Vision 7

This is vision seven and our education is moving in a very special way. We're moving by phases, and we have a series, a sequence of four phases that make together a whole a square, as it were, four angles of vision, four corners. It makes a square. It makes what the British Empire used to call the big picture. Why it is that a gestalt of four is the largest Picture that we can make is a problem in terrestrial mechanics. Maybe on some other planet it's different. For us, the square or the rectangle, this kind of an aperture has a psychological wholeness to it. And to go beyond that takes a very special recalibration. You can do it, but it takes a recalibration so that the four seasons make a year. The four sevens of the week make a 28 day lunar cycle. And there are many other qualities. But the geometry of the square, of the stability of the square, of the ability of our gestalt seeing of our having a sense of form is conveniently indexed by a quaternary, by a hole. And so our education moves by two squares. The first square is the square of nature. The ecology of nature. And the second square is the ecology of consciousness, quite distinct and quite different. Classically, if you were to teach this 2500 years ago, you wouldn't put the second square on top of the first square in any kind of an aligned way, but you would rotate it about 45 degrees, so that you would have a diamond on top of a square and excerpting that out, you would get an eight angled eight pointed Figure, and that would be the set, the octave of a complete double cycle. A double squared cycle. In the thousands of years that men and women have been civilized. There have been many ways to look at this. But about 100 years ago, there was a historian, a very famous American historian. His name was Henry Adams. Henry Adams father, Charles Francis Adams, was the American ambassador to England during the Civil War. And so young Henry Adams grew up in London during the American Civil War. But instead of studying British history, he studied American history because his grandfather was John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, and his great grandfather was John Adams, the second president of the United States. And so Henry Adams grew up as a young man in London during the American Civil War, wondering, what is the United States that it should come to this? And he got interested in history, and he wrote a great huge nine volume history of the United States and the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, and it's one of the world's great histories. But he got to thinking later in life that the United States and its history was but a small drop in the concourse of world history, and that what dominated world history were not national histories but the development of civilizations. And so Henry Adams began to look as a historian with a kind of a scientific outlook. This is in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. And he became the first scientific historian in history. He took a model from the physics of the late 19th century, the physics of gas pressure, which he took to be universal. And he developed a theory that civilizations are born and expand to a certain extent of like gas, expanding mechanically until it reached a saturation of form, and then the civilization died. And once that death set in, it was simply a mechanical readout of these universal laws and principles. And Henry Adams developed a phrase which he used to head an essay called The Rule of Phase in History, and it was the first time that anyone took a mathematical physics theory and translated it into the historical cycles of phases. Now, the limitations of Henry Adams are the limitations of taking gas pressure as the sine qua non of physics. If we take quantum physics and use Henry Adams insight into the rule of phase in history, we come out with a very profound understanding, something enormously profound, because Henry Adams was brilliant enough and a great enough historian that he was not so far wrong. It's just that his theory was based on a 19th century Mechanical distribution of gas pressure, rather than what we would understand today with the theory of relativity and with quantum mechanics. Atoms, by the way, found that Western civilization reached its apex in the late High Middle Ages and was going downhill ever since. And he found that Western civilization would end in 2012 A.D., and that he wanted to see what the apex of civilization would have produced. And he found two great buildings in France the cathedral and the Mont Saint-Michel of complex just off the French coast. And he wrote a monumental book called Mont Saint-Michel, in short, saying that this was the high point of Western civilization. This is where everything before led to and where everything since has fallen off. And in Mont Saint Michel and Henry Adams, being a good historian, took himself there to these sites, and he sat in one of the window bays at Mont Saint-Michel, and he tried to find what was the feeling tone there that was similar to the feeling tone in Charlotte Cathedral. And he came out with the sense that there was a dutiful devotion of love to the Virgin Mary, that the Virgin Mary as a feminine presence in heaven, requiring of one the response of grace and propriety towards the mother with courtesy and chivalry towards the woman with a sense of protectiveness and. Commitment towards the development of the relationality of love and in the rule of phase in history. Henry Adams was the first to show that you could make a graph of the career of a civilization. One historian who was influenced by this was Arnold Toynbee and Arnold Toynbee. In order to understand whether or not Henry Adams was correct, decided to take a look at all the civilizations on the planet and to chart their development from their origins through their flourishing to their end and the study of history, which was completed in 12 or 13 volumes, took his whole lifetime, and he found that every single civilization on the planet has died except one, and that one was limping along towards its demise. Asked once to find what was the essential crisis by which civilizations died, Toynbee found that inevitably there was a flash point where the challenge was not answered by the response. And so his theory of history was that civilizations produce challenge environments for human beings that increase in their complexity and intensity and come to a maturation of an ultimate challenge, and that as long as there is a response to the challenges of civilization, the civilization continues to mature, but as soon as a challenge in its complexity or intensity. Does not have an appropriate response to it, the challenge begins to. Dominate and the civilization spirals into death. And there is nothing anyone can do at that point to save it or to stop it, and that the only clever modification of the death throes of civilization that was ever developed was to transform the old civilization into a new one, and he found that the only civilization still carrying through was Western civilization, because it had transformed several times that it had received a challenge that elicited no appropriate response at the end of the classical period and had managed to transform itself to the medieval, and that the medieval. Had reached a challenge situation. But again the civilisation was transformed from the medieval to the Renaissance, and that we were living in a time where the Renaissance has produced a complexity of challenge for which there is no response. Toynbee characterized it. He said, if you cannot understand the word response to a challenge, consider the phrase failure of nerve that civilizations die because the men and women within its form have a failure of nerve. And he noticed in the 1940s that the failure of nerve has been endemic in the Renaissance transform of civilization for some while at that point. And of course, if one follows the Toynbee argument, if one follows a Henry Adams argument, we live in the last great days. There are other assessments that would say that civilization that we were born into died already, and that we are living in a phantasmal land. Part of this education is to show that in that scale of visions of history and civilization, the working trigger, the fulcrum by which the geometry spins itself out, is always focused on the person, not on the individual, not on the tribal member, not on the mind in terms of its integral capacity to think, but that the focus is always on a differentially conscious person because it is only that objectivity that has managed to transform themselves out of being an example of a culture, an example of a tribe, an example even of a civilization, and become capable of navigating themselves in their own lives. So the phrase that I used to use in the 1970s, an education that is worthwhile, helps you to become at home in your own life, and that the maturity of that life keeps bringing up new levels of challenge. And you have the differential conscious capacity to keep transforming So that that response meets that challenge. The difficulty in that whole procedure is that we continue to mature indefinitely, and so we must learn that learning never ends. One such forebearer of this kind of education was Thomas Jefferson. And in a letter to James Madison, he said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. That as long as we keep our sense of liveliness to the use of our intelligence to apply it to life, we will always be able to live. But when the situation outstrips our ability, that is when we begin to perish. Today's lecture. Today's presentation is entitled memory, Memory and Symbol Transform. Memory belongs to vision and yet it acts within integration. It acts within as if it were in the square of nature. The four phase form development of that ecology of integration that begins with nature develops its sense of ritual comportment, the objectivity of action, of what we do, of the existentiality of forms, the body that nature and ritual develop, the sense of experience, of a feeling toned experience that is characterized by myth, not myth as lies, but the mythic as the use of language to characterize experience with a feeling toned underlay, which allows for a further integration of the actions of ritual comportment, which tie in the foundation from nature so that the mythic process reaches all the way back to the natural process and continues the integration continues. The integration that was there in the body continues it so that it's there in the mind, and that symbols in the mind are that final integration, so that nature, ritual, myth and symbols make a square, they make an integral, a path, integral ecology, they make a square. And one of the difficulties Is is that is as far as our scale of attention seems to be able to extend itself without a really radical recalibration. So that when consciousness comes into play, when vision comes into play, one of the elements in the square of nature goes out of play, goes not out of existence, but goes out of our attention. So I use the phrase already about 30 years ago, about a scale of attention that has this square. And then I began to use the phrase a square of attention. And that, as a new phase comes into play, joins the square. The Oldest phase goes out of attention and seems to now drop into what used to be called in the 1920s, the subconscious, or it used to be called in the 1890s, the unconscious and brought back by someone like Jung. Whether you call it unconscious or subconscious, it's really that it goes out of the attention and that the form now is modified. Your picture of the world. There was a historian of ideas named Wilhelm Dilthey who developed the German phrase Weltanschauung, a world view that there is a Weltanschauung, there is a big picture, there's a square of attention, and that that is the largest form by which we comport ourselves to the world. That the world view Is the ultimate resource, the ultimate reference in the sense of calibrating everything else, and that when vision comes into play, when consciousness comes into play, it is so different from the other four, because everything we have known up to then integrates. All of it comes together. It joins. Whereas consciousness does not join, it differentiates. It takes apart. And consciousness for the first time brings into play a technique possibility called analysis that one can now analyze, one can take apart, and the original excursions into vision before it was called consciousness, before there was any sense of being able to utilize it as a differentiating technique. As analysis. The earliest experience of this, some 40 or 50,000, maybe 100,000, maybe 200,000 years ago, the first excursions into the differential mode were called. Well, classically they were called magic. It was called magic, a magical realm, a heavenly realm, an under the earth realm, a supernatural realm that men and women were capable of not only being natural, but were capable of having moments of supernatural qualities, of having insights, of having the ability to feel deja vu, of the ability to Suddenly know that this is leading somewhere, that you don't want to go, or this is leading to a culmination that you do want to happen. The development of foresight, the development of insight, and that this was in classical mythology, the Promethean spark that made man potentially superior to the old gods. Zeus condemned Prometheus to eternal enchantment at the top of a mountain, for having delivered the spark of foresight to man that this creative spark eventually would produce. As Prometheus foresaw the ability of man to supersede the Olympian gods of the Greek pantheon, that Zeus days were numbered because man, men and women, through the development of foresight, would see the limitations of the mythic, because consciousness as a process is superior to the mythic as a process. One can no more consciously than you can say. You can look deeper consciously in vision than you can feel, but you can also bring the capacity of visionary consciousness back into place so that you enlarge your language, you enlarge your ability to feel. A good example when music received a great boost from Johann Sebastian Bach and went from the monastic kinds of choirs to suddenly the development of oratorios that took the seed of Monteverdi type. Operas and made a Saint Matthew's Passion, or made a mass in B minor. All of a sudden you had a different capacity of feeling, and Bach having a further transform from old Papa Haydn, where Haydn realized that you didn't have to present this new feeling toned, larger scale music in a church. It could be presented secularly that one could develop a music that was an oratorio not based on religious themes, but it could be based on secular themes, and that there was such a thing all of a sudden, instead of working for a parish, you would work for a court, and so the court musicians came into play, and Papa Haydn became an inspiration towards the end of his life. Towards a young man, Mozart, who suddenly discovered that there were capacities of using personal lyric qualities to musical themes that would transform already the court secular music of Haydn, way beyond what Haydn had done to Bach. And in someone like Mozart for the first time, you find the personal artist capable of using the mythic feeling tone language of music in a completely idiomatic, personal way that whereas you could recognize themes in Bach and you could memorize themes in Haydn, you could personally whistle themes from Mozart. A huge development in music. And of course, someone named Beethoven came along and took the personal idiom of being able to whistle your own tunes and bring them into play in larger scales. Beethoven realized that you could take the whistling of birds in the Vienna woods, and you could develop something like the Sixth Symphony out of it. Out of bird songs on a personal basis, so that the conscious, visionary capacity of man in the last several hundred years has jumped enormously beyond what the capacities were there. But this produced a very interesting radical inversion. That man's response became so much more powerful than the challenge. And for the first time, about 200 years ago, there were men and women who were larger than the civilization. They began to step outside the civilization to the extent that it didn't fit them anymore. And suddenly you had phenomena like the American Revolution or the French Revolution. In the French Revolution, they said, we are going to start with the year one. We're no longer a part of even the time counting of the civilization we're looking at in vision seven today. We're looking at a way in which these enormous developments bring into play something which is so radical that even 200 years later, it makes one shudder. Not only does consciousness come into play so that nature subsides and seems to take a subconscious or unconscious, a kind of a background quality. But when something further from vision comes into play, something called art. The next phase that goes out of play, that goes into the subconscious, goes into the unconscious, goes into the background, is ritual. Because art and ritual don't mix. It's like the supernatural and the natural don't mix. They don't mix within the square of attention, but they keep a special relationship that the differential always brings into play, and that is proportionate ratio ability. The rational does not belong to thought. It belongs to consciousness because consciousness, the differential, brings into play the proportionate, the ratio, so that you do not have the supernatural and natural together in the same form, but you have a ratio of consciousness to nature that's always usable. And when art comes into play, ritual and art, which are mutually exclusive in terms of phase, even if you're called on the phone, it still is mutually exclusive. But they're satiable. I hope someone gets that. This quality of art to force ritual out of the square of attention brings about a crisis even more profound than the discovery of the supernatural, that nature must modify its position in our sense of form, because the supernatural, the supernatural, really does happen. And when art comes into play, ritual must subside. And when it does, the confidence in existentiality also subsides. The age old confidence that the body is the arbiter of objectivity erodes, and this is one of the primary causes of the failure of nerve that triggers the death of civilizations. The ability lot of artists within a civilization to outgrow the expressive forms of the civilization that the traditional forms that the culture supports and the civilization expresses no longer fit. And there become individuals who are not only larger in the sense that their vision is larger, but they have an ability as artists to express the personal scale of creativity, of using the powers of differential consciousness related to the integral, but also the spiritual person brought into play. And at this scale. The individual artist comes to deal with an existential crisis. They no longer fit in the society in which they live. They no longer fit within the culture, which was the feeling tone basis of the images that they were using. And they begin making new images. And then something even further happens, as we will see in our education later this year, that just as there were four phases to the natural ecology, consciousness has four phases also, and each one of them more powerful than the last. And the problems that vision caused are dwarfed by the problems that art causes. But the problems that art causes are dwarfed by the problems of history, because history is such a powerful process. History is more powerful than vision, as myth is dwarfed by nature. The powers of history to bring into play process are legendary, and we have never had a population of people who have been able to deal with history. But there's something even more powerful than history that comes into play, and that is science. The Latin scientia. Science. It means not only knowing, but it means knowing on the scale of the universe, being able to investigate the entirety of nature as a unified whole, but a unified whole that develops vision, art, history, and a further expansion to the largest possible differential form, the cosmos, so that science introduces a cosmic dimension of objectivity. And as this conscious dimension of objectivity that finally obviates the fourth element. Just as history pushes myth out of the square of attention, science pushes symbols, pushes the mind out of the square of attention, so that the entire integral confidence of the mind that it can think its way through something and learn joins. The background is no longer present and there. And this, of course, is almost impossible to do if one clings to the mind. The problems of clinging to the body are legendary, and the problems of clinging to traditional culture are even more legendary. But the problems of clinging to the mind are almost never, ever been solved. One example of the way in which they were solved in ancient Greece was to pair up with the clarity of action and image, to pair it up with mystery religions. And so you find people who built with great rational clarity, like a building like the Parthenon, which is not all straight post and beam, but every aspect of it is slightly tilted so that you have a building which is integral whole. According to a proportionate ratio of form all the way through. But paired with that was the heyday of the Eleusinian Mysteries and everyone who admired intellectually. The perfection of the Parthenon also went every year to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Not too far distant from Athens and Eleusis. Those capacities that were there in balance for the classical Greeks did not work for the Romans, because they never developed it out of themselves. They took over the tandem. It's like someone swallowing it whole without chewing your food. You get indigestion. Roman civilization got Greek in digestion because they never were able to develop it out of themselves. And when the Roman civilization was declining and falling, the transform within it was a transform of the old Greek mystery religions brought back into play with the Greek love of form, so that the early medieval civilization was a nascent revival of the Greek ethos, and only in its development did the Roman exterior come progressively to dominate this, so that again, the medieval civilization in its high point replayed the fall of the Roman Empire in a shell type way, and the Renaissance was a rediscovery of that ancient Greek ethos of the mystery religions and the clarity of the geometric approach, which has since, of course, in our time our grandparents faced the crisis of that particular, um, demise. I once gave a series of 52 lectures on the 19th century, and the pattern of the 19th century was the progressive dematerialization of the worldview. When the 19th century began, people were confident that things were real, and by the end of the 19th century, that confidence had been completely eroded mathematically. The discovery by James Clerk Maxwell of the equations of electromagnetism. The development, even by 1900, of Max Planck's constant, that there is always a residual leftover that specific. But how it works one never knows. And within a few years of that, Einstein's general theory of relativity, the development of quantum mechanics, the 20th century has made an exponential dematerialization. There is no way that any tradition received from anywhere on the planet can deal with the scale of challenge today, so that a new response needs to be made, not out of the ashes of the old. The ashes of the old are radioactive. We can't use them, but a new civilization can be made in a new way Instead of being based, as all the rest of them have been on a ritual, myth, symbol, foundation, we can base a new civilization on a complementarity that brings two squares of attention into play in a harmonic ratio, without having to wait to go through all of the stages in development. We would never last long enough to do that. Here is an example. And we're going to take a break. Here are a few lines from the great Roman epic the Aeneid, written by Virgil under direct commission of the founder of the Roman Empire, Augustus Caesar. He wanted to have his own Homer, to found his own civilization. And Virgil was that. Here is a couple of lines from the Aeneid. The Trojan War used in Homer is reused by Virgil. But whereas the battle in the Greek epic was based upon the wrath of Achilles, here in Virgil an entire savagery is let loose which characterizes the Roman outlook. Just then, through darts, through weapons, came this warrior Polites, a son of Priam, fleeing deadly Pyrrhus, and down the long colonnades and empty hallways wounded and Pyrrhus after him, vicious, eager For the last spear thrust and he drives it home. Politis falls and his life goes out with his blood. Father and mother watching. And then Priam, the king, in the very grip of death, cried out in anger. If there is any righteousness in heaven to care about such wickedness, the gods will have the right reward. When the Roman indigestion began, when they swallowed the Greek ethos whole, one of the qualities that was unable to be worked into it was that the supernatural elements were never put into ratio with the symbols. And so Roman ratios were always off just a little bit, and progressively in time it took about two generations from when Virgil wrote this, that every single Roman emperor went insane because they were not able to handle. They were haunted by the visionary capacity that they had let loose in themselves. From Tiberius Caesar, through Caligula, through Nero, and on into the Flavians, you find one after another of nightmares, where the apex of the power is unable to sustain their own sense of supernatural power, in a ratio with the harmonics of developing a stability within nature. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Our next pair of books. Our next pair of texts, as they used to call them. We're going to use Shelley and Shakespeare. We're going to use Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and we're going to use Shakespeare's The Tempest. Shelley and Shakespeare, both in their own times, transformed the English language. Shakespeare is a Renaissance transform of the English language, and Shelley is a romantic transformer of the English language. There was a time where it was very risqué to read Shelley in the 19th century, and some of the pocket editions of poems were so you could hide your Shelley. Of course, he's not risqué at all, in the sense that we would call risqué today, but his flamboyancy Was really something. And in Prometheus Unbound, of course, he took the English language into uncharted waters. When you get to Shelley and try and get a copy of Aeschylus Prometheus Bound, because what Shelley was doing was reading Aeschylus with a mind towards filling in the last volume of a trilogy that had been lost since antiquity. So Aeschylus Prometheus Bound is linked up, is like a center, which is then transformed by Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Prometheus bound is a Greek tragic form written at the end of Aeschylus life, where he is trying to bring together a particular kind of classical Greek, a classical Greek, The only classical Greek that's comparable to Aeschylus is the poet Pindar. And someone once characterized their languages as like these mountain peaks where there's no vegetation. It's straight up and down. The syntax of Aeschylus is this soaring suddenness, they used to say of Aeschylus when he was old, he was balding, and that eagles would mistake the bald head of Aeschylus for their eggs, because they had this lofty quality to to his dome. Shakespeare's The Tempest is his own transformation of a previous transform that he had gone through when he was young. Shakespeare was a tutor in Lancashire to a very royal L family, noble family, and he had taught himself largely based on models like Ovid rather than Virgil, to deal with mythological transformations not by the theme, but by the the very quality of the interpenetration of characters, so that the early Shakespeare is like this tremendous roller coaster of characters. And by the time Shakespeare had about 20 years of experience under his belt and he wrote The Tempest, he had distilled the transforms to the phrase so that The Tempest is like this roller coaster ride of phrase by phrase. It's very difficult to stage The Tempest because of that. Most modern versions of The Tempest are imitations of of someone's own version. Shakespeare's Tempest is almost unbelievably dynamic. So we're going to take a look at those two. And what we're doing with vision is different from what we did last year. Last year, everything that we talked about had an integral quality, whereas everything that we're talking about this year has a differential quality. Our bad habit is to use our minds to hold everything. And so I'm using a kind of a staggered language so that you can't think it through at any one time. You have to keep coming. And it's not a trick just to make more money. If you come in a regular fashion, you'll begin to notice that the overlay is in a sense of proportion, so that as you go on in the second year, the sense of proportional gestalts should be able to grow and mature, whereas last year it led to the comprehension of feeling and then the comprehension of thought. The differential conscious cycle is betrayed by accuracy of thought prematurely. Because thought is only one aspect, one phase feeling is only one aspect, one phase. And what's brought into play here is a sense of a gestalt that only reveals itself later, so that there's a line in one of our texts, a mystical line written by a woman 800 years ago. She writes, when you weep for me, I take you in my arms. But when you love me, then we two are one. For thus united nothing can separate us. And rather a blissful waiting lies between us. So that there is a paradox that comes into play when vision enters into the square of attention. The paradox always comes into play because the differential sense doesn't integrate, it doesn't agglomerate, it doesn't join, it doesn't add on two, and the habit of the mind is to try to make visionary aspects pure images, which then add on to the mythology, or try to make visionary insights, augmented ideas so that one then symbolically adds to them. Consciousness is not a footnote to myth. It's not a footnote to symbols. It's not a part of thinking. It's not a part of feeling insight. While it can join, it doesn't join in an additive way. It doesn't join in a subtractive way. Rather, when consciousness comes into play, when vision comes into play, you get an arithmetic function known as division or multiplication. Never addition. Never subtraction so that if you begin to add or subtract visionary elements to mythic images or to symbolic ideas, you can be sure you're carrying over a bad habit. It was a good habit when you originally had it of integrating, but now it's a bad habit because further, integrating beyond a certain point produces what? It produces a world of lies. It produces a fanciful notion that leads to falsification, that is a fictitious realm. In the Chinese five phase energy cycle, Tao te Jen e li that each of those energy phases leads to the next. But that fifth phase factors back into the Dow without leaving a trace, so that the scale is a pentatonic scale. Chinese music is on a pentatonic scale. The western octave, its musical scale is an octave, an eight, but in the western octave the eighth is always a restatement of the first, but one level higher. Do re mi fa so la TI do. So that the western octave is already a spiral rather than a rod. It's not measuring music by an octave. That is like a rod, but it's already a curved arc that comes back to itself. One point higher so that you have a calibration that leads further, always leads further, so that the phrase in Western wisdom, the eight reveal a ninth. There's always the sense that there is an interval that counts, but the interval counts most when you realize that it is no longer just an adding quality, but that there is a dividing and multiplying. In alchemy, there were many qualities of gold that were found. You didn't just make gold. And the way that the old alchemists would talk about the superior quality of the gold is how much magnifying power it had. This is great gold because it can. It can be applied a thousand times a thousand fold a great book on Shakespeare was called Shakespeare's Division of Experience, that there is a way now that division and the multiplication join through insight, the symbolic arithmetical functions of addition and subtraction, so that you would have a classic text, one of the classic texts that was ascribed to Pythagoras, where was the theoretic functions of arithmetic. The famous translation into English was done at the time of Shelley by Thomas Taylor, and it's still in print. The theoretic arithmetic of the Pythagoreans. Why is it theoretic? Because in Greek the term theory doesn't mean thought. Theoria in Greek originally meant contemplation. It meant consciousness not focusing like in thought, but consciousness opening up as in visionary scaling towards further ability to analyze, so that the Greek term practic practice it means action. It refers to ritual. Comportment refers to the existential actions. But theory theoria refers to the contemplative consciousness that doesn't contemplate images so much, doesn't contemplate symbols so much. What does contemplation do? It brings into play the divisions of experience and the multiplications of possibility, so that a contemplative life is not one of thinking. A contemplative life is one where meditation leads to conscious differentiation. It's a completely different thing. The mind will never be able to think of an idea of contemplation, not including the mind thinking of thinking as integration. It just can't do it. Hence, in Zen, the use of a koan to baffle the mind so that the mind stops its habit, which is good in thought and is a pernicious habit carried over to consciousness. To continue to use thought as the arbiter in consciousness is the very height of fool's gold, of foolishness. And so there is a quality of experience undergoing a transform where experience no longer leads to integration but leads to further differentiation. Vision is that kind of experience. A good mnemonic way of looking at it is to use an old saw. There's a great deal of difference between myth and magic. A mythic form always has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Whereas a magic form has a transform in it, and the transform usually comes at the very end, so that instead of having a beginning, a middle, and an end, it has a beginning, a middle, and a transform. Um, a conscious literary form would be the fairy tale. A fairy tale Hale is great when instead of having an ending, it has a transform built into it. There's a great essay by Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien on fairy tales, where he shows that the magic form of the fairy tale includes when you get beyond hope and there's no way out. The very conditions of the problematic change and the way out is just now discovered. It wasn't there before. It wasn't there to be discovered before. It's discovered now when you have exhausted all the possibilities and you find that you have to transform the entire form and not just one aspect of it. Um, the rebirth of civilization on a new level, uh, in our time, is taking the form of a fairy tale. By 2012, it will seem that there's no hope at all, and that's when the transform will happen. There is a quality of trying to understand this, though, in terms of thought, where we have recourse constantly to go back to thought, back to some symbolic idea, back to a comparison. And it's in this regard that we're using the medieval and the Renaissance presented by two women. The Renaissance presented by the Art of memory. Dame Frances Yates and Mechthild of Magdeburg presenting the high medieval. Here's a little bit of a characterization of the two. Pardon me for reading it, but I'm trying to convey an idea. Now, the atrophy of the mind. The atrophy of the mind that characterized the early medieval so-called Dark Age, brought to the fore a confused jumble of mythic experience and in polarized contrast to this weltering sea of rough psychic weathering, it posited a ship of the soul that needed its home port quiet somewhere beyond. The medieval people yearned for something quiet and glacially. A stunned silence crept over the Western world, a numbed stupor with little mind. Much myth, desperate rituals and a regressive magic haunted nature where superstition ruled the night, and quite often Also, the day one desperate ritual set clung to was how to raise the soul above the magic haunted, watering world to a place of contemplation where one could find peace. So that the Pax Romana, the peace of the Roman Imperial Empire, which had sabotaged itself in a hundred ways, was replaced by something that could be called a pax anima. That there was not a seeking of further authority in this world, but a seeking of an other world peace, a peace of the soul, and so that the Middle Ages slowly showed this, this desire, But not knowing of any kind of maturation process, any kind of ecology of maturing, the medieval world turned increasingly to rote methods, to ritual ways to achieve this end, so that you found everywhere a surge of interest in monasticism, in asceticism, a method community where personal maturity was nearly extinct. And you find characteristic of this the art of the early medieval period stops being a art of line and becomes an art of mosaic. You no longer have the confidence that you can draw a line freehand, hand, but you have to piece together the mosaic and instead of having the portrait of someone, you have increasingly the presentation of an icon, an iconographic ultimate magic conveying portrait. And so the icon in mosaic presentation of a human model or celestial model brought down for us to see begins to have magical properties, and the medieval period becomes. We even use the term Byzantine. Byzantine in English still means convoluted beyond belief, superstitious to the nth degree, and being able to use a filigreed logic of thought to justify all of it. The Renaissance. In contrast to that was based on the art of memory, the art of remembering, remembering, remembering how to navigate by personal maturity instead of relying on a group method so that even the phrase a Renaissance man or a Renaissance woman means someone who is able, out of their own resources, to come to develop their own navigable qualities and maybe not reach the port that is known, but reach some unknown destination that you put up for yourself. Hence a Christopher Columbus sailing to places where there are no known ports, or someone like a Galileo who says that the heavens move. And they held them at a table in Rome until he signed a declaration that the heavens don't move. It's against the Ptolemaic rules of our church doctrine to have the heavens move. And towards the end of his life he was a very bad boy. He wrote in the margin of one of his manuscripts, and still looking through the telescope, the moons of Jupiter move. So that there is a contrast between Renaissance memory and medieval ritual. The Renaissance memory seeks more and more to find its objectivity, not in the ritual body, but in the personal art. So then the Renaissance, Its square of attention is all weighted towards finding objectivity in art as distinct, diametrically from the medieval outlook that found its stability in the objectivity of the ritual body. Tell us the right method by which our group can be secure, and the medieval person is largely satisfied that they don't work, that none of them work was a cause for the restlessness of the medieval world. The medieval world was based upon always trying to find a way to make the method work, either by tightening up the methodology, by torture, by Inquisition's various little techniques, and once we get everyone agreeing at the same way, this method will work. And of course, none of them ever did because they can't. Um, the medieval culture would have admired the Third Reich. They made a fantastic attempt to make everyone conform. And of course, even on that level, the Third Reich was an abject failure. Communism, which after 70 years had inculcated such a standardized ritual medieval comportment that even now it's difficult for young Russians to think creatively. It's difficult for East former East Germans to fit into the dynamic German society. It's very difficult once you've been not brainwashed, but that I can never remember the German word. The Nazis used gelijkheid. It means forcing conformity. Because if everyone conforms, the magic of the ritual will work. It never will work. So that symbol transform replaces mythic submersion and the medieval world of 2001, surging in comeback surprise shows a revival of fundamentalist surety of group methods over the personal symbol transforms of deep memory. Our lack of navigating history has set adrift, set us adrift in myth, regressive mythic confusions, haunted magic's sure methods, group certainties, extraction techniques. Every weekend, instead of a hermetic America, we have a medieval America. Again, it's nothing new. The typographies of Medieval and Renaissance occur again and again throughout history. Throughout civilizations there have been Medieval China's and Renaissance China's. There have been many medieval China's and many Renaissance China's is a very long history. One thing that makes a difference in our time is that the dimension of time has speeded up, so that, as one of the beautiful things that Joseph Campbell once managed to bring out, he said, the complexity of the modern individual is equal to whole tribes of people thousands of years ago. We live in one lifetime now, the span of what would have been almost a complete culture. And in fact, there are some people developed enough that they live many lifetimes within 170 to 90 year period. We're using Mechthild of Magdeburg as a woman in the medieval period, with Frances Yates as a scholar presenting the Renaissance period. And we looked at three weeks ago a basic contrast. The medieval synthesizing symbol was in the book the codex originally, and the book that came to synthesize all books was the Bible. So that the text of the Bible in the high medieval period was the synthesizing symbol. And yet in that same period, almost no one could read it. Even if it were there, they couldn't read it because what is called the Old Testament, largely written in Hebrew, and the New Testament largely written in Greek. And even if you were a Latin professor, you couldn't read it. And most people could not read Latin. The illiterate population was a trace element, so that what you had was a synthesizing symbol that no one could avail themselves of. And so the fulcrum of objectivity dropped back to the next level, where objectivity records in the body so that the medieval personality, the medieval culture, was a culture of the body and its comfortability or its anxiety. And of course, the anxiety was fed constantly by the very real uncertainties that surrounded one. And so you relied because you couldn't rely on thought being clear. You had to rely on the mythology being simplified so it could be clear. And so the mythic presentations of the synthesizing book in medieval civilization were was the the common rule of order. The Renaissance is in direct diametrical opposition to that. We found that it isn't the book that's the synthesizing principle in the Renaissance. Yes, they collected books, but they didn't use the books in that medieval way. The play was the synthesizing symbol in the Renaissance, and that's why you find the highest expression Russian of the Renaissance outlook is in someone like Shakespeare and not just Shakespeare. Just to take the English language by itself, you had people like Christopher Marlowe writing and Ben Jonson a whole raft. The Italian drama Machiavelli himself was famous in his own day, not so much for the Prince, but for his play La Mandragola The Mandrake Root Man. And so the play, the dramatic interplay became the way in which a Renaissance symbol was presented, not just synthesizing, because the sense of a play different from a book, a book one reads silently to oneself so that the words sound in one's mind. It's very curious, because at the beginning of that Roman imperium school boys were taught to read out loud and you were punished if you were silently reading. The idea of silent reading is a Christian emendation on a book, learning that wasn't brought in until the fourth century A.D. up until the three 60s A.D., Roman schools were loud because the boys were reading out loud all the time. You were not supposed to read silently. Whereas the silent reading together was an imitation of the contemplative spirit. And it was supposed to give you this sense of the real contemplation, whereas real contemplation doesn't come from a book at all. Real contemplation as Mechthild radically shows, comes from a division of experience and a multiplication of insight that blossoms from within, out of within. That is a kind of a convolution of the largest, without coming into the deepest within and flowing out like a fountain. And because it's always going on, she calls it the flowing light of the Godhead. It's like an ecology of deep energy within that comes out through one and blossoms to the widest possible and the widest possible by a magical visionary. Complementarity comes to the deepest within and comes back out again. We know, in fact, that this is what happens in stars. That light in stars begins as photonic energy of transform from hydrogen to helium deep within the core of the stars, and that light, through slow percolation, comes all the way through the body of the star like our sun. And it takes about a million years for light to percolate from the center of a star like our sun, back out to the surface where it radiates. And then eight minutes comes to the Earth as light. But that light that comes in eight minutes is already a million years old. So that light, sunlight, starlight is ancient from its origin point, and there are some stars so large when you look at Orion, the next time the sky is clear and the left hand shoulder of Orion, that big yellow star, Betelgeuse. Its surface is so broad that where our sun is, the surface of the star would be at the orbit of Mars. So there are enormities, but light has that quality, that it percolates from the center out and radiates out and carries with it the capacity to be folded back in. The farthest out quality can be folded back into the center. Every telescope that gathers light gathers the ancient light. I think now the the Hubble telescope has gathered light from about 12 billion years ago and brings it to the center of the telescope and reprocesses and brings it out so that the Hubble telescope is a contemplative tool. In actuality, there are some very large projects the Herschel Space Observatory that the European consortium is going to put up. They just renamed it. They were calling it first as an acronym, and they're going to call it after Herschel. It takes only infrared light, and it'll be able to go back about 15 billion light years in the infrared and bring it back to a single focus and bring it back out so that we could then analyze that light in millions of different ways. This is exactly the process that consciousness is familiar with. It's its own turf. And to reduce it to an integral addition to thought would be a travesty. Consciousness no more fits into thought than someone who is completely free. Fitting into ill fitting clothes. When someone like Methil comes in to try to transcend her own time, her writing, her poetry goes into the dramatic form, into the play format, and very often she will have. Here is a three part play The Soul, the Lord and the senses. This is very sophisticated of a woman 800 years ago. The development of the third person in a conscious play only goes back to about 400 BC. The first person to ever do that was Sophocles. Sophocles introduced the third speaker in Greek tragedy of, about the time when the old Aeschylus was writing the Prometheus Bound trilogy. The senses say, ah, lady! Come you there, then we are blinded, so fiery as the glory of the Godhead, as you well know that all the flame and all the glow in heaven above and earth below, which burns and shines all does flow from God himself, from his divine breath through divine lips, from the council of the Holy Spirit, who may abide it even one hour. And the soul replies to the senses, because the soul is making a response to the challenge of the senses. The senses are saying you're outscaled. There is no way that you could ever find an equilibrium, much less a transform. So why do you even try? And the soul's reply is fish cannot drown in water. Birds cannot sink in the air. Gold cannot perish in the refiner's fire. Notice water, air and fire. Three of the four elements. What's the fourth element? Earth. So the soul is going to now position itself like that phone call back on the earth. All my effort to try and have a transcendental language short circuited by AT&T. Let's build them. Let's try it again and let us is now the technique of coming back and not only coming back to repeat, but coming back to repeat and take it one step further. Birds cannot drown in the water. Birds. A fish cannot drown in the water. Do you like that transposition? You see the perils of the creative mind. Water, air. Gold cannot perish in the refiner's fire. This has God given to all creatures to foster and seek their own nature. How then can I withstand mine? The earth is not an earth of cloudiness. The earth is the fundamental basicness of existence. God has given existence its ability to exist. And so the body, its earth, is not dirt, but its body is existence itself as a fundamental element. And then the Lord comes in as the third voice in this dialogue between senses and soul and a sophoclean way. The third voice in Sophocles is always the voice of recapturing equanimity. With the triangulation out of Sophocles technique came eventually the transformation of geometry into trigonometry. When you can triangulate, you can find things that you never could have found by simply measuring in a straight line. The Lord comes in after the soul, in the senses. The soul's final thing I need your teaching. For the earth is full of snares. Then our Lord said, stand soul, and the soul says, what will you, Lord? And the Lord says, the self must go, and the soul says, but, Lord, what will happen to me then? And the Lord says, you are by nature already mine. Nothing can come between you and me. Not even existence. There is no angel so sublime as to be granted for even one hour. What is given to you forever. So much for theology. Thank you.