Symbol 6

This is symbols six and someone mentioned mentioning the latest news in physics, the Higgs boson, and the quotation from the discovery of the Higgs boson from the CERN people in Switzerland. The big colliding physics instrument. They said that the Higgs boson is a vibrating chunk of vacuum. And it is difficult to determine whether you have it or not, because it's not something that you can readily have, and that you have to energize the vacuum high enough so that a chunk of it shakes off. And Leon Lederman at the Fermi lab, who were running a race for 20 years with the CERN people to discover the Higgs boson. Leon Lederman called it the God particle because it is so transcendent from anything that man is used to dealing with. Uh, except that today's lecture will show that we've dealt with this sort of thing for thousands of years. We've dealt with vibrating chunks of vacuum for a very long time in wisdom traditions, and so it comes as no great surprise that the most energized particle in the universe is but a phantom of what we thought things were, and is actually an energized portion of the context within which existence occurs in the first place. And perhaps, just to paraphrase the article a little bit, to put the physics into a more understandable frame. If someone talks like William Blake and we're doing Blake right now. So this is germane to what we're dealing with. We're doing Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job. If you have a context which allows for a form to emerge, that context is a background. And form and background together Are always a pair, and they always have a mutual relationality, so that given some sophistication, you could learn to single out the background for observation and thereby make the background a thing, so that the form which emerges from a background can be turned inside out in a way so that the background is what you see. Now, this is as recent as 35,000 years ago that our species did this. And do you remember me talking about Paleolithic cave art with the hand? How the impress of the hand say on magnesium oxide to make a good black hand against the cave wall, or some kind of ferrous iron oxide to make red. And if you make an imprint of the hand, you have an image of the hand that's an image. But if you mulch the color in a kind of an herbal saliva mixture, and you blow the color against the hand and then remove the hand, that's a stencil. And what you're showing here is you're showing the background as the colored area and what is cut out. The form that's cut out of the background registers as a negation, a negative image so that there are images and there are like stencils. Negative images. And in a negative image the background emerges and becomes a thing, becomes something that one can talk about. And you can get sophisticated enough so that you could talk about form and background in such a way that both are objective things, and because both are objective things, the relationalities between them also can be singled out as being objective. So that the collection of objects that one has are now, at this point, three in number. You have a form which is objective. You have the background which is objective, and you have the relationalities, which can also be objective. Zero is not a negation. It is never an image. It is not a background against which form emerges. Zero has a different. And here language is beggared. There is no word in any language for what zero is. There are ideas about zero for which there is language, but not zero itself. Even the word itself here betrays a habit of identification that goes back to a quandary that all the way from Paleolithic times up until about 2500 years ago. It was a difficulty in talking about these things. The most successful person in antiquity to talk about zero in a realistic way was a man named Parmenides. Parmenides had long white hair. He wore long white robes. He looked very much like a William Blake god. And he wrote a mystical poem called The Way. And it's sort of like a Greek Tao Te Ching. He Parmenides was like lao-tzu in ancient Greece. He lived before Plato. And in his mystical poem. There is a portion of the flow of his ancient Greek language, where the language is twisted in such a way that there is an intersection that happens, and the language before the intersection is of such a nature that the language after it is a stencil of what came before. So that somehow in the flow of that language, there was a turning point. The word in ancient Greek was metanoia. Metanoia and a metanoia is a turning point, not like a ballet pivot, but is a turning point in the mind. What turns in the mind in the sense of ancient pre-Socratic Greek metanoia. What turns in the mind is the flow of language. And remember now that the flow of language is almost as if it were something that rolls along on little wheels, and the little wheels that it rolls on are images that the flow of language in the mind on image rollers can do a flip flop such that instead of rolling along on the images, the images are now what is moving and what is rolling was what was being carried on the images before, what was being carried on the images before the narrative line, the plot line, the narrative line, the line of narration, the story. The story line was being carried along on rollers of images, and all of a sudden in the mind is a rare event that does not happen in nature at all, or rather to say it in a better way. The only place in nature that it happens, the only place where it does this pivot, where it has this metanoia is in our mind that our mind is a locus, a place where such a radical change can happen, where a process becomes its inside out opposite that the form becomes the background. And what was the background now becomes the form. Later, that whole. Quality of mysteriousness about what Parmenides meant, what he was up to, began to haunt the Greek philosopher Plato. And a lot of Plato's dialogues take little issues that when they're all put together, they're like explorations for climbing a certain mountain. They're like base camps for getting to the top of a very high peak. And the peak that Plato's early dialogues aim for is the ability to finally come to terms with a fundamental metanoia that Parmenides and his mystical poem the way enunciated. The best way in which I heard it originally was a simple English phrase. Parmenides said, what is, is, and what isn't isn't. And that they never meet. That they are not only opposites. They are polarized opposites to the extent that they are disjunctive. That is, and is not never meet. There's never a point of contact, there's never a point of bridging. And I heard it from a professor, William Hay at the University of Wisconsin a long time ago. And a little bird like the one that's in here today was in one of Professor Hay's lectures at the University of Wisconsin a long time ago, and he paused in a lecture trying to explain this mystical insight of Plato, just like I will. And he looked at the bird, and he fell silent, and he looked back at us. There were about 80 or 90 of us taking this philosophy course, and he said simply, Plato would have loved it. What would Plato have loved? That discourse which runs along on rollers, not of images but of meaning, can also have a point of metanoia in the mind, and that after that what follows is meaning with the ideas as the rollers underneath, and that when you do this, the metanoia of discursive language, like in a discourse, has undergone a transform, the same way that a transform of a form into its background has occurred. That is to say, there is such a thing as experience turning inside out. And there's such a thing also as thought turning inside out so that the background of a thought emerges into attention and the thought itself becomes de facto the new background. And that what you have is the stencil, the print out, the stencil quality. Of the background of the thought and that that's what's in your attention in thinking. Nowhere in all of the ecology of these arcane concerns and considerations is there a zero. And what Parmenides was saying about isn't what isn't isn't applies to zero. That zero is not a negation. It is not at all a background for any kind of form, but it is a limitless context for the ensemble of form and background in the first place, like with the Higgs boson. Matter and energy are form and background to each other, mostly for us. Matter is the form and the energies in the background. But we're familiar by the beginning of the 21st century with a technological civilization where very frequently the energy is in the foreground and the mass, the matter is in the background. When one is tuning a television or radio, you're looking for the energy frequency. You're not looking for the station as a physical object. You're not looking for that. You're looking for the frequency. An astronomer who tunes his spectrograph to a star's light, tunes it to the electromagnetic frequency, and fine tunes it to the photons of that particular star. There is a quality in symbols which we're looking at today, where the zero performs the transform. The context of form in background itself seeks to come to our attention and can't. It's like the Higgs boson being a vibrating chunk of vacuum vacuum. In early 21st century physics is of the utmost importance Because it's only with vacuum that the speed of energy can slow down enough to create matter. You can't have protons and electrons and neutrons that go up to make matter. Any matter. All matter. Unless those particles have slowed down from an ultimate speed. For now, just think of the speed of light so that when you look at an equation like Einstein's. E equals MC squared energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. If matter if atomic particles couldn't slow below the speed of light. They would not be gelling enough to be able to form stuff so that sublight existence is dependent upon something to slow it down and vacuum, as in the Higgs boson, is exactly what slows energy down enough so that matter can congeal. Does this mean that the Higgs boson is a particle like anything else? It means like it's an ultimate particle, in that it is the first indication that gelling can occur. How does it indicate that? Because it sponges up energy in a locus. Because energy in its frequency flow has a slight interruption in its flow so that it becomes light. What was it before? William Blake says what it was before was eternity. So that when eternity slows down because of the circumstance of nothingness, eternity slows and becomes light, and light itself slows and becomes matter. And that we evolve in that matter realm, but that our minds are capable of speeding up, of re-energizing matter through imagination so that the mind can rise out of the material circumstance in which it finds itself and raise its energy until it becomes light. And Blake goes further. He says that there are some people who can raise themselves from a light stage back into eternity. He wrote that about 200 years ago, and it looks like it's going to get interesting again. In fact, the Tate Gallery, for the first time ever, is going to show the 100 plates of Blake's Jerusalem in London. Can you imagine 180 years they've never been shown. He was called the Cockney nutcase in England for a long time. It's interesting to see that an operator Function that continues, a vector of either energy or matter has the ability to show a complementarity. Energy and matter have a complementarity. Form and background have a complementarity. But there's something else which is not the background, nor the form, nor any relation between them. Something which we can temporarily call a context of eternity. And that context of eternity does not have a property of occurring, so that it's not subject to coming in and out of existence, nor is it subject to any of the processes or functions of complementarity. Any two mutual elements of a complementarity can always be affected. One of the deepest matrixes of affecting it are the principles of arithmetic functions. You can divide them, you can multiply them, you can add them and you can subtract them. Now you can multiply and divide, add and subtract forms. Every schoolchild knows that. But you can also apply all those arithmetical functions to backgrounds as well. And those backgrounds can emerge into our attention to where it's the main thing that we're looking at. We can multiply and divide and add and subtract energy, as well as matter quite easily, but we cannot apply addition or multiplication or any of those for arithmetical functions to zero. Zero is unaffected by the application of arithmetical functions. Not only is zero not affected by it, but there is a symbol called infinity. The infinity sign. Infinity, also like zero, is not affected by any arithmetical function, which means that zero and infinity never participate in a complementarity. They are not elements of a complementarity, but they are like an ultimate context within which a complementarity like form and background can happen. Matter and energy can happen. So that the vacuum which occurs in not a primordial sense, but before a primordiality occurs, the vacuum is there in a zero sense and not there in a sense of pre one. It's not there in a sense of negative one. And this is what is so difficult since Plato's day, 2400 years ago, that the way in which our minds are taught to think, we cannot think the unthinkable, which is that what isn't, isn't. Minds are not capable of thinking of zero. We're only capable of thinking of zero ness. And one of the great strides in intellectual logic occurred in India, where there was a distribution of the negative logically throughout every element of any proposition, of any linguistic utterance whatsoever, to negate a sentence, a statement, a logical statement like this is a pot. One can see that you could distribute the existentiality equally to every word in that there is a thisness. This is there's an is ness a there's an anus pot. There's a pot ness. One can also turn that inside out in a negation way and say, there's no this ness. There's no is ness. There's no anus and there's no pot ness. And in Indian logic, about 1500 years ago, it was called the the new method 1500 years ago. There's always a new method. In in Sanskrit, nava is like new. Nova nava the same root. Um. The press that published Gandhi's works in Aminabad was called Navajeevan new life. Nava Naya was the new method logic 1500 years ago in India, and they spent a lot of time and intellectual acumen looking at the way in which negations in this distributed way take the onus away from everything, not only things and processes, but the relationships between things and between processes and the relationships between things and processes. So that in this entire stew, where everything can have an is ness of this ness of patterns, you can also take it away and have a not business, a not thisness, a not gnosis. And then this absence one has fallen into the trap of projecting existentiality onto Non-things. The mind in its way of learning to think, does not know that has done this. It is forever naive about this. The only way that the mind can wake up to the fact that it has this bad habit is for spiritual consciousness to come in and wake it up in a very special way, to wake it up from the tennis game of form and background, from the ping pong match of energy and mass. And this is called a moment of eternal insight, the bearer of that transform. In order to do this, to affect this, to affect the mind's objectivity on this fundamental level, The operator carrying that transform has to have as much objectivity as the mind in order to do this. Otherwise, the mind would just dismiss it as if it were like an intruder. Because the mind, when it gets refined enough to look at not. Is this not this ness? That mind is so arrogant that it would never listen voluntarily to any one else. And so your spiritual person has to come in to your mind on an object level equal to the objectivity of the arrogant mind in its totality. So it has to be very powerful with the spiritual person carrying consciousness to the mind has to be at least minimally as powerful as the entire integrated mind. Complete. Plate, and sometimes that's very powerful indeed. Fortunately, sometimes it's not very powerful. And there are instances in human history of very ordinary peasant people waking up and becoming conscious spiritually, and their minds learning the humility that there are limits to the process of thought. The classic case in China was the case of a 14 year old dishwasher. His name was in later Chinese history was Huineng. And he was just a nameless little peasant boy in the south of China. And he was looking for a place just to get some some food and some shelter out of his homeless rural condition, and he ended up in a monastery where the most powerful spiritual teacher of the day, his name was Matsu. Matsu was. Like an enlightened bulldog, a very substantial character, a very tough sort of character. And he carried the impressive title of being the fifth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China. And he was old, and he was ready to pass on the mantle. Literally, the mantle would be your robe. And in those days, because of the Buddhist lineage, it wasn't just your robe, it was also the bowl, the begging bowl. The begging bowl was the symbol of receiving, and the robe was the symbol of Sending the bowl was the amulet for integration, and the robe was the talisman for differentiation. The bowl was always that which you held in both hands, and you ate whatever anyone put in that bowl. That's how you lived. Your sustenance was whatever is put in that bowl that is for you to eat. And the robes were always sewn new every spring, and they were sewn out of scraps. You went to the the junk heaps at the edge of some large village where they had finished making clothes, and they just put the scraps of the fabrics into the trash bins. And in ancient times, in the old paradigm. You went to the scrap heaps every spring and you took out the scraps. And every monk used to carry a needle and thread at that period of the season, in the spring, after the, uh, after the wintering, and you would sew in a quilt like fashion the scraps together and make a new robe. The idea of having beautiful robes is absolutely anathema to the ancient Buddhist tradition. When you see the spiritual teachers and their beautiful robes, it's a sign of arrogance, of mind, and of not understanding truth at all. I remember one time when the very venerable Walpola Rahula came from Oxford University to Los Angeles about 30 years ago, and he was at the University of Oriental Studies at Tynan's Place. And all the different Buddhist sects in Los Angeles were all there. And their colored robes, the the Japanese Zen priests and their black robes, the Korean Zen priests and their gray robes, and the Tibetans in their red robes, or some of them in yellow robes. And they were all brown robes for certain kinds. And. The venerable Rahula came out. He looked for all the world like Barry Fitzgerald from the old Bing Crosby movies. And he had this monkey like face that when he smiled, he looked like an innocent little child. He was about 80 years old, and he looked around the room. And he looked at this parfait Of important monks in all their beautiful new fresh robes. And he looked at the back of the room. I was the only person without a robe in the whole damn room. He said, in the West the Buddha has no robe. And it fell on deaf ears for the most part. Matsu, when it came time to pass on his robe and his bowl. Made a little quatrain. He made a spiritual poem which had a symbol sense to it, where the form became the background with a single transform mysteriousness in the hidden in the process, but rather than the transform mysteriously being a relation between the form and the background so that one could identify it. It was distributed equally in the entirety of the quatrain, so that you had to understand the quatrain as a whole and as a context in order to get the way in which the form and background were complementarities. And the robe and bowl were to be passed on to the person who wrote the best quatrain to match the master's quatrain. And so the head. It's always a pecking order. The head monk, the famous head monk, the master of all the other hundreds of monks, wrote a beautiful quatrain, and everyone assumed that in the morning he's going to get the robe and the bowl, and his quatrain Read colloquial translation from the Chinese that the mind is a beautiful mirror and shows reality pristinely when it is completely polished and free of dust. And of course, to the mind, to the mind's sense of mind. This is the most perfect, beautiful statement of enlightenment that you could ever want to have. Little 14 year old Hui Neng got finished washing the pots and pans and cleaning up in the kitchen, probably around midnight, and he read the quatrain that was posted on the board and he scrawled underneath it in very poor penmanship because he was ignorant little peasant. He said there is no mirror. So where can dust collect? In the first place. And somebody saw this graffiti and woke Matsu. And of course he wasn't in very good humor, and he immediately sent word out to find who had done this. And they brought the little culprit in. And he took his bowl, and he wrapped it in his robe, and he gave it to him, and he said, you'd better leave town because they will kill you. They'll be so jealous. But you are the sixth patriarch. And when he was old and he was near his own death, Huineng gathered several thousand people together. And as it as it says in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, he ascended the high seat and he arranged his robes, and then he arranged his mind and he said, friends, let us arrange our minds. And then he delivered this old story of how he had become the sixth patriarch. And in the Platform Sutra he says to all the prospective seventh patriarchs, he said, no one can be a seventh patriarch from true enlightenment, while everyone who understands this is themselves the seventh Patriarch. And so he broadcast the dharma, the High Dharma, in a way in which it was out there on the broadcast waves. And anybody who could build a receiver and tune it and get that they were the seventh patriarch, and they're still seventh Patriarch showing up every once in a while. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Okay, let's come back and let's see how the complication occurs. It gets very convoluted because as Blake brings out again and again and as modern psychotherapy early in the 20th century reiterated, there are evidently images that come into play in our minds that are not from our experience. They come from someone else's experience, and that there are various levels of depth of this, because some of those images come not from the experience of other Individuals, but come from deep parfaits of ingrown habitual comportment. So that one would say that there are images from an archetypal source, from the race, from the tribe, from the nationality, from even previous stages of hominids. And that that parfait can go back millions of years. Now, in Blake's time, no one knew that. No one was aware of that. But they used as a surrogate that evidently there were. As they said at the time, there were eternal images that come to haunt man Because of things which we don't do as much as things which we do do that because the forms and the background have an exchangeability they have not just a complementarity on the higher level, they have a complementarity, but in the mundane world they have a mutuality. They're mutual. So that there are repercussions for what we do. But there are also just as real repercussions for what we don't do. That circumstances and scenarios, episodes, scenes, events all have their play and such a deep, long lasting Way that to incomplete. Seen to incomplete a drama. The actions not done. The parts left missing still function as if they had been there. The amputee who still experiences the arm graphic case. So that we have a very complicated jungle of images. And that jungle becomes extraordinarily terrifying when you realize that the images and ideas that come into play can come from almost anywhere in human experience. And with Blake, because he was so alert to try to be complete. He was developing his own mythology, and so he wanted to have as complete a base as he could. He began to explore all of the great views, the great religious views, the great philosophic views, the great artistic views of all time. And in this mélange of all of his explorations, this took place in revolutionary London. Not only a London that was having repercussions from the American Revolution and the French Revolution, but England itself was experiencing the Newtonian revolution, where. As one writer Marjorie Nicholson put it so aptly, a long time ago she wrote a study of mid 18th century English poetry, and she said the charmed circle of traditional English good sense was broken. And as people tried to recycle the traditional values that had always worked for them, the cycling junked and trashed and broke it all apart and shattered it so that by the 1790s, England, especially London, was the scene of a great crisis, almost as great a crisis as in Paris with the French Revolution, or in America with the American Revolution and all of this came about the same time. So that when 1800, when the year 1800 bloomed on the face of the planet. In that way, at that time, North America and Europe, they were in a complete quandary as to what to do. The French Revolution had gone so far as to date the year one. We have nothing to do with history anymore. Whatever happens, happens because of our conscious intent from this moment forward. And by the year ten of the French Revolution, a great reaction was setting in because for every revolution there is a counter revolution, not simply because it's a political model that seems to reoccur, but because it goes as deep as existence Itself. For every form there is a shadow of its negation that accompanies it. And it's not the same as a zero, but has an is ness has an existential reality that shadows are existentially operative as if they were real, and not only shadows, but as Blake, who used the term shadow for exactly this phenomenon 100 years before Freud, he said, not only do we apparently exist and have shadows, but we also, because of our mind, have specters that there are ghostly outlines of us that reverberate and accompany us just as if they were like, intellectual shadows that the power of the mind, the power of reason, like the physical body, has its own shadow. But the shadow for mental objects is a specter. Is this ghostly quality that truly does haunt us. And that two great processes. Blake saw them as great processes, energy, and the imagination that the imagination brings into play what we would call in the classical Greek use of the term. We use it here in this education dynamics, that education is the oomph in the current of action, and that in experience, that oomph of the action comes out in an image. Play the imagination and that working with the imagination all the time Blake saw was energy was universal natural cosmic energy that comes into play. And as the energy comes into play, it was apparent in Newtonian London by 1800 that the energy kicks it up into higher and higher orders, so that the imagination gets shifted out of a low gear into a higher gear. That what was the kind of image base that was operative on the tribal level suddenly gets shifted into a much higher gear when the tribes coalesce and come together and make a culture, an intertribal culture, and that that gets shifted into an even higher gear. When you get into a civilization that takes many cultures and weaves them together, and then you put a civilization into an industrial scientific mode. It goes even higher so that the energy level takes the images out of their natural bed where they were comfortable and they work and puts it into several orders higher, so that then human beings are completely swamped by this tidal wave of images and their play, which becomes compulsive, which they cannot handle because they themselves are trying to deal with it on an old, slow, low level. And he said, art is the only thing that can tune. Someone can tune a population up to the higher energy levels, where you can deal with what's there, with what's haunting you and everyone else that you see. That you can't stop railroad trains with spears, no matter how good a spear man you are. You're outclassed by the confrontation. And so, Blake, in trying to find a way to focus his art to come to a theme which could be used to exemplify the transform of imaginative orders by energy levels. Went back to the Old Testament and chose the Book of Job. He chose the Book of Job as being the archetypal presentation of the way in which a symbol operator narrative Changes on all the levels and reaches the very highest level of all, which is not that of a great world civilization, but is a return back to the level of the eternal. A return back to God's grace, not man's. And so he chose the Book of Job, and for us, we have to step aside from, for a moment, one of the great plates from Blake's book of Job, when the morning stars sang together. And it comes. It's the 14th out of 21 plates. The first plate is unnumbered. It's the zero plate. But the zero plate has illustrations. It has seven phases. Seven angelic phases in a curl. Like a comma, like a great comma. And the seventh, an angelic figure, is the Savior who brings the descent into its transform and returns it back. That as long as the descent has been transformed and turned into an ascent, then it will complete itself, and that direction will always carry its way home. Wrote a poem one time. The phrasing I used in the 60s. In the warm glow. Radiance in the presence of that pause. The Holy Spirit will steer the star course home. That once you're on that ascent mode, then it's just a matter of Time. It's a matter of playing it out. But the 14th plate comes not as anything that man sees, but comes as an unexpected yet hoped for symbol from the divine. This is a not man's symbols, but God's. It is a time in the universe when all the stars were young and that they formed a celestial choir. That is to say that the radiance, the light radiance. In Blake's time 200 years ago, they just knew about visible light. They didn't know about the magnificent spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that comes off stars. There are some stars. That invisible light looked very puny, but in, say, x rays there magisterial or in extreme ultraviolet there spectacular. The Pleiades look great in visible light, but in because they're so young and extreme ultraviolet light, they're just shatteringly brilliant. Light from stars carried the resonance of the presence of the divine. And the morning stars sang together. That's what's here in this plate. But for Blake, we're going to step aside for Blake. He's using the book of job. What is it about the book of job that nominated itself, that made it seem the most likely place to not put the hand of a spear thrower, but to put the comprehension of a transformed symbolic mind, to put the visionary comprehensiveness there at that place, on the book of job, in order to deal with the cacophony of the nightmare of the modern world. What was it about that now, in Blake's time, as I talked last week, the most astute mind of the age preceding Blake was that of Sir Isaac Newton. He was extraordinary, not a mental giant. He was on the level of almost like a mutation, as someone once said of Goethe. He had an IQ of 200. Who knows what he thought about Newton? Was that kind of a figure? And for Blake, Newton was one of those people who was responsible for opening a door that he could not comprehend, and therefore let in not only all the good, but let in all the demons as well. And for Newton, the main thrust of his whole later life was to try to understand the central symbol of the Bible, a symbol which occurs not only in the New Testament but in the Old Testament as well. And not just any place in the Old Testament, but occurs most pristinely in the most urbane of all of the prophets. And that was Ezekiel. Moses is like a Cecil B DeMille epic prophet who was so magisterial that it's hard to get a personal sense of him. Just larger than life. Um. Samuel was the first Nazarite in ancient Judaism. Uh, a woman had the right to consecrate an unborn child to the service of God. And that child was called a Nazarite. And one of the earliest prophets, Samuel, was a Nazarite. His mother consecrated the baby in her womb to God. And so Samuel grew up to be to be the archetype of the prophet who has never known anything else other than service to God. Samuel is the creator of Jewish kings. He's the one who, when it comes to creating a kingship for Israel, he bestows the kingship. He tells them, you don't need a king. If you have God, you don't need a king. Yes, we need a king. So he created the kingship and bestowed it on Saul. And when Saul turned out to be a bad apple, he took it back from him and gave it to David. And so Samuel is the one who made Israeli kings. So it's a very distinctive prophet, Moses, very distinctive prophet. Almost all of the Israeli prophets are distinctive. Isaiah is like, um, full strength lemon juice, um, catastrophically sour to wake people up. Jeremiah is enormously learned, like someone who was like a librarian of all of the essential things. But Ezekiel is like the wild card prophet in ancient Israel. He is the prophet of the exile. He is the prophet who says we have been put in exile for a specific strategic purpose. And the purpose is that when we return, we must bring the fruit of the lesson of our exile with us out of exile, and plant that new kind of tree in Israel that we have to change our orchards. We can't have orchards that grow this old fashioned kind of fruit anymore. We need a new kind of fruit, a new kind of tree, and we need a tree that comes out of spiritual vision. We need a visionary fruit. And so Ezekiel is the prophet of visionary fruit. And at the center of Ezekiel's vision is that there is a constantly morphing symbol that sometimes is man, sometimes is lion. The Gnostics. Later on in a second century early Christianity didn't know too much about Judaism. And so, because they were converted Romans, they knew nothing about Judaism, as a matter of fact. And they used to talk about the lion faced power, which is just one phase of the Ezekiel ever morphing quality. Sometimes a man, sometimes a lion, sometimes an eagle, and sometimes an ox. They used to, in medieval times, say of Thomas Aquinas, that he was so certain that he was like the steadiness of the ox is like matzo. In medieval Christian philosophy, very permanently dependable to be exactly what he is. But in Ezekiel, this eagle ox lion man Was like a kaleidoscopic symbol that guarded the transform portal that you could not go through to a spiritual, visionary world until you engaged that for that quaternary, that quadratic symbol and its ever shifting vectors of meaning. And the only way to do that was in perfect balance that you could not, no matter how wise you were or how clever you were, no matter how wily you might get to be, no matter how learned you could possibly be, you could not deal with the four swords constantly flashing of this central guarding symbol, so that the only way to deal with it was to get into a surrender of acceptance to God's mystery. And in that equanimity you could go through. Later on. Dante, some 1700 years after Ezekiel used the same spiritual vision in bringing the first part of his Divine Comedy to a transform, not to a closure, but to a transform so that you could go on beyond hell. And the transform was, in Ezekiel fashion, that the only way to get free from a constantly turning wheel of nightmare is to find your way to the only quiet place on the wheel, and that's in the perfect hub. Because at the perfect center hub of that nightmare wheel of existence, you find quietness, you find rest, you find equanimity, and you can go through the equanimity of that hub. It's called the soul core. And so Ezekiel masterfully presented a four part, a quadratic, a quadruple conundrum of symbolic possibilities for the mind that the mind cannot figure its way through. The mind has to learn to relinquish, to surrender what it thinks is control, what it thinks is authority to the equanimity of the spirit. And the spirit is not victorious because it wins. Arguments with the mind doesn't argue with the mind at all. The spirit in its way, doesn't argue with the mind, ever. So it isn't that. Well, the mind is constantly winning its battle against the spirit. It's an ignorant way to think of it. It's when the mind learns enough to cease its fighting, not only in tactical terms, but in strategic terms. Stops planning to win. But then a different quality takes over, not takes over so much, but encompasses what had been a battleground and transforms it into a field of peace. And in the New Testament, Ezekiel's vision was so pristine that they used it as the template by which the structure of the entire New Testament, each one of four Gospels, was the version of the eagle, the lion, the ox, and the man, and that that quaternary of those gospels in the New Testament was to be that squared template of four symbolic morphs of the same mysterious, constantly turning center. And the only way to go through was to find the equanimity where all four met, and at that quietness to go through. And where do you go through? In the New Testament? After the four Gospels, one went through a very peculiar kind of equanimity, not an equanimity of peace, but an equanimity of ultimate horror. And that fifth element was the apocalypse, the book of revelation, That that's the passage through, but with such a mysterious way through, and was not at all the way in which Ezekiel showed the way through to be an ultimate spiritual calm because of trust in God, but to be an ultimate spiritual terror which works in the same way but is not only hair curdling, one would say it curdles karma as well. You could never be as vicious and as mean as the ultimate apocalypse of the universe. So you can stop trying to be vicious in me. It's a back way of coming into it. For Sir Isaac Newton, he tried to match up the Old Testament and the new. He tried to match up Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation, and he tried to match them on the basis of the hub symbols. And he saw that they were the same. And he couldn't match them, and he couldn't bring them together. And he spent 30 years on it, and he never succeeded. And Blake being a much more insightful spiritual visionary than Newton, Newton had to learn how to see Transcendentally incrementally. But Blake had it even as a child. Blake saw that Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation meet together, where the Book of Job is. The interplay between them in the Book of Job contains the secret. The secret. Transform is there. That job experiences an apocalypse in his life. Everything is taken from him, every single thing that he has. He loses. His children are killed. All of his possessions are gone. Even his wife gives up hope in him. And job is left alone on a mound of ashes. And then, as if to bring ridicule into play, three so-called comforters one. A brash young man who has all the latest answers, and two older men who have all the traditional answers and varying degrees of presentation. They come to find out what job has done to piss God off. And job's response constantly as I have done nothing. You must have done something. If you haven't done something, then it must be that esoteric. What you didn't do. Sins of omission. What didn't you do? I have not undone nothing. And constantly the book of job is. It unfolds argument after argument more and more refine it. Well, it must be something that comes because you're the focus of things done or undone before you, your fathers, your fathers, fathers, your lineage. Because everyone knows sins are visited upon the wicked to the seventh generation must be somebody else. And you're suffering because of job says, is not that I am not unloved by God? So that constantly the equanimity, the needle like certainty in the Book of Job is that job himself never loses contact with God. He always has a direct tie, not a tie of experience. All that has been trashed, not an existential tie. He can look around. He can see everything is dead, is gone. And it's not a mental tie. Because his mind is so wearied and numbed and blurred that he cannot focus. He couldn't maintain an idea of contact at all. Yet he knows that his his secret heart is still a truthful resonance of the presence of the divine. He knows that. And that's where the vision of the morning stars came together. Comes to job not as some kind of just grand Busby Berkeley type show, but this is God's response to job. Yes, you still see me in the most primordial way. You see me in a way which is not only before your fathers, fathers, fathers to 7 million generations, but before the stars even had planets. You go back to the primordiality of when the choir of the universe was first fresh in singing. That's how deep you're tied to me is. We would today say that all of the elements heavier than hydrogen or helium were made in stars. There is no other way in this universe to make those heavier elements, except in the fusion cores of stars so that out of the 92 natural elements, 90 of them were made in stars. We could not exist. We're made up of actual atoms from stars, and we still carry on the deepest level of all. Not the nightmares of tribes, not the haunting perniciousness of past karmas because we were alligators or reptiles or whatever. But the deepest level is that we are whole because we come from when stars in the morning of the universe sang together. So Blake chose the Book of Job, and we know today that it's a curious thing about the Book of Job, because while the Book of Job is set in very ancient times, and there are origins of the themes of the Book of Job that go back to about 2000 BC. The theme of the constantly suffering righteous man who is tested by by evil, which is impersonal. In the ancient Hebrew, one never refers to the Satan as a masculine. The Satan is always neuter, is always the neuter article that's there before. So thus Satan is a neutral individual, neither male nor female, and therefore is in a peculiar way the negative cutout of equanimity, not the equanimity as being quiet, but the negative shadow of quietness as being neutral. And where does that kind of shadow and all this fire ridden Los Angeles? I mean, you mentioned the Satan and things burn up. Where does that happen? That neutrality can only happen in man's mind. There are in nature truly inorganics. There's no doubt about that. But the inorganics are not neutral like the Satan is. The Satan is not only a neuter of gender, of sexuality, and you must be aware that sexuality goes down to the molecular level. Plants are sexual. Not just animals, but there is a gender bias all the way down to the origins of life. And as Teilhard de Chardin observed, once rocks are not dead, they're just pre-life. They belong to the zero that turns into the generations of engendered life forms. The Satan is not in that spectrum at all, is outside of that spectrum, as a shadow would be, but not a shadow of something that's fictitious, but a shadow of something that came into play. What came into play? To cast that shadow? The neutral abstractness of a false sense of self in the mind. The Satan is a shadow of the arrogant false self that focuses in the mind. And so the book of Job begins. It says, yum yum Yahweh, there comes a day of the Lord, and then all of the things of heaven and earth present themselves before the Lord, before his throne. And whenever the Satan comes, God always stops and says, whoa, where did you come from? And the Satan always replies, from roving to and fro on the earth. He doesn't come from any stability. He comes from constant restlessness, because the false self sense in the mind is not really equanimeous. It's a kaleidoscopic restlessness that's so encompassing and hypnotic that it seems to be standing still, when actually it is just a kaleidoscope of of blurred chaos. And the Satan says, well, I come from roving to and fro on the earth. And immediately the response in the book of Job. God says to the Satan, Will you come from the earth? Then you must know my best servant job. On the entire planet. The best being who serves me is job. And Satan says, what should be me? I'm the most important figure on earth. Well. This job. Look, you favored him. No wonder. No wonder he sings your praises. He has 152 foot yacht. His house is on five continents. His wife dresses in Valentino. Take him away and see what happens. Take these things away. And so power is given to the neuter. To the Satan to disrobe. Job. It's like the hem of the robe of glory. In Alexandria, hundreds of years later, it's like the great mythic cycle of Inanna, where her descent into the netherworld into the nadir that at each level she has to divest herself of one of seven symbols that clothe her her scepter, her crown, her robe, until finally she can only arrive at the nadir of the netherworld nude. Job arrives through the taking away layers of the neuter, the Satan. He arrives in a spiritual nudity. He has nothing left. There is no place for his confidence to be In nature. Nothing in the existential, nothing in the ritual realm. Nothing in the mythic realm. Works. Nothing in the realm of the mind of symbols works at all. Hopefully you will never have to go through such a situation, but you can come to a point to where suffering completely eclipses the mind. There is no hope whatsoever left. So when Blake came to write a great spiritual epic called Jerusalem a Hundred Plates, the one that's showing in London, the first plate shows Blake himself going into this underworld, this cavern. And it says above, abandon all hope ye who enter here. This is the only way that you can go in. You cannot enter there with any kind of confidence whatsoever, because there is no confidence to be had anywhere at all, and no hope of it even. Blake chose the Book of Job because this was the way in which this mysterious quality of primordiality not only worked to bring life back again, but withdrew the projections of the Spectres and the shadows so that they were also folded back in, so that that those qualities which were not there in naturally existent things now were there and put the sparkle into the gem. And it's this kind of equality that's there in the book of job. Now we know at the beginning of the 21st century that the Book of Job, though its themes go back to 2000 BC, Was not written as we have it at that time. It wasn't even written in the time of Ezekiel and the exile. It's deeply related to the Book of Daniel in its thematic presentation, in its language, style, and in fact, the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job are contemporaneous. They're written at the same time they were written about 160 BC. And they were written by one of the great writers of all time, a man whose name we do not know, who's known historically as the Teacher of Righteousness, the founder of the Qumran community alongside the Dead Sea. And they were written to be work books for differential consciousness, to find a way to get through the phases of betrayed ritual, of trashed myth, and of abstractly subversive, arrogant mentality, and that when all those avenues are closed off to man as a resource, he is still not damned. He has a greater resource than all of these put together that comes into play and only comes into play. Man's extremity is God's opportunity is the old way to talk about it. And so we're going to come next week and look at a vision that Blake began, not exactly in the book of job, but as a frontispiece to Europe, a prophecy done in 1794 that God does not sit quietly on a throne, but that holds a caliper of beginning the geometric arising of experience, because it's out of the transformation of arithmetic functions into geometric fingerings, where symbols come into play from images. Symbols are the deepening of images, just as arithmetic functions deepen with geometric applications. And what comes out of it, then, are series of forms. In Plato's time they were called the five Pythagorean solids. The pyramid, the sphere, the cube, the dodecahedron, and a larger polyhedron. And it was these five solids that reoccur as differential conscious phases of vision and secretly structure the universe. As someone who used that very outlook was Johannes Kepler, who figured out in his math that the planets must move in shapes that are mathematically affine to those five Pythagorean solids. And he did wonders with that. I suggest that you try to get a copy of the Book of Job. It's in the portable. Blake. They have this same figure on the cover and in the back of the portable. Blake, you will find all the illustrations to the Book of Job. Try and look at them because I'll refer to them next week. Thank you.