Symbol 5

Today we have our our amulets and we'll see how many people made amulets. I brought an amulet that my daughter had made when she was ten. And these are. An amulet is always a symbol that holds meaning, and it holds that meaning in a form so that symbols are forms, and symbolic forms are can be enormously stable. There are symbolic forms that have stayed with us for tens of thousands of years, some of them hundreds of thousands of years. So the stability of symbols reflects the objectivity of the mind. We're used to thinking of the mind as being rather fluid or facile, but generally minds are formed, or, to use the Elizabethan pronunciation, formed. They're made into forms, and the structures of those formations are meanings that are fortified by curling some of the meaning back into experience, and having that experience come back, and then curling it back again and again. And then this laminar way, we build up a quality of meaning which gets fortified by belief. So that gradually the mythic origins of symbols become overlaid by a covering of laminar layers of belief, so that later on, if someone says in a colloquial sense, well, that's just a myth that needs to be exploded, they're not really talking about myth, they're talking about belief, about beliefs. It is the belief structure that gives the bones to culture and allows for tradition to be passed on, so that this whole process is not one that should be foregone or watered down or crippled in any way, much less obliterated. We need that culture is built up in this way. Tradition is continuous in this way, and we need the capacity to have belief and belief structures. But they are a different variety from myth. And so in our education, when we looked at the way in which myth was a flow, that the mythic horizon was like the surface of a sphere, or if you like, a surface of a bubble and that that surface, that sphere of experience is the carrier for that was language. And as language develops an ability to penetrate to interiorize, to go inside of the sphere, inside of the bubble to occupy that inner space. That inner space as a psychic area that develops is the beginnings of the mind. And so the mind is an interiority, an interiority that has its capacities also to create an objective realm which has as much stability in nature as existential things. And so the objects of existence, things which exist, the things of the world, are in a very brief, cursory way, thought to correlate with interior Objectivity, and the old traditional sense of wisdom from hundreds of thousands of years ago was that things have a capacity to enter into us and take up existence within us, so that we have the objects of the world which occur within us, and that there's an existential reality that carries over from that, so that the power of the image was that it was the carried quality of the thing that has entered the mind. But about 2500 years ago, there was a flip flop of this traditional wisdom. And the notion came, it was a philosophic notion that the interior objects are. Imitations. They are representations. They're imitations of the outer things. And that there is a mimesis involved. And the first codified presentation of this viewpoint was made by Aristotle about 2400 years ago in in the city of Athens in Greece. The Aristotelian outlook was a radical inversion of the traditional wisdom. You would not have found the idea that an interior realm had an imitative correlation to an exterior realm in someone like Pythagoras. Even in Plato, you find that this is always questioned. It's always one of the basis for the questionings and in later refined Greek thought, in Plotinus, you find a complete understanding that the idea that art is an imitation of life, that symbols are secondary to existentials, that they're dependent upon them, is not true at all. Not the case. If you look at the classic wisdom teachers, let's say from China, you will find consistently through Chinese civilization, from the times of Fushi 3000 BC to the Duke of Zhou, 1100 BC to Lao Tzu, about 500 BC to Chuang Tzu about 300 BC, all the way to Huineng about 600 700 A.D.. Consistently, Chinese wisdom sees it the way that Pythagoras and Plotinus would have seen it, and they would have seen it the way that Homer saw it. And if you went to India, you would find a consistent wisdom tradition from the earliest Upanishad of Yajnavalkya, of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad about 900 BC, through the historical Buddha, through Nagarjuna, all the way through Patanjali. You would have found likewise this wisdom tradition. The Greek rationalist inversion of the way in which nature integrates had catastrophic difficulties attendant upon it in the ancient world, and one of the difficulties was that Alexander the Great was a prized student of Aristotle, and spread the Aristotelian outlook throughout most of the known world. The arch rivals of the Greeks of that time were always the Persians from the times of. Probably from Pythagoras, who studied in Persia for 11 years and had no problem with the Persians whatsoever. About 550 BC, but from the time of around. Probably from about 500 BC. The Greeks and the Persians were always antagonistic to each other, vying for control and all the way through Alexander the Great's realm. He died in 322 BC, so for a couple of hundred years, the classic understanding of Persian outlook on symbols comes from a report by the great Greek historian Herodotus and Herodotus. This is book one, section 133. Herodotus informs us that the Persians are very fond of wine. It is their custom to discuss important affairs in a state of intoxication, and on the following morning their decisions are put before them by the master of the House, where the deliberations have been held, and if they approve of the decision in the state of sobriety, they act accordingly. If not, they set it aside until the next drinking session. When sober and they have their first deliberations, they always reconsider the matter when under the influence of wine. In a similar manner, Strabo, the first century AD, a Greek geographer and consequent historian because of that, says that the Persians consultation on the most important affairs are carried out only while drinking, and that they consider resolutions made at that time more depended upon than those made when sober. And about 1000 A.D. in the Shahnama by Ferdowsi. The great Persian epic, the Epic of Kings always. Deliberations are held during drinking bouts, but decision is postponed till the following day and you find this quality always there. In China, after the Han dynasty, China's greatest mystical poet, Li Po was always writing poems with a cup of wine. All of his poems are about what the Persians used to call the drunken universe, that there is something in the state of intoxication where one lets go of the conviction that the mind lords it over things and that things manipulate the mind that that two way street. Because mimesis works both ways. If you're convinced that things are imitated by the mind, then the way the world is, the mind will have to obey. But if the mind is strong enough, then it tells the way things are going to be, and the world can damn well toe up. That two way street of imitation was always dissolved. When one is drunk, when one is inebriated, so that under the influence of wine, the Chinese from the Han dynasty down always considered this the more trustworthy, like the Persians, the more trustworthy state. Incidentally, the grape was introduced into China by a general name Qian Qian about the second century BC. Before that, the Chinese never had the grape. It's interesting, too, because the grape was introduced at the same time as alfalfa. Alfalfa is the food for horses, and in the great Central Asian steppes, where the Persians had their vineyards, they traveled by horses, and so alfalfa and grapes came together, and the great Chinese general who brought them also brought a new style of horse into China, so that when you see the Han dynasty, you see instead of the coteries of warriors for the first time, you see an armed cavalry, which are the pride of the Han dynasty. And later on, when the Tang dynasty is founded, it redoes the Han because it gets the latest breed of horses who were much faster. Han horses are like Clydesdales. They're very strong and they're stout. In war, Infantry have no chance against an armed, trained man on a horse that doesn't budge in battle. But the Tang horse is different from the Han horse. The Tang horse is built for speed, and the Tang dynasty was built on horses that are completely mobile because they had discovered by that time, instead of the Roman formations of the Han, they had discovered Alexander the Great's technique of whipping cavalry around and outflanking an enemy. Napoleon won many battles by understanding how to use cavalry in an Alexander the Great mode, and the founder of the Tang dynasty, Tongue tied sung did the same thing. He extended China from the Pacific Ocean all the way to Afghanistan because he did a Pony Express thing. He kept thousands of horses, pooled every 30 or 40 miles so that he could send an army across to Asia in the time that it would take most deliberations by the enemy to decide what to do. They were already there. So the grape and alfalfa, the sense of intoxication adding to the reality of one's mind that one's mind is no longer in the flow of experience, which is flowing between the activities of the ritual existentials and the mental subjectivities in between those two polls the flow of experience, the flow of language, the flow of feeling between those two. But in intoxication, all three of those phases the symbol, the ritual and the myth in between all three of them are set aside as a set. And what you're left with is pure nature. So that when one is intoxicated, the mind is returned back to the mysteriousness of nature, back to a primordiality that pre phases existence, so that one is brought back into the mystery of nature, where the mind works in a different mode, instead of the mind recording an imitation of things through the medium of language, which is representational and having it register as some kind of interior image. That's then building bone through this imitation process. When you are drunk, there's no structure that's built with that set. Ritual is circumambulated language is circumambulated. The symbolic imitative capacity of the mind is outflanked, and one moves with lightning speed to the mystery of nature. And there the mind finds a different kind of affinity that the mind is capable then of original objectivity. That the same process that allowed the ritual action of existence To make objects in the world in a state of mystical immersion in nature. The mind can make original objects that have the same primacy as existence, so that the mind makes originals, not imitations, so that the mind which has gone back through a state of intoxication, to nature, to the mystery of nature, learns to be original. And in this sense, wisdom traditions always talk about men and women who have learned to turn away from this world and the mind made by this world, and to go back to nature, to the original. And that kind of mind makes symbols which are not imitations of anything. They're original and they have because they do not have the the quality of being limited by ritual liminality, because they have the higher integrating dimensions of the mind, an original symbol in the mind is able to integrate the entire structure of nature, so that symbols made in an original mind have the capacity to integrate perfectly, completely. And so one finds in wisdom traditions always some kind of a phrase that talks about the perfect mind, the completed cycle that one finds the center not so much as a center point, but one finds the center because one has brought all of the sphere of the mind to a focus. Now that the center then is a focus, and rather than being a point which would be an imitation of some exterior point, the center of the mind then, is a focus of originality, and that the mind integrates not rituals, not myths, not even early symbols. But it originates an archetypal symbol, sometimes called the self, sometimes called the soul. Always it is the focus of the entire sphere of what reality could integrate. And so this quality is something which for about 2500 years has been misunderstood in all academic school presentations of learning because they simply don't know. The teachers themselves don't know. The tradition of that doesn't know. And so it's the ignorance of the schoolboy raised to a level of sometimes Cambridge dons that they know a lot about their books. They don't know anything about life. They don't know how to live as men and women. And so this whole quality is what we're looking at here. And the title of today's lecture is The Resonance of Presence, the Resonance of Presence. And we talked several times about how in the primordial world. The the earliest wisdom, expressions and images of. If you look at the way in which Australian Aborigines before a lot of civilisation came in and ruined them, if you look at the original expressions in imagery of Australian Aborigines going back about 60,000 years, what always portray objects as having these resonances around them. And if you saw a collection of several objects, say, a kangaroo and an emu and a man, each one of them would have its resonant lines around it. And where the lines intersect, they tended to make diamond patterns, just like the early rocket exhaust. When hydrazine was first used as a fuel, you could tell that the burn was perfect because there would be diamond shapes in the exhaust. It was a sign of the equanimity of the process and of the flow. And in Australian Aborigine bark designs, you always see this. You see the resonant white lines around each existential. And where they intersect you find the diamonds of the wave forms, the wavelets as they intersect. Those diamonds are the jewels of focus, and they become the realm where symbols occur. And that one interplays then with the world in this resonant way. One of the great examples of an early Aborigine shield showed the world of men and animals and plants resonant. And at the top there was an end to the resonance. And then there were five figures of Europeans with nasty faces who had no resonance whatsoever, and they had come to dominate that they could be seen, that they did not know about resonance, they only knew and were free to dominate, because they didn't understand that there was resonance, that there was ecology, that there was presence. And so they just manipulated brutally. This quality is there in nature, in nature. Mysteriously, the resonance is always there. We talked about a couple of weeks ago of how gravity in a very interesting way. Gravity is a resonance of mass. It isn't so much that gravity waves are coming out from something is that they are resonant extensions of the way in which mass occurs as an energy form. Energy flows that are brought into bows that become mass, energy becomes mass, and when it does, the resonance of it are gravity waves. And that one has then this sense that the entire universe is alive in this kind of wave formed way, that the ripples of the universe are incredibly rich as a tapestry, and that our quality then of having a center which is primordial, is that that center which is primordial is in direct, resonant contact with the entire tapestry, so that one has the sense at the center, at the sole center of the mind. One definitely has the realization that one is universal. There is no resonance that is not able to be found. Now, the Aristotelian view, the cutting up of this, the blanking out of all the residents, and just something which you can pound. This is a fact, man. It's only that that counts. That also has, in a very peculiar way, a career of increasingly getting refined until it shows resonance again. I once did about 300 lectures on the 19th century to show how, in the 19th century, the physical reality of 1800 gave way to the physical immateriality of 1900. And by the time you got to 1900 and mocks of famous universal constant, it was a constant for which there was nothing to point at. It was a residual of what is archetypally true of the process of mathematical understanding of energy and mass? It just simply is there. And Max Planck's constant, h, is still being used 100 years later because it happens to work. We know from the development of Aristotelian scientific astronomy now that one can find not only hydrogen atoms out in the universe, in between planets, in between stars, in between galaxies. Not only are there clouds of atomic hydrogen, there are clouds of molecular hydrogen. There are clouds of other molecules. Not just atoms, but other molecules, including organic molecules. Molecules that the list now for intergalactic gas includes all of the elements that are needed to make amino acids, so that the roots of organic life are even there in intergalactic space. So the difference between organic and inorganic, between inert nature out there and our special nature in here, obviously is not the gulf that it was once assumed. And this is important because one of the volumes that we're going to use, Susanne Langer's Mind an essay on human feeling when she started out in the 1930s, her first published book, philosophy in a New Key A study in the Symbolism of Reason, rite and Art. Reason, symbols, rite, ritual and Art. Three styles of objectivity. The objects of ritual which are the things of this world. The things that get synched into objectivity by the action. The action of energy, the action of mass, the practicality, the objects of reason being the symbols, the ideas, the mind and the objects of art, and she was convinced that there was a great line that held all of these together. And she says it is in the center part of this line, the object of. Right. The objects of reason. The objects of art. And that line connecting those objects is that obviously there is a radical quality that occurs in the mind, in symbols. And her conviction from this came, in fact, from a philosophic tradition that began with Immanuel Kant, that symbols in the mind have an a priori reality and objectivity. And Kant was convinced of it because of certain backgrounds which he had, but translated that into an Aristotelian presentational mode. And so Susanne Langer, through her great teachers Alfred North Whitehead and Ernst Cassirer, wrote and published Harvard published it in 1942, a philosophy in a New Key. And she was constantly tussling with this, because it meant that the mind was the focus of some kind of radical break. And that the radical break was between the mentality of animals and the mentality of humans. That human mentality is markedly different from animal mentality. So runs the Aristotelian myth, the belief. And the difference is that man has a capacity which the animals do not have. He can live in a symbolic realm. He can be intellectual. That animals cannot live in an intellectual way. And out of this came a book. Some 8 or 9 years later, it was called Feeling and Form a theory of Art developed from philosophy in a New Key. And she came to the conviction that feeling was the primordiality out of which thinking came. And that if you want to understand symbols and thinking, you have to first understand feeling and experience. And this worked on her for about a generation, until finally she wrote a three volume set. It took her more than 15 years to complete the three volumes. Mind an Essay on feeling. Finished it in 1982, almost 50 years after she began. And she says in the beginning, you can't really expect anyone to understand this until they see the origins of it and followed all the way back. But this is a kind of a process which doesn't just stop and start with her. You have to include her teachers. You have to include their traditions. And in order to make sense out of it, oddly enough, this entire stack would have to be about a mile high. But we can truncate it because we can come back to the way in which the Persians and the Greeks at one time understood each other perfectly well, and a generation later they didn't understand each other at all. And consequently there was a period of several generations of warfare between them, which, oddly enough, the Greeks won, outnumbered about 100 to 1 in both territory and population, they won in the time of Pythagoras. You do not find any quality where the Greek and the Persian understanding of wisdom is different. Very, very similar. And the key to that is because Pythagoras had an Egyptian background before he went to Persia, and that the Egyptian background was a common background to both the Greek and the Persian at that historical time, about 500 BC. In fact, the Persians had taken over Egypt in the person of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses, and it was a part of the Persian Empire for a while. But before that, there was a common ground that goes back several thousand years. And to go back in that background is very complicated and very difficult to do. One of the qualities that we need to understand is that for the Egyptian archetypal original symbol experience, they found that the pyramid was the shape, was the symbol which manifested for them the originality of the mystery of the universe. And we have to understand that when you look at a pyramid, the base of a pyramid is a square. And that what rises from the plain of that square are four triangles. So that there is a quality of a pyramid. That's not just the four triangles, it's not just a three dimensional triangle, but it is a three dimensional triangular projection from a square. Whereas the Persian outlook, very similar to that, does an act of counting that there are four sides to the square and three sides to the triangle adding up to seven. And so you find in Persian wisdom cyclings of seven, with a hidden notion that there are triads that are very potent and very powerful, and that those triads that are potent and powerful tend to fall into sets of four. If one brings the center into play. That if you bring the center of a triangle into play, then you have a four quality. Not that there are four sides like a square, but there are the three sides brought together with the center, and that you count the center. The Chinese are remarkably similar to the Persians in this way, because dynastic China originates in a contact with ancient Iran at the beginning of the Shah dynasty, about 2200 BC. It goes back a long, long way. And one of the hallmarks of that contact is that with dynastic China, for the very first time, you find something you never found in the rice fields of China, you find chariots. And in the Shah dynasty, 2200 BC, they're different from the Pre-dynastic Chinese because they have chariots and a number of other things which are from the contact with the Iranians, from Central Asia. So it goes back a long, long, long ways. But the quality of seven in the Persian tradition is that it tends to arrange itself into sets of four. And about the time that you find the Greek experience with the Persians meshing together in that pre Pythagorean time, you find a people who were in between the Greeks and the Persians On the overland trading routes. And those people are the ancient Jews, the Hebrews of about 600 BC, the Jewish populations of the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in Persia that came in and swooped up, vacuumed up all the talented men and women to run the Neo-Babylonian Empire. It was the great kidnapping, it was the exile. And during the period of the exile, about the time that Pythagoras was maturing, the great prophet, the great original prophetic mind of Judaism was Ezekiel, and Ezekiel was someone who returned back to the mystery of nature, to the primordial mind, but did it in exile in Persia. And so his vision was a jewel like original, mysterious vision of four faces, of archetypes that have something to do with the wholeness of man. And Ezekiel's vision. It's in the book of Ezekiel. In the Old Testament. There's a man's face, there's a lion's face, there's an ox's face, and there's an eagle's face. And when the Greek language Jewish radical community were called the first Christians was under the ultimate stress. About 90 A.D., Saint John, exiled on Patmos, saw the same four figures the man, the eagle, the ox, and the lion. And so you find in the Apocalypse of Saint John, the same four set of four figures that Ezekiel had some 600 years before. And that those four figures, those four faces, came to haunt William Blake, who is the other figure that we're taking along with Susanne Langer. And Blake's quality was to dissolve himself back, not into the mystery of nature alone, but to dissolve himself into the mystery of nature and into the mystery of myth at the same time. Because Blake was not just someone who returned back to the mysteries of nature, he wanted to return back also at the same time to the mysteries of original mythology. He lived in London at the time when there were a number of very alert people. One of his close friends was Mary Wollstonecraft, who became Mrs. William Godwin and who became the mother of Mary Shelley, who married Percy Shelley. Plus, he was influenced by Swedenborg in a number of religious mystics, and he had his own capacity. When Blake was eight, his mother told him to quit talking to his friends about seeing angels playing instruments in the trees. It's not the thing that you tell your neighbors. When Blake went back into his original mind, immersed into the mysteries of nature and the origins of myth, he found that he could see the Figures that Saint John had seen, that Ezekiel had seen, but that they were in fact misinterpreted in his own time. And so he called those four figures the zoas, the four zoas, that there are four capacities, and one of them is the mind, and one of them is the body. But there's also something to do with energy and imagination. And when we take a break, we'll come back and come back to this. Let's come back. We've established a a nutritive field, and many things are suspended and alert in this field. There are chariots and there are sevens, and there are pyramids and triads and squares. And all of this is in motion like some kind of Kandinsky painting. The mind always asks at this point, what's the key? Meaning what's the table of contents and what's the calibration? So we know what page it's on. And the response from the chair is Krishnamurti used to say the speaker says there's no page numbers at all. The original symbol is different. It has a it has a different quality. It's the difference between somebody who's like a high school geometry teacher who's putting those nice lines on the board from Matisse. When Hokusai was 90 years old, he said. I have finally learned how to draw a line. And if I lived to be 105, I'm going to produce art. It's a quality of. In scientific analysis, one always looks instead of for the page numbers. Because if you're looking for a polymerase chain reaction among several million cells, how do you know what page it's on? How do you know what book it's in? You you look for something else. You look for the vector. And there's always something which carries the vector a carrier. And so you look to find out who are the guides who know their ways through this grand suspension, and the symbols which come unbidden are the guides. Those symbols are the guides. For someone like William Blake, natural mystic child genius in a way living in a London that was tremendously enriched by several centuries of character and characters. But when he was born, there was a titanic wave of creativity on a primordial level, deeper than that of Immanuel Kant later on in German ideological, idealistic philosophy. And that was Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's works were like this Titanic ripple through, especially the society in London, not so much outside of London, although you find it registering all over England. But in the City of London, the 1700s were dominated by Sir Isaac Newton's gravity, by the gravity waves from the man's work. And he had shown in his great works not only the Principia mathematica of 1687, but a work that he had written before that and was published later called his Opticks, where one understood that vision and light are our universals that can be understood by a new capacity of man, a capacity of the mind to deal with symbols that were not meaningful because they were limited, but meaningful because they could explore the unlimited. That one could be precise to any degree of accuracy about infinities and zeros even. Now, there weren't many people who understood it intellectually or mathematically or logically. But the ambience of London's literary society were shattered by this experience. And instead of having someone who was measured as being a great poet because, like Alexander Pope, he could write perfect lines every time you began to have the appreciation for someone like a Wordsworth whose images trailed off into the infinities and occasionally presented the mysterious zeros themselves. And William Blake grew up in that kind of mysterious London. He was exposed very early on to an extraordinary fact about Sir Isaac Newton that while Newton was the genius as a young man in physics and mathematics, he was the Lion of Cambridge, the Green Lion of Cambridge University, the the mathematical genius of of all ages. But Newton had spent the last 30 years of his life trying to decipher the secret symbols of the Bible, and couldn't do it. That this. Incredible acumen, able to deal with the calculus of infinitely large and infinitely small, was baffled exactly on the founding archetypal symbols of the Jewish and Christian religions, especially those symbols that were in the Apocalypse of Saint John and of the visions of Ezekiel, that somehow Ezekiel and Saint John, the Old Testament and the new were linked together. And there was something that held those two together. And it was a book which became the focus for Sir Isaac Newton's efforts for 30 years. And it was the book of Daniel. Anyone who lived at that time could quote you from any of these books, they not only read them, they lived by them. They could tell you book verse in chapter where these images were. And the fact was that in the book of Daniel, those four figures that were there in Ezekiel, and they were there also in Saint John, that somehow there was this transition of this square of archetypal keys to the mystery of the universe that went all the way through and formed like a symbolic bar, the fulcrum of which was the mysteriousness of the Savior, and that the import of this, that these four figures were the symbolic bounds of the secret processes by which God worked out the destiny of the universe, especially for the listening ears and the witnessing eyes and the alerted mind of man, that this set of four symbols the man, the lion, the eagle, the ox. These four symbols were so powerful that they styled the entire structure of the New Testament, the four Gospels. Each one was one of these figures. And there were to be no more, because this was the liminal set, this was the square. This was the foundation upon which one could build an accurate understanding. And Newton tried for the last 30 years of his life he could not, he wrote, dream after ream, after ream of discussions and possibilities, he applied his enormous intellect to this, and William Blake decided as a young man that he had the capacity to understand and to appreciate this mystery, and that where Newton went wrong is that he had not had the genius to develop his own language, other than just the mathematical language of abstraction. And so William Blake set out to develop his own mythology, not to make it up, but to go back to the primordiality of himself and to bring it out of himself, and that out of that new mythological field of experience that would flow the way that the mystery of nature actually flowed. Forget civilization, forget history. This was the way in which Primordiality would be. He would then use himself, use his own mind to bring the energy and imagination of that experience and link together his body in this world and his mind as the center of this world, and that all of this would then make a. An ecology of understandability, that he could be a beacon of truth to the world deeper than Newton. And as a young man, I think he was in his mid-twenties. He did a fateful sketch of, for him the central figure in this mystery. It wasn't Daniel, it wasn't Saint John, it wasn't Ezekiel. For him, it was job. The central mysterious figure, the symbolic guide that Blake chose for himself was job. Because there was something mysterious. There was something deeply, symbolically arcane about job. Job was the figure who had a direct link to God. And while everything was cut off from him, he lost everything in this world. Until you've lost everything, you can't imagine how devastating that is. To lose everything and not to let go of that secret direct. Not a tie to God, but the certainty that the resonance is still active. That job was the figure who denuded of everything existential and everything of his mind, and everything of his life, was left on a mound of ashes, and the only certainty that he had was that he was still a resonance of the presence of God, that God had not abandoned him even in that condition. Even when his wife said, obviously God hates you. Curse God and die. And job said, no, that I know is not true. And so for Blake, this was the figure. And all during his life he struggled to try to make an expressive form, a symbolic form that could carry his new mythology, could carry it intact, and by intact he understood. He was very sophisticated. He understood that this mythological language had to have images and words, both images and words, both in such a form that they would not be imitations in the interiority of human beings, but would be originals. And so he devised a way of engraving on sheets of copper. He would engrave his words and his images on sheets of copper, a backwards mirror wise, So that when you ran paper over them, they would then print out. And so these printed sheets were originals in the sense that they were original printouts. They were not copies of something. They were printed out from the obverse with the understanding that if you gave it a spiritual charisma, a blessing of one's primordial spiritual energy, that those sheets, then when they were brought to a reader, to a viewer, that those sheets would print out the original in the spiritual mind of the viewer. That there would be this process of the transmission of originals, not any Aristotelian imitation whatsoever. No stage would be not original. And so he took great care that you do not mass produce the pages, but that every page be struck by hand, by himself, and by his wife Catherine, working together, and that every page, if it were to be colored, should be hand-colored. On the first set of the images for the Book of Job were struck by a patron for a patron of William Blake, a man named Thomas Butts, as early as 1818, and that an artist friend of his named Linnell James Linnell. A set was made in 1821 for him. These were all hand-colored by William Blake. And then, towards the very end of his life, though the set bore the date 1825, it was actually 1826 when it came out. He died a few months later, in 1827. The entire set of the illustration of the Book of Job, the illustrations of the way in which the mystery God's mystery was unfolded symbolically for man in a series of 22 plates. And that these 22 plates had only 21 of them numbered. One of them was unnumbered was the zero plate. So that the illustrations that Blake did and remember now 1826 is right at the white hot heat of the development of an age of revolution. Thomas Jefferson in 1826 celebrated the 50th anniversary of his writing of the Declaration of Independence that started the whole age of revolution, and he was still alive. In fact, the Marquis de Lafayette was still alive. Also, John Adams was still alive. The makers of the Age of Revolution were still alive in 1826. Goethe was completing Faust Part 2 in 1826. It was a tremendous age, and Blake was right at the epicenter of the whole thing. And his illustrations to the Book of Job were like this final coup de gras, against the materialistic ignorance that baffled man from his spirit for once and for all. And when the set of plates came out, the title page bore no emblem number whatsoever. It only bore. A swath of seven angels, seven angels in a clockwise swath, and one found in these seven angels. Seven phases of the way in which the divine symbolic phasing of original presentation happens. The seventh figure was that of the Savior, Jesus the Savior. When you look at a symbol set that's very similar to this, the major arcana of the tarot deck, you will find 21 numbered cards in the Major Arcana, plus a fool card which has a zero on it. That zero card is the air matrix against which the other ones form sets. And were that first card not the bearer of zero, then the sets would all be subsets of that first card, that one. But because that first card is a zero against which the other sets are made, their ratioed ness, their proportion is against not only zero, but also infinity. Because any logical process, any mathematical expression, can bear an infinity or a zero in the same place and not lose any of its meaning whatsoever. So that one has a primordiality earlier than the one, and one has a cosmic ness beyond counting into eternity. It's uncountable. It's innumerable. And because it's innumerable, it's also unsayable. But it's a silence which is eloquent, not a silence which baffles, but a silence which has its profundity in that it allows the registry of presence to be perfected. So instead of meaning, registering what you have is the meaning which would carry all the meaning in the world, but a carrier which dissolves and leaves only the profundity and not any of the messenger whatsoever. The old hermetic way was that the messenger brought one message, and that was she brought the message of silence. Not that there is no message, but that you cannot say this message, so don't try to hear it that way. Here, hearing itself, and when one is able to hear hearing itself or see seeing itself, then the mind does a very strange thing. It dissolves its abstracted capacities into a. The ancient world was to say it dissolves it back into eternity, so that what emerges out of that is a consciousness. For consciousness is very much the resonance of presence, a consciousness which is eternal because it's not based. It's not founded upon things. The things of this world have nothing to do with it whatsoever. They are, in fact, the mathematical term is quite accurate. They are extraneous. But eternity from that standpoint is not extraneous to the world. It can be brought into play, brought into play as if it were an indexing dimension itself. And what does it index? It indexes especially time, eternity indexes time and also indexes space so that one gets a world instead of having its fundamental on what is countable, its fundamental now is shifted to what is transformable. And so consciousness makes a universe where transform is the fundamental reality and not polarized. Materiality is a spiritual cosmos. It may be a material universe, but it is a spiritual cosmos, and not because one hopes it is, or because one has a metaphysics that figures out that it must be, but rather it's the obtaining non condition. And this is totally different. This is a wisdom learning. You don't learn it in schools. So that Blake was an enormously complex individual and towards the end of his life towards being 70 years old, when he brought the illustration to illustration to the Book of Job out. The title page bears no number. It is the zero matrix against which three different sets of seven can be made. And if you start with the title page as the zero, with the seven fold phase of the angelic orders, the seven spheres of angelic order, not the seven spheres of planetary order, those seven spheres of planetary order are cutouts compared to the seven phases of angelic order for Blake. And if you use the title page as the zero page, then plates one through seven are the first set of seven, 14 through eight through 14 for the second, and then 15 through 21 for the third. But by the time you get all the way through to the 22nd plate, to the final plate, in the illustration of the Book of Job, which illustration? Number 21. So the Lord blessed the latter. End of job more than the beginning. That's the codification of it. The 22nd plate gives job more than he had at the beginning. It's a key. So at the 22nd plate can also then be the matrix against which everything is put, in which case the first card is the zero, the title page and the first set runs 0 to 6, the second 7 to 13 on the third of 14 to 20. So you can have the first plate or the last plate, either one, in which case you get a different ambit, a different setting, a different kind of triad from of the other. And they're related together in a sense that while the one spirals forward, the other spirals back, and you get a twin spiral like that. And of course, we'll see later on when we get next month to the final pair of books in the symbols section, we're going to take Plato's greatest dialogue, the Timaeus, and we're going to take William Yeats most mysterious book called A vision. And in a vision, we'll see the enormous symbolic genius of Yeats turned into visionary consciousness of the highest order, where when you have complementary spirals coming to each other, you have a situation where the moving node of the spiral is constantly the center. And because you have two and a complementation, the center can be exchanged and occur anywhere in the entire matrix, not only anywhere along either spiral, but anywhere within the resonance of that double spiral, that double helix that makes life also. So there is a magisterial kind of vision capable from this kind of understanding of symbols. It has nothing to do with diagrams of Metaphysicians. It has nothing to do with traditional religions. It has nothing to do with the kind of philosophy that thinks that the mind is the arbiter of all, especially not that so that there is a there is a mysteriousness at play here. And one of the qualities which Blake had and which Yeats got naturally, and was triggered by his acquaintance with Blake when when Yeats was a young man, he he worked with a man named Ellis, and they did a huge presentation of the symbolic mysteries of William Blake. And Yeats and Ellis book on the on the Symbolic Intricacies of William Blake, was one of the first times that anybody understood William Blake in terms of William Blake. Blake was almost ignored during his lifetime, and for maybe 50 years afterwards, he was written off as a kook. The guy's an idiot. He's a jerk. He never made money. He went around making all these strange kinds of prints. Who knows what this shit is? That's exactly how they talked about it. And then when Yeats's book came out and Blake, suddenly everyone said, oh. That's an early Cary Grant. Oh. It's a quality where Yeats then took upon himself to carry forward Blake's work, and to make the kind of poetry that prints out, originally in the spirit of the reader. It's a whole different kind of poetry. And what did they call that? School of poetry when it first came out? Symbolists. That's what they were called. And unfortunately, the mental acuity of the British mind at the time went for a metaphysical interpretation of Yeats. And so you had very few poets who followed Yeats and the people who were cantankerous enough not to go for this British reductionism. The French, their Symbolist poets, produced a magisterial poet, Paul Valéry, who unfortunately decided that this was the key to understanding his favorite religion, and he went back with an enriched Roman Catholicism when he had every capacity to understand how to dissolve all of it. The inheritor of Yeats in many ways were the American poets like Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings. You find, therefore, Yeats, when we come to his vision, seeks exactly what Blake sought, but in his own time and in his own way. We'll see that Yeats had every confidence in his psychic capacities. He knew how to look at his psyche, not in terms of the mind, but in terms of the psyche itself. But he needed to have a language which was as primordial and is mysterious in origin as William Blake's own mythology. And he didn't have that. So Yeats had to wait. Until he found a life companion who had the ability to generate a language as mysterious as William Blake's. And that person was his wife. And Georgie. Well, she was a very ordinary, nice looking lady. Was one of the greatest automatic writers of all time. And she wrote reams and reams of automatic writing by the suitcase. And they were under the bed, constantly coming up. And she would be the medium, the channel through which this fantastic cacophony of secret document pages, all written and automatic style. Mile a minute and all just thrown into these suitcases. And Yates sat down to tease out of that mass of symbolic shape, which he did, and at the end of his life he wrote a vision, and he showed that the cosmic philosophy and his wife's automatic writing is the ancient Hermetic understanding, not of the diagrammatic as above, so below. That's a transposition that only a materialist would understand. It isn't above and below at all. It's that the presentation always carries within its resonance the originality. So at the deepest interior, one has also the beginning of the exterior. It isn't as above, so below and some diagram on a page. It's at the center of the interior. You will find the beginning of the universe that you thought was out there, and actually is at the deepest part within here. And if you were able to go to the deepest part out there, you would find the deepest center of your own focus, that they are complementary spirals that exchange centers all the time. And that's why we're eternal and not just $0.48 worth of minerals. I think somebody figured it out. That's a long time ago. It's probably up to $1.50 now. So that there is such a thing as a symbolic set of equivalence. But the equivalence is not apparent on any stage less than the perfected, with the proviso that the perfected always is capable to carry its resonance anywhere. And that's why ordinary equations of equivalence will work mathematically, symbolically, and why they apply, and why material reality responds to it. It isn't just that E equals MC square. In some four and a half pages of mathematical theory. You can do that. You can bring atomic energy out of those atoms and put it into play. It's done every day. It's been done every day for several generations now. And even further from that, one can bring eternity into play within the limited world of polarized time space. So that the spirit turns out to be extraordinarily practical. And its distribution is as perfect as one would ever want it to be. Blake was one of those Symbolists who spent most of his life trying to. Find a way in which to express this. Now Susanne Langer, who were pairing with him when she began with philosophy in a New Key, published in 1942, published at Harvard, written in 1941, written in the real depths of the Second World War, she went through a whole series of chapters to show that simple Bull transformation is the key, and that the key works much like a musical key would work, and that if you shift the way in which your language indexed by symbols, if you shift the key in which you're expressing it, you get a different expression, a different rendition. She didn't carry it a step further, which someone like a Stravinsky did. And that is if you can do that once, if there is a different key, then there must be such a thing as a master octave for a set of keys. And even further from that, the the insight that Schoenberg had. There must be a set of keys, which would match not an eight part octave, but a 12. Part. There must be a 12 tone octave by which a perfect music could be expressed, which is also true, and a few courageous composers like starting with Stockhausen and going on to Alan Hovhaness. That apparently there are an infinite number of keys. There is an unlimited range of music, and that man is free to compose anywhere and everywhere in that beautiful range of the delectable mountains of infinity, mountains and rivers without end. And this is also true. For Susanne Langer. Her main emphasis became the way in which feeling is the template by which thinking operates, and that symbolic transform in the mind is presaged by transformation of feeling. On the mythic level. In the oldest Egyptian judgment of the soul, it's always carried with the Greek word for it, because the Egyptian words were not known until very recent time. The Greek term was psycho Stasia. The weighing of the soul, they usually say. And when you look at Anubis holding the little pointer, that's on the grand scale in the netherworld, it isn't the soul that's being weighed against a feather. What is there is the heart. Because for the Egyptian wisdom tradition and all the way through consistent till today, the heart is the conscience. It's the center of sentience, so that whatever center the mind has, it is already presaged by a template of feeling centered heartedness. So while you may not be mathematically alert enough to triangulate in eternal fields to find a mind center, nevertheless you can find a feeling center in the heart very easily. And so the psycho Stasia was the weighing of the heart to see if the heart was as light, as a feather, as a plume. That plume, by the way, was not just the lightness of a feather. Remember the astronaut on the moon who dropped the feather and the tool together. And they fell together, showing they were equal. It's not that the heart is as light as the feather, but the feather is a symbol is a hieroglyphic for Matt. Matt. Matt is the carrier. She's the carrier of the vector of justice. She's not just an image of truth. She's not just a symbol of truth. She is the carrier of the vector of justice, which allows for equivalence to manifest in time space in the first place. So it's much more delicate. And that that was known 5000 years ago shows how decadent our time is. A junkyard. That weighing that psycho stature of the heart as the conscience is the center of sentience is the center of feeling intelligence. And if that feeling intelligence is able to exchange with the carrier of the vector of justice, then how you live will be true. You understand? Isn't that the heart is as light as a feather at all? That's not it at all. It's at that center. That heart center of your life will be able to carry the possibility of justice through the livingness. And that's why living form is always the criteria for art. Art is always living form. It's never an imitation of anything. It's a presentation of itself. And all symbols which carry transforms unto eternity are also living forms. Informs. In all societies, world round, there are always those gifted openness who see movements of light before someone physically dies and their body goes that way. The Scots used to call it second sight, that one sees light moving before the physical body itself goes that way. Is the resonance of their presence showing up as a as a light wave. That light is not made out of photons. It's made up out of a magnetoelectric energy about 10 billion times what photons are. And one can see that. In one's psychic soul before the physical world records it as a happening. That's why if someone were really deep, like a Saint John, you see events in history before they happen, sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years before they happen. That's the art of prophecy. It has nothing to do with predictions for the newspaper. It has everything to do with eternity coming into play in this world. More next week.