Vision 5

We come to vision five today. Five and we need to make a little bit of a distinction between genders men and women. Not so much men and women, but boys and girls. And if you've raised them, you know that little boys get into the games that they play. Everything has a motor at some stage an age. But little girls are different. They get into the play of the play, not into the game, but into the play of the play. They set it all up. We're going to have tea and you're going to sit there and you're going to be so and so, and I'm going to be so and so on. There was a little girl about 122 years ago in the French Pyrenees. She was with her father on a little outing and walk, and they stumbled into this clef of these rocks, and it became a cave. And he was into being boyish and exploring the cave with a little torch that he had. And she was a little girl who took it all in, and she looked up and she said, Papa. The bulls. And there on the ceiling of the cave was the largest Paleolithic Sistine Chapel of all time. The cave was Altamira, and this is the little girl that first recognized for 16,000 years saw the bulls of Altamira. This is the little girl. What's startling about Altamira? It's about 16,000 years ago. What's startling about it is not that there is Paleolithic art. There was Paleolithic art for tens of thousands of years before that. But Altamira is like the Sistine Chapel in that the whole field of the nutritional nourishing basis of life is put on the ceiling. The bulls are taken out of the fields and put into the cave on the ceiling. That's a vision. Altamira is an indication to us that Paleolithic cave art matured to the point of cathedrals of Sistine Chapel's, and matured to that point at least 14,000 years B.C.. This quality of an inner secret place caves in Paleolithic time. Pyramids at the beginnings of civilization. And when civilization got going. An interior world. All of this is an indication that there is an inner secret place, and in that inner secret, not so much place, but realm. There's a special place within that realm. Like in Altamira, the cave is very long and sinuous lines, and at the back of the cave there is a room that is special that has the ceiling of the bulls. And so it was a special place. It was like the nave of a cathedral that goes to a special part where an altar would be, and there is where you put at that altar place in the consecrated realm. That's where you put the vision. The cosmic vision that the ceiling of the visionary world is the transformed base upon which life obtains. The fertility of the bulls, the power of the bulls. The sense symbolically that life must be empowered and be powerful to continue to survive, often in a universe where the inorganic seems to conspire against it, and circumstances make resistances that make it very difficult, and life is rarely ever been easy. And so the vision, the vision of a transformed cosmos being the foundation of life and fertility on Earth transformed into the ceiling, the starry expanse. It took a long time from being able to see Altamira's mural of the bulls, to being able to go out and to see the entire starry cosmos of the night as a ceiling. That was an enormous, monumental change. And when that change came about, when it was possible to look upon the expanse of the night sky as a new ceiling, as a new Sistine Chapel, it gave birth to the constellations of the stars as the image base of the way in which the cycle of life occurs on Earth and transformed it into the canopy of the heavens. The deep conviction and not a conviction of an idea or an ideal, but the deep conviction through tens of thousands of years of symbolic artistic experience based on millions of years of life savvy, came to several thresholds of expression over the last 5000 years, since the first time that the cosmos was portrayed as the Sistine Chapel of nature, that God's heaven was a canopy of symbols that in a single vision transforms from the mysterious nature to the conscious aspiration so that heaven became. In that transformation, heaven became, instead of an unconscious context of nature, it became a visionary tapestry of aspiration. That all of this life doesn't just simply happen, but that it has purposes. It happens because certain confluences, certain integrations happen, and those in turn bring new phases that have new thresholds that are brought together. And so there is a phase form aggregate that develops, and it is so fundamental that we can use the name that Richard Feynman gave to this entire process, that this is a path integral, and that you can follow any transformation by its path integral, even to the point of a massive transformation to a differential consciousness, which is able then to analyze, in addition to synthesize that, the integral path discloses a complementarity to its mode, and that nature is not exclusively just there, but evokes its complement, and that the mystery of nature already has that kind of invitation that there is a complement to the path integral, and that is the differential possibility spectrum, the differential spectrum that is as wide as the development of exploring it make it. The more that you explore the differential, the more that there is there. And so a cosmos is infinite, not in the sense of a terrifying unlimitedness, but of a fertile development that the more that we explore it, the more there is to explore. And so it is an expanding, not an expanding universe. It is an expanding cosmos because our play in it, like a little girl's play, plays with it and develops the facility. That quality of Complementarity where. Integration and differentiation work together is easily expressed by our kind, and we call that love, that the interplay of those two modes together is the activity of love, is the recognition of love, and that the quality of love is recognized first, not in the path integral. We're still too much a part of the story and not the active storyteller, but the first place that love is recognized by the storyteller to involve them is the level where art emerges out of vision, where art the artist begins to present out of magic That the old Paleolithic supernatural realm of magic gave way to the first Paleolithic artists about 40,000 years ago. And that we look at planetary evidence and we find that man even in our species. Homo sapiens sapiens has been around for several hundred thousand years, and our forerunners not so much different from us at all for many hundreds of thousands of years before that. Neanderthal man had a larger brain than we have by at least 100 200 cc's. And Homo erectus is so close to us physiologically that you could take a 2 million year old skeleton and clothe them in muscle and put him on a basketball court. And he could play. He could play. He might not have a nice hook shot, but he would run you ragged because. He grew up running on the vast savannas of Africa and was at home running after game, just like a leopard. Tremendous athlete. It was Homo erectus that moved out of Africa and explored all of the Eurasian landmass on foot. Very formidable in all of that millions of years. There is no evidence whatsoever that art occurred. Even Neanderthal man. The men and women who are closest to us in DNA, closest to us in brain capacity, did not have the capacity to improve and develop beyond a certain stage, beyond the form at which the path integral led. The spear points and the arrow points of Neanderthal man. Homo Neanderthals are beautifully refined, but they never changed, so that a French paleontologist one time made a beautiful observation that those men made beautiful points. Stupidly, they never improved on them. They are the same for hundreds of thousands of years, and the same pertains to our species. Homo sapiens sapiens were obviously unchanged for maybe 150,000 years. And then comes a threshold where art emerges as a differential form out of the capacity for vision. And ever since then, our species has been improving. Not improving because of evolution, but improving because we have evolved ourselves. And as our capacity to creatively change ourselves and adapt ourselves has begun to rival Homo erectus, who not only could move out of Africa and explore all of Asia and all of Europe at the time when the Earth was completely different from what it is today. Our species is going to move out of the savanna of our planet and go into those starry fields, into suns and planets without number. Not because of being aliens, but because of being ourselves more and more. The ability to algorithmically improve whatever is needed, including the transforms. And that's what this education is all about. To collect the old lightnings and wisdoms and bring them back and put them into a form that isn't a storm. We don't need an apocalyptic storm anymore to force us to change, to force us to continue to make a difference in ourselves and our lives in order to live. We have the chance to be gentle in this new way. The vision. The old vision. The vision of Heaven. Constellating a tapestry of symbols that are not only integral but differential, so that the pattern of life and the vision of consciousness weaving together made possible the new form of art. And while pictorial art, painting and also sculpture, almost at the same time in one of the great caves, now there is at the point where one would expect the Sistine Chapel Paleolithic Sistine Chapel mural. Instead of a mural, there is a sculpture of two bison, a male and a female copulating. And they're placed in such a way that this is a sacred It felt that one would experience going through the entire geographical dimension of the cave and naturally come to this apex. And there at the navel of the interior arrangement of that Paleolithic temple is the altar of the transform, and that the transform is all about bringing about an interpenetration, that life occurs because of an interpenetration, like the integral and the differential together, like nature and consciousness together, and that love has something to do not just with sexuality, but with a cosmos that interpenetrates with the earth and an earth that gives something of itself to the cosmos, and that this is what it's about. We're taking Two women whose works give us a fresh look at the way in which vision occurred, with such a powerful resonance that the gong struck is still, some 900 years later, still quivering, and those residents are still coming off the wall. One of them is a woman named Mechthild of Magdeburg. She lived about 800 years ago and she wrote mystical love poetry. And the other is the Art of Memory by Dame Frances Yates, whose volume on the Art of memory came on the heels of a book which appeared in 1964, which caused a sensation at the time. I remember first seeing a copy of it, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Dame Frances was about six feet tall when I saw her lecture. She had this sort of blue whitish hair swept back, and she had one of these strong English voices, and she taught at the Warburg Institute in London. And she had grown up in a house where she had lived for 55 years. And her second story bedroom looked out on an old oak, and she took the patient solidity of that oak as the cadence of her investigation of her scholarly activity. And she spent all of her life patiently researching. And towards the end, like a gorgeous oak tree, gave out fertile seeds. And in about 10 or 12 Startling Books, she almost single handedly reconstituted the area of Hermetic studies in universities. Up until then, it was always written off as occult stuff, as metaphysical stuff. We don't talk about that. This is all metaphysics. I can remember when that was the reigning view in university life. It isn't occult stuff. It's about the mysteries of nature and the mysteriousness of consciousness and why they work together, not just to make a synergy in a path integral, but to make a deep complementarity. That evokes the real. This is a wonderful book, and we'll talk more about it next week. I want to focus on Mechthild of Magdeburg. Her book is called The Flowing Light of the Godhead, the flowing light of the Godhead. And she wrote this probably somewhere around the 1270s A.D.. In the Middle Ages, light was a mysterious phenomenon. It was always metaphysical. In medieval Europe, light was always something that was constellated in a mysterious sequence of phrases that began the Gospel of Saint John. In the beginning was the word, and the word was light, and the light was the life of men. So that there is something about a written language symbol. A word is not a word spoken so much, but written. There's something about language, there's something about light, and there's something about life that they morph one into the other, that there is a phase form flow from them, and that when you get to light, light is the bridge between language and life, that somehow light is a carrier energy. And we would talk about that today. The carrier energy of life, the photon carries energy and is capable of incredible modulations, is capable of even being Court. I think the internet was buzzing last week with articles of how light has been caught in laboratories, and there it is. Not only caught, light can be squeezed. Not only that, light can be opened, it can be transformed because it's a universal energy in the most dramatic quality of light. Benjamin Franklin flying a kite with a wire coming down to a key, collected lightning and showed that it was electricity, that heavenly light is electricity, and that there is a way to save electricity. In Franklin's day it was in Leyden. Jars. Jars developed in the Dutch manner of trying to find a way, technically to make an instrument. To do this, the Dutch Leyden jars were the way in which electricity was first stored so that you could reuse it, and the electrification of the entire world came out of that simple experiment of Franklin putting his transformational consciousness to a Dutch invention. Mechthild was. A woman who belonged to the Beguines, which was an order that was not an order. A religious order that was not a religious order that began in the Netherlands, the Low Countries, as they say, the Dutch. The Beguines were secular monks who were female. They didn't go into monasteries. They lived in life. They lived in communities together. Usually there was a communal house, and there would be a dozen or so who would live together. They were severely suspect by the church, criticized all the time by the church because they wrote from the inside out. They had no authority other than what they said in their poetry, that they had a fertile, living contact with God. They didn't need any structural training in Rome to be able to express personally what divine love was, not just what it was in a logical dissertation on the pecking order of authority, but what it was in its reality. Now, there were precedents for this. In the south of France in the late 1800s, early 1100s. There was a man, William, who of Poitiers, who was the first to be able to express in poetry what we call now. He was singled out as the first troubadour, the first man. Here is a Handbook of the troubadours and the great. The Troubadours by Robert Briffault. And there were later on even women troubadours. The troubadours sang of love in a secular way. Related to the troubadours were the Italians, the Gagliardi, the Goliards, Bards who sang in a more risqué, vulgar way about love. They sang bar songs in classical Latin. They took the scholastic phrases, and they turned them into the sorts of songs that you would sing. Were you drunk and free and didn't care and were ready. But the troubadours had their conventions of lyrical, personal language. It was always lyrical in the sense that it came from them. This doesn't come from any authority, it comes from me. But the conventions, even with this female troubadour from the mid 13th century, about 1250 1270, at the same time as Mechthild of Magdeburg. This is what a troubadour Or would write Dame Gilmer several nights traveling by dark, despondent in the worst of weather, wished aloud in her own tongue for a place to stay. These were overheard by two lovers on their way to see their ladies in the neighborhood. One of them turned back to help the gentleman. The other ran straight to his lady. Now which of them did as he should? Compare Mechthilde with this. My veins contract and my heart melts out of love for you. And my soul roars with the bellowing of a hungry lion. Tell me, dearest one, what will it be like for me then? And where will you be? You are like a new bride whose one and only lover has slipped away as she slept. She had entrusted him with all her love, and simply cannot endure his parting from her for one hour. When she then awakens, she can only have as much of him as she can carry in her thoughts. And this is the source of her lament. You can see how Mechthild is just oceans of sensitivity above, around, below, and beyond the literary conventions of a lyrical tradition that's based upon learning. The whole point of the beginnings is that they were not learned in the sense of the mind, but that they were open in the sense of the heart, and that there is a direct concourse between the heart and something beyond the mind. This is a very difficult thing. Let's look at let's look at the chakras in yoga, just for a minute of the motion of energy through the chakras rising up the heart. The Anahata chakra has a way to directly leap over the Ajna chakra to the Sahastra chakra. So that heart energy. If the heart is open. Is not integrated into the next phase, but flows directly like a ribbon into consciousness. The loving heart and the open mind yield consciousness not naturally but almost supernaturally, so that there is a. There is a flow between the heart and consciousness, between the realm of myth and the realm of magic, and that this flow is capable of being, even as it were, because myth and magic, myth and vision are both processes that the mind, if it insists on coming into the sequence, its sequence in the path integral is to be in between the process and the flow of myth, and the process and flow of vision, or to use the old language between myth and magic. The dry, sober island of the mind's forms rises to make very clear distinctions, because myth is the flow and process of experience, of feeling toned experience, whereas vision is always a transcendental quality of experience. The mind, in order to be itself, ordinarily exists only in the path integral, only in the ecology of nature and the nature of the mind, as long as it's only natural, is to be a summation of the integral process. And so the mind integrates and exclusively does this. And in order to do this it has to keep collections firm. And so it has the power to make circles and squares and triangles around experience and put them into forms so they stay there. And the mind can do this as well as gluons. And their lattice work can take protons and electrons and neutrons and make atoms. The mind is as powerful at making integral forms as the processes of existence are to make atomic structure and molecules. Minds are incredibly adapted to do this. They integrate and they make forms that stay. But the difficulty is that those forms that are made only contain what they surround, only contain what was put in them originally. They are like the Neanderthal spearpoints. They never change. They are beautiful ideas, made stupidly. And if the conditions of life change, those ideas become like stuck gates in an old film. They shudder and it's apparent that you need to clean the machinery. And so a surrogate change is introduced, and it's called tinkering the process and making sure that if you can't change the ideas, you change the people that they pertain to so they fit into those ideas. And that's how ideologies become empires. And we live at a time in history where empires are very easy to make. They're really easy to make. 5000 years ago, it was very difficult to keep an empire together because people were still clumsy. They still were very natural. They would drift away. You give them more gold than they can spend, and they lose interest in the empire. You give them more wine than they can drink. And one afternoon they again lose interest. And there are all sorts of things. And so empires have become very good at managing the populations, so that, like ants raising aphids, the aphids do not evolve into rebellious super ants. And so colonisation of human beings has come a long, long way. And now, with genetic manipulation, it is possible to make a very docile population that will stay and whatever idea is made for them, it's about 20 years away. So it behooves us to remember to remember what in the hell it is all about, and to remember that we are the tellers of the story, and we can tell as many different stories as there are of us, and that it helps all of us to remember that heaven is speckled with infinite possibilities, that the openness of star clusters without end is an indication to us that there are differential forms which are a part of reality, in addition to the integral forms of mere things and mere ideas, not mere things and mere ideas in terms of the ecology of respect for them. They're absolutely important. Necessary. We have to have atoms. We need molecules, we need minerals. We need the plants and the animals. We need ourselves to have forms of tradition that hold. But in addition, we also need for our health and for our life the ability to transform them, to change them, to improve them. We need those qualities of the energy of light. And so, for quite some long while, for about 4000 years now, one of the great transforming qualities of vision that's been operative in our species has been something which can be encapsulated as the man of light. Here's a little book, the Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Henry Corbin. Mechthild of Magdeburg. The flowing light of God. There is something about a person becoming a form of light whereby their reality, their radiance, is able to enter into not just other people and not just their own life, but enter into the heavenly realm itself. Enter into God. And that the personal radiance of someone in this way has no need of going through the minds phase that the symbolic objectivity that the mind would posit is instead carried over like an arithmetic sum that's carried over and it establishes itself in the spiritual person. And the spiritual person has a differential form, works very well with a physical body, which is an integral form. And there is such a thing as spirit and body coming together without asking the mind for permission. Let's take a break. Let's come back to a historical problem that developed. The problem that developed was not that what we have been sharing earlier this morning didn't come to pass, but that it did, and it created its own special set of problems in the 12th century. In the 1100s there was a Renaissance, but the Renaissance of the 12th century left out the mind. It was a renaissance of the heart going directly into consciousness. It was a renaissance of love. And it produced its own brand of problems. There is always resistances. There's always a recursive quality, an undertow to any advance, any development. And if you lose traction in a development, you slide back to the last established objectivity. And we're talking about huge phases. The education here makes it clear that there are three steps to the mind. Three giant steps. Seven league boot steps to the mind. There's nature, but nature is the given. And the first step out of nature is existence. The ritual comportment. The way in which an action establishes objectivity. Things are not existential because they stay where they're put. They're existential because they are. Because they're sustained in their emergence. The second step is the development of myth, Of a feeling toned experience to a life form. And this is not necessarily just us. Animals feel. Also plants feel. I remember very clearly the first experiments that played classical music around plants, and they grew better. And anyone like myself comes from a tradition of practicing yoga in the high mountains and knows that you can meditate with trees, and it's like a real brotherhood, and you can sensitize yourself to that quite accurately. You can feel the rhizome of the entire Sierra Nevada as one brotherhood. That's possible. So plants feel. Animals feel. One of the qualities of the old alchemical tradition was that the metals also feel they have their own phase form development that leads to gold. And just so there's a another feeling toned inorganic progression in minerals, so that metals and minerals also not only feel but they grow and that the earth is maybe inorganic, but it's not dead and it has its feelings. And so, like in Zorba the Greek, Zorba tells, uh, Alan, the Alan Bates character, he says, I have to patch up the mountain. We've taken all this from the mountain. We have to make make good. So ritual and myth. And the third step is symbols. And you're there at the mind. And it's true that that entire ecology is a path integral. And you can become very sophisticated at it and it will run its course. You can build a tradition on it, and you can align symbols and rituals so that they make a bar of certainty. There's no doubt about that whatsoever. And in that bar of certainty, one becomes quite acclimated and accustomed to testing it by identity and the laws of contradiction and identity, between symbol and ritual, between mind and body, between the existentials and the idea. Can be linked together with tests of identity, and one can prove spuriousness by contradiction. It's all logical. It's all true. And when you circumvent that by the heart, going directly into the magical realm of consciousness, into the transcendental realms of possibility, the mind reacts because it's orphaned, and it reacts in such a way that it is like an isolated adolescent becomes very incensed, deeply lonely, grieving in that roller coaster sense of not knowing what to do, but being angry at needing to do something. And so the response by traditional authority was to take women mystics like Mechthild of Magdeburg and seal them off, do not permit them, and by 1320 it was almost impossible to find anyone who was like this except a couple of men. There were male versions of the Beguines. They were called Big hearts, and the greatest of all the big hearts was a mystic named Meister Eckhart. Once the great Zen master D.T. Suzuki and writing about that, the West had had Zen for a long time, used Meister Eckhart as an example that in the 1300s Meister Eckhart's writings are very Zen. But that age, the 1300s bred progressively an unease, because the reverberations of this kind of freedom began to undermine the confidence in authority. And so there was a great push to bring this back under control. One of the intelligent ways that was found to aid the bringing back of the mind into play, making it a part of this whole ecology, and yet not losing the advances was the Italian Renaissance. And the Italian Renaissance is finding a way to bring the mind into play, so that the mystical heart and the wild consciousness have a way of including symbols. And so, whereas you find mystical love poetry? In the 12th century Renaissance? You will find a very powerful symbols in the Italian Renaissance, and the symbol becomes the arbiter of the way in which you have recovered, letting the flow of the ribbon of myth and magic come together in such a way that the mind is ambidextrous with them. And the function which mystical love performed in the 12th century Renaissance is performed in the later Italian Renaissance by memory, and so the art of memory becomes extremely important. It becomes the common denominator of how the path integral complements the development of personal artistic consciousness. And so the art of memory became a very central feature. Another book. It seems like the women are writing all this. Frances Yates, the Art of memory. Here's the book of memory. Mary Carruthers, A study of memory in medieval Culture. This is about Renaissance memory. This is the art of memory as practiced in the High Middle Ages and in the medieval period. She writes the most comprehensive model of the medieval view of what constituted memory is the medieval book itself, so that the book, the book becomes the model of memory in the medieval period. The Renaissance transformation is to take the function of memory is the glue that's bringing together differentiation and integration. Instead of using the book, they use the theater so that the Renaissance theater becomes the forum by which symbols can act in their capacity to do not just an integration, but to do a complementarity. And so you find the conscious theater of the Renaissance is deeply allied to the need to preserve symbols, ability to integrate. And you find a very complex quality in the Middle Ages with the emphasis on integration. You had a kind of abrading that went together, that body and mind were braided together and you had this nice plated quality to hair. In the Renaissance, there was the added emphasis that it's how the coiffure is arranged. That's just as important. The braiding is only preliminary and it's the hairdo itself, the completeness. And so Renaissance symbolism shifts its basis from just exclusively being something of the mind, something integral to being something which is ambidextrous, where it can be of the mind. Yes, but it also is of consciousness, not a consciousness that leaves the mind out, but a consciousness that reaches back into mythology And helps the mind to integrate better and better, so that a conscious transform of mythology became the working basis in Renaissance philosophy, not simply to rehash and bring back ancient mythology so we can integrate like the ancients did, but with a new consciousness that we're selecting out of that mythology. The very myths in the way that we want to have them, so that we get out of that new fructified mythology, a new symbolic set of ideas. And central to that was the most precarious of all the ideas from antiquity that suddenly loomed as a real possibility and an almost exponential peril. The idea from Humanity in ancient times was that there is a possibility of a God man, a divine man, a man who becomes a God. And when it came out in the Italian Renaissance, the fact that there was this perilous, almost blasphemous quality, that man might remake himself on the level of being God. And this was an added kind of a peril to the entire scene. One of the ways in which that tension was bled off, so that it just didn't decimate you, was to bring a idea from antiquity into play. It was brought into play Especially during the 12th century Renaissance. And by the time of a couple of centuries later, it became one of the central synthesizing ideas that always added humility to man, even though he was getting divine like powers. And the idea was the idea of the night, the idea of chivalry, the idea that there would be someone who is so capable at warfare, who knew the arts of the sword and the lance and the shield and warfare, the art of the horse, the art of all of this so well, but did not bring it into service for the ordinary That evil ideas and cultural situation, but brought them into play to help those less fortunate. And out of this came a very special night. It was called The Knight Errant. We know that figure as the chain, the lone gunman who saves the whole valley because he's more dangerous than any of the gunslingers, because he is the greatest gunslinger of all. And so the knight errant, the original knight errant was a man named William Marshall, and lived back in those days when it first, in the 12th century, was becoming something that was necessary to bring in. But one of the surprising things is that knight Errant were not made in the Christian West. They were not made in the Greek West of antiquity, but that the knight errant is of Chinese origin. James G. Liu, who was at the University of Chicago for many years. An excellent man, the Chinese knight errant that Knight Errantry began in China in a period called the Warring States period, when the Great Zhou Dynasty began to the founders of an etching based on humanity. A humane etching after 6 or 700 years of the Zhou dynasty, the hold, the glue, the lattice work that held the society together had frayed, and you had a period called the period of Warring States. Warlords all over the place, each with private armies and crushed in between all these massive gears were the normal population. Out of this came a kind of warrior who was homeless in the sense that he no longer had a single court to which he was responsible. He was responsible to his own recognizance of who he would help and when he would pick his own fights. You see, this kind of Chinese knight errant in the Far East becomes the wandering samurai of Kurosawa films like Yojimbo or Sanjuro, who, when asked what his name is, he looks around to see some image in nature, and he sees these white camellias. And he says, my name is a white camellia. Sanjuro. How in the world does the Chinese knight errant come to 12th century Europe? Well, not just to 12th century Europe. It came especially to the south of France, to Provence, to around Marseille. Because the Western Europeans had gone off on crusades to the Holy Land. And while they were there for several centuries in the Crusades, a whole level of civilized development that came from the other side of the crusading circle was introduced to the knights there in the Crusades, and they brought back especially to southern France. The Chinese knight errant evolved into their own form and their own institution. Surprisingly, the Chinese knight errant that didn't include love poetry. By the time it got to the south of France, they include love. It included the deepest erotic love raised to an ennobling level. How in the world did it get there? Because it came from China, through Iran, and the filter of Iran tuned to ancient China for thousands of years at that point. Dynastic China begins about 2250 BC, and when Chinese dynasty, the Sha dynasty, a thousand years before the Shang, really got going. The Sha dynasty of 2250 BC has a great deal in common with the ancient Akkadian, Sumerian Iranian Civilization of that age. How do we know? Two things appear in the Shah dynasty at 2250 BC that were never revered before in China. All of a sudden you have chariots and you have jade. There's nowhere in the early China that you find a usable jade, like the jade that becomes the stone of heaven that comes from the far, uh, Tianshan Mountains. It comes by caravan route that is all the way across the Gobi Desert. And horses and teams of horses put together for chariots. Those are inventions on the great grass steppes of Central Asia. Um. At any rate, Iran On became a very sympathetic interface, so that a lot of Chinese ideas came to the West through Iran, but somewhat modified. If we look at the 12th century, we look to see what has the mystical love and the knight errant got to do with a set of ideas. We find that the major set, that those elements form is the idea of the art of courtly love. Here's a little excerpt. The Art of courtly Love in the Milestones of Thought. It's an excerpt of this book, published in 1941 by Columbia University of the Art of Courtly Love. And in it you find, um. A dialogue, a dialogue between a man and a woman. And the whole art of courtly love. Are these problems put into a dialogue form? What if. Well, then what happens? What if this. Well, then what happens? This is the problem of a man of high nobility who falls in love with a woman of a middling class. What are you to do? And it's not just that she's not rich, and he is that simplistic and doesn't understand anything about it. The complexity to make it very simple and short is here. In her response to him declaring his love for her, and she says to him, a woman of the middle class who found herself worthy of the love of a count would be truly blessed. But you should consider carefully what praise or what reward account or a marquis would deserve if he asked a woman of the middle class for her love. What a strange Tercel would we consider? A Tercel is a hunting falcon. What a strange bird would we consider? One who would leave his partridges and cranes and pheasants and seek his quarry among the wretched sparrows? The daughters of hens. I am glad, of course, that a count finds me worthy of his love. But nevertheless I am afraid to accept a man of such a lofty and grand family who asked for the love of such a humble woman. It seems to me that he does so only out of the meanness of his spirit. For only the great hearted deserve to know the secrets of ladies and to have their love. So if I should give you my love. And then find in your person a lack of those things that one demands in love. And I might not have them either, because they are not natural to my class, then our love could not long be managed as it should be, or it is better then to refrain from even entering into such an affair than to suffer so much that we will have to end it before it has begun. So that there was a delicate issue, a delicate problem. This was written about 50 years before Mechthild. Mechthild solves it like any great universal genius, not just for a problem, but for all time. Who is a greater nobility? Who is a greater marquis or count. Then God Himself, then the image of God raised to a person whom one loves. And so Mechthild of Magdeburg has in here this kind of dialogue, just like the art of courtly love from 50 years before. Her dialogue is between the woman and her soul bridegroom. Then she puts on the slip of soft humility, so humble that it cannot bear anything underneath it. One of the earliest of all the mysteries that one finds in some of the early secret writings is that one came to communion clothed only with a white, uh, like handspun chiffon covering and nude underneath. It gave rise to critics of salacious behavior, but it was a symbol of the purity of one's coming with only the pure white. You almost see an image of that in the early gandhians, where the handspun their own cloth. In India it was called khadi, that you only wore clothes of your own making, that you spun the yarn and you wove the yarn and you cut the yarn. And so your caftan was handmade from scratch, just like the opposite direction of your handiwork was to reduce your person down to your nude body. You were carrying like Inanna. No emblems of the false world. You came simply and purely as the body which you were covered simply and purely by the transcendental sheath of of purity, of design, of the art, of the simple caftan. So she writes here. This is about 1270 A.D. she went to no university. She was a member of no order. She was just herself. Then she puts on the slip of soft humility, so humble that it cannot bear anything underneath it. Over it comes a white dress of spotless chastity, so pure that it cannot bear anything in thought, word or touch that might soil it. The three here thought, word, and touch are an ancient Zarathushtrian triad thought, word, and deed that the purity must be in all three, so that the flow of the equanimity goes through all three without a hitch. Thought, word and deed. A word is a myth. Thought is symbol, and the touch is existence. So that the flow of the path integral goes through the body, through the experience and through the mind without a break, and so that it merges into the pure light, the contemplative realm of differential consciousness, the the realm of heaven, unstopped and just pure. What we would say a vector of freedom. Then she puts on the cloak of her good name, which she has gilded with all the virtues. This symbol in Hellenistic Jewish antiquity was called the robe of glory, and there was a hem of the robe of Glory that was in fact translated into English by James Meade about 1896 or so. James Meade was Madame Blavatsky's secretary, and he translated a, I think, a 10 or 11 of these ancient hymns and put them together, and they're collected in a series and in a book called echoes of the Gnosis and the hem of the Robe of Glory, that only when the soul puts back on the robe of glory is that soul ready to join the radiance of the cosmos again, ready to ascend again. Because nothing of the impure world remains. To hold one back. She enters into the woods. The company of holy people. What kind of woods are these? In Dante, the Divine Comedy begins with the dark wood in which one becomes lost. It's an allegory of the confusing world, of the realm of the world, which is a fearful jungle and not something which is a garden. Paradise means a garden. It means nature tended in such a way that the choicest plants, the choicest birds, the choicest fruits are available. The Garden of Eden is a Paradise. Paradise is a return to this. The cultivation of nature by visionary consciousness raised to an art of the spiritual person She enters into the woods. The company of holy people there sings day and night. The sweetest of the nightingales, the well-modulated union with God. And she hears many a sweet voice of birds. Holy knowledge. The birds tell you it's an ancient zarathushtrian theme also that the bird of the spirit tells one the sacred. The name Homa actually means a sacred bird. In ancient wisdom, only he who can hear that spirit bird can be king. And still and still the young man did not come. So she sends out messengers because she is eager to dance. The exchange is a dance. She sent for the faith of Abraham and the longing of the prophets, and the chaste humility of our ladies, Saint Mary and all the holy virtues of Lord Jesus, and all the excellence of his chosen ones. You notice here that she includes Jewish and Christian alike, in a spectrum of possibility that runs without selection. All of it. Then a splendid dance of praise takes place. The young man finally comes and says to her, lady, my chosen one, I am here to dance with you. And just as artfully we follow the lead. And her song, then that bursts into this is a lyric poem that the beginning runs like this. I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me. If you want me to leap with abandon, you must intone the song. Then I shall leap into love. From love into knowledge, from knowledge into enjoyment, and from enjoyment beyond all human sensations. There I remain with you to circle higher and higher again and again. And his response to her, by the way he sings to her through. You threw me into you, threw you from me. And so you get the lover's knot. The knot of eternity tied knot stiffly but lightly as a bow that can be opened and retied opened and retied so that the the gift of life can change, and one can redo it as you go along. So that there is two different qualities that come in together. One is the mind which has knowledge, the other is the heart which has love, and both are brought together in a vision of wholeness. A man named William Chadwick did a couple of volumes for the State University of New York. They're Sufi volumes. One is called the Sufi Path of Knowledge, and the other is called the Sufi Path of Love, the heart and the mind woven together. The Sufi Path of Knowledge is about Ibn Arabi, and the Sufi path of love is about Rumi braided together. Why would they braid together? Because Ibn Arabi comes from southern Spain. He comes from Andalusia. He comes from the 1200s, exactly the same time as Mechthild of Magdeburg. And his emphasis was on the visionary recital of the way in which the journey through the phases comes to a trance form, where the whole is not just a braiding in the mind, but includes the mind in a very much larger set of the real. In this way, imagination, which was originally mythic, now becomes creative. And there is such a thing as creative imagination in Ibn Arabi. Um, you can see that it goes very quickly. Very far that the presentation here has an extraordinary kind of resonance to it. As soon as you begin to yourself inquire, develop yourself. Look at some of this material yourself. You begin to see that the exchange becomes rather extraordinary. One of Henry Corbin's last books was called Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, that heaven comes to earth and man goes into the heavens, and that both are all right with the real. Thank you.