting of meaning into ideas, and that the center, the target center around which ideas are formed and compacted, around which the spectrum of meaning becomes a set of understandability. The centers of those are symbols. Symbols are the seeds for that final quality of bringing together. So symbols bring together, and in doing so, one of the standard misunderstandings is to think that symbols are made of representational images. Therefore, symbols represent something else. Emerson, in one of his wiser moments in one of his lectures, the young Emerson, a very brilliant young man, said, we must remember that symbols present their meaning. Symbols do not represent something else they present themselves. And so this presentational quality of symbols leads very directly to the dramatic demonstration in a ritual action way of symbolic meaning, so that one of the great prizes of the whole ecology of integration is that when the mind really understand something it loves physically to demonstrate it, to do it, to act it out so that there is such a thing as infusing into dramatic action a symbolic integration of meaning, which has been arranged in sets, in developments, sets almost as if they were like arcs of meaning, and that those arcs of meaning are brought not in a simple circle, but are collected very often in the way in which layers of shell or layers of an onion. The example has been used many times, so that the integral qualities of the mind are not to have geometric, clear cut, simple shapes and forms, but to have a sense that what is brought together here has many layers of filigree. And in fact, this is quite truthful to nature, because the existential quality of existence doesn't stop with a static cut out of the thing, but always includes a resonance of its existence. There's always a resonance. And so the deeper quality of thinking clearly appreciates that what you are thinking of always has a resonance which accompanies it. You can't imagine being realistic and practical about an orange that doesn't smell like an orange. The molecules of fragrance of the orange are there. The reflective qualities of the orange are there. And so we have to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves, to use a phrase of a very great teacher a long time ago. There is a quality of seeing that if you settle for the static outline of it, this is accepting an abstraction rather than an image of the actuality. So that images have resonances included in them, and symbols have complexities of resonance, and occasionally have those complexities of resonance arranged into a harmony. So that later on there is such a thing in consciousness as a harmonic analysis of something. One can be logically quite infantile when it comes to just identifying true and false about things that are static. But there isn't anyone in the world today who's a professional engineer and mathematician who hasn't mastered the complexities of a harmonic analysis that goes into almost infinite detail, and the fact that we can handle infinite detail masterfully is a promise of our great future, our great future as a species who becomes really conscious and lives not just in some kind of abstract space with time tacked on to it, but lives minimally in a five dimensional conscious time space where the resonances are alertly taken into consideration all the time and the possible harmonics are recognizable. So when we come today to today's lecture, the title is symbol sets and spaces. Symbol sets. Sets and sets of Sets and spaces. Because there needs to be an articulation. I have several times used the example of from say about 50 years ago when young boys in junior high were still taught type setting and they would have these big wood crates with the different size boxes and the little lead letters. And the E box would be the biggest, because that's the one you would use the most, except for one other box, which was a long one in the front that was filled with blanks, because in between each set of letters you had to put a blank, otherwise the words would be run together. And so one has to have spaces. One has to have interval lengths in order to make articulate the sets and the forms. Words are always sets of letters. And one of the problems in symbols is that you're dealing now with written language, and articulation can be overlooked inadvertently through forgetfulness, forgetting to be articulate by graphically distributing the spaces with the sets. And this is a very great problem. And most education today. What serves as education, what could be derisively dismissed as mere schooling? It does a great disservice because it's inculcated many generations now who have no idea that this is how you must do things. Symbol. Sets and spaces. Written language. And I want to bring into play here. This man is now about 75 years old. He's one of the world's great anthropologists named Clifford Geertz. His book The Interpretation of Cultures has been a classic for 30 years. He's been at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton for all that time. His memoirs available light. His introductory paragraph to one of the last chapters. It's about culture and mind and brain. And then he puts a slash. It's also about brain and mind and culture, because if you run it one way, you can also run it back the other way. This is the way in which Conscious reflection puts in a reversibility and makes a pair so that your line of development not only runs culture mind brain, but brain mind culture. That reversibility, that reverse polarity is a sign of great consciousness. It's a consciousness that there is a set of differentiation that goes with the set of integration, with the proviso that the set of differentiation is not alignable in kind with the set of integration. They are not parallels in that the one repeats the other. They are complementarities in that the one redoes the other in a completely different way, so that there was such a thing as the wisdom A dance developed when men and women like ourselves matured far enough to go into civilization. And in civilization, tribal dances are modified in a radical way. They no longer just follow the steps of the Four seasons in a ritual way, in a mythic way, in a symbolic way. But civilized dances have specifically built into them a reversal of movement so that you have such a thing. Our term comes from the classical Greek, because in our particular civilization that we're using, it was in the classical Greeks, where the language terms were formulated. First. The term in Greek is correa correa, and it means a process where you have a certain development to a space, and within that space you have a turn, and then you come out of that space and you go back the other way. So that in classical Greek poetry, like Greek tragedy or Greek lyric genius, like Pindar, you will have a dance form, choreo put into language, written language where you will have a stroke and then you will have a stand, and then you will have an empty stroke, and that you will have sets of this in a Greek tragedy might have, say, five sets of this kind of development, so that you do not follow the action in a way in which plays now have been reduced. You don't follow the action by acts, but you follow the resonances and the consciousness of them by the sets of the strophes, stands and antiestrogens. And in this way you build up a structure, a conscious time space structure. Our education is much like that. Our first year is like a great stroke of integration, the way in which nature happens to work. And then we have a turn. In dance, it's called a pivot sometimes. And it's in this pivot. It's in this turn that the motion is reversed. But one doesn't just come back through in a reversed order. But the entire ecology of integration is complemented Whatever was brought together is now opened up. And so differentiation is an opening up, not just step by step, but every step opens to all other steps so that consciousness is a field of infinite possibility. The mind egotistically clinging to its security will not go there. The mind will balk at this, because that scale of freedom is seen as madness by a mind that is habituated to the drug of security. It is only by getting off the timeline of the pushers of pseudo freedom that one has the courage of heart has the transform of mind to be able to explore the infinite possibilities of real freedom. And so in our, um. In our, uh, course outline, we have this kind of writing. Myths give us models for acting out our lives. The mythic figure is an ideal of sorts for types and styles to emulate and appreciate, or to reject and vitiate. Myths are timeless, since the typology and even the plots are always similar no matter when or where human culture obtains. The wicked stepmother, the wise old man, the beautiful princess, the animal helpers, Hours all over the world. History gives us ideas for planning out our lives rather than being a mere model, an image the idea is capable of generating a plan for action. Any acting would be a mere rehearsal towards improving performance in an actual life situation. History relates to life, while myth relates to story. History develops a strategy for patterning life, where myth sensitizes us to types of scenarios. To go beyond the scenarios into your own life is the achievement of historical consciousness. And so our education has this quality. It has a quality where it leads to life and does not stay within the stories given the story Storylines are sketches. They're not the whole story. The stories are not the whole story. Beyond the stories is the storyteller who can make up something new. And we're aiming for that. But one of the crucial triggers, one of the great snags in this process is written language is the development of the objective capacity of the mind to make ideas. Is that capacity summed up in symbols? And how we use symbols is of great importance to us. And one of the most fundamentally freeing qualities is to realize that some symbols are so powerful that they not only organize Experience and images, but they can also organize other symbols. And there is such a thing, after all, as a symbol, a grand symbol that organizes them all. If that grand symbol that organizes them all is made in a surrogate way. You get a pseudo vision and you get a tyrannical, integral form called the totalitarian world state, complete with its religion and its dictator. And this past century has seen scarily several times when the human race came very close to having that happen. We're going to use Clifford Geertz opening statement to sort of position a humane understanding for a moment about this whole swath of sensitivity and possibility, and he writes between them. This is 1990. This is 2000. Rather, between them, anthropology and psychology have chosen two of the more improbable objects around which to try to build a positive science, culture and mind. Very improbable objects, culture and und Geist culture. Esprit. Both are inheritances, inheritances. Both are inheritances of defunct philosophies. Both have checkered histories of ideological inflation and rhetorical abuse. Both have broad and multiple everyday usages that interfere with any effort to stabilize their meaning or turn them into natural kinds. They have been repeatedly condemned as mystical or metaphysical, repeatedly banished from the disciplined precincts of serious inquiry, repeatedly refused to go away. And it is indeed a very sad situation to see, having done this now for almost 40 years, that there is more ignorance today than there was 40 years ago about these kinds of concerns, and that the new generations coming into play don't even know that this kind of miasmic peril is not only around the corner, but is in play everywhere on the planet, and that there isn't any population of men and women anywhere doing anything effective about it. And so we need to sensitize ourselves to a courage of heart that while we are beginning to learn this, not to go into despair about it. It literally is a matter of not only rolling up your sleeves, but of learning to roll up the false ideas in one's mind, the kind of mentality that parades itself as mind. And in this, we've chosen to begin with two novels, one by a man William Faulkner, one by a woman, Virginia Woolf. And both these novels come from about the same time period as I Lay Dying was written in the early 30s to the Lighthouse in the late 20s. They are both called in terms of literary styles, stream of consciousness writing. The stream of consciousness writing took its name because two great epics of literature came out about the same time. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, A la recherche du temps perdu and James Joyce's Ulysses, both in 1922. And from that period on, for a number of years, this style of trying to present a stream of consciousness, a conscious space, time dimensionality was used. And of course, the great grandfather of all this was Henri Bergson. And Henri Bergson's thinking about how time is not a thing, nor is it a sequence of bits of thing, but that time is a flow which he called durée duration. And since time is a duration, what occurs within that flow is like a concourse of resonances rather than a welter of points, so that you do not make something out of pasting points together or gluing points together. But there is a realization for the sculpting of the contour of resonances in a duration. And so the stream of consciousness writing was this way. And the two really great examples are Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Here's an example of William Faulkner from as I Lay Dying. There is no narration other than the name of a character, and the thoughts and feeling experiences and existential comportment of the character. Before that, there was a different character. So nowhere is there a narrator. There are just the characters presented. Where is the concourse? Where is the flow? Where is the duration? In the reader? The stream of consciousness is not in the book, it's in the reader. So that the act of reading this writing uses the reader as the symbolic way in which conscious visioning is taking place so that the writer, using great art, has left themselves purposely. Out of the book in the sense of narrating. They have presented characters. And the impressions, the sensibilities, the experiences, the mentality of the characters, but not themselves, so that the reader becomes the storyteller. And not only integrates the story, but every time you read it, you integrate it in a somewhat different way so that the reader gains. It's like this where an engraving which is printed out against your own consciousness. So when it's called stream of consciousness, it's not that there's a conscious stream in the book, it's that the act of symbolic envisioning is happening in you, and it is you who become the artist. It is you become the storyteller. It is your spirit that not integrates the meaning, but differentiates the meaning sets that have been presented here. Here's a Faulkner as I Lay Dying, one of the most famous passages in world history. Poor white family based on the mother. Everyone dependent on the mother to do everything all the time for them. She's dying. The husband, aunts, poor white southerner doesn't know what to do. The kids are all falling apart. The youngest one, named Vardaman, just doesn't understand what's going on. He's only eight. This is from the character Tull, who is a neighbor who's driven his wife on a buckboard to come and help around the house, and he sees this man sitting on the stoop on the porch, stunned. He's not very intelligent. He's totally egotistical. Written in Faulkner's Southern English, ants keeps on rubbing his knees. His overalls are faded on one knee, a Serge patch cut out of a pair of Sunday pants, worn iron slag. No man dislikes it more than me, he says. A fellow's got to get a get ahead now and then, I say. But come long and short. It won't be no harm done either way. She'll want to get started right off, he says. It's far enough to Jefferson at best, but the roads is good now. I say it's fixin to rain tonight too. Well, his folks berries at new Hope two, not three miles away. It's just like him to marry a woman born a day's hard ride away and have her die on him. He looks out over the land, rubbing his knees. No, man. Miss likes it. He says they'll get back in plenty of time, I say. I wouldn't worry none. It means $3, he says. Might be. It won't be. No need for them to rush back. No way, as I say. I hope it she's a goin, he says. Her mind is set on it. It's a hard life on women. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be 70 and more. Worked every day, rain or shine. Never a sick day since her last chap was born. Till one day she kind of looked around her. And then she went and taken that lace trimmed nightgown she'd had for 45 years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. You will all have to look out for PA the best you can. She says I'm tired. Anse rubs his hands on his knees. The Lord giveth, he says. We can hear cash. A hammering and sawing beyond the corner. It's true. Never a truer breath was ever breathed. The Lord giveth, I say. That boy comes up the hill. He's carrying a fish knife. Long as he is, he slings it to the ground and grunts. Ha! And spits over his shoulder like a man. Durnan. Long as he is. What's that I say? A hog? Where'd you get it? Down to the bridge, he says. He turns it over. The underside caked over with dust. Where it is wet. One eye coated over, humped under the dirt. I aim to show it to Ma. Barnum says. He looks towards the door. We can hear the talking coming out on the draft court. Cash to knocking and hammering at the boards. He's building the coffin. There's company in there, he says. Just my folks, I say. They'd enjoy to see it, too. He says nothing, watching the door. Then he looks down at the fish laying in the dust. He turns it over with his foot and prods at the odd bump with his toe gouging at it, and is looking out over the land. Vardaman looks at aunt's face, then at the door. He turns, going toward the corner of the house when aunt calls him without looking around. You clean that fish? Aunt says. Vardaman stops. Why can't Dewey Dell clean it? He says, you clean that fish. Aunt says, oh, poor Vardaman says, you clean it. Aunt says he don't look around. Vardaman comes back and picks up the fish. He slides out of his hands, smearing wet dirt onto him and flops down, dirtying itself again, gape mouthed, goggle eyed, hiding in the dust like it was ashamed of being dead, like it was in a hurry to get back, hid again. Vardaman cusses it. He cusses it like a grown man standing astraddle of it. Ants don't look around. Vardaman picks it up again. He goes on around the house, toting it in both arms like an arm full of wood, overlapping him on both ends, head and tail durn nigh big as he is. Anse's wrists dangle out from his sleeves. I never see him with a shirt on that looked like it was his. In all my life. They all look like Jewel might have given him old ones. Not Jewel though. He long armed, even if he is spindly except for the lack of sweat. You could tell there ain't been nobody else. But he answers that way without no mistake. His eyes look like pieces of burnt out cinder fixed in his face, looking out over the land. And when the shadow touches the step, he says, it's 5:00. There's a tone here that myth doesn't have. It is a symbol laden work of literature, and when someone conscious reads it, it's great art. But the book itself is a written, symbolic language that is radically different from myth. When we take a break, we'll come back and look at that again. Let's come back from our break. Let's come back from Faulkner, from Faulkner's prose. Let's come to Virginia Woolf's prose. And here is again, stream of consciousness, this time Virginia it, Wolf. The young son James, who's happily with his mother, Mrs. Ramsay, who creates life for everyone. And she has said, perhaps we'll go to the lighthouse tomorrow. And his father, who is a philosophy professor. Very precise, Mr. Ramsay, who knows definitely that he has gotten in the sequence to Q and hopes that he can get to R and he has said, no, it's not going to be well. And the father, Mr. Ramsay, has come to the doorway and is trying to sop up the sympathy of his wife, Mrs. Ramsay. And the son James resents this sympathy of his mother being sucked up by his father. This this guy, he he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures, for the magnificence of his head, for his exactness and egotism. For there he stood commanding them to attend to him. But most of all, he hated the twang and Twitter of his father's emotion, which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on by pointing his finger at a word. He hoped to recall his mother's attention, which he knew Angrily wavered instantly. His father stopped. But no, nothing would make Mr. Ramsey move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy. Mrs. Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely folding her son in her arm, braced herself and half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to poor erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive, as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating. Quietly, though she sat, taking up her stocking again, And in this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure. He said Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him. Charles Tansley, she said, but he must have more than that. It was sympathy. He wanted to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life warmed and soothed to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life. The drawing room behind the drawing room. The kitchen above the kitchen, the bedrooms and beyond them the nurseries. They must be furnished. They must be filled with life. Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said, but he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life was needed not only here, but all over the world. Mrs. Ramsay sets aglow everything because of her life giving energy because the resonances of her person, of her body. She's beautiful, she's growing older, she's still beautiful. She has the physical resonance of a beautiful woman. She has the mind resonance of a comprehensive symbol. She has the spiritual resonance, resonance of this prismatic person. And in contrast to her, Mr. Ramsey is needing infusions of her energy all the time to pinch him awake back into life. Why? Because he lives in an abstracted realm where he is out of contact with nature. One of the perils, and we haven't gone into the pathology of symbols much. But one of the pernicious perils of the mind is that it can be abstracted, abstracted away, abstracted away not only from nature. But because of the mysterious way that existence emerges from nature. When one is abstracted from nature, one is also abstracted from existence. And so you have to prove existence to yourself. You don't have any sense for it. You don't have any sensory certainty. And so one has to check. One has to have the specs. Oh, yes. But it doesn't glow. It says here it should glow in the day. This abstracting, the abstracting creates in the mind the word that one of the great critics of world literature, Erich Auerbach, in his book Mimesis Towards the end he uses the term figure, creates a figure, a mental figure. And peculiarity is that the power of the mind is that the mental figure can be abstracted even from character, so that one can be abstracted only from nature and from ritual. Ritual comportment. The actions of existence one can be abstracted from feeling. One can be extracted in such a way that the abstraction extracts you from the feeling, tone, quality of experience, and even abstracts you from the mythic narrative threads that create the fibers that allow for experience to gel together so that one can be abstracted in such a way that you don't know where you are. And such an abstracted position then needs to have its diagrams. It needs to have its geometric cities with which it's constantly stamping not only oneself, but other people. The cookie cutters of certainty and everyone and everything is but fodder for your activity of checking To see if they're if they're real. This whole abstraction, the abstraction figure. Has a symbolic idea. It's called the icon. The icon. And there is such a thing as iconology iconography, the study of the icon. Not an image, a symbol. And this entire entourage, this entire ecology of the icon, involves subsidiary ideas that are also very powerful in and of themselves. The mosaic, the putting of pieces together so that it gives the appearance of an image, the appearance of a form, mosaics of embedding jewels within those mosaics to embellish the icon. All of these qualities are difficult to appreciate. And so years ago, decades ago, actually, I came up with a very simple exercise that helps illumine this entire thing, and that is to make a pair of symbols. It's a primordial activity and it's effective. And so I would like all of you to make a pair of symbols. One of the symbols, the name for it is an amulet. The other symbol, the name for it is a talisman. And what an amulet does is protect it's seals. It protects you. It seals you. It seals meaning into a traditional experience in such a way that that sealing withstands the ability of any other minds of encroaching on you. An amulet seals you a specially protects your meaning, your integration against others who could threaten you. Especially others who are stronger than you, more powerful than you in the sense that they have more developed powers of integration. And so an amulet is a way of protecting your self against their powers, and not just other people, but other orders. Of mental objects which can seem to have a life of their own, which which could also encroach. Whereas a talisman is different, it's to be used for exploring. It's a tool for opening up possibilities. It's something to take with you on an exploration. It's a differential symbol, and a talisman carries within it a transform, whereas an amulet seals and doesn't allow for a transforms to happen. It seals and protects and keeps it the way that it is. And the difference, the monumental difference between an amulet and a talisman when they're paired together is apparent in a very profound way, because this is the way in which organic cells in living creatures. Utilize two distinct capacities vis a vis water to make a membrane. To make a cell wall. One layer loves water. The other layer doesn't like water. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic and back to back. They do a wonderful thing because they do go back to back and one protects against dissolution in water. The other allows solution in water so that functions can happen within, like food can get digested and energy released. And that there are always thresholds through this membrane, through this cell wall and those thresholds Largely in cells like our cells, the membranes between the cells are ionic channels of elements like sodium or potassium, so that you will have an atom of sodium ionized embedded into the membrane of the tissue. And it allows for electrical impulses to go back and forth, allows for bodily functions to happen. So in a way. Something like sodium, when paired with a very deadly gas called a chlorine, when the sodium atom and a chlorine atom are brought together, it will make salt not just table salt, But that whole formula becomes a formula for many kinds of salts. So there's a whole range of chemistry and salts. They have a lot to do with transforms and transformation. One looks at old alchemical literature and you think that mercury is the transformation of salt. There are hidden understandings that are there in the structure of things and the wisdom way that are so misunderstood and passed on as if this were traditional learning, that the ignorance is absurd and that people are not only, as Krishnamurti once said, he said, I'm appalled that my countrymen are not only gaining disciples by the millions, but that they're collecting shekels. For what? For parading ignorance on a vast scale. The issue is not to make a point where there is a single understanding where one can come to a judgment, and that this is what this means. This is what he's talking about. This is what we're to understand. It's not that at all. There's no understanding in that way of approaching. None whatsoever. So we're doing a classic circumambulation. We're scouting all the possibilities and all the resonances together, and we're allowing for the play of this to include us, rather than waiting for some bureaucratic structure to tell us what we need to get through the day. And it's not just that play and bureaucracy are a polarity. They're a disjunctive polarity. They never touch, they never meet. And our condition in the mystery of nature, as we're still emerging as children, is to play. Babies hardly ever ask you who's in charge of the food. They want to eat, and they usually play with the food. So that play is a is a quality of mind that is essential. And a bureaucracy is a regressive formulation that we're convinced that society needs a bureaucratic structure to carry on its social functions is a sign of psychosis. It's psychotic to believe that. And as a species, we're endangered by that particular misunderstanding. Symbol sets in spaces. The amulet and the talisman, when they're paired together as a set, will give us a window, an approach to understanding how the transform works. Why symbols transform. If you look at an equation, an equation is an amulet. As long as it stays as an equation, E equals MC squared, you may not be able to follow all of the meaning of it, but enough so that you can appreciate that that equation, as it stands symbolically as a written symbol, has an amulet quality. But the hidden power within it, its transform, is that it's not just an amulet Protecting and sealing that meaning, but it can be applied and one can apply it and you can get atomic energy out of it. The first time that that was discussed in a really profound, intelligent way, an Italian. His name was Enrico Fermi, and he contacted a man who could really think had an A+ mind. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he said, it can be done. You can open up this equation in such a practical way that you can create atomic fission. You can create an atomic bomb. You can create atomic energy. Fermi, because of his great humanity, wanted atomic energy. In fact, the world's first great atomic pile outside of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi reactor. And when it was dedicated, it was a big thing at the time. This quality of turning a symbol into its talismanic quality means letting the channel of transform operate. And so we're building in such a way that our definitions of understanding and of form and of ideas are not sealing them off, but are membranes that will later on allow for transforms to be carried through. And this is very important. It gives you an organic structure. This is an organic education, not because we're always talking about food, but because of the very process, the structure by which our learning takes place that it doesn't gel like a brick wall, but it gels in such a way that it's a living membrane and, well, it keeps form. One of the ossifying tendencies is to not use abstraction as a tool, and let it run away with you, and to live in an abstracted world. Um. The notes here say face an abstracted sense, saving face putting on your face. That face is an amulet. I remember once in the early 70s in Canada, using an R crumb cartoon. It was called Getting to Know You. And it's about the perniciousness of letting the cosmetic world get away with you until you find the perfect face. And you only can be yourself when that face is finished and put on, and only then can you go out into the world. And when you don't have that face, you can't let anyone see you. They might discover something about you that you don't know yourself. And woe unto you. This quality also shows up in other parts on the backside of people, saving that and protecting that. The notes here say that this quality of abstract figural self means that thought can get cut off. And the odd thing is that thought, because it's a higher power of integration, when thought is cut off, it has the power to reach back and cut feeling off. And thought when it gains the strength to cut, feeling off becomes even more powerful, and its abstracted projective power can even cut the sense of sensation off. There is such a thing as an existential alienation, not just where you feel alienated, but where your body is alienated. Your body no longer has any touch with nature. A zombie. So that one needs a surrogate life, a surrogate energy to bring this alienated body, this egotistically cut off feeling, this abstracted mind back into some semblance of play. And there are plenty of Drugs plenty of adjunct applications of technology. The industry is huge to do this. Uh, one of the worst, uh, drugs in this is, um. Is the idea that, um, schooling, as it is generally practiced, teaches us it generally supports a surrogate sense of self and world and does more damage than anything. Out of this, the term abstract figure, or just figure with the understanding of abstractness. Why would someone as learned as Erich Auerbach and his mimesis talk about, um, The figure, he says at the end of his book that it is a term that comes into play in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages. In fact, he wrote a volume called The Literary Public The Literary Language and Its public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. He was a specialist in this. Why then? Why there? Because in late Latin antiquity. Where is this? This is about 17 or 1800 years ago, in the times of the Roman Empire getting its heyday. Why would a literary language have such a potent force at that time? Because at that time was the first time that there It was a sense of some mentality, some abstracted mental configuration figures put into an order, like an ideological order, or that written language carrying that impress was projected out to what seemed like the whole world at the time for the first time. Now, there were occasions where there were empires before the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire at that time is the classic case of how this happens, because it's documented so fully, because we still live within its further resonances. It's still there. China had its dynastic empire just as strong as the Romans. But the development of our particular civilization never felt the full impress it will in the 21st century. And we have yet to deal with the grandeur of an imperial Chinese tradition just as strong as the Romans. But in this sense, there is a quotation that Auerbach puts in here. It's a quotation from a Roman writer named Juvenal. Juvenile was a great satirist who wrote in the early Empire days. The quotation is, but where in the days of old Metellus could you find a Cantabrian Stoic? Where could you find somebody in Spain who would be a stoic? Now the whole globe possesses Greek and Roman culture. Eloquent Gaul has trained Britons as lawyers, and eventually they're already talking about engaging a professor of rhetoric so that this whole scale. He quotes Horace and a great poet of the Augustan Principate, the early days of the Roman Empire, saying that his works can be bought everywhere in the world, projected out until it became not just a culture, but broadcast on the level of a civilization. This quality can only be done through symbols. It's only through a the power of a mentality that has a written language that can carry a meaning on this scale and make it so indelible that it stays in individuals, generation after generation, century after century. It has a somewhat different tone from a tribal tradition. A tribal tradition will always go back to nature. If one matures in a tribal way, there's always such a thing as going on your first hunt. I remember because I came from a pioneer American family of being told at 12, you have to learn to shoot. And I can remember being sensitive, boy, you mean I have to kill something? Yes. To learn to kill with a gun. To learn to hunt. Faulkner has one of his great stories called The Bear, where a young Isaac McCaslin, who is opening candies. Having to go to the big woods to learn to hunt like men. And the old man who's half black and half Indian Sam fathers, tells him that's not what the big woods are for. They're not to go into to drink whiskey and play cards and go kill animals. They're to learn that the mystery of nature will accept you if you prove yourself to it. And in the bear. Isaac McCaslin, who's about 12 or 13 years old, finally heeds the guidance of Sam fathers, and he sets the implements of his power, of his symbolic power over nature aside. He puts the gun, leans it against a the tree. He takes the compass and drapes it over the gun, and he leaves his watch so that his command, his symbolic command of nature, is set aside, and he begins wandering. And then he remembers that Sam fathers tells him, you can never be lost in nature. That if you make a sashay off to the left and come back to where you started, and then make a sashay off to the right and come back where you started, and you keep increasing those sashays each time you will, in this butterfly paired way, not only canvassed the ground, but you will map it in terms of resonance, not only of where you are, where you started, but how you moved to get back and return. Not to return to stay, but to return, to pass through. And in this sewing alternate way, in this syncopation you will create a map of the terrain, which is real in terms of what's there and you participating with it. It will be mapped in such a way that your symbol of it will be a living reality, and you will be included in the mystery of nature. So he begins doing this, and that's when he sees the track of the old bear, the biggest animal in the woods. The old bear that no one has been able to kill. Legendary bear has a foot that got caught in a trap, so it has a little bit of a of a crinkle in it. And he sees this impress in the mud, and he sees the water filling the track. And he realizes the bear has just been there. And he comes into this clearing. And as soon as he comes into the clearing, the bear is there looking at him, and for a moment the veil of civilized fright petrifies them until it fades, because he doesn't have the powers to do anything about it. As that fades, the fear fades away, and he realizes the bear is not an enemy, that the bear is the biggest guide of all. And he says volkner rights. He says the bear looked at him and included him, and then didn't turn and go, but faded back into the woods as if it were a mysterious huge fish in an old pond that gently subsides and leaves instead the feeling that one is included, one has become a part of the big woods. Not to come and drink whiskey and play cards and play at killing animals, but that one has learned to become real in the mystery of nature, and that the symbols that come out of that are not symbols that are in the mind, but symbols that inhabit the mind in such a way that they can transform out of it. They can gain wings of understanding and vision and carry you beyond where you were in your limitedness, and have access to the adventure of the unlimited. That unlimited, which is so vast that all of the known is itself but a mosaic speck. And on that scale, we gain a maturity where vision comes into play will only come into play like the spirit of romance. She's not going to stay with someone who's closed off. She comes to participate in a life. But she will not be caged. And so one learns that below that mythic image of the mother, below the existential image of the feminine in the mystery of nature, there is such a numinous occurrence as the lady of the Wild Things. Who will not be bagged on any level whatsoever in the integral. And her children are free not because they have choices, but because they can explore. And that quality that's there destroys the capacity to be hypnotized by the icons. You never again are ever susceptible to that. And pasted slogans are just simply pasted slogans. They don't stick. And tyrannies have a great deal of problem with a population like that. One easy way, and I'll come back to this next week. One easy way to picture this for yourself is that on the existential level and the ritual level, on the sensation level, you can think of a face that has radiant lines coming out. Existence has its awareness. The body can sense. You can walk blind for just a little while and begin to sense. You can get yourself. I once practiced running through the Western Sierras at night without any moonlight at all, and I could always find my way. It took several years to do that. But you can gain that facility. The body can know where it is. A diver on a high board who has to do a triple somersault and hit the water just right. He doesn't need a slide rule to triangulate. One gains that facility so that the body has an awareness which has its own existential wisdom about it. And that body awareness, that energy like that in myth, in sentience, in intelligent feeling gains its resonances like a bell struck. The sound is bell shaped. If one could in a moment follow a particle of the nitrogen or oxygen, it would carry the arc of that bell shape with the sound wave, so that the resonance of something physical, the body has its own resonances in experience, and language is born there because language carries the energy frequency of the resonance of things. So if the images are not pictures of something else, the images are. The resonant matrix itself is such a thing as the living image. And when those living images are interiorized in a natural way, they produce living symbols, not symbols which are pasted slogans in a mentality, but living symbols which carry with them that symbolic capacity not only to be amulets of the true, but to carry transforms also back into the world, so that a living symbol can transform. You can change the world. It's malleable. It will go into any shape given the right technique, so that intelligence differs from sentience. Symbol differs from myth and differs from ritual in that you have the awareness say like the spikes of energy coming out, laid onto the resonant waves of sentience so that an intelligence is the two brought together so that you have the resonance, but you also have the ordering capacities. So that sensation and feeling are brought together or knit together in a way that intelligence has the ability to think not just abstractly, but to use abstraction as a tool to think for real, to integrate for real. And the mind is extremely powerful, is capable of doing this to any degree of exactness. Each of us has a mind that has that potential and that capacity. One can bring integration completely to, um, a fullness so that the mind at that profundity is the only place in the universe where rest occurs. Where complete rest occurs. A peace that clearly exceeds understanding. But that rest is not a death. It's a portal. It's a threshold of carrying a very great transform. And out of that transform comes consciousness and consciousness, as we will see. It'll take us about six months to go through this patiently. Consciousness is a transformed mind. It's not the same as thought at all. And to mistake that is simply to be uneducated. And just because almost everyone one meets is convinced of that is no need to stop there. Let's come back and let me finish by coming back to Faulkner for just a moment. I want to carry. This quality. This is the character named darl from as I Lay Dying. Pa stands beside the bed from behind his leg. Vardaman peers with his round head and his eyes round his mouth, beginning to open. She looks at PA. All her failing life appears to drain into her eyes. Urgent. Irremediable. It's jewels she wants. Dewey Dell says. Why? Addie? Paul says him and Dahl went to make one more load, they thought there was time that you would wait for them and that $3 in all. He stops stoops, laying his hand on hers for a while, yet she looks at him without reproach, without anything at all, as if her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable cessation of his voice. Then she raises herself, who has not moved in ten days do we tell? Leans down, trying to press her back. Ma, she says. Ma. She is looking out the window at cash, stooping steadily at the board, and the failing light laboring on toward darkness and into it, as though the stroking of the saw illumined its own motion board, and saw engendered. You cash, she shouts, her voice harsh, strong and unimpaired. You cash. He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child. He drops the saw and lifts the board for her to see. Watching the window in which the face has not moved, he drags a second plank into juxtaposition, slants the two of them into their final juxtaposition, gesturing toward the ones yet on the ground, shaping with his empty hand in pantomime the finished box. For a while still, she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither with censure nor approbation. Then the face disappears. She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at Paul. She looks at Vardimon, her eyes, the life in them rushing suddenly upon them. The two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown upon them. Ma, do we gel? Says Ma, leaning above the bed. Her hands lifted a little. The fan still moving as it has for ten days, and she begins to king. Her voice is young, strong, tremulous and clear, wrapped with its own timber and volume, the fan still moving steadily up and down, whispering the useless air when she flings herself across Addie Bundren knees, clutching her, shaking her with a furious strength of the young, before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that had been left. Thanks.