Symbol 9

This is symbols nine, and we're positioning ourselves through a long acclimation to a very refined language. We're positioning ourselves to begin to understand in a different way, in a new way. The old way was always corresponding to physical things, to material reference to correspondence that had a numerical, repeatable relationship. And that way is good for tribes, and it's not very good for the kinds of person that inhabit civilizations that are differentially conscious. And so our education is concerned constantly in a regular way, with tuning our ears to a different style of speaking, to calibrating our minds to a different form of Gestaltung. And the old way of speaking about this was that if you look at a stone, it's the stone. If you look into a crystal, you see the complexity of its structure. And so a symbolic mind is like a crystal. It has a structure which is capable of multiplying, of presenting many facets at the same time. But there are certain kinds of crystals that are jewels, and the jewel is able to present a an elated gestalt of unity that scintillates and sparkles, so that even though it's a million facets, it is presented as one brilliant jewel like flash. And we're trying to appreciate this. We have come by the beginning of the 21st century to a state of understanding, the world of understanding that even stones Even atomic elements like hydrogen or helium can come to an understanding for us, in which the million facets of those elements can be presented in a single flash. Now it's called in 21st century physics, the complex name for matter at that state is called Bose-Einstein condensation. When an atomic element is chilled and brought to quietude, brought to that state where heat no longer moves The atomic structure. Different atoms will coalesce and will act as if they are a single atom. All of the material will act with a unity as if it were but a single atom. So that a Bose Einstein. Bose was a mathematician from the early days. In this they worked with liquid helium. There are properties that happen to matter at that particular state. And what's amazing about this is that in yoga, the very same discovery was made many millennia ago, quite a long time ago. And that is that if the human mind is brought to stillness. If it's brought not just to being quiet and not just what normally is called still, but is brought into coherence, like regular light being made coherent by an arranged polarity and becoming a laser laser light. The mind can achieve a coherence, which is like a laser of attention and the entirety of the mind, no matter which mind it is, how much it knows, what it knows comes into like a Bose-Einstein concentrate in that kind of super stillness, comes into the ability to bring everything that it is into a singular focus. This ability to make a single pointedness of mind. The discovery of it was in India. And so Sanskrit is the first language in the world that had a word for that. And in Sanskrit it's called ekagrata. It means single pointedness of mind. It means that the entire mind looks singularity wise. What it sees, it sees in its beauty, in its wholeness, and not only what it sees, but the act of seeing is full. The Greek term for that kind of fullness was called Pleroma, and the Pleroma was not so much an object, but was the cooperation of the seer, the seeing and the seeing that what is seen and the seer are both folded into the stillness, into the act of seeing. That kind of laser singularity of seeing is called in English since the 14th century. Since Chaucer's day, we've used the term in English vision that is regular seeing sees objectively and sees a correlation, and you can develop that into through various theologies or ideologies. You can develop that into a very complex kind of mutual ricocheting correlative. T.s. Eliot in and his poetry developed a theory of the correlative vision of poetry. This is a lower wisdom. It's a lower understanding. There is such a thing as a high wisdom and the high wisdom, the high understanding is that the singularity is not based upon one, but that the singularity continues. It's integral even in folding upon itself, and disappears and becomes then an index, not of oneness, but an index of zero. We're taking two figures. We're taking Plato, who lived 2400 years ago and whose philosophy is one of the strongest philosophies ever made on the planet, and we're taking baby steps. It was one of the great poets of the late 19th, early 20th century. Someone once wrote a critical study of Yeats's language and entitled the book High Talk, because Yeats was the kind of man haunted and bedeviled by his own capacities of genius and his own resistances of stubbornness. At the same time, he was compelled to always try to seek a transcendent resolution because his resistances, his stubbornness, his tendency towards violence, his lustful regard for physicality, which was sublimated and buried for decades and finally, towards the end of his life, was just released for various reasons, and it became haunted by erotic compulsions, for instance. But he was always able to try to transcend and to go above and below calibrations of oneness into what would be called zero states. And so when one looks at the dramatic works of W.B. Yeats, you find a whole sheaf of books now comparing Yeats drama with Japanese Noh plays, which is the Zen form of drama. All these books are books on Japanese Noh, Zen drama and Yeats's plays, and we'll talk a little bit about that later on. So that Yeats calibrated himself to zero and was stymied as to how to bring that into play, bring that into life. Whereas Plato was always calibrated to the one, the big one, the one, the good, the ultimate. And throughout Plato, his drama, his dramatic works are philosophic dialogues, so that Plato's dialogues are a form of symbolic play. The characters who discuss in Plato's dialogues are arranged with a dramatic scenario, and that dramatic scenario has a very peculiar development in history. When we look at the cultural milieu out of which Plato came. It's called the Greek term for that is Athos, Athos, out of which we get the word ethnography, the study of ethos, the study of various not just cultures, but cultural styles. The Greeks have a certain ethos. The Chinese have a certain ethos. The Indians have a certain ethos. All so-called national types. But an ethos goes deeper. It is not just the paint on the surface, nor the stain in the tissue, but it's the grain of the structure. The Greek ethos was brought to a focus by Plato in his style of writing dramas, because the other two aspects had already been filled, the other two aspects being tragedy and comedy. In the Greek ethos, there were three and only three ways of transcending. The first way is personified by Aphrodite that one could get out of the body. The Greek word for that is ecstasies, ecstasy. One could stand outside the body by, um, what? Aphrodite, symbolically, um, brought into play as a mythic image the transcendence of ecstasy. Sexuality. But not just sexuality. The key to Aphrodite sexuality was not her legs or her breasts, but was her smile. It was the smile of Aphrodite that was the symbolic focus for the invitation to stand outside yourself. And so she was the experience of love. We come from a culture that just emerged from confusing lust and eros and love as being different things and different qualities, and actually it's proportional. It's like eroticism is love caramelized, but lust is love burnt. For the Greeks, love was a way of going. Ekstasis outside of yourself. But it was expressed in dramatic form as comedy that when one understands love, when one understands ecstasies, when one understands the smile of Aphrodite, there is a comedic quality to understanding life. Life not as a as a Phil Silvers comedy or a Bill Cosby comedy, but life as a grand comedy like Dante's The Divine Comedy. You would not read Dante and chuckle very much, but it is a comedy, and he entitled it The Divine Comedy because it was the smile of Beatrice that was the invitation to his being able to complete the journey of his reality and discover that love was true for him. That love was trustworthy, that you can understand everything the seer, the seen and the seeing by love. But in the Greek ethos, there was another quality that was equal to love. And this made a very difficult thing for the Greek ethos. Alone, out of all the cultures on earth, the Greeks were haunted by the fact that just as love was able to be a symbolic synthesis outside of oneself and understand transcendence, there was something as powerful as love equal to it, and that was made into the mythic image and symbolized by Mars, by Aries, the god of war. And what the god of war symbolizes, just as Aphrodite symbolized the beautiful smile that invites one to love, and in that Eros transcend in ecstasy. Aries or Mars, the god of war, struck one with terror that one can be frightened out of your wits, scared out of your existence. And so there was a kind of negative, transcendent quality of terror that you can be scared out of yourself. And the neurotic is someone who is scared but still maintains themselves, and the psychotic is someone who's been scared out of themselves. They're not there. They don't dare be there. And so for the Greek ethos, terror and love were equally balanced. Tragedy and comedy were equally balanced. But there was a third transcendent mode for the Greek ethos, and the third transcendent mode was that of Athena. Athena. Athena. Athena was the transcendence of wisdom, that there was a quality where one could balance love and terror. And in this balance, there was the capacity to transcend by wisdom. And Plato wrote the plays about wisdom. Transcendence. Whereas the Greek tragedians wrote the plays about terror. And Aristophanes and many others that we don't have their manuscripts preserved, wrote about comedies so that in the Greek ethos Plato was a style of dramatic presentation of the way in which to go outside of yourself, by wisdom, by wisdom. And Plato in his transcendent dialogues, is the root of a whole lineage called philosophy. And Yeats belongs in that lineage. Yeats is one of the the great Platonists. But we have to understand. Plato lived 2400 years ago. He lived at a time where that ethos was under crisis, and for only a couple of generations were the Greeks able to keep the focus so that there could be someone initially like an Aeschylus, who developed Greek tragedy, and later someone like Euripides, who was the last great writer of Greek tragedy because the focus had wavered, and in between Aeschylus and Euripides was the perfect balance of Sophocles. When you get acquainted with Greek tragedy, with the presentation of transcendence, by confronting terror, you see that Aeschylus is like the original high flying eagle, and Euripides is like the man walking on the earth, bringing it down to the common man. And Sophocles is perfectly poised in between the two. He is the grandest of all of the Greek tragedians, in that he presents it in a form where terror is seen with such deep equanimity that one goes through the horizon of terror by seeing that if terror is infinite, it cannot touch a mortal individual, and if it is infinite, then it has no basis upon which to act upon things, and literally snuffs itself out, so that the balance of Sophocles was proverbial in ancient times. When Yeats was at a crucial mature period of his life, he began translating Sophocles from the Greek and presenting Sophocles in plays in London and in Dublin. He translated the Oedipus Rex, and he translated Oedipus at Colonus. But got involved with the book that we're going to talk about a vision and didn't translate the third of the trilogy, it's called The Theban Trilogy, three plays that figure together, Oedipus Rex being the first. Now, it's interesting because Oedipus Rex was the play was the Greek tragedy that Freud chose to exemplify the Oedipus complex, that what was wrong with a masculine psyche could finally be boiled down and reduced to the eros and terror brought together in a Sophocles Oedipus Rex horizon, and that one could identify the source of neurosis and the trigger for psychosis in that particular symbolic figure, Oedipus. And of course, the same for the feminine version, the Electra complex. Electra is also a sophoclean quality, so that psychoanalytic symbolism took its vocabulary from Sophocles, and one of the reasons that Yeats was translating Sophocles was to pull that vocabulary, that language, out of the psychoanalytic limits, out of the dead end of psychologizing. Because basically psychology is about the psyche. It's about emotional feeling, toned energy that relates the body to the mind. And as long as you stay with the body and the mind being bridged by being interfaced, by feeling, by images, by dreams, by myths, then you're all right. And it's fine. But when consciousness comes into play, consciousness does not belong in that ecology in any kind of separate way. It belongs like a Bose-Einstein concentrate to the whole of it, all of it. And what was surprising to ancient wisdom is that when you go into an ecstasy is far enough, when you go into ecstasy, to love in its far infinite horizons, just like terror, just like high wisdom, the qualities of it cease to be distributable elements and become a wholeness, a oneness, an allness, which, if let to be all, winks out and leaves no trace of anything whatsoever. But what is left is not nothing in the sense of nil. What is left is emptiness, which is absolutely functions the same as fullness. Absolutely the same. So that if someone is calibrated to one, you will never get there. You will think that the oceanic all is it and you will become sophomorically Pollyanna about everything to your detriment and in reaction, because the world never is real in those terms and doesn't respond to that, you will become crusty and sour and bitter. And Plato, in his old age, spent a lot of time writing a big, huge tome that almost no one reads called The Laws. This is the way it is. Kids in hundreds of pages. So that the Greek ethos, oddly enough, chosen in the late 19th century early 20th century to be the arbiter, the paradigm, the language vocabulary source out of which the understanding of psychology, the understanding of philosophy, the understanding of literature was raised as a world standard. And of course, it didn't apply in many places in the world. The Chinese don't have very much response to the Greek ethos at all. The Indians have modified and used their own development. They can appreciate it, but it's a very minor thing. The Indians of North and South America had no relationship to it whatsoever. The Australian Aborigines could care less. So as the world became fuller and more populated at the very same time that the Greek ethos was being selected as the arbiter of how we will understand ourselves, our health, our ability, what is seen, what is real, what is logical, what all of this. There were more people in the world who saw things quite differently in other. And so at the very same time that you have this, you have a revolution in things like anthropology, pulling out the fact that there are many ways to be human. There are a lot of ways to be human. And they never even heard of Plato. They never heard of Greek tragedy. They never heard of Greek comedy, and they especially never heard of transcendental wisdom. But they had their own forms. They had their own ways. And so the challenge, at the very same time that it was coming into focus as the arbiter, it was being eroded and undermined at the same time by a comparative anthropology that was soon to sweep it aside. But at the same time as that was happening, there were discoveries that it wasn't just civilized man and so-called primitive man. It wasn't just the the ego with its superego overlay and its ID foundations, but that the species, our species goes back geologic ages, millions of years and the precursors tens of millions of years, and the precursors to that hundreds of millions of years. And so you had the development at the same time as the focus of the universal distribution of the European based, Greek founded ethos being undercut anthropologically and also in terms of archaeology and paleontology. And someone like Yeats was completely staying away from the sciences because of that, because it was an uncanny challenge and thought that it would go away if you refined the language in terms of transcendental wisdom. This is one of the difficulties of calibrating by zero. You understand that all of it comes clean if you pull on the cord real enough. Not only will the apparent not undo itself into a straight string, but as any good magician knows, the string itself will vanish. So that one could say, like in Zen. The problem is that you think there's a problem. The solution is that there is no solution because there was no problem in the first place, so that looking for a solution was the problem. Now, all of this is wonderful in a high dharma, but it does not bring itself into translation, into lives very easily at all. It doesn't have an application. And so someone like a Yeats, even though calibrated to zero, had a very big difficulty with life, with people. And yet someone like Plato, who calibrated to one saw not the zero, but saw it as a nil. So the lecture today is entitled Yeats zero. Plato nil. Cute, huh? One is reminded of some beautiful lines from Wallace Stevens poem where he talks about, um, it's a poem called The Snowman, where one has to have a mind of winter and stare at the landscape in deep, accumulated penetrative continuity. And he says to look at the shagged, icy see spruces and the glitter of the sunlight in the ices. And to be cold and not care to see exactly what is there, and nothing that also is there. So there is a deep quality of literature about this time. Yeats vision comes out about the time that Wallace Stevens was writing The Snowman in the early 1920s, but for Yeats, we'll see that he was haunted because he had an overlay on top of the Greek ethos. He had an ancient Celtic ethos, also an Irish culture, an Irish background, but that the Irish background just didn't go back into English history. It went back into Celtic mythology. It went back into the origins of Celtic mythology in one of the most transcendent horizons that the planet has ever produced, and that is that there is an invisible realm of beings. The English word that was brought into play by Edmund Spenser in Shakespeare's time was because Spenser was also in Ireland, and he used the term faerie, the fairy realm, that the fairy realm is not below this in another world. It's not above this in a transcendent world. It's not something that one has to read between the lines to see here in this world, but that the fairy realm has its own heaven and netherworld, its own reality, and it's like a different dimension. It's like a higher dimension. And so it's here all the time, but invisible. And that one has to be able to live in such a way that you inhabit the fairy realm and acquire the fairy faith. And in fact, one of the people writing about the time of Yeats, writing a Vision in Ireland was E.y. Evans-wentz, the great writer on the Tibetan Book of the dead, the first person to ever present the Tibetan Book of the Dead in English. The first person to ever present the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, the first one to ever do a biography of Milarepa. All of these great things that he went to Tibet to learn to find. And they all published by Oxford University Press, the highest level. His first book was called The Fairy-faith in Celtic Countries, that once you're admitted to the realm of the Faerie dimension, the common people and the Celtic Irish tradition called them the she spelled s I'd h e the she. The cultivated classes would not use that kind of popular term. They're not the she, but they're the Tuatha de Danaan, the tribe of the goddess of goddess Danu. They're part of the primordial people of when Mother Nature was real and her children were real. In the mysticism, the mystery of nature. The mystery of nature. Of the of Mother Earth's primal realm. So that the fairy realm is a primordiality of originality that comes from the mother, not the father. The father's realm is the one, the one, the one God, but the mother's realm, the original lady of the Wild Things. Her realm was zero. Her realm was the realm of the fullness of nothing in particular. Nothing exactly. Which meant infinite. And so Yeats was constantly having to sort for himself, whether the woman that he was attracted to was attracting him because of Aphrodite, or because of the lady of the Wild Things. And one of his great friends in his life, because she was manifestly not displaying any kind of Aphrodite smile to him, and yet was a primordial woman, was Lady Gregory. And as long as Lady Gregory was alive, Yeats always had a certainty beneath and beyond everything that he knew where he was in reality, because Lady Gregory was the cadence of the real in the feminine. Lady of the Wild Things for him and her estate at Cowley in the west of Ireland, was always open to him whenever he got scared or terrified or confused. He could always go there, he could always spend time there, and he was always able to recalibrate himself back to zero there. She ran a zero based hostel for him, and that's hostel was a place of refuge for him. And when she died in 1932, early 1932, he was like a lost little boy because in a way, he depended on her to fulfill that function for him and never developed it himself. He enjoyed the pleasures of driving the sports car, but he never learned to build his own car. And it's a different thing. So we have a peculiar kind of a situation for us. We're trying to appreciate in our education something which is exponentially beyond Plato and Yeats. I mean, Yeats was dead before I was born. Plato belongs to a whole different eon from me, and great as they were, we are really so far beyond them both that it is amazing. And yet they are valuable to us because they give us a check. A reality check on how the civilization that recently died was born and developed, and why it died, and why in its death throes where we were born, we have not yet seen anything called a healthy life. We've never been able to see, to experience a world, a planet that is healthy. It has always been ill, dying, disease, and crippled since we were born. So that we need a vision, a capacity for vision, to see beyond, to see beyond where we always have been. Not because of ecstasy, nor because of terror, but a specialized form of high wisdom. And that is to see what can be if we do this, that, and the other that there's nothing there. But if we do our actions, our dance, then that sunrise will be there. It will be there because it's a promise, by the way, in which reality works. If you put the right ingredients together and put that in the oven, you're going to get a meal out by by the recipe, you can tell what you're going to make. And so this education is like changing the recipe so that we get a different kind of person out. We get a person who's at home, not in having to undergo the crushing gravities of terror or the disorienting of overlays of ecstasy. Nor are the precarious singularities of high wisdom very hard to do, but some kind of person that's at home as at home in consciousness as we are in nature, because myth and ritual and symbol all belong to the natural ecology. They're all. The brain and the mind are a part of nature. They belong with nature. It is not the mind that is transcendent, but consciousness. Consciousness is like a vapor that came out of the food. The Chinese term qi literally meant the steam from the rice originally. It's the steam from the rice that you can use to drive engines. You can't use the rice. You can use the rice to eat or to mend paper. But the steam from the rice is just as important. And you can do a lot with steam power, and with qi, you can do the kind of power for transform so that the circulation of the chi in the body is a very low level. Even animals can do that. They don't have any problem with that at all. That's why people who get hung out on the transcendence of Tai Chi Chuan, it's just it's what animals do. 2300 years ago, Chuang Tzu made fun of people who thought that they were wise because they could do these kinds of movements that even animals do. It's not that at all. There's something profoundly beyond that. And when the classic yoga transformed by the Buddha in India went to China and met the Tao Te Ching, transformed by Zhuangzi and brought into play in the figure of Huineng, you had a transformation called Zen. And what was born out of that. Daichi Suzuki writes the great interpreter of Zen for the 20th century. The interference, the way to bring a zero calibration into play in life. The interference is sometimes helpful, sometimes decidedly not. As a rule, it works both ways. Civilization is human and artificial, but some are not satisfied with it and want to go back to nature. Well, so-called modern progress is by no means unmitigated bliss, but on the whole, at least on the material side of life, we seem to be better off these days than before. In a similar way, Zen found that you can take language and you can take a certain limited set of language Called a certain kind of statement called a koan and a koan originally in Chinese. Originally it meant just public document, something that has the authority of a law. But in this sense you don't know what the principle of operation is because there are no precedents for it. And so it's a law, which is true, but it's unknown in its application. And so the koan became a riddle. It became something that, you know, is real, but you cannot know how to use it. And so the difficulty was condensed. It wasn't the seer and the seen, it was the seer and the seeing. So that Zen with the koan condensed language so that the symbolic reverberation was on the very surface of the mind, the very surface of the sphere. With the act of seeing, with the process of seeing and that process, that language process of seeing in that way is the mythic horizon, the mythic horizon that usually goes out in language, in images. But this way the images and the language were withdrawn, were brought to the very surface of the mind. In astronomy, it's very much like a neutron star. A neutron star's gravity is so huge that its magnetic field is plastered on the surface of the star. It doesn't extend out. And at a certain criticality, that neutron star whose gravity field is plastered on its surface. That seer whose image language base is plastered on the surface of the mind at a certain density. It becomes like a Bose-Einstein concentrate and acts as if it were a unity. And in doing so, it has one and only one action, and that is, it folds in upon itself. It winks out. In Sanskrit it's called bindu, or the effect of it is called moksha, or the actuality of it is called seeing through. Seeing through. Seeing that there, because there is nothing particular to look at. One can look at anything and see all. Let's take a break. In Psychotherapy. The whole process is to retract the projections, to bring them back in. You've put it all out there. They're to blame. Those are the bad guys. Well, no they're not. They may be, but that's not your problem. Your problem is projecting onto them a whole film of stuff. And they're guilty of many things, but not these things. They're innocent of these things. These are your things? Yeah, they're really bad guys, and you have to watch out for them. But not for the reasons that you think. So that retracting projections. Basic thing in therapy. But. It all depends a great deal depends On who has directed that film? Who has who has choreographed those projections? Because if you bring them back, you bring them back to the filmmaker. While the filmmaker is flawed, he's going to just make another reel. And because he has the memory, oh, I've withdrawn all those projections. I'm. I'm adjusted. I'm okay. The next time it doesn't register that. You should do that again. Well, I've already done that. Or if you do that again, then you begin to doubt. Well, how many times do I have to do this? And especially if you have a popular idea of the transpersonal, which is a misnomer if there ever was one Who's trans personal. If you go transcendent from the mind in ecstasy or terror or wisdom, and you go beyond that mind, if you go into the dimensions of conscious space time, the person is not a thing. The person is not an integral at all. The integral person would be but a mask to the spiritual self. That's one of the themes of Yeats. Yeats, the man and the masks. Both Yeats and Rilke were very careful about masks. All of Yeats's dramas, all of his plays that were deeply revealing using a symbolic language, used masks on the actors. To ritualize the action, which is not a regression by ritualizing the action and by symbolizing the language, you bring the existentials into a level where they're stable and you bring the mythic into a level where it's stable. And when you parallel the ritual and the symbol together, when they as an ancient Chinese metaphor, when these hunt together, they're really efficient. Falcons always hunt in pairs. So when you when you bring the ritual action, which is not ritualized, but it's ritual action expressing a tandem to a symbolic language and a different dimension is doing the choreography. Then something else comes into play. It doesn't come into play because it's made. It comes into play because it's invited. It's invited. All true prayer is invitational. You never ask for things. Because you may get those things and you may not know what to do with those things. King Midas wished that everything he touched turned to gold. And it did, including his daughter. So the invitation. The invitation is leaving an opening. And so the choreography of ritual action and symbol language together make a form of drama which is not mythic, nor is it referential into the nature of the integral. Its referent becomes something to do with the invitation from the unknown, from the future, from the conscious, from the cosmic, and one invites that dimension to come into play. This is like using in math mathematics, factoring in the zeros, so that instead of being stuck in arithmetic, you can now go into the differential emotions of mathematics. And yet it's a precarious threshold. That threshold, if done in slow motion, is like hitting the sound barrier at about Mach six. It'll shatter almost any kind of material, and so it's better to do it in a different kind of emotion than confrontation. Then retraction. In a therapy, if you're successful at withdrawing the projections, one says, well, then this therapy worked and that you're healed, but you're only healed in terms of that situation set. There's something beyond being healed and that's being cured. Being healed, pays attention to the illness and the symptoms. Being cured pays attention to the existential reality. What was the saying? Put your trust where moth and rust do not occur. Don't lay your treasures up on earth. Whereas thinking that you are happy because you've been healed and you're back to where you should be on this earth. That entire choreography is a skit on the Titanic. And even if the film director is king of the world, it's still. So it becomes an odd situation. Plus, it becomes paradoxical because if you go in for transpersonal. Very often that transpersonal is not the spiritual self, but is the ego. It thinks because you've pulled in these projections and because now you're going to transcend that, that transcendence follows the direction of the integral of pulling in. The therapy has been all about pulling those things in. So you pull in and you go back to the body. You go back to a ritual level. You go back to a mythic horizon of experience where the ego happens. And so the ego thinks that it is. The transpersonal convinced of it can prove it. It can triangulate and check itself vis a vis the mind and the body. And of course, they're both going to agree. All of that is a very complex snare known as the world. It's a very big snare. And for the most part, it doesn't make any difference. If you're just going to follow the, as Bronowski says, follow the seasons and follow the the line of the animal life. But if you want to look up at the stars and in between them and be real. In a world without end, then something else has to happen. Then a transform has to come in which changes the symbolic indexing, which changes the calibration of the ritual if to recalibrate the actions. And so one of the most important tandems in Zen. Is that the koan works with tying a bow for the mind, and zazen works on tying a bow for the body at the same time. Practice them together. Practice sitting. And practice sitting so that the mind is gains its coherence. Its concentration retracts what doesn't retract. The whole film of projected images, but retracts the resonances of the process of thinking itself. That's called meditation. Yeah. The Sanskrit word for it is Diana. Guyana. Guyana means to concentrate by bringing the resonances back to the origin, and as the resonances are brought back to the origin, one can experience in the mind the clarity that this was not about images at all. This was about a vibration, about a frequency that was not universal, but was, um, conditional. You made a certain musical instrument. Primitive musical instrument. And you kept banging that. And the resonance from that you thought was the vibration, the energy of life. And it wasn't that at all. It was your own makeshift conditional tool to get by. And that meditation is all about retracting the confidence that that's real, but that zazen practice needs to be paralleled by a koan which confronts the mind so that the mind retracts its ability to manufacture scenarios symbolically, structures that justify and that rationalize. And finally, the two together come into such a sync that the equanimity between them becomes noticeable. Because of a universal process. If you bring a polarity together, all of the tension that went into making relational forms between them becomes condensed, becomes Intensified. And so meditation is not very quiet. When it's real, it's quiet when it's achieved, but it becomes more and more difficult to hold it because the tensions become more and more important as almost an object in an in and of itself. And this is a great difficulty, the first mathematician on this planet to really approach a zero index to the limits of finite mathematics had a mental breakdown in 1884. His name was Cantor. Georg Cantor. And this little reprint of his classic contributions to the founding of the theory of transfinite numbers. And he called the zero calibration. He was Jewish, and so he used the Jewish term. He used an aleph, the character that begins the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph, a subzero aleph zero. And you can find on page. 103. The smallest transfinite cardinal number is Aleph zero. Transfinite. That means when you can count as high as you can count, that number is less than aleph zero, because L of zero was a calibration. Not in a sequence of points of numbers of cardinality, But was outside of that entire spectrum as a set. And so the beginning of something outside of that is the beginning of not only transfinite numbers, but transfinite sets. And Cantor struggled mightily and developed a thing called set theory. Here's a book set theory and the Limitation of size. And he really had a he had a difficult time. And when he died in 1918, in a sanitarium after having struggled for years and years, the very same year that he died, Hermann Weyl published an epochal book called The Continuum. And it's all about how the development of set theory in a transfinite mode, where you stop counting by dots by points, by numbers. You stop the tagging of intelligence to existential reference, which can be parted, and you allow for the wholeness of the all to be a context of reference rather than a referential correspondence, so that consciousness becomes contextual rather than referential. And all of your logics become subsets of a mental activity period. And then you enter into the realms of higher mathematics. Then you enter into an infinite field of maturation and development. And that becomes a source of joy, not joy like in happiness, but joy in suffused Participation in a mystery, and it's almost indistinguishable from the joy of running freely in a landscape. I remember once I used to have, a long time ago, a a drawing from South Africa done about 20,000 years ago, and it was of a an ancient Paleolithic hunter, with his body painted and running with his long hair and running just to run, not to chase an animal or hunt an animal, but just to run free. Wide open on one of the plains in South Africa 20,000 years ago. The not the joy, but the French word here. Elan. There is an elan. Henri Bergson called it an elan vital. There is an energy of life that shows that life's energy was not dependent upon the points of existential beings. For it to occur that life was a conscious dimension to the universe all the time, and was a context and not a referent. It isn't a matter of trying to identify is there life on Mars? Is there life on any of these things? It's that life is concomitant with time and space. It's as primal as time and space, so that its jewel matrix is not something rare, but something which is, quote, normal to reality. Wherever the real occurs, really, it is alive. And so one weans oneself away from a death perspective of retrospection, linked to a mind body tandem for certainty, and comes into the freedom of cosmic play. And in that freedom of cosmic play, one comes into a very interesting situation. I if I can find it here. I was going to go through, um, Wiles book on the continuum, a Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis. And then while developed group theory, which led to the development of quantum mechanics, because without that you don't go very far. And his great little book on symmetry using one of Kepler's snowflakes. The beginning. And of course, from symmetry and the continuum, one can go to something like here's introduction to supersymmetry. And then you get into nuclear physics. And one finds that there are things called chiral quark dynamics that there are, in fact, wonderful things having to do with the mystical truths of that are there in primordial man and eventually time. Harmonic electromagnetic fields in chiral media. Chiral means handed, left handed, or right handed, and as they occur, as that occurs, there are resonances, resonances of the way in which quote handedness occurs in the universe, and all those resonances weave together and make a tapestry which, when it comes into an integral, produces matter. Produces things called quarks and gluons and lattices. And eventually one comes to see that there is such a thing as the physics of quark gluon plasma. Can you imagine? And on page 13, bear with the language. On the other hand, the logarithm that is an exponential graphing causes a gradual decrease of the coupling strength between color charges, both at large momenta or small distances. This is the celebrated property of asymptotic freedom, which means which makes quantum chromodynamics the prime candidate for a theory of strong interaction because it describes the approximate Scaling of cross sections at very high energy. And so one comes into possession of a very differential conscious physics and mathematics and psychology, not based on the psyche, but based upon the energy of which the psyche is a form, but not a form, as we thought. It's not a form that's limited to a body or limited to a mind. It's a form that has a focus capability, which is a little bit different from an integral, because a focus can be many things. For instance, it can be a prism rather than a thing instead of absorbing light. It can diffract it. It can refract it. It can do many things so that there is a quality to symbols. Here's an ancient amulet from about 300 A.D., and this amulet was Sanskrit, and it used to be written out in the mind, in a language form. In its language form, it was Gotti. Gotti. Gotti. Gotti. Bodhisattva. And it occurs in the Heart Sutra. The heart in Sanskrit is re re re, like in the in the Tibetan Book of the dead. When some physical being dies, the first preservation of the form so that it can be held temporarily, is to fill each of the orifices of the body with a psychic projection of re, so that that body is sealed spiritually so that it can hear the language of vision, the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the dead. And remember then, what to do. It's the same as the Egyptian mummies. Only the Vajrayana mummy is embalming the dead with the mystic Hridaya. And one can use language. One can use symbol. One can use vision in this way. At the center of the 3D, though, is an ohm. Ohm because the origin, the seed, the out of which the whole development of all of these layers grew. The seed in India was ohm. That was the symbol out of which the resonances of transformed Hinduism, which became Buddhism, out of transformed Buddhism, which became the Mahayana, and out of the transformed Mahayana, which became the Vajrayana and also became Zen. So that all of these layers were there as resonances of that seed, and they were there because that's how it developed historically. So that there is, in conscious time space, a very real dimension of history that comes into play. And it's much like the recipe we were talking about later. The recipe is, in principle, what you're going to get out of it. And so it works in a differential way. Also, what is possible is there because you have already put the ingredients in there as seeds to develop. For a Tibetan who practices the Vajrayana to a perfect T, they become a transcendental Tibetan. You can be whatever you would like to be, but you have to put that in there in the form of nourishing as seeds. And so an education like this takes the entire planet, all of its heritage, and brings all of its heritage into play as seeds. So when that's activated the entire history, the entire dimension of the entire planet is available and is there so that one can not only know many things, but any things one can recognize and remember as a part of one's own heritage, any aspect of the development of the human family, any element that you've put in. And so the whole education nourishment is to make sure that this is as rich a recipe as can be. Because when we take it out of the transform oven, we want to be able to eat in any language, any culture, anywhere, including future ones that have not yet come to be will still be at home there. And so this is a very curious thing. When Carl Jung wanted his essay on synchronicity, published by the Bollingen Series under the Interpretation of Nature and the psyche, they included Wolfgang Pauli's essay The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler, and later, when Pauli was had passed on about three years ago, they published a collection of his essays, The Message of the Atoms Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the unspeakable. The unspeakable is a form of the silence. It's not that you couldn't say anything, but that you could talk infinitely about it. And so it is unspeakable. It is silent out of fullness, not for not having anything to say. The difficulty, classically, is that there never was a language that was made other than Tibetan to be specifically for talking about differential consciousness. Greek became as refined as it could in those directions, but came out of actually a culture that was intimately tied up in the Near East, in in the region of Cyprus and what became Palestine and Lebanon. The original of Greek Linear A was spoken about 2000 BC in places like the Mediterranean coast of Palestine, which is what made such a incredible subconscious synergy between the Greek used by Alexandrian Jews 2000 years later, and the development independently of Near Eastern religion, that became refined Hellenistic Judaism. And so you find someone like Saint John of the New Testament, using the same language that Philo of Alexandria used, and both those the same language that the Hermetic writings are in. They use the same language because it was an integral and differential spectrum from a convergence because of a shared origins. The classical Greeks were deeply related to the way in which Hebrew history developed also, which is why the Book of Job reads like a classical Greek tragedy. If you look at it in that way, not because of an influence, but because of a confluence, and so there is a great deal that is dependent upon it's actually a universal law of conditionality. However you fill the nutritive possibility that will be a range of activation for you. So if you want to be a good Tibetan, you can just stick to Tibetan Buddhism and you'll become you can become a very good Tibetan. If you'd like to be a very good ancient Egyptian, you're going to have a hard time crossing streets. We are at home not only everywhere on the planet, but for all time. We're at home in a time dimension. A historical dimension that goes back millions of years. No one had that before. There are kalpas in Hinduism, but they are symbolic expressions. They had no idea, and they had no conscious reality of the way in which A DNA code that shifts about one tenth of 1% goes from a chimpanzee to an Einstein. There was no realization for that. And we do. Plus, our future is unlimited. It's wide open. If we were visited by an alien, like in The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the film made 1951 right at the crux of saucers being put into secret hangars, and the story of the film is a Hollywood version, because the original story is entitled farewell to the master by an early science fiction writer named Bates H.E. Bates, and in farewell to the Master The Original Story, it wasn't. Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, who was the captain of the ship. It was the robot Gort who was the captain of the ship. The robot was the master, and the man was the messenger of the robot master, so that it had a peculiar poignancy written in the 1930s, but the film in 1951 was changed. The director, Robert Wise, was a very, very excellent director. He had directed things like Catwoman and later on directed one of the great Star Trek films, I believe, The Wrath of Khan. So he directed many, many excellent films. He turned it inside out because the idea that a robot, that an abstract person would be. The master was a haunting someone like Bates. The early writings about robots were all started by a man named Schepke Carl Schepke. He was a Czech writer in Prague, and he wrote a play called R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots. And it was performed in London and in New York about the time that Yeats was beginning writing his vision the early 1920s. And in R.U.R. rossum's Universal Robots, the robots understand finally how to make themselves better than men could make them, how to design themselves better than men could design them, and so they take over their own evolution, and they build themselves better than man could build them. And then they decide that man is rather superfluous, because he keeps getting in the way by thinking that he runs things. It's the perfect scenario. It's a Hasidic tale. It's a Prague Hasidic tale. Like the Golem, that man's pride in his mind will produce the illusion that his mind can make things better than life itself could. And this is a very, very deep running thing. But in the film, Robert Wise and the screenwriters made it so that the man could turn off the robot by a phrase, by a command phrase. His name was Klaatu. And so he would literally say Nick's No to the machine, to Gort, the nine foot robot, and it would shut him off. It would make him go back, retract all of his capacities and go back to bringing the man into a place of repose. Beyond life and death, where he could then be brought back into play in an original seed of himself. And in the film, the man dies. Michael Rennie's character dies, and the robot brings the body back into the flying saucer. And it's all witnessed by Patricia Neal, who is the Ayn Rand figure in the film. And she she is like a woman who knows how to witness the actuality. And incidentally, I think that she played in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. She played that figure. So Patricia Neal was very experienced when she came to this role. She knew how to be that way. An uncanny kind of a lady. Um, no wonder Gary Cooper was head over heels for her. An amazing gal, and she witnesses that the man is brought back to an equilibrium that is neither death nor life, but is originality. He's not brought back to life. He is reinstated to his originality. And then out of that, he reconstitutes a new calibration of the way in which this history will play out. That old history was limited to a style of time and space arranged by a certain conscious vectoring, whereas it didn't work out, they ended up killing him. So now he reconstituted changes the way in which consciousness will work out that time space. He tells them, if left to yourself, you will die Unless you are able to change yourself and accept the invitation from the unknown and come out and meet us, we're not coming back to you. You will have to come out and meet us. And so the flying saucer takes off at the end of the film, glowing a glowing, uh, invitational portal that we're all out there having a good time. If you want to stay here and be sour and kill yourselves, that's rather a stupid way to go. That there's a whole vast cosmos out there. Come out when you're ready. And so this whole idea of alien helping turns out to be alien invitation to grow up. Two distinct themes that are braided together and they form a watershed. All of this comes into play for the first time In the Greek ethos in Western civilization in the figure of Pythagoras, but Pythagoras communities were limited to a long duration, five years of apprenticeship, and then who knows how many years they were a life long achieving of wisdom. Whereas Plato's Academy was something where you came in for a little while, comparatively, you came in for a number of years and then you graduated. You were out. So that the shift from Pythagoras to Plato is a shift from life, mystical to an academy philosophical. And that the Academy then focused made the integral available in a dialogue form which was philosophic in its structure, a transform from the old Pythagorean way of life. It was found in Greek antiquity that this did not work. The second generation of graduates from Plato's Academy included somebody called Aristotle, which went back to a different form, an integral form, and left the differential as a potential something which we are not talking about today. We're only talking about this. We're not, after all the information we're after only the information that's relevant to the limited concern that we have. And you can recognize that this is a procedure of law. It took 600 years for someone to come along and retransform the Greek ethos back into the Pythagorean openness of life. And that figure was Plotinus. And right on the verge where Plotinus would have been successful beyond belief, he was ready to build finally the philosophic city. His students included the Emperor Aurelian and his wife, and maybe 8 or 10 of the most powerful Roman senators. And they were all set to have Roman backing to build this city down in the southern part of the Campania, down near where the Sibyl of Cumae in Virgil opened up the mysteries of the Roman mind to the fact that there might be something like The Lady of the Wild Things after all. And just as they were ready to do that, an outbreak of diphtheria killed Plotinus. Killed Aurelian. Killed many of the senators, and the entire thing fell through. And around 270 A.D.. Yeats was one of those figures who came at a time where he thought that he could re-enact the Pythagorean Plato Plotinus series, but he never investigated Pythagoras, because Pythagoras leads into mathematics and into science, and Yeats turned a blind eye towards that. So he starts with Plato. And Plato had transformed Pythagoras zero into a one index. And so at the depth of Yeats, you find Plato's One haunting him. And had he had moments of confidence in the Zero of Plotinus, he was the great Yeats. And when he regressed through lack of confidence in that, he went back to a regressed oneness. And this always devolves, because a polarity that's brought back into play like this becomes a knot and a curious thing happens. A knot, mathematically, is a one dimensional self-avoiding vector in a three dimensional context. And so the further that it goes, the more knot that it makes, and you cannot pull on that to undo it. The more that you pull on that, the more it achieves the semblance. And that's what the ego is. The more that the ego is denied, the more that it conceives that it is real and you are wrong. And in that polarity, there is no chance for learning. There's only opportunities for dominance. And that's generally what happens. It's a free for all. It's a carnival of dominance that characterizes human life on that regressed level. We're going to come back next week, and we're going to take a look at the way in which, underneath Plato's sequence of dialogues, one can see a wisdom structure at work. Thanks for your patience. Thank you.