Vision 12

This is vision 12, and it means that we have come to the end of our presentation on vision, and the next phase that emerges out of this will be art. And when we take a look at art for 12 weeks, we'll take a look at art in a way which is by now familiar to us. We'll take three pairs of books, disparate books paired together to give a sense of orientation to themes and a kind of goalposts for what we're looking at in terms of a threshold of increasing our learning, of furthering our education. And our education now is going into deeper waters. We saw in the first year of the two years, in the first year, that as we developed our sense of orientation, that we increasingly integrated what we were doing, and there were several plateaus of integration. And at each of those plateaus, we had an interval. And our first year we began with nature saying that nature was the only realistic context where we could begin, and that we discovered that there was no starting point per se, but there was just the commencing and ongoing of a process. And that that this lack of a starting place in nature was characteristic of nature and has always been characterized as the mystery, the mystery of nature. And we recognized the mysterious ongoingness of nature by beginning with a pair of books. One of them was the I-Ching, and the other was, uh, a series of essays of Henry David Thoreau from his journals. And they were all concerned with walking. And so our first year of education began by acclimating to ourselves that the ongoingness of a walk. We had an exercise where we took walks, three walks, beginning from where we live and going around our neighborhood and coming back. And we did this three different times, modifying in the second and third walks by introducing some primal element like earth, air, water or fire. And that throws walking and the etchings, handling of change, constant change that these characterize the way in which the process of nature actually works, not by principles but by working. And we kept trying to hold off and suspend any kind of conception, any kind of sense of what was going on and just went into the process. And we talked about the way in which a French Thinker, one of the great early anthropologists also involved with early sociology. Lucien Lévy-bruhl. Who said that the original condition of men and women was a participation with nature, and he used the French phrase a participation mystique, and that the early sense of fitting into life was to participate with the mysterious cycle of nature, and that we notice that what came out of nature, emerged out of nature, emerged out of the process of ongoingness, out of the sea of change. Were the forms of physicality, the body, the existential stabilities of objectivity. The objective things, so that the things of this world emerge out of the process of nature. And in this second year, we've been looking not at the process of nature, but at the process of vision. And now art will show us that what comes, what emerges out of vision, is a different kind of object. It's an object that has more than four dimensions. It's an object that minimally has five dimensions because in addition to the three dimensions of space and the four dimension of time, it has a fifth dimension of consciousness, so that forms in art have higher dimensions than the forms in existence. Existential forms. Natural forms are integral only. They occupy space and time to the mutual exclusion of each other. Whereas five dimensional forms, forms in conscious time and space can have a montage of space, they can have a simultaneity of time. And so the polarized mutual exclusion of each other in time space does no longer hold. And so artistic forms have a not only a different dimension, but that their way of emerging is not to integrate. Like existence integrates out of the sea of change, of the mystery of nature that art forms do not integrate. They differentiate that art forms come into being not as bounded integrals, but as resonant differentials, so that the forms that belong to art will be characterized by differential resonance, and that one of the first forms that will pay attention to is that the human person is a differential form, and does not have the limitations of existential materiality. We are used to being told that someone is going to find themselves, is going to find their person, by learning superior methods of integration. Now, there are no more superior methods to integration than mathematics, or very sophisticated high Dharma yoga or prayer without end. And all three of those integrals disclose unanimity lay that there is no object there at the ultimate integration. It's as if a star going to the ultimate of integration disappears into a singularity, surrounded then by a black hole. But at the center of that black hole is a singularity that winks out of time space. So in advanced yoga, The character, the personality that's there on the mythic level that's even there on the level of symbol. Can be integrated to the point of vanishing. The bindu of Sanskrit is that vanishing point, that singularity. And so too we found that this limiting of our sense of person to an integral mode has always been brought into question, especially the last 5 or 6000 years, because the nature of culture, that experience, the realm of experience, the realm of feeling toned, sentience, the intelligence not of the mind, but the intelligence of the heart, The wisdom of the heart. The intelligence of feeling. Toned. Experience that expresses itself so adequately in images that it gives rise to the development of imagination. That this mythic process follows in a very real way the process of nature, so that just as existential bodies emerge and become objective out of nature, so objects of the mind emerge out of the mythic horizon of feeling and language and become quite real, that mental objectivity is as real as physical existentiality, and that indeed there can be alignments between objects that have a ritual Essentiality and objects that have a symbolic mentality, they can be aligned. But we're going to discover that the person does not align with the body and the mind and form a third. There's no such thing as a mythic plot line that goes from body to mind to spirit. It doesn't happen that if that is the scenario, then what you have is not real, but an artifact of symbolic integration and is actually a veil of the mind. And so today's lecture is entitled ideas do not limit consciousness. Like the color scheme of a matisse painting, the colors don't have to stay within the lines. The painting does not have to be realistic, as a correspondence between the mind and the existence that art is a differential resonant form, rather like a prism, and that differential forms are characterized by a range of possibility rather than by a boundedness. And so, instead of looking for a boundary for form in art, we need to acclimate ourselves to finding a visionary process where the emergence of a resonant form allows for increasing possibility. And we're going to use as the center of our beginning Uh, two books. One of them is by Kandinsky, called Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written in 1913, about the time when Kandinsky, one of the great artists of the late 19th early 20th century, when he was beginning to feel the need to express to Non-artists why it was that art was completely different from what they thought it was. And the other book is a book written on Rembrandt's self-portraits published just a few years ago. And Rembrandt and Kandinsky will be our beginning portal of the way in which art emerges differentially out of vision. And that Rembrandt and Kandinsky are great examples for us of highly conscious artists who We're discursive in their art, not about the integral ideas, symbolically about art, but of conveying the resonant possibilities of art leading into a further realm, a realm which we will see traditionally was called the cosmos. That a cosmos is not a universe. The universe is an integrated idea of the entirety of nature, whereas the cosmos is an open ended infinity of possibilities, an open ended infinity of possibilities that could, were it not still active, differentially collapse into a chaos. But because it's generation differentially proceeds through an artist, proceeds through an architect, proceeds through a prism that allows for the originating vision to put its full spectrum of possibilities into play, and even raised to a higher order, to a higher power of differentiation, still maintains its capacity to generate form, not integral form, differential form, not a larger boundedness, but an increased range of possibility, so that the cosmos is an unlimited possibility of as many universes as there needs to be, even imaginary ones. And one of the difficulties in this is the carrying over because of faulty education. Because of a predilection of our current social order. Because of the taste of the culture of the last couple hundred years. We carry over like something that was once very good, the power of the mind to conceive and hold ideas, to see everything, including ourselves, through very powerful ideas synched by symbols. We carry that over into a differential mode, into a differential process. And this does a great disservice to us. One of the reasons of using as the last pair in vision the last pair of books in vision. Shakespeare's last great play, The Tempest, and Shelley's great poetic epic Prometheus Unbound, is that both Shelley and Shakespeare had the capacity of an artistic language able to express differential form, and we're quite clear both in their own time, separated by about 200 years, quite clear about the processes and their works of art. Their respective works of art were the vehicles by which their consciousness expressed themselves, and they were not limited by ideas. One of the great directors of our time, Peter Brook. This little book, it's a lecture, actually. It's just 40 pages evoking Shakespeare. Peter Brook, who has done a number of great films. He was the one who filmed the Mahabharata in. I think the film version runs six hours. The stage version ran nine hours and was put on here in Los Angeles in the Olympic time. Peter Brook, who has directed Shakespeare off and on for nearly half a century in his lecture on evoking Shakespeare, had this to say poignantly for us, even if a concept is something necessary in speech, it is tragically pathetic, as a portion of the amazing whole that speech can offer. Concept is that little thin intellectual strain that the whole of Western civilization has bound, bowed down to excessively for centuries. Concept is there, but beyond concept is the concept brought into life by image and beyond. Concept and image is music and word. Music is the expression of what cannot be caught in conceptual speech. Human experience that cannot be conceptualized as expressed through music and poetry comes out of this because in poetry you have an infinitely subtle relationship between rhythm, tone, vibration, and energy, which give to each word as it is spoken, concept, image, and at the same time an infinitely powerful further dimension which comes from sound, from the verbal music and goes on in this way. A very beautiful way of expressing the distinction. The difference was presented in, I think, the third program of Ken Burns ten part series on jazz. And one of the narrators, the jazz musician named Wynton Marsalis, he was talking about how when jazz was first recorded in the early 1920s, the most one of the most popular musicians in the United States, and his records sold the most of anybody was John Philip Sousa. And so he played a John Philip Sousa theme march theme on his trumpet. Then he played the version that Louis Armstrong played on an early jazz record about the same time. And when he played the Louis Armstrong version, the jazz version of the Sousa theme, you heard what had happened to the integral time signature. The Sousa time signature was in a ritual comportment that allowed for the sound to emerge in its sequenced way, where each beat had its oneness, whereas the Louis Armstrong jazz version, coming out of a New Orleans origination, a Chicago pizzazz style New Orleans jazz and Chicago pizzazz, the syncopation was completely recalibrated so that instead of just having all the ones lined up in a ritual way, there were hiatuses and emphasises that allowed for a skipping and a jumping and a hopping and a looping, so that the ritual theme was now a jazz art riff that had a lot of zeros mixed in with the ones so that you could come in at almost any juncture and take off from the theme from the melody, and go off into an improvisation and come back to it and pick it up exactly where you had left, or pick it up 2 or 3 beats along the way, or not pick it up at all if that was your choice. That jazz allowed for the zeros to be differentially co-present with all the ritual ones, so that the march could now be a jazz work of art. This is exactly the kind of thing that Shakespeare did with drama, and that Shelley did with poetry. The airing out, the making articulate by transforming the time signature. And one of the things that helps us to understand how profound this is. Simple though it sounds, how profound it is, is to consider that time is not a fourth dimension, but the first dimension. That time is not something added on to space, but that time occurs first and true almost instantly. Space blossoms out of the stem of the time signature, but that space does not blossom out of a signature of ones that are aligned, but out of a one that extends itself indefinitely. So that time has the capacity of being one. That its primordiality is not a series of ones, but is simply one. And that in that long slide of oneness, space blossoms and can be integrated so that along with that oneness of time, there is a oneness of space. And it's that oneness of time, space that is a universe. And that Christmas can come out of that as a fifth dimension, but especially can occur as a complementarity to the first dimension, time and exchange with it so that one can have such a thing as a conscious space that is timeless without time. And we saw when we were in the symbol section that a writer like Virginia Woolf created in many of her great stream of consciousness novels like To the Lighthouse, created moments of timelessness within her work of art that Mrs. Ramsey, as one of the figures, one of the characters in her novel, created this not in paintings or in writings like Virginia Woolf, paintings like one of the characters, Lily Briscoe, Go, or the writer herself, Virginia Woolf, but that the character Mrs. Ramsay created these timeless moments, these eternal moments in life, that she was the creative artist for her entire family and all of her friends. She was an artist in life and did this in Livingness and that Virginia Woolf. Though she could do this in writing, she was in awe of her character, Mrs. Ramsay, or a later character, Mrs. Dalloway, who did the very similar thing that the writer was in awe of her own character because the writer could not do this in her own life, though she came very close to it from time to time. Virginia Woolf and her life was the center inspirational pivot around which the Bloomsbury Group in London collected people, disparate people like T.S. Eliot and John Maynard Keynes and Clive Bell, and a whole coterie of artists and thinkers and writers clustered around her place. She and Leonard Woolf's place near the British Museum in London in that time. What is the coherence? The coherence is that consciousness emerges differentially, not out of time, so that what characterizes consciousness is not that it is a long time durational survivor through space, but that consciousness is a process that occurs in. And here we get caught because we have to go back to an idea. We have to go back to a word which we take largely as an idea. But the idea and the word are descriptive differentials of a dimensionless continuum, and the word is called eternity. That consciousness is a process of eternity, not of nature. And because consciousness is a process of eternity, what emerges out of conscious vision has a differential capacity of calibration based not on its correspondence to space or its correspondence to time, but on its harmonic with eternity, so that art is a completely different thing from a thing that a human person, a spiritual person, is not a thing at all. And to conceive of a person or the cosmos, or a work of art as a thing which must obey the existential conditions of space and of time, sequencing is a reductive, regressive process. And Shakespeare's The Tempest and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are both exactly about this, presenting 200 years apart. And because we're speaking here about 200 years after Shelley, you've got a sequence of waves of 2000, 1800, 1600. Three waves, 200 years apart, which discloses that there is also a frequency. There's an energy frequency, there's a rhythm to energy, and that rhythm to energy is called dynamic, that there is a differential dynamic that comes into play, and that this is called history. And we will see in our education in about three months that history is not a form in integration at all. There's no such thing as history doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in nature, and it does not exist in the mind either. That history, in fact, is not a form, but is a process, is a further Their process is a further differential process that is a higher order to vision. And just as vision is a differential process, history is a differential process also. But on a much higher energy level, it's dynamic is much higher. And just as the form of a work of art or of a person can emerge out of vision, what can emerge out of history is the cosmos. Not the cosmos, but all cosmos, any and all or none. And this is a very confusing, because the vehicle that we depend upon to understand this is the mind, and the mind is an integral form, and it belongs to the ecology of nature. And its focus is best when it doesn't factor differential resonances into its operation. Because as soon as you begin to factor differentials into the mind, the mind must give up its sense of logical clarity. It must give up its excellence and its expertise at aligning existentials and symbol uh into, um, higher integral orders. And the mind must learn humility to do this. And so one of the first things that consciousness brings into play, as we've seen, is it challenges the mind to learn to keep silent, that the ongoingness of the radio station of the mind must be turned off from time to time, from moment to moment. And of course, anyone who begins a process of trying to learn visionary techniques like meditation, or like prayer, or like higher forms of trance, or just simply real natural magic, um, it is a difficult thing to learn that silence is golden and that those zeros, those intervals, those spaces of not saying are just as important in delineating. What do they delineate? Do they they do not delineate further details of the form, but they delineate the A frequency troughs of the energy process of differentiation, so that consciousness is not just conscious as the mind supposes it, to be conscious of every little bit, but that every little bit has a zero that matches its one. To put it in a computer, talk for a second, that there is no such thing as a series of ones without the articulate spacing that goes with it. Otherwise the ones blur together and make we use a musical term here. They make a trill. They do make a trill. So that 2500 years ago, when there was a man in India who was a classic super Yogi, he was the greatest meditator of his generation, in fact, the greatest meditator, probably for several thousand years in ancient India. And in his practice to bring the mind to a single pointedness which he was successful at. He found that each moment of thought. The Sanskrit term that he used 2500 years ago was a cheetah, a cheetah, Sita. And later it became Bodhichitta because the meditator was the Buddha, the historical Buddha, and the Bodhichitta. The atom of thought has 16 parts, but only eight of those 16 parts are able to be discursively counted. The other eight always occur as a trill. They do not have anything but a blur, and it's as if those other eight are always sounded as a chord whereas the previous eight can always be counted. And yet for each moment of thought, you cannot just say in short form that there are eight discursive elements plus one trill, making nine. In the West we called it nine and Plotinus. This is the Aeneid, that atom of thought which consciousness is able to entertain, consciousness being the background against. One can find the atomic structure of the objectivity of thought in the West. We gave it a nine. In Asia it was given 16. So that when you see an ancient wheel of Truth. It generally would have, in the popular parlance, 16 spokes. And yet because of the trill, you will see eight spokes that are emphasized, and the eight spaces in between are not emphasized. And of course, when you see this in motion, it generates in such a way that the rim of that wheel has a phantasmal area, an area of ghosts and demons and angels and all kinds of figures. And when someone looks then at a Tibetan wheel of life, you see this penumbra not of Shadow from a form. But of the illusion. Realm of samsara. Because of the spinning dynamic of that wheel. So that one needs to be freed. Not just in the Western sense, like Ixion being freed from the wheel of birth and death, but to be freed, first of all, from the illusion that the sparks that are generated are real, and that you have to be fearful or covetous, that you have to have faith in it or fear from it. That all of that is irrelevant. That is not of real use at all. And that by concerning yourself to protect yourself or to aggrandize yourself, to go against or before to want to grasp and have, or to not to have any of that realm of illusion that must evaporate first. And so the Asian vision is always to disallow your fantasizing from being a part of the structure, that the structure of the mind is purely integral and has no echo, that one can be very clear in the mind to the point to where there is no resonance, no echo whatsoever. And that when you do that, the structure then that occurs in its fullness is able to be folded into itself, perfectly into zero. And that this was the technique of yoga. This was the way in which it worked. Not just to exercise, that you were in good shape to play better tennis, and not because then you could hold sway over others by manipulating telepathically the images that both terrified them and pleased them. All of this is child's play. All of this is gamesmanship. It's just more arcade in the West. The emphasis was not on the disappearance, but on the further resonances that conscious time space engendered and brought into play. And when that Western influence came into contact with the Buddhism of classical India, it changed the way in which the classical Buddhism of India worked. It went from the old way, the Theravada, to the new way. The Mahayana and the Mahayana is east and west coming together. And the true seed of the development of Mahayana actually comes from Hellenistic Judaism. It's an odd thing, but Shelley and Shakespeare at the apex, what turned out to be the apex of their careers? Shakespeare retiring soon after The Tempest. He went on to write a couple of plays with some other people. One of them was called The Birth of Merlin. But largely, Shakespeare ended with The Tempest. Shelley lived for another couple of years after Prometheus Unbound was brought out, but he drowned. So these two works are at the ends of what became their artistic lives. And in both the concern is with omnipotent power, which is controlled by the mind and its integral powers, and how being freed from that is not possible once the mind has integrated that natural ecology. Once the mind has done that integration, there is no way within that cycle, within that ecology to go outside of it. What goes outside of it is literally standing outside of the form. And as we talked about several months ago, there were three classic ways in which you could do that. You could be scared out of your wits. Terror will do it. You can be Pleasured out of your body. Ecstasies. Ecstasy. We'll do it. And high transformed wisdom will do it also. And that going outside of the form shows like a simple Matisse painting that the colors can play artistically outside of the bounded forms that were assumed to hold them. And that consciousness can whistle even beyond the tune, like in a jazz improvisation. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back.