Vision 11

This is vision 11. The title is Epiphanies Evaporate. Rituals. Epiphanies belong to vision. Epiphany is a word was reintroduced into English literature by James Joyce especially. It's an old word. It comes from the archaic world. It comes from the pre-classical world. An epiphany is a disclosure not by seeing out, but by seeing in. And ever since civilization began to condition how we see, we have progressively, from age to age, lost the ability to have epiphanic revelations. And from age to age they are rediscovered. The technique is rediscovered. When we look out, our stereoptic vision focuses on an object, on a point. Ostensibly, although it's not very refined. Usually we focus on some kind of a delimited field, which we then assign the name that this form. This is a Box. You can refine your perception to see accurately to any degree of specificity. The external vision can be trained so that you can see the old Sanskrit word for it was ekagrata. You can see single pointedly, and of course in the high Dharma, you can see so accurately that the point disintegrates into its component whirl, and you lose the form. You see exactly nothing. And this seeing exactly nothing has a quality whereby it is indistinguishable from the general cosmic context of the interior. Seeing interior. Seeing in civilized millennia is all conditioned by exterior seeing. We are used to seeing shapes and named objects forms. And so when we look within. When our ability to imagine begins, we ape the external seeing and we look to see images within. We look to see forms within. And we assume that these forms in our mind, these mental forms, these mental images must have a correspondence to exterior Images, exterior forms. And so what is born is the general notion of referentiality and the idea of identity. That that object out there is identical to the object in here. And this then is the basis of proceeding logically. That the clarity of seeing the object and the clarity of having the interior image of it matching gives the referential notion of correspondence the supposed accuracy of identity. And that one could put it into a universal form where you see. Not any thing in general or anything in particular, but you see only a and you have in your mind exactly the a and so A equals a supposedly is the criteria for logical assessment of reality. And all of this, the entire ecology of that is fraught with assumption and is both in nature and in reality. Untrue isn't ever true, is only true to the extent that one limits oneself to a mental referentiality to a material idea of external form. Yeah, it's a notorious problem. Epiphany in archaic times, before civilization was the ability to look at a complexity and not at anything in particular, and let the enormity of the complexity disclose to you its infinite variety. And that one then looked with wonder, and the ancient portrayals of human beings that would look this way would have very large eyes. Owl eyes, like Athena's great symbol, was the opened eyed owl, the owl of wisdom that one has learned to see. Not exactly, but cosmically. And so an epiphany is the ability to recover this primordiality of stopping to look with acculturated, conditioned eyes and to look with completely mysterious natural seeing, and that this mysterious natural seeing has indeed, it's a concomitant in the interior vision, because rather than looking to see with stereoptic eyes that focus objectively within. The mind in its natural integral is made not to see stereo optically, objectively, but to see say objectively in such a way that it sees all, it sees an illness. It sees an illness not of all the stars together so much that any particular star or grouping or the entirety of the night sky would be seen in its illness. That is, its total ness is a resonance around whatever it is that one sees. And this is characteristic of vision. That when vision occurs in a natural transform, consciousness purely is not an abstracting function. Consciousness is a visionary illness, so that when one looks visionary, the more that one would look at something, the more you would see it would disclose more and more of its interconnectedness, and you would see more and more detail in the American Indian testimony of Black Elk. Black Elk speaks. He is later in life traveling Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and he has this epiphany that something is wrong in his native land and his villages, in the circle of teepees and the Black Hills of South Dakota. And he goes into this visionary, not trance, but visionary mode of being a great eagle flying over the Black Hills area and wherever his seeing as this visionary eagle looks, he can see in more and more detail in greater and greater depth, so that vision consciousness has a complementarity to nature, a complementarity which has a very peculiar tone because it is a complementarity nature replaces progressively as one uses it, the function of the phase of nature in the square of attention, so that instead of having a square of attention in an integral comportment towards life of nature, ritual, myth and symbol, vision comes in, and all complementarities exchange with each other Without losing a hitch. Without changing the sequence, but with introducing a transform into the way in which the sequence um, uh generates itself. And so ritual generates itself out of vision rather than nature. Myth still generates out of ritual, but if ritual has been transformed by vision, then the myth is parallel to the vision rather than parallel to nature and the process of feeling tone. Sentience matures out of the transformed ritual rather than out of ritual existence, which comes out of nature. All of this becomes exacerbated because the mind, when it symbolizes interiorize, the language form of feeling toned experience into a symbolic meaningfulness within. And this is a very dangerous, perilous kind of integral then, because it tends to want to supplant the natural with an alternative and the alternative characteristically. In civilized parlance, is magic. And so there is a problem that consciousness brings in the peril of magical supernaturalism, which will obviate the natural. Displace it. Erase it. And so all Indigo programs of authority are fearful of consciousness, because it's always mistaken as a kind of a magic which we cannot control, which could take away our power to control. And of course, the best defense is an act of offense. So all civilized authoritarian structures seek to preemptively appropriate the magic for themselves. We own the ritual sequences, we own the ceremonies. And so all of the magical possibilities are included in our empire. And of course, the great historical example of Um, absolutely bald faced. And its power play was the founding of the Roman Empire by Augustus Caesar. He made sure that all the sources of vision available to anyone in the Roman Empire were in the city of Rome, in a special temple built to hold them in the Foro Romano, and that he not only had it built and designed by Agrippa, his number one general and architect, but that all of this activity was synched with the ability to control the magic. So any scrap of visionary text, any oracle, especially the Sibylline Oracles that had to do with the founding of Rome itself were all confiscated under penalty of death. If anyone kept a scrap of prophecy back, you were killed and it was confiscated. It was taken to Rome so that all prophecy was hoarded in Rome in one place. And this was the ultimate guarantee that your political power was fixed for all time. And thus Rome became an became the not and the the eternal city. And for the first time in this planet's history, a city came to symbolize the ultimate magical, visionary control of the entire range of possibilities of a square of attention, of a range of application of an authority of power. What jeopardizes this ecology of appropriation is art. Because art is outside of the purview of even a magic empire. A magic authority. And what is difficult is that a political structure has no ability to curb the ability of an artist to bring out of magical vision their own forms, their own works of art. And so art is always the deepest enemy of political tyranny. Political tyrannies never fear competing factions so much as they fear a single artist Because a single artist can steal their thunder, can steal their magic, and they know that that's their Achilles heel. Because the magical realm is not integrable with ritual, myth and symbol, or even with nature. Because it is. It belongs to a differential mode, and you cannot commandeer it by any process of integration whatsoever. Consciousness remains wild. It's a wild card. Always. You can only hold control of a deck that contains a wild card by cheating. You have to then make the process not that you beat the odds, but that you must beat the dealer. And of course, the greatest book on Poker. The title of it is Beat the Dealer. You don't play against the odds. You play against the dealer. And this is the key. If you play against the dealer, you raise gambling out of a mythic process and bring it into a technique that's an art. And you can master the array of probabilities as an artist. Gambler so that you can beat a dealer. You can always. You can always beat the house. And of course, every casino in the world has a list of people that are not allowed to play because they can beat the house. And there are great gamblers who have learned how to win, and they always win in the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata. A professional gambler is brought in by a competing faction because they know that he will never lose. And the great victory of the Pandavas over this competing faction for the kingdom is not solved by a great war, but solved by the fact that Yoshitha learns how to gamble so he cannot lose. And he beats the professional gambler so that even a sage like Vyasa 4000 years ago in India understood the play of consciousness can be raised to a fine art. And what is the art in such a thing? That the conscious gambler becomes an artist that controls the process, so that he is no longer subject to the ritual limitations, The ritual rules of the game are completely evaporated by the power of the artist coming out of his conscious technique, and in this way, epiphanies evaporate. Rituals. You can learn to play in a cosmic scale, where the limited scale of mere rules of engagement can never entrap you. You always can color outside the lines. And so empires fear the free conscious artist more than any other thing. This is a this is a problem that Shakespeare especially addressed towards the end of his life in his play The Tempest. And it's a problem that the young maturing Shelley At what turned out to be the end of his life at 29. Addressed in Prometheus Unbound. The two things that we're using together here. We're using them together to help us understand how vision not works. If one just simply understood how vision works, you would be co-opted without even knowing into a subconscious assumption of identities and contextuality and eventually political parties. And to mistake aesthetics for politics is the very root of empires retaining their what are they? They call it suzerainty. They control over Competition. The first thing that Stalin did in communist Soviet Union, different from Lenin, was to make sure that he got a political esthetician to control the artists in Russia, because the Russian artists were some of the greatest artists that the world has ever seen. Russian artists of the time included Marc Chagall and Vasily Kandinsky, among others. Stravinsky. Russian artists at the beginning of the 20th century were some of the most courageous artists of all time, and as a group, it's a it's a who's who list. And so Stalin made sure that the artists were curtailed. The state Aestheticians name was Plekhanov, and he brought in the ploy. Art can only produce to support the position of the authority of the state. And of course, as soon as Plekhanov began to do this for the Soviet Union, the Third Reich in Germany said, oh, that's right, we better cover this. And so degenerate art became the number one scapegoat before the Jews. Degenerate artists. Max Ernst out. Uh, Max Nix is probably from that era. The artist becomes a needle who is capable, in and of themselves, to prick the bubble of authority, to puncture it, and once punctured, the bubble of authority cannot be regenerated. This is a not a universal rule. It is a cosmic principle. Once The personal spiritual penetration of the unreal occurs. The unreal cannot ever reconstitute itself and what is on the way to freedom. The first saying is that not everything is good. Everything is much worse because the protective bubble is gone. The illusion that things are not that bad is gone, and one sees for the first time that not only are things bad, everything is bad and that you are the worst. And so the first thing in enlightenment is to overcome the absolute despair and not commit suicide. This, um, this quality haunted the old Shakespeare and the young Shelley. Both of them together. Um, bring in a capsule about 200 years. It's like a parentheses. Shakespeare's Tempest was written in 1612, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, written in 1820. And if you take a look at the development of society and of history and of human freedom in that time period, what occurs most poignantly is that in that 200 plus years was the development of modern science. The deepest issue in science is not that of establishing tables of identity. The deepest issue in science is to establish an epiphany of the cosmos. That one sees clearly and truly the entirety of what is, and that anything less than that is usually a program dictated by sponsors and kowtowed to by groups seeking to keep their funding going so that there's very little science in the world. Mostly it's institutional graft. And it's this kind of quality and problem that Shakespeare raises for the first time, for the first adequate time in world history. When Shakespeare was writing The Tempest towards the end of his career. It was so new, the penetration was so radically piercing of the veils, the bubbles of authority, that many persons of the time were unknowing that it was anything other than a fabulous entertainment. And for quite a long time, in fact, right up until the 20th century, very few people were able to look at Shakespeare's The Tempest as Shakespeare's The Tempest. They saw versions of it. They saw varieties that were conditioned by the cultural mores of their time, by the political exigencies, of their immediate context. And all of this goes right up until almost to today. Almost to today. The. This is every year they put out a Shakespeare survey. I think it's up to 50 some issues. This is Shakespeare survey number 43, 1990 Cambridge University Press. The problem here. Reading The Tempest. My subject is The Tempest, how it has been read recently and how it might be read otherwise. My vehicle for approaching this subject is the poetic style, its most minute formal details. My immediate purpose is to read The Tempest in a way that offers an alternative to, and an implicit critique of, certain readings produced by American New Historicism, all capitalized and British cultural materialism all capitalized. My aim is to discover uses for stylistic criticism that will reassert the value of textuality in a non-textual phase of criticism, and that may contribute to the reconciliation of text and context, the aesthetic and the political. And if one reads this with a little more than academic consciousness, you can see how the writer is co-opted without even knowing that he's co-opted. And it's very much. We used to call it in the 60s, the game of parentheses. Just because you move the parenthetical conflict over doesn't mean that you have rid yourself of the game of parentheses. That's a Transposition, not a transformation, and almost all cultural activity since Shakespeare's time has been a chessboard of transpositional arrangements to make sure that you have the power moves on your side, and that entire game is an illusion. All the players, all the moves, the entirety of that game is an illusion, has no bearing on what is real at all. Yes, that means about 400 years of supposed history is largely irrelevant. Indeed, later on, this very intelligent writer 1990, Tries to bring his application of keeping away from American New Historicism or British cultural materialism, and to go into the way in which the text and its context unfortunately identified as aesthetic and political. But how text and context, how form and background play out in this most mature Shakespeare. And we have to understand that by the time of the writing of The Tempest, Shakespeare was so monumental as to almost baffle assessment. There are two plays by Shakespeare that all the scholarship of 400 years has failed to find the originals of a midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. And so the reluctant consensus of scholars is that they must be from the artists himself, that these plays must have originated with Shakespeare himself. And it's interesting because those two plays, more than any other plays in the canon of Shakespeare's plays, deal with magic. Midsummer Night's Dream deals with the magic of love, the way in which pairings in love engender a complexity which evaporates when the ritual assumptions are seen through. And the alignment of the pairs. In a midsummer Night's Dream there are four pairs, so you have eight figures that align in four pairs, which makes an octave, Which makes a set which can be used as a key for an instrument, like the piano or music or an ogdoad. And so a midsummer Night's Dream is a great vision of the healing power of love as a conscious process that is, a transformation of mythic figures. Midsummer Night's Dream is all about how myth transforms into the magic of a midsummer Night's Dream, and the great protagonist in that is puck. Puck, whose favorite motto in a midsummer Night's Dream is what fools these mortals be. You put a little juice from an herb on their eyes and they fall in love with an ass. The Tempest comes at the end of Shakespeare's life. The Midsummer Night's Dream came when he was young. He was in his 20s and was first in London, and when Shakespeare came to London first, he had a whole sheaf of plays that he had written when he was a tutor for one of the great Lancastrian houses in the Midlands of England. But he couldn't get into London society because everyone he had it cornered. All the playwrights were very famous and they were a hard drinking guys, and they didn't want to talk to anybody from the boondocks. So Shakespeare, in this fantastic, beautiful way that he had saw an end that nobody had covered. He began a service of parking the horses because people had to ride out from London a little ways to get to the theaters, and he got the concession for parking the horses of the nobles, and when they would, he would be parking their horses. He would slip them pages of his script, and they would after a while, people said, you know, this is kind of interesting. Let's take a look at this guy. And that's how Shakespeare's career began. He was a groom in a very paradoxical way. He was a groom courting the great with his language. In Midsummer Night's Dream was one of his first plays. The Tempest comes at the end of his life. It's the last great play that he wrote. And in The Tempest, as our erstwhile expert says, The Tempest thus addresses itself directly to the problem of language and meaning. About which it registers extremely serious doubts. What would be the serious doubts? That anyone can learn to speak the truth? As Pilate would say, what is truth? And the difficulty is that as one learns to play cleverly the transpositional game of shifting parentheses, you become more and more convinced that there is no such thing as truth, only relative qualities of positioning. And this, of course, folds in very nicely to the power plays, especially of empires that have commandeered the magic. The current Walt Disney Studios to forestall a lawsuit. We won't name any names is very different from the Walt Disney Studios. When Walt was around, the original Walt Disney Studios were full of magic. It was a magic kingdom over on Hyperion Street in Silverlake. But the Walt Disney studio empire today is one of the hugest businesses there is for entertainment. And it's not about magic. It's about power. A friend of mine went over one time, and she said she kept losing her step because the plush carpeting was six inches deep in one of the offices, and she couldn't step. They want you not only to take off your shoes, but your legs. Our friend erstwhile academic friend then quotes from The Tempest. Quotes. Caliban, he says, denied or delayed communication. Denied or delayed communication. Instead of saying something directly, you go indirectly. But if you go indirectly, the fractal tendency is to keep going more and more indirectly. And if you delay, the delay becomes a limbo which becomes permanent. So that in an odd way, only truth is direct, and any kind of allaying of truth falls prey to either a limbo of no movement whatsoever, or a confusion of restlessness where you're always going, but you never get anywhere. These are polarities, so that the world of falsity is a perfectly modulated nightmare of polarization, where on one side you're frozen and on the other side you're heated up to an ultimate restlessness. And these are the two versions of hell. The Old Norse hell was cold and the English hell was hot. And these are both functions of that polarity where truth is obviated. Our position is something like that described by Caliban and his most memorable speech. And then he quotes. Be not afeard. The island is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments will hum about mine ears and sometimes voices. That if I then had waked after long sleep, would make me sleep again. And then in dreaming the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me. That when I waked I cried to dream again. It's like the land of the ultimate lotus eaters. It's an addiction to being addicted, and that any kind of broaching of consciousness, of waking up is seen as the jeopardy! Robert Graves has shown. He then quotes from Robert Graves book The White Goddess, Subtitled The White Goddess, is a grammar of poetic myth. Robert Graves has shown that the confusion of tenses contributes to a feeling of arrested time, so that if you go into a frozen limbo, there is an arrested sense of time, and if you go into a restlessness that confuses time, senses, it also produces the feeling tone of arrested time. And those two versions of Arrested Time to the ego are repose there, like a contemplative repose that one would have with an equanimity within, so that you are baffled by an ultimate kind of bubble. You think that you are at ease when you are most deluded. Next week is vision 12, and that means that we will have completed our process of inquiry into the phase of vision and be ready for the next phase that generates itself out of vision, and the next phase is art. There is an enormous joy that came to Palaeolithic men and women to discover that their hand could reach out with a bit of burnt wood or smeared mineral, and make images of the animals. Deep inside the earth in a cave of their whole life. Sustenance, tapestry from outside. There's something deeply satisfying and transforming about art as it came into disclosure for our species about 40,000 years ago. There was no art before that. There was craft, but no art. And there's something truly magnificent in the mysteriousness that the first images did not record on the ceilings of walls of the mind. But on the ceilings and walls of caves under the earth, so that Paleolithic men and women were enormously refined in their reality. Not in realism, but in being real. And to put the first images not in the mind, but on the walls of caves under the earth, in a hidden womb of the mother of us all, to put the birth of art there, those embryonic forms, those images. And everywhere that you find the images of animals, you find the hand, you find the synthesizing symbol not a mental symbol, but a symbol which occurs in the Paleolithic mind, which was not to register in an interior space, but to register in the conscious act of doing, of placing that hand on the wall. And of course, one of the earmarks of that is that it occurs in a complementarity that the hand occurs as the hand, but it also occurs as the stencil of the hand removed, so that both the hand and the stencilled space of the removal of the hand, the blowing of the pigment of the manganese oxide salivated and blown onto the form. And then you take the hand away and you leave a stencil both what is there and what is not there. As complementarity forms and art emerges not just as an integral form, but as a differential form which has the both aspects. It has the tau and the t in liveliness together. That great revelation for it is a revelation. It's a revelation that the artist is objective, that the artist is able to make forms, not forms like nature makes, which are integral, but forms like an artist makes, which are differential. They're like prisons and they disclose a whole spectrum of possibility so that Paleolithic, Paleolithic art discloses a range of possibility. So that art forms are not at all existential forms. They're not ritual forms. And that's why art has nothing to do with ritual. And just as when vision comes into play and displaces nature so that consciousness has a supernatural base. And works with ritual and myth and symbol. In nature's place. In nature's place. In the phase form ecology of the square of attention. So when art comes into play, it takes the place of ritual. So that the use of ritual magic is a very dulling, unconscious sabotage of the very process of differential emergence and, quote, bad because of that. Not just that it makes people superstitious, but that it makes regressive something that would be a natural recursion, and that is the bringing of art into life. That art is indispensable because it is the first conscious form, the first conscious form as a differential form, and that differential form of the personal art, that personal prism of possibilities. Is our sighting of being able to finally appreciate the form of the cosmos. Because the cosmos is also a differential form, not an integral form. No one ever integrated the cosmos. That's why there's no graven image that can take the place. There is also no graven symbol. As soon as you have a symbol for God, you've lost God for sure. So that the alignment of the person and the cosmos is an alignment of scales, of prismatic possibility. And the cosmos is always infinite. And complements the mysteriousness of nature, as one would say, in a high perfection, to a degree of any specificity that one would like. So when we come to art, the first pair of books that we're going to look at. One, a book by an artist, Kandinsky's great 1913 publication concerning the spiritual in art. And the other is a book on Rembrandt's self-portraits. Very few artists since the Paleolithic period have ever been as conscious as Rembrandt, and his series of portraits throughout his life disclose an incredible, limpid beauty of appreciative reality, which is one of the great healing graces of world civilization. So with Kandinsky and Rembrandt, we start art. But the most difficult pair will be the third pair. In every phase there are three pairs. Three pairs not of books, not of texts, not of codex, but three pairs of readings which we use as carrying around with us in a kind of talismanic way. I remember once a woman named Helen White. She was one of the world's great English teachers of mystical English poets. She was at the University of Wisconsin, where I was. I was about 17 or 18. I lived down the street from her. She used to have us in her living room at night and drink wine and talk about mystical poets like George Herbert and John Donne. She said When she was a girl that people used to carry around James Joyce's Ulysses. Not so much to read, but to carry as a talisman of their having come of age. That they no longer belonged to a dead past, but were part of an emerging, conscious present, where in the possibilities of the future were real. You cannot get to the future from the past. You can only generate a future from a present. And so if you can't come present, there is no future. And that's why consciousness needs to wean itself from ritual and enjoy art. What is the great social function of art? It's the pitch pipe by which we adjust to the personal spiritual Possibilities of the cosmos. The final pair in art will be Schiller's Great Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and Stravinsky's Poetics of Music. And Stravinsky and Schiller together give us a very good talismanic pair to carry around for a month. Each one of these pairs of of readings we keep for a month a cycle of a moon. So it's like three moons. Each phase is three moons. Paleolithic talk. Because once one has three three moons, once one has a beginning, a middle, and an end, you get a sense of the plotting of a movement, plotting of emotion. But whereas in the first year, in the integral mode, that beginning, middle, and an end are accumulative in an integral way. In the second year they are dispersals so that the beginning, the middle and the end are further openings up into further possibilities, so that by the time we get to Stravinsky and Schiller, my task is to present art in such a way that you would be filled with wonder that there is not world enough in time to investigate the possibilities. And so to now with Shakespeare and Shelley, with The Tempest and Prometheus Unbound. That vision is not something to be understood. There is no idea of vision as profound as the beginnings of the wonder of exploring the possibilities of vision. Any idea of consciousness subverts consciousness Business itself because consciousness is a process and not a form at all. And what is the great magical qualities of vision is that it parallels not only the mythic feeling toned exercise of language, but also parallels the further differential process of history. Um, once upon a time, men and women who knew how to mean what they said talked about God as the Lord of history even 5000 years ago. The greatest phrase the old Egyptian pyramid text could use is that RA is the Lord of millions of years. Minimally, our sense of this sophistication. Applies to form and style and our Little Quotations from Shakespeare survey 43, 1990, writing on reading The Tempest. The sophisticated effects of form and style in The Tempest bespeak a degree of self-consciousness considerably greater than most recent political readings can admit, a self-awareness that comprehends the issues of politics and power. Central to the colonialist argument, the poetic and structural figures of repetition become directly pertinent figures to a critical debate over the European colonial impulse, when that will to power is regarded as an effort to recreate the self in a new environment. Shakespeare lived at a time, wrote at a time where the new world was not just discovered, as in Columbus Day, and not just conquered as in Cortez's day, but was colonized just beginning to be colonized, to be made in the image of a European realm of empire. It's part of the new empire. We don't just have the Kingdom of England, but we have a British empire. We don't just have the Kingdom of France, we have a French empire. And so the only model of empire at that time that was workable for them was the Roman Empire. And so all of the international European empires of 400 years ago, where their improved versions of the Roman Empire, which was still very current because the Roman Catholic Church is a continuance of the Roman Empire. And so there was great competition between crown and miter, between pope and not just king but emperor. And the most poignant figure in that whole transition was Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the first of England, is the most devastatingly poignant figure in that transition. She was the Augustus Caesar of that whole age, and she was relentlessly magnificent in her determination to secure that authority and that victory for herself and for her forebears. The man most influential to Elizabeth was a man named John Day, who was her personal astrologer, and he earned the right to be her number one adviser in the deepest levels of empire. The commandeering of magical texts, of prophetic texts, of the whole mythological tapestry, the integration of it into powerful symbols, and the use of those symbols to transform the world in ways that we want. Because when John Dee was young, before he was the great Elizabethan magus, the Queen's conjurer, John Dee was the greatest mathematician of his day. Not mathematician and theoretical mathematician. There were French savants who were better than he was at pure, what we would call pure mathematics. But John Dee was a genius at applied mathematics, and he's the first one to find out ways to navigate on the high seas, out of sight of land. And he wrote a mathematical treatise, 1575. And it's that mathematical treatise that allowed for the British Empire to base itself upon a sea going fleet. And so all the shores of the oceans of the world were open ports for British colonization. Primordially there were competitors like Portugal with Henry the Navigator, but it was John Dee's work that cemented it. But it wasn't just for that. John D was also the maker of the visionary mythos, that the British had a right to this kind of world rule, because all the British monarchs were developed from King Arthur, who was not made by power alone, but was made by magic. Arthur is the once and future king. He is made by Merlin, the greatest magician of the ancient world in terms of European continuity, and so John D became the contemporary Merlin, and as Merlin had made King Arthur. John D now would make Queen Elizabeth, and Elizabethan England was convinced that the mathematical navigation of the globe. Most of the globe is water. The globe is a sphere. It is the largest bubble that man is capable of on this planet. And the empire that spans the entirety of the globe, not only 360 degrees, but the entirety of the surface of the globe, is made available by the magic of a kind of a mathematics which not only was good for navigation, but was like a template that had a deeper occult understanding. And if one could understand this universal occult language underneath the mathematics, then you would not only have control of the globe, but of the starry context astrologically affecting the globe. And so John Dee spent the last 30 or 40 years of his life under assignment from Queen Elizabeth. Find the occult language underneath mathematics. Mathematics is how man deals with this world. But deeper than that is the language of angelic communication. Find out how to speak with the angelic language so that we can control also the astrological influences on the planet. And one of the big difficulties that they well knew is that along with angels, that same language is spoken by demons as well. And so there was a great fearfulness and she kept it under cover. And John D, his experiments. Here's a recent publication, published 1984, the Enochian evocation of Doctor John Dee. The language of Enoch, who could speak with angels. And so the angelic occult language of divine terrestrial communication was all locked up in this, and he was assigned a special research place to delve into this. Not in England. It was too risky. It was too potent. Dee's place was at it was called Mortlach, and it was on the Thames River. And it was on the way out to the Thames River, to Richmond, where lots of royal palaces and decisions were made, and it was only a short walk from John Dee's place to the Queen's digs. She wanted him farther away in case in case the demons are contacted Before the angels, and so he was sent to Europe. He was sent to an area that was then associated roughly with Poland or Bohemia, and he was assigned an occult place to do researches into angel magic. And he was assigned the greatest channel psychic channel of the day, Edward Kelly. And they went out there in the late 1580s to try to find a way to harness angel magic. Enochian language Enoch is a figure from early Hellenistic Judaism. About 200 BC, Enoch is the first figure to be able to, in Jewish history, to be able to go through the visionary realms of the heavens and to see the transcendental images of God on his jeweled throne in the heavenly regions, and come back and report on it. In a way, Dante's Divine Comedy is an epic high medieval representation of the Enochian journeys. The Book of Enoch was so completely and perfectly effaced. Why was it effaced? It was effaced in times when the Roman Church took over the Roman Empire, and they didn't want to have this competing magical possibility. So all traces of the Book of Enoch were destroyed. Unfortunately, there was a very far flung Christian enclave out of reach of the Roman Empire, and that was in Ethiopia, and a man named R.H. Charles in the turn of the 20th century did a translation from the Ethiopian Book of Enoch that was found there by a great traveler, Robert Bruce, and brought back into play. And we today have the complete Book of Enoch as it existed about 200 B.C.. What is unfortunate about this is that the experiment blew up, and here is a book published in 1659, of Spirits and Apparitions a True and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Doctor John Dee, a mathematician of great fame, and Queen Elizabeth and King James Rains, and some spirits. And it was the biggest exposé of its time. And it blew up the whole relationship of anyone hoping that there would be another Merlin. And so occult things were banished from the public purview of being associated with royal power. Oh, it still was there because it's a concomitant part. But royal power always then disguised the occult of concerns. They were never talked about openly again. Whereas in Elizabeth's day it was bubbling very near the surface. The man who did this exposé, his name was Méric Casaubon. And his father, Isaac Casaubon, was the man who sabotaged the Hermetic tradition. And he did that. Casaubon was Active in France. He was a kind of a he was an intelligence figure, kind of like a CIA figure for the Protestant Reformation, trying to run a competition to the Catholic Jesuit order. And he sought to find a way to sabotage the sources of power of the Roman church so that Protestant empires could be victorious in this most interesting way. His basic emphasis was on classical historicism, and especially his métier was on the development of satire. And you would think, well, what does satire have to do with it? And of course, it has everything to do with it. It's one of the keys. He left the continent and went to England. He became a naturalized citizen, and he was there from 1610 until his death in 1614, and the Tempest was put out 1611, 1612, right in the middle of it, because Isaac Casaubon, the father of Meric, said with great scholarly aplomb, we know that the Hermetic tradition cannot be ancient, because look at how many parallels there are to the Christian writings. Obviously, they are much later than the Christian writings, which means that they're from the AD centuries. In fact, they must be from the two hundreds or three hundreds or who knows how recent they are. And it never occurred to anyone that maybe the Christian writings. Were versions of the Hermetic writings. Be that as it may, Shakespeare's The Tempest was right in the center of this, and the old Shakespeare remembered not only his youth with a midsummer Night's Dream, but he remembered that the most flamboyant, beautiful character in London when he was a young man was not himself, but was another playwright who had a red beard and carried a dagger, and was a university graduate, and could quote you in Greek or Latin through the longest drinking period, any checks that you wanted. His name was Christopher Marlowe. Who, had he not died in a bar fight, probably would have run Shakespeare a great competition. Marlowe's greatest play was called Doctor Faustus, which took directly the whole magician magic vision, In consciousness theme and brought it into Elizabethan London in a way that everyone was scared at what this might reveal if people started to think too much about it. And so a competitor, the competition always seeks to undo your stuff by coming out with parallels to it ahead of time. It's like the studio politics. Well, if Warner Brothers is making a vampire picture, well, absolutely. We're making a vampire picture released before them. And so Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, when it was realized how potent it was just before it came out, an academic named Robert Greene was hired, and he wrote a exposé of Magus people based on old Roger bacon, Friar Bungay and and Friar Bacon. It was called, and it was rushed out onto the scene and everybody made a great to do about this and Marlowe's play instead of being sabotaged, everyone's appetite was whet by it, and Doctor Faustus, when Shakespeare was young, was a catastrophic epiphany for many people who realized that beneath this power game of mathematics and crowns and scepters and all that is a queasy suspicion that there may be an occult language of magical consciousness that can, in a flash, dissolve the entire world of power, and that this is where the real calibration of value lies. Shakespeare never forgot it, and when it came to the end of his career in The Tempest, he recreates himself. As Prospero, as a figure who had the capacity for a Faustian turn of events, but who also had the capacity to dissolve the magical process not into evaporation, but dissolve it into further differential form of great of great work of art. And the tempest is that it is a play beyond all plays. It is that quality of opera that it's like Richard Wagner when he was writing The Ring Cycle, and he realized when he completed it how enormous the ring cycle was, but that it had missed the fundamental magical transform that was there because he had stayed with the Symbolic organization of mythic stories and figures. And so Wagner left the ring, and he wrote an opera that was completely transcendental in its differential consciousness, showing that the real mystery is in reality of infinite possibilities. And that opera is Parsifal. And the scale is not just a better opera. It's a completely different kind of work of art. It's a work of art, of the individual opening themselves to the cosmos. This quality haunts those who have power in this world, because there's nothing worse than having a population of people who see their power as tired, old, and irrelevant. Nothing hurts more than to have your very children dismiss you as being irrelevant. Your your power is not interesting. Who cares? We want to go and do other things. We don't care how many islands you own. We'd like to go and explore the asteroids and planets and other star systems, so you can have all the colored areas of the world map that you want. There are worlds without end. And so the space program had to be sacrificed. It's too much of a reality. Epiphanies evaporate. Rituals. This whole emphasis on Elizabethan magic or ritual magic, all of this finally had to do, and has to do with language being used In a way which condenses its meaning and its power by symbols. And that symbols not only condense meaning and build power, but have the ability to transform. And that that transformation engenders consciousness. And one of the things that is so fearful is that the consciousness tends to be wild. It tends not to be controllable. It tends to color outside the lines. Consciousness tends to be like the palette of Matisse. It likes to be pure color, and it's not very much concerned whether it's inside the lines or not. It's this kind of an art that bedevils the political realm, and art and politics really don't mix at all. The more that art comes into play, the more that men and women are sensitive to the differential possibilities of life and see that the political wrangling is actually ritual transpositional games and they lose interest in it. This quality occurs also in Shelley here, from the recollections of the last days of Shelley and Byron by an Englishman named Trelawny. He. He wore a fez type hat and a scruffy beard. Someone once said he looked more Arabic than he looked English. It was an adventure, and he happened to be the person who was there when Shelley died, when he was drowned and actually conducted The Old Norse pagan rites of burning the body on a pyre, and also was there two years later when Byron died and performed the same service for Lord Byron, and Trelawny wrote his recollections in 1858. 30 years, 40 years after the events, and then revised them in 1878, when he was in his 80s. And he said this about Shelley. Shelley is certainly a man of most astonishing genius in appearance, extraordinarily young, of manners, mild and amiable, but with all full of life and fun. His wonderful command of language and the ease with which he speaks, and what are generally considered abstruse subjects are striking. In short, his ordinary conversation is akin to poetry. For he sees things in the most singular and pleasing lights. If he wrote as he talked, he would still be popular enough the most imaginative poet of the day. And then later on. 30 years later, he was trying again to get across something ineffable about Shelley. Shelley comes into a room and then asks Shelley what he had in his hand. His face brightened and he answered briskly. Calderon's magico prodigioso. Calderon's a great Spanish playwright. A great he has magico Prodigioso is a play about fantastically huge magic stuff. I am translating, he said some passages in it and the woman says, oh, read it to us. And Trelawney is watching all this and he doesn't quite get well. What is this young kid, Shelley? This is his account of 50 years after the event, and shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents that could not interest him. Shelley was uninterested in ordinary things. He was interested only in magical consciousness to begin with, heading out into deep waters. He was fairly launched on a theme. He instantly became oblivious to everything but the book in his hand. The masterly manner in which he analysed the genius of the author Calderon, Around his lucid, instant interpretation of the story and the ease with which he translated into our language. The most subtle and imaginative passages of the Spanish poet were marvellous, as was his command of the two languages. After this touch of his quality, I no longer doubted his identity. A dead silence ensued. Looking up, I asked, where is he? And the woman said, who? Shelley? Oh! He comes and goes as a spirit. No one knows where or when. Shelley is the Ariel of the Tempest. In fact, Andre Malraux did a biography of Shelley, a very famous biography. A number of decades ago, and he called it Ariel. Ariel was a spirit so pure that he could whistle straight out of sight. And Shelley had that quality, but he was also Prospero. He was that impossible figure that, in Shakespeare's time were two figures that did not, could not mesh because they were not measurables to use the language of chemistry. They weren't miscible. There were two liquids that that don't go together. But Ariel being the same kind of liquid that Prospero is a visionary, liquid, visionary consciousness, a conscious liquid. But we know today, in 21st century chemistry, that liquid has two distinct phases. It has a low density phase, and it has an atomic possibility of having a high density phase so that you could have, as it were, a liquid within a liquid. And Shelley lived at a time 200 years later, where the high density liquid of Ariel had learned to generate itself within the liquid of Prospero. And so Shelley was distinctly a was a conscious phantasm come to life in Elizabethan England? He was an impossible thing. He was two figures, even in the most advanced person of the time. Shakespeare was head, shoulders, waist and ankles, more conscious than almost anybody of his day. But by Shelley's day. Shelley had emerged within that Shakespeare. Like a denser liquid and his language, instead of being a transformational medium of the mythic language which Shakespeare's was, Shakespeare's consciousness came into mythic language and used it to make a new quality of symbol. Shelley's language comes into play and takes symbol and transforms it so that what comes out is a higher quality of history. And it's interesting because Shakespeare transforms the process of myth and mythic language. Shelley aims to transform the process of history. Prometheus Unbound is not just a literary work of art. It is an attempt to change the course of the world. It is a revolutionary, not a political revolutionary, but a conscious, artistic revolutionary. Who are so new on the scene that they're hardly understood at all. Even today, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in a university. But the imagery of these transforms goes down into the popular level. The popular level registers the transforms. It's like the geology of the terrain registers all of the delicacy. Even though one doesn't know all of the isotopic qualities of atomic structure are registered in the rocks, and so to the general population registers the most sophisticated of all developments in consciousness. It's there so that the popular image of Caliban from The Tempest, he's always described as a fish like character, a mutant, the creature from the Black Lagoon. And of course, the big concern with Frankenstein is that he needs to have a bride. And of course, the whole development of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's wedding guest has everything to do with the development of all of these figures, has everything to do not with reconciliation as a symbol thing of integration, but reconciliation in the sense of allowing Incredible supernatural phases of nature to emerge as discoveries of a conscious. Universe. Quite different. It has more dimensions than space and time. It's capable of who knows what and even capable of humor. Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. And of course, not only Frankenstein, but they throw in Dracula and Wolfman. And the whole thing is, is that it's a mystery play was the way in which an ancient mysteries, especially the Pythagorean. You were cautioned. Don't tell anyone what it really means. We won't.