Symbol 10

We come today to symbols ten. Symbols ten. We're linking together all of our material and linking together. The Saturdays that we come together, we sit together, the community, the community of continuity. And there is something deeply satisfying about a continuity that builds. And one of the most profound mathematical little books of the 20th century was called The Continuum by Hermann Weyl. He did a lot of the work of mathematizing quantum physics so that it could be applied and brought into things like atomic energy and so forth. Atomic research. And he says, each one of us at every moment directly experiences the true character of this temporal continuity. That is to say, we have a we have a primordiality with a temporal continuity. So that time is not something that's embedded. It doesn't fit into something else. But that time is of the essence, literally. That space Has a time we've built into it. Every one of us, at every moment, directly experiences the true character of this temporal continuity. But because of the genuine primitiveness of phenomenal time, we cannot put our experiences into words. So that language, putting something into words is a different process from the process of our actual participation with time. Which means that our existence, our physical existence because of cells, because of molecules, because of atoms on all those existential dimensions of structure. Our existence happens in time space always. And it is a continuity. But our languaging are using of words. Tries to approximate. That is like an overlay on top of that. And so it's like a flow that seeks to align itself with a deeper flow. And though it does a pretty good job in an ordinary sense if you become Critical about it. You can notice that they do not, um, that they overlap, that they have at times a very high development of what in geometry is called congruity, but that they are different. It's like in South America when the great Rio Negro River flows into the Amazon around Manaus, the Amazon is sort of like a milky brown, but the Rio Negro is much darker. It's black, black river. And even though they flow together, they flow parallel for hundreds of miles, where you can see that this current is still the Rio Negro. And this current over here is still the Amazon River. It takes a long time for them to modulate in the sense that they mulch together and they become a single river, so that when you get to the Amazon Delta, the water is all of a single color. The flow process of language is very similar to the flow process of nature, but they are different. They overlay and with someone like Plato. He came at a time where this was a crisis for people. Because they had come to experience such a quick growth, such a quick maturity away from. The original quality of their life a life based on the animals, a life based on the village's rural life, rural life that had its own mysteries, festivals of celebration, of being immersed in nature, the Eleusinian Mysteries and many others. And within the space of a few generations, they had gone into new territory, where they were so abstract that they were trying to find their sense of order, their sense of person in terms of an enormously sophisticated building like the Parthenon, rather than with the village festivals at harvest time. And they found Plato's time. The generation just before him found that there was something radically peculiar about us, that we seem to settle for appearances, and that we do not further our inquiry about what is real, and that this is not just due to laziness or some overlaying general ignorance, but that there is a structural quality to this penchant to this predilection, and that the mind, when it begins to think clearer and clearer and begins to order itself and begins to array its understanding by symbols. It has a tendency to abstractly take that symbolic ordering as more real and more fundamental than the world of experience of myth. And it runs into a double problem. The mind at that juncture runs into a double problem. One is that it begins to be so abstract from nature that it considers natural things as sort of not real and also unclean. But it begins to, as it abstracts itself away from the process of nature, from the process of tribal, mythic, rural life That abstraction opens up a sensitivity. It sensitizes itself and begins to receive images from beyond the mind that were not in nature. They were not in the tribal life, but that they come from some transcendental realm into us. And the mind, unbidden, begins to have images that are not representational of natural things or of cultural things, but of transcendental things. And that those transcendental things have a peculiar quality to them. They don't integrate with all the other images, all of the images of nature, all of the images of culture can be integrated together. Doesn't take any great shakes to do that, but transcendental images tend not to be integrable because they have a different mode. They they exist not as integrals with a polarized sense, but they exist as differentials with a relational quality. Relational. So instead of connecting or not connecting, instead of polarities that do connect, or polarities that don't connect, they tend to be elements that form proportionate ratios. And so the mind that gains a proportional ratioed set of images is called the rational mind. Rational because it's intellectual, it's intelligible, and its images are in proportion, their ratios, and therefore one learns to geometries about structure rather than to categorize about structure. And the crisis came because there was such a quick radical change in personality. Sometimes it happened within the single generation, and the generation that it hit the hardest was the generation of Socrates. Plato was 28 when Socrates was killed. The state killed him. And when Socrates was born, he was born the same year that the historical Buddha died. Socrates generation. It's difficult for us to appreciate what a catastrophe that generation suffered, a catastrophe of a leap of mind into an ability to be so visionary, rational that they began to suspect that normal human life was crazy, was insane because the difference was so great. Someone who tuned themselves to the rational looked upon the irrational populations as almost animal like. And this was a fearful thing, because it wasn't just that those are animals closer to animals than to us, but that aspects of ourselves were also closer to animals. And so they were trying to get rid of, to blot out, to filter out the animal bases of their own lives, meaning their bodies. And so the mind became a super critical school master to discipline the body, to behave and be rational. But bodies are not rational. They're natural bodies to be healthful must live in a natural flow. And communities, in order to be at home in nature, must also have that kind of flow. And so you had a crisis of consciousness. And the best way to exemplify it is by coming back for a moment to our other figure that we're pairing with Plato, Because our education is not about the Greeks. It's not about anybody in particular. It's about us and our possibilities. And what's being delivered is something that has never been taught before in this planet. But in order to get there, we have to appreciate things that happened historically to our kind all over the planet, and that there were different takes on these things and that they have all come together, not like the Rio Negro and the Amazon. The 20th century was not at all that kind of confluence, but it was like a forced introjective implosion. It's the principle of the atomic bomb. In order to make an atomic bomb, you have to have a sphere of explosive Of material that converges instantaneously to a center point, so that the pressure. And the compression is enough to set off a atomic chain reaction. And then it blows back out in the 20th century. Our species, mankind, Homo sapiens, suffered an atomic explosion of character. And it blew itself out so that there are no working remains left of it. The only possibility is to use the new vibrations of the explosion and reconstruct something new, or not reconstruct, but to create again. New personalities, new character, new civilization that can work under these conditions. Because the natural basis of man was destroyed in the 20th century permanently. It'll never come back the way it was. You cannot go home again. But the good news is, is that our kind has always survived the catastrophes and come out of the cataclysms. Better off. And so we have a real promise, not just a hope. We're not crossing our fingers this time. We're getting to work. And a better world is coming. But paired with Plato, we have Yeats. And I want to read two poems by Yeats. One when he was a young man and one when he was a mature man. Because you can hear in the difference between these two poems, the crisis of consciousness that happened in Plato's time. And then you can see why the dialogue, the Timaeus is one of the primal documents in world history. The first poem by Yeats is When he was a young man. It's called The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Off the West Irish coast there are many islands that have within their name free. Innisfree is one of those islands. Here's how this early poem reads. And then I'll read the second poem, which is called The Second Coming. Two of the most famous poems in the English language. The first one, the rural I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree. And a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made. Nine bean rows. Will I have there a hive for the honey bee. And live alone in the bee loud glade. And I shall have some peace there for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning. To where the cricket sings. There midnight's all a glimmer and noon a purple glow. And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now for always. Night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. While I stand on the roadway or on the pavements grey. I hear it in the deep heart's core. And then. About 30 years later, a poem about the crisis of consciousness. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dimmed tide is loosed. And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The second Coming hardly are those words out when a vast image out of the Spiritus mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in the sands of the desert. A shape with lion body and head of a man. A gaze blank and pitiless. As the sun is moving. Its slow thighs all about it. Meanwhile real shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep. Were vexed to nightmare. By a rocking cradle. And what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. This happened to the classical Greeks in the generation of Socrates. They're beautiful. Zorba the Greek. Dancing loveliness of being in nature suddenly was naive bumpkins parading in a ridiculous way. And yet those who were able to see natural life now as ridiculous also saw cultural life as a sham. Because it was not real. It was only a superficiality made out of guessing at these natural dregs, trying to piece something together and all of it. Nature and culture, nature and myth. Were ready to be sacrificed. Like Abraham, ready to sacrifice his own son. Why? To make sure that the security of the Transcendently visionary mind was safe from the madness and absurdity of the world. And at the same time got themselves into a bind. Because that mad world, that absurd world, was deeply ingrained into nature. And so they began to suspect nature of being crazy also. And out of this, a couple of hundred years later, came the whole Gnostic thing that nature is made by a flawed God. The whole thing is a nightmare. And our only refuge is to get as logical and rational as possible and stay there, because that's the only safety that there is. And that safety was a box canyon, because the mind cut off from the integral ecology suffocates under the weight of its own technique. Cervantes is at the beginning of Don Quixote. He says it best. He says Don Quixote read so many books that finally his brain shriveled up, that his whole intelligence dried out and no juices of humanity were left, only a single ideal that began to dominate everything that he looked at. And everyone was either a bandit or a maiden in distress, and there were nothing in between. The whole foundation of the civilization of the classical Greeks had been based just a hundred years before, on a couple of individuals who arranged the village life in a structure so that the city of Athens, in Socrates time, was only about 150 years old in terms of an urban civilization. Yes, there was an Athens before that. It was a very small place that had had nothing to recommend it except a fabulous past that Plato will show in the Timaeus. And then about 150 years before the time of the maturity of Socrates. Two men, Pisistratus and Solon, put out a series of laws and codes by which the entire tribal rural structure of the ancient Greeks in that part of the world, Attica, was brought into a new symbolic structure called the city of Athens. And that the city of Athens took as its base the epics of Homer, and that the epics of Homer taught them to understand with the pure clarity of the synthesizing symbol. And that once you got a population, not everyone, only the property owners, only the aristocracy, only the males, so that only the male property owners were educated on the Homeric basis to learn to concentrate meaning into symbols that then could fit into an abstract codification of understanding. And the great synthesizing symbol, the navel, that held that conception of man and that city together was the Parthenon. It was right up there in the center of the city and the Acropolis. Everyone could see it at any time. This was the top knot that held the entire tent of that structure together. And yet, in that building in the Parthenon, the Parthenon is named Parthenos in Greek means virgin. Virgin. Not in the sense of not being sexual. Virgin in the sense of being primordial, of never having been touched by the changing world. That Athena was the Virgin, not on sexual terms, but on Primordiality. She belonged to a primordial world that was eternal. She was not subject to change. The idea of sexuality dominating something is actually very plural. Even bugs are sexual. It's not the thing, but the primordiality of what is real. That is serious as a very serious thing. Athena belonged to the Homeric order of the Olympian Gods, and they were eternal forms. And it was that eternal form, that eternal net. That was the model for how man could understand the structure of how reality worked. But the Homeric base was on the basis of a humanity that was able to focus onto natural symbols, whereas the restructuring by Solon, especially the Code of Solon, the laws of Athens, while they used Homer to educate children when they got when those young men got to a certain age, they were shown how that was only a child's view of the world. And now you had to mature because you were going to wield real power, and the real power was not in the myths but in the politics. That the political abstraction into symbols that were not mythic, but symbols that were based upon the mind's ability to abstract, and that we run Athens by the power of our minds, which holds our political aristocracy together. And that's how this place works. It's called realpolitik. Realpolitik is who owns, who has the money, who does the pushing. And yet, the more that that took hold in a quick way, the more that it started to occur involuntarily to many of these young men, was that they were starting to get images that weren't folded into the code of the political structure. And I wondered, where does this come from? Transcendental image symbols were beginning to impinge on their minds from elsewhere. They were like conscious dreams that you can't turn off. And that's when Socrates came into play, saying that this is a clue for us. That the mind is like a portal, and it not only receives images from nature and from culture, but it receives images from beyond, from the divine realm, from the spiritual realm, there are spiritual symbols that do not have any correspondence with things in nature or in culture, except that at the very primordiality of nature there seems to be a symmetry between what is deepest in nature and what is structurally at the foundation in the spirit. And it was on that basis that Socrates set out because he did not know any answers, but he knew how to tell when something was not right. He knew when something was wrong. He knew when they didn't fit. They didn't jibe when there was a confusion in someone's mind because they were talking about rational things. But on the basis of coming out of myth, of coming out of culture, out of coming from a naive sense of nature. And he knew because he practiced and he did it for year upon year upon year, he would talk to people, and he learned the techniques of bringing out by relentless questioning that they really didn't know what they were talking about, that what they were talking about was guesswork on the basis of culture, or it was an overlay on a mystery of nature, which was much deeper than they had supposed. And it was finally, because of this, that Socrates was ordered to be put to death by the ruling aristocratic Council of Athens. The the tyrant Council of 30 condemned him to death, and the charge he was teaching young men not to believe in the gods of the state a real serious radical challenge. But when we come to Homer for a moment, we come to the to the primordial basis of the Athenian urban civilization of its culture. It is based on Homer, Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad is the epic of the masculine. The Odyssey is the epic of the feminine. In Homer the masculine, the sense of the masculine is conflict. The greatest masculine energy is war. Conflict raised to the level. What in. In the film that was made on Patton, George S Patton, Francis Coppola did this screenplay and he has Patton in there at the one part of the film, he's watching the American Third Army just racing with all of its tanks along the road. And he stands back and he says, God, I love it. Compared to war, every other aspect of man dwarfs. So that in the Iliad it's about the masculine sense of conflict, of confrontation, of making polarities come into their smashing ness, because it's out of that tension, out of that energy that the masculine then knows what to do, and that is to take control, to possess command. Or to be in a hierarchy where those who are in command are clearly stronger than you, clearly better than you. And it isn't just the guy who can clean out the bar sometimes the guy who owns the bar, but the feminine epic The Odyssey is completely different because the feminine is not about conflict, it's about relationality. It's about incorporation. It's about coming together in a way that something interesting is brought out of the coming together. And so the Odyssey was different from the Iliad, and it was the Iliad that was used primordially in the Solon Athens education. The Iliad about confrontation. And the thing about the Iliad is there was an English professor named Wade Geary, hyphenated name, who one time did a diagram of the structure of the Iliad, the beginning of the Iliad is linked to the very end of the Iliad, and the second episode in the Iliad is linked to the second, to the last, and so on and so on, so that you have these brackets where as you read into the epic or you listen into the epic, you come to the center, and the center has only one episode, but the episode just before it occurs. The rest of it occurs just after it, so that you have a series of polarity brackets that focus on a single episode and the single episode. At the center of the Iliad is the death of Patroclus. He's killed by Hector, the great warrior prince of the city of Troy, and he's killed because he from youth learned to fight alongside of his friend Achilles. They learn to fight as a pair, as a team, and they were always watching each other's flank. And two great fighters, if they're watching each other's flank, can go through a population of of foes like a knife goes through butter. It doesn't matter how many there are. If you're in shape, you can you can clean out because they cannot get at either of you. There's a great example of that in the in the magnificent Western chain, where Alan Ladd, playing Shane, fights alongside Van Heflin, who's the the rancher who will the farmer who will not give up. And they take on the whole room full of guys and and beat them. At the center of the Iliad, Patroclus is killed because Achilles is pouting and is not on the battlefield that day. Here's his latest girlfriend. Bricius has been commandeered by Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition. He says you took my favorite girl. Well, then, God damn you, I won't fight today. And because of that, his best friend is killed. And so he comes out savage in the second half of the Iliad. And it's the savage wrath of Achilles. If you're going to kill my friend, then all of you are going to die. And the first one that's going to die is Hector. And of course, Achilles doesn't just kill him, but he mauls the body because he drags it behind his chariot three times around the whole circle. Circumference was about a 45 acre city. And so it was a big circumstance all afternoon. He dragged the body on the stones just to show them, if you mess with me, I will not just kill you. I will brutalize your hero to nothing. Homer wrote the Odyssey as a way to take that and enfold it into a way to come back home. Once men have gotten to that alienated, murdering quality of their masculinity. What do you do with the killer? You have to find some way to bring them back home so that they can live in their life again. Remember in the late 60s in Berkeley, where we were counseling returning Vietnam vets, 67, 68? The returning vets were 19 years old. They'd been drafted at 18, sent over and learned to kill, to kill men, women, children, animals, everything, and came back and were supposed to go back into nice little Wisconsin small town lives. They were haunted by the fact that they had become killers. They liked killing. Their whole masculinity was based. And they can ruin you, man. And then they would break down into tears and weep uncontrollably and counseling them year after year. And seeing how this works is not a question of manhood. It's a question of masculine tyranny on a structural level, because that's all that you brought into play. You didn't bring any femininity into play at all. So that the Odyssey was a way of bringing it back in here in the Odyssey, the moment where Odysseus is being brought into play is when his wife, Penelope, comes down at the very end to see whether she will accept him again or not. Here's how it reads. So would a person speak? But they did not know what had happened. Now the housekeeper, Eurynome, bathed great hearted Odysseus in his own house and anointed him with olive oil and threw a beautiful mantle and tunic about him, and over his head Athena suffused great beauty to make him taller to behold and thicker. And on his head she arranged the curling locks that hung down like hyacinth petals. As when a master craftsman overlays gold on silver, and he is one who was taught by Hephaestus and Pallas Athene in art. Complete in grace is on every work he finishes. So Athene gilded with grace, his head and his shoulders. Then, looking like an immortal, he strode forth from the bath, and came back then, and sat in his chair, from which he had risen opposite his wife. And now he spoke to her, saying, you are so strange. The gods who have their homes and Olympus have made your heart more stubborn than the rest of womankind. No other woman with spirit as stubborn as yours would keep back as you are doing from her husband, who, after so much suffering, has come home at last in the 20th year, back to his own company and his own country. Come then, make up a bed so that I can use it here. For this woman has a heart of iron within her. In Homer in the Odyssey, she is called circumspect Penelope. She always goes full round, but her full round is not circular. Her full round always is to change one particular thread of the woof, so that when she comes back through it, she comes back on another level. She's circumspect in that way, and as soon as she hears that, that he will sleep in a different bed from her to night, she gets a glimpse that there's a test. There's an alchemical test of relationality here, because she knows that the synthesizing symbol for the Odysseus that she married was that bed, their marriage bed. So she says to the servants, fine, move his bed, move his marriage bed out into the hallway. And then Odysseus just stands up and he's a savage warrior. He said, you can move our marriage bed out into the hallway. I, who was a young man, took a living olive tree and fashioned it as the center post for one of the posts of our bed, so that our bed was rooted in the very ground where it grew since we were children. Has someone cut the goddamn tree down so that the bed can be moved? And she knows that it's him. She knows that he is still prized. What made their relationality real? Let's take a break. Masculine. Feminine. Conflict. Relationality. Athena. Athena is a warrior feminine. The goddess of wisdom is armed, and she can fight. She wears a helmet. She has her spear. And I don't know if they brought it out. But if you ever go to the Getty and see the fifth century BC statue of Athena that you have, that they have full size, and you walk around and you look on the inside of her shield. On the inside of her shield is a python curled in an infinity sign, and that's how she holds her shield. And if you can't hold your shield with a python and an infinity sign, then you're not going to stand a chance of understanding how Athena fights. Wisdom is not a milquetoast, sentimental niceness. There's nothing nice about it. It is penetrative. It goes beyond. And so Athena is famous like Aphrodite was famous for her smile. Athena is famous for her eyes that are so evenly balanced in their gazing that they look into the infinity of the horizon, so that the way of wisdom was feminine. Sophia in Greek is a wisdom is feminine. So too in Hebrew Chokhmah is feminine, But it's an armed femininity so that it can interface with the masculine. When you see that great Renaissance painting by Botticelli of Venus and Mars and Mars is asleep, and she is watching him sleep after their union. The great Renaissance Platonism is there because invisibly, they're choreographing. The entire thing is neither Venus, neither Aphrodite nor Mars, nor Ares, but Athena. Wisdom is choreographing by making a set out of the masculine and feminine together, so that what one has is the wholeness, and the resonance of wisdom is has a spherical shape to it, so that instead of getting a geometric city in the structure of your mind, you get a trigonometric functioning in consciousness so that consciousness is distinctly different from the mind. The mind of a woman will be relational. The mind of a man will be polarized, confrontational. But consciousness in both men and women is of wisdom. It's different. So in Plato's day, his teacher Socrates, was teaching how you cannot go back to the rural homeyness Anymore. Nor can you go on to the purely abstract disciplines of thinking that you're an expert and that, you know, those are the sophists, those are the teachers that teach you how to think clearly in the mind without the interference of the world. There's something else at play there but that you have to exhaust. Not so much to purify, but you have to disclose to yourself that any particular pro or con about any issue, masculine or feminine, can be exhausted, in that it leads to a finite understanding that you come to a place, you come to a stage that upon a dialogue of questions upon a dialectic, and a. The Greek word was in Plato, Dionysius it means division. There's a great book on Shakespeare by a woman called Shakespeare's Division of Experience. It's a sophoclean take on the way in which Shakespeare platinized that is to say, you can hold a pro and a con in a masculine way for distinctiveness only so far, and you can hold a pro and a con in an inter. Relationality in a feminine is only so far. There comes a point in both gender declensions of investigation, where what emerges has a singular quality and does not divide further into pro and con. The Greek term for that was aletheia truth, the one so that in any kind of a process of Socratic dialogue, the purpose was to purify by following the thread all the way through to the truth. And the truth was not an understanding of what you originally were either for or against, but the truth has a characteristic quality to it. It's undividable, it has a singular quality to it, and that that singular quality to it accepts by its nature transformation. That you cannot transform polarity so easily. You cannot transform the masculine polarity or the feminine relationality so easily that you have to bring those pairs together. The square and that square has a center, it has a pivot, and there's a way in which that square transforms out of the plane in which it was just a square, and it achieves a three dimensional cubic quality, the same thing with a circle. The center of the circle transforms so that it's no longer a two dimensional plane of consideration in the mind, but becomes a sphere of presencing in consciousness. And so the square becomes a cube, the circle becomes a sphere, and in that amplified extra dimension, that three dimensional quality, another dimension is immediately tasted. It's like a taste you can taste. It's like a physiological sensation of taste. Only the taste is not on the tongue. The taste is in the characteristic quality that it occurs. The physicality occurs with a different kind of time. The cube occurs with a different kind of time from the square. So that the two dimensional plane of the mind tends to have a geometric abstractness to it, sort of like a freeze dried ness to it, and it's very clear, but it doesn't participate with the world in its temporality. It doesn't participate in the full Spatial dimensions, whereas consciousness, the conscious forms, participate in the fundamental quality of the world, their real in nature, so that consciousness becomes an extra dimension in the fullness of time and space. The four dimensional world, the three dimensional cube, or the three dimensional sphere has a fourth dimension of time, and one notices that all the time the integral cycle was working because it had a temporal sequencing, and that's what made it memorable. Without the temporal index always there woven into space, there would be no way to know from moment to moment that they linked together either masculinity through conflict or femininity through relationality, so that time becomes apparent, and further, that in the conscious quality of trigonometric functioning, one notices now that the time that you can keep track of has another quality. And that quality is eternity. It's eternal, it's non-time. It's the context out of which time originally occurs in the first place. And that consciousness then as a dimension, allows you to understand for the first time that space occurs out of a matrix of infinity in the first place. And so Plato came to understand that when the world was made, the world was made, he says. God was a craftsman. He was a maker. God the father was a craftsman and a maker, and he kept his eye on eternal forms when making the world so that the world has an eternal template. Now, this was as far as they could go 2400 years ago. The person who went farther was Pythagoras. But Pythagoras emphasized that there was no way that you could learn until you learn to hear through silence. In Plato's dialogues, you do not find the hiatus, the preparatory hiatus of silence. You find the language refining itself in the pursuit to aletheia, to truth. Whereas in Pythagoras, it's the immanent mystery of nature that discloses that the nature nature which allows for existential things to occur is a resonance of eternity. Now in Pythagoras, he found a very difficult heritage that he had to bring together. And one sense he had studied for 11 years in Persia, and he had learned not the original complementarity of Zarathustra, but he had learned the mediated Polarity of the Zoroastrians, where there are two eternally warring principles. Good and evil are eternally polarized. So he learned that kind of masculinity in his teaching, and he tried to weave it in with his Egyptian understanding, and the Egyptian understanding was likewise masculine. The Egyptian wisdom tradition has very little femininity in it. Later on, the Persian tradition became feminine because of the resonance of the true God of Zarathustra, which again are very, very inclusive. But Pythagoras had a difficulty because he learned the Egyptian and the Persian masculine versions, and it wasn't until he put it into practice that he realized that a single teaching scenario between men alone was not going to deliver wisdom, so Pythagorean communities were distinctive in the ancient world. There was always communities of men and women together. That's why you could tell that a community was in a wisdom tradition that was Pythagorean and not for, say, say, Buddhist. In Plato's time, Buddhists were called Gymnosophists, and they learned their wisdom in a yogic way. Jim didn't mean just in the gymnasium, but it meant in that kind of disciplined, masculine way, so that the Buddhist tradition at that time was purely a masculine discipline, whereas the Pythagorean tradition was purely masculine and feminine together, because only then did you get the spherical wholeness of humanity. Only then did you get the cube, the cubic dimensions of what? The true rationality. It's not just a pair of pairs, but there is a pair of pairs that pair together, and that this gives you a kind of a cubic quality to it, so that there were two different declensions of proportion in Pythagorean Platonism, one is a proportion that proceeds by squaring. The other is a declension where the sequencing is by cubing, and that they both start together at one. Only the one line runs in a doubling to four eight. The other runs in a cubing three, nine, 27 and the Greek letter. The alphabetic letter in Greek that looked like these two lines that converge together was the Greek lambda. It was like an L or a V together. And so this great lambda symbol became the synthesizing symbol of how those two progressions of proportion meet at one. So the one was literally a one, which was a beginning. It began with one. But the deeper understanding was that that one was embedded in a mystery of complete openness, So that the Plato's understanding from the Pythagoreans was that the world that we can talk about begins has a beginning, but that it has an indefinite double progression. It doubles in cubes as far as you want to go. And that's from ancient Egypt. The Egyptian idea from primordial times was that every day and each day is created by the living of it, so that the Egyptian Book of the dead, its title, really is The Coming Forth by day. This day to day is real because we live it, and because we have really lived it. There is no way to erase it from the universe, so that this day, in its cubic, in its spherical reality, joins the whole line of other days all the way back to the original day, the first day, the beginning, but that we can extend this line indefinitely. And this has been going on so long that the days have mounted not only to years, but to millions of years. So the Egyptian phrase is that RA is the Lord of millions of years. And yet the Egyptian understanding was a mechanical, abstract distribution of that line of cubes or spheres going back to the original. Whereas the Pythagorean Greek modification of that absolutely crucial That that lineage was a historical. It had a historical development. It wasn't mechanically distributed. Not each day was the same as the as every other day, but that there were historical figures that changed, and that this day was a part of a scenario that was unfolding. And so there was a movement called history, and not just the abstract distribution of days, so that the Lord was not the Lord of millions of years, so much that the Lord was the God of history. And because in that cycle of history, the future shape that was being unveiled now meant that wisdom had a prophetic quality of not guesswork, but of knowing what is the pattern that's being formed now. And what does that look like when it's finished? And so there came to be men and women in the Pythagorean communities who got very good at being able to see what is emerging out of history and following that. And as they followed those shapes and became better and better at it, they saw that those shapes were subsumed under larger shapes, and that finally there was one grand shape that was the largest of them all. And that shape was the universe. The cosmos. And that was really taking shape on the largest level was the cosmos. The cosmos was coming into form. And that the working trigger by which this happened was not the actions of gods, but of men, of men and women. It's what men and women do every day that ultimately counts, because the cosmos will not come in to fullness unless we do. The fullness of our day. And that the deepest quality is not that an individual does his fullness, but that individuals are bonded together into spiritual communities are the real working gears. Great individuals can do a lot, but they're very rare. It's rare to find a great individual. You might have to go hundreds of years, sometimes even a thousand years, before there's someone comprehensive who can do it all. But mostly history is the banding. Or we say now in math, the bundling together of many people in their historical capacities of living, and they form really strong cables. So it's the movement of the community. But the community is a community of wisdom, of spirituality, of the cubic capacity. And politics is the carving out of a masculine idea of form on the template of old Egyptian mechanical, abstract distribution of time and space and effort. Or it's carved out on the basis of the polarity of the so-called Zoroastrian, um, good versus evil or whatever, that the political forms were forms that were derived from human experience in a gender based dead end. And therefore we're really dead forms. And by forcing people to live and fit inside of these kinds of forms was to condemn them to slavery, not to slavery, to some tyrant, but slavery to an abstracted principal ideology, which in itself was generically wrong. And so Plato took it deeper than Socrates. Socrates was a danger to the state in and of himself. Plato was out to radically transform the very nature of politics itself, and nearly succeeded. Was invited to the island of Sicily three different times by Dion, the tyrant of Syracuse. He wanted to have the latest, modern, best state. And when he got to understand what Plato was about, he would send him home. He would say, no, no, it's my kingdom. They would say, yes, but you must administer it in a wise way. Meaning make this transformation hand the community over to the people. Dion never made a platonic community. The closest they came was Plotinus trying to make this ideal city about 270 A.D., and then that fell apart because of a diphtheria epidemic. Amazing. In the Renaissance, places like Florence and Venice tried to bring that platonic ideal city back into play, but they tried to do it as a side adjunct to rich bankers like the Medici, who said, yeah, you can do that on your time. We'll pay for it. Whereas there were some people who got mature enough who recognized, no, no, no, no, you don't get it. We don't work for you. Everyone's in service for a living. Not an ideal, but a living potential which can be brought into play. And of course, all of this was quashed. And so someone really wise in the platonic Pythagorean lineage in the Renaissance, like Machiavelli, wrote a little book called The Prince, is still used as the ultimate code book for authority and power and how to keep it. The best example of using platonic Pythagorean wisdom to make a different kind of community, as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Only they were. They were a very cosmic in their view. They said, well, let's not do it for just 10 or 20 or 200 or 3000 people. Let's do it for an entire country. At the time when Jefferson refashioned the United States in 1800, there were 4 million people here. They said, let's one place in Jefferson's writings, he stood on some land that he owned in the Appalachias, where the natural bridge is, and he seemed to see in a vision a northern lights like angelic future, people going over his head, going inland. And from that he got the vision to send Lewis and Clark to explore a territory which he arranged to get from Napoleon called the Louisiana Purchase that tripled the size of the United States overnight. And of course, Napoleon had just recently gotten it, and he was planning on having a French empire in the New World. And he gave it up because Jefferson refused to fight. Jefferson used wisdom. He sent James Monroe over to speak with Talleyrand, and he said, we have the figures here. We've taken a survey, and you have 20,000 French men who can bear arms, and we're sending 20,000 American men through the Cumberland Gap every month. I'm sure we can come to an arrangement before you lose everything. Wouldn't you like to make a little money? And, of course, they sold Louisiana for, I don't know, two sous per acre or whatever it was. It was nothing. And this quality of making a community of men and women who do not dovetail together on the basis of polarity, who do not relate together on the basis of just pure relationality, but who are able together to add a conscious dimension to time space itself, so that the community is a spiritual community, not because they're good or nice or because they pray every seventh day, but because the whole fabric of time and space is spiritually vivified. That's a totally different thing. It's a totally different radical thing. Plato's Timaeus is about why this would work. It works because the cosmos is such a structure, is such a form in itself. And so what we're doing is we're going to make a human community that can grow to any size, any application that is in harmony with the actual cosmos. So the cosmos is going to be a friend to us, not in a friend like you can phone them up, but a friend in the permanent sense, in that everything we do will have a vibration in the universe. It will fortify us on the cellular, atomic, molecular level as well as on the level of our lives. And as you can see from, this is a tremendous leap ahead. Has nothing to do with planning out an ideal city by laying out streets. It has nothing to do with that. Whereas Alexander the Great unfortunately didn't study with Plato. He studied with Aristotle, who taught him that you better diagrammatically lay out the streets first and then you can build Alexandria from that. Washington, D.C. was originally laid out that way, too, in that nice pattern. They were fancy. They turned the square so that it was like a diamond. Vis a vis the Potomac. And it's all laid out that way. And one reason that Washington, D.C., doesn't work is that its whole foundational basis is on something that was out of date 2400 years ago, and they didn't listen to the people who were in the house at the time. Jefferson and Madison. Mr. Jefferson, this quality of the Timaeus is also fortified because it was the only dialogue of Plato's that survived all the time. It's never been out of print. All of the other dialogues of Plato were lost for many hundreds of years. They used to call it the Dark Ages because there were no dialogues of Plato except the Timaeus available, not the full Timaeus, the first 53 parts, and also in the Timaeus linked with it to show what the ultimate plan city ends in self-destruct. The myth of Atlantis was included. So the Timaeus has the myth of Atlantis woven into it as a contrast that if you want a diagram of authority and power on a purely masculine, abstracted mental picture, you will never do it better than the Atlanteans did it. And they lost. They lost out to the ancient Greeks. Ancient being. Critias, one of the men in the dialogue. The Timaeus. Critias, who was the grandfather of Plato's mother, and Critias, learned from his grandfather, also named Critias, who heard it from Solon himself that the Egyptians told Solon in 600 BC. 100 225 years before Plato wrote the dialogue. He's bringing this back into play, he says. My great grandfather heard it from his grandfather, who heard it from Solon, that the Egyptians told him, You Greeks now are nothing but children. You believe in children's stories. Your whole radical politics, your whole radical, abstracted Logic. The cosmology sandwiched in between these two powerful disciplines of the mind are not historical at all. That, for instance, you remember only one flood when there have been many floods. If you keep history long enough, you see that their whole cycles and not just floods by water, but floods by fire, cataclysmic fires, and the cataclysm of fire strikes from on top, and so that the mountain and the raised areas of the earth are singed and everyone dies, and only those who are near the water survive. And yet when the floods come, those who are near the water all die, and only those on the mountain tops survive. And that the Egyptians told Solon. Our Tradition was founded 8000 years ago. But your tradition is older than ours by a thousand years. Your tradition, which you know nothing about, was founded 9000 years ago, makes it 9600 B.C., 11,600 years ago, which is about the time when the last ice age was far enough melted that there was, as a Sir Kenneth Clarke said in his civilisation series, sometimes there are errors when the world seems warmer and more friendly, and it's a spring time and anyone can make something new. Then the world itself is fertile because the feminine is always linked to the landscape, to the land, or the seascape that it is the undulating Land. That makes the context of nature the ultimate natural context, and that as long as there is a relationship to that, there is the possibility for Relationalities to go all the way back into the primordiality of nature. One can go all the way back, can go all the way back. Not to just a gender femininity, but to a primordiality of the feminine. That is beingness that is fertile, that the new can come out of. Children can come out. Birth can happen. And that the lady of Wild Things is wild indeed and honorable. But she also has the capacity to be fertile, and if necessary, life can begin again from there. This quality infuses Plato's Timaeus. He wrote it when he was in his early 40s. The Greeks at that time used to say that a man reached his beginning of maturity at 40. And Plato says several times in his dialogues. A masculine mind is so distorted by the traditional ways of growing up that until he's 30, he's not even able to learn anything. He has to have 30 years of experience before you can tell him. You're going to have to forget a lot. You're going to have to relearn a lot, and you're going to have to learn a lot. And when you add those three together, that's 110% of what you know, and that it takes a while for that refashioning of a man to happen, because it isn't a matter of just changing. If you just change, you stay on the circuit and you go round and round and they think, oh, because they have changed that. They're different where they're just another place on the circle, the wheel of life. The wheel of life is not life giving. If you look at the Vajrayana wheel of life, it is held by a demon the little fangs, little Dracula fangs, and long Fu Manchu fingernails. Oh, so you've mastered the wheel of life? Well, welcome to hell. And there are so many teachers out there pretending that they're spiritual. If there were time not to have to do all of the original work, their plugs could be pulled in one day. Are you kidding? They're worse than children. They're bad dogs. Curs, I say Kers. You want to have some masculinity? Bring it on. There is a quality in Plato where he was at the point of his maturity, and he was reaching back in his own family to his mother's grandfather, his mother's grandfather, grandfather. Because there is a cycle of family wisdom where every other generation has similarities. If you count each generation, you get into a mechanical, distributed property ness. What am I going to inherit from my father? What did he inherit from his father? Whereas the grandparenting has a different quality to it. It's not what you inherit from the world. It's the stories that they tell you. It's the spiritual experience and depth of humanity that they pass on to you. So that grandfathering or grandmothering is an ancient land form. Mysticism. Not a mysticism, even a mysteriousness, because it's the grandparents who take you by the conscious hand and guide you through a life path that goes into that five dimensional time space consciousness. They're interested in seeing you blossom completely, including the visionary realms of consciousness. But one thing that grandfathering and grandmothering cannot do, they cannot initiate you into an even stronger differential process called history. For that, you need an education that the deepest, that family wisdom patterns can go on this or any planet is in that grandfathering visionary quality. And what can come out of that is the person the art of the person. But what never comes out of that because it cannot, is history or science. History and science are further differential reaches and they require an education. And that that education cannot be purely about history and science, but has to start all the way back in the mystery of nature. Otherwise it doesn't hold with the reality of how we actually live and get here and get prepared so that we're ready for a historical process and a real scientific cosmos. That's what this education is. It was not possible 2400 years ago to deliver this. Plotinus was as close as you could come in the ancient world, and even then it was problematical. Pretty far. Even in Jefferson and Franklin's time, it was very problematical. The depth of the bad habits of Miss mythologized History are deeper than the grain in the wood. They're like the grain in the molecular structure of the being. The problem was not just ignorance, because one didn't know mentally, or ignorance because you were provincial and the cultural thing didn't happen. But it goes all the way back in a true version of what the Gnostics saw. It's in the structure of matter itself that the limitation is because you have to be able to transform the body as well as the mind to get the spirit. And if the body isn't transformed, also, it's going to become so much excess baggage for the doctrinaire mind, and it's easy to flick bodies off into death by a doctrinaire ideology that considers itself superior. That's what the Third Reich was all about. Their list of exclusion was going to grow and grow and grow. The old saying was, everyone is superfluous except you and me, and I have doubts about you. More next week.