Symbol 11

This is symbols 11 and the title today is M zero Transform triggers, zero transform triggers. And the theme today is that nature always changes. It's always changing. This creates a difficulty for us because our mind is always priding itself on certainty. So that when we look at nature in a very deep way, our sense of certainty is absurd in face of nature always changing. And this has been a classic problem for about 2500 years. Before 2500 years, the methodological systemization of thought was not refined enough as a mesh to catch those inconsistencies. But about 2500 years ago, 2600 years ago. In a coastal area that is today Turkey in those more ancient times, 2600 years ago, as a part of Greece, it was the Turkish coast and it was a part of Greece called Ionia. And the Ionian coast of Asia minor was the last reaches of the Orient and the first border of the West. And so these colonies, these Greek colonies on the Ionian coast, prided themselves on having a Greek heritage, which was encapsulated in the idea of precision and balance. And about the time that Athens became codified under the laws of Solon. In Ionia there was a philosopher named Thales, and he is the first in a line of philosophers that are called Pre-socratics. And Thales lived about 600 BC, and he is the first one to have confidence in the mind. Being able to understand nature, that there must be some fundamental quality, some fundamental thing, something that can be identified, which is the underlying foundation and basis upon which all the variations of nature occur. And Thales was the beginning of this whole trend of objectifying nature, so that one could think clearly and logically about what is. And this entire development lasted for about 200 years, from 600 BC to about 400 BC. And those 200 years, there was increasing confidence that nature could be understood. But the Ionian cities were not just Greek, they were also Asia minor. And there was a pressure from Asia minor, from the Orient. That life belongs to nature. And nature is really mysterious, that you cannot know because it is not knowable. And their persuasion early on could be brought under the aegis of a mythological figure, Orpheus. And so there is this Orphism, or Orphic quality of mystery, religion that permeates the clarity of the Pre-socratics. And so the Greek personality of that age and of that time had incommensurate as a part of its constituent character. Now the Ionians, because they had great affinity with the Greek in intelligence of setting up colonies, and also had deep affinity with the more ancient tradition of the Orient of the Near East and that ancient tradition focused at that time on, um, on that area, which today is Lebanon. At that time it was called Phoenicia. So you have the Phoenicians and the Greeks there blending in the Greek character. And the Phoenicians are famous for their navigating along coasts and setting up colonies all around the Mediterranean, especially the northern coast of Africa, and and even out into through the Pillars of Hercules. Even out to the British Isles, there were Phoenician, uh, sachets and some colonies, especially in the south of France and the northern part of Africa. And this had started a very long time before. There is, for instance, at Stonehenge at the level of its original construction, about 2500 BC. About the time of the Great Pyramid, there is an impress of a shape of a dagger, and that dagger only was made in Mycenae in classic, not in classical Greece, but in ancient Greece. Mycenae. Its empire ended with the Trojan War about 1200 1100 BC. So the Ionian Greeks set up colonies like the Phoenicians, followed the same path, were navigators, but their essential contribution to world civilization was to focus the attitude that nature can be understood by the mind that there is such a thing as certainty. Now, in our lives, this certainty was obviated permanently for all time. It is not possible, not because you're not smart. It is not possible structurally to understand, with the kind of certainty of identity that the pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers expected. It just is not ever going to be possible. It cannot be done. But further than that, there is also the realization in our time in the couple of generations before us and now brought to a focus where it's certain that there's no certainty, because the very structure of the brain has a parallel kind of uncertainty to the structure of matter. There just is not any way that the causal connections touch thought does not move by this nerve neural cell touching the next one. They don't touch. And not only is it because there's a synapse gap there, but that thought never moves along a single thread, but always by what one could call now or neuronal clouds. And so it's like thought is like weather in millions of cells at the same time. And it's like a light show that whole different disparate areas of the brain light up. One of the fine figures in this, a man whose fame was obviated by Werner Heisenberg because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The other man. His name is Erwin Schrödinger, famous for the paradox of Schrödinger's cat, where you cannot tell whether the cat is alive or dead. In actuality, in terms of quantum physics. But Erwin Schrödinger was a character. He was largely an embarrassment to some of his confreres when he was young, because he liked women and was frequently seen trying to make time. But Schrodinger also one of the great universal geniuses in mathematics. And I brought three of his monographs. They were printed in Dublin in 1944. This monograph is the union of the three fundamental fields gravitation, Mason, and electromagnetism. And the fact that somebody could integrate mathematically a mason field with gravitation and electromagnetism in 1944 shows you how avant garde he was. There might have been five people in the world who could have read this. And he was the only one who wrote it at the same time. Unitary field theory. Conservation identities and relation to Vale and Eddington. Two great scientists, one who spent a whole lifetime developing group and set theory in mathematics, Hermann Weyl. We talked about him last week and we brought in his great book on the continuum, a Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis. And Sir Arthur Eddington was one of the great cosmologists of an earlier day, the 30s and 40s. Eddington was completely obviated by Schrodinger at this time, and Vail was elevated to being one of the great seminal mathematicians of nuclear physics and modern cosmology. The third, the point charge in the unitary field theory that no matter how deeply you look at the electron, it has a point charge quality to it. Whereas the nucleus can be got into and you can discover a structure in the nucleus, the electrons structure is not within it, but is in its ability to hold stable orbits around an atomic nucleus on different energy levels and only those energy levels, and that it doesn't slide from energy level to energy level, but it jumps. It jumps in no time at all. And so the nature of point charges in atomic structure is that it holds quanta of energy levels, which are universal. The hydrogen atom has several energy levels at which an electron could inhabit it, and only those levels, and that if an electron moves, say, from the fourth orbit to the second orbit, it emits a certain amount of energy, which records as a line in light a spectrum line in a spectrograph. And if an electron moves from the third orbit to the second, it emits a different energy, slightly different light, and if it moves in a special way, it will emit a red line. Hydrogen anywhere in the universe will do this so that you could analyze light spectra Spectrogram from a star 10 billion light years away, or a galaxy 10 billion light years away. And you could tell how much hydrogen is in that galactic structure, and that hydrogen occurs in three different states. In fact, it occurs as hydrogen. It occurs as a kind of a heavier hydrogen, which is deuterium. And occasionally it has a form where it's in the heaviest possible state and it's called tritium, and it's tritium that is used to manufacture hydrogen bombs, very rare in nature. All of this amounts to the fact that Schrodinger was one of the great engineers, one of the great architects of the way in which structure was understood, not only structure Of matter, but structure of mind, of the brain and towards the end of his life. He got to writing little tiny books, books like 8090 pages. He got very serious that there was so much misunderstanding, not only among his confreres, which he he knew that there was misunderstanding because they'd been miseducated. They simply didn't know quantum mechanics and nuclear physics and how you couldn't expect them. But then he saw that the younger generations coming up were not being taught either. And so there was going to be a world where there was ignorance about things and a regression naturally back to previous states and not back to the physics of, say, the grandfather generation or the great grandfather generation, but going back to a medieval mentality. And indeed our world in approaching 2001 is more medieval than at any time that it's been in the last 500 years. The number of people who understand anything beyond. Say the 1440s is just a trace element. Most people live in a 14th century blur. They live as if they're in the 1300s still. Their emotional comportment, their ritual patterns are those of people living in the 1300s. And the 1300s were famous for a cosmology that was based not on a mystic insight, but on mysticism. System, an ideology of mystery, rather than on a founded within mystery itself. And this is a great difficulty. So in 1956, Schrodinger gave a series of lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and they were published as Mind and Matter in 1958. And he begins, he says, very first lecture, the physical basis of consciousness. How come there is consciousness? What is the physical basis of consciousness? And is this true? Does this happen? And he begins with the problem. And the first sentence tells the problem. And it's still the problem. The world is a construct. The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It's made up. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own, as if it were there in such a way that you could consistently point to it and say it's there. Pound on the table, put a word book, match it up with this and you got it. But you don't got it. And that's the poignancy of this whole thing. He goes on to say, but it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Great poems have been written that it is naive to have confidence in your truth because it exists. The medieval conception of God was that if you could prove that God exists, then you had it all. Whereas the proof of the existence of God is a puerile activity of immaturity. To simply settle for God because he exists is the lowest common denominator of stupidity. God is God not because of existence, but for a whole telephone book of capacities way beyond that. And one could list that indefinitely. It's a great science fiction story by Arthur C Clarke, one time about people in the far future, canvassing all the known intelligent species in the universe to try and list all the names of God under the old medieval idea that there are only 9 billion names of God. And if you could put them all on one master sheet, then you could call God forth and get what you wanted. Interesting. So, as Schrödinger says, it is becoming manifest existence. It's becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings on in very special parts of this very world, namely certain events that happen in the brain. And then he goes through several pages talking about the neural system, talking about physics, talking about physiology, bringing things out. And he finally comes to a statement which rings like a bell. This was late 1956, about the time of the Suez Canal crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. And for those who were alive then. He says, to my mind, the key is to be found in the following well known facts any succession of events in which we take part with sensations, perceptions, and possibly with actions gradually drops out of the domain of consciousness with the same strain when the same string of events repeats itself in the same way. Very often you get used to it. It becomes habitual. You don't have to think about it. And it just like having once learned to type. You don't think about where the letters are. But it immediately is shot up into the conscious region. If such a repetition, either the occasion or the environmental conditions met with differ from what they were on previous occasions, something new, something different, immediately were brought back into consciousness about what's going on. What is this? And he uses a phrase poignant. It's the first time. That anyone ever used the phrase. I found it years after I began using it, he says. At first, anyhow, only these modifications or Differentials intrude into the conscious sphere that distinguished the new incident from previous ones, and thereby usually call for new considerations. Differential consciousness. Has a domain and its domain has a quality, a tone, a fresh presence. Newness. It also has the dynamic of learning. Learning something new, learning something different, or recalibrating. Learning a variation of what you did know or thought you knew, and that these two Also are within a tone of livingness. It's always a life context. It's always he calls it living substance. And he says that consciousness occurs always with something alive that's learning in a freshness that's present. So presence learning that's constantly fresh. What constitute a continuity of consciousness. And of course we can check this. We can check this against many examples in ancient wisdom. We can check it against China or against India or even against ancient Greece. And we'll use ancient Greece. We're using Plato's Timaeus, because Plato's Timaeus is the culmination of the cosmology of that Ionian tradition, of trying to understand nature and trying to understand nature in the mind, and trying to understand nature in the broadest sense of the cosmos and in the broadest sense of the the structure of the mind. Encompassed by all of us. So that mankind in the cosmos, the two elements that count in the Timaeus. And it's the culmination of the whole Milesian. Ionian, the whole culmination of the philosophic tradition of the Greeks Up until this time, and it was so treasured. I mean, it was treasured. After the Timaeus was put out, it was put out on a scroll. It was never out of print. It was one of the few books that survived completely during the Middle Ages, during what used to be called the Dark Ages, when most of Plato's dialogues, most of the classical Greek learning, was just simply forgotten or existed in 1 or 2 copies in some monastery. Who knows where and were found later on in the Renaissance and the enlightenment and afterwards, the Timaeus was always there. It was always held because it was the cosmology upon which the Christian religion based its idea of heaven and God. This was the philosophic back pocket almanac By which, in the long centuries of argument from different sects of Christianity, was finally hammered out a way to understand who we are, where we are and where we're going. And what is all this anyway? And so the Timaeus is one of those curious documents that wherever you find in the last 2500 years in the Western world, wherever you find a fabric of understanding, there's always threads that come from the Timaeus. And the curious thing about the Timaeus, because of the way in which it was written, those threads stand out in a certain kind of light, that if you would hold a fabric from some large mental conception, some idea in Western civilization, any idea in Western civilization under, let's say, infrared light, you would be able to pick out the strands of the Timaeus from that fabric. Whereas if you took a document, an understanding, an idea out of Chinese civilization wouldn't be there, except in very rare circumstances where there was Western influence. For instance, when you look at the Japanese form of Buddhism, the Amitabha Buddhism, or its version Nichiren Shoshu Soka Gakkai, if you look at its documents, you can tell that it had a Western Timaeus influence on it, because its cosmology has all those threads that show up in Under Infrared. You could see that it's essentially a document which belongs not to the East Asian civilization, but it's a variant, a fabulous variant of Western civilization. Plotinus. Is the differential conscious flowering? He's the whole bouquet of what? The Timaeus is the original stem. This plant underwent a kind of Luther Burbank development for about 700 years, and the variety of garden that came out is in Plotinus. He died about 270 A.D. so that wherever you find the Timaeus after 270 70 AD in Western civilization. Not only does it show up under infrared as having Plato's Timaeus in it, but if you put it also under ultraviolet, you see that it has a plotinian weave, that these threads are put in in Plotinus way. And when you have these two, you can take a look at any document in Western civilization since 300 A.D., and you can tell that it belongs in this lineage, in this tradition. It has the. It has these threads and it has this weave and, you know. So that when it came time, early in the 20th century. For the great enterprise of mathematics and logic to be woven together into a single presentation, it's called the Principia mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead took the tack that all philosophy was a footnote to Plato. In this sense, Bertrand Russell took the tack that one has to be completely accurate all the time, logically, and not get caught in a game called The Theory of Types. At least he held that until one day, on his own recognizance, he was riding a bicycle in Cambridge, and it suddenly occurred to him that he didn't really love his wife at all anymore. And he was so dumbfounded by the sociological, psychological impress of that discovery about himself that increasingly, his mind was concerned with social and political issues rather than mathematical issues. And he said that after that, he could never quite precisely think again in the terms that he once could as a young man, when he still was confident that he loved objectively. All of this has to do with the way in which consciousness is a dimension of time and space. And that at a certain sophistication of objectivity, one has to learn to go beyond the abstract certainty of the brain based mind. And entertain a zero transform trigger, which begins to bring the dimension of consciousness into manifestation so that one can understand that time and space and consciousness all together. We've not a fabric but create. Plotinus is known as the most significant writer. He talks about the spherical domain of the spirit, and that there is a curious thing in the Aeneid. He's, um. He talks constantly. These are the Aeneid are 54 lectures that he gave at his house in Rome, and they were written down by various people. And after he died, all of a sudden from diphtheria in an epidemic in Rome. Um, His. The notes from his talks were collected together and arranged in a series of nine books. Hence the word Aeneid means the nine. The arrangement of a set of nine and in these Aeneid was constantly. When you get towards cosmology, he's always talking about the Timaeus, and he's always talking about the Timaeus in his way. So at these particular remembered lectures that Plotinus delivered in his own home is the very crux of the way in which the woven strands in Western civilization carry cosmological ideas of the universe and cosmological ideas of the mind together in a tandem. They're always in a tandem, however you think about the universe and all of its stars. You also think about the mind and all of its ideas, and they're always in a tandem. They're always in a set. They're always in a group. Because that's the way in which Plotinus wove. That was his technique, that was his style. And so it's always there in any major Western ideas. And this is why someone like Erwin Schrödinger is surprisingly a Plutonian Platonist, but would probably not want to admit that. In Plotinus, when he talks about time and we've talked about time in here and, you know, the the presentation here is that time is not a fourth dimension, but time is a first dimension. Here's what Plotinus in a lecture on Time and eternity. The classic use of the Timaeus in a Plotinus way. He he. At least the transcript says that he said time again has been described as some sort of a sequence upon movement. So here's movement. There's a sequence on movement, and somehow time is involved in this. But we learn nothing from this. Nothing is said or nothing has been said. Just saying that nothing has been said Until we know what it is that produces the sequential thing. Probably the cause and not the result would turn out to be time. So that this is a very curious paradox in Plotinus. This is exactly where it happens. And the only the only person in later antiquity to to really understand this was a late philosopher, the last of the great Greek tradition philosophers. His name was Proclus lived about 500 AD, and after him education fell off like the continental shelf. From Proclus to the Renaissance in that thousand years. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, said you have a dull, gray plain of mediocrity that has only one spike of a single individual who had original genius, and his name was John Scotus Eriugena, who was an Irishman who learned to read Greek so well that he could read Plotinus for himself. And when he read Plotinus for himself, he he realized that what was being said in the doctrinaire pablum had no relationship to reality whatsoever. And of course, being a practical man, the Emperor Charlemagne decided that he would like to have students of John Scotus Eriugena instruct his successors so that they would be wiser than the people that they were governing. And out of that came a short lived Renaissance called the Carolingian Renaissance, made by Eriugena and Charlemagne. It's usually a wise man and a king together. It's usually a merlin and an Arthur. It's usually an Aristotle and an Alexander the Great. It's an ancient tandem. The original king in that mythology was Sargon, and the original wise person was a woman. Was his daughter Enheduanna, who wrote the original Inanna epic and probably wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh as well about 2350 BC. But this whole thing of how the mind and the cosmos form a set, and that this set as you improve one, as you polish one, you have to also at the same time polish the other, so that when you come to a capacity to see. Truthfully. In Plato, aletheia, truth is what is discovered to be undividable and no longer capable of pro and con. And one of the proofs of truth is that there is unanimity of agreement by everyone involved, and it sounds like an ideal that is impossible to reach. And yet the whole vector of meaning in Plato and in Plotinus is that we can reach a unanimity. And on that basis, our community is on the level of atoms coming together and making molecules that human social institutions based on that quality of understanding are eternal. They are good anywhere, any time. And one would add in a science fiction age like us, for any intelligent species, no matter how alien they are, if they're intelligent, if they're conscious, and they're living in our universe, they would come to understand. With us there would be a unity not based on identity, but based on we've talked two weeks in a row on something called a Bose Einstein concentrate, where the physical atomic structure, molecular structure, which includes the neurons, comes to a singularity so that a community then would act Like a transcendental flock of birds who instantly fly altogether in a different way, and they never check with each other. Where are you flying? Plotinus says, along with Plato, it is possible to have a cosmological community of man because our origins are truthfully the same as the cosmos, and that our mind and the cosmos can form not just an identity of cross-checking certainty, but the same plasma. Let's take a break. Zero. Transform triggers the way in which nothing whatsoever. Cuz. Transformation. That's called spontaneity. Spontaneous. Spontaneous. One of the qualities that is most mysterious from the level of nuclear physics is how. Hydrogen electrons can flip their charge spontaneously, and that those flipped charge, flipped spin hydrogen atoms can come together and form molecular hydrogen. And it happens, apparently with impunity, all over the cosmos. 12 billion light years away. There are clouds of molecular hydrogen existing, and there are no chemical workshops within who knows how far. Nature in her mystery harbors the option to be spontaneous. It's a curiosity. Our Western civilization, the one that just died, did not allow for nature to have that privilege. It had to be certain. It had to be existent. It had to be there. Because otherwise, how could what we say have the importance of corresponding accuracy? How could we be sure that we were the experts, the authorities on what we knew? And all of this comes into play in our lifetimes in the way in which Science in a cosmic way and nature in a mysterious way form a continuity. Our whole second year is an exploration for a realm that we're just now disclosing. That there is a differential conscious realm which is beyond the natural integral ecology completely, and yet participates with it to such an extent that there seems to be a deep complementarity such that with all the greater, because we're uncertain and have to go by possibility, we can say that we are most likely real. We have the greatest possibility for a reality that we have had for a long time, and that those centuries before us, with their limited criteria of certainty, seem to us now to be bordering on the absurd. They let absurd lives, for the most part, and the institutions that they made all the way up to including maintaining a rickety civilization that simply depended more and more on force and authority to enforce the apparent polarities, to keep it together. And in the Second World War found itself imploding to the extent that it even resulted in the release of atomic energy in the hands of mankind. The continuum. There's something about the universe that has a continuousness to it, and that in this continuousness there is an operative structure that, classically using the same author classically, is described as symmetry. Hermann Weyl's great book on symmetry from Princeton, using Kepler's snowflake. And there's even such a thing as super symmetry. That as Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching says, we cannot speak to Tao. But what we can speak about its deepest. There's a structure of paradox. That when it comes to the T. The way things are in being what they are, there's seemingly always a kind of polarity that has a capacity to be disparate and at the same time to flip its spin and to be integrable. That somehow existence occurs because of not an ambiguity, but because of an ambidextrous ness on the most fundamental level of preparedness, of pairing. And yet, even in a polarized existential material. Level of the universe, when one gets deep enough into it, the quality of individual, certain isolated Stuff disappears into a flow which no longer resembles solidity at all, and that even the metaphors of liquidity fail because it isn't the liquid either, and that one can't even stretch it and get into some kind of, uh, some kind of a twilight gestalt and and use as a metaphor, gas. It isn't solid, it isn't liquid, it isn't gas. And so the current early 21st century way of talking about that profound level of materiality is to call it a plasma. Here's a monograph on the physics of quark gluon plasma. Many orders below atomic structure of nucleus and electron. And when one comes to the Bose-Einstein condensation of a material coming down to absolute zero, and that the individual atoms no longer retain their individuality, but that the entirety of the substance acts as if it were a single atom. That one is faced with a mystery, and that this is examinable is now empirical, rare, granted. Nevertheless real. How do they talk? How do they write? Reads here the time scale for the formation of Bose-Einstein Concentrate. One important feature in all the weakly interacting boson systems discussed here means a form of matter. Boson systems. Is that the particles have in general a finite lifetime to remain in the system. One is reminded of one of the most profound repetitions of the historical Buddha. All things, all conditioned things will pass. All conditioned things will pass. That atoms, even on the level of Bose-Einstein concentrate, that that form has a finite lifetime. That it occurs Within a context of time, spin aligned atomic hydrogen can flip its spin, resulting in the formation of a molecule. Molecular hydrogen and atoms can evaporate from a trap, even a vacuum trap. Excitons. Certain kinds of exotic particles and positronium are combined of particle antiparticle pairs and can thus decay. Since they are not conserved. What are the experimental consequences of the spontaneous broken gauge symmetry being only approximate? So even on cosmological levels, symmetry in the sense of a polarity occurs always, always, Was always within the context of time. So we come to come back to Plotinus. 1700 years ago, the most profound thinker of the ancient world, the Hermes Trismegistus of his time. He says. We must go back to the state we affirmed of eternity. Unwavering life, undivided totality. Limitless knowing. No deviation at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet at least it did not exist for the eternal beings. It is we that must create time out of the concept and nature of progressive derivation, which remained latent in the divine beings. The powerful statement when Plotinus was talking this way, he was elucidating Plato's Timaeus. He was saying this for 700 years has been a synthesizing guideline for us. And when it comes to the deepest, most profound contemplative penetration, encased in the most refined intellectual understanding and put in the most realistic life process. We find this every time, all the time. What do we find? We find that time is created and that we have something to do with the cooperative way in which it actually happens. And of course, it was as much of a shock then as it is now, to hear someone talk this way. And it doesn't mean that there was no time before us. It's that we are siblings on a shared development where our minds are made in such a way of such stuff that we affect the way in which time actually is. And that there is a capacity in us through Alignment and integration that we can come to our own kind of Bose-Einstein concentrate, where we find a unity of soul within us to such an extent that we experience singularity, and that that singularity takes something which was rare before, but now is characteristic. It takes a peculiar ultimate transform. It accepts a transform that it flips its spin spontaneously, and instead of integrating more, it now goes the other way and it begins differentiating instead of integrating. Now that that mind that found its center found that at its center being purely center, that, it can pivot spontaneously, and when it pivots spontaneously, what it then does is it has the ability to be constantly alert, present, constantly learning. And thus consciousness occurs and occurs with continuity, and that this continuity of consciousness is amenable to being woven into time and space. That nature accepts our consciousness as a family member, which it can wed. Mother nature will wed that father or wed that male, that consciousness, and produce children. It's extraordinary. It means that consciousness and nature can fall in love and love each other because they understand each other to the extent that they can exchange essences so that we get such a thing as a conscious universe, which is a cosmos, that the cosmos is a conscious universe. It's not dead, it's not inorganic, it is not abstract, nor is it objective on the mere level of existence, nor is it objective on the mere level of abstraction. Yes, the body is real. Yes, the mind is real in its objective ideas. But neither of those are exhaustive criteria for what now is real. Another criteria that comes into play constantly is that it is spiritually eternal. Not out of an idea of spiritual eternal, and not out of a bodily hope that it's it spiritually, but because it in fact is on a deeper level than is it is not because it is. It is because it's doing that all the time that that process is active. That's called the spiritual person. So that spiritual persons are not just crossed fingers good ideas, but actualities in a real cosmos, in fact, have an alignment just like the body and the mind have an integral alignment. The Greek ideal was the body and the mind perfectly balanced in alignment. The Olympic Games are that ideal, the perfectly balanced athlete. One is reminded of that beautiful statue of of Zeus that was fished out of the Aegean Sea about 70 years ago off Cape Sounion, the Cape that year round, before you get over to where Athens and the Piraeus is. And they found this beautiful, um, 8 or 9 foot statue of Zeus and perfectly naked, muscular, uh, Olympian god in the process of throwing not a thunderbolt, but throwing a javelin. As an Olympic athlete, perfectly poised and balanced so that you could stand the statue without even a base onto some flat surface, and it would still stand perfectly balanced, the Greek ideal. But even with all that, though, the body and the mind have an integral alignment. The person and the cosmos have an alignment, but not on an integral basis. They don't mulch together, they differentiate Together. So that heaven is at home in a person who is totally free in the sense of differential freedom. Which obviates any ideology whatsoever, including an ideology that there are no ideologies. It gets that peculiar. It gets surreal. It gets absurd. It gets Harpo Marx ville. So that Plotinus, in trying to bring the Timaeus current with his time, sets the stage for W.B. Yeats. Because not only did Russell and Whitehead redo Principia mathematica, showing that the structures of logic and the structures of mathematics are the same operation with different expressions. At that very same time, people like Yeats were attempting to probe just as deep in their own way, trying to go into the symbols, not the symbols of logic or the symbols of mathematics, but those symbols that are there in the way in which language structures experience into a mind integration, to where visionary consciousness flashes into transformational actuality. And Yeats was a master like Russell was a master of logic. Yeats was a master of the way in which symbols flash into vision spontaneously. And so in a vision. And he entitled the work. This great work he worked on the last 15 years or so of his life consciously, and the roots of it go back, way back. A vision and what is he doing in here? The section on page 67, the great wheel, the principal symbol. And you see right away a quaternary structure with the proviso that the square is not for so much, but it's a pair of pairs. And there is such a thing that if you have a pair of pairs making a square, then any pair of right angles will be a polarity and a potential complementarity. And thus the diagonal of a right triangle. The old Pythagorean diagonal is the mutual interface that is the true diameter of the pair of pairs. It's a quality in here where one is dealing on a nuclear level of symbols, with twos and fours and threes, and the difficulty with Yeats because he shied away from science. He shied away from mathematics. Superstitious? Perhaps just a volunteer for me. That generation were somehow intuitively superstitious that if they got into mathematics that it would erode the fineness of their symbolic occult vision. That it would ossify in some subtle way the freedom of their metaphysics, the freedom of their symbolic poetic that mathematics will destroy a poetic by infiltration and corrosion, which, incidentally, is not true at all. But because Yeats went into this deep, visionary quality without informing himself of the mathematics of the time, he made a fundamental error. He saw the six figure, he saw the snowflake, he saw the hexagon, he saw the hexagram. He saw that, but he saw it as a pair of triads rather than three pairs. He saw it as two times three instead of three twos. And so it led to a kind of an impasse where it's in mathematics, it's called recursion, that you get far enough and there is a recursion not into its opposite isn't that you go plus so far that it becomes minus, but that the structure turns itself inside out. And what was going towards the centre now becomes on the outside, on the rim, at the same time as reversing itself. So the recursion is not only changing this way, but it's changing this way. And actually those two aspects are linked up with two other aspects so that you get you get a diagonal that turns itself inside out, you get a mirror quality to the error. And because the mirror quality preserves symmetry, the mind that does this will never know that it did this. And you could talk to someone forever and they would never know. They would never understand what it was that you were saying. Critically, the only way to educate someone like that is to bring them out of their mind into a transcendent or an immanent quality where they leave their mind. And this is what they did in India. India was a sibling of the Western civilization up until the time of the historical Buddha, and the Buddha taught a meditation where you put your mind in your hand and just leave it there, and you go on from there. China never followed that way. They took a different way. But Yeats, when it comes to the Great Wheel, the principal symbol, right away. Page 67. He comes to one of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He comes to Empedocles. When this is Yeats writing, we're back to the pre-socratics that we begin with today. The guys who said nature is understandable. There's got to be a way. There's got to be a structure and there's got to be some Thing that is uniformly universal as the foundation upon which that structure is made. If we find that we've got it made, we can figure it all out from there. Empedocles comes later. He is a variant of the Pythagorean. The Pythagorean went for numbers. Empedocles made a variation of that. He was. Instead of a mathematical Pythagorean, he was an imaginary Pythagorean. He went for the images. And so Yeats, of course. Images, poetry. Symbolic poetry. So he writes here Yeats is writing when? Discord. Discord. It's not in harmony. When discord writes, Empedocles has fallen into the lowest depths of the vortex. What is the vortex? The vortex means going down into the angle. A triangle will have three vortexes. A single vortex will be a meeting of two vectors. Any kind of visual sighting in space creates a cone of vision, and the eye that is doing the seeing is at the vortex of that cone of vision. So that image and vortex get deeply associated. And for Yeats, he learned this from Ezra Pound, because there was a whole style of poetry at this time called the images symbolic poetry. Amy Lowell, who learned it from her translations of the Chinese from Tu Fu and Li Po. So that there's something to do with the way in which the seeing eye sees, and in doing so creates a cone which has a virtual vortex at its origin. So Yeats, working with us, writes, when discord writes, Empedocles has fallen into the lowest depths of the vortex, the extreme bound, not the centre. He says here, Burnett points out, this is John Burnett, who did an edition of Plato about this time, which was the world standard in the English language at the time, John Burnett's edition of Plato. He writes, it's not the centre so much. It's not that point at the eye. It's instead like a synthesising core that goes all the way through the entire cone. Concord has reached the center and into it. Do all things come together so as to be only one? That is, that they are synthesized so that the old phrase used to be. It isn't so much that there's a soul, but that there's a soul core that runs through the entire structure. If a structure occurs essentially in time and has this light cone spatial quality, then the synthesizing integral, in fact, you can call it a path integral ala Feynman, but the synthesizing integral will be that core of the light cone running in its temporality. A. Little difficult, but if you listen to the tape, I think it'll come through. If you read Yeats, even more so. All things come together as only one. So that that core has, like the qualities of a Bose-Einstein concentrate, it has a singularity of vision. And at this time with Yeats and with pound. And because Yeats is getting a lot of the inspiration of this from pound. Pound being an American gets it because he comes from the tradition of, though he tried to be international, he was still an American. He gets it from the tradition that goes back through Whitman to the American Transcendentalists, goes back finally to Emerson. And Emerson. He called it an angle of vision. And he didn't mean it was just the angle of vision, but holding this angle up and then rotating it and seeing everything in its way through this angle of vision, that it isn't so much that the mind is blind, but it doesn't know how to see allness. And so it has to see allness by a rotation of an angle of vision through its 360 degrees. And then you will get everything that's there in that light cone. Then you will have seen all, but not all at once. But having seen all with a consistency of a Bose-Einstein soul core of oneness, the field of the gestalt will then merge itself into in memory the wholeness, and one will be able to remember the all, even though you couldn't initially see it all. It's like someone who stands and can is only allowed to see one degree of vision, can see very accurately one degree. If they turn themselves around in a circle, they will have seen 361 degree angles and they will know full circle the panorama of where they are, and they can in memory, reconstitute the entire context the 360 degrees. Even though they were initially limited, that reconstitution by memory is the essence of Plato, saying we learn by remembering. Not that we remember something because it was there before, but because memory as a structure weaves itself into the way in which our limitedness approaches through patient, putting together the entirety. It's like receiving telemetry from a mars rover. You don't get the picture of Mars right away. You get little bits of information and billions and billions of electronic bits. But you can slowly put that together and make a vista of Mars, even though it was just electricity flowing. But the electricity was calibrated in a way that it was comfortable, and we knew how to calibrate it and comb it because we made it that way. Plato says this is the way that the world is. We calibrated it and we combed it. And what the basic thing is, we have to remember that we did this, and that's why it is like it is, and that if we forget that we did this, we will never be able to figure it out in terms of nature, because nature has been changed by us to be what we mulched it to be. It has our saliva with it all the time. So if we're trying to look at an empirical nature with no human saliva, it's all been chewed. It's been chewed for millions of years. So that the realistic thing is to know that and take that into account so that you have something called adaptive optics for the mind. You learn not to look for certainty in correlations that you can pound on, but to look for the delicate balance of the actuality with the way in which you are looking. And how did that come to be in this way in the first place? And by informing oneself, yes, it takes a while, but not as long as you might think. And you get better and better at it so that it becomes almost second nature, and you learn to see realistically so that you can see immediately, spontaneously whether something is true or not. And it's not a psychic wild card talent. It's the way in which one looks to see. I remember one time I used to show him I was teaching in Canada. I was teaching very young students, 1819, trying to teach them art. And I used to show a film that I got from the French government of Quebec. It was a film on Marc Chagall en francais, and there was a section in the film where Chagall goes into this coop of pigeons in Provence in southern France, and he goes in to sketch pigeons and the filmmakers cleverly. Instead of just filming him going into the coop, they set up a second camera behind the pigeons, and they clicked it on so you could see how Chagall looked at the pigeons, and he looked up for a split second and then looked back. And when he looked up in that split second, you could see through his eyes all the way into eternity. Because being a good hassid A+ world class artist, he looked to see what was real. So that Chagall's birds and his paintings are not images of birds. That while we never saw those, those. It must be imaginary. No, they are real spiritually. That's why Chagall used to hold his hand up to his canvases to make sure the colors were alive. There's a famous photograph of him when he was doing the ceiling of the Paris Opera. And these wedges of the great circular mandala of music. I don't know, a 45, 50ft wedges. And here's little Chagall going up there and holding his hand up and saying, no, no, this color is not alive. You have to redo this. It's all primal colors. And I think the section which is Mozart has this cloud of yellow out of which comes these ballerinas. Not that Mozart wrote ballets, but that that's the way Chagall was painting the quality of musical, spiritual exploration of time, space. A la Mozart. He explored it not in the way of some liturgy, but in the way of a dance, like a ballet. Mozart's exploration of the nuance of human feeling was new. No one ever danced through musical structure like Mozart did before. Before that, there were dances, but there was no free form dancer like Mozart is a Mozart melody is an excursion into conscious freedom of feeling. That's why it's so astounding. Why do you think Soleri was so jealous? He knew more about music than Mozart. He couldn't do it. The great thing about a Mozart melody is that you can hum it to your heart's delight, whereas. Well. Let's come. Let's come here to. Let's come here to the way in which, when that transform occurs. The way in which symbolic language operates is noticeably different. We tried it with Yeats last week. I want to try it again. Two poems, one early, before the transform took place, and one after when it was just a part of the way in which he was. This is a famous poem of Yeats when he was young, the Song of Wandering Aengus. I went out to the Hazelwood because a fire was in my head, and cut and peeled a hazel wand, and hooked a berry to a thread. And when white moths were on the wing and moth like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in the stream and caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor, I went to blow the fire aflame. But something rustled on the floor and someone called me by my name. It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering though hollow lands and hilly lands, I will go out where she has gone. And kiss her lips. And take her hands. And walk among long dappled grass. And pluck. Till time and times are done. The silver apples of the moon. The golden apples of the sun. Beautiful. Mythic. Here's a slice of a poem. Extraordinary and visionary. From about 25 years later. On the grey rock of Cashel. The mind's eye has called up the cold spirits that are born when the old moon is vanished from the sky, and the new still hides her horn under blank eyes and fingers. Never still. The particular is pounded till it is man. When had I my own will? Oh, not since life began. Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent by these wire jointed jaws and limbs of wood themselves obedient, knowing not evil and good, obedient to some hidden magical breath. They do not even feel so abstract. They are so dead beyond our death. Triumph that we obey. It's from the double vision of Michael Roberts, and it is Michael Roberts as one of the protagonists visionary protagonists that produces Yeats a vision. And when you get into the vision, you find that there is a huge chart that occurs. The chart occurs pages 96 and 97, 98, 99. Four pages. You might take a look at your copy. It's called the table of the four faculties. The four faculties. But remember, Yeats is bringing it together in a pair of triads rather than three pairs. If you bring it in a pair of pairs, the third aspect is the mutual exchange property of both. The diagonal in the square belongs to both triangles at the same time. It can spontaneously change spin so that you have your symmetry on the hexagonal snowflake way, but with only A5A pentatonic scale, whereas the other gets lost in the pairs of triads that remind one of trinities that go back into the ideological jungles of argument form of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The four Faculties will mask creative mind, body of fate or destiny. Take a look at Yeats's vision and we'll come back next week. And I'll show you how Yeats's vision and Plato's Timaeus came together, crunched together in a very peculiar way. It isn't just sometimes in a writer like Plotinus, but Plotinus wrote in beautiful, elegant classical Greek. But he was translated into English by a contemporary of Yeats named Stephen McKenna. And McKenna, not only a contemporary of Yeats but also of Evans-wentz, helped translate The Tibetan Book of the dead. And a contemporary, also of Wallis Budge, who translated from the hieroglyphics The Egyptian Book of the dead. All of these things were happening in the same place, London, at the very same time, and it was like a stew so rich that the fragrance of that delectable meal made them all hunger for something that they couldn't quite get to. They had made the meal, but they didn't know the recipe. And so our generation largely were left with a glorious triumph that nobody knew how to repeat. Till now.