Symbol 4

This is symbols four and we're getting set to move on to another pair of books. And so you might want to get them during this next week. We're going to shift from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. We're going to shift over to a new pair. One of them will be William Blake's illustrations to The Book of Job, and the other will be a work of philosophy by an American philosopher, Susanne Langer. I used to use philosophy in A New Key for many decades, But I'm going to use the first volume of her trilogy, three volumes that make a set. The first volume is readable by itself. It's called mind An Essay on Human Feeling, and I think it's important to distinguish that we are capable of looking at the mind in terms of its origins. And because we can look at the mind in terms of its origins, we can also develop the capacity to see the mind as a form. It's one of the peculiarities of mathematics in an advanced state that once you know the origin point, you can trace its development all the way through its entire quality, even unto infinity. This comes as a great surprise to people who are educated in terms of the mind, and who see everything in terms of the mind. They have the proverbial rose colored glasses, and they don't know that the cosmos comes in a larger rainbow than you could imagine, that the rainbow that you can see is but a small arc of the entire spectrum. The entire electromagnetic spectrum is quite huge, and it's complemented by a magnetoelectric spectrum, which is about 10 billion times the energy. If you were an electromagnetic ghost Capable of floating through the universe at infinite speed. And you encountered the Magneto-electric cosmos. You would pass through without even knowing that it was there. If you can imagine the space in between an electron and a nucleus magnified 10 billion times minimally, you can see that there are transcendental realms that make our sense of transcendence paltry. Part of the presentation today is to recalibrate that symbols while they deal with the mind, while they focus on thinking, on thought are capable of accepting what we would call today and have called for a long time. Transforms and because symbols can accept transforms, all symbolic forms are capable of undergoing a transformation and having an applicability in a differential mode. That is, all symbolic forms integrate, are capable of integrating, symbols integrate. They most certainly do that, and they're very powerful at that. But a transformed symbol is able to differentiate also. And so there is a monumental watershed. There's a threshold. And the threshold is so peculiar, so unique, the threshold between an integral and the complementarity to it, which is a differential Your realm of possibility, a field. And so one can talk about objectively the world of things. The world of protons and electrons and neutrons. The world of atomic structure. The world of points that occur. And one can even pair with those points, the processes that also occur. So that one in a language has nouns and verbs. But there is such a thing as a transformational grammar that takes those nouns and those verbs out of their collecting mode, out of the integral mode of working, and transforms them into something else Transforms the narrative line of a myth into the surprising string figure of a fairy tale. And the difference between a fairy tale and a myth is monumental. For a fairy tale has always been a language which has undergone a transformation, and generally in a fairy tale. The transform, as we will see, is that one changes from being a figure within a story to being the storyteller, and it is a monumental change. Remember in the 60s when esoteric underground comic books were all the rage? George DiCaprio was one of the great illustrators. Leonardo DiCaprio's dad And George once said the classic revelation fairy tale revelation in the 60s comic book range was written by R crumb when he wrote a character who asked the question, who drew you? Isn't everyone drawn? No. There are transforms where a universe becomes a field of possibility, which is a cosmos in which you are the draw and no one has drawn you, not even yourself. And I remember one of the phrases from Rabbi Alvin Fine in San Francisco. He said, when you are within the traditional orthodoxy of Judaism. You understand the phrase when Moses asked the burning bush, who shall I say sent me? The traditional translation is I am that I am. But the transform in Hellenistic Judaism was to understand the vocabulary in a different dynamic, not in the a equals a tautological certainty of I am what I am, but in the transformative grammar of I will be who I will be. It is wide open. And in that sense, one understands Moses in a Philo of Alexandria way. God is saying, I am unlimited. Don't put a form on me. So there is a quality here that we're trying to appreciate in symbols for the quality is that while symbols do indeed integrate, in fact they become so powerful that they dominate. They order in such a way that they can index all of the meaning of an image base. They can take sets upon sets, upon sets of images, narratives of plot lines. They can take the nouns and verbs and take those plot lines and take those sets, those narrative episodes, and even abstract them and bring them together in something called the geometry. The mind is so powerful that it can geometries experience. But there is beyond that, beyond the mind, the capacity for a geometry to acquire the transform of a trigonometry and a trigonometry shifts its emphasis from a structure which is static in geometrical, to a structure which is dynamic and has relationalities and other relationalities comes a whole new sense of comparative proportions, which are called ratios. That mind is the rational mind, not the mind that can take a categorical index on an integral alone, but the mind that can begin to accept a transform and see the ratios of the real. This mind then prepares itself for a yet deeper transformation. The mind that has transformed by a trigonometric functioning, gone from the plane of geometry figures to the sphere of trigonometric relationalities, is prepared then, for a deeper transform, where consciousness comes into play and consciousness is much more powerful than the mind. Thought is indeed powerful. But consciousness can wrap the mind up into a single form and contemplate it whole. If we have A ribbon if we have a flow of a process. If we have a flow like time, time as the first dimension which flows and then it's flow, it blossoms into space just as it happens. As time flows, space blossoms in the dynamic of time so that there is a possibility, a space, space possibility where the flow can have an intersection, it can have an integral and a point can form and many points can form. They are part of the flow, but they are what we would call an architectonic of the flow, so that all structures in the integral universe are architectonics of time. They are all time bound. All integral forms are time bound, including the mind, including the universe. It is time bound also. But there is such a thing as a transform. Where eternity comes into play. And differential consciousness is not time bound. These are the eternal fields where indeed God has his home, but not in a form that we would understand in any kind of naive way. There is a ratio quality that we're learning to appreciate. And so when we come to symbols for, we're looking at Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Stream of consciousness writing. It isn't that the stream of consciousness is a time continuum. It isn't that at all. It's that the stream of consciousness is a differential field of eternity, which from time to time can penetrate into the foreground so that the narrative line of time bound imagery, which can be symbolized, suddenly parts and discloses that the context of time forms is eternity. And there are eternal moments in To the Lighthouse. There are eternal moments and as I lay dying, and that it takes great art to disclose the eternal within the temporal. It's difficult if one is trained only in an education mode, that trains the mind to understand that the mind, capacious as it is, is a limited form. But such is the case. Today's lecture bears a very odd title. Its title is numeracy. Algebra's literacy and we talk. Last week we brought in this beautiful volume that the University of Texas put out a few years ago before writing From Counting to Cuneiform by Denise She meant besserat her great volume in several parts, showing that numeracy preceded literacy in world civilisation by at least 5000 years. We were using symbols to count and to register numerical, largely business, transactions for many millennia before any kind of alphabet, any kind of cuneiform, any kind of Chinese characters were developed. So that numeracy goes back much farther than literacy. And numeracy has a ritual comportment rather than a symbolic focus, though they are symbols. Numbers when they work tend to be Ritual in their focus. They have a symbolic base, but the point of focus is in ritual. Whereas a symbol which undergoes a transform does not have its point of focus in ritual, but has its field of base opened up into vision so that a transformed symbol is literally a number turned inside out and out of that number turned inside out, one gains a visionary capacity where the tendency is not to go back to ritual action to confirm its objectivity. The mind loves to have its objectivity, its symbolic objectivity confirmed by action. And we're taught in the world to consider this practical. And indeed, in terms of nature, it is practical to see if your ideas work out that you can do something. But in consciousness, that's no proof at all. In fact, it's irrelevant. It has nothing whatsoever to do with truth in consciousness. Whether there's an action or not, whether it's traditional or new is completely irrelevant. The resonance of the real is for further possibilities to generate. And that's what vision is all about. In one of the earliest wisdom communities where this kind of education was taught and developed, the phase form brought into a curriculum of somewhat limited time for a larger population, a mixed population by the way of men and women. Previous to that, most populations of wisdom were limited to men. But the great teacher who brought men and women together in a larger community of wisdom teaching was Pythagoras. And in Pythagoras, in the Pythagorean teaching, in that educational community, there were two distinct modalities, two distinct levels, two distinct groups. We would call them in sociology or in advanced anthropological analysis. We would call them moieties. The first group were the arithmetic, i.e. those who understood numbers and how numbers work, and how integration functions and leads to powerful ideas that the mind can make, held together, synched by symbols. But the other group constituting then a set a moiety. The other group were called the mathematicae, and they were different. Now the arithmetic were limited. When they initially began to a pair of functions. The original arithmetic could listen, but could not speak. You were enjoined, not forbidden. That's a little strong, but you were constantly enjoined not to speak that for five years, for a period of five years to learn to listen, because what was being said, what was being used, was not an ordinary language, but was a language that had laced into it certain transforms. And it took a while for you to get used to hearing. And when you built up the ear of hearing, remember we talked about how all of Buddha's remembered sermons began with thus have I heard. In fact, one of the most powerful amulets in the Vajrayana in Tibetan is the Tibetan character for thus. The Tibetan word for. Thus Ivan. And that symbol became even more powerful than om, because Ivan in the Vajrayana is the starting point for the hearing of truth, and it takes a while to recalibrate. The brain actually changes its pattern of neuronal working by hearing. When you hear truth long enough, the brain combs itself out like fresh water. Running long enough on natural rocks will purify itself. It takes water about three miles of running over granite to purify itself in nature. Used to before acid rain, but it used to take about five years, 2500 years ago. For someone of ordinary capacity and of extraordinary curiosity, to be able to stop hearing in a tribal way, to stop hearing in an encoded way, and to be able to just hear what someone was saying to you that was new, not loaded with identifiable qualities, but presenting ratios of the real, where something new could be seen almost any time so that the arithmetic had a pair, one for five years. They were called in Greek akousmatikoi those who heard. And when you could hear, one of the qualities that would come out is that you could speak extemporaneously and make sense. You didn't have to plan out what you were going to say, which meant that you had not conditioned yourself, but you had deconditioned yourself from having to figure out what you're going to say ahead of time. And one of the proofs of someone who, on the arithmetic level, was ready for a transform is that you could speak spontaneously, and the short form of that was that you could make a prayer of praise, a poem of praise for the divine on the spur of the moment, on the spot, and recite it fresh, never having thought of it before, never having it written down. So the spontaneous poem or prayer of praise was always the high water mark in world wisdom for all civilizations. That one was ready for the deeper transform, the deeper transform to move out of the arithmetical, numeracy based, ritual based certainty, to transform to the spiritual person, the differential spiritual person whose sense of certainty is not that you can pound Found something, but that you can gesture to an ever widening field of possibility. This quality of wisdom education, once sensed once gone through, is indelible. You will never again be misled. You will be able to tell, although figuring out what to do about it in this world is a little difficult. Now. Someone beautifully said of their ten year old daughter a couple of weeks ago that she began to say, you know, my playmates don't sense people are on the other side. They don't sense the presence of people who have died or people who are not there. And the mother said, well, we can talk about it, but don't speak too much to your friends about it. They'll think that you're weird. She said, well, mom, can I just be real part time then? So we're part time real for a little while. But you will get full pay and you're insured. The good news is that the pioneering of all this was done before this star ever burst into flame. This universe is at least 15 billion years old, and the star system here is only about four and a half, 5 billion years old. So everybody, everything has been taken care of before this star started its supper. Don't worry. It's 100% out of your hands. So as time unfolds or flows. And it's interesting because the first computer language apparently was called Flow-matic in the 50s, done by a woman. Grace Hopper. The flow-matic, the way in which one moves and the purpose of it was to disclose. Business transactions the way that numeracy had done for the last 8 or 9000 years. They used to be called, yet when they were clay like this tokens. So that numeracy. Has a token quality. It doesn't deal with the real but with representations of images. Which are supposed to be participating in the real. Now all this is fine as long as you can keep track, as long as you remember all of the counters in this. But the difficulty with the mind is that the better it gets, the quicker it gets, and abstraction becomes a pernicious habit. And you forget that these are tokens, these are representations, these are appearances, and their processes are taken then to be quite legitimate and in fact, the source of certainty, so that the manipulation of representations is considered a proof of certainty, which is patently absurd. It is full of so many logical flaws that there's not enough time left in this world to characterize them all, so that there is something else that's going on here. And out of Flow-matic came COBOL, the common Business oriented language. That's what it was. Computer languages for data processing. Not about math, not about mathematics, but in particular, not even processed in a wisdom way through the arithmetic. No one ever took time to listen long enough to hear what they were saying to each other. When COBOL was formed, apparently they were supposed to be three groups. The short range group, the intermediate group, and the Long Range Group was planned in the Pentagon in early 1959. The Department of Defense brought in the biggest industrial giants like IBM and RCA, Sperry Rand, the US Air Force and Department of Bureau of Standards, and several other powerful agencies, and they said, we're going to make a new language for the coming computers to run business for us in this world. And through that, we will take care of all the situations that are likely to arise. And we don't need to depend upon mathematics. We will make our own from scratch data processing language and have its ritual certainty. In those days, the ritual certainty was rather a dirty business. By the way, when computers first began, they used to have stacks and stacks of of cards. They were called IBM cards with little tiny slots, rectangular slots, maybe 2 or 300. Sometimes on a card there would be tens of thousands, if not millions of these cards, and you would stand in front of these computers with a vibrating little card sorter that would organize these cards, and the dust and soot and paper bits would be snowing in the computer offices, and you would come out and you would be filled with grime and grit. And it was a certain veracity that one should have known that one is dealing slightly with the demonic air. But in an ignorant society encased within a dead civilization, in a even more decadent education. No one knew, or those who did passed silently in the night. Someone who went a little deeper than that. We're going to get to him in science. Richard Feynman. One of his early books is called The Theory of Fundamental Processes. And when you look at it, he was at Caltech, and his buddy there at Caltech, Professor IRA, helped with it. You came into such little subjects as Fermi couplings and the failure of parity. Enrico Fermi was the one of the great founders of the way in which to apply the quantum mechanical fractioning fractionating of the atom, so that one didn't just have atom bombs, but one had atomic energy. And one of the world's first commercial atomic reactors was outside of Chicago and named for Fermi. In fact, the Great Fermi Lab is one of the world's great centers, even here in the 21st century for that kind of discussion. Fermi couplings, couplings, pairings, and the failure of parity that there is under the odd exotic duress of transformation, a breakdown of the natural order. Now, this is not so scary at all. All true solutions break down natural order. Sodium chloride dissolves in water. It's a breakdown of the natural order of the crystal. Salt dissolves in water. Water and fire are universal solvents. And if you add alcohols to them for the organics, you find that those three masterful transforms pretty much take care of physical matter. Fire, water, and alcohol will take most of what you can deal with in the physiological, in the existential, in the ritual world. But the transforms for mental forms have a different quality of water, a different quality of fire, different quality of of alcohol. They must have a symbolic deepening of that. And something like trigonometry is a symbolic alcohol. It prepares you for a different kind of transformation. Once you have something in a solution, there's a deeper transform that comes into play to bring something new, a new form out of that solution. And that's where the alchemy came in, just to dissolve something. It's just the first stage, the first step. It's not a breakdown of the natural order to desecrate nature, but it's to take nature into a furthering quality, into a transformed quality. You can call it transcendent if you like, but transcendent as a word has become loaded the last 200 years, loaded with Kantian and Hegelian and many other names that could be applied connotations. I'm keeping it as simple as I can. When symbols take a trance form, you cannot expect that the integral order that was the basis of certainty before will be trustworthy, that it will work at all. And in fact, one of the wisdom things that you can just tie a little bow around your finger in differential consciousness, if you can prove it physically, it's most likely been regressed. If you're able to have an image in your mind of something, then it isn't spiritual. If you have a picture of God in your mind, you can bet that's not God. No graven images. Niels Bohr used to insist, when he had this pack of talented youngsters like Schrodinger and Heisenberg, Heisenberg to to teach. If you can have an imagery of what you're doing, you're not doing it right. Because when you get into the wilds of differential conscious quantum universe, the universe stops being a universe and becomes not quite an omniverse, but a cosmos. The old Pythagorean term is quite accurate. It becomes a cosmos. It becomes unlimited in the sense that the unlimited and the limited together form a set of generating possibilities without end. In the about 700 years after Pythagoras, a phrase was developed and the phrase was world without end. And it replaced in that high, hermetic third century A.D. it replaced the old traditional image of a heaven. That heaven was a place. There was a throne. There was an image of a god sitting on that throne in that place. But instead that God's realm was without limit, and that the high consciousness of spiritual man was to be open to the indefinite, glorious grandeur of God's further realms. And so there is a quite a different thing. And with someone like Feynman, theory of fundamental processes taken to an even higher level, this volume still in print, he wrote with a man named Hibbs from the JPL Quantum Mechanics and Path integrals, that in the integral there is a whole ecology. There's a matrix that contains the entire ecology of nature, ritual, myth and symbol together in a quaternary so that one's appreciation of the whole form. When you deal with it in an equation way. There is such a thing as quadratic equations, and one can apply this to the entire integral path, which is not a path that runs in a straight line, but has an ecology of circumambulation throughout the entire matrix of the square of attention. And that the lines of plot, the narrative lines of the way in which the mythic goes, are but a part of this larger matrix that the geometric using by the mind symbolically in its abstraction Action has also its limitations, and that if you are schooled in an ordinary way, you are so overshadowed and over distanced by the pseudo ideologies of mental training that you suppose that not only is the mind everything, but that your mind is not capable of even full development, and you defer to others and their minds. This is the universal basis of tyranny, and it is not coming into the 21st century. Let's take a break. The flow. The flow of time. So that as. As time flows, space Orson's not in its wake, but almost at the same time, not quite at the same time. But to make the differentiation is a very sophisticated the flow of time. So that time is the ultimate membrane within which forms of integral occur or can occur. But that transcendental forms, differential conscious forms not being time bound, do not have a time boundary. So that it takes a different context within which to see conscious forms And the person is a conscious form. Person is not an existential form, not a symbolic form. And we can use a clumsy kind of language. It's actually a language that's 300 years old. The first person to use this kind of language that I'm using right now was Sir Isaac Newton before he was, sir. When Isaac Newton did his experiments with light, he used prisons. And he found that if you take a darkened room with just a little slat of sunlight coming in, and you put a prism in the slot of sunlight, the prism will make a rainbow spectrum against one of the walls. And he found that light fractionates into the color spectrum so that sunlight starlight. The photons that come in as visible light in the ordinary universe. Holds its integration in nature, but as soon as it's put into a prismatic transform, it gives you the spectrum. So instead of having the photon being incorporated in the light, the photon gives you the spectrum of its full possibilities. And we know now that that spectrum, that rainbow on Newton's wall, extends beyond the visual into the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was there all the time. He just we can't see it That our eyes are calibrated through billions of years of evolution. Carl Sagan's billions. Billions and billions. And our eyes are meant to see visible light. Our eyes are perfectly calibrated to see by visual light. We can't see in the infrared or the ultraviolet. Yet they exist. We can't see in the x rays, yet they. They exist. And we have equipment. We have technology. We have machinery with which to see that ultraviolet astronomy is undergoing a huge transformation as we speak. Just as x ray astronomy did about a generation ago, because we're able now to go into energy levels beyond that of visual light. Cosmic rays. One can see now by cosmic rays. One can see the development where we're going to have the ability to see by gravity waves. I don't think we'll see neutrino blizzards for a while, but that's possible in some more distant joyousness. All of this is to disclose that differential consciousness has so much more wider range than the mind that it is unbelievable, and the comparison is ridiculous. Which makes Of an education that limits itself to the mind as the context actually a puerile. Pseudo education. So that our whole sense of calibration is in need of including transform, not at the end but at the middle. That there is as much after a transformation to find out and learn as there is before. And this is a polite way to say it, that the supernatural has as much dimension and possibility and significance as all of nature put together, and nature's rather stupendous. Which means that when we're learning Symbols, as we are doing now, and we're learning the powers of the mind that not only can symbols integrate, but that that integration can be on higher and higher orders, not just to integrate a set of images into a symbol, but one could integrate sets of symbols into a higher order of symbols and so on. And you can go very, very far along this compacting density and that the mind is very good for this and very suited for this. And does this naturally is not a big thing for the mind to be able to do this. It just takes any training and discipline. But. The ritual confirmation of symbols is a very low level Of truth ascertainment. It's not a very good basis upon which to make an assay of truthfulness at all. If we look at this symbol rubbing from England. Saint George slaying the dragon. The circle surrounded by the floral motif within which is the circle, the Roman arch put into a kind of a Gothic cathedral window treatment. And that done full circle so that there are eight floral petals to the Gothic. And if you look at Saint George slaying the dragon, one can appreciate the symbol and the fact that he's the patron saint of England. But if you go to confirm this symbolic presentation on the basis of experience in nature, you can see that it's very deficient, because here Saint George is holding the lance at the very end with one hand, and you're not going to be able to slay a very strong dragon holding an eight foot lance on the end. It's going to be brushed aside the first time the dragon twitches. So you have to confirm the symbolic through running it back through experience and that experience in a resonant harmony with nature and a more virile saint. George Would hold the lance tucked under his arm, as you did in any kind of a serious knighthood joust. And about two thirds of the way back, so that your thrust is not through your arm, you break your arm. If you try to thrust the lance through something as strong as a shield or an armoured body, much less a dragon. You do it with body anguish. It's the only way that you can do it, unless you've jousted with some pretty tough knights. You will never know that unless you're able to consult, experience, and get that experience in sync with nature. If you just have your symbols, go back to the ritual comportment, back to the existentials for confirmation of truth. You can be led astray very quickly and never know it. The mind can be Received. You have to really distort the body to deceive it. The body registers lies right away. It's the wrong food. This is not the way to do this. It's the wrong situation. The bodies are extremely truthful, like children and animals. They have to be really distorted to sustain any kind of lie. But the mind is susceptible to lying and not even know it. If we take a photograph like this, the Hubble Deep Field photograph, and we see this was a blank spot of sky, and they ran the Hubble Space Telescope on it for, I think, ten days straight. And this entire chipboard of galaxies came out. There's a blank. Three squares in the top. Does that mean that the universe doesn't record there? No. It's an artifact of the photography process with the Hubble telescope. So that one can have symbols and you can find an alignment with ritual action, with existentials, with the body. You can find that kind of alignment, but you cannot trust that that alignment is then the criteria or the arbiter for truth or certainty at all. It's always best to take in an integral the whole path integral, which means consulting the entire matrix of nature, ritual, myth, and symbol as an ensemble together as a matrix, and consulting that to see how that ecology of integration plays out. And it's not an ecology like a plate of spaghetti. It has a path integral. It's very rarely ever a simple curve. It does convolute like a plate of spaghetti, but it can be followed. The mind's capacity to discern that kind of complexity is there, and we can do that. But the consulting physician always has to be a visionary consciousness, because the mind will get lost in the convolutions of its own power and never know it. And this is indeed a source of great problem. It was bad enough when there were individuals in Neolithic times. Who could do that? And lord it over a valley. But when you have the power of a worldwide civilization, we can't have the risk of a dictator who can manipulate atomics and genetics, getting lost in the plateful of spaghetti of his non-mature integral. There isn't any population democratic enough anywhere in the universe to deal with that kind of tyranny. You simply lose. So the wise thing is to deal with it now, to deal ahead and with Feynman, with the theory of fundamental processes, with quantum mechanics and the integral path. One doesn't come out to a super sombre thing, but the pleasure of finding things out. You get a pleasure out of this. And we're going to use in science later on next year. His QED, quantum electrodynamics, the Strange Theory of light and matter, little Princeton publication. Just excellent. We're preparing ourselves to explore that differential range next year, which is as broad and as comprehensive as the integral range has been for us this year. And we'll find that there's another matrix. There is a differential matrix that has further capacities that are engendered by transform the capacities of vision, the capacities of art, of history and of science, and that those capacities need to be appreciated in their own kind, in their own way. If they're reduced, and the understanding of them is on the basis of a ritual comportment, on the practical action level, the misunderstanding simply reinforces the mind's bad habit into a perniciousness, which develops into an illusion, which deepens into a delusion. And when you believe that's your delusion, and a delusion carries itself indefinitely because it has no check in nature whatsoever, it has no check in life. An abstract delusion is indeed a madness in which one could be lost indefinitely. And it's true that there is a capacity for cosmic expanded consciousness to go in and pull that person out, but that's a very difficult and delicate situation. Let's come to our let's come to our texts for the last time. We've looked at as I Lay Dying as a presentation of not a storyline, but of a transformed symbolic storyline where the reader is the storyteller. And what Faulkner has done as he's presented a flow of characters, each of the characters having a standpoint, having a character set. A character boundedness by which they see the world, and as the novel is read, the storyline unfolds and a cognizant reader can use the book as a prism and tell many different stories from this one. There was a volume of poetry one time by an American poet named Kenneth Patchen. It was called A box for Containing All Possible Journeys, and it was a series of poems that were presented literally in a box, and you could arrange them in whatever way that you wanted and come up with new poems. I remember one time at the University of Wisconsin, which is on Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, and there's a spit of land that goes quite far out into Lake Mendota. And at the very end is this tree that grows out over and one time in an inebriate. I don't say celebrant, but inebriate condition. I crawled out and swung around on that tree to carve my initials. And there were the initials and the name Kenneth Patchen, 1947. So I went to my favorite book dealer, and I said, who the hell is Kenneth Patchen? Because I thought, you know, this would be interesting. And I was presented with a patron's, a great poetic epic, Albion Moonlight, which is indeed stream of consciousness raised to the nth degree. So here we have Faulkner. We have a time flow, the pace of which is, however, is the cadence of our reading. And in this case it's not reading silently, but it's reading out loud. It's lifting the symbols off the page in an oral, mythic way so that your experience is mythic first and then symbol later. But I'm reading it in such a way that I'm trying to keep the symbols transparent, to transform so that you will have the experience of hearing the mythic, but understanding the visionary so that if it's done successfully, the symbols become windows through which the experience of the meaning flows into the prismatic spectrum of possibility. And sure enough, the first long section of to the lighthouse is called the window. Here's the end of as I Lay Dying, the son who built the coffin for the dying mother, Addie Bundren, who has died. Cash. So Jule got the team and come for me, and they fixed me a pallet in the wagon. He hurt his leg, and we drove across the square to the corner where Paul said, and we was waiting there in the wagon with Dewey, Dell, and Vardaman eating bananas when we see them coming up the street. Paul was coming along with that kind of dearsum and hangdog look all at once, like when he has been up to something and he knows Ma ain't going to like carrying a grip in his hand. And Jule says, who's that? Then we see it wasn't the grip that made him look different, it was his face. And Jule Jules says he got them teeth. It was a fact. It made them look a foot taller. Kind of holding his head up. Hangdog and proud, too. And then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip, a kind of duck shaped woman all dressed up with them, kind of hard looking pop eyes, like she was daring a man to say nothing. And there we sat, watching them and Dewey, Dell's and Vardaman's mouth half open and half ate bananas in their hands, and her coming round from behind, poor looking at us like she dared e'er a man. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little gramophones. She was for a fact all shut up as pretty as a picture. And every time a new record would come from the mail order and us sitting in the house in the winter listening to it, I think, what a shame Darrell wouldn't be there to enjoy it too. But it's better for him. This world is not his world. This life, not his life. It's cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell, Paul says, kind of hangdog and proud too, and with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. Meet Missus Bundren, he says, as soon as he could. He went to town and got a new wife. What we're experiencing, aside from the beauty of Faulkner's great storytelling, is how the mythic flow that mythic horizon Cannot be processed by the mind, but the mind can hold its forms in transparent. Lightness and allow for the experience to go through into the visionary so that we envision the story, and in doing so, we become storytellers ourselves. It is a very great difficulty to learn to do this in a specific way. And yet it is so natural to us because we are, after all, the conscious kind, that it can be engendered just by doing it. And so a lot in this education is just simply to do it, and in retrospect, to disclose and to find out how it was that we did it. And that can be done in retrospect. So that in a Pythagorean community, 2500 years ago, when you had learned to listen long enough so that you could speak extemporaneously, you were then taken out of the numeracy and the algebra of integration, and you were brought right to the threshold to where the mathematician you could take over, where you could begin to see the juxtapositions of proportions and begin to ratio the real. And this would give you an interior structuring, which was not at all diagrammatic, but the Pythagorean way was always to give it a foundation In music, you learn to compose and to sing your music. And there's all the difference in the world between knowing the dance steps and being able to sing your ceremonies with the community. There's a whole difference in that. And the spiritual dance of the community was its proof of being, not in the fact that you all believed the right thing and the same thing. That's not, say, redundancy and it's idiocy. It's that you all dance together and your lives carried that transform into your consciousness. And that's how wisdom men and women have for many tens of thousands of years come to maturity. This is a little section from to the lighthouse. The lighthouse? Yes. It's a symbol. The beacon of the light is a symbol. It's periodicity of illuminating the people, the landscape. It's relentless metronome of periodic illumination. As if it were some kind of a terrestrial pulsar, giving the cadence of encoding a symbolic integral. But here again, we have to guard ourselves. And wisdom always learns to guard itself from its own tendency to be supercilious. Only our conscientiousness prevents that unbeknown slipping and sliding and compacting the symbol, if it jumps immediately to ritual, becomes an encoding for a habitual action, and one begins to look at other people in terms of whether they're toeing the line. There's very little enlightenment for someone who does, who pushes a lot of code, as programmers will say. I've pushed a lot of code in my time, but I never got an insight into wisdom doing that. I made a good paycheck. Pushing code is not at all the process that one wants to do here. That's a tool and that encodes that numeracy, those algebras. They are tools and used as tools that are very effective. And they can bring us out of the arithmetical right to the Hold of that trigonometric transform that allows us to go into the infinite. Infinitely large and infinitely small, with the threshold of equanimity apparent. And one never sees equanimity. There's no nice fine line in the spirit that. Oh, there's the equanimous. It's that that flow becomes so completely. Extended that the line's resonances have carried it out to the entirety of the time. Form. Remember, anything is not just what it is. It has its resonances. It has its fragrance. It has its light reflecting qualities. It has all kinds of electromagnetic properties. They're all a part of what's real about it. And until differential consciousness comes into play, there's no possibility of doing an analytic which is much beyond weighing it, counting it, and clubbing somebody over the head if they don't get it. Whereas if you do a differential analysis on this mathematically, you could do that indefinitely. One of the differences in a mathematics different from a data processing is that you will find increasing numbers of techniques and processes, all bearing the names of people who discovered them, who invented them, who disclosed them. And if you don't know what a Green's function is, you could find out. And you can do an awful lot when you have just a few of these kinds of transforms so that an education like this is made to sensitize us, me as well as you again, to the fact that if we hold our emblems lightly, the I-Ching says heaven suspends its emblems. There's no glue in the sky holding the stars there. There doesn't have to be. Even the gravity waves are but intersecting resonances of the existentiality. There's very, very good possibility that gravity is a resonance of point. Objectivity. Very good. How can I put it Pythagorean wise? Gravity is the sound of objectivity. That's why it says thus. Have I heard. When you hear an enlightened one Enlightenment speak. It has that dustiness. Here's Virginia Woolf, who in 1927 writing To the Lighthouse, was extraordinarily sophisticated in the resonances and ratios of the real. He was sorry that he had said, damn you. But no, he did not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little. They both felt uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back. She had been reading fairy tales to James, she said. No, they could not share that. They could not say that they had reached the gap between the two clumps of red hot pokers. And there was the lighthouse again. But she would not let herself look at it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought she would not have let herself sit there thinking she disliked anything that reminded her that she had been sitting thinking. So she looked over her shoulder at the town. The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that. Mrs. Ramsey thought the lights of the town and the harbor, and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which it sunk. Well, if he could not share her thoughts, Mrs. Ramsey. Mr. Ramsey said to himself he would be off then on his own. He wanted to go on thinking. Telling himself the story. How Hume was stuck in a bog. He wanted to laugh. But first it was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's age. He used to walk about the country all day long with nothing but a biscuit in his pocket, and nobody bothered about him or thought that he had fallen over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for the day's walk if the weather held. He had had about enough of banks and of Carmichael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he thought, looking across the bay as they stood between the clumps of red hot pokers he had walked all day. He had made a meal of bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch. An old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best over there. Those sand hills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house, scarcely not a single village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there alone he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children, he reminded himself, and he would have been a beast and a cur. To wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man. That he had been true would be a beauty. Her mother said they would stem the flood a little bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole. His eight children, they showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely. For on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the hand dwindling away. The little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea. Poor little place, he murmured with a sigh. She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed. Directly he had said them. He always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase making was a game, she thought. For if she had said half what he said, she would have blown out her brains by now. More next week.