Art 2

Art 2. And I want to start out with a quotation from the May 2001 Scientific American to explain why the title of today's presentation is Digital Survey Discovery. It has to do with Rembrandt, and it has to do with Kandinsky. It has to do with art, but it has some surprising connections. And so I'm going to begin with this quotation from the May 2001 Scientific American. Known objects tend to cluster in data clouds. In any parameter space, any kind of hypothetical 3D setting. When all sky surveys at many wavelengths are available online through a project called the Virtual Observatory. Astronomers will be able to explore multi-dimensional parameter spaces looking for rare or unusual objects they didn't realize existed. This is differential consciousness. This is not nature. This is not integration. If you look at the night sky and you look at the stars and you look at the moon, look at the planets, comets, meteors, whatever that looking with the eye in nature is always folded into the integral ecology and the mind in terms of the brain, in terms of our experience, in terms of our body, in terms of nature, that entire ecology weaves patterns integrally. It always does that. It always will do that. It's what it does. In order for something like I just read to make sense. There has to be a transformation of that whole integral ecology. And further, there has to be a distillation of the new form that comes out of the transform. And three, there has to be a third further process of sealing that form so that it holds not integrally but differentially. So the theme of what we're presenting last week, this week, the next ten weeks in art is that an art form is at least three orders removed from natural forms. That art does not occur in nature. It doesn't occur in ritual, quite distinct from ritual objects, and it doesn't occur in myth, and also that it doesn't occur in symbols that art forms occur at least three processes of differentiation further from what is normally called the inner world of the mind. And this is a very touchy, very important point because it erases wholesale thousands of years of philosophic understanding about things like epistemology, logic, And especially aesthetics. And it is such a amazingly radical procedure that very few people have been able to appreciate it so far. Even though we can trace its history going back many thousands of years, it's only been recently that art forms have achieved a quality of presentation strong enough, transformed enough, distilled enough, sealed enough in order to stand up to the rigors of integral criticism. Integral critiques. One of the heroes Of this was Rembrandt. And just to get your mind oriented, Rembrandt was born in 1606 and died in 1669. So he looked a little over 60 years in the 17th century. And we think that that was a long time ago. But one of the most surprising things is that the old Rembrandt, who was only 63 painting his last self-portraits, was working in 1669 at a time when Sir Isaac Newton was delivering his first lectures on what became his optics. So that Rembrandt's way of painting and seeing. Has a congruence with Newton's way of seeing. And that Rembrandt and Newton synched together in a very beautiful way the harmonic between art and science. At one of the most crucial points in world history. Crucial point, because it was at that time unique. There never was, except in one rare, isolated patch of circumstances in ancient China. There never was a time when human beings Developed what has come to be known as modern science. And the fact is, is that modern art and modern science have a paired genesis. They're about two thirds of the way through the 17th century. Most people would think that one of the forerunners of Newton was Descartes. And you can make a case for that and understand somewhat a very limited scenario. But the more fruitful thing is to realize that Rembrandt and Newton, the old Rembrandt, the young Newton, are contemporaries, and that both of them had to do with a new way of seeing that new way was to take oneself Outside of the entire frame of reference, of integral, happening outside of nature, outside of ritual, outside of myth, and even outside of the symbolic mind, and to find a way to operate outside of that entire frame of reference. And that before them there were examples of men and women rarely, who were able to do that, but that those examples before them largely were classified under the aegis of mysteries or under the catch all phrase of magic, or, I guess, the retrospective way of talking since the middle of the 20th century because of Mircea Eliade's book on shamanism, that these are shamanic experiences of going beyond nature. Which is going beyond our given nature into some new, as Shakespeare called it, undiscovered country, a geography, a landscape that is truly supernatural. And Rembrandt and Newton are a pair of figures who bring this entire transform into enough light, into enough optical aesthetic seeing capacity that the Visionary capacity was able to be transmitted to a fairly large number of people without them having to go through some kind of religious preparation, without them having to go through some kind of magical initiation, without them having to go through some kind of shamanic access. And the generation that came directly following on this event of Rembrandt and Newton styled itself the enlightenment. That's what those men and women called themselves, that they were not a part of the Renaissance. They were not a part of the Baroque. They were not into Mannerist styles that they had come into something new. They didn't know what to call it. So they called it the enlightenment because it had to do with a new capacity of seeing a new variety of light that had never been seen before, the light of transcendent seeing, but not transcendent as in a mystery any longer, or a magic any longer, but a new art and a new science. So that after the middle of the 17th century, there was a double genesis of art and science, which surprised people at the time because they were already inheritors for a couple of hundred years of the Renaissance. And they thought that the Renaissance, and rightly so, and in their time and even up till the end of the 20th century, people around the world, in universities, everywhere on the planet, would have said that the development of Western civilization was fulcrum on the Renaissance, and that it comes up even until our time, so that we speak of somebody who's capable in many areas as a Renaissance man or a Renaissance woman. And yet. 300 years ago, there was an epochal change. There was what used to be called in poetry, a sea change. It isn't just that it was different in a patch here and there, but a sea change means that the entire atmospheric dimension of the planet changed. And a new art and a new science came out of that. Rembrandt is really the great pioneer in this, which makes him one of the world's great figures. One of the curious, heroic things about Rembrandt, as he did it almost completely alone. Someone like a Shakespeare always had his comrades around him. The camaraderie of the theater of the theatrical group. His group were the Lord Chamberlain's Men and later on, the King's Men. They always had a kind of a London limelight, a kind of a royal patronage. They were always the best guys on the street in London. Rembrandt was almost completely alone. He only had two people that he could depend on his son and his long time companion, a Hendrix, for the last 25 years of his life. And so Rembrandt is always singled out as this colossal hero. He was what people usually ascribe to Michelangelo. Rembrandt is that titanic genius who takes upon himself in his art the ability to do a triple transformation. The first transformation is to bring a differential process into play out of the tightest, wrapped integral form, and that is the mind. And as long as you still work in terms of the mind, your operation is going to be mentally formed. And Rembrandt was that kind of an artist who was able to operate very easily outside of mental forms. He never had any taste for making a standard travel trip to Italy to go and copy Italian Renaissance paintings or sculptures or whatever. He never had any kind of a tendency to go to academics or learned people, even though he grew up in Leiden, Leiden, Holland, which was a university town, and then Amsterdam, which was the most international city of the day. He cavorted with ordinary people, shopkeepers, lower class people, not middle class, lower class people. He liked them because they had a veracity of existentiality, which he himself kept alive because he wanted to make his transform his art in such a way that it could come back and fit and be at home in the common, ordinary existentiality of human life. Because one of the most difficult things is to go into a sophisticated transform, and to come back and not be enchanted by the mind, Because the mind is the first form that you come back to when vision occurs. The very first thing that vision wants to do is go visit the mind again. Someone who goes into a transcendental experience. When they come back to themselves, they come back to their mind first. And so Rembrandt, in a very purposeful way, obviated that as a call. He said, I'm my trains not stopping at that station. I'm coming back to the bedrock where everybody lives. And to make sure about that, I'm not going to read a lot of books. I'm not going to learn a lot of things. I'm going to embellish the physical body experience of life with all the costuming I can because I want to enrich it. And so all of his life, Rembrandt, as much money as he would make, he would spend more on buying outrageous things at auction like strange rocks. He bought a lion skin one time, all kinds of guns and weapons and costumes, old dirty clothes from hundreds of years ago. And he would dress himself up in all these things, and then he would, as a metronome of his visionary development. He would costume himself and paint himself in all kinds of various modes, and he would paint himself in all kinds of expressions to see the variance of himself, the variations of his physicality, so that it would register not in his mind as an idea of variety, but it would register in his art as a spectrum of possibility of this body, so that the spectrum of the spirit came back and synched itself with the physical body, so that Rembrandt is the hero of body and spirit, being buddies, getting along. Whereas the mystics generally come back to the mind. The magicians always come back to the mind. You can always tell a magician because they're enamored with symbols, or symbols can do it. Symbols index the whole hierarchy of nature. Whereas to someone like Rembrandt, he's unconcerned about hierarchies. He's unconcerned about controlling authoritarian symbol because he knows that there is always a tendency, bidden or not, for those hierarchies and those symbol authority communiques to become an ideological framework. And those ideological frameworks always have a form that they make mentally, and those forms are called political forms. And to give it a kind of a name that fits in with the array of language that we're using here, let's just call it a politic. And generally, that politic is cinched by money, so that its true name is Political Economy. And the world's first book on political Economy was written in Amsterdam about 1612. Rembrandt was six years old because the Dutch were learning how to make an empire based on commerce. Forget large armies. If we are making enough money and we're able to buy ports and relationalities, and we're helping everybody get rich in business, we don't have to fight them. We can incorporate them. And so the Dutch in Rembrandt's lifetime made a world empire not based on military strength, but on wise acumen of working a political economy. With just a fraction of the military might of England. The Dutch snared all of the Indonesian islands away from the British. The British East India Company founded in 1602. Was helpless because the Dutch just pulled it in, including South Africa and many other places. The population of Amsterdam, at the time the largest city in the Netherlands, had gone from 30,000 to about 120,000 people. And yet they commanded a worldwide empire. Because of the use of a political economy, a politic is always a mental form which co-opts your visionary capacity to come back into a hierarchy where the symbolic authority is calibrated by the money. Whereas Rembrandt is not concerned ever about a politic, especially an economic Nomic politics, especially political economy. He is concerned with what we would call classically and need to call anaesthetic. Anaesthetic, a way to understand, to appreciate and to judge by a calibration of value, works of art and artists, and the effect of art and artists on our lives and aesthetic. Turns out not to be one of the classic five categories of philosophy which the integral order of academic thought had posited for many long, centuries, millennia. It's not at all a part Of that classic calibration and scenario, it completely different. And Rembrandt is the great heroic example in painting, like Beethoven is in music of the figure who transforms out of the ecology a vision and make sure that that vision is further transformed by a distillation into a form, a presentational form that holds its shape not by glue, but holds its shape by a related ratioed realm of possible, of possibility. An aesthetic is about a calibration of value based on range of possibilities, not on how much it's worth in terms of bucks, so that an aesthetic is a direct, radical challenge to politics and economics. Art is revolutionary in its very nature, and that's why political systems and economic orders are always a little uneasy when a great artist appears on the scene, because they don't pay much attention to them. And Rembrandt is the first great artist to not have to work for the church or for the dukes, for the royal court, for the ecclesiastical court. He was his own man. He painted what he wanted to paint, and he used as his models and figures those people who are around him, his own family when he was younger, his own son. He loved the fact that when he painted a Christ or a Daniel or a Tobias, or any biblical engraving or painting, he used shopkeepers that he knew. He used a women that he knew. He used his own son, Titus, as a model. When he was given a Bible as a young man, he was told that he would have to study theology in order to understand what the Bible meant, its lessons. He never did that, because even as a young man, his predilection was, I don't have to look in academic studies to find biblical characters. We have plenty of Jews living here in Amsterdam. I can go and visit them and the same types are here. And so he would go out on the street and he learned his biblical acumen through talking with the Jews of Amsterdam, rather than reading theological tracts, so that when he married, his first marriage lasted about ten years, and she died because of complications of childbirth. For Titus, his fourth child, three children died almost immediately Saskia, his first wife. Saskia's. Family, the Eulenburg's, were Mennonites from a man named Menno. They were radical Protestants. They were not Lutherans who had broken away from the Catholic Church. They were radical Protestants that had broken away from the Lutherans even further than the Lutherans had broke away from the Catholic Church, had gone into a completely radical kind of understanding that Christianity has nothing to do with worldly structures, political things, economic things. It has to do with leaving all that behind, and that when you leave it all behind, you gain a spiritual freedom that allows you to come back into the world and see it in realistic terms. And so the Mennonite communities became very good business people. Those kinds of radical revolutionary Protestants were the ones who made a great change in the way business is done. A couple hundred years later, Max Weber wrote a book called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is a curious kind of an understanding that when Rembrandt met the young Saskia from this Mennonite background, her cousin, about 20 years older than Rembrandt and Rembrandt, was about ten years older than Saskia. Her cousin was the man, the art dealer, who was encouraging the young Rembrandt to leave the university town where he had grown up, and to come to Amsterdam and to start painting, because he was so incredibly talented that with the right art dealer, his body that they could get, all the commissions that they could handle. And so the young Rembrandt, he was still a teenager. He was about 19 years old when he went to Amsterdam to live with Saskia's older cousin. And the very first commission he got was to paint what was an ordinary kind of commission in Amsterdam of that time. It was an anatomy lesson. The surgeons in Amsterdam were fairly wealthy, not because they charged their patients so much. They did that, but they charged the students who wanted to learn to make that kind of money so they would have students paying them a lot to learn. And the way that they advertise that they were well worth this money was to have beautiful paintings made of them giving anatomy lessons. And so the calling card of Dutch surgeons at that time was to have a beautiful, classic group portrait of themselves teaching their students and showing how beautifully honored they were by their students. And Rembrandt's commission was to paint an anatomy lesson for a certain Doctor Tulp. Only Rembrandt's painting was such a colossal recalibrating and ordering that it's one of the world's great first paintings. It's unbelievable that a teenager could do this. And in that first painting, he blew out all the competition in Amsterdam, in Holland, in Europe, he became the greatest painter alive by far. But you have to learn to see aesthetically, to appreciate that. Why? Why it was so colossally different. The transform must be further distilled so that it achieves an expressive form, not a form of integration, but a form that holds its calibration of openness so that the possibilities continue to be real and don't fold in and glue themselves into a limitation so that differential forms are always open because they are spiritual. In fact, we call them spiritual because it's like spirits. Spirits ain't grape juice. It's fermented and then it's distilled. If you leave it at fermentation, at the transform, you get wine. But if you distill that wine, you get a liqueur, you get a cognac, you get a brandy. And art forms are like liqueurs. Liqueur, by the way, is not a drugstore or supermarket kind of a word. It comes from chemistry. Liqueurs are distillations of fermented things, and fermented things are always organic. So that transforms engender a kind of livingness an organic quality. And distilling organic quality makes it a liqueur, makes it an art form. But there's a further process that's needed, one that very few artists are capable of. And that is, you have to be able to seal that distilled art form so that it will hold its shape when brought back into an integral ecology of the world. Otherwise, the world's integration tendencies, which run like a diagonal down every process in nature, every process in nature, is subject to like a gravitational pull of pulling something together. And the mind especially, is the number one thing in the universe that uses that kind of integral gravitation to pull things into a limited shape that has clear boundaries and logical form, because it the mind just loves to do that, and that is death to art. Art doesn't survive that. What happens to those forms? Those forms cease to be art and they become examples of propaganda. And eventually the aesthetic is a pseudo aesthetic where the state tells you, we need this kind of building because the Führer likes it. And so one has to be very cautious about learning about art, because there is a third quality. That's why they call him Hermes Trismegistus. Third, quality not only transformation and distillation of that, but a sealing of that distillation in a very special way. Even the phrase hermetically sealed. What does hermetically sealed mean? It means a complementarity, not of two halves, But of a pair that are put together in such a way that you cannot pull them apart. And how do they hold together? They hold together because they're not glued by ones, but they're sealed by zeros. Because art forms that are sealed by zeros, not glued by ones, maintain their differential radiance even in an integral natural ecology. They don't corrode, they don't decay, and they don't dissolve. Now, the classic enlightenment example of a hermetically sealed object was made by a man named Magdeburg, who took two Halves of a steel sphere and put them together, and then had a pump that pumped all the air out from the sphere so that it had a vacuum inside, so that the two halves became a single sphere, held together by the atmospheric pressure. And even hundreds of horses hitched to both sides of the sphere couldn't pull it apart. And so it became a cause celebre in the enlightenment that there was such a thing as hermetically sealed forms. But in the several hundred years later, almost nobody even understands why that was done or what it means. Because we've come down very far to a very low level junkyard. Pardon me, but there is hardly anyone on the planet who knows anymore. So we're trying to learn how to learn again and to come back up from Paleolithic Sake hunting and get back to where? Where heavenly human again, this whole process of transforming and distilling and sealing Rembrandt was able to do on his own, almost completely alone, within the space of about 40 years of work. It's unbelievable to see someone that has that kind of talent and courage. The key, the synthesizing key, and the differentiating spectrum that operate together in Rembrandt's work is the portrait, the individual portrait, the self portrait and the individual portrait and the group portrait and the way in which that portraiture Fits into a scope of painting called the landscape. Because landscape is traditionally the way in which nature envelops us, we're enveloped by the geography, by the atmosphere, the weather, by the circumstance. And a painted landscape is bringing another dimension into the natural landscape, and making of it a work of art, so that the portrait is of the protagonist, and a landscape is of the setting, the context of the protagonist. So portraiture and landscape are two very closely interwoven knot themes of art. That's an integral way of talking. That's a mind game of naming. You have to watch your nomenclature. You have to keep it supple and not let it accidentally drift back into a reductive labeling, because the mind does not know in its own workings that it is only labeling. It thinks that its descriptions are real. And so one has to be compassionate about one's mind, just as you have to be compassionate about your body. After 100 years or so, the body gets pretty rank, and after about two seconds the mind gets pretty rank. That's what Zen is all about. Let's take a break and we'll come back. To Kandinsky for a moment. We're working on Rembrandt. We're working on a triple transform that art involves. When Kandinsky first published Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1912. He was concerned, um, with how it would be understood, because at 1912, you can imagine the world was poised on a very peculiar kind of a ridge. In one sense, uh, it was convinced that it was very sophisticated and that, to use the old Victorian phrase, that the sophisticated aristocratic people of Europe had crawled Hauled ashore from the seas of evolution. They had arrived, and the only further improvement was to have more soirees. And so there was that kind of equality and yet lurking underneath it, because it wasn't really Victorian. It was Edwardian times in England. And the tendency was that underneath there was the intuition that there was a haunted quality to the forms of mankind. And the best place to find that is in the the novels of Henry James and the ghost stories of Henry James, the the eerie Edwardian suspicion that all this is really haunted. And then, of course, just a year or so later, the First World War tore the entire Confidence and structure to the politic, into bits that were never and will never be put back together again. In 1912, the urban mode of transportation was still largely horses. And we're not going to go back to horse and buggy days no matter what. Here's a poem published just a year or so later by Kandinsky in a volume called, in German, Klange Sounds. And the poem is this. Its title is different. There was a big Figure three. White on dark brown. Its upper loop was the same size as the lower loop so many people thought, and yet this upper loop was somewhat somewhat somewhat larger than the lower one. This. Figure three always look to the left, never to the right. At the same time, it looked slightly downward for only in appearance. Did this figure stand perfectly straight in reality. Not easily discernible. The upper. Somewhat. Somewhat larger part inclined to the left. And so this big white figure three look to the left and a little downward. Or perhaps it was different. Let's jump from Kandinsky around the beginning of the First World War. Let's go back to 1669, the year that Rembrandt died, the year that Isaac Newton, as a young man in his 20s, was appointed to the most outrageously prestigious chair at Cambridge University in England. He was appointed as the Lucasian Professor of Economics of Mathematics at Cambridge University, for instance, who today is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking. Established for a great mathematician. The Lucasian Chair went from the originator to Isaac Barrow and then to Sir Isaac Newton. Not yet, Sir Isaac, just Isaac Newton. He was in his mid-twenties. And in his very first lecture, January of 1669. Like with Rembrandt's first painting, he blew everyone out. It was like instead of there being a gentle breeze, a tornado hit the intellectual world. Here's how he began his inaugural Lucasian Lecture. He was in his late 20s, 20th January 1669, Rembrandt was still alive, still painting his last great self-portraits. Newton. The recent invention of telescopes has so occupied most geometers that they seem to have left to others nothing in optics untouched, nor any room for further discovery. Moreover, since the lectures you heard here not so long ago brought together such a variety of optical topics and a vast quantity of discoveries with their very accurate demonstrations, it might seem a vain endeavour and a futile effort for me to undertake to treat this science again. But since I observe that geometers. And when he talks about geometers, he's talking about people who have a sense of mathematics and of light and of space in a kind of a Cartesian geometric universe, an integral mode. And he's about to pull the rug out forever under the confidence that that alone will do. But since I observe that geometers have hitherto erred, he's saying all of them, the entire thousands of years of history of them up to today are in error. When I found their error have erred with respect to a certain property of light. Light, which is the which was the metaphor of God's creation. Luke's fiat. Let there be light. God creates the universe with light. It's the most primordial of all the existential realities. And that man, up until today, has not understood light at all. With respect to a certain property of light, pertaining to its refractions. And then he goes on to say, there are so confident, and they have been so confident with their demonstrations and their logical spelling it out. And yet and so in the 1920s, when somebody had just found a catalogue of Newton's library that had been lost for 200 years, and wrote a short little book called Newton the Man. He says beautifully again. When Newton found he wanted a calculating tool, he invented the binomial theorem, and from a modification of this he later invented a system of fluxions, which is now commonly called the calculus. Later, again, when he wanted to calculate the shape of bodies of least resistance, he invented a further modification, which is now known as the calculus of variations. And all of this was a new language that took mathematics out of the realm of graffiti, scrawling and put it into a penmanship where one could write the way that creation itself writes, that one could understand the infinite variations between 0 and 1, and that the liminals of the real are expressible as ratios of the zero and one in their infinitely refined ballet of proportion. The binomial theorem. Theorem. By the way, the term c, the nomenclature tells you everything by is two Nomial two two principal named things. It's a paradox. It's a theorem of preparedness in that if one uses this kind of a conscious template of applied mathematics, you can open up something, even something as universal as light, and show that light is composed not just of light, but can be refracted into seven different rays of color. So that Newton brought in the science for the first time of the prismatic diffraction of light, and showed that it consisted white sunlight consists of seven different rays, seven different colors that can be excerpted, can be refined, can be abstracted, you can abstract red light from sunlight, you can abstract violet light from sunlight. You can abstract yellow light the seven colors that the seven rays of color that together make up sunlight can be taken apart and you can work with those. And now 250, 300 years later, you have a computer screen that will offer you millions of colors digitally. In 1669, it was so unheard of that the only person who would have understood Newton at that time would have been Rembrandt, because he had already worked with the way in which a kind of an artistic binomial theorem went into the realm of color, and it's called by a very curious name. It's called chiaroscuro. The working with light and shade in such a way that light and shade work as a complementarity and not as a polarity. You don't work with black and white as a polarity. You work with light and dark as a complementarity, distributed over the entirety of a canvas, and you get a different quality of presentation. If you work with black and white as a disjunctive polarity. You get such a thing as a black line in a white volume. Whereas if you work in a Rembrandt way, you slightly modify it so that the white becomes sort of a, like a yellow, and the black becomes sort of like a dark brown, an umber brown. And you can work with. Let's take a light yellow that gains intensity so it becomes a gold. Now you can work with a gold and a dark umber brown, which receives a gentleness so that the dark umber brown becomes a kind of a milk chocolate. And now you've got gold and milk chocolate. And now do a portrait of someone using that kind of a scale, that kind of a binomial theorem, and you start to get a portrait. Let's see. One of Rembrandt's last portraits was of Homer. One of the world's greatest paintings. And the gold features of Homer emerging out of the chocolate brown canvas stagger you with the sense that this is not a representation of someone else, but a presentation of Rembrandt's Homer and is alive right then and there, every time you see it. So that art becomes alive in the sense that you're seeing it is no longer seeing a representation, but you're witnessing a presentation, and you cooperate with the life of the work so that art and life happen to go together, not in a putting together kind of way, not in an additional kind of a way, but in an interpenetration of mutual reality, so that there is such, such a thing now as not just ratios abstractly, but ratios of the real, because that's how this life is happening. And where glue before was an addition kind of a thing or subtraction. Now the way in which form is held together is not by arithmetical forcing, but by a phenomenon of process known as love. Curiously, because it is the mutual attraction and mutual fortification of each other into a new presentational reality. One is different from what you were just a second to go completely different, transformed out of the integral integer individuality into a shared mutuality, which is unlimited because its range is not just seven rays or infinite number of rays, but so many different dimensions of possibility that. Let's go back to the beginning of today's lecture about the virtual observatory that's coming in about ten years. It's one thing to map the night sky. The first person to do that was Edwin Hubble up here, just outside of Los Angeles at the Mount Wilson Observatory. He not only mapped the stars, but saw that there are clusters of stars by the billions that form clouds called. He called them. Galaxies were called nebula before then. That galaxies are like island universes. And he mapped the galaxies, not just mapping the stars that you can see, but mapping the galactic island universes that you can't see. There are billions of them. The Harvard Galactic map of about 50 years ago had 6 million galactic structures on it. Now it would run into many zeros. That is primitive still in differential consciousness, because beyond the integral capacity of the eyes to see about 6000 stars at the most, and you can actually see a couple of galactic structures. The Large Magellanic Clouds you can see Andromeda from the Southern hemisphere. You cannot see a galactic structure now called Sagittarius A, which is a whole galaxy intertwining with the Milky Way disk on the other side of the disk from our star system. It's only by a differentially conscious reissuing of the real that one can see the perspectives that are hidden from the natural limitations. But even all that is primitive really primitive, because the electromagnetic spectrum is not limited to visible light at all. And you can have maps in the infrared. You can have maps in the ultraviolet. And by bringing all the levels of an enormous scale of energy frequencies and making congruent simultaneity, one has a virtual observatory where all the dimensions of the electromagnetic spectrum for the entire universe are all presented in a single differential form, so that you could analyze it forever and never run out. And what is odd? As soon as the complexity gets to a certain threshold, a curious thing begins to happen. Clouds of random data begin to assume the shapes, and the shapes look very much like those kinds of artistic shapes that Xiao Muro used to paint on his canvases. And it happens all by itself. The goal of the virtual observatory is to link all observatories, link all of their cosmic harvests into a single network that can be explored using the same interface by anyone, anywhere, so that any being on the planet or in the star system can access this, and can investigate the entire differential cosmos at any time that they choose, on any level that they choose. With this scale of freedom, there are no political forms that are made that are going to hold because they're going to seem like stupid cutouts, and men and women are going to be free on a scale that's not even imaginable today. This is about 20 years from now. So that a completely different way of learning how to learn has to come into play. You cannot learn how to learn in the old way. All you can do is learn your lesson. And those lessons are time dated. They go out of date depending on what kind of reference you have. In science they go out of date in about three months. And art, it's three seconds. We've got to have something new every three seconds. The quality of differential education is something that goes back to the way in which Rembrandt and Newton began, with that most primordial quality of light, and saw that light has a spectrum called color. And when the When color comes into play, there is a way to go into a key of creating with it. And the key in Rembrandt's Curious Girl and Newton's binomial theorem is to shift your stance from integration to complementarity, because a complementarity has an entire different range of principle. In integration, there are laws of form. In fact, there have been many books written in the last several hundred years of the laws of form. The limiting of procedure by laws of form seem to those who are encased by them as being the most certain foundation upon which to live and direct the lives of others. And it's that certainty, and it is that confidence that is totally misplaced. And that 332 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton, before he was, Sir Isaac, already scrapped, and Rembrandt, some 360 years ago, was already painting outside of those kinds of limitations. So what we're looking at here, when we come to pairing up Kandinsky and Rembrandt, we're looking at a very curious kind of a vibration, a very curious kind of a resonance. Kandinsky came from a very Sophisticated, very authoritarian type of a family background in Russia. He was assigned to become a lawyer and to learn law, and up until he was in his mid 20s, Kandinsky was a very good boy. And then he happened to go into the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, which became Leningrad for a while, and that unfortunate hiatus called the Soviet Union. It's now Saint Petersburg again. And still there in the Hermitage are a couple of paintings by Rembrandt, and Kandinsky stood in front of Rembrandt's curious paintings, and he received a death blow to his traditionality, and it took a few years for it to set in. And at the age of 30 he resigned from the life that he was in, and he left Russia. He went to the Bavarian city of Munich, and he began to enroll as a beginning artist and to start from scratch. And when he got there, the tone of what was new at that time, this is the mid 1890s. Art had developed from what we would call an art genres now from Impressionism. And because it had to be new, some called it Post-Impressionism, or because it had to be new. Some said, well, this is a different style. It's a younger style, it's a younger style, or this is art, which is completely new. It's Art Nouveau. And Kandinsky, in his studying, in his work because he came in as a mature man. He came in as someone who understood what law trained logic can deliver. And he was after after something else. Maybe it's a Freudian slip. I hate to tell you. He said, the people around me are talking about going beyond Impressionism before they even know what Impressionism is, before they even understand what is Impressionism? Impression. Impressionism is that color in volumes that are not necessarily geometrically defined, as in straight lines or geometric forms. Patches or clouds of color impress us in such a way that they evoke from our body feeling, which is not modulated by the mind, that we receive impressions from the color directly. So that color is a special language of light, and that we have to learn to see, not with the eyes hooked up, authoritarian to the brain. We can do that. Yeah. In which case we're always asking, well, what does it represent? As if nothing is what it is, it's always representing something else. It's a famous thing in current theology. They're trying to find where the New Testament came from. And how about these books in the New Testament? They must have come from books before them, and there must have been books before them, and that the ultimate is to find the first book. And they call that now in theology, the Q document from the the German word Quellen, meaning source. And so everyone's looking for the Q document of, say, the book of Matthew, as if Matthew didn't know how to write his own book. He was a tax collector. He knew damn well how to write his own book. They always say that Peter was tough. No, he was stubborn. That's different from being tough. Matthew was tough. There is this quality in Kandinsky where he saw penetratively that Impressionism is not an ism at all. It's not an ideological construct. It is a Language that works through the mind without stopping in the mind to register. And that what carries the function of that is the basic capacity of the mind to do a certain functioning, which is not to make images that represent, but to make a process of representation without having any image. And that the process pure of making representations without any image, if there is no image to occupy the representational process, then the process is open, and instead of representing something else, it represents its open Function, and they called this abstraction. Abstraction. And so, for the first time, a scientific principle. Entered into art consciously, and it fit because it had come. Originally from the same genesis. Now we don't have time to go into it here. But the the prophet, the forerunner of Impressionism is Goya. Francisco. Goya. Goya y lucientes. And it's in Goya's self-portraits that you find the bridge, if you're looking for it, the historical bridge between Rembrandt and the way in which Monet and Renoir would paint portraits. We find it in Goya? For Kandinsky, what he was interested in was an insight that had been made available by a man, a I'm sure that you've heard of him. His name is Cezanne. And Cezanne had saw that the very process of composition requires not structure, but a structuring, and that instead of structure, to make a limited form, you can convey a structuring which makes a diffracted possibility of a range of forms. The most famous example of Cézanne's technique at this is a painting he did of a landscape called the mountain is called Mont Sainte-victoire. He painted it several times And when Suzanne looked at his looking at Mont Sainte-victoire, his canvases showed the vibratory diffraction of the representational image into the spectrum of its possible ways of seeing. And out of this, for instance, came Cubism, and out of this also came Kandinsky's concern that there must be a way in which one can paint abstractly without letting representation get in the way, and constantly colour the way in which you paint. And you see so that he was after a non-objective presentational art, and that this was a very difficult thing to affect because the Impressionist Union style. Art Nouveau tendency was to follow the sinuous moving movement of the line that somehow the line then is the way, and if you keep that line sinuously moving and curlicues doing that, that's a way then, to mitigate the limitations of form. And that doesn't really work. That creates a jungle rather than a jungle style rather than a different style. Whereas the simple application of open abstraction, even to the line, produces a kind of an artist that the world had never seen before produces a matisse. In 5 or 6 lines, Matisse can draw a beautiful woman. It's 5 or 6 lines on a piece of Manila paper. She's there. The response is there. This is a completely different understanding of art. The granddaddy of all that is Rembrandt goes back to him, goes back to him. Because in his time, when he was a young man, the whole thing about etchings was still fairly new. The whole the whole process of engraving was something that that was difficult to investigate and do right. It had been used mainly either for diagrammatic work, or it had been used to produce what was popular in the early 17th century, called Books of Emblems, where they would take like tarot card images of primordial things, and they would arrange them and say, well, these are the basic emblems of how life is pushed and pulled. These are the keys. These are the typewriter keys by which we're manipulated. And if we have the right universal emblems, then we'll be able to handle ourselves. Now this came a thinker named Pascal, not Pasteur Pascal, and he made the world's first computer. It's a French mechanical calculating machine in the 17th century. And most computers today are still Pascal descended machines, whereas there's every possibility of having a completely different technology. Completely different. At Caltech as a researcher who's been there for 30 years, named Carver Mead, and his whole emphasis for 30 years has been to make computer chips that don't hear and see in a Cartesian geometric universe, but hear and see as we would in a Rembrandt mode. And instead of having machines, then you would have resonances of your own human capacity. Not just that you would do your own computer programs, but you would have resonances of yourself operative at computer speeds. No, not the gigabyte speeds that we have petabyte speeds. That's 10 million times the speed the spirit moves at even faster than that. So that the spiritual form of art. And here, Kandinsky's book in 1912 is called Concerning the Spiritual in Art. His whole concern is that we need to appreciate that we are learning how to learn, and that to a pair of things happens at the same time. As we learn in this new way, we unlearn what we thought we knew, and so that we have this kind of double butterfly effect of freeing the spirit from the cocoon of habituation. And that art is indispensable in that because it's the first form that comes into being in a five dimensional continuum. A continuum that has consciousness as a dimension as well as time and space, a five dimensional continuum. Art is the very first form. And that the human person is an art form, not an aggregate. No one ever found themselves by adding up all the sum totals of their portfolio. You are not as much as you can say you're worth on the market. It's irrelevant. It has nothing whatsoever to do with it. It is, in fact an illusion, and to believe in that illusion is a delusion. So that one of the processes of learning how to learn is disillusionment, of having surfaced the delusion that you were in. And it's embarrassing that you actually believe that stuff and forced others to believe that stuff and even hurt them so that they would believe in that stuff and that it was really paltry because your range of what you thought you were enforcing was so minuscule with what you could have enforced, had you have known better, and that all that whole ensemble of activity is idiocy and that love is really real. But it doesn't glue things together. It holds lightly a spectrum of infinite possibility. And we'll talk more about that next week.