Vision 9

This is vision nine, which means that in our movement, our education as a movement, we have a kind of a syncopation. It's the syncopation of walking one foot after the other. And this syncopation gives us a sense of balanced momentum. And that balanced momentum develops a kinesthetic context. And all of this is as it really is in nature, even raised to the level of scientific inquiry. Electricity moves because of a negative and positive polarity, and as the line of electrical current moves, it generates a magnetic field that spirals around. And this dynamics and this spiraling energy that comes out together constitute electromagnetism. And yet we know from the equations of electromagnetism that they solve in a negative way as well as a positive way, and that there is a complementarity, a magnetoelectric force, which has a complementarity structure to that of electromagnetism. All of this needs to be brought into play with the comprehensive education, as we are endeavouring to not so much follow, but to disclose. An instruction will give you a model to follow. A normal kind of academic presentation will give you a design which you are expected then to be able to follow. But this education has no plan or model other than an informed sense of procedure which is real rather than a game. And so our education moves by disclosure, by discovery. And it's your participation that gives it the dynamic. All of the material that I develop for you in the language that I give you is like a magnetic field that will certainly be there to complement your movement, your dynamic. But it's up to you to bring that dynamic into play by coming on Saturdays, by reading, by thinking, by your discussions. It is your participation. And we saw last year, at the beginning of our education, that one of the most astute observers of so-called primitive man, a Frenchman named Lucien Lévy-bruhl, understood that if we wanted to bring into our minds and appreciation for primitive man. For the original human beings. The sense of primitive man is that he participated not so much in his culture, not so much even in his existentiality, but that primitive men and women participated in the mystery of nature. And so it was characterized as a participation mystique. That the participation in the mystery of nature is what gave the context out of which the emergence of existentials had a place to be. And that if you start with things, if you start with existentials, you are cut off from the source, the origins, And it makes very good sense that at the same time as Lucien Lévy-bruhl was the development of the idea of French existential philosophy based on the anxiety of the modern age, the anxiousness, because we don't have any guarantee about anything, any security about anything. It is the participation, not in existentiality, but in mystery, that guarantees that emergence into form has a context that allows that form not only to emerge, but to keep fertile so that another phase develops out of existence, and that further phase is called experience. To try to find what really exists. Does God exist? Does man exist? Does truth exist? To put the emphasis on the existential is to invite a kind of a breakdown. Whether it's a felt in a physiological body, anxiety immediately, or in a mental angst later on is of no great moment to those who suffer. So that the most primordial of all phases in an education is the mystery of nature, and not the existential upon which one would found this, that, and the other. And we have seen in our first year of education that by coming out of nature as a mystery, that what is really existential are not things as in cut and dried for all time things, but the dynamic action that things employ to have emerged and to keep emerging. And so the ancient name for nature, not nature in Latin, but physis in Greek, out of which we get physics, meant that what was existentially of moment was that which is emerging. And so the most profound of all of the origin myths of ancient peoples are not about creation so much, but about emergence. If you look at, let's say for the moment, the Navajo peoples. The Navajo peoples have an emergence myth. They don't have a creation myth, as in in the beginning this is square one, and then you move to square two and so forth. But there is an ongoing ness and emergence. If you look at the text in Hebrew of Genesis, the first word bereshith is a gerund. It means a while the beginning is occurring, such and such happens so that the idea of following from dot to dot to dot, from point to point to point is an intellectual game and is a veil over the appreciation of the real. And we talk last week about theory of games, and how the tremendous emergence of the theory of games coincided with the industrialization of education in the 1920s. That the application of business techniques developed through the Industrial revolution filtered down into education in the 1920s. And I showed you last week, the University of Chicago Press volume by Robert Callahan, The Cult of Efficiency in Education, published in Chicago in 1921. In Chicago, because Chicago had been a hotbed of progressive educational reform for many years, and at that time was one of the great places in the world for appreciating how we really learn. The great John Dewey and his wife Evelyn had developed schools of tomorrow in Chicago as early as 1902. And of course, people like Frank Lloyd Wright were there, or Jane Addams and Chicago at the turn of the century was a place of great educational, intellectual ferment. What we're looking at is the way in which our education comes 100 years later, we're in the 21st century. We are already sophisticated on several orders beyond what was being presented at that time. But the cult of efficiency in education of the 1920s became exacerbated because of the Second World War, and the Second World War squeezed the social order in ways in which we are only now able, in retrospect, to appreciate. It was not just that the whole world was at war in a titanic way. It was that the United States was put onto an anvil of transformation that forced it to speed up several fold in terms of the time element. And of course, it was again in Chicago in the early 1940s that the first indications that there was such a thing as splitting the atom, it happened underneath the football stadium in at the University of Chicago, and that whole troop of people were moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico. And the project Manhattan developed the atom bomb out of that. In the crunch of this, the language that was used to carry that transform was not able to be fitted into the industrialization of education that had happened in the 1920s. And so a new mathematical model was developed concomitantly with the atomic bomb. And that mathematical model received its imprimatur in a volume by John von Neumann. And it was on the theory of games, the mathematical theory of games. And they found that this same mathematical theory of games is a language that applies not only to the compressed structures of physics and of military application, but also of economics. And so by 1944, when that volume came out, the sense of destiny for civilization, for society, for the United States in particular, was thrown to a very crucial threshold. And there were two sources in addition to the atomic bomb groups that came together. One was the Office of Naval Resources and the other was the Rand Corporation. And in 1950, I'll bring it in next week, the Rand Corporation published its own study on the theory of games. And ever since then, a very high order of ideological design has been incorporated throughout the society and especially has grasped the reins of education even stronger than the industrialization of education from the 1920s. It is sometimes in the 60s it was referred to as a systems approach, where you would have modules that were designed to gear and fit together, and that you could test each component of each module to make sure that it worked as if you were building a rocket engine, and that the student then was the system of all of this put together under the aegis of a theory of games. But we showed last week that there are many points in theories of games where one drops out of the mind. We talked about Um, one of the aspects of theory of games is in the use of a maximum and a minimum. Usually games have to do with polarity and competition and with a scale of minimum and maximum. This is due to the use of calculus in the general gist of expression. There is such a thing as derivatives that come out, and of course, if you play the stock market, you know that you make a lot of money now and derivatives and not just stock, but the corresponding derivatives in theory of games vanish at a certain point. And that point in game theory, uh, is uh, a point where the domain has its threshold of definition and that threshold of definition is balanced on a centre and the centre is not a point so much, but. In statistical development of game theory, it's called a saddle point because it's shaped just like a saddle on a graph. And that that saddle point turns out to be the very definition of the characteristic function. The characteristic function is, of course, that one one wins, but that you cannot win if all the players drop out of the game. And usually a game becomes statistically easy to handle when there are two sets of players, two coalitions, and if one of the sets one of the coalitions drops out, the entire game is over. It enters into what is called a zero game condition, and the voiding of a coalition is beautifully called an empty set. And we saw that in the development of mathematics, there was a point at which a man named Georg Cantor developed a fundamental number called aleph zero, at which counting commences not with one but with aleph zero. Otherwise, the cardinal system of existential number sequence is an unestablished set, requiring an auxiliary set to make its axiomatic basis for existence. This shows up in any kind of computer program that you will have bugs that occur in the operation. The joke in early computer wear was that the bug list grows much larger, the more complex you make it, so that there was a ceiling point at which the utility of using computer logic for expression of complexity was beggared. And as one thinker, early computer thinker Max Delbrück at Caltech said, it's very easy to computerize the sixth grade. It's almost impossible to get to the first grade, and preschool is too complex for logic to describe. We're looking at in our education the way in which a realistic disclosure of learning does not follow a game plan at all, and that our Inculcation to theoretical game plans as if that were rational, as if that were the basic structure which we must ape in order to learn, is actually a procedure that produces a dullness and numbness and inevitable error. And we live today in a society that is in a dead end condition, because there is almost no one who is real anymore, in the sense that they are able to learn in their own lives. And I suppose it will be a kind of an interesting thing when people walk around with their little palm quarters, all trying to figure out where they are and what they're doing. Men and women of our species have always been brilliant. The name of our species. Homo sapiens sapiens means that we are wisdom, wisdom, people. We are not only wise, but we are wise about being wise. And we have been that way for hundreds of thousands of years. At the very origin of images of ourselves, someone who was wise was always wide eyed. Hence the mythology of Athena. The goddess of wisdom is the owl, the wide eyed owl. And this goes all the way through antiquity here from the Sumerians about 5000 years ago, the god of thunderstorms, the god of awakening to the powers of the mystery of nature, is wide eyed. And I put it next to a portrait of Shelley. Who? Whose wide eyes you can see. Because Shelley is one of the figures that we're looking at today. In our syncopation, in our moving left foot, right foot, left brain, right brain, in our syncopated movement, in our powering our preparedness. Not a polarity, but preparedness. The parade braiding of dynamic gives a mutual overlay, a kind of a shared magnetic quality to it. And instead of there being a single magnetic field, there's like a pair of shared magnetic fields which are able to disclose a different kind of dimension From that that one would experience limited to the integral, limited to the mind's ecology of understanding. And that further dimension is the dimension of consciousness. Consciousness is a dimension of relationality, not of individuality. So that consciousness is always that dimension of parents raised to a kinesthetic gestalt, that you're aware of how the relationalities actually work and allows two things at once. It allows an ability to analyze which otherwise wouldn't occur, and it allows a capacity to have memory which otherwise would not occur as well. So that Analytic capacity and memory are functions of consciousness and do not occur within an integral ecology in the natural order. Memory and analysis belong to a realm of conscious time space. They do not occur in time space. In a four dimensional continuum that precedes strictly by integrals, consciousness precedes by differentiation and works very well with integrals. One can analyze integrals very well with the five dimensions of conscious time space, but from the standpoint of a mythological tribe, consciousness is a magical supernatural realm, something that who knows what this is and belongs in the mythic level, undifferentiated from the mystery of nature. And so we find that there is a great deal of difficulty about 150 years ago. One of the first human beings to ever go into the inadequacy of an intellectual psychology was the young William James. He was the first great lecturer in psychology at Harvard, and he used at the time Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology, which was a Victorian kind of a tome. I have a first edition of it, big red volumes that look so impressive, and they're faulty all the way through. And James was the first human being to ever write a text of psychology that was based on reality. And the two volumes of William James's Psychology are still in print more than 111 years later. James, in his Principles of Psychology, emphasized that thought is a development out of feeling. And until we have an ability to be sentient, to be intelligent about our feelings, our thought will never have that integral capacity of clarity which we prize so much. And yet there's something beyond thought that comes into play, not into play as an added area, not a further addition, not another integration, not a higher integration. To think that consciousness, which is beyond thought, is a higher integration is to play with metaphysics, not physics, but metaphysics. It's an Aristotelian faux pas. Madame Blavatsky, who was one of the greatest metaphysicians of all time, called it metaphysics. People who were not professional at metaphysics, metaphysical, and someone like William James would have said Madame herself was the all time great metaphysics. That consciousness which occurs from beyond the mind. James was very big into psychical research and understood at the time not only James, But all of the leading lights at the time Yeats, later, the young Jung all investigating what is this from beyond? And the beyond is not the magical supernatural realm of the superstitious tribe, but is that kind of conscious dimension that comes into play in a very special way? It comes in, to use the mathematical term recursively. It curls back and weaves its way back into the natural order that consciousness comes back into play, so that the brain is not just a physiological neurological conglomerate of cells and synapse gaps, but actually has the function of neuronal clouds of energy that carry. Thought that carries the perfume of consciousness and that that comes back into play in such a way that experience from a mind that is flowered in that way and has that perfume, that the experience begins to show the impress of that, the structuring of that and a differential quality begins to inhabit experience where it was not there before. And that can come all the way back through, through the mind, with its symbols, through experience, with its myths, all the way back into the rituals of actions, of life, the existential comportments that allow for us to be real in the sense of our physicality. Shelley was one of the first individuals to be able to understand that you need to have a transformation of language beyond the mythic and beyond the symbolic in order to carry a differential, conscious vision. And then you had to have a way to bring that differential conscious vision as the mnemonic capacity back into the mind, back into the mythic experience, and back into the ritual actions of the, of existential life. And so Shelley was a researcher into this realm, and even as a young boy, there were two sciences that appealed to him as a pair together all the time and forever, chemistry and electricity. He was he was an amateur chemist when he was a little boy. His grandfather was quite wealthy and had established a great house, Field Place, down in Sussex, south of London, about halfway down to Brighton from London. And Shelley grew up there, and he not only experimented with chemistry but with electricity. His one of his relatives got ill one time, and he took in a primitive galvanometer to try and bring her back to health. It's just a little boy. The quality of the young Shelley's reading centered finally on the ancient Greeks because he learned Greek. He made his own translations of Aeschylus at a time when he was still a teenager. At one time it was a part of the education of persons to know Greek as well as your native language, French or German or English, and all of that came into play in England in the Renaissance, at the end of the Renaissance, in the generation of Elizabethan England. You would have learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as English. You would have been quadrilingual all of the best families. All of the children were raised in that way. Ben Jonson is a famous statement about Shakespeare. That he had little Latin and less Greek. Didn't mean that Shakespeare didn't know a lot about those languages. It's just that he was not a scholar on the level of people who learned them as a child because he grew up in a family in Stratford. His father dealt with gloves and was just a tradesman. His mother was a Catholic, and Shakespeare's mother was threatened with official death by Queen Elizabeth's couriers because one of her close relatives was involved in an assassination plot against her. And so when Shakespeare was about 15 or 16, he was ushered out of Stratford and put up into Lancashire as a tutor to some of the younger children of one of the big families and houses in Lancashire. And so he didn't have time to become a scholar in Latin and Greek. And that's what Johnson's phrase was about. Consequently, in those Lancashire noble houses, instead of the young children being forced to learn Latin and Greek, they were forced to put on plays by their tutor. And Shakespeare's first dramas are plays written for the households of the Lancashire people. And of course, with all of this, you see why I chose as the pair compliment to Shelley Shakespeare, where our education always moves by politeness. We try to engender the sense that our participation makes the balance. And what is offered is a disclosure pair all the time, and we keep changing the pair. Every month we change the pair. We have a pair of books. And our pair this time is Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Carefully chosen because The Tempest by Shakespeare and Prometheus Unbound by Shelley as a pair is fertile. The disclosure realms of differential consciousness that can come out of that pair are enormous. And of course, that pair follows the use of several pairs already. We go in triads three pairs, four weeks for each one making a set of 12 weeks. And then we have a 13th week, which is an interval. It's sort of the vanishing threshold so that we don't inadvertently creep into a game. And the intervals every 13th week, not becoming superstitious, but so that we don't get ourselves inadvertently sliding into gamesmanship about our education. It's for my protection as well as yours. The pair that we just finished with was Francis Yeats's great book on the Art of memory. The development in the Renaissance through the Middle Ages. The transformation of scholastic memorizing into creative memory that the medieval memory was all based on. Book, the book, and the logical way to follow one's argument through the book. Whereas the Renaissance memory, the synthesizing fulcrum for the Renaissance was in art, and it was the art of memory that became the the royal art in the Renaissance. So we looked at Francis Yates, The Art of memory, and also the great visions of a medieval mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, who about 800 years ago understood that there is such a thing as the visionary complementation that not only does God love us, but we love God, and that this is a interplay very much like what love really is, and that love between human beings is very much in participation with the man God activity with the God man activity. And that the medieval vision, the mystical vision of this dynamic, of the complementarity of love, was largely discovered by women In the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century, the 1100s, late 1100s and in the early 1200s. And there are maybe a dozen world class female mystics of that time. And it was their development of the dynamic capacities of human divine love that led most precisely several centuries later, into the development of the Renaissance. The core teacher of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino. His great book dedicated to Cosimo de Medici's grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, called The Book of Life and it's all about love. It's all about the way in which love extends in its resonances to the love of wisdom, which is philosophy. And that philosophy is an extension to the mind's ability to think lovingly based upon the experiences. Capacity to be intelligent about feeling. Feeling love in a realistic, experiential way. And so that motion, where feeling is carried by a language that is structured like a ceramic matrix, holding the capacities for a structure so that the structure of thought coming out of the experience of complementarity. Love comes into the birth of ideas that are fertile, that are able to transform further than just the mind's symbolic structure transform into conscious flowering. Hence you will see studies of called the flowering of the Middle Ages or the flowering of American culture. Because there is this not just a symbol, not just an allegory, but an actual transform that occurs, the blossoming forth. And so our education has moved in this way. And we'll see that the next pair of books that we'll use, we're going to use Kandinsky's great little book called The Spiritual in Art Concerning the spiritual in Art. And paired with it will be a book on Rembrandt's portraits. Because among all the great artists that have lived on this planet, one of the best Cursive remembering of one's experience, raised to sentience, integrated into high intelligence that transforms into consciousness, that becomes the ability to make great personal art. Rembrandt is an archetype more than an archetype. He's himself. Rembrandt's self-portraits are one of the greatest galleries of self disclosure on the planet. He made about 70 or 80 portraits during his entire life, and from an early portrait that shows Rembrandt painting himself holding up a glass, a beer stein that was about 30in long. It's called a yard glass. That's because of people who would ride on fast horses would come into the saloon area, and they would expect to be handed their quaffing drink while they were still on horseback. And it had to be a long glass to hand up. Here's Rembrandt as a youngster, portraying himself, toasting the fact that he's got his lovely lady in his lap and he's just bought all these beautiful things at auction, and he's surrounded by all the good things of life. And one of the last portraits of himself shows the old aged, ill and dying. Rembrandt himself, still looking, smiling out of what if you get close to the canvas is just seems like a blur of browns into golds, into a little bit of sheen, of clear. And when you step back, you see the portrait of the artist. And as you go closer and closer to the canvas, the artist disappears back into the emergent mystery of the canvas This itself. We're going to take a break and we'll come back. Let's come back. Let's come back to not a focus. The kind of language that's being used here is akin to poetry. It's not a language of explaining or of outlining. That kind of language belongs to the mind in a very special, kind of limited way. And it's all right in the mind, and we need to know about that and be able to follow that. You can't put together a model of something without being able to follow the directions, but we're not following the directions to put something together. There's nothing there. It's only by the process of inquiry that we begin disclosing a development that creates the possibility of something further emerging. So that vision is very allied to nature in the sense that nature has its mystery and vision is mysterious. That both origins are not beginning points but ongoing processes. So that nature and vision are processes and that they flow. And there's a kind of a flow. One of the one of the great transforms in William James life is when he was in his early 20s, he went down to the Amazon jungles. It's 150 years ago, and he proceeded to get smallpox, and he had all kinds of difficulties, and he was about ready to just crumble. And he decided that he had to go on. And so William James, by the time he was 23, was canoeing with natives by himself thousands of miles from the coast in the Amazon jungles, he wrote, his mother, he said, you wouldn't recognize me. My head is shaved so the insects don't get in the hair. The full beard. I have no shirt. I have tattered trousers, no shoes. And I'm joking with the natives as we go onto these rivers and some of the rivers that come into the Amazon, the silt carried in them is black, whereas the Amazon itself is yellowish, and they will flow sometimes for hundreds of miles without mixing. Vision and nature are like those great rivers of the South American jungle. They can flow for a long time and are not miscible. And yet, with just the right transform, their miscibility becomes instant and they come together. The transform that makes that possible is a form called the person. The person but not the person. As a tribal entity. Not the person. As an existential individual, but the person as an artist. There's an art to conscious life. And without that art, the miscibility of the mystery of nature and the mysteriousness of vision Run concurrent and they don't mix. So that one of the functions of the differential person as an artist is to bring those two great processes together. But those two great processes are separated by an intermediate process called myth. And the mythic process often flows along with nature and has its meeting place in a kind of an objective sandbank that runs along with both those called existence, called the material world. And the material world, in its objectivity, melds together the process of nature and the process of experience so that the body registers very adequately both processes and keeps them concurrent together. And so the development of bodies is a very good glue that keeps nature and experience together, keeps language and the emergent nourishing process of life together. But the process of nature and the process of vision nowhere are congruent. They don't touch by a single objectivity. The mind tries to make itself that objectivity. And it isn't. The mind certainly touches vision. But as the mind touches vision, on one side, it touches myth and not nature and the other the body touches myth on one side and the flow of nature on the other. And the body is very good. After billions of years of development, many billions of years, physical matter like protons and electrons have been around for at least 15 billion years. They're very good at bringing together the mystery of nature and the capacities of what we later understand as experience the ability to come out from a body in our actions and to develop a tone that eventually refines into feeling. But in between nature and vision, there is no way that they're miscible. There's no way that they touch. And so the initial development of consciousness seems to be supernatural. It seems to be magical that it comes from somewhere beyond. And indeed it does come from beyond. And a great deal of the fear of learning is that you are exposing yourself to something that is beyond the control of your mind, beyond the ecology of certainty in the integral. Bertrand Russell, once in one of his books, said, men fear thought like the plague because thought is wild and it will go where it wants to go. And where does thought want to go? It wants to become conscious. It wants to develop an analytic capacity. And so the fearfulness on the mythic level, on the tribal level, on the level of the peasants in the village is to be very fearful of something that's supernatural. Of something that's magical. Something that's beyond. Especially something that is consciously beyond. The tribe is fearful of, especially science. Science is that further field of differentiation, even beyond art, whereas art is about the differential forms of the person. Science is about the differential form of the cosmos. An enormity, a complexity not only vast, but vastly vast, asymptotically complex, and the cosmos nevertheless has an order. That order in the old Pythagorean sense had a title, a name to it. It was called the the Diocles Maecius. The understanding was that there is a wholeness whose openness goes into an unfathomable non boundedness. And so the ancient term for it in wisdom was that this was an eternal, a realm of eternity, and that heaven was the realm of this deliciousness, of this eternal. And that man in his natural state was limited to the earth, and that bridging in between the heaven and the earth, between man and God were a whole series of elemental powers. The name in Greek is spelled d, a, e, m, o, n daimones. Translated by the Latin apologists who were using a religion called Christianity as the glue to make an empire, they called them demons that in between God and man are whole levels of demons. And one has to watch out for this. And that. Who are you as a person to try and navigate the demonic realms by yourself? You need the protection of the church and the empire and all the help that we can get. And that's why we have to collect from you. And our insurance costs are going up. And so we need a premium called obedience. And thus tyrannies and empires are made with a lot in view of keeping the game going. That entire ecology has been punctured many times. And one of the greatest punctures of that whole ecology was chalet. 200 years ago, Shelley, who as a youngster was precocious in chemistry and electricity, who became convinced when he began reading Greek enough for himself that the whole mythological tapestry of ancient Greece was a veil over a secret, mysterious philosophy that was not cogent in terms of the mind's sense of form, but cogent in the sense of cosmic differential form. And that there must be a way not to move step by step through some demonic realms, losing power all the while to try to get to the cosmic, to the eternal, but that there must be a direct secret passage within that if you went deep enough within, you would come out into the eternal, into the cosmos, and that the transform that made that journey possible was poetic language. That language raised to the conscious level and then raised from the conscious magical level to the art, the level of the great art. The artist, the poet Who makes originally that art is not an imitation of something existential, but that art is original, its creation again, all over again, so that the work of art is a fertility, that once it is made, it is a transform that continues to make that the resonances of a work of art are the resonances of original creation, and that one could remember how you did that, and remember that the resonances of original creation have a harmonic to them, and that that harmonic is like a scale of creativity, and that you could remember and bring that back into play. Where would you bring it back into play? You don't need to bring it back into play in the body. God has already made the body out of nature beautifully. And you don't really need to bring it back into play, into the mind, because the mind can really understand it can come to understand quite well. But the sore spot that needs to be transformed most was myth that the mythological realm of experience, of feeling toned, experience that was the basis of the mind in the first place. If that's not transformed, then the mind keeps doubting its own moments of clarity, its own moments of being real, and goes back to trusting mythological, traditional ways of understanding what all this is supposed to be. And so Shelley took a great look. He was only. In his 20s. How can great poetry transform myths so that it doesn't produce the bad habits of mind, of encasing us in phony veils that are integrated into ideas that are ideological sources of tyranny for man? How can you free man by changing his mythology so that it doesn't interiorize in a dead end way. And he found that there was a mythological figure who really was a transform hero of this kind of consciousness. And his name was Prometheus. Prometheus. And that at the very origins of the dramatic art of making a conscious art form of drama was the very first of the great tragedians was Aeschylus. And Aeschylus. His last great work was a trilogy about Prometheus. He wrote it about 456 BC, and only the first of the three plays survives. The Prometheus Bound and The Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Aeschylus was famous for his Aeschylus. Greek language was like the soaring movement of a hunting eagle. The syntax of Aeschylus Greek was full of pyrotechnics, of movement that later people, later Greeks, even a generation later, were in awe that anyone could have done it this way. His great successor in the next generation was Sophocles, and Sophocles couldn't run with the eagle flights of Aeschylus, So he specialized in a kind of a Greek that was equanimeous. And so Sophocles Greek is full of the balance. Whereas Aeschylus language soars pyrotechnically. And in this pyrotechnic soaring, the greatest figure that he created was Prometheus, who in this part of the Prometheus Bound. Has dared to help man over the Olympian gods of Greek mythology, especially going in contrast to the king of gods of Greek mythology, Zeus and Prometheus did the most pernicious act that Zeus could have entertained. He delivered the gift of creative, conscious fire to man, so that man eventually would mature beyond the place where Zeus's powers lay, and that man would learn to overcome his life. Thinking that Zeus was the king of gods and Zeus would be overthrown. So Zeus took Prometheus and chained him to the highest peak in the Caucasus Mountains beyond the Black Sea, there to be tortured, because this eagle was eating out his liver every day. And still Prometheus did not recant. He did not give up, because he knew that in the long, blind glacial movement of his development, his fears were not from his recapitulation to the gods, but that there would come a day when men would mature enough and remember that he was chained there, and men would come and free him. That the long distant descendants of those men and women who were fertilized by the spark of conscious poiesis the ability to make originally would, of course, not just make anything originally, but they would make themselves originally again, not a remade humanity, but a new humanity that had never been made before. That there would come conscious men and women who would understand and remember and would free Prometheus, so that when Zeus from time to time checks on Prometheus, in this one episode, he sends his messenger Your Hermes and Hermes comes to see that Prometheus is suffering. And has he recanted yet? And, uh, Hermes in the conversation in Aeschylus Pyrotechnic Eagle Greek Hermes says, you're making fun of me as if I were a child. And Prometheus says, and are you not a child? Sillier than a child. If you look to me to learn there is no torture or device that Zeus can use to twist me into speaking out. Not until these crushing shackles are broken. So let him fling his branching strokes of lightning at me, or shake the world altogether. With his snow's winged white and mumbling ground. None of this will bend me or make me break. Or tell the name of him who will. His kingdom may fall. Zeus. Think that there's a name of some one, and he wants the name so that he can kill the mother before that figure is born. But the figure is not an individual, but is a whole level of original mankind that are yet to come and will come. And 2250 years later, shall set himself the task of replacing the missing third volume of Aeschylus trilogy, the complement to Prometheus Bound, The Prometheus Unbound because, he said, in many places the time has come in our time to free Prometheus from the constraints of mythology. He no longer belongs as a figure frozen in the tapestry of Greek mythology, visited only by encyclopedist academicians. But we need to break that energy free, so that in our lives that Promethean figure lives again as ourselves. When the great science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke wrote about a spaceship going out for the first time, he named it The Prometheus. This vision that Shelley had came at a particular time. He had left England and was living in Italy and in between he had spent some time in Switzerland, and he'd gone to Geneva and he had run away with his second wife, Mary, who became Mary Shelley. And Mary Shelley was the perfect companion for him. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who had written A vindication of the Rights of Women, or Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. She was a women's Lib writer. 250 years ago, one of the greatest writers of all time, one of the most beautiful women of all time. But Mary Wollstonecraft, who was supposedly against the idea of conventional marriages because they weave you into the glue of a regressive kind of society, but had fallen in love with a man who also held that marriages traditionally were a numbing glue of society and We must not marry, had nevertheless fallen in love with her. And they married, and his name was William Godwin, who was the author of one of the great revolutionary tomes called Political Justice. And so the vindication of the Rights of Women and Political Justice married, and the child of that marriage was Mary Shelley. Who ran away? She was just 19. She ran away with Shelley, and they went to Geneva. And then they took a friend of theirs named Lord Byron. And they went deep into the Alps, around Mont Blanc. Chamonix. It's in France, but it's right on the edge of Italy and Switzerland. And let's see, Mont Mount block is 4800m, and they're at the world's end. Are the great glaciers that come down from the French Alps. And these glaciers are not frozen, silent postcards, but they're grinding rocks moment by moment. And the entire Alpe mountain range seems to focus on around the veil of Chamonix, so that the edge of the glacier, moment by moment, is grinding the granite foundations of the world into dust, and you can see it raining constantly on the edge of the glacier. And there are huge cracks and thunder booms, not from Zeus, but from the earth, morphing and growing moment by moment. And it was there that Shelley first saw the Prometheus Unbound and Mary first saw the novel that she would write at the same time called Frankenstein, so that Prometheus and Frankenstein were born together in this most unusual pair, this unusual couple. And of course, the great demise of Frankenstein is him plunging off a ship in the Arctic Ocean for the distant, icy depths of eternity. She wrote her first version. They just printed it. Uh, the printed text of Frankenstein is usually from the 1831 edition, but her first text was 1818. She was 20 years old. Frankenstein in the manuscript is subtitled Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. The Frankenstein of Mary Shelley is not the dumb Frankenstein of Abbott and Costello movies, or the Frankenstein of the 1931 version where his language is good, wine good. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a genius of eloquence and high mentality, put into a body that had become crushed by flawed experiment and was ugly beyond belief, was eerie and creepy beyond belief, and that he was tortured because he had this elegant, exquisite interior crammed into the most monstrous body imaginable and suffered accordingly that he had this beautiful poetic spirit put into a monstrous monster's body. And of course, we recognize that this theme also is a theme which haunts Shakespeare's last great play, The Tempest. And the monster in The Tempest is Caliban. Caliban, who's kind of blurred Toadlike freckled, splotched skin existence was the bastard son of a witch named Syrax, and that which was imprisoned by a magician who had come to the island. A very powerful magician, Prospero, who brought all of his books, all of his library, all of his occult magical powers and took over the island from Caliban's mother, and then made Caliban his servant, his slave to do his bidding, and Caliban, resentful all the time waiting for the daughter of Prospero to grow until she could be old enough to be attacked. And one of his phrases, where he chortles and Caliban says to himself, ho ho ho! I will populate the island with lots of little caliban's clones of myself, and it will be a beautiful place for me to be. Shakespeare's Tempest is curious because it was written for the occasion of the great wedding of its time, the fearsome politics of the 16th century, which had larger than life figures like Cortez and Queen Elizabeth, had produced a societal situation that was just dynamite. Which within a few years didn't just fall apart, but erupted into a thing called the Hundred Years War, which killed a third of the people of Europe. They never tell you that it really gets bad. It does. But in Shakespeare's time in 1612, towards the end, there was this fabulous marriage between a royal heir to the British powers and the royal heir to the Germanic continental powers. And it was to bring in this marriage piece to that whole part of the world. And would have done so had not. The groom died within a year or so of the marriage. But The Tempest was written as the marriage Confirmation that this was all the great powers of nature and consciousness brought together into a harmony. And the basis of it was that language, a language that had been transformed several times before, the language being English, an English language that had emerged in such a way originally that the original English language, the Old English language, emerged not as a language of peasants, but as a royal language of epic greatness. When you look to see where does Old English start? It starts with a great epic called Beowulf. The English national epic Beowulf. That Old English comes on the scene as a classic language that was consciously informed and that its antecedents are a kind of a transform of an old German, an old Germanic mixed with, uh, Norse elements mixed with some Latin. But the great figure there at the Origins of Old English, the Venerable Bede also wrote a great history. It's called the history of the English Church, to try to show that this whole development of ancient understanding had come secretly through some kind of a side passage, not through the central passage of a Rome that had become monstrous and had fallen, but that the more esoteric lineage came through those few on the edges of the Atlantic world, the Irish Greek speaking monks had brought a secret concourse of ancient wisdom through, and that this is what shown at the end of the Six Hundreds and the Venerable Bede. Venerable Bede's history shows all of these capacities of bringing together two things that should not have been able to be miscible. The courage of the pagan existentiality that goes back to the Paleolithic warrior with the deep, quiet humility of the interior Christian. And so Beowulf becomes this impossibly beautiful epic, very much like the Bhagavad Gita. The marrying together of a warrior with wisdom, of a Paleolithic warrior who has the gentle humility of transformational wisdom. And that these two miscible together form a new kind of a person never seen before. And 1300 years ago, Beowulf was remarkable as a figure, and that that Old English was transformed about 700 years later by Chaucer into the most humane language available. Chaucer's English is as discursively alert as one could get at 1400, about the mysteriousness of human nature being able to civilize not only the rocks and plants taming the animals and the plants, but that man could learn to tame himself and become civilized. Not in the sense that he was quashed down by codes of law, but that he was transformed by something beyond codes in the consciousness of honor. And of course, we're using The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer as one of our year long readings, and the origin of The Canterbury Tales is not making The Canterbury Tales, but within what becomes the first tale in The Canterbury Tales. The Knight's Tale on The Knight's Tale was all about love, about the incredible transformational powers of love, even under the most weird and strange circumstances, that love is able to bring Ring consciousness into play in such a way that it dissolves the trigger mechanisms of mythological expectation, which, when solidified in the mind, become powerful ideas of tyranny and authority. That we have made these doctrines for you to obey, and you damn well will. That all of that entire ecology of Faust. Lets say Faust. As Shakespeare would have said, this Faust. Authority should not have sway over human life, that we are not the rolled out dough to be cookie cutter stamped by people whose ideas have more money, more power, more tradition than our own recognizance of our heart and our spirit. And of course, Shakespeare's transform of Chaucer's English, made of Shakespearean English, one of the world's greatest languages, able to be so differentially conscious in its expressivity that one can move not only to the form of the differential person as an artist, but beyond that, to the entire world as a single stage, and become cosmic. Shakespeare's language reaches into the eternal. It's a transformed media that's good all the way through to the farthest stars. But one thing was left out, and that was the recursive power to come back and transform society. Shakespeare's transforms are those of the spiritual person, but he didn't dare at the time. Transform the society. The spiritual society was one that was under threat of immediate death. You would have been killed immediately. Many of his friends were, many of his family were, and many others were. And so when Shelley came along, 200 years later, he said, it's time to take the transforming capacity of artistic language and great dramas and transform society as well. That just freeing man as a person is not enough. We must free society on that level, civilization on that level, so that social forms are able to be cosmic as well. And this is what Shelley set himself to. And as soon as he was there in the Vale of Chamouni, watching this glacier, talking with his wife about the what became Frankenstein, the modern And Prometheus and he going into Prometheus Unbound, he got a letter from England that an even younger poet genius from him was dying, and his name was John Keats. Keats, one of the most delicate men to ever have lived, published a work which was so savaged in criticism that Keats and his wretched weeping burst blood vessels in his lungs, and the damp seeping blood in his lungs made him tubercular. And he began dying of consumption. And he went to Italy to try to heal, but really to die. And Shelley had sent for him and said, you come and live with Mary and me. We'll take care of everything. But before he could, he died in Rome. And Shelley Wrote a great commemorative poem called Adonis Adonai from the Hebrew Adonis from the Assyrian merging two together, and the last stanza of his commemorative poem On the Death of Keats, published at the same time that he was finishing up the Prometheus Unbound. He had this to say. The breath whose might I have invoked in song descends on me. The spirit's bark has driven far from the shore, far from the trembling throng whose sales were never to the tempest given. The massy earth. And sphered skies are riven. I am borne darkly, fearfully afar. Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heaven. The soul of Adonis. Like a star. Beacons from the abode. Where the Eternals are. That man, spiritual man can so transform. That he may recursively reach back from the eternity of heaven. And help those who are helping him. More next week.