Vision 10

This is [vision] ten, and our focus is by using Shakespeare and Shelley currently. And we're trying with Shakespeare and Shelley to bring a pair of books together to give us some way to look, to see and not to see what they compose, but to see through their juxtaposition, an original vision, something never seen before, something never disclosed. And it's very difficult to see something new, not just because we don't recognize it, but because literally we cannot see it. It's invisible. I think one of the most graphic examples of this that I ever saw in when I was teaching in Canada, we got a film from Toronto, and it was shot by an anthropologist of an audience of Inuit people, Eskimos, who were watching a film of New York City landscape. And they were absolutely impassive because they didn't see that this was a city. It was an abstract jumble of gigantic forms to them, because they had never seen even a two story igloo. And to think that all these giant things were full of hundreds of thousands of people was not in their comprehension. And then they shifted over to a series of compositions. They were asked to make Eskimo prints of a tree, and they had never seen a tree in their lives. And so they tried to compose a tree from the descriptions of a tree. And all of them missed the fact that trees have thousands and thousands of leaves. They were all just little bumps and ridges on little bit of jagged, twig like protrusions. And that was as close as they could come to a tree. This is exactly the kind of situation where someone is trying to convey the spirit to someone who is materialistic. And it is deeply paralleled by trying to convey that the person, the spiritual person, is a differential form and not an integral form, and to convey that to someone who is mental. The materialist is limited by the body and the body's capabilities, but the mental limitations are greater and more severe than those of the materialist. And so it's a very difficult thing. And I think the classic phrase for the last 500 years is that a little learning is a dangerous thing. A little learning Creates an inflation of character from the mind's power of integrating, and instead of the natural existential experiential character, the inflation produces, what we know as the ego. And the ego is a mental creation that distorts the character by inflation. And this inflation has a curious effect. All of the contexts surrounding the ego is put into this fisheye lens kind of distortion, where everything is seen as belonging to you and you have every right. If you have a superior mind to organize them according to you. In Um, in the great Hollywood fable film Earth Girls Are Easy. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and Jim Carrey. One of the songs is has the refrain, the trouble with you is that you're not like me. You don't look like me. You don't act like me. That's the trouble with you. The ego has this distorting quality, and the ego because it is an artifact of the mind. It doesn't exist in nature, it doesn't exist existentially, and it is not at all a form of experience. It is a distortion by inflation through the mind. And one of the Deep recognitions of this was in Shelley's Defense of Poetry, where he says, poetry is a mirror that makes beautiful that which is distorted. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted in the sense that the distorted shape, the distorted, the distortion context is corrected, is removed or corrected, and the context comes back into its wealth and position, so that poetry. In Shelley's expression, poetry is an art which brings back into play not the mirror of the mind, inflating the character of experience, but rather it is as we would, I think most likely say, is a prison that instead of a mirror, we have a prism, and the prism collects together, and through that kind of differential focus gives us the complete spectrum, not only the complete spectrum of light as in a rainbow, but gives us deeper than metaphor in actuality, the complete spectrum of the actual shapes of the world and of ourselves and the relationships between them. The use of the image of the prism as a transforming symbol was characteristic of the 18th century because of Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac Newton, who gained permanent fame in 1687 by producing the Principia mathematica. It was the first time that all the relationships of physics and astronomy and mathematics were put into an order, which they have retained to our own day. The transformations of the 20th century into relativity and quantum mechanics being all based on transforms of Newton's work and Newton's work was encapsulated for the public, not in his Principia. Almost no one could read it. Almost no one today can go through the mathematics without a university specialty education. But what they could read was a book that he brought out in the early 1700s, a book from his youth that he had written but not published before the Principia. And it was called The Optics. And Newton's optics was all about in the public mind how the universal quality of light by which God creates is related to the human eye, by which man sees to do his looking, his creating. So that Newton's optics created in the 18th century, as the decades went on, a revolution in poetry and the revolution was characterized by. It was a great woman, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, who wrote 6 or 7 books on the poetics of the 18th century, and one of them was called The Breaking of the circle that the old medieval and even Renaissance circle of the wholeness of nature was broken by Newton's opticks, and that the breaking of it was the sense that there was no real circle if we did not see it in that limitation, that the circularity, the perfection of the geometric city of nature was a function of our alerted intelligence. You can see the resistances of LA are determined. But I'm an old Yogi and it doesn't bother me at all. Just stick with me. My language will flow even if we fall into the sea. I'll keep talking. You know. And as Nobel Prize speech, Faulkner lamenting the the fear of nuclear war and all this was in 1954, he said. But when the last ding dong of doom has struck, there'll be still one more sound, that of man's voice talking, complaining, and asking questions. Mirrors and prisms. A mirror reflects what is shown into it, and the mind is very much mirror like, and has no self-conscious internal correction to an inflationary quality that it introduces into experience. Why? Because it is an experience that is the background out of which the mind is integrated. The mythic process of language and feeling which constitutes experience, which weaves and makes that fabric of experience. That mythic process is interiorized interiorized by language largely. And there can be languages of color and languages of sound, as well as languages of words. Languages of gesture. But language is a interiorized medium by which experience and feeling come into a higher integration, and that interiorization creates a space. And that space, that inner spatiality, is what becomes our sense of mind, our sense of mentality, at least originally. So that the mind does not know when it adds an inflated space to that central protagonist of experience, which is the human character. So that character Occurs naturally in experience. Character is the individual of myth. And there are very few individual individuals in myth. Mostly character are types. Character is developed by the circumstance, by the inheritance, by the style of regard. One can see the character in a person, even in a baby, in a child, especially by the age of five. You can see who they are. And if you've ever raised a child, you know that. Or several children. You know that this one is quite different from this one. This infant feeds this way. This one feeds a completely different way. This one sleeps this way. This one doesn't sleep this way. All this are. These are all functions of character. And character is a natural development. But the ego is an inflated from the mind distortion of character, and its inflation largely is the introduction of mental spacing into the functioning of character, so that the popular stage figure is someone who is swell headed. In Shakespeare, uh, I remember my first role in acting, Shakespeare in 12th Night, I was Malvolio. I was 16 years old, and Malvolio was this inflated character who thinks that the lady loves him because the two of the protagonists have played a prank on him and put a letter in her hand with her signature, saying that she was infatuated with him. Even the term infatuated, inflated, and Malvolio this, this prissy dandy thinks that she really likes him because he wears these yellow garters, cross the tide and and of course, this is the most ridiculous buffoonery thing. And Malvolio parades later on in 12th Night before her expecting that he is going to really reel her in and she is just totally disgusted by him. This is a characteristic way in which Shakespeare presents character and inflation, and does so in such a way that you see the comic comparison between them and the comic comparison, or if it's a tragedy, the tragic comparison. And there's a third variety, which is the historical comparison, not a comparison of two things, but two elements of the same thing brought into a relationality so that the two are brought into relationality, make a ratio, they make a proportion, and it's the training of the audience. By seeing such plays again and again, in many forms, in many guises, that one comes to see that the proportion between natural character in inflated ego produces most of the comedy and most of the tragedy, and unfortunately, most of the history that passes as if it were natural, and that all of this is generated by largely by the mind as the mind who is the ghostwriter behind all of this and that we this is the human condition. We are all a part of this and that what dissolves that kind of false proportioning of ego taking over character under the subservience of the mind. What dissolves that whole set is vision is the acquiring of the ability to not be hypnotized by looking at these things, but looking through the ratio of these things to the discovery that there is a hidden play behind this, a hidden play of form and proportion behind this and that. That hidden proportion behind this has its own arrangement of energies, and that all of the possible proportions belong together in one grand harmonic spectrum, and that one could then make a conscious music out of that spectrum, out of that harmonic, which would be related to the natural music, of feeling and of experience, but would have an added conscious dimension of vision. And therefore there are beautiful songs that tribal people would sing in their natural character. But there are civilized songs or psalms or tunes or lyric compositions that someone would consciously sing, transforming the natural music into an art. And so Shakespeare is all about this. Shelley is all about this vision is all about this. How to take an experience which in its natural occurrence is perfectly fine, but which has been distorted by the mind, swelled into an egotistical false proportion. How to restore that back. And the restoration comes because the mirror has been transformed into a prism, a prismatic form, a differential form for a prism. A differential form doesn't further integrate, it doesn't integrate at all. It differentiates. And so the process of differentiation at its origin is a corrective to the tendency to keep integrating more and more the mind, thinking to itself that it needs to become a super mind. And it is this. It is this conviction of the mind to further its own powers that creates the monstrous distortion for Spear. That monstrous distortion came in two ways when he was young. It occurred in a midsummer Night's Dream because it was a confusion of scenarios that finally had to be combed out. The monster in a midsummer Night's Dream was the figure bottom who acquired the head of an ass, a donkey's head, and through the charms of puck, under the goading of Oberon to play a trick and serve a lesson on his fairy queen Titania that she would fall in love after an herb juice was sprinkled on her eyes, with the first being that she saw, and Oberon had puck change bottom so that his head was that of an ass, and she fell in love with this peasant bottom who had the head of an ass. How ridiculous. Towards the end of his life, in fact, at the very end of his dramatic life, in his last great play, The Tempest, which we're looking at, he turns that image of bottom into transforms that image of bottom as an ass who was a comic figure when he was younger in a midsummer Night's Dream, becomes a menacing mutant possible monster in The Tempest called Caliban. Caliban. Who's this Splotched skin? The feral being whose mother was a witch. Sycorax. But. And I need to give you a couple of sentences here. This is from a book, Shakespeare's Caliban, a cultural history by a husband and wife team. Their name is Vaughan. Caliban may also in addition to all of these descriptions. Caliban may also be an anti-mask figure. Now a mask. Mask was a court drama. It was somewhat different from a play, and a masks convention was always to have costumes and pantomimed actions and music in the background, more than to depend upon the speeches between the characters so that masks were the royal version of a lower level entertainment. But the mask in Shakespeare's time was just beginning to come into vogue, because it was getting dangerous to write too much intelligence into parts because people were being killed by various court factions. Being blamed for these unfortunate revelations of who's who and who was doing what. And so court masks came into play. And in literary history, the great age of court masks is in Stuart theater. And the Stuarts replaced the Tudors, the Tudors being largely Henry VII and his successors, mainly Queen Elizabeth, the Stuarts being James from Scotland, coming in to rule England about 16 0304, and from there on until the Stuarts were overthrown by Protestant revolutionaries under Cromwell, and then they were overthrown during the restoration, when they brought Charles the Second back and everything went back to loving masks and even larger, grandiose we're back again. We're going to have court theatre again. And in the restoration you have all these great dramas of the ridiculous satire of language put in all the court masks raised to the nth degree of music and costume. And that's when you have things like, I think the greatest composer of that day was Henry Purcell and Purcell's great, uh, English Restoration. Operatic productions like King Arthur or The Indian Queen, and so forth. The fairy Queen. All of these are forerunners of the Broadway show. They're exactly like that. Don't make it too philosophical. Make it grandly entertaining, and let's make some money. Um. Caliban may be an anti-mask figure in Shakespeare's most mask like play, The Tempest. Why? Why would it be a mask like play? It's the very last play of Shakespeare, and it's one of the first indications that theatre in England was being alerted to the fact that it's dangerous to write too much intelligence into the speeches of the playwrights. You better make it more flash and show more costume and gesture and music than poignancy, so that The Tempest is the watershed between Renaissance theater and the court masques of a very, very scared population of the later 1600s to 17th century. Caliban may also be an anti-mask figure in Shakespeare's most masque like play. There's an expert on Stuart Masque who explains that formal court masque and court masques were always formal. They had a formal structure. You followed this format. It was what works. It's just like the Hollywood studio thing now is a masque like parade. It has nothing to do with making movies anymore. It has to do with following the formulas that work. Give them what they want, and one eventually settles for the lowest common denominator. And then you produce many versions of that and hope that one of those hits, because there's no judgment anymore of what is great or good or even entertaining. The formal court masque was generally separated into two sections. The first section was the Anti-masque, and it was performed by professional actors and represented a world of vice or disorder. Here's the here's the bad confused thing. And then here's the wonderful, cheerful, colorful stuff that we like. All the the most famous designer for Anti-masque costumes and figures was a he was a young man when Shakespeare was finishing up his career, and he went on to become the greatest architect, the greatest theatre designer, costume maker, probably of all time. His name was Inigo Jones and Inigo Jones. The animistic figures designed by Inigo Jones included wild Ben satyrs, Indians from the New World, phantasms, pygmies, tumblers and jugglers, and even in one grand thing, the contents of a cooking pot which kept boiling over and was gross on the stage. The second part, or masque proper, was performed by members of the court and represented the triumph of their aristocratic community and their beliefs in hierarchy, shown on the stage that everything is all right. We're in control. We own all the sources of power, and look what we can do so that when the masque was over, you had been fortified in your confidence that your particular inflationary universe was the one that held everywhere that anyone could get to you from. What is strange about The Tempest, Shakespeare's The Tempest is that he shows at the end of his career that there is a transform quality to language which is within an ace of being, the kind of language that magic employs, that Magic is all about changing something into something else. It can be a magic, like an alchemy changing lead into gold, or it can be a magic in changing an empty hat into a rabbit. That magic's ability to transform, to change is very similar to the spiritual transform which a sacred language is capable of and is characteristic of. The difference is that a traditional magic language is still spoken by the mind, still has an inflationary quality to it, and seeks to change the images and at its deepest, seeks to change the synthesizing symbols so that the images are changed. Whereas a spiritual transformation is a high, magic, is actually a vision, has a little bit different dimension to it, and that different dimension is that it always brings consciousness into play instead of metaphysics. A metaphysics is the mind trying to go to a higher integration of its integration to become a super mind. And this temptation of the mind to think that the next step from it must be a super version of it is itself an inflation, and that the mind has no capacity in itself to tell the difference. It does not know the difference between a super inflation of itself and the ideal. Further integration of itself, and becomes absolutely unbelieving when told point blank that there is no higher integration, that what comes next is a process of differentiation which opens everything up again and doesn't bring things into greater and greater compactness. The mind in its inflationary habit refuses to believe that because it knows from deep, integral categorical experience that there is no possibility for that, that all beliefs have led to this idea and this idea encapsulated in this ideal by the technique of integral to a higher and higher orders, and therefore, to go further, one has to go to a higher order of this, and that leads away from physics and its realms into metaphysics. And this, of course, is a quality which is tragic in man. It's the essence of tragedy. It's the pride that goes before the fall. It's also the essence of comedy in that small versions of this are truly comic, that someone would imagine that this is the way things work is is coming. But deeper than tragedy or comedy is that relationality of the mind, swelled by its own sense of finery, Henry to think that it could be invisibly super grand, if only it could make that next step, that next move, and where that plays out is in the realm of history and the mind loose as the supposed synthesizing principal, the principal actor of history brings upon itself a complete. The term is from Heraclitus, made popular by Carl Jung, an enantia dromio. That is, something shifts immediately from what it was to its opposite, and instead of getting science, you get a form of pseudoscience which is indistinguishable from something called ritual magic. One of the great intelligent uses of Shakespeare's The Tempest. It was used as a template to make the science fiction film Forbidden Planet. And a lot of what I'm saying this morning, if you'll take the time to go and see a version of Forbidden Planet, you can see how it plays itself out in this way. But deeper than that was the way in which Shelley understood exactly what Shakespeare was getting at in The Tempest. Because 200 years later, Shelley had come into a generation that had seen the subtle glacial squandering of Shakespeare's great intelligence about the harmonies of art, and especially because it had undergone the breaking transform of Newton's opticks and the great development of mathematical penetration. Not just penetration, but I think the word that Shakespeare uses at the end of The Tempest piercing, that some ideas were so profound and so great that they pierced through the mind's ability, bursting the bubble. So that the instant lack of confidence in the mind to choreograph the world fell immediately to its polar opposite, that somehow one needs to have the right ritual magic to control a world which the mind can no longer do. And instead of getting a super man one gets a Frankenstein. And it was Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, and the subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus. And she did the first edition in 1818, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound came out just a year later. For instance, Mary Shelley's great last work is called The Last Man, Not the First Man. She wrote a book called The New Adam also, but she also wrote one called The Last Man The Disillusioned Vision of the End of Civilization, set in the 21st century, so that all of these themes, these interesting, massive themes, not only intertwine, but they form a coagulating substrate, which is in fact the petri dish out of which civilization found its demise in our lifetime. Because that entire civilization did not face the challenges and quandaries that was raised by its own proficiency. And so we truly live now in a very interesting post, Historic kind of a time. There's nothing to go back to, and we haven't yet engendered any future to go to. And so we're just adrift on an ocean of endlessness until we do something about it. And that's why this education to begin the processes of coming back. Because each and all of us together have this ability which is already there, declared very, very clearly in Shakespeare and Shelley. Shakespeare 400 years ago. Shelley 200 years ago. Myself today. Chaucer 200 years before Shakespeare. So every 200 years, somebody comes along and says, here's how it is, folks. This is what we do. Shelley at the end of Prometheus Unbound tells us the things that will begin to heal us. But in a poem, I'll just give you the first few lines that he wrote at the same time that Mary was writing Frankenstein. He gives us the initial visionary moment, the insight. It's. These are the first lines to his poem Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. By him he means a psalm, like the Psalms of David, only he means the Psalms of David, with an added harmonic of conscious dimension coming into play, not additionally but in a differential way, opening up the mirroring capacity of a psalm to the transforming prism of a hymn. The hymn to intellectual beauty, the awful shadow of some unseen power, floats, though unseen among us, visiting this various world with as inconstant wing, as summer winds that creep from flower to flower. Like moonbeams that behind some piney mountain shower. It visits with inconstant glance, each human heart and countenance like hues and harmonies of evening, like clouds in starlight, widely spread like memory of music, fled like aught that for its grace may be dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Take a break. Let's come back to where we left off. Let's come back to Shelley's language. In the hymn of intellectual beauty, written about the time that Frankenstein was first written. Frankenstein. The modern Prometheus. Frankenstein the Shelleyan. Caliban. Band just like Caliban in The Tempest. Frankenstein haunts that retreat of the. The way in which Shelley's Prometheus envisions a future in Shakespeare. The Paradise is this island out away from the Europe, Asia, and African continents, the three continents where most of the Old World is, and the island where Prospero has gone is in the New World. It's an unknown dimension. It's on the threshold of some some different place geographically. But in Shelley's time, the threshold of the unknown is a transformational capacity which will deliver not a geographical new world, but a future. The future is there. And so Shelley is a romantic revolutionary. He's not looking for a new geography. He's looking for a new time. He's riding on the coattails of the French Revolution. That said, we're going to begin with the year one. Forget that. The year is 1789. Forget that. There's nothing to do with us. Everything that has to do with us begins now. Man recreates himself now, and the difficulty is that the now became apocalyptic. The French Revolution within a few years turned into what was called the terror. 390,000 people were killed in five years, mostly by the guillotine. All of the nobles. All of the aristocrats, all of the royalty. Anyone that anyone pointed the finger to and said they're anti-revolutionary. That's it. So that there was instead of the Paradise of a revolutionary future, there was the apocalypse now. And Shelley's writing on the coattails of that, Mary Shelley's writing on the coattails of that, and Prometheus Unbound and Frankenstein, or two sides of a coin. Not the coin of the realm of the Empire builders, but the coin of the undiscovered country. The possibilities of man yet to be. And for Shelley, he ends the Prometheus bound with these kinds of lines. There they have been quoted for 200 years as the last statement that made any kind of possible sense. And yet it's 200 years old. This. This is the day when down the void abysm at the earthborn spell yawns for heaven's deputy. Despotism and conquest is dragged captive through the deep love from its awful throne of patient power in the wise heart. From the last giddy hour of dread endurance from the slippery, steep, crag like narrow verge of agony springs and folds over the world, its healing wings, gentleness, virtue, wisdom and endurance. These are the seals of that most firm assurance which bars the pit over destruction strength. And if with infirm hand eternity, mother of many acts and hours, should free the serpent that would clasp her with his wings. These are the spells by which to reassume an empire over the disentangled dome to suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and bear to hope. Till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change nor falter, nor repent. This like thy glory. Prometheus, is to be good, great, joyous, beautiful and free. This alone is life, joy, empire and victory. Listen to the last words of Shakespeare's Tempest, Written about 200 years before. Spoken by Prospero, the magician who has given over his magic. Now all my charms are overthrown. And what strength I have. Mine own, which is most faint now. Tis true. I must be here confined by you, or sent to Naples. Let me not, since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver dwell in this barren land by your spell. But release me from my bands with the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours. My sails must fill or else my project fails. Which was to please. Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant. And my ending is despair. Unless I be relieved by prayer, which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults, as you from crimes would pardon be. Let your indulgence set me free. This is not a part of the play. It's called an epilogue. And it's a curious thing when you look at the shape. Most of the conventions of drama, in order to be effective, have a three act structure. Acts one two, three. Three act plays. A beginning, a middle and an end. It's the basic plot line, and if one is writing from plot, if one is writing a mythic plot, a three act play is a classic form. It's even a court approved form. But The Tempest is a five act play. Many of Shakespeare's plays go color outside of the conventions outside, because he's not dealing with myth, he's dealing with magical vision. And that five quality, the hand as a star. That five star or in the Chinese five phase energy cycle, the quality of a pentacle of a five quality a Scale, but this epilogue is outside even the five. It's a curious thing because these lines are not spoken to anyone on the stage. There's no one on the stage. The drama is over. These lines are spoken to the audience. This epilogue by Prospero takes that alchemical sequence of transform that the play of The Tempest is, and holds it open to the audience watching. Because these lines are spoken by Prospero from Shakespeare, this is the author saying that he has spent an entire lifetime in the theater. He spent all of his mature life here in London through incredible events. He's seen everything. He's seen too much of everything. And this is it. But he can only be let go if the audience will release him. If the audience's fascination in their complementation to the great playwright presenting his plays, and for some 1819 years, for a whole generation, he was simply not only the best he was. Head, shoulders, waist and knees above everyone else. In the final compendia of his poems, which constitutes the First Folio of the printed poems, there was a beautiful foreword that Ben Jonson wrote to some of the plays that had never been released in quarto. One of them was Troilus and Cressida, based on Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. And he says in the preface to Troilus and Cressida, Dear reader, you may find herein more wit than you have brain to grind it upon that among our crowd and our time. This guy was so far out that he was able to go to the other side of the world and bring us back through the centre of the earth to where he was this incredible, incredible mind, incredible man, because he could go outside of his mind into a visionary consciousness and there create an art of language that delivered us as well, reached back and pulled us out of the pit of our habit. And the worst habit is not the change that somebody else puts around you, but the change which you can't see, which you put around yourself through habitual limitation, and not just of your physicality, but of your mentality. And that to be freed from your mind is one of the greatest freedoms of all. And it's that freedom that is only capable of a transform. We talked last week about games, about games being something that we need to learn not to play. Uh, today's lecture is, uh, its title is, uh, Quarantine Complexity Theory. The ultimate game theory of our early 21st century is complexity theory. Why? Why quarantine it? Because a theory Is always a synthesising idea that comes into the mind that uses a symbol integral. To hold its shape. And that's wonderful and it's beautiful. And we need to do that. And we need to learn to do that. We cannot live exclusively by that. That's a little learning. That's a very dangerous thing. To be pulled out takes a very curious kind of a transform. And the transform cannot work until there's an alignment. The spirit is never freed until the mind is aligned to the body. It's a curious fact. Why is that? The old philosophic, um pair were always theory and practice in Greek theory practices. The practice is the ritual actions whose circum spectral boundary are the existential limits of the way in which we are in our physicality. That's the practice. The theory is an internalization, largely by language carrying, ferrying, meaning as it goes into an interior, into the mind. And there the theory is the mind's ability to make a form, an objectivity, a clarification on a higher integral So that the theory and the practice can be aligned. The Greek ideal was that the mind and body are aligned so that they have an equanimity, the perfect balance of the of the clear mind and the healthy body together. But while that alignment is possible in a natural ecology, it cannot go any further than that. That's as far as it can go. If you go into a practice of a yoga which can deliver an alignment to mind and body, that alignment occurs sometimes after long travail, long practice, long contemplative struggle to bring that alignment to. And when that is there, that's it. That it would go somewhere else is a fiction. That it would be something further is an illusion. And to believe that it is possible to do something further or else is a delusion. That's the whole art of a yoga, that this balance occurs and that equanimity occurs, and one can bring that equanimity and that balance to ace perfection. And what happens when you do that? The body and the mind together and their alignment vanish. That they reoccur as a great surprise, but they come back again as a great surprise. But they come back not aligned, but in a complementarity. They're are no longer in a line. They're no longer in a mythic line. They're in a wholeness. Which obviates complexity of being an ultimate. That alignment is is forest. Nature goes. But that complementarity is where reality supersedes, because there's more to heaven and earth than our philosophies. There's realms without number in great harmonic resonance beyond. There are capacities that the physical world and the mental world have no idea of, have no acquaintance with in any of their actions, and yet are capable of going and exploring and navigating there if informed by the spirit, the informing spirit. The conscious vision. Consciousness adds to time, space, another dimension, and instead of having a flat two dimensional world, or instead of having a complex four dimensional world, one has the beginning of many dimensions which have shapes that have never been named because they are differential shapes and not integrals. They open up into possibilities without end. That's the phrase world without end. So that in our time complexity theory is the ultimate game theory, and it developed out of the same military industrial matrix that game theory came out of, which is a commandeering of the structures of political economy that were first mooted at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. In Shelley's time, the first great writings on political economy, the first great economist, David Ricardo, Adam Smith. They're all writing at the same time as Shelley is being born. They're all coming from this time period at the end of the 1700s, when the Newtonian, Newtonian, when the Isaac Newton Opticks was breaking the old poetic circle. It was ignored by the origins of economic theory. And one finds a confidence in the writings of Ricardo or Adam Smith, which in the next couple of generations has brought into question. And the first great philosophic writer who tried to bring a Newtonian transform into the science of economics was Jeremy Bentham. One of his great works is called the Theory of Fictions. One has to be very circumspect and careful of the way in which military and economic and industrial organizational capacity of the mind is used as a tool and is not made an empire context that co-opts and corrals everyone into an inflated, egotistical mind. This is truly a Frankenstein sort of thing, and it makes suspicious everything in the differential ecology. People become afraid of science. They become afraid of history. They learn to reject art, and they squelch vision before it has a chance to even be born, so that everything is kept on a ritual, mythic level. And on that level, it's very easy to sound wise if you're in control. We have it all covered. All the entrances and exits have our labels on them, and we issue the only passes. Therefore, everything is all right, isn't it? And everyone agrees until you come into possession of something like a dream or something like a deja vu feeling, or something like a Saturday where somebody says, well, this is not quite it. In fact, All of that is negligible. That entire world order is negligible in face of an infinite cosmos. It's not even a good plan for a single planet, much less 8 billion star systems. What are you talking about? You think you have power because you control the economy of 2 billion entities on one planet? Well, you can't even control the moon. Which is why there are no bases on the moon. They're not controllable. You can't require of them tax forms if they're on the moon. There is a particular curiosity. As soon as game theory came into play. The control, the ability to mathematize the mind's control of processes that came into play in the late 40s and was really entrenched by the 1950s. That everything should result in a beautifully organized world. That's exactly the time period that two of the great ecologies of life were being contaminated food and sex. Today we have, uh, Aids and mad cow disease. And who knows what, because the natural ecologies have been compromised by an egotistical inflation of a false kind of regression that in no way replaces a recursive quality of improvement. And the mind not knowing about conscious freedom dissolving ideal plans, including the ideal plan of empiricism. So-called, there is a quality of radicalness that actually occurs, which changes a good plan into what William James, towards the end of his life, called a pluralistic universe. Someone once called it an omniverse. It's called a cosmos. It is an infinite array of possibilities. Any one of which opens up into others. And at one time when, um, uh, in China, about uh, 1400 years ago, there was a phrase that was used. It was called the Matrix of Mystery, and the seed of that was a very large sutra. It was like about 800 900 pages. The Avatamsaka Sutra, the Flower Sutra, Flower Sermon Sutra. It was all based upon the smile of recognition that comes when the mind shuts up. It comes from the one of the historical presentations of the Buddha. You know, he taught for 45 years, and he used to deliver little short talks and longer talks and huge talks. And one time he just held up a flower, and the only person who smiled was a guy way in the back. His name was Kashyapa. Kashyapa was a very great magician. In fact, he had when when the historical Buddha was first enlightened and he was looking for a place to teach, and he didn't know whether he could teach it or not, whether there was anybody to teach. And one of the first things he ran across on the Naryn River in northern India was this encampment of the super magician Yogi named Kashyapa. And Kashyapa was especially powerful in Kundalini energy. Great serpent. Psychic power. And he could do all kinds of stuff, not just bend spoons, but really big stuff. And he had 500 people apprenticed to him along the riverbank. And the Buddha came in like a Clint Eastwood without any guns. And he said he'd like to spend the night. And everyone laughed at him. He had to spend the night with us, you neophyte Yogi. And so, Kashyapa, to have a little fun, said. Yeah, you can sleep in my hut. And of course, during the night he did all of his big magics, his big serpent magics. He sent all kinds of of huge world class, scary nightmare serpents just to eat shit out of this young Yogi. And of course, they all vanished so that in the morning, Kasyapa found that all of his psychic powers had burnt out. And he was the one who smiled when the flower was held up, because he had gotten it big time. So after that he was called Mahakasyapa, which means Mahakasyapa. The mind. Indeed. Snakes were one of the Buddha's very special. He loved snakes. He loved the biggest snakes. In his enlightenment, he sat not only under the Bodhi tree, but under the four trees and under the last of the trees. There was this huge thunderstorm that came up, and so this giant king cobra, about 30ft in length, came and wrapped himself seven times around the Buddha and put his crest over the Buddha to shield him from not just from the rain, but from the lightning, so that the lightning would hit the Naga king. It would be grounded into the ground and protected Buddha. So Buddha knew all about. He liked serpents. He loved those nightmare big snakes. I mean, they came and they said, oh, our friend, all that Kundalini energy nightmare, Apocalypse Now was all transformed. What was it transformed into? Pure openness. Pure openness. A serpent which circles and swallows its own tail makes a circle. But a serpent which devours itself ends up leaving pure openness. What did Charlie Chan say in one of his mysteries? He said, some people look at the donut and others look at the whole. Pure whole. And so when Mahakashyapa, with his pure whole mind, saw the flower. The flower instantly was flower in the exfoliation of the pure openness. And it was still a flower, even though the context was nothing except pure openness. The flower was still a flower. And he smiled because it was real now, not real. Just as a perception of the body, or an interpretive conception of the perception by the mind. But it was real as a flower in him. In him was. How did D.T. Suzuki once said, you have to say that Mahakashyapa Mahakasyapa was filled with flower nests that he because he was completely open. All that there was, there was just floweriness. There was nothing else that he could be. Anything. Whatever there was, he could be that including the cosmos as a whole. That one is so vast that, as Paul Klee said one time quoted by Wallace Stevens in his Theory of Poetry. Paul Klee lived in a universe so vast that straight lines were seen to fall. We train ourselves to use our minds, and then we have to transform ourselves so that we are not just mental. And what is freed is the person, and the person becomes an artist. The person becomes an architect. And instead of being a figure in a story. One becomes a storyteller. And you can tell stories without end. Interesting stories. Even stories that are real. Even stories that are flowers that occur. And everyone's shared openness as just exactly as they are. This is why we need to quarantine complexity theory. It's wonderful to have. And in that room it can stay. And we'll go and look at it when we want to. Not today. So long. Um, this quality is a quality that comes into play into the Tempest, right at the before the epilogue in the fifth act. And this is a facsimile of the First Folio of The Tempest. My old friend Jake Zeitlin found this for me at. They were throwing it out of a library one time. I'm going to use the new Shakespeare. I learned to carry Shakespeare around. You know you can't read Shakespeare seated. The best way is if you've ever acted in Shakespeare, you know that you have to. You have to carry it around till you learn the lines. And then as you're walking around, you deliver. And if you don't have a kinetic posture of intensity, you're not getting the lines, because the lines transgress the rules of diction in every possible way, because they change according to whoever is saying them, they become something freshly discovered. Just then they're lines so that he's always new. There are versions of the Tempest. I don't know if you've seen the film Paul Mazursky did with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands and Raul Julia. Susan Sarandon it's interesting, but it isn't Shakespeare at all, or Gielgud's Prospero's Books. There's so many versions of The Tempest, none of them are Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Tempest is interesting. He comes in, the quality of the play is almost over, and he's speaking with his spirit. The spirit that he freed spirits name is Ariel. In one line he says, Ariel is a spirit so pure that when he ascends, he shoots straight up out of sight. So that aerial is the polar opposite to Caliban, the blotched wild monster, and Ariel the pure high note of freedom, the final million eyes and we, as in free whistles, out of sight. Ariel is the conscious transform of puck. Puck is Earth's spirit that likes to play pranks because he's a little boy. He's a little boy prankster trickster. The most beautiful presentation of a midsummer Night's Dream was a film done in 1935. Max Reinhardt and Puck was played by a very young Mickey Rooney. And just exquisite. You can. You can find it. You can see it. So Ariel and Prospero. Act five is just one scene. Act four, in fact, is just one scene. So there's like a three act play, and then there's a fourth scene, which is an act. There's a fifth act, which is a scene, and then there's an epilogue. The epilogue is like an exclamation mark. It's like om and part is saying om is the silent exclamation at the end. And if you don't say it that way, nothing is real. All you did was utter something. But if you say it that way. Then something comes into play in nature that was not there before. It's called cosmic peace. And in order to repeat that, it's not just peace in the Upanishads, it's always put into triplicate. Shanti Shanti Shanti. Peace, peace, peace. Meaning not just peace and not just super peace, but peace that passes understanding nevertheless is real. And when that is real, the context of openness allows all of us to be exactly who we are without any kind of inflation whatsoever. And we discover that we are real as we really are, and not just some modification of some game theory, however complex. In the fifth act, Prospero comes out. And he is saying to Ariel that your time of obeying my orders is through, because I'm going to do two things. I'm going to take away my magic powers because I'm going to take off my magic costume, my hat and my robe, and I'm going to take my magic book, which I've used. And he says to Ariel, I will drop it so deep that no anchor is ever plumb to those depths of the sea. Where does that come from? That kind of language, that kind of magician's hat. The pointed conical hat with the stars and the crescent moon on it, and the long frock gown, the kaftan, always identified with magicians. Not in the European tradition before 1200 1200 A.D.. Merlin never wore that kind of a costume. That kind of a costume was first worn about 1200 A.D. by a man named Michael Scott. And Michael Scott was the wise man to Frederick II Hohenstaufen, who had the Kingdom of Naples and several other European territories. And he came into contact in the late 1100s. In the early 1200s he came into contact with Iranian wise men, the Magi, and it was because of wearing the costume of an Iranian wise man that Michael Scott was the first European to wear that magician's costume, the pointed conical hat and the the gown. 200 years after Michael Scott in 1200 comes. Chaucer in 1400. 200 years later. As Shakespeare in the Tempest. 200 years later as Shelley in The Prometheus Unbound. 200 years later as us. All of us here. So there's like 800 years or 1000 years of continuity of an energy wave that runs through history, of a frequency that's maintained in a wisdom kind of a cycle, because it's not like Ariel disappears from time to time, but nevertheless can be heard for someone who can listen in the silence. Prospero says. You, ye Elves of hills and brooks and standing lakes and groves. And ye that on the sands without printed foot do chaff the ebbing Neptune. And do fly him when he comes back. You demi puppets that by moonshine do the green flower ringlets make whereof the ewe not bites. The ewe is the sheep, the sacrificial lamb. And you, whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms that rejoice. To hear the solemn curfew. Why would they rejoice? To hear the solemn curfew? Because it means all the physical beings in the world are going to sleep. And the supernatural beings can play that. This kind of energy, that magic mushroom energy coming from after the solemn curfew. By whose aid? Weak masters, though ye be I have bedimmed. The noontide sun called forth the mutinous winds. And twixt the green sea. And the azure vault set. Roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder. Have I given fire. And rusted jove's stowed oak with his own bolt. The strong based promontory. Have I made shake. And the spurs pluck up. The pine and cedar graves at my command. Have waked their sleepers opened and let them forth by so potent my art. But this rough magic some. I here abjure. And when I have required more heavenly music. Which even now I do. To work mine end upon their senses. That this airy charm is for I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth. And deeper than ever plummet sound. I'll drown my book. So that there is a hidden in here a very curious kind of quality. The most powerful context of magic in Shakespeare's day was not the alchemists, they were just a very small fringe number of people. And it was not even royal power, but it was church power, church empire power, and by staff. He's speaking of the crozier of papal authority, and by the book he's speaking of the holy book in the sense that there is only one book, that misconception. It's a curious thing because Shakespeare was raised a Catholic, that he grew up understanding the precariousness. One of the little vignettes in the Shakespeare household when he was a boy, he was told, you have to watch out now. The Protestants still remember when Queen Mary, a Catholic queen, burnt Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the stake for being a Protestant. When they get in power, they will kill us, in which, of course they did. Shakespeare was trying to say that there is such a thing as a heavenly harmony beyond all empires, no matter who has what kind of staff, of what kind of authority, and who has a book, no matter what kind of a book that there is. To paraphrase Solomon and Saint John, if all the books that could be written were written, the world is not big enough to hold them. So more next week.