Art 1

This is art one. And what I was showing you was a diagram that goes back about 4600 years. It comes from ancient Egypt, and it was the mnemonic schemata by which proportion was put into architectural design and the Great Pyramids were built. The origins of this go back to Predynastic Egypt, and it's generally known as the Ujit or the widget. The Eye of Horus. And it is the sacred symbol for the Egyptian civilization. The version that you saw is the left handed eye. There's also a right handed eye, and that right handed eye is the one that I generally have used in my time. But the other mirror of that is the ancient version. The Eye of Horus, divided into its parts into six parts, had as its proportions. The circle has the fraction one half. The. The left part of the eye One half the circle here. One fourth the eyebrow. Here an eighth. Here is a 16th, here is a 32nd, and here is a 64th. So that these proportions were all proportions of one, they were proportions of unity, so that the Egyptian expression of art and of architecture of all process used a base of one. And they one was divided in half. One half of that was divided in half, one half of that was divided in half, and one half of that was divided into half, so that you had a scale of proportion that Ran a 64th, a 32nd, a 16th, an eighth, a fourth, a half, and then all six of those were encompassed by one, by unity, so that you had seven stages, seven phases of proportionate ratio. Doing what was never stated was that all of this emerges out of a zero context, and that the zero plus the seven gives you a notion of an eight quality. If you look at the mythological origins of the Egyptian religion, there's always a pair that has a progression of three other pairs, making four pairs, making an ogdoad making an eight, and those eight emerge from Aton, who has no designation whatsoever, is a zero designation. But the ancient Egyptians never had zero as a designation. The earliest evidence that we possess is a papyrus called the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, found in the 1850s, and it is the. The copy that we have is from about the 1550s BC, and was used still as a template for architectural proportion at that time. But it does go back to the origins of dynastic building in Egypt. Art, even at that time, 5000 years ago, was the way in which form emerges not from nature, but from consciousness. So that when you look at the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, it has designations in it that all things can be known from this, including all the secrets. We're concerned at Art one today of how form emerges from consciousness, and how that complements the way in which form emerges from nature. When form Emerges from nature, the form that objectifies, we call existential. And it's important to realize that art forms are not existential. Art forms complement the existential reality that emerges from nature. They complement in the sense that both together form a whole, which then we would designate as real. Up until the discovery of the kind of form that emerges from consciousness, existentials were considered real existential material forms. The objects of this world were considered the arbiter of reality. We're considered the base. They, in their aggregate, were the unity. But with the discovery that visionary consciousness, like the mystery of nature, is a context out of which emergence is possible, and that what emerges is a form, but that art forms are differential, whereas existential forms are integral, and that they are different in the sense that they may form a complementation, they may together constitute a complementarity, but they also can occur in a polarity. They can occur disjunctively in the sense that bringing them closer together. One increases tension and taking them apart one decreases tension. And so the entire mysteriousness of art is that it has a polarized integral scale for its existential integral mode, but also has a differential conscious mode that complements it. And generally, just as a rule of the thumb runs the other way, the way in which a polarity may become a larger whole in a complementarity requires that the material world accept the operation of a transform, so that transformation is always involved in consciousness. There can be no consciousness. There is no vision. Without the operation of a transform. But what art form makes clear is that initial transform. Is carried to a further transformation. In order to have an art form and to make it easy to. Talk about the second transformation. Following the old alchemical language. We'll call the second transformation a distillation. So that art forms are a distillation. That's how they emerge from consciousness. Whereas existential forms are never a distillation. And they are never a transformation. Their emergence is what we would call physical. Physical. And so the Greek term for physics. Physics doesn't mean that it's there. It means that it is emerging. Emerging only there. And so the physical form is existential. And has a further quality of integration. So that physical form can become psychic form. And this psychic form is the mind's form. The form of symbols. So that in that integral ecology there are two stages of formation that belong to. Integration. One is the physical, the other is the psychic. One is the existential world of material, the other is the inner world of symbols, of mental objects. And among mental objects could be designated something like numbers or something like the constituents of geometry, so that physical and psychic objectivity are capable of an alignment of increasing integration, increasing condensation so that the inner world becomes a greater power of the outer world. Symbols are able to index the material objectivity And in our education. We've been talking about how they emergence into physical objectivity is actually able to be talked about sensibly as the operations of ritual. So if there is such a thing as ritual form and there is such a thing allied to it as symbolic form, and that ritual and symbol work together, they can be aligned together in a movement of integration. And that this movement of integration, this ecology of the integral, the way in which the integral operator increases its effectiveness, that basic motion has a time element to it. And we talked about this at the beginning of last year already, that nature is mysterious. Nature is not. The physical nature is not. The existential nature is the sea of change out of which the existentials come, out of which they emerge, that context, so that nature is always mysterious, and that nature can be talked about only in a kind of a sacred reverence for its zero quality, in that it is a full zero, a full emptiness that allows for one to emerge. And as we talked about last year in our education, one always emerges whole. There's never partial existence. There's always here. It is. It exists so that the emergence of one. It always births whole. It births in oneness, so that all existentially sustaining phenomena share a common denominator of oneness, of unity, so that if one could talk about them as being ratios, they would all be ratios related to one. They would all have this same common denominator, so that existence in the material world is always some portion of that oneness. And that was considered as the arbiter, as the basis of being real, until a self-reflective consciousness discovered that there is another kind of form, Not just the difference of inner form and outer form of physical and psychic, but that somehow the psychic form takes a transformation and comes out with a new capacity, and that new capacity differentiation is able to engender a completely new kind of form, a third form, whereas the first two are integral. The third form is differential, and the classic way of understanding it is that the third form is like a crystal in the sense that it is able to diffract light. It is a crystal in the sense of a primordial prism. And so the way in which the initial tracking of this was was to follow the light. You've heard the phrase that in a in a in a political mystery, you follow the money, and that's how you can tell what's happening. In wisdom traditions, you follow the light. How are they dealing with light? How is it being handled? And a differential form of light in a primordial sense was always the rainbow. The rainbow was a diffracted spectrum, and that diffracted spectrum then had a very special lesson to show, a very special lesson for antiquity. And just to open it up, we'll come back to this in succeeding lectures. This is a book reprinted the ancient tradition of geometric problems, published about 15 years ago by a science publisher in Boston, and the author talks about how the mathematical idea of a locus, a locus being a located point in some system of coordinates, has at its earliest expression in the Greek tradition, uh occurs in one of Aristotle's Um treatises that has survived, called the Meteorologica meteorologists, about weather. He writes, an odd stroke of good fortune has preserved for us a fine example of the synthesis of the locus problem from the late fourth century BC. It is embedded in a section it's called in math alumni. In a section within the discussion on The shape of the rainbow and the Aristotelian Meteorologica. It's in book three, section five. Alumni five of the Meteorologica. Before that little point occurs in Aristotle's discussion, and he doesn't go further into it, because Aristotle was not really, um, fully capable of explicating the rest of that discussion, because the rest of that discussion belonged to the Pythagorean community. And one finds the kind of mathematic that is involved in determining a locus in a rainbow structure has its esoteric aspects to it and belongs more properly in the mature Plato, especially in the Timaeus, or in the great dialogues leading up to up to the Timaeus, the Theaetetus and the sophist. What's important for us is to understand that about 2500 years ago, appearing for the first time in what we would talk about as classic Western thought in the figure of Pythagoras in his mathematical inner teachings. Remember that the Pythagorean was not just a student of knowledge, but was a student of mystical community within which a certain transformation of knowledge occurred. And now we're able to see that that. Transformation of knowledge that occurred within the Pythagorean community had a second transformation as well, so that there were the Greeks as usual. Then there was the community of transform, the mystical community, the Brotherhood, the brethren. All kinds of names have been applied to this kind of human form. That human community who were collected together had a vow of silence, a vow of not using language for a five year period. And during that five year period of not using language, they received the designation within the community A as a level of participation called the hearers. They were able to be hearers of the word and the Greek term for this at the time. Fifth century BC was called acousmatic. Acousmatic one is able to hear, and the silence was enjoined so that the ear could disengage its habitual use of mythic language. Because mythic language not only fills the ear, but fills the eye with what? With symbolic integrals that have a ritual basis so that you only hear and you only see, and thus you only know what you are used to Seeing what you are used to hearing and you cannot see something new, nor can you hear something new. And just to complete it, you cannot taste something new. You cannot feel something new. You cannot smell something new. So that you belong to an integral order that serves the world well but has no application on a transformed level, because the transformed level is completely new. Because it doesn't occur in nature. And so the supernatural, the supranatural, the magical, the mysterious, the conscious, the artistic all occurs as Functions of a transform of the usual and you have to de habituate yourself. And so the akousmatikoi were silent at the end of a five year probation silence. Probation, the akousmatikoi if they had performed that phase and that function right, they were ready then for a transformation within the community. And the transformation was to be able to take the form in your mind, a symbolic form and transform it. So it would be operative in vision, in consciousness. And if you were not able to make a symbol operative, visionary in consciousness, it meant that you just had not completed the silent probation. And you were not admitted to the inner circle. The inner circle. Even the phrase the inner circle. The inner circle comes down to us for 2500 years. The community is a circle. And within that community, within that circle, there is a delimiting of the general world, so that the circle of the community is able to function together, and that that functioning together has a further purpose from just being in the circle, the further purpose being able to get to the center of the circle, and so that the transform was to go from the topographical area of the circle to the center of the circle, to find the center, to find one center, but not one center is an individual, but the entire community of seekers were trying to find their mutual center, their mutual zero. Because it was only through that zero center point that a transform could work. You find it in the architecture of something as massive and as basic and simple as Dante's Divine Comedy. There is no way to get out of hell. There's no way to exit the inferno once you're in it, except by one passage and one passage only. You have to go out through the center. You cannot go back. It's like shark's teeth. You cannot go back. There's no way to go back. And as you go forward, it gets worse and worse. Deeper concentric circles of hell. But if you go deep enough, if your guide can take you to the center, you can exit. Hell, you can exit Inferno. Because hell has, as this community of the damned has no ability to clutch and hold at the center, because the center point is the zero point. It has no way to participate in the functions that are operative elsewhere in the topographical circle. It's like if you have a wheel. A wheel is spinning. But in terms of the dynamic of that wheel, there is a point at which there is no spinning exactly at the center. That central point Accepts something that does not belong to the wheel. It accepts an axle. Now, that axle can be made in such a way as to accept the dynamic of the wheel in turn. But it can also be put into neutral so that it doesn't accept the dynamic of the wheel and does not turn. You can shift into neutral and the dynamic of the wheel. It doesn't matter how horrific it is or how wonderful it is, or how powerful it is, when you're shifted into exact neutral, it has no effect whatsoever. It is at that shift into neutral point at the centre. That transformation can happen. You can transform so that the Pythagorean inner community were called the mathematicae, and they occupied a very special locus within the community they occupied mutually. Together they constituted, in their special aggregate, the center of the community. They were the center so that the transform could work through them. And it's a very curious thing, because in the development of mathematics, a couple of hundred years ago, there was a British mathematician named Hamilton. And in calculus, in higher mathematics, you run across Hamiltonian space where instead of considering a point as just one point, a point can be an infinite number of little points that together constitute that point. Hamiltonian space is a differential space, not an integral space, so that the whole notion of oneness can be disengaged from the point. There is such a thing as training the mind to become so concentrated, so accurate, so specific, that it sees that the point is not just one, but that the point also is able to be zero. So that when it comes to a standard school textbook, we give it to 10th graders around the whole planet today. Euclid's elements. This translation reads A point is that which has no part. The original Greek translates actually that a point is a locus of no dimension. Zero dimension. Now, if you have a zero dimension locus, what transform would it first take? What would be the axial shape that would first go through that point of no dimension? And the answer to that is time. Time because time, despite the 19th century and the 20th century, is not the fourth dimension, but the first. Time is the first. So that one time as a first dimension penetrates through a locus of no dimension. It generates a line. We call it today colloquially a timeline. And the timeline is the first one dimensional shape in the universe, and so a timeline has a curious kind of quality, as the point of no dimension allows a movement through it all. This is very transparent, very invisible, very mysterious. If a locus of no dimension allows for a one dimension moving through it, as long as it moves in an axial way, it generates a timeline, and that timeline blossoms spontaneously with three dimensions of space, so that space blossoms out of time almost instantly. You would be very hard pressed to calibrate time. I think you can get down now below nanosecond and picosecond. But there's still the sense that almost instantly following, say, a picosecond, that you have spatiality. As soon as you have space, you have mass. Yet we can grind fine enough in consciousness now and conscious science to see that there are instances of no mass occurrences. Neutrinos have such a skimpy mass. Such ghostly particles that though it's a blizzard of neutrinos, billions and billions and billions, as Carl Sagan used to say on every little fingernail. And yet they don't occur as far as the world is concerned, nor as far as the integral mind is concerned. They only begin to occur in the mysterious form of art, and they're only detectable consciously in the high Dharma realms of science. But nevertheless, they do exist, but not exist as existentials. They exist as the snow of differential form called the cosmos. They do not emerge from the mystery of nature. They are already the mystery of nature, so that there is a quality where practicality. Flows back into its energy, and that the energy flows back into its zero ness, and that that condensation cannot be accomplished integrally. The only way that it accomplishes itself is to turn itself around and occur differentially, so that no matter how fast your hand can move, the mind is much faster. But no matter how fast your mind moves, insight is that much faster. And no matter how fast insight moves. From the Eye of Horus realm, reality has already occurred even before insight could begin. Thus, art has a very peculiar quality of discovery for us. Art forms always and all the time, everywhere. Present to us all the mysteries of nature going through all the realms of ritual. Emergence into the development of feeling toned experience and the development of mythic language with its interiorization to symbols and the mind, and that transform into consciousness and that distillation into art. All of that is presented all at once, all the time. So we're trying in this education to be like, we're trying to be like nuclear physicists, like those physicists who use a bubble chamber because they can't see fast enough with their physical eye, nor can they think fast enough with their mental acumen, no matter how sophisticated they have to track what happens in a bubble chamber and later on use their analytic vis a vis what happened. What are the paths of energy particle that are disclosed in this? And so our concern here in art for the next three months, including this lecture, the next 12 lectures, is to patiently take a look at this most mysterious process that we are of such stuff that even dreams are not made of it. We are so supernatural compared to dreams, really has to be the true extraterrestrials by far. And what we're trying to do is patiently disclose to ourselves that this Happens most easily, not for an individual, but for a community. That wisdom has a communal prejudice for efficiency, and that it's very difficult for it to happen one at a time. But it is much easier when it happens at least two at a time in a pair, and it's much easier when it happens in a community. So that realization is optimized when you have a very large community, and that this is one of the esoteric principles of democracy. Not that everyone has a vote that's sophomoric, it's that everyone participates in the communal form and can build a transform center together much easier. You have to be almost a superhuman Yogi to do it yourself. A Padmasambhava can do it himself. A Milarepa can do it himself. A Nagarjuna can do it himself. Those kinds of people are so rare as to be almost trace elements. But the numbers of men and women in communities who have transformed number in the tens of millions. And it is possible to have a community now which is planet wide. No one has ever seen the planet transformed. It reminds me, and we're going to take a break. In antiquity, when Plotinus was teaching in Rome, Plotinus was a really super Yogi. And. Someone said to him, you know, in these refined, uh, transformed edges of what you're talking about, you're saying that we have an interior guide who is like a guardian spirit, or sometimes the Greek is translated as a tutorial spirit. It means a hermetic guide teacher spirit within who helps us to go to the center. And being open in that center to accept a motion through us where time transforms into eternity because consciousness is eternal, is not subject to time at all. The spiritual person is not time bound. Their acclimation is an eternity so that they have eternal life. But in order for that to happen, the community is a much better vehicle than trying to train yourself in some kind of super Yogi military way to do it individually, because the very process that leads one to individualism obviates the transparency needed for the transform. So you have to be self-effacing to the nuclear level if you can, self-effacing your quirks go to it. You don't have to wait for anyone. Otherwise, it's better to search together in a community. And this is why most of the great transformations that have happened in art about 100 years ago, though they had their insightful beginnings in individuals. They tended to be schools, they tended to be groups. They tended to be like with Kandinsky, who were taking were taking Kandinsky and Rembrandt as our beginning pair of texts for art. Where I was using pairs of books. We're taking a look at the way in which Kandinsky, born in 1866 and trained in Moscow to be a lawyer, went to an art exhibit in 1895 and displayed on the wall was one of Monet's paintings called haystacks. It's one of a series of six paintings called haystacks. The Getty has a monet haystack painting. You can go and see it here in Los Angeles a Kandinsky. The lawyer looked at it and he was transformed. He was transfixed by the work of art which reached out to him, and he was unprepared for the fact that something in himself reached out and met that work of art, and that that axis of transform emerged out of him in some deep way, and out of the work of art in some deep way, and formed an axis of consciousness, and discovered that as he moved along that axis of conscious relationality between himself and the work of art, that that electric movement along the axis, it lengthwise produced something else that was correlative. It produced a magnetic field circulating around the axis so that he got together an electromagnetic contact with a differential form that pulled out of himself his differential form of person. Let's take a break and we'll come back. And so Plotinus was teaching in Rome in his own house, because that was the ancient Hermetic tradition. He always taught out of where you lived so everyone could see. This is how you are. And someone said, now the tutorial spirit. The guardian spirit you say, is a guide for us. And that that tutorial spirit, that guardian spirit is always one level above where we are. And so as we mature and the guardian spirit brings us up to that level, the guardian spirit then goes to a higher level. And so this ladder of ascent is always we're being guided in the sense of following a path which is ascended like that, and that there are a finite number of levels that one can come up. And the tradition was that there are always seven levels that one can come up. And as one gets then to the sixth level, then your guardian spirit is on the seventh level, and you come to that great maturity where you come to the seventh level and then your guardian spirit is where. And the question was where? Where does the guardian spirit go? Do you join the guardian spirit? And the reply was a little bit curious because it has to do with the way in which musical scales developed in the West. If you go through the musical scales, do re mi fa so la TI do. The eighth note in that scale is a repetition of the first note in that scale. On one level higher so that the scale, the calibration is not so much in a line, but is a line with a zigzag at the end that takes you to a higher level. So that the idea of of a scale is not just that it measures like on a straight line, but that it's measuring accumulates and ends with a step of ascent. You go, you're ready for the next so that the scales, when put together, overlap. The last dough of that octave is the first dough of this octave, so that they overlap so that they do not join, but that they overlap. And so in geometry, one of the basic principles that came down reductively as identity was actually congruent, that these two geometric shapes are the same when they are congruent. When you put this triangle on top of this triangle, they occupy the same triangularity so that it's reductive to think that this triangle equals that triangle. They're not identical. That's a misnomer. That's a mental ideology that's projected, that belongs to centuries later. There's no such thing as that. There was never the understanding. The same way when Plotinus came to express how the guardian spirit then occupies the entirety of those seven in a step higher, that one moves from a guardian spirit of this world to a divine spirit of a higher order. And so they there happened to be a. Magician from Alexandria. Plotinus was born in Egypt and was raised in Alexandria and studied in Alexandria. And so there was this magician, a very good diviner, magician in Rome, and he happened to be there when this lecture was being given. And they said, well, this man specializes in manifesting, um, the spiritual beings. Can we not manifest your guardian angel, your guardian spirit, your tutorial spirit? And so Plotinus, because he was always a teacher, was willing to include himself all the time. So they looked to try to find a sacred space in Rome. And the entire city of Rome. About 2 million people at that time, they're the only consecrated land left in the entire city of Rome was the central space of the Vestal Virgins temple. It was the only sacred space left in Rome. Everything else had been desecrated over the centuries of complex gobbledygook. So they went there and they went into got special permission. Plotinus's students included the Emperor Aurelian and his wife and many senators, so he could go wherever you wanted to go. They went into the temple of the Vestal Virgins, and the Alexandrian magician brought through an evocation, and Plotinus guardian spirit came out and everyone was aghast. They couldn't believe it, because instead of being a guardian, spirit was God. And Plotinus let it stand as the recognition that you're not always making steps. There is such a thing as arriving. So that the Guardian tutorial spirit, the teaching phase is meant to deliver you to yourself exactly at the moment when you are met by divinity. And then that is yours. Not individually so much though it occurs individually, but that it's eternally what it what it is not is existentially, but is cosmically so that cosmic forms are further differentiation of spiritual personal forms. And there's only one cosmos, but not one, as in the unity of the natural integral cycle. But one in the sense of infinite complexity. As Walt Whitman once observed, Mother Nature falls in love with her complement, who is characterized by freedom and variation. So that it's not a question Does God exist? That's sophomoric? What is at stake is not answering such a question, which is a ritual, reductive kind of a question, and can only have an answer which is false all the time, forever. But to bring a transformation of mind into such a prismatic play that one joins the cosmic infinity eternally. Kandinsky and Rembrandt, in their own times and their own ages were the best artists for delivering what Plotinus in his time delivered. And we'll come to Rembrandt, um, next week. More. But I want to concentrate on Kandinsky and not on Kandinsky's theories of art, or on his works of art, but initially with a poem, because the seeing through is related not associatively, but transformatively in a correspondence with hearing. And so one of the great little publications of Kandinsky is called sounds Klange in German. This is published by Yale University Press. Sounds. And it's his poetry meant to Sound to you as an acousmatic in such a way that you can spontaneously see within your mind the form, as it were, a work of art, not on a canvas, but on the basic plane in your mind. So he's delivering a lesson in differential geometry so that it records on a basic plane in your mind, and not on a basic plane in the material world, like a painting would be. Why? Because the basic plane of that painting in the world, you have to do a refinement to be able to get that to the place where it could occur in a symbolic way and then be transformed. Whereas it occurs in the mind initially. The very next step is the transform. So here's the poem. It's called seeing. Oddly enough, a great visual artist writing a poem called seeing. Blue. Blue arose and fell. Sharp thin. Whistled and penetrated, but did not pierce through. Everywhere a rumbling thick brown. Hovered, seemingly for all eternity. Seemingly seemingly. Spread your arms wider, wider, wider, and cover your face with a red cloth. And perhaps it is not yet displaced at all. Only you have displaced yourself. White chink after white chink. And in this white chink, a white chink. In every white chink, a white chink. It is not good that you fail to see the turbid. It is precisely in the turbid that it dwells. And that is where everything begins. There was a crash. This poem appeared in the Dada Review, 1916. Now, anyone familiar with the Hermetic tradition can understand right away that this is the way that the creation is described in the first Hermetic Treatise, the Poimandres, the mind Shepherd. The first thing that happens is out of the mysterious nous comes a falling smokiness that in falling gains incandescence and bursts into light. This is a very peculiar thing. If time is a one dimensional movement, an axial movement, and is the first dimension when it blossoms into the three dimensions of space. One way in which to geometrized that is, that an axial line generates a triangle. And that triangle can occur on a plane, and that plane is actually a surface which can be run through that line. And that that line itself is not a line so much as the movement of a point. And so Kandinsky, after he wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912, 14 years later, by 1926, Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus, and he wrote a sequel to Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and it's called Point and Line to plane. And this is like the ABC's of the way in which form occurs in natural integrals. And that only by knowing how form occurs in natural integrals can you transform that into art. One of the qualities that haunts Kandinsky's work haunted the Pythagorean understanding of form. 2500 years ago haunted the geometry of Euclid. 2300 years ago. And that is that the very first statement, the beginning, is that a point is a locus of no dimension. And that when a locus of no dimension moves, it generates a line so that the line is not a thing so much as the movement of a no dimension locus. And such a line, when it's moving, has a curious quality. The point of no dimension can now be expressed in a pair of points without losing any of its identity. Its legerdemain on God's scale, that one becomes two because of movement, not because of space, but because of a time function occurring and that no dimension moving one dimensionally in a straight line in an alignment will spontaneously generate a pair so that. Though the second statement in Euclid's 10th grade text is a line is breathless length, the third statement is extremities of a line or points. So we have moved from 1 to 2, but with the proviso that we're wise enough to understand we have not moved from 1 to 2. We've moved from unity to pair without losing a hitch. We have lost nothing. What we have gained is a range of expressivity that allows for the development of the entire ecology of integration. Because now that we have one and two, we can go one, 123. Dot dot dot infinity. We can extend a line of sequence indefinitely. And in fact, one of the great popular physicists of the middle of the 20th century, George Gamow, wrote a book called one, two, three. Ellipsis. Infinity. One. Two. Three. Dot, dot. Dot. Infinity. Wonderful. George Gamow changed my whole conception of physicists. I was 19. I was the head porter at Sequoia National Park. And George Gamow came up in a red convertible with a young blonde and matching sharkskin luggage. And I thought physicists were supposed to be dowdy. And George Gamow woke me up. One. Two. Three. Infinity. It means, then, that Sequence can occur without existentiality if it is left in pure time. With the proviso that the pure time have an alignment, because if the line. If the time line curves or moves in any other way, it tends to devolve as soon as it leaves the straight and narrow, it tends to devolve, and so that one of the mathematical definitions of a knot is a one dimensional self-avoiding complication in three dimensional space. So that, curiously, one already has an ethic without having any rules whatsoever. You can have knots Or you can have the straight and narrow, and if you have the straight and narrow, if you keep that alignment. It will act as if it were single pointed that the paired points of the line being aligned can also be a single point without any effort at all. And if you find the center of any circle, that point of no dimension, which is the center, will accept any aligned movement through it as if it were the axial movement of the center itself, so that the openness of the point of no dimension will accept the dynamic of the axial movement and move itself without any kind of complication That you've got something that's hitting something or something that's pushing something. It's just openness itself, accepting a dynamic so that openness becomes the dynamic itself. And when openness is the dynamic itself, the timeline is eternal. It doesn't register as a decay because the decay factor, the complication factor, the not factor is when the peritonitis is conceived as a polarity. And only polarized particles can produce what we call matter the material world. If it's aligned, if it's centered ness is alignable, it Can integrate to pure, no dimensional pointedness and convey through its openness. Any alignment, any dynamic. And this is a very great mystery because, as Kandinsky. Points out on page 60 of point and line to plane, because Kandinsky thought along these lines, the point of no dimension can carry the transform of openness to the entire circle. Whatever the circle is, the circle as a result of condensation in spiritual terms. There is such a thing as the entire community transforming at once together. If they are all related energetically to a common, Not a locus, because a locus is a term for position in terms of coordinates in a plane on an integral sequential time bound context. Instead, the term classically used even 2500 years ago. It was not a locus, but it was a focus. The Latin is loci et foci, and whenever you would mention in antiquity the phrase loci et foci, it generates immediately among somebody who's learned that this is the key conception, the key idea to the principle of memory, not the principle of memory so much, but the art of memory that the art of memory deals with loci et foci. Those two together, not so much in alignment, but in the way in which a low C can transform into a fo C, and the alignment then which was necessary in the integral is transformatively applicable, applicable to any movement whatsoever. A differential line can be anywhere and thus carry a center anywhere. And so by 1500 years ago, a man named well, we don't even know his name. His pen name was Dionysius the Areopagite. And his works were preserved because someone read in the New Testament that someone named Dionysius the Areopagite heard Saint Paul lecturing at one of the Greek cities. So all of Dionysius the Areopagite. Mystical literature was preserved through the Middle Ages because they thought, well, this is by somebody who was a friend of Paul. The church is behind Paul. We're going to God damn well save these works. And so this mystical Pythagorean wisdom that was effaced everywhere else in the ancient world, it was burned and destroyed, got accidentally impiously saved by the very people who were burning this stuff. Can you imagine? So someone like Kandinsky can write a poem called White Horn. This was written in Paris in 1937, when the Nazis were threatening to take over Europe. Especially. They had their eyes on Paris, and they eventually got Paris a few years later. Here is Kandinsky's white horn. This is the way a great artist works esoterically Heroically through his art. A circle is always something. Sometimes even very much. Sometimes. Rarely too much. As a rhinoceros is sometimes too much. Sometimes it. The circle sits in compact violet. The circle. The white circle. And grows unquestionably smaller. Even smaller, the rhinoceros bends its head. Its horn. Its threatens. The compact Violet looks angry. The white circle has grown small. A little point in an ant's eye. And twinkles. But not for long. Again it grows. The little point in the ant's eye. It grows in growing. In growing. The little point in the ant's eye. Grows into a white circles. Quivers. Wants and only wants. Everything white. Where has the compact violet gone? And the ant. And the rhinoceros. So you can see what an enormously great artist Kandinsky was in the face of all of it, because he had seen it all. Being Russian, he had not only seen World War One, he had seen the Russian Revolution and everything else. There is a quality that we're seeking to convey. And that is there is such an enormous treasury of mysteriousness in what we're doing, but it cannot be said all at once. It can't be delivered like that, because delivering like that makes it a lie. The very process of delivering something like that at one time in one sitting, in a compact idea which you can get and understand, means that I have lied to you. I have to get the what the the actor used to do that good Richard Boone when he was a bad guy. Do not listen to someone who tells you the truth. Those damn rhinos. It cannot be delivered because there's no it. There's no delivery that's capable. And you would have to falsify yourself in order to receive it that way, so that there is such a thing as a paired ecology of searching presencing, and that one of those ecologies is integral of getting it, the other is differential of letting it go, and that if you balance those together, you're always verging on realization that there is a balance complementarity between integral and differential. And if that is maintained all the time, at any time, at any point along that line of development, there can be a wake up call. And so the material is presented over two years with as much balance as I can engender in rainy Los Angeles and other complexities. For those of us who've lived here for a long time. Rain is the least of our problems. When someone like Rembrandt, born in 1606, he was born about the time that Shakespeare was writing his great tragedies like King Lear. And he died in the late 1660s, 1669. He matured rather quickly, so that by the 1620s he was already painting in a way that you began to understand that this was really somebody. So he painted for more than 40 years. And in those 40 years he painted 75 self-portraits. Because it was like one of the ultimate self-reflexive recursive acts of spiritual consciousness, of which we are capable of to take the timeline of our own life development and to take the pair of points oneself. As you begin the portrait oneself, as you finish the portrait and keep them aligned so that the self portrait is a single work of art is a very difficult process, and that's why one of the assignments that we have quote assignments, schoolmaster type assignments is to make for you to make a painting, a self-portrait, to go through the act yourself of a painting, a self-portrait. And as we go through the next 11 lectures from this, it will disclose itself in resonance. The principle in physics is called that of the soliton. If you have a particle that is aligned with itself and thus real, when it quivers and sounds, every sound vibration from it contains the entirety of the form, just so when it quivers, every photon from it contains the visual entirety of its form. It sounds mystical. It. It really is mystical, but not so mystical. Astronomers everywhere in the world for the last 80 years have used a spectrograph to analyze a star's light. And all you need is one photon from any given star. And you can analyze that. Now, all you need is one photon from our sun, and you can get the entirety of the sun in that photon. You can analyze that light. Of course, the developing emulsion of photographs of the sun, spectrographs of the sun has improved by the early 21st century. We can get it down even to one photon, which is frozen in its movement. You can take a cloud of sodium atoms and you can charge it with a special interfering electrical charge. And you can actually slow a photon of light and stop it in a microscopic, nanoscopic cloud of electrified sodium atoms. We can do that. It's a very big yoga. But what's important here is that this ability to take light, to take the basis of seeing or to take sound. To take any kind of a resonance of something down to its nth particle, and to differentially be able to analyze and bring out the real wholeness from any part goes back to ancient Hermetic antiquity. It's always been the teaching conviction and the basic certainty by which one could have confidence that you could teach, that you could teach not by giving something to someone, but by creating the environment in such a way that the evocation is met by the questing, by the searching that you're searching is met. By what you are searching for, coming to meet you. Shakespeare used the term well met, meaning exactly that there is this quality, the soliton principle, the quivering in sight. The quivering in sound, the quivering in taste, in touch. In ancient India, the development of logic was always fundamentally grounded, not on sight or sound, but on touch. The certainty of sensation to registry not just its existential materiality, but to be available for its complement to come into play, and that is its spiritual resonance into wholeness. And art is the very first occurrence in that differential ecology where form occurs, not existential form. Artistic form. And what has to understand here. The relationship of 0 to 1. If you begin counting so that your calibration begins with one, you count by ones. What you get are existentials. If your calibration is slightly enormously shifted so that your calibration begins with zero. You do not get existentials in the sequence you get traditionally. It was just it was called a mystic. Instead of an existential, you get a mystic. If the zero and the one are polarized, that's the basis by which a logic works. But if the zero and one are in a complementarity, then what is generated out of that is called anaesthetic. So that anaesthetic is not just ideas about art. That's bad teaching. That's like being fourth rate teachers of fifth hand stuff. Aesthetics is not about ideas about art at all. It's about the resonance of A01 complementarity as the calibration of the way in which integral and differential play. So that when you look at we've talked about this before. The square of attention, the four sides of the square of our attentiveness, the four, any of the four phases in their sequence of our education. The art square of attention includes art and vision and symbol and myth. What it does not include in its attention is nature and ritual, because nature and ritual, though there they occur and certainly have been there generatively they're not a part of the attentiveness in the square of attention in the big picture, in the frame work of the way in which art is appreciable aesthetically. So that the beginning of the square of attention of art is with myth and myth is a matter of feeling toned, experience gaining a language. And Kandinsky was very careful to show that one can gain a feeling toned language by having operative not words so much, or even shapes so much, or even juxtaposition so much, but that you can do it on the basis of color. And that by limiting yourself to a feeling toned language that aesthetically develops out of color alone. For this, he said, this is abstract art, so that the development of abstract art by Kandinsky is the first one to ever do it. He saw that you can take abstractly a single series of elements, and art can have many different elements, But in this abstract painting, what you present is non-objective art, and that non-objective art being an art that's not concerned with images, it's much easier for someone artistically to begin to appreciate the conscious, transformed aspect of art rather than the symbol mythic aspect of art. Instead of making paintings of Roman gods in French costume of the 18th century, you make a painting of color relationalities that convey not something about Roman mythic figures, but something about your own spiritual capacities, so that the emphasis, while it includes myth and symbol, has shifted its stance so that the pivot is on the conscious two dimensions vision and art, rather than on the integral myth and symbol, so that you stand on both feet, but you shift your posture so that the emphasis is on the other angle of vision instead of the mythic angle. It goes on to the visionary angle. And the emphasis then is not on myths that are generated out of rituals, but on art that generates further into the realms of consciousness. And we'll see that that further realm of consciousness is history. Art is a form that not only emerges out of vision, but is a form that generates what we call history. So that history becomes a real higher order of conscious process. Differential process. History is a differential process. It's not integral at all. There are no integral forms in history. History is not an integral process. It has nothing to do with nature. It has nothing to do with myth. It has everything to do with vision and with art and being a higher order of differential process. It has a special form that emerges out of its operative, and that form is the cosmos. It's very complicated when you put it all together. It's actually very simple. If you flow into letting the understanding distribute itself over some duration of time. I used to call it the principle of the snowshoe. If you try to step quickly into this, you're just going to sink up to your neck. But with the snowshoe effect of distributed attention over several months, we'll be able to generate one of those neuronal clouds of sodium particles where we can stop a moving photon of light and take a look at how reality really illuminates. And that it does more next week.