Art 6

Part of our problem in the 20th century. Was with the procedure of abstraction. And abstraction is a wonderful function. It's a process in function of the mind. And in order for the mind to think, it needs to perform abstraction. But in the 20th century, abstraction was assumed by shoddy conceptualization to be an essential also for ritual, and produced a century of tyranny and terror. Because abstraction in ritual is a neutering process and leads to death every single time. So one of the problems that we have here in the 21st century is to recalibrate the disease of the 20th century and to bring abstraction back into the family of functions. So that thought again participates with life and does not egotistically, whether through inadvertence in some kind of ideology or inadvertence in some kind of ignorance, lead us on a swift road to demise. And so this education at this particular juncture is concerned with a whole spectrum of procedures and issues of phases and functions of not only an ecology, but a double ecology and how it works together in paired complementarity and not in opposite duality. This is a very difficult process. The recalibration of this is particularly difficult, and it was in fact an issue in the beginning of the second quarter of the 20th century. Only those individuals who took the time, who had the talent, who devoted their lives patiently to dealing with this issue, were just a trace element of the population. And they're showing up still by machines. Uh, about 1926, 1927, 1928. The maturity of some of the mathematical insights of Einstein, based on work that had gone before him and contemporaneous with him, had come into a focus with an individual named Niels Bohr and Niels Bohr around 1913, had come into a vision that the structure of the basic unit of existence, the atom, was quite different from what it had been supposed. The supposition was that the atom was an indestructible unit, and Bohr's atom by 1913 was that it was in fact a miniature solar system. That it had a nucleus, and that it had orbiting bodies like planets or moons, which were the electrons. And so this miniature solar system invited right away for the trace element of humanity that were able to follow the math at the time, who had the opportunity to be given the vision at the time. The concern was this means that the atom is not an indestructible unit, but is some kind of penetrable structure that we can go within, that we can open up the atom to an inner universe. And so the subatomic particle field was available. And the strategy of approach in the vision to this, for Niels Bohr, was the Chinese symbol of the Tai chi, the Taoist symbol. And later on, Bohr even went so far as to put the Chinese tai chi symbol on his family crest. A Dane with a Taoist family crest. The quality of work that Bohr did on what he called complementarity produced very quickly. By 1927 1928, there were papers and books and conferences on something called the Quantum Universe, The Quantum World. And today, at the beginning of the 21st century, some three full generations later, we have books like Quantum Networks, Dynamics of Open Structures, or even farther, Quantum Dots. So that technology has come back again to the issues of the early atomic era. Mathematically, in the 20th century, about the time of the First World War. We need to understand that even quantum dots are not zero and are not an ultimate, and that zero is in fact not anything that can be handled in terms of idea, in terms of thought. Only the idea of zero can be handled in terms of thought. Only the symbol zero can be handled in terms of thought. And that in order to handle zero we have to stop handling. That zero is not a thing. It does not belong in the integral scale of measurability at all. That zero is not an element among other elements that can be factored in, worked in, or even worked with that zero only occurs in a realistic way to vision, and that consciousness in particular is a differential field which is directly related to the functioning of zero ness. The functioning of the void is exactly characteristic of consciousness. So what's important to us, because we're talking about art now and art comes out of vision. Art is the first form. Art forms are the first forms that come out of vision, that come out of consciousness. And it means that art forms are born, are emerged from zero ness. And thus, if not recognized in their complementarity to nature, eventually assume a characteristic of opposition of polarity, they become antithetical to natural forms. And one of the great enduring human natural forms is culture. The culture which is passed down and becomes tradition so that culture and tradition, if we're not careful, if we're not conscious, if we're not educated, art becomes antithetical to culture. And one has such a book as To Hell with culture, written by Herbert Reed, published in 1963. I remember when it first came out. To hell with culture. And Reed at the time, was an extraordinary individual. Reed was on the board of the Bollingen Foundation to edit the collected works of Carl Jung. Reed was the first one to make great monographs on our sculpture, Henry Moore. His book on Henry Moore is extremely well done. The first great book on Henry Moore. He did a monograph in 1934, but during the Second World War this book came out. Henry Moore by Herbert Read and it was the first great monograph of him. Drawings and sculpture. And this book has gone through morphs for half a century. And now is this whole stack of six books, the catalogue raisonné of Henry Moore. Many editions, many more. So Herbert Read was extraordinary. But persons like Niels Bohr or Einstein in science, or Henry Moore in art, the artist and the scientist are so extraordinarily conscious who deal conscientiously with the vision matrix out of which their forms emerge, are sometimes incapable of expressing in discursive language to other human beings what it is that they're doing and what it is that they do. The artist who talks about art is very rare. Usually they won't tell you. Their art speaks for them and the same for science. Really great scientists and mathematicians are great scientists. Sometimes they're great artists. A mathematician like Fermat or Kurt Gödel are really artists with mathematics, but someone like an Einstein or a Bohr. Are scientists, and they use math in that way. Since the Renaissance, there has always been a tandem pairing of the arts and sciences. The whole notion of a university underwent a massive recalibration in the Renaissance, and the medieval university, like the University of Paris or Oxford, were recalibrated in the Renaissance. And instead of being focused on, as the medieval university was on theology and logic, the Renaissance University was focused on the arts and sciences, and through about 500 years of the vicissitudes of history, the arts and sciences. Tandem the pair that art forms and science forms belong together in a resonance that has a harmonic for calibration for them, which is a distinctly different shape from the kind of commensurability that natural forms have ritual forms, ritual forms of existential action, and symbol forms of mental ideation, of symbolic thought. If we do not know that consciousness is different from thought, we will miss the very threshold of difference between them, a difference which allows for them to weave together in a complementarity. And we will co-opt. Either way. We will take differential consciousness, co-opting integrals or integrals, co-opting differentials, and we will come out with outlaw aesthetics or with usually social tyrannies. Now this is a very serious problem and very difficult. And one of the points in the 20th century where all this came to a head, where all of it really came to an issue was 1940, the year 1940. Because in 1940 it was apparent to the conscious few that not only was it possible to go into the atom, but it was possible to bring the energy out of the atom and for man to use it. It was possible to have atomic energy in the form. Initially, the only conceivable form was that of an atomic bomb. Later on in the 20th century, somewhere around 1944 45, I think it was in the autumn of 1945 that the great visionary Teilhard de Chardin wrote the first socially conscious essay on the atom bomb, Spiritual Thoughts on the Atom Bomb, where he said, man has opened not just another tool, but another dimension of himself, that he has become a creature which has received Parity with the whole realm of creation in nature, and that man must grow in comprehension so that his ability to destroy does not match the ability for nature to create. That they do not blank each other out in a universal neutering. That neutering can only come not from atom bombs. It comes from a fundamental unconsciousness about abstraction. So that in the period from roughly the First World War to 1940, you find increasingly in the arts and sciences a preoccupation with abstraction. That abstraction as a function is of interest. Abstraction as a procedure is engrossing. Abstraction as an idea is rather haunting. And in this, um, I'm going to single out two individuals today who were extraordinary. One is Henry Moore, and we're talking about Henry Moore with Frank Lloyd Wright. And we're going to bring Wright in. And then next week expand what we do with Henry Moore. Today the mathematician I want to allude to today is his name is Hermann Weyl. W e y l. Hermann Weyl. And in 1940, Princeton University. Princeton is where its advanced institute had invited people like Einstein to come and be, and Princeton was involved in the way in which nuclear research on the mathematical level transformed. E equals MC square into the atomic bomb. So it's very, very formal. Wiles publication, 1940. Algebraic theory of numbers. It used to be 2500 years ago. With the Pythagoreans, that number was the ultimate abstraction. Number was so new 2500 years ago that it was like a mystery initiation into conscious, advanced forms before anyone could even appreciate. And it took a whole series of initiatory steps to wean someone away from the tribal cultures of tradition so that they could come to Until a zero threshold beyond which one could handle the abstraction of number with some kind of conscientious humanity, and not fall prey to its demonic potentialities, of being misused because of unconscious ignorance of its powers. That power of number of abstraction was placed increasingly by the Pythagoreans into logic, and logic developed as a discipline in the ancient world in order to be able to handle a conscientious, conscious use of abstraction in procedure to develop the sense that structure underneath everything has its order, has its ordering, and that there are principles. There are rules, not rules so much as rules, but principles or rules in the sense of axioms. And the whole development of the procedure by which number can be handled in a discipline went to the because of the Greek sense of depending on visuality for confirmation of structure. The abstraction of the numerical early Pythagorean emphasis went to geometry, and it was in the sense of using the development of the ability to think in geometric theory that the Greek mind became the language of thought in the ancient West. In China, it developed in a different way. In India there was a cognate development, but again in a slightly different way. The Chinese development. Did not have an issue with zero. The way that the West did in China, the use of the complementarity that was inherited from the founding of the Zhou dynasty already was able to circumvent through comprehension a lot of the difficulties that were stumbled into by the Greek West in India. The final resolution, the Idea of zero came into play about 150 AD, the first great thinker in India who dealt with it was named Nagarjuna. Naga in Sanskrit is the snake, the serpent, the king cobra. The Naga King Arjuna is the great warrior of the Bhagavad Gita. So Nagarjuna is the is the great Kundalini serpent warrior king, and he is the one who brought zero into Buddhism in terms of a discursive language that used the Sanskrit term shunyata shunyata emptiness. And of course in Nagarjuna always in its complementarity. Shunyata was always paired in complementarity with Tathata. Tathata the best translation into English. D.t. Suzuki, translated about 90 years ago as Suchness. Thus ness, not just Existentiality existence emerges out of nature, but suchness emerges out of shunyata. That art forms have a suchness to them. They have a thus ness to them, and that their emergence always has a dimension of personal tone, so that when an art form and a person is an art form, when an art form emerges out of The zero base shunyata of pure consciousness. The form that emerges out of it tends to collect around a prismatic focus of a spectrum of possibility. And this is why all art forms have a spiritual tone. All persons, wherever they occur in the cosmos, wherever in the universe, sentient, intelligent life becomes conscious. Their forms of viability in the cosmos are spiritual. There's no such thing as a demonic person. There are regressive ritual masks of egos, for sure, but there are no demonic persons. This quality of forms, differential forms coming out of the vision, which pure consciousness is um, also is mooted here in Herman Wilde's work focused on the algebraic theory of numbers. Numbers in their Pythagorean origin are the ultimate abstraction, but by the time the logical treatment of the way in which geometric city schools us to use number abstractions, by the time that left the Greco-Roman civilization and had to be translated into a different civilization, the civilization that it had to be translated into was the rising civilization of Islam and the civilization of Islam was not Greco-Roman, though they used a Greco-Roman procedure of working with abstraction, of using geometric city as the fundamental ordering of the way in which consciousness wove itself into form. There had to be a translation from the Greco-Roman terms, from the Greco-Roman procedures, and where number was the language coupled with geometric city. In Greco-Roman times, the geometry was coupled with a new kind of abstraction in the Arabic civilization in Islam, and that's where the term algebra comes from. Algebra is an Islamic contribution to the planetary ethos. This algebraic theory of numbers in 1940 is not just a putting together of Islamic algebra with Greco-Roman numbers. This already has gone through about 800 years of permutation by the time Hermann Weyl gets to it. But the previous 780 years of it was all of a piece that already could be called a great tradition that flowered and became a tradition in the Renaissance, and by the 16th century, by the 1500s, one had mathematicians who understood the algebraic theory of numbers in terms of the way in which Islamic algebra wove into Greco-Roman numeral Numerosity and produced a geometry which was not just a plain geometry but a spherical geometry already in the 1500s. You had a mathematician like John Dee, who learned for the first time in history, how to mathematize the navigation of ships on the world oceans, the sphere of the whole world. And because of that fact, because of putting that into the education system, the English ruled the waves. The English navy beat out everyone, though the Spaniards were better at shipbuilding and the Portuguese were better navigators. The English educational system factored in John Dee's mathematics because Queen Elizabeth liked John Dee because he did her horoscopes. When you have the Queen's attention, the Queen can do anything that she wants. She said, we're going to make sure that our realm, our culture, our tradition is a global one. And so you have, in John Dee's lifetime and Queen Elizabeth's lifetime, the translation of this ability to globalize the algebraic theory of numbers so that Shakespeare, when he builds his own theater, he calls it the globe. And up above the screen of the globe, he has the Zodiac in homage to John Dee, because of the gift of his ability at astrology. We have this ability to span the entire globe, and so one has a very interesting kind of situation you have. In a in a volume by. Herbert Read you have a quotation here it is in this volume a quotation from Shakespeare and it's from a midsummer Night's Dream. The quotation runs this way. And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them into shapes. And gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name is a very profound way to speak. This was written in the spring of 1594 by someone who was just 30 years old. He wrote it around his 30th birthday. As imagination bodies forth, as a form emerges. An imagination form is emerging. It's not an existential form. It's not the way in which an existential form comes out of nature. It's the way in which an imaginative form comes out of vision. Vision. It's very interesting because the whole world, the a midsummer Night's Dream, is Shakespeare's Renaissance fairy tale drama. You know, they used to for a couple of hundred years. They used to have armies of critics and English teachers searching for the origins, the sources and analogues of Shakespeare's plays. And they found them for everything except two plays, which, alas for the critics, must come from the man himself. A midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. They're his. And a midsummer Night's Dream is his. The way in which imagination comes out of vision is very much related to the realm of the fairy tale, the fairy realm. You know, when when Monet was first discovering that what he was painting were not things that were out there in nature, but he was interested in painting the ratioed relationality of the artist in the mode of making art consciously with nature, and he called that the French word that he used was fairy. The fairy realm. When Yeats was learning to calibrate his great natural talents, he had many occult wild talents could mind read. He could do a number of things. He had Claire Voyance. He had the ability for touch to open up things. He focused on Irish fairy tales in order to mature himself, so that his sense of language could move from the mythic story line of tradition to the Old squiggles of the fairy tale. Because the fairy tale is always different from the myth. The myth always follows a plot line which projects itself on a plane of the mind, and can even be given a transform so that the mind works with a sphere. But still, it's John Dee's old navigation of a plot line on a sphere. It's still that. It's still a mercator globe that has a longitude or a latitude that's still a straight line projected onto a globe. But a fairy tale does not have geometries of any sort. It has a different sense. Its sense is in the original meaning of the word ratio. A fairy tale is always a ratio of the possible with the natural, so that they're always together in a proportion, so that the fairy realm is fertile for something new. That's why Herbert Read's book is called The Forms of Things Unknown. Art is here for the forms of things unknown, and they will always be open to possibility. There's always an unknown so that consciousness is at home with the unknown, whereas tradition is very uncomfortable with the unknown, culture is very suspicious of the unknown, and ritual is absolutely a protective activity when it comes to our species of making sure that we don't get too deep into the unknown. It's all right to dip your toes. It's okay to go wading a little bit. And occasionally brilliant people might take a little swim, but watch out for deep water. And Melville in Moby Dick has a section where he's talking about how deep the ocean is, and he didn't quite realise. He thought the ocean was a really deep. He didn't realise that it is enormously deep that the ocean has depths that run deeper than 7000 stories high. Forget it. The enormity of the oceans of this planet are nothing compared to interstellar spaces. And so our civilisation Civilization that's emerging. Our stellar civilization that this education is made to be, is to get us over the fear of being at home, where 99 point as many nines as you could, right? Percent of what you deal with is nothing. Not a blank, nothing but an invitational recalibration of a real that's in proportion to the fairy quality of heaven. We have to get used to being at home in a nature which now is more heavenly than earthly. And that's what we're after here, is to recalibrate vastly, indelibly, and in such a way that it does not reduce itself down prematurely to Abstractions used in a ritual manner because it would lead to certain death. If the next generation doesn't learn from us how to be real in the universe of wide open interstellar spaces, they will, within their lifetimes, reduce themselves to a neutered nothing. It's absolutely guaranteed. The odds for it are not just overwhelming, they're certain. So when we come to try to understand. Something like Henry Moore or something like Hermann Weyl, the arts and sciences, and the way in which they have developed in tandem through a realization that consciousness has a supernatural quality to it, so that when consciousness Becomes self-reflexive begins not to look upon itself as a form so much, but to participate in the mysteriousness of its own functioning in order to have a ratio it can't use itself. The really powerful super Yogi is not aware that he is super powerful Yogi until he does something. Then it's really big magic. But the super powerful Yogi does what the artist does and what the scientist does. He goes back to nature. He goes back to nature, as nature really is in the integral, the mysteriousness of nature, and out of the mysteriousness of nature he is able to pull a ratio able otherness to his conscious dimension. And so the artist returns to nature not as a collection of things, but as a range of possible things, the forms of things unknown. And he makes out of his activity, out of his art, or out of his science, out of her art, out of her science. That person makes new living existentials so that they now belong in life, just like natural things, but that they are not just natural things. They're prismatic because they carry with them a conscious dimensionality that's already a part of their existence, so that they are creatively existent, so that art forms like spiritual persons are creatively existent. They're always exuding and radiating the vitality of life. And so they are always friends of life. One way to tell if something is art is that you feel the vitality that comes. The deeper one appreciates, the more that you feel the vitality of life. Let's take a break and we'll come back. To. Zero. Let's return to zero. When Nagarjuna, some 8850 years ago, was speaking of Shunyata, there was a problem in his time that had emerged. When the historical Buddha was teaching, he made it quite clear. He taught for 45 years, and he made it clear many times. That the way in which human beings are constituted in cultures, that even the Dharma would be misunderstood within a time period, that the true teaching would be dissipated and would vanish. When this was noticed, about some almost 500 years after his time, when this was noticed to actually be occurring, there was a figure in India, a very extraordinary figure named Ashvaghosha. Name comes from the Sanskrit which the word is refers to the neighing of horses. The the power not of the stallion, but the power of the horse as a vehicle to expand the range of man. Much in the same way that the nickname for Boris Pasternak in Russia was the horse, because he was a powerful expansion of the capacity of man to feel and express well. Ashvaghosha was that kind of figure 2000 years ago. And he noticed that the atrophying of the Buddha in his presentation of Dharma was due to a tradition bound time dimension that constricted the mind's ability to transform, and when the mind was narrowed in, its ability to transform, it naturally quite naturally regressed and compensated by a swelling of ritual. That ritual compensates to make up for the lack of transformation into consciousness, into vision. And so Ashvaghosha searched around to find a new way to re-energize the transform of traditional Buddhism, and he found it from South India in a very curious way. He found it from the Jewish Christians from Kerala. The Jewish Christians in Kerala had received the the missionary figure of Saint Thomas about 40 A.D. Ashvaghosha, about 50 years later, took the insight of Hellenistic Judaism in the Christian mode. Thomas was a very good presenter of Jesus, and so the Saint Thomas presentation of Jesus's transform was grafted onto the Buddha's transform and produced a new phase in India. It was called the Mahayana. It was called the Mahayana the Great Way, as opposed to the old way, the Theravada. And over time, people in the Mahayana who are not really in the Mahayana. They called the old way the Hinayana, the little vehicle. They're only after getting enlightenment for themselves. What we're after in the Mahayana enlightenment, for not only all people, but for all sentient beings in the entire universe. And that because all sentient beings in the universe are linked together all the time, everywhere, for real. None of us can have enlightenment until it's completely saturated throughout the entire universe. So until then, we're all putting off our own individual enlightenment. And the Bodhisattva vision came into play. Well, Ashvaghosha brought in the transform of Jesus and recut the transform of Buddha. And so the Mahayana is actually a Hellenistic Jewish Christian Buddhism. And his book Ashvaghosha. Book is called The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. In Sanskrit, faith is Shraddha Shraddha and the book is called Shraddha Pada the path of Faith. Not faith is as in keeping your fingers crossed, but faith that the living ratio of consciousness is sharable and that one of Jesus's great transforms is to show that consciousness can be shared, that there is such a thing as a conscious community, and that the conscious community. It's a Hellenistic Jewish ideal. The traditional Jewish understanding in antiquity was God shows his face to no man. But the community, when it is pure, may behold him in their works, so that the beatific community, when they're doing their works, that's the face of God that's beholding. So Jesus's transform was that there is such a thing as a communal sharing of conscious vision, and therefore there's such a thing as a spiritual, personal form that comes out of that, that one belongs with that community. And this was about 2000 years ago, 1900 years ago, By the way, the great conqueror of the time, Kanishka, considered Ashvaghosha the most precious treasure on the earth, and he brought his enormous armies in from Central Asia. And he surrounded the city where Ashvaghosha lived. Um, and uh, instead of laying siege to it in a military fashion, he said, no one will be able to go in or out until Ashvaghosha delivers himself to me to educate my empire. And after a while Ashvaghosha came out and he was taken into Kanishka's entourage. And that's how the Mahayana went from India into China, Japan, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, everywhere. Um, this sharable consciousness, this, as I call it, a shared presence. Vision, which is able to become an art form, was one of the great themes of Henry Moore. One of the tremendous themes that Henry Moore developed. And you notice in his early work, there are individual pieces. And after the Second World War, there are especially group pieces of Henry Moore. His sculptures begin immediately to take on the group aspect, and one of the indelible beginnings for him is the realization of the potential of the mother and child, that the seed of the community is in the mother and child, because the mother and child are not two, but they're a pair and that preparedness has as its real fulcrum a zero based openness which is indistinguishable from nothingness, which is the mystery of nature. So that if you go back to the real mystery of nature. Nature is mysterious because nature is always fertile out of openness, is receptive to emerge and reemerge and reemerge, worlds without end. That the fruitfulness of nature is in its mysterious openness, and that the zero ness in the transform from mind to consciousness is participates in that. It's not identical because that's a mental gymnastic to say, well, shunyata is equal to the openness of nature is a misstatement. There's no distinguishability whatsoever. So that the correct way to talk about it, it's a part of the same flow. It's just that one notices it because you create an aperture through which one can appreciate that the flow is continuous. It's uninterrupted. Art forms are the apertures of appreciation of that continuity. And spiritual persons are two. One is spiritual, not because you're good, but because you're a ratio of the real through which the appreciation of the continuity of reality is appreciable can happen. So in India, from that day, from Ashvaghosha day, the emphasis went from doing yoga asanas to make sure that you get it, to the ability that if you could just appreciate the universal shareability of it, it's called darshan would be sufficient. If one could learn to see openness truthfully, you would then participate in that continuity. And this, in India to the present day, is one of the synthesizing and differential truths of the whole Indian civilization. This came into play in the 1920s in the arts and sciences. One of the artists who brought it into play was Henry Moore and one of the scientists. One of the mathematicians who brought it into play was Hermann Weyl. We've been talking about this morning. When you look at Wiles work. Not only the algebraic theory of numbers, but his cognate work with it is called the classical groups, their invariants and representations. The community is a group, and while is world famous for all time because he's the first one mathematically to get right, which doesn't mean that he got it correct in terms of a test. He got it right because it works. He developed a theory of groups and mathematics. And so the classical Groups is one of the world's great monographs in mathematics. And it came out. Here's his preface to the first edition. Ever since the year 1925, Henry Moore was 27 years old. He was at one of the flash points in his career. He had grown up in Yorkshire amid the slag heaps, the coal mines. He had found encouragement in a high school teacher who let him experience a little bit of art. Then he was taken up into the First World War. He was sent to the trenches in warfare. He was gassed. He was in an advanced artillery regiment that started with 400 men, and three months later there were 50 left alive and 30 of those had to be hospitalized with gas injuries that kept not immediately occurring, but later on. And so more coming back at the age of 21 had seen enough horror for an entire lifetime in just a few months. When he was released from service. They gave him a chance to go to the art school and leads the art college and a beautifully at the Art College in Leeds, England, an industrial city. The vice chancellor was a very wonderful man named Sir Michael Sadler, whose son had translated Kandinsky's book on the spiritual and art just a few years before. And so this young returning veteran trying to get over being gassed and nearly killed read Kandinsky Red Vision and design by Roger fry, read a book by Ezra Pound on the sculpture Goodyear Brzezinski. And in the mish mash of all of this, realized that he had a chance to go deeper into his art, but that he had to maintain a kind of a distance from an academicism, which would make a regressive habituation of art as just a way to earn money, do your job, produce. And so more was always just on the fringe of being an art teacher and on the fringe of being an outlaw. And for all the time he was at the Leeds College of Art. He wanted to go to the Royal College of Art in London and he was finally blessed. He was sent there and when he went there they did not allow the art instruction for sculptures to carve. That's how crazy it was. You may not carve if you're going to be a sculptor. This is crazy. This is unbelievable. Moore managed to spend about 14 years in two seven year cycles as an art teacher, but he was always on the outside. He was always working on the outside. And he said that his classroom was not the Royal College of Art, but the British Museum. And he would go to the British Museum and he would look at the collections, And there he found the objects that Fry and Pound and Kandinsky. We're talking about that realm. African sculpture, Mesoamerican sculpture, Mayan sculpture. And he wove that into the Gothic sculpture of the English churches and English cathedrals until he had a very rich stew, but a rich stew, not in the sense of somebody who was learning art by the numbers or teaching art by the effectiveness, but someone who was exploring his visionary fairy tale domain. He was doing, in a sense, what Monet had done some half century before, when Monet wanted to find a way to practice his art. He would take himself off. He would take himself back to his childhood haunts. Even though he was born in Paris, he was raised in Le Havre, on the on the coast, and so he would go to the Normandy coast by himself. He would live in caves and he would paint, and he would paint not what he saw so much, but he would paint the vision of what he saw, presence on the canvas so that the canvases became living things to him. They the canvases were not representations of something else. They were presentations of the energized, conscious fairy realm. So the canvases were alive. And the discovery then for him was that if you did not let the ritual response register in your from your perception to your conception. If you learned that kind of artistic yoga of not letting the normal happen, the normal response, that perception, instead of finding its integral in conception so that the conception then receives perception in its terms, you stop seeing in terms of mental expectations, and what occurs are only impressions from the perception in your mind. This is a very advanced yoga. This is a Mahayana yoga that was perfected in the two and three hundreds A.D. in India. The successors to Nagarjuna, the great Mahayana Dharma yogis, developed this possibility. It's a technique of not letting perception gel into conception. Perception registers, but it registers as the perceptions suspended in an openness so that one does not see objects. One sees just the impressions. And if you persevere in that yoga, what you finally see is the function of seeing itself. You see yourself seeing. It's a kind of a witnessing, not of something, but witnessing yourself a self-consciousness. But even to say self consciousness now is a is a beggared reduction. It has nothing to do with the actuality. The actuality is that when you look to look, then you don't see things, but you see transparencies. When D.T. Suzuki had his first Satori experience at 20 years of age, he was invited to go to Chicago in 1897 to go and translate the Tao Te Ching. In Chicago, at the Open Court publishing house, Paul Carus had set up and D.T. Suzuki's Zen master, Soyen Shaku Roshi, said, you cannot go until you've had your first Satori experience, your first enlightenment experience. And young D.T. Suzuki said, well, if I don't have it, I won't be able to go. And his Zen master told him, he said, no, no, no, no, it's not that you won't be able to go. You will have to commit Hari kari. You will have to kill yourself, because you have come to a threshold where you will have to be real, or if you are not, you will become demonic and wrongly influence a lot of beings. And so you have to spare them that travail. You're going to have to kill yourself if you don't achieve enlightenment. And the day before the ship was sailing and the Hari kari knife was ready, he says he was 97 when he died and he wrote in his memoirs in his 90s. He said, suddenly I realized that I was going to have to kill myself, that there was no way that I was going to have enlightenment. I wasn't prepared, there was nothing I could do. I was I realized I was naive and unready, unsophisticated, in no way prepared for this. And that's exactly the matrix out of which Shreepada gains its momentum from nothing. And he said he came out of the zendo, and he was shocked in the moonlight, discovered that he was completely transparent. And he looked up and he saw all the trees were transparent to. He saw the crystal realm where God sings. And he was he was so shocked by this that he went to see Shayan Shaku, who woke up just long enough to tell him you can go better catch the boat. And that was it. In Back to Hermann Weyl. Because we're working with ratios of the real. We're cutting proportions, we're recutting. We're not here to instruct, to make it clear. The mental habit that needs to have language make things perfectly clear. It belongs in the Nixon era of politics. We're not going to make one thing perfectly clear. We don't care. We're unlearning as fast as we're learning to maintain a balance so that the openness occurs all the time, so that at any time our shroud of Sparta will gain it's dynamic and you never know when it's going to happen. Here's while introduction to the classical groups. Ever since the year 1925, when I succeeded in determining the characters of semi-simple continuous groups. Not just groups, not aggregates, but groups that occur in continuous continuity, while later on wrote a classic book on the background of mathematics called The Continuum. It's still in print from Dover Paperbacks half a century later. No one has ever done it better. You don't have to do it better. The continuum, because it is the continuum of mathematics that is, the matrix out of which form, with its conscious dimension, emerges creatively in the first place. It's called original form. It has a pristine quality that one recognizes. You cannot recognize Existentials in this way. Existentials do not register even with the purest perception. They are not original because perception, even though it's not a kind of representation as people usually think. All perception is creative, but the existential things themselves are not original. They're recut all the time. Our body is made up of tissue, and if you went down into that tissue and bone and blood and nerves and everything, you would find molecular structure, and below the molecular structure, we'd find atomic structure, and below that the subatomic Make structure. And all of that emerges originally out of the mystery of nature at the beginning. What beginning? There's no identifiable point at which there is a beginning. The coordinates are zero, zero zero for that on any scale. And yet all of that not only emerged existentially, but re-emerged and re-emerged. Every atom in my body, in your body, every atom of every molecule was fashioned long before this planet even came into existence. These atoms have been around since the beginning, and the heavier atoms were all made in stars. So anything heavier than helium or the occasional lithium atom, you might have one out of a trillion atoms. It's lithium. Everything above that. The atomic scale was made inside a star. We're already existentially interstellar compositions already. So that even when perception is ace perfect in the most powerful yoga our form is capable of. You do not see original form in nature. You see the recutting of millions and billions of times of the molecular atomic structures into the shapes, but with consciousness as an added dimension, you can see original things. That's why a work of art is original. A spiritual person is original. They never were before. And they're not just existent now, they are radiantly real so that a spiritual form is radiantly real. An art form is radiantly real. Old Monet, when he was blind with cataracts and he had to wear dark glasses and he couldn't see, he was technically blind and had eye operations. That's when he did the largest impressionist murals of all around. Yeah. Uh, I think there is something like, uh, hundreds and hundreds of meters of murals. They built a special place for them. The ex-president of France, Clemenceau, made sure that that there was a place where Monet's final paintings were housed. He was blind. He couldn't see, he couldn't see. And what he could see was all skewed to the yellow. He couldn't tell yellow from white. And when you look at the old Monet's work, it's an ocean of subtle color. That's so extraordinary that one is one's whole sense of what color is is dwarfed by the magnificence of it. Like the old Beethoven's final symphonies and quartets, he couldn't hear when I couldn't see. And yet, an artist that has matured themselves to cosmic size can see clearer, can hear clearer than physicality, because they inhabit the realm where the mystery of the openness of nature has flowed clear through the aperture of appreciable nothingness, where the conscious transform comes and has re-emerged into infinity and the original openness, the transform zero and the infinity of indefinite possibilities is a continuous flow that is indeed a continuum. In the deepest sense of that, there is no way that one does anything to that, so that there is a quality of understanding that at its really refined. Making integral forms at its highest level is not to make forms that represent something, but forms that are transparent, to allow us to look through, to see the real flowing. And that's where the vitality of art comes. Work of art is alive. It lives. It lives in a fairy realm which is more real than existential. Existential things eventually will decompose. They all fall apart. The longest lived particle is the proton. It exists as itself for billions and billions and billions of years. Carl Sagan. Billions. But eventually, even protons decay. Given enough time, they will fall apart. But spiritual forms are eternal. They don't fall apart because they were never pasted together in the first place. Let's take a break until next week.