Symbol 3

This is symbols three, and we are looking at the way in which the mind begins to occur. And the mind has its objectivity, which is capable of an alignment with the body. And it's a very simple thing. The mind aligns with the body through the neural system. That's what the nerves are for. And all the nerves come together and feed along a spinal column and the spinal column, like a stem blossoms into a brain. So that there is such a thing. It's very simple Physiologically, the brain is a part of the body so that the mind can be aligned with the body. The mind is also objective, but in between those two goalposts, it's like nature in her grand game. He has goalposts, the body and the mind, and in that space between them is the way in which experience happens and occurs, and feeling is established. And it's as if the body and the mind are not so much polarities, but they're like a tuning fork. They're able to be tuned, and when they're aligned, when they are tuned, we have the feeling of the flow and one can become refined that the flow is not a dull, quiet equanimity, but has its pulse. It has its energy flow, and that that energy flow also has within the frequency of the energy. It has another quality of which complements the energy and creates a dynamic so that there is a dynamic sense. There is a periodicity not just to the frequency, but there is a cycling quality that goes along the energy flow. And this is the dynamic. So that if you were to look at it in terms of. Nuclear physics. If you look at the atomic structure of matter. It has energy because of polarities. But in addition to positive and negative polarities in energy, there's another fundamental quality. And that is electrons also have spin. So that you have in the terms of spin on the atomic level, you have the roots of dynamic so that the physiological body doesn't just respond to positive and negatives, it also responds to spin. And so there is such a thing as a pair of pairs making a square, making a stability so that polarity for energy and spin clockwise or counterclockwise for that quality of dynamics are there in the body. And when the body is aligned with the mind, the mind also then acquires its objective variety of that kind of energy, that kind of dynamics. If we look at the electron in early 21st century manufacturing, some of the advanced technology is based on the fact that electrons have certain properties that can be aligned with something beyond their polarity and their spin. That is to say, electrons on the subatomic level in manufacturing. We're not at the pioneer stage anymore. We're well capable of doing this. We can take advantage of the fact that electrons also have holes, and you can align the holes of the electrons to help in the manufacturing process of certain advanced technological feats. It's done all the time now. So that when it comes to being practical and objective, what is practical in this universe? What's the bottom line? The bottom line is that there is a tremendous complexity already, even at the physiological level of existence. Electrons not only have Opposites. They not only have spin, but they have holes so that objects on the existential level have shadows. So that all of this is in process before the mind even comes into play. So that psychological characterizing of shadows as being qualities that are there in the mind there late in the day. It's been 13 or 14 billion years since electrons have had holes already. So it's nothing new. But we have to keep track of the things that count when we're being objective and trying to understand and not get carried away by thinking that the mind is the origin, much less the only locus for these kinds of phenomenon. It happens on the subatomic level all the time. It happens on the supra atomic level all the time, because in addition to there being electrons, there are also electrons which have a higher order of energy. They are more powerful, they have more energy, and not just a little bit more, but considerably more so that there's a second kind of an electron. It's called a muon. And in fact, there's a third kind of electron that's even much more powerful than a muon. Many times, a couple thousand times as powerful as an electron. It's called a tau tau particle. So there are three energy states for the electron, so that even before we get to the mind, even before we get to a realm where one would hope to be able to talk discursively about the psychology of shadows, the psychology of energy levels, it's there in existence already. It's established already, which means that the problem is not to find out why the mind is encountering shadows when it tries to get whole, as if this was something special and a sign of pathology. It's just simply the way things are. As Lucretius said about 2000 years ago de rerum natura. It's the way nature is. It has polarities, it has spin, it has energy levels. So that wisdom hasn't been naive for at least 7 or 8000 years. About the fact that when you get practical and you want to align the objectivity of the mind with the objectivity of the body, already there's a lot in play. And that means not so much discovering something new. But discovery really means to uncover. Discover. To find out what's there. The obscuring veil comes on the mythic level that comes with feeling. Because feeling is very difficult to have. Clear cut. Because feeling doesn't exist. Clear cut. Feeling is not an objective Like the body or an objective like the mind. The feeling process is not objective at all. It never is. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have its understandability, but its understandability is not intelligent in the sense that the mind would be intelligent. It's not about thinking about feeling. One is not intelligent about feeling. The term is sentient. One is sentient about feeling that there is an order to feeling. But it's not an order of objectivity at all. It's an order of process which includes energy flow, spin, relationalities, and indexing orders so that if one wants to be, quote, intelligent about feeling, you have to put intelligence aside, at least initially, in order to learn how to do it. It's like music. Music is able to be symbolically analyzed. There's no doubt about that whatsoever. But that's a later activity. And we'll see at the beginning of next year when we get into vision, into consciousness, that consciousness begins to be able to use what it has learned in symbols to retrospectively look back and in a retrospective way, begin a process using symbols in a new way, using symbols to analyze. And consciousness develops a capacity which nature never had, and that is the capacity to exercise an analytic. And though that analytic will have its roots, its foundation in symbols. Its objectivity is definitely in the mind. It's not a quality of vision to be objective either. Consciousness is not objective either. It's like the body and the mind both being. Objectivity can align. Feeling and consciousness can also align. But because they're not objectivity, they align in the way in which energy flows align, in the way in which musics align. So there's such a thing as a conscious music. It's not an intelligibility about consciousness that's important. Most intelligibility about consciousness is a projection of limited minds. Any good training in a classic yogic process blows that out of the water immediately. Forget that. That only gets in the way. That's why the process is called in Zen, refined after about 1500 years of refining technique. It's called no Mind. Yeah, the Zen of No mind. Yes, you can bring the mind into play later on, but the important thing is to understand and realize that it is an adjunct at that point and not the show. It's not the theater, it's not the troupe. It's not the play Even. It's just simply a stage. So a great deal of education that has gone astray, especially in the last 300 years, has gone astray, in particular to the pernicious fallacy that the mind is the arbiter and the mind is not the arbiter in nature. The mind is not the arbiter. And in terms of the cosmos, it's certainly not the arbiter. It is important. It is indispensable. But the mind, in order to participate in penetrative qualities of nature and in transcendental qualities of the cosmos, the mind has to learn to transform so that symbols carry a quality within them that they can carry transformation transforms And that that capacity for transformation, the fact that symbols can be used in this way, not simply to bring together meaning and tie meaning. If it's badly tied, it's tied into knots. If it's well tied, it's tied into bows. Because someone with experience at doing this understands that you're going to have to go back and open those up. So don't tie them into knots. Tie your meaning into bows. Make ideas that can be improved later on. Don't make ideas that become knots of doctrine that then everyone is tied up by. And you think that children are fine because they have learned to be tied up the way that you were tied up? That's ridiculous. Make a present of learning petite and beaux, and that they can untie it later on very easily, and then retie those bows and teach them how to do that. That's what's going on in this education. And so making a present of learning is a quality of understanding symbols, which is not taught anywhere in the world today. Can you imagine the whole planet is barren of this simple courtesy. Now you can see this is revolutionary talk, and it's well that someone keeps it quiet until it's finished, because this rather steals the thunder of a lot of important things. Not just university systems, but governments and empires. They do not like a free population, a free population. You have to ask permission before you do something with them. They're not very malleable to force symbols, carry, transform. So that meaning, which has been brought together in those bows of presentational understanding, can be not only retied in new ways, in different ways, but that the alignment with the body is malleable, that the body can also change, not just that it grows in girth. And in certain swollen ways, but. Bodies can be revisited by consciousness through the symbolic transform so that transforms are a two way street. So if the body has a major part to play in transformation, at least as major a part as the mind does. And what is it that's objective about the body? It's rituals. It's ritual actions. The actions of comportment. So I used to style it about 35 years ago. I liked the idea of comportment. It isn't just what you do, but it has its erode vectoring. It's what you're doing. With whom, how, and for what. So that that comportment means that there is a community quality. That's very important in ritual action. It's one thing to be a prima ballerina and to try to dance yourself. It's a whole other order to enjoy a pas de deux in ballet. And it's something else again, to be in a tribal line and dance together. That's really something. And at the end of a of a major ceremony, American Indian style major ceremony. When a ceremony is finished, like the eight day sun dance on, the entire tribe gets together, the men and women their arms around each other in a great circle. And they dance that final night together. Because it's not just a healing and a knitting, it's the way in which the ritual action, working through the symbol transforms fructifies the conscious sense of being personal in the cosmos. Those people then are restored and that's missing in this culture. You can hardly call it a civilization anymore. The civilization that we thought we were in crumbled a long time ago. It hasn't been around for several generations. We're living in little cultural pockets of backwater, of the ruins of a civilization that failed. What we're doing is we're developing the capacities to regrow, to revisit our bodies, to put bows in our minds, and to open the freedom of presence in our persons so that another civilization, this one, no one as wide as the entire star system can be made so that Men and women and boys and girls and dogs and cats and everything can be at home in something that spreads about one light year in diameter, very, very big home. If you look at this book is published this year, 2000. It's a 21st century book. Oxford University Press. This is the Oxford Mathematical Monographs. This is about Richard Feynman's intellectual work. When we get at the end of next year to science, we'll take a look at Richard Feynman's QED, his little book called Quantum Electrodynamics. This one is called The Feynman Integral and Feynman's Operational Calculus. It's 800 pages. The quality of an integral is that it can not only seal meaning together, but that it can encompass a transform that releases possibilities. And that's what a transform is about, releasing possibilities so that the meaning, the integral, the amulet quality of the symbol is transformed to a talismanic quality and a talisman releases not just releases the meaning, but releases possibilities of meaning, an entire array, and that those arrays are not just catch as catch can, but that in the cosmos there are indexing levels of possibility that really work. They really work. And if you get to those frequencies, if you get to those spin relationalities, your equations Will work just like alchemy said they would. They will transform the physical matter and you can apply them to the mind. They will transform the way in which the mind is structured because symbols deal largely with structure. That's what they're doing. They're dealing with structure. And what consciousness does is it brings into play the whole idea of orders of power. Vision has to do with the jump of capacity, not just of space and time, but the way in which consciousness then weaves itself into space and time and becomes a conscious space time where in that five dimensional continuum, the range of possibilities are so wide that something that would have been impossible Possible before now becomes not only possible, but doable on an almost elementary way. And that is to make a prison of the alignment of body and mind, to make a prism so finely united together that the focusing qualities of that prism allow for meaning and sentience and intelligence and existence to come into play in a ray of possibilities called the spiritual person, and that the spiritual person is not like rocks, not like ideas, but the spiritual person is a differential form made out of the woven capacity of possibilities, of presence, of possibility, delivered by transforms. And yes, symbols are important, but they're only tools. They're just the toolbox. And to make people slaves or servants or to queue them up because somebody has symbols, they say these are the ones that you need. All of this is pernicious. There are infinite number of possibilities of tools for maturing the spiritual person. There are star systems without number. There are not only sentient beings, but intelligences like ourselves. When they do it different from us beyond imagination, the cosmos accepts that. Mother nature accepts that it's okay by her. She loves the fact that her kids, her her gang is an ever burgeoning wonder. And she's at home in that sense. Why does the mind then so easily get waylaid? Why does it not know this? In fact, the mind does know this, but it gets covered. It's like a sediment deposit. And now, in the last couple of hundred years, the technique of observation has become so industrialized, so technologized, so computer technologized industrialized that it's like a fine spray that anneals, even before the process of experience has a chance to become sentient. And that sentience interiorize into real intelligence before any of that can really happen in gel instantly. Doctrines and ideologies and abstractions are laid onto it so that you are coated. Before you have a chance to walk in your first shoes. They're bronzed even before they got on your foot, and then they bronzed your foot. And we are told this is really good because now it's all preserved. This mummification of the spirit is going to stop. Because somebody is here to say no more. Let my people go. Abstract figure. When you get to an abstract quality of the mind, that's where the shadow action begins to occur. And the body's alignment with the mind takes that alignment, and the shadow has an effect on the body. And the mind Understanding the dynamic cycles in its abstractedness not having a real hands on touch through the actual physical body, through its existential sensory touch, the mind loses touch with the natural process because nature is not objective either. Nature is like feeling. It's a process. Nature and feeling. Unconsciousness. There. Feeling flows. Nature flows. Language and feeling. Myth flows. Vision. Consciousness flows and they can flow in great parallels together. It's like great oceans of process and movement. And whereas the body and the mind can existentially align in an objectivity which the mind then can seal by symbols and bring those symbolic sealings and understandings into the realm of very powerful ideas. There is a quality in abstraction where the sense of touch with nature is lost, and what comes into play then, is an anti-life negativity, as if there were resonances of shadows that produce the sense of death. And by the way, that's the only death there is in all this cosmos. There is no realm of the dead that's dead. I think somebody once said to a man named Lazarus who thought he was dead, come out. They'd never recorded, but I think he also said a few choice expletives of the people that buried him prematurely. What does the only death there is is in the abstraction of the mind? So that that Shadow Realm has just to take some popular mythology from the American 1940s. It was a big little book, The Shadow and the Living Death. Can you imagine how pristinely natural American mythology was for boys in the late 30s and early 40s? Why? Because people were really down and real, more real than they had been. For almost 100 years. The shadow and the living death in this one is called the Shadow and the Ghost Maker. Shadows and ghosts that electrons have not only holes. Shadows of the electrons. They have not only positrons, which are their polarity or can engender a polarity with protons. But there's also such a thing as a ghost of an electron. It's called the neutrino. And so uniform in the ordering is the cosmos that muons also have neutrinos and taus also have neutrinos. So while there are three different kinds of electrons, different energy levels, there are three kinds of neutrinos. So that energy in this universe has a ghost particle by the uncounted quadrillions. There's a neutrino blizzard going on all the time, which, if we were able to see, we couldn't see anything else. It's unbelievable. So that these kinds of images. The shadow and the living death, the shadow and the ghost makers. Here's another one called ghost Avenger. Shadows and Ghosts, so that our sense of the psychology of symbols is ill founded until we really build it by phase maturation in this entire natural ecology called the cycle of integration. And that cycle of integration is the way in which Wisdom was taught for tens of thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. One of the early evidences is in Paleolithic art. And even 35,000 years ago, one finds that the symbols are not haphazard or accidental, but that they are placed in the caves in such a way that they are grouped into tableaus, and the tableaus are grouped into a journey. And that obviously in order to mature, one was taken through the series of tableaus in some kind of generating order, so that that generating order was synthesizing all the time and carrying the integral through with an operational calculus in the person of a guide, somebody who was performing the transform for you. And even 35,000 years ago, you can see this kind of tableau. And once you see that, once you see that there's a cave not far from Marseille, the French coast found about 5 or 6 years ago, dates from about 35,000 years ago. The first great Paleolithic cave found, Lascaux, occurs almost 19,000 years after that occurs about 19,000 B.C. also has that kind of a tableau effect? The symbols are grouped together into sets, and these sets are arranged in phases so that if one has a transform to carry your way through. Each set opens into a more capacious integration so that the integration becomes deeper, more profound, the bows become more complex. You might have 7 or 8 bows tied all at the same time, and that when you come through that kind of a cycle of sets, there is a flash point where the integration becomes of such a quality and immensity that the abstract tendency of the mind to keep track of it, the pride that it can keep track of it is set aside. Not that it's lost, but suspended, and in that childlike suspension of doubt. Some insight kicks in that you're not the author of. It's a gift. It's a gift of learning. It's the gift. The first Promethean spark of transcendental understanding. Oh, they used to say the gold miners used to say Eureka, meaning I found it. At that flash point, there is a different characteristic to existence and a different characteristic to the mind. The mind is no longer what it was. The body is no longer what it was. What happens to the body as it becomes transparent instead of being opaque, it has a transparency. One can see in the way in which old Paleolithic artists saw. They saw, I think, the term for anthropologists and archaeologists. They had x ray vision. They will draw the animal, the fish, with the bones and everything, as if you can see through it. And the great symbol that carried through in Hellenistic times was that of the fish that had the skeleton of it, the transparency. And by that fish they meant a fish from the Nile River called the Mormoris. It lives in the bottom of the muddy Nile, and it's lost its eyesight many millions of years ago, but developed a kinesthetic sense of the whole body, sending out pulses like a little tiny radar. And the fish Navigates through its bodily radar, and it makes the entire environment. Transparent so that it can tell where it is. Like sonar. Doesn't have to look at anything. And that was the fish. That was the symbol of early Christianity when it was still Hellenistic Judaism. All of these things are understandable. We no longer can afford to be naive little kids, expecting distorted adults to tell us what the doctrines are about this we can learn for ourselves what it really is. What is it really? It's understandable in ways that we can go back and check it and refine and open those bows again and again. And what's the proof of that? How do you know when you've learned? When you get that x ray vision and you can see for yourself that no one can lie to you. The mind also has that x ray quality, not seeing through things, but seeing through structure. It can see structure transparently. It can understand what three is, what a square is for. Why is it that two cubed equals eight and that that's a universal structure. Why is it that five only occurs as a radical outside of the progression of paradigms, that all these things can be learned? But the learning of them is not based upon a dictionary of symbols, where you check what the doctrines are that are passed down by generations of ignorant people parading as if it as if they knew they never knew. And one can review whole libraries of metaphysics and religion and occult and philosophy and not find very much that's there. It's not very much that's usable. The book came out just a few years ago, and this was published by University of Texas in Austin, 1992. It's by a woman, Denise Schmandt-besserat. It's called Before Writing. And it's the development of how alphabets are very late in the game of written symbols, that written numbers predate written language, that numeracy precedes literacy by many thousands of years. Literacy at its oldest might go back 5000, maybe 6000 years. Numeracy goes back many thousands of years before that. So that when we look at the way in which an abstract meaning structure is expressed by symbols in an amulet form, you have to go to numbers first before you go to alphabets, and before you go to a written language. And suppose that anyone knows what a written language is all about. One has to understand what written numbers are all about, what numeracy is all about. It goes beyond counting because the counting in and of itself is not important. It turns out to be an extraneous reflex action. It's only when you make sets of symbols of numbers and pair them together with an image of the numeral in cuneiform for eight, with the picture of sheep. Eight sheep. Now you've said something. What about those eight sheep? Those eight eight sheep went from Abdul to this other fellow over here. And the transaction was made not just by transferring the animals, but by recording that on clay about the size of the palm of the hand. The original numeracy, the original literacy was in the palm of the hand. It was hand sized tableaus. The hand went from being a Palaeolithic Paleolithic symbol in the caves as the great symbol of integration to being the integrator, the operator holder of all the meaning of the transaction that linked the body and the mind, and the vision of the structure relating to something new. Abdul no longer owns those eight sheep. He does. And it was the hand sized clay with the little cuneiform numbers on them that were the beginnings later on, of course, in order to make sure that there was no mistake, because men and women are always like us. They always want to make sure that we got what we paid for, that those cuneiform clay bits were hollowed out and they became pockets and little images, little clay images of each sheep, in this case, were put in the pocket to make sure that what was recorded on the outside was on the inside, and that that bill of sale, the hand clenches like this I got at the sale was made. Not just the sale is made. I got the sheep. I got the proof of ownership so that this whole idea of images slipping behind the numbers to fortify their meaning is not about psychology, it's about archaeology. Let's come back to the original. Netherworlds interiors and heaven's netherworlds interiors and heavens and the whole acquaintance with the Image eternal of another world is very, very ancient. It predates our species. You don't hear about it very much in the last decades. But early in the century, a Neanderthal grave was found in Israel on the upper slopes of Mount Carmel. And the grave dated from about 200,000 years ago, more than 100,000 years before our species ever came into existence. And the curious thing about the Neanderthal grave on Mount Carmel, the fact that it's right there on Mount Carmel, was that there were traces of pollen, seeds outlining the body so that obviously this Neanderthal burial. The figure had been surrounded and outlined in flowers. Symbols of the transitoriness of life and the beauty of life. And that when the transitoriness has its phase of also being transitory, then the eternal comes back into play. The transitory is transitory. It will go, but the eternal doesn't go. It's deeper than is ness. The Philo of Alexandria once said, God is more primal than the one. There is a depth of registry that causes pens to fall from hands. And this depth of registry is disclosable but and discoverable, but not makeable. You can't make it so that when we get to the end of this year, the deepest, most profound silence about integration, the final step of integration is acceptance. Truth is meaning accepted. So that there is a process here of integration where it gets deeper, more intense, more complex, more involved, really Energizes and the intensity can be enormous. Titanic. But there never comes a point where some intelligent being is so powerfully intense that they can finish the integration. Therefore, the last quality is that earliest prayer form of you open up yourself to receive. The receiving is the secret. You must be ready to be able to receive that gift. And what is given that gift on each photon of light, the ankh of life. You're given that energy. But also there's the spin. There's the dynamics where were not only is life given, but the whole comportment of contextual resonance is made apparent, which includes community. There's such a thing as the reality of community not pasted together, not riveted together, but resonant together from the origin. And it's that resonance of things. It's like gravity is the resonance of existentiality, so that when you have symbol sets, when you bring together the tableaus of the images held by symbols literally synched together in the early days, in the early days, say at Altamira, the whole ceiling like the Sistine Chapel. Only a Paleolithic version. The whole ceiling at Altamira is filled with bison. Bison that are kneeling. And the herd is together so that it isn't just bison, it's the herd. It's the enormity of the eternal herd of the food supply that's there, and is the animal cosmos in that Paleolithic temple of Altamira. And the only way to see that is to stop looking down, to stop looking out, and to look up, to get into the receiving mode. It's that kind of equality and the orans position, this gesture, The earliest form of prayer. And there's a great integral that happens when acceptance is brought home. And that gassho that presentation like that is the beginning of a new resonance and that new resonance. The hands, the integration brought together where not only symbols and their sets are integrated, but the spaces are also worked in without the spacing, without the spaces, there would be no articulation. And so acceptance is not just a final frosting, but is allowed to settle and permeate the entirety of the structure. Acceptance must percolate down through the entirety of the structure, and it takes a while, and it's as if there were in the process of feeling sentience and mental intelligence, a complementation to the way in which light is made in stars. Stars don't just shine and that's it. That's rather naive. Our star sole about 865,000 miles in diameter, about a small, medium sized star. It takes the photons about a million years to percolate up through the stellar interior, and to come out radiantly as light, so that the light that we receive is not just eight minutes old, but at minimum eight minutes plus a million years. So it took a long time for our star to percolate the energy to make light. One of the ways in which to pronounce our name in the ancient was ancient light can be pronounced that way. There is in a deep wisdom when someone doesn't just teach it or just exemplify it, but who is able to accept that there's an ancientness there that goes back not only before our species to Neanderthals, but goes back to the very origins of this whole phase form development with in which our species is just but one phase. And we mentioned earlier a couple of months ago how Mary Leakey Discovered in a section of East Africa where a volcano had erupted and had sent ash down and covered these footprints that went across a mud embankment, and that it showed the footsteps of a female hominid some 2 million years ago walking. And one can see that you could walk in her steps, and alongside of her steps are a smaller child hominid, walking with her in such a syncopated way that they must have been holding hands. That seed and archetype of community, that resonance of love that goes beyond the individual into that shareability that presence. Uh, goes back to the very origins of the whole ecology of hominids. You can see chimpanzees from 70 million years ago holding hands. In nature, there is a tremendous profundity that all of these processes, when you really get to know them, have a patience and a periodicity of enormity to them. And wisdom is taking in the resonance of the symbol, sets and spaces, but also realizing that there are orders in those resonances and three great orders that complement the existence which we usually focus on the nether world, the interior world, and the above world. So that if you're keeping track in a comprehensive way, they're a minimum of four. Four different ways in which something can be. And the matrix of those brought together that quaternary is very firm. And when one learns an analytic based on that in a transform, then intelligence soars and there is no limit to what we can understand. It's open. Freedom has no limit. Let's come to the two books that we're reading. We're always pairing books together. It's like a tuning fork. Every month we have a different pair, and we're using William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse as our tuning fork, and we're going to carry it through till next week. And then we're going to shift. We're going to go to a new tuning fork, a new pair of books. One of them will be a work of philosophy of the 20th century, and it is the first volume of a three volume set, a trilogy. Just get the first volume and it's called mind An Essay on Human Feeling. Before she, the author of Suzanne Langer and Suzanne Langer, a very profound philosopher, one of the really greats of the 20th century. I remember when I was teaching in Calgary, Alberta, about 30 years ago, she was a guest lecturer at the University of Washington in Pullman, and we drove down through the plains to go and listen to her, and it was amazing to see this white haired, very thin, almost scrawny woman who didn't live on campus, lived in a small cottage with no electricity outside of Pullman so she could be by herself because she had gotten to a place where she was writing mind, an essay on feeling, and she needed a pristine quality of solitude. Why? Because for her, at that stage, her wisdom was so great that the resonances were endless, and she needed to keep track of them long enough to see that they keep going. You don't look for the conclusions. You look to see that freedom is still being generated in possibility. World without end is the old phrase. So we're going to take Susanne Langer's first volume of mind, an essay on human feeling. She wrote once in a book on aesthetics, problems of art. She said, I'm scouting the possibility that thought is an elaboration of feeling, and we need to know feeling first. Then we can understand thought. And we're going to pair with that William Blake's great sequence of pictures illustrating the Book of Job. Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job will be formative for us. William Blake rather like Susanne Langer in her elder years. Blake lived in a section of London called Lambeth, across the Thames River from the strand, and all the important residences of London. He lived in an impoverished, lower middle class, very low middle class area, and he and his wife Catherine, patiently living outside of their time, almost totally ignored, except for just a few patrons. And near the end of his life, Blake, who at that time had long white hair, a long white beard, and wore white robes. He looked like a William Blake illustration of God himself. Uh, some literature was visiting Blake one time and recounted this. His name was Henry Crabb Robinson. He said someone was speaking about God and so forth and so forth. And William Blake stood up trembling and said, don't speak of God's words that way, and so forth and so forth. So he was in 1825, near the end of his life. He would only live about 18 months longer. And for him, the Book of Job was a mystical, symbolic set of an ecology of understanding in this deep, percolating way. Because job in the book of Job, it's called in um, in Jewish tradition. It's in a set of writings of the five megalithic. It's the wisdom writings it belongs with. Not the Torah, nor the prophets, but or the histories Chronicles. It belongs to a special set, a special group of writings. It belongs to those writings that you have to live with for a long time in order to understand, because they're not understandable in everyday terms, nor are they understandable in regular mind terms. The Book of Job takes a definite percolation of light, and it takes a long time to disclose through acceptance what is being done here, what's being said, what's being written. And Blake, whose art was all based upon the fact that his books, his illustrated books were not books where the object was here on the page the page was engraved on copper backwards, so that the page was a print out from the engraving, and the engraving was the archetype. The printed page was but an image set carrying the resonance of the archetype. It was but a resonance, but that when someone who was spiritually alert would look at those images, they would print off the page into their interior realm for real. And so all of his books were handmade, made by hand. It would have been a spiritual travesty to have them printed by someone else. He printed them all by hand. There was a figure in early American history who did thousands of printings by hand and learned the profound William Blake understanding of wisdom. His name was Benjamin Franklin. And when you look at, I think the Library of Congress put out an 800 page catalog of all the printing done by Benjamin Franklin by hand. He set everything by hand, worked the presses by hand. All of the early material, the religious and political tracts, the Bibles, the currency, everything used in early Philadelphia life. That part of Pennsylvania was all printed by hand by Benjamin Franklin. When someone does this this way, you gain an access to the profundity of ancient light and the way it actually happens. And for someone in that milieu, someone who talks about symbols in a naive way seems like a school child. And the compassion is that one wishes that you had 2 or 3000 years to mature them so that they could see. Here is Faulkner from as I Lay Dying, a couple of paragraphs from two sections. There is no narration. There are only characters and their stream of consciousness, their feelings, their thoughts, their existential sensate comportment. And this book, like a William Blake set of prints, is made to print out inside the reader. The reader is the narrator, and depending on your maturity, your patience, your percolation profundity, you can pull More and more and more out of this. These two sections. One is called Vardimon. It's a little boys, about eight. His mother has just died, and she died about the same time. He caught a huge fish who got it, fell out of his hands into the dirt, and he got all confused about the dirt covering the fish. And then his mother is supposed to be in a coffin, and that's going to be put under the dirt. And it started to rain. And he comes to fetch a neighbor, and the neighbor's name is Tull, and his wife's name is Cora. And here's just a couple of paragraphs to give you this chance to get an impress. One ancient way of doing the impress is not to read the words, but to say them. The oral language. The delivery of oral language was always a proof of the spirit in ancient times In Hellenistic Judaism. One of the proofs of spirit was that you could compose a spontaneous hymn of praise to God, and you could say it. It could be heard. In early Buddhism, the sutras were never effective unless you heard them. That's why they always began. Thus have I heard oral language. It's not just mythic. It carries the feeling, tone, sentience upon which understanding is matured. Vardhaman. When they get it finished, they're going to put her in it. And then for a long time, I couldn't say it. I saw the dark stand up and go whirling away, and I said, are you going to nail her up in it. Cash. Cash. Cash. His brother's name. One of them is named cash. He's building the coffin. I got shut up in the crib of the new door. It was too heavy for me and went shut. And I couldn't breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. I said, are you going to nail it? Shut? Cash. Nail it, nail it. Paul walks around his shadow. Walks around over cash. Going up and down above the saw at the bleeding plank. Dewey Dell said we will get some bananas. The train is behind the grass, red on the track. When it runs, the track shines on and off. Paul said flour and sugar and coffee cost so much because I'm a country boy. Because boys in town and bicycles. Why do flour and sugar and coffee cost so much when he is a country boy. Wouldn't you rather have some bananas instead? Bananas are gone. Eaten, gone. When it runs on the track, the train, it shines again. Why ain't I a town boy, PA? I said God made me. I did not said to God to make me in the country. If he can make the train, why can't he make them all in the town? Because flour and sugar and coffee. Wouldn't you rather have bananas? He walks around his shadow. Walks around. It was not her. I was there looking, I saw. I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up. She went away. Did she go as far as town? She went further than town. Did all those rabbits and possums go further than town. God made the rabbits and possums. He made the train. Why must he make a different place for them to go if she is just like the rabbit? Paul walks around his shadow. Does the saw. Sounds like it is asleep. And then Vartaman comes to this poor white sharecropper cropper home and still sees it from his standpoint. His wife wants him to go and check and see if she's died yet. Is Addie Bundren died? You go and check. He says, no, it's raining in the morning. It was not to midnight and had set in to rain when he woke us. It had been a doubtful night with the storm making a night when a fellow looks for most anything to happen before he can get the stock fed and himself to the house and supper ate and in bed with the rain starting. And when Peabody's team came up, lathered with the broken harness dragging and the neck yoke betwixt the critter's legs, Cora says it's Addie Bundren. She's gone at last. Well, Peabody Martyr been to, er, one of a dozen houses hereabouts. Besides, how do you know it's Peabody's team? Well, ain't it? She says you hitch up now. What for? I says if she is gone, we can't do nothing till morning. And it is fixing to storm, too. It's my duty, she says you put the team in. But I wouldn't do it. Stands to reason they'd send for us if they needed us. You don't even know she's gone yet. Why don't you know that's Peabody's team? Do you claim it ain't? Well, then. But I wouldn't go. When folks wants a fellow, It's best to wait till they sense for him. I found it's my Christian duty, Cora says. Will you stand between me and my Christian duty? You can stay there all day tomorrow if you want. I says. So when Cora awaked me, it had set in to rain even while I was going to the door with the lamp and its shining on the glass so I could see myself coming. It kept on knocking, not loud, but steady, like he might have gone to sleep thumbing. But I never noticed how low down on the door the knocking was till I opened it. And I never seen nothing. I held the lamp up with the rain sparking across it, and Cora back in the hall saying, who is it? Vernon? But I couldn't see nobody at all at first until I looked down and around the door, lowering the lamp. He looked like a drowned puppy in them overalls without no hat, splashed up to his knees where he had walked them for miles in the mud. Well, I'll be darned. I says. Who is it? Vernon? Cora says. He looked at me, his eyes round and black in the middle. Like when you throw a light in an owl's face. You mind that air fish, he says. Come into the house, I says. What is it, your ma, Vernon? Cora says he stood kind of around behind the door in the dark. The rain was blowing onto the lamp, hissing on it so that I'm scared every minute it'll break. You was there, he says you seen it then? Cora comes to the door. You come right in, out of the rain, she says, pulling him in and him watching me. He looked just like a drowned puppy. I told you, Cora says. I told you it was a happening. You go and hitch. But he ain't said I says. He looked at me, dripping onto the floor. He's a ruining the rug, of course, as you go get the team while I take him into the kitchen. But he hung back there, dripping, watching me with them eyes. You was there. You seen it laying there? Cash is fixing to nail her up. And it was a laying right there on the ground. You seen it? You seen the mark in the dirt. The rain never came up till after I was coming here. We can get back in time. I'll be darned if it didn't give me the creeps even when I didn't know it yet. Great spiritual forms are like spiritual persons. They impress in such a way through the symbol, transforms and reorder the physical world and reorder the mind. The mind is more naive than the body. The body can get back to nature and get well, but the mind wants. It's taught to be abstracted. Can't get back to nature. To get well, it has to get back to feeling to get well. And if you don't know how to feel, how are you going to get well? More next week.