Vision 6

This is vision six and the title is kind of curious. The title is bows are open flows, knots are not. I used to use a phrase a long time ago about tying your learning in bows rather than making knots. If you tie them in bows, you can untie them very easily and retie them. And if you tie them in knots, it's very difficult to get back at them. So that a bow is actually a form of flow. Whereas a not someone wants mathematically defined, not as a one dimension self-avoiding vector in a three dimensional open space. The ego is a not. That because it's tight. It thinks that it's a strong, whereas the. The person is a bull and can always modify, can always grow, and the person emerges out of vision, whereas the ego always emerges out of myth, so that the ego always is a symbolic, not that it thinks because it's well tied, that it has everything. And some very strong egos have everything, but they don't have themselves and that eventually proves to be a very interesting conundrum. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? Somebody said that once. The difficulty in appreciating Western civilization is that it's not understandable without eastern civilization. The contribution in a planetary culture is east and west. Pretty well balanced, actually. Like we saw last week that the whole origin of the idea of a knight errant is Chinese from the Warring States period of the early three hundreds BC in China. So that one could go back and you could read Chuang Tzu as the Daoist philosopher of Knight Errantry, and it makes Chuang Tzu a whole lot more interesting than just to think that he was a secondary Lao Tzu. He is a primary author. Out of Lao Tzu comes Tao, but out of Tromso comes Zen and Chuang Tzu is the Chinese way. The origin of understanding why a knight errant like the Toshiro Mifune samurai were so successful in the 1950s and 1960s in the West because more than the Western gunfighters, the Kurosawa samurai showed that there is a brilliant quality of penetration through not just the baddies, but the whole scene that creates an illusion where the baddies think that they're heroes. One of the easiest ways to make a distinction is to make the distinction that was made 500 years ago between the medieval and the Renaissance, the medieval outlook and the Renaissance outlook. And we have as a pair of our text that we're using here. We have a Renaissance work, the Art of Memory by Frances Yates. Dame Frances, very famous in London at the Warburg Institute and also one of the greatest of the medieval female mystics, Mechthild of Magdeburg. So we have a medieval and a Renaissance text pair of texts. But Mathilde's work was never characteristic of the medieval realm, she was not published. In fact, most of the female mystics were were not published. It wasn't until 800 years later, for instance, that Hildegard von Bingen, whose great contributions to music were even recorded. So the women mystics of the Middle Ages are like a secret sap flowing beneath the surface invisibly, and they give us a way of understanding that there was a living tradition, even when the medieval realm seemed so completely secure in a dead end, kind of an arrangement. The medieval world specialized in arranging elements, whereas the Renaissance specialized in the play of elements. The arrangement of elements in the medieval period leads to a kind of a hierarchy of form that eventually culminates in something like the great doctrinal Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Whereas the Renaissance play of elements leads into the development of the understanding of the essentialness of art and leads into the portrait paintings of Rembrandt, now the Summa Theologica is interesting and Aquinas has his place. But if you're going to find yourself, if you're going to discover the person, you will not find it in an arrangement of elements. You will only find it in a play of elements, because the discovery of the person is an ongoing art and is not an issue or point of doctrine. This becomes extremely important when we realize a difference in the way in which ideas, in their symbolic or patterning, tend when they're in the mind, when they're in the mind in an integral way, they tend to want to make a plan and a design, and they tend to look for a way to synthesize. Whereas in the play of elements, Consciousness is not concerned with coloring within the lines, but is interested in the entire field within which the form occurs, so that you have to envision where we are now. A quality that is distinctly different from the mind in its integral mode. Consciousness is differential. It is not integral, and it's only through the play of differentiation that one is able to disclose patiently the form of the person. Because the person is not some kind of heraldry design that for all time is posited, and you can stamp it on things that you own The human personality is a differential form, rather like a prism, like a lens, and discloses a way of seeing that improves as you go along, as you utilize it. So we're looking at the way in which an arrangement of elements into a doctrine is a dead end when it comes to understanding vision, but the play of elements in consciousness has to come back into this world, and it has to come back into this world, first of all, through the mind, so that the classic situation that develops, you have a visionary capacity to the extent that you've prepared for it, to the extent that you have put the ingredients into the recipe. You will get out of the oven of transformation a proportionate vision, visionary capacity and that visionary capacity is not polarized to the realm of integration. Differentiation is not a polarity to integration. It is in a relationship of complementarity, so that vision in its differential consciousness tends to come back, to come back, to weave itself back into the realm of integration, the realm of nature, of ritual, of myth, and of symbol. If it comes back with a kind of a weak origin, it comes back in a weak way, and it means that the return of vision comes back just so far as the mind and the mind in its integral. The Renaissance term for it in English was conceit. In its conceit, the mind thinks that vision was for itself alone, that consciousness was meant to come back and to inform the mind alone. If it's a little stronger and vision comes back and goes through symbols, through the symbolic mind, into myth, into feeling toned experience the experience, the feeling toned, quality of experience. The mythic horizon says, well, it came back for me. And out of that you get The physics. You get the symbolic, informed quality of vision, but you get it registering in feeling toned, experiential plays in myths and mythic structures. And out of this comes a metaphysics which says, well, we're much better founded than just a mental logic. But if vision comes back, if it has had a generate quality of coming back and goes through symbols and through myth all the way back to ritual, then you get something different. Instead of being focused on logic or metaphysics, then you get for the first time the capacity to have an architecture, because in the ritual comportment of action based existence, one seeks to Utilize the capacities of vision and symbol and myth and ritual together, and to build so that you find in great visionaries like Plotinus, you find him talking about the architecture of the universe, about the building of the universe. And if there are moments where great vision happens and that one comes all the way back to nature, so that the visionary qualities of consciousness come all the way back, then you get phenomena like the historical Buddha. You get a quality of integration that sends out through the entire ecology of integration, a new round, a new round of capacity, so that the transformation then becomes much stronger and a new kind of form comes out a new differential form. If you start from ritual, or if you start from myth, or if you start from symbol and you get a vision on that basis, you can develop from any of those three or any combinations of those three. You can develop vision to the point of finding the art of the person. You can do that. But as we have seen in our education, for every objective stage that occurs, that precipitates out of a process, there's usually another process then that on a higher order comes out and comes into play, and the higher order process of consciousness from vision. Vision is a first order. It's a primordial level of process, of differential process. And out of that comes the person. But there is a higher order of differential process, and it's called history. And history is much stronger than vision, much more relentless than vision. It's like nature is much stronger than myth. It's as if vision pairs itself with myth, but history pairs itself with nature in the sense that some ultimate form is capable of coming out of that. What we saw came out of nature, out of the process of nature was existence. What would be as enormous, as incredibly comprehensive a form that would come out of history and out of history comes the cosmos. The cosmos is a differential form, like the person, and it is impossible for an ego to deal with historical problems. It's simply outclassed. In fact, the ego can't even deal with visionary problems. And so the ego deals on the basis of a mythological experience integrally brought together in the mind through whatever symbols it's able to engender, and counts occasionally on hints from a visionary experiences of transcendent Cendant quality. None of that touches the province of art, and none of that even begins to address the problems of history. Whereas in the Wisdom of Civilization back as far as written records go, 5000 years ago in Egypt, 5000 years ago, you find in the Pyramid Texts already the understanding that beyond the pairs of the gods, beyond the ISIS, Osiris, beyond the Shu, and the Tefnut, beyond the four pairs of the gods is a Godhead, unnamed and unnameable. For convenience, the ancient Egyptians used the term Aten, out of which the Greeks got the word Atum that there is an unknown, indivisible divinity, and that it is this divinity which is the true energizing of the universe. And this unnamed god in the ancient Egyptian, um, was always the sense that within the four pairs of gods, there is a ninth field of reality which encompasses those eight, um, 3000 years after the Pyramid Texts. One of the Hermetic treatises that was found with the Nag Hammadi material found in 1945, in a buried place along the Nile River near the Egyptian village of Chenoboskion, but it was called Nag Hammadi because the actual finds were in this this one area. One of those documents was a hermetic document that it hadn't been seen for 1700 years, and it was called the eighth, reveals the ninth. And when you read it, it's a dialogue. It's a wisdom philosophic dialogue. It is the play of language rather than the arrangement of language. It is one of those Renaissance source documents that they would have gone wild over had they have known of it. And in the eighth, reveals the ninth in the dialogue, the teacher and the students discover in the play of the dialogue, in the play of the language between them, that everything that they are capable of delineating and understanding forms a very tight symbolic pattern. But the coherence of that pattern is due to a deep, profound wisdom, which is not limited to that pattern. That without that wisdom field, the patterns unity would never have a chance to emerge, because you would always be inside the form and never know its limitations. Whereas the knowing of the limitations of symbolic form is proof positive. It's like an indirect proof positive that consciousness is not limited to the mind. And since it's not limited to the mind, it is not limited to natural integral limitations that the mind can undergo what is called a transformation. And because the mind can transform, it can leave the limitations of symbolic ideas and venture into the uncharted ocean of consciousness. And that the ship that carries the exploration on that ocean of differential consciousness is the person, the spiritual person, because is able to be mobile and navigate in an open ended field and is not dependent for its location on any kind of satellite system. Telling you where you are on the earth that you can in fact, leave the Earth and go anywhere, and that anywhere becomes instead of an arrangement of the mind. It becomes an unarranged cosmos, not a cosmos. Of chaotic unknownness, but a cosmos of navigable adventure. And thus the cosmos. Is indeed a differential form. And the cosmos of the differential form. Finds its harmony in the spiritual person. This is the way they would talk in the Renaissance. This is the way it was in fact said in the Renaissance. Distinct from the Renaissance was the medieval period that not only preceded it, but ran as an undercurrent all the way through it and is still here with us today. We have many political forms on this planet, the beginning of the 21st century that are positively medieval in their outlook. They like to think that arranging elements in some sort of coherent mental plan, with a set of coherent doctrine to support it, is the best chance of achieving all of your goals. The entire list of goals given is paltry. It's like reading tea leaves in terms of an unlimited cosmos. When you can see 12 billion light years, it doesn't make much sense that you're happy that you own all the land on this side of the creek. So we're dealing with scale here, and scale is one of the keys in architecture. You have to know what scale you're building in the Renaissance. One of the young stage designers who designed costumes and stages, and he was interested in the old Shakespeare. His name was Inigo Jones, and Jones took it upon himself to go to the oldest building in England, the oldest monumental building in England. He went to Stonehenge and he wrote a little monograph on Stonehenge. And he said conclusively, the Druids did not build Stonehenge because Stonehenge shows an architecture. It shows somebody understood the principles that are there in Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century A.D., that the plan of Stonehenge is not at all a Druid worship of mythological Illogical nature, but has within it a capacity to reach through to the architecture. That ideas throw into transform, and it opens up to the entire cosmos that the architecture of Stonehenge was meant to take you into your differential form, your differential transform, and relate you to the entire cosmos. And to do this in such a way that you can bring back recursively that cosmic personal proportion and use it in your life, so that one of the qualities that the Renaissance was convinced of is that the play of elements in art is really the play of love in life, hence the great concern in the renaissance of love. That love not as a phenomenon, but love as a noumenon, as a visionary transformation, could be brought back into human life to give us the sense not only of alignment geometrically, but of relationality in a trigonometric function, so that what comes out of it is not so much the lines of some kind of diagram, but the spherical orders of a cosmos. And it is the play of the spiritualities within a set, a set of eight that disclose that there is A ninth possibility, and that the ninth is in fact a very curious quality. In the eighth reveals the ninth in the Hermetic doctrine of its treatise. It says, at one point, when we get to the eighth quality, the eighth sphere, we find a kind of a silence. And that that silence is a very peculiar kind of a silence. It is our silence. And when we become acclimated to having our silence operative within the set of the seven spheres, where there was sound for us the seven planets, the seven days of the week. The seven of anything. The eighth level. The eighth quality. Bringing it in is a silence that when we become acclimated to it, we hear singing from the other side that the choir that is singing is not an earthly choir. No one here is singing. Everyone here is accounted for, and we are all silent and listening. And that when man learns to listen on this comprehensive level, he hears singing from the other side that there is such a thing as a 10th, a 10th sphere. And it's there that the angels sing. Nothing on earth can hear it except the silence of the eighth. And so you find this kind of a quality in ancient wisdom which resurfaces in the Renaissance and becomes extremely confident that if we transform, we need to understand that the fulcrum of transformation is a kind of a silence in sound. It's kind of an openness in space. It's kind of a pause in the constant inner voice of thinking that it's only in that zero quality of interface that the transform gains its traction, because the transform will have no traction to transform. As long as it stays within the form, it has to be able to go into the field which surrounds the form. And if your quality of energy goes into the field, then the form can be transformed. This was, of course, the great principle, not only in alchemy, but the great principle in studying astronomy astrology, that there is such a thing as the order of coherence and integrals. There is such a thing as the five planets and the sun and the moon, making a seven quality, a seven set. But there is something there beyond which there is an eighth, and even a ninth, and even a 10th quality that one becomes used to. In Frances Yates The Art of memory. She brings out a structure. By a man named Camilo. The Memory Theater of Julio Camilo, so enticing in the 1500s that even the King of France gave him 500 ducats to build it, and Camilo was one of the most famous men of his day. And when you look at it, the memory theater of Camilo has the seven pillars of Solomon's wisdom arranged in a semi-circle. And then it has the seven planets, the five planets, and the sun and moon. And then it has radiating out from each of these seven pillars, starting with each of the seven planetary structures, seven levels, so that you have seven times seven, you have a amphitheater of 49 places that are delineated out. And by this Camilo said. One can learn anything that one wishes to learn, but the quality of this is medieval. The quality of this is an arrangement and has already. Almost three generations before that been superseded. In 1465, the great artist Mantegna did a tarot deck and then the tarot deck of Mantegna. You find already a very powerful Renaissance transform that doesn't move by arrangement. It moves by play. And in the tarot deck by Mantegna, you can see some of the origins of later tarot decks that came out, for instance, the The Fool card as IL Mesereau. And there are traces and you can see how the so-called modern tarot deck was a development of this. But the modern tarot deck, as it comes out, is based on a metaphysics, whereas the Mantegna tarot deck is based upon a Renaissance transform of a Hermetic wisdom. In the modern tarot deck, you have four suits and a major Arcana, and the Major Arcana is overwhelmingly commented on, as if it dominates the four suits, and therefore you have a structure where you have a head and you have the pairs of arms and legs. But in the Mantegna tarot deck, the five suits are evenly distributed, because it's only the even distribution of form that gives you the yoga. It's the evenness of mind that is yoga. To the extent that the head dominates the hands and the feet, you can't dance as well. You can't hug as well. It's the distribution over the five that the thumb and the fingers together make a whole hand that the entire hand comes into play. And in the Mantegna tarot deck you have this even distribution, so that you have 50 cards. You have five suits of ten each. In the Camillo Memory Theatre, you have Apollo on the second level of the centre pillar, as if this was a place of great honour. Where is Apollo? In the Mantegna tarot deck? Apollo is in the 10th place. The 10th card of the fourth suit. And what is this suit? Apollo is the 10th card. What are the nine cards before him? The muses. The nine muses. Because actually, in wisdom antiquity, Apollo is at the head of an order of the nine muses. Why? Because the muses are the order for transform between divinity and man. And Apollo has his place not as some Greek mythological figure, but in a visionary place of a transformation. Mantegna understood that Camilo had no idea whatsoever. Camilo, by the way, was one of these huge fat guys who stammered and stuttered, and he got a accidental. Um, reputation in the 1500s for being enormously courageous. He was with a cardinal one time and a pet lion got loose on an estate, and Camilla was too fat to run, so he just was petrified. And he stayed where he was. And it turned out that the lion being raised in captivity sort of liked Camilla and brushed against him until they came, and they took him back to the cage, and he got this reputation of being brave. His theatre had has this reputation that it is about memory. It's about the way in which the mind, in a medieval sense, arranges elements and thinks that that's a tonic, whereas the memory is the function of consciousness. It is not the function of math. The function of math is imagination and its extremely subtle point. Why is it that imagination and memory form together two different kinds of dynamics? And why is it that we confuse them all the time? Because imagination in math and memory and vision have a capacity to exchange places, to exchange orders, because the fulcrum between them is not a fulcrum separating them into polarities, but is a fulcrum of no dimension which allows exchange between the two, and thus they form complementarities and memory brings with it all of the capacities for differentiation, and puts it at the center of the integral cycle of nature. Whereas imagination can go exchanged into memories, place into consciousness, and becomes rather what the Sufis used to call creative imagination. It's not imagination based on images that are, but it's on the play of images that are possible. One remembers a great phrase of Robert Kennedy one time he said, some men see the world as it is and moan and bewail, whereas I see the world as it might be, and I try. There is this quality of exchange of centres, which is at the very basis of love, and it is also at the very basis of the way in which a cosmos generates itself out of a universe, a universe, a one verse. A universe is an ultimate arrangement, but if it has an ultimate arrangement that has an even distribution all the way through its form, the form takes transform very, very lightly and very easily, and the transformation of a universe integrally yields the possibility of a cosmos differentially. You can see this in the ancient Chinese understanding of the Tai Chi symbol. The Tai chi symbol has a circle of light in the Teardrop of the dark and A circle of the Dark and The Teardrop of the light. Those two teardrop forms of dark and light exchange centers. In The trigrams, you'll find that those are fire and water. Fire and water are universal solvents. When a third universal solvent was found working just as powerfully as fire and water, it transformed the nature of transformation itself and civilization. Because they found that the chemical transforms of fire and water were equaled by the transformation of alcohols. Alcohols also dissolve there. It's a universal solvent like water and fire. In fact, there are some vitamins which are only water soluble and there are some that are alcohol soluble. And so the development later in Chinese civilization, like in the Tang dynasty, poets like Li Po of constantly drinking wine is like an allegory of taking a third transform, of dissolving the forms that do not. They're not amenable to transformation, dissolving those forms into a way in which they can. This quality was there in the way in which the tarot deck of Mantegna shows. At the fifth set of ten, you have the sun, you have the moon, and you have the five planets, but there are three other cards. There are cards that do not appeal appear in Camille's memory. Theatre. You have the eighth sphere, which this lovely angelic dancing woman holds up and it's full of stars. My God, it's full of stars. And in the ninth, she holds up a complete zero. And in the 10th, you find the cosmos. More after a break. Last week in vision five, about how the medieval synthesizing symbol was the book and how the Renaissance synthesizing symbol was the theater. It's the difference between a book which has the authority, and a dialogue which develops a relational understanding. It's the difference between Aristotle and Plato, the Aristotelian authority. In fact, in the Middle Ages he was called the philosopher. We're not interested in anyone else. And one of the curious qualities in medieval philosophy is that the most poignant of the Aristotelian books was a conflation of one of Plotinus's works with one of Aristotle's, and it was conflated and called the Eisagoge and the Eisagoge. Let Plutonian Differential consciousness into the medieval sense without understanding its function. And so very often in the medieval world you will find a restless quality with the way things are, and it yields the medieval penchant for pilgrimages. The pilgrimages of the medieval population in the Renaissance become the desire to have your own place raised to the nth level of the villa. The Renaissance villa and the medieval pilgrimage are quite distinct in their approach, and you will find in the Renaissance the greatest architect of villas of all was Pelagio, and when Pelagio died in 1580, His architectural signature on the way in which you build a play of elements into your art, made a whole vocabulary that influenced architecture. Ever since Thomas Jefferson's Monticello is a Palladian villa in Virginia. When you look at Jefferson's great last 20 years of his life, he devoted to building the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, just down the hill from Monticello. And he called it his Academical Village. And you notice the arrangement of buildings. It is like a differentially extended Palladian villa with the wings that would be the rooms arranged as separate buildings for classrooms around the central dome structure, Sure where the entire open quad comes. Where I went to undergraduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We had a thing called Bascom Hall that was at the top of the hill, and there was just a plain open field in between. And then all the major north hall, South Hall in between. And it's again a Palladian structure, because Palladio was one of the great culminations of the Renaissance, not a culmination in the sense of some overwhelming great work, but the sense that he made a great vocabulary for others to work out of. It's like in music you have the development of the personal art of music, not so much in Bach, but in Papa Haydn and Haydn's first, uh, student who really understood what he was doing was young Mozart. And then from Mozart, you found this tremendous culmination in Beethoven. But it isn't Beethoven's musical vocabulary that's used so much. It's Richard Wagner who follows in a differential way. Beethoven. So to an architecture you find the great father of Renaissance architecture is Leon Battista Alberti. And then you find the Mozart of Alberti Haydn. You find the Mozart in architecture and Brunelleschi, and then you find the Beethoven in architecture of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, who built the dome of the cathedral in Florence. But Michelangelo rebuilt Saint Peter's in Rome in order to rebuild it. He demolished the old Saint Peter's in his civilization series. Sir Kenneth Clarke said it's an idea that makes even me jittery. Some 400 years later, he pulled down the central cathedral of Roman Catholicism to have a basic, clear field so that he could build it again the way that he wanted to. And so Michelangelo, as an architect, is like Beethoven. But Palladio follows Michelangelo not in the sense of making greater works, but in the sense of making a vocabulary that everyone used thereafter. And so, um, it's interesting to see and to understand in the Renaissance, the play of elements rather than the arrangement. The medieval arrangement is given over to the energies of transformation. It doesn't matter how beautiful, how complete, and how perfect that plan, what can we do to improve it? What can we do to change it, to give it our variety? And so the theme of later in music, after Wagner, Johannes Brahms developed the capacity he called it in his composing wisdom, the principle of developing variation, that it isn't just the enormous Wagnerian sonority of tone and theme and motif and leitmotif and so forth, but it's the way in which you can give an infinite variety of inflection, and you can make of music a jewel. A scintillating jewel. And in Brahms music, one finds this jewel like quality. That old Papa Haydn would have been astounded that it led there. This quality of the play, rather than the arrangement, shows that the Renaissance was working on not the basis of a symbolic structure of the mind, but on a basis of a visionary consciousness active in the art of memory. So the art of memory that makes the Renaissance not a memory that is pedestrian, in that it tries to remember what the arrangement was. Now let's see, where does this go? That kind of memorizing is medieval. The Renaissance art of memory was an art, the art of memory. Not to figure out where it goes because that's where it went. But what can you do with this? So that the Renaissance discovered that memory was able to polymerize symbols and make new kinds of products that no one had ever seen before, and a kind of a gorgeousness came out of human nature again, and it was a gorgeousness that they recognized had everything to do with love. It has nothing to do with authority. It has everything to do with love. And yet the overwhelming majority of people Lived, as they still do in a medieval realm where they needed authority. And so you find in the Renaissance a kind of a parfait, where the really wise individuals take care of the way in which the world has to be in order to keep it from going, falling apart. But you always leave the door open for those special men and women who get into the ability to transform. And the places where the Renaissance chose as the arena for transformation were three kinds of architecture. The personal house raised to the level of the villa, the town hall raised to the level and plagios of the Basilica in Vicenza and the theatre, and again the ultimate Renaissance theatre was built by Pelagio towards again the end of his life, and it's called the Teatro Olimpico. Pelagio was a member of the Olympic Society in Vicenza. Vicenza is in the Veneto. It's a was a part of the Venice of series of cities. At one time it was sort of like a poor relation to Padua. And then Venice became the after Florence in the 1400s. In the 1500s, the the Renaissance energy went to other cities. Um, the Renaissance energy from Florence, for instance, went to Milan. Milano in the person of Leonardo da Vinci. And the Florentine Renaissance energy went to Rome in the person of Michelangelo, but the energy that went from Florence to Venice was not that of some overwhelming genius like Leonardo or Michelangelo. It was the quality of wisdom that was there in the Florentine Academy. Under Ficino and Ficino's favorite students were always the artists and the lovers of wisdom. Um. One of Ficino's favorite little students was started with him when he was 16. Was Michelangelo himself. And Ficino always used to include young, little teenage Michelangelo, so that he would get used to the fact that grown up people play with cosmic possibilities and don't concern themselves whether or not you're remembering where things go. Another person in that entourage was Botticelli, and you can go on and name many others Fra Angelico. It was quite a crowd around Ficino, so that that energy of educating oneself to be able to do more went to Venice. And so the Renaissance Venice of the 1500s is the starting place. And you find there an improvement in the sense of a refinement where you find an interesting quality, say, in the faces that Botticelli paints. You find them refined in Titian to a point of almost unbelievability, where you find the sense of dramatic qualities in Fra Angelico, of a whole frieze of things. In Venice, you find people like the Balinese who were able to show the development, or Giorgione, where all of a sudden you realize that there's this enormous resonance beyond the personal in the cosmic. In Florence, it was the individual, the spiritual person who had the energies of the cosmos. But in the Venetian Renaissance, you more and more got the sense that there was an exchange that not only do we get cosmic energies, but that the cosmos gets personal energies from the exchange that we make. So that man has indeed a glorious place in the ecology of the real. His capacities at creation give Heaven a chance to open up the possibilities Loyalties beyond the natural spectrum into the supernatural possibilities, and that it isn't the metaphysics of someone's imagination in myth that makes the supernatural possibilities, but it's the artist performing his magic, extending the personal energies out into the cosmos that creates that fantastic quality. When you look at Plagios, Theatro Olympico made started about two months before he died. As an old man, you see the signature of the amphitheater, as you would have seen it in ancient Athens, in the theater of Dionysius the origin and the home of Greek tragedy, the origin and home of Greek comedy. The first theater in the world, in an urban center that brought together what the Renaissance rediscovered, that it's in the play of the language of characters in those kinds of scripts, like Aeschylus or Sophocles or Aristophanes or Euripides would write. They're not set authorities, but they need productions to put them on so that the Renaissance specialized not in getting the rendition right scholastically, but in getting it interesting in terms of showmanship. Let's have a production of Sophocles that's incredible that no one has ever seen before. And the very first play. This is why I buy hardcovers. The very first play and the Teatro Olimpico was Sophocles Oedipus Rex, but it's only in the audience part of the Teatro Olimpico, that you could recognize the theater of Dionysus in Athens, because when you look at the stage, the stage is completely different. The back of the stage has. I don't know if you can see this. It has a receding street scene in Renaissance perspective, going back into the infinities so that the stage was of endlessness because of man's perspective, and developed. So the audience watched not only the tragedies and comedies from the proscenium back to the back of the stage, but they looked through the drama, through the action, on the stage into the backdrop, which was a Renaissance city going back into the infinities of perspective, so that when Pelagia built, he didn't build just to have a nice building now, but to have a building that would increasingly have its resonance, which it has throughout the world. When you look at the villas of Pelagia, the last great villa of Pelagia, here at the top of this hill, it's called La Rotonda. It is built in the form of an ancient Greek temple. The Greek temple used to be to those mythological gods, but the Pelasgian villa is the personal home of someone and doesn't have just one portico where the rich will worship comes in, but it has four porticos to every direction, so that when you go into the inside of the Villa rotunda, you have in the center of a house. If I can find the the illustration, probably not. In the center of the villa rotunda, you have a dome rising off the floor so that it feels like you're in a personal church. You're in a cathedral of the individual, not a cathedral of the authorities who are running a religious structure. This is the home where someone lives. They are not interested in the authority of a structure out there. They're interested in the play of the art of life here at home. And of course, one of the great qualities of the of La Rotunda is that it took a seed from the greatest structure of the medieval architecture. It took a seed from it and opened that seed in a Renaissance way to become a la rotunda. The seed was the maze at the center of Chartres Cathedral on the floor. Charlotte Cathedral, the greatest of all the Gothic cathedrals, but in the part where the transept and nave intersect, at the very center, at the navel of the building, in the floor tiles, is a maze, and the maze is in the form of an exfoliate flower of the cosmos, and it is a maze in that you have an entrance to begin walking, but the maze is such that you must walk on every square inch of the labyrinth to reach the center. The secret of the equal. The equanimeous distribution of pilgrimage. That the goal is not as important as the fact that you covered every aspect on the way there, so that when you reach the goal, you also have achieved a saturation of the possibilities, because it's the saturation that allows for transformation. And if the goal is not a point at the center so much as a saturation of the entire set, then you have made a transformation from the medieval to the Renaissance, utilizing the medieval to make the Renaissance. And so La Rotonda by Pelagio, one of the greatest buildings in world history. He also took the medieval pilgrimage in the form of boats that would sail on the Mediterranean, going towards the Holy Land. Going various places. Sail on the North Sea. He took the idea of the boat that the stability of the boat in the water is the keel. It is the keel that holds it. And in the top of City hall in Vicenza he put a keel reaching into heaven, so that the basilica, the town hall in Vicenza, has its keel as the roof dome. The ship of state is well founded because its keel is into the openness towards heaven, towards the sunlight so that you find this kind of equality, this kind of an understanding. The interface was an interface where in the medieval period, the mind was seen as a mirror. It's constantly used as an image. In medieval times, for instance, the most famous of all mirrors in the Middle Ages was the Mirror of Alchemy. It was a book by, uh, composed by the thrice famous and learned friar Roger bacon. Roger bacon, who was an exact contemporary of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Roger Bacon was probably the most intellectual figure of that entire age. He was arrested several times in his life, and he was kept in prison many times in his life for. Up to 10 or 15 years at a stretch. And Roger bacon, in order to confound. Those who were trying torture on him, to get him to confess to being very strange, um, trained himself to write upside down and backwards so that his notebooks are almost scribbled, and that even if you held it up just to a mirror, you still would have it backwards. So he took the old thing instead of giving you the form, he took the obverse and then the reverse of that so that you got a written kind of notebook. That was a contrapositive of what the world sees. And no one could make a double transposition except somebody who had trained his mind to do that. And in the notebooks of Roger bacon. His cipher was infamous in the Middle Ages and also in the Renaissance. And in fact, it wasn't until the early 20th century at Yale University that someone was able to decipher Roger Bacon's code and bring out the fact that, in his notebooks he had discovered the principle of the microscope. 800 years ago, the mirror of alchemy. The mind is a mirror that the mirror reflects back and is the ultimate collector of images. So the mirror is a symbol. In the Middle Ages is the mind, which, at the ultimate honesty of its integration, shows you what is there in the reflection, in the imagery. And in the Middle Ages they thought reflection was thought That's everywhere. They talk about it as if it's a given. But reflection is only an integral side of thinking as a function. Intuition penetrates through mirrors because thinking is not the exclusive. Be all and end all of intelligence. Insight penetrates through mirrors and makes mirrors transparent. In fact, not only just transparent, but makes of mirrors, lenses, prisms through which one sees the entire spectrum of light. And you find in Renaissance philosophy again and again the understanding that it isn't so much the mirror, the reflective quality of thought that's important. But it's the prismatic quality of art that opens up the spectrum of spiritual life into the cosmos. And so you find something like this as a difference. The memory theater of Camilo. Here's what Francis Yates says about it. The basic images in the theater are those of planetary gods. We're back at mythology again, aren't we? We're back at metaphysical mythology. The affective or emotional appeal of good memory images, according to the rules, is present in such images. The more feeling in the image, the more that you'll remember it, right? So if you highlight it and you underscore it and you electrify it and you sell it like hell. Everyone is going to remember it loud and dirty so they'll remember it, said George Patton. Here is the expressive tranquility of Jupiter, the anger of Mars, the melancholy of Saturn, the love of Venus. Here again. The theater starts with causes, the planetary causes of various effects, cause and effect. It's on the food chain. It's on the authority chain. It's this. But what does old Inigo Jones write about? Renaissance theater? Jones quotes in his own English translation. He was reading Vitruvius, who was a Roman architect of the second century A.D., and he couldn't find a translation of certain passages. So Jones, Inigo Jones being a Renaissance man, he made his own translations, and because he was an architect, he knew how to structure what Vitruvius was talking about. But because he was a costume designer, he knew what kind of gorgeous imagery you need to help the drama and everything. So here's and Jones quotes in his own English translation. The passage in Vitruvius book five on how the plan of the ancient theatre was based on four equilateral triangles. Four triangles, four times three makes 12, right? It isn't the zodiac of 12. It's the architectural arrangement of four triangles together overlaid that rotated. Make a circumference that has the 12 nodes, but not because there are just 12 nodes, but because there's an inner structure that generates it. What was the building that he looked at to get curious about this? Stonehenge. Stonehenge. The ancient theatre was based on four equilateral triangles inscribed within a circle. A figure like that used by astrologers when discussing the musical harmony of the stars. This is the first known English translation of this very difficult passage. So that this is a quality that's there. In this book is by Frances Yates. Also. It's called Theatre of the world. All the world's a stage. For whom? For someone who's person reaches into the cosmos like Shakespeare. And then a couple of weeks, we'll get to Shakespeare. We'll get to The Tempest by Shakespeare, which is like Palladio's basilica. It was the place in which all the dynamic possibilities of scintillating, jewel like cosmic person were collected together, not at a single point and not in authority, but in a criss cross interchange way, so that the magic of Shakespearean stage could. Generate a kind of quality which one sees only in mystical visions of the whole. Marc Chagall did a painting one time, bringing both. It was called The Creation of Man. Where this angel of the presence in Judaism, the the the angel there at God's throne is the angel of of the presence. And what the angel of the presence does is provides a context within which anyone who can emerge completely will do so there, because the opportunity is there. So the angel of the presence is carrying the figure of Adam just before God breathes life into him, and the figure comes out of a whirlwind, this spiral form, which is the energy of history, which is the energy of nature. It's like the chambered nautilus spiral. It's like the double helix spiral, but overlaid on the spiraling energy. The spiraling dynamics are all the radiant lines of a different form of energy. And dynamos together. The spiral and the radiant. Brilliance. Together, both forms together. Overlaid together and as in the Chagall. Hasidic painting done about 40 years ago, you would have seen in. Something like Mechthild of Magdeburg. Vision. That this is a way in which. Mystical consciousness diffracts the pattern of light from nature. She writes at the very beginning of her book. This book I hereby send as a messenger Hermes the messenger. It's a female Hermes messenger in the 1200s. This book I hereby send And not from some authority. She says, I send it to you, to all religious people, both the bad and the good. Equanimity. The entire field. Otherwise, there is no saturation. There is no transform. It's like the ancient saying the Buddha spoke to all as if it were rain falling on everyone. Fructifying all, both the bad and the good. For if the pillars fall, the building cannot remain standing. And it signifies me alone, and proclaims in praiseworthy fashion my intimacy. All who wish to understand this book should read it nine times. You notice the old Plutonian Aeneid that it's going over it and over it and over again, because each cycle is not a repetition. Each cycle is a further transform of the phases of understanding it. And after nine times one gets very good at reading it, not reading it just as it is here, but reading it in your own way. It's like an actor who becomes used to a role and at a certain moment realizes the possibilities of the role that he hasn't seen before. That it is, is stupendous, and that there are some times where it isn't the language in the script that's important, but how you deliver it, that. I remember seeing a Henry Fonda in a live production one time. I was called First Monday in October about the first female justice of the Supreme Court. And I kept wondering, why is it that you keep noticing Henry Fonda all the time? All the other people like Eve Marie Saint, are just as attractive, but you always watch him. And finally, there was the key. Before he delivered any line, he made a physical move before he delivered the line, so that your eye caught the movement and you were looking at him before he delivered the line. No wonder he remembered all his lines and one time graphically the point of the play. He went to sit down, and he paused for just a second, delivered the crux of the play, and then finished sitting down. It's that kind of a quality of a great actor who understands there is a strategy to drama, of letting the audience participate in the discovery of the moment, because that moment is a transform, then it's no longer just a play. There is a theater of the real, in which the audience is conspiring with the actors to produce something that is real. It's not just an imitation of something else. This is legitimate. This was just now created, just now made. We have exceeded the powers of mythological gods by many orders at that time, she writes in her Mechthild. This book is called Flowing Light of the Godhead, and under it she has this little dialogue of phrases, not a medieval theological scholastic argument, but just phrases without anything. And the first phrase is, ah, Lord God, who made this book? And the next phrase is I made it in my powerlessness, for I cannot restrain myself as to my gifts. The next little phrase. Well then, Lord, what shall the title of the book be? Which is to your glory alone? And the next phrase is, it shall be called a flowing light of my Godhead into all hearts that live free of hypocrisy. The soul came to love, greeted her with great deference, and said, and again, it's like a dialogue in a play. But there are no character parts given. It's just the dialogue, so that it is a cascade of dialogue with the characters taken away, so that it is your own cascade of dialogue which you say yourself, God greet you. Lady love. May God reward you. Mistress Queen. Lady love. You are indeed perfect, mistress Queen. That is why I am above all things. Lady love, you struggled many a year before you forced the exalted Trinity to pour itself utterly into the humble, virginal womb. Mistress and Queen, that was to honor and benefit. Lady love. Now you have come here to me, and have taken from me everything I gained on earth. Mistress Queen, you have made a happy exchange. Notice here that the reference is back. Like to the book of job. Everything is taken from job but is not a tragedy. It is a transformation. Job has given everything back because he has the open space. It's like Michelangelo seeing the bare field in Rome, saying, now we can build a building. This quality of mechthilde comes later on in this kind of poetry. She has prose, she has dialogue, and then she has poetry. She has all three forms brought together. And here is her. I seek you with my thoughts. As a maiden secretly does her lover. I shall fall terribly sick from this. For I am bound to you. The bond is stronger than I am. Thus I cannot become free of love. I cry out to you in great longing. A lonely voice I hope for your coming with heavy heart. I cannot rest, I am on fire. I pursue you with all my might. Unquenchable in your burning love. If I had the strength of a giant. If I got onto your trail still I would lose your tracks. Please, my love. Run not so far ahead of me. And tarry a while in love. So that I can catch you. You have taken all things that I have from you. Leave me, at least through grace. That same gift that you have given to even dogs in their nature that I might be loyal to you in misery, free of all discontent. This I do indeed desire more than I yearn for. Heaven is a graphic rejection of scholastic medieval theology for the personal dissolving in the solution of the transform of love. She says, if you want to have your icon images of heaven, you can. But I am free to go beyond. More next week.