Art 11

This is Art 11 and we're moving towards a threshold. And the next phase is history. And our threshold as it approaches. History has a very peculiar kind of equality. And I might just remind you of the way in which this progression goes. We have a sequence that has a rhythm to it, and this rhythm has a measure. And the measure is by pairs. One of the elements of the pair is a form which has an objectivity. The other element of the pair is a process that has no objectivity. It also has no subjectivity. So this is a very difficult initial quality to be aware of. That object and subject is a false pairing. Subject object is a false pairing and is a deceptive polarity. Now, the fact that almost all the psychologies in the world are based on subject object polarity and most philosophic discussions of the last 500 years are based on subject object polarity, does not obviate the fact that all of this is, as one used to say, a tissue of lies. It has no bearing in reality whatsoever. It is all fictitious. So that what we're doing has, as its basic quality of establishment, a frequency of objectivity process in pairs, in measured pairs, to reestablish a a realistic comportment towards ourselves and towards each other, and as a new basis upon which to comb through the fictitiousness that fogs everything in our lives. Every aspect of our lives is larded up with deception. The minds that we have are deceived. The society that we live in is fictitious, and the techniques that we have to bridge the two are ineffective. So we are adrift in all complete ways. Now, this has been a condition that has been located classically for the last couple of hundred years in particular. 200 years ago, 1801 we've been talking about this in the previous art presentations. 200 years ago, there was a concerted effort to try to Establish a new basis upon which men and women, human beings, could begin to establish a more realistic life, and the basis at that time was a revolution in society and its concomitant a revolution in the mind, and both the mind and society were revolutionized together by having them as a tandem return back to a primordial nature. Now they, the prophet, the forerunner of this return to nature that was emphasized 200 years ago, has always been singled out to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Because Rousseau's Confessions, which came out in the late 1700s. Rousseau's confessions were a self-revelation of a human being on a scale that had not been seen probably since the Confessions of Saint Augustine some 1300 years before. And in The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which is still in print in 100 editions all over the world, he cites an incident which changed his entire life, because it allowed for him to have a self-reflective moment of such penetration that he saw through The veil of deception of his own life, and that that veil was not imposed upon him by others, but was made up by he himself. The moment he says in his confessions, he was rowing out on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, and he was full of the turmoil of his life. He was very passionate, kind of a man, and he was always filled with plans and plans that could not be realized, and he would get angry at those who got in the way, and he would get angry at the inability of himself. And so he was rowing out on Lake Geneva and in the midst of the natural scenery. It was a very placid day. Lake Geneva was very quiet, reflecting the mountains around, And Russo dropped his oars, dropped his anger, dropped, his lust of which he had plenty. Dropped his greed. Now, this is a classic yogic triumvirate. Anger, lust and greed. When you see Tibetan mandalas. Anger, lust and greed are the pig, the snake and the rooster that chase each other around and around. And it is the dynamic for the world of samsara. The world of illusion is powered by a flywheel that has only anger, lust and greed. But because they go so fast, chase each other so fast, they become a blur. And so it is mistaken by the ego for being the energy of life. And so the fictitious world is highly energized in an egotistical way by deception, which is in its fundamental anger, lust, and greed. Be that as it may, Rousseau found himself so placid that he forgot himself for the moment and became completely absorbed into the serene, reflective reality of Lake Geneva. And it was like a Zen like experience. Only he didn't know he wouldn't have used that term. But he realized that nature has a mysteriousness in its mirror of calm, which absorbs us into it so that we leave this world, not this world of real nature, but this world of egotistical fictitiousness that the mirror of calm nature absorbs only the image of actuality and reflects that and does not absorb the fictitiousness. Now, this image later on became famous because Dracula does not have an image in the mirror. Vampire demons will not show up in a mirror because they are not of nature. They're not natural. They only exist in a demonic fictitious realm which, as long as we exist there, they can get us. That nature has a mirror substrate that only reflects the real, and that this is part of the mystery of nature, and that if we are absorbed into the mirror of nature, a kind of natural alchemy happens. We lose all of the accoutrements of lies and deception, and are seen and can see ourselves completely unnatural, not only naked to the flesh and naked to the bone, but also naked to the mind. Now this is an extraordinary quality, and out of Rousseau's account came a whole welter of Individuals striving to make something out of this. And one of the things that was made out of this was the French Revolution. We're going to use in the history section. When we begin history, we're going to use another confession, but not a confession like Saint Augustine, but an autobiography by Benjamin Franklin. And we'll see that Benjamin Franklin is a completely different kind, a completely different type of human being from Rousseau. Benjamin Franklin belongs to the enlightenment, whereas Rousseau belongs to the Romantics. Franklin belongs to the structure of the mirroring so that a mind becomes very clear mirroring of exactly what is nature's structure and nothing else. Whereas Rousseau becomes the protagonist of a search to purify oneself, to get to that mirror like status. The voice that most clearly expresses Rousseau is Friedrich Schiller, whose work we're using and one of Schiller's poems, famous poems, is called The Might of Song. The might, the Power of poetry, the power of poetry to affect a successful quest to purify oneself of the dross, not just in the mirror of nature, but in the Absorptive reflection of the mystery of nature, that one can be not just reflected as an image, but one can be absorbed so that what comes out is not a reflection, but reflectiveness as a mental awareness, not a reflection of image, but a reflection of reflectiveness as a power of mind to create something new from the original. This is the power of the poet to make art. And so for Schiller, art became the number one vector by which human beings could free themselves from the fictitious world and go back to nature. Not just as a natural object to be reflected in imagery which is truthful. But to go back as a creator of images to bring out something original, something new, so that art has to do with original creation, not with recreation, not with a reflection of truthful images so much, but with the creation of a reflective ness of creation originally where almost anything can be brought out. Central to this endeavor is the shift from an image space to a measured time. From space to time. It's not just shifting gears, but it's shifting dimensions because space in its three dimensional quality of being pictorial. And one could have an art like painting, or one could have an art like sculpture and ostensibly an art like architecture. All of these arts deal with space. They're spatially organized. But music is a time art. And it turns out also that architecture is a time art. Architecture and music reveal themselves in a temporal succession, which takes memory to be able to appreciate and master, and that the measure of the time, the equal parts that constitute the measure of the time succession, have a medium, a second medium through which they are expressed in groups, and that the expression of the grouping of meter is the rhythm. So that time has a meter, it has a metronome of existentiality, and it has a parenthetical grouping of symbolic structure, so that meter expressed through rhythm is the very way in which the integral of music is actually made, but that music is made personally so that it achieves form as an art, not just by meter through rhythm, but through a lyric personal quality of melodic arrangement into a harmonic presentation. So that there are at least three different levels of objectivity that are present in the art of music, are present in the art of fine poetry, like in Schiller, are present in like the architecture of, say, of Frank Lloyd Wright or a Plato or a Christopher Wren. And that this transformation of time, on the basis of adding a conscious dimension to it, not only creates art, but prepares the ground for history, so that history as a process is not natural. It is supranatural just as vision is not natural, vision is magic. Vision is supernatural. Vision is supra natural in the sense that it is a conscious blossoming beyond the objective limits of existence and of mind, so that works of art are distinctly different. They are differential forms and they are not integral forms. They use integral forms, but transform them by a five dimensional minimal reworking, and that this is where the creativity comes into play, so that art forms in their differential, prismatic, jewel like energy not only transform, but they redistribute the transformed objectivity in such a way that a new process comes into play. The process of history, which is a kaleidoscopic, multidimensional process that is a stronger than a than any process in the integral, stronger than myth, and also stronger than nature in the sense that historical process can create not only like vision, the forms of art, but that history itself as a kaleidoscopic differential process can create a further objectivity, which traditionally has been called the cosmos. Not just the universe, but all possible universes, that the the cosmos is not limited by the article the that what is cosmic. Is every possibility, including the imaginary ones, including the unknown ones, all brought into play simultaneously, and that history is the process by which this can happen. Now, for the last 5000 years, cultivated civilized men and women have addressed the divine as the Lord of history. In the Pyramid Texts of 5000 years ago in Egypt, God is addressed. Not a God or any god, but the unsayable, unknown fundamental matrix out of which the pairs of gods are made. There are. In the Heliopolitan recension there are four pairs of gods, so there are eight gods, but there is a ninth godhead from which those other pairs emerge and come, and that that power is the reality, which is the cosmos, and which has as its epithet the Lord of millions of years. And it comes down to our own time. So that when Rousseau was absorbed by the placid mirror of Lake Geneva and discovered that almost everything he held about himself was fictitious, including all of his pet techniques, all of his prideful characteristics by which he thought he was unique, turned out not to be unique at all, and to be very prideful, even to the point of greed, anger and lust. And he discovered a capacity in himself to let them go, even for a moment, even for a little while. And in doing so he experienced a rush of freshness, of energy without a dynamic, without a time dimension, without a time element, and discovered thereby a moment of eternity can actually occur within a human being's life, that we have an incredible capacity to be real. Even in a fictitious world, we can have a moment of deep truth whereby the time metronome of the culture and of the mind ceased to have traction even for a moment. And this. Eternal moment, once it occurs, is its resonances, because they are eternal. Like the most phantasmal gamma ray, high energy gamma rays penetrate. Through everything, all of the fictitious partitions. And one always can remember. That energy and apply it in any moment and see through the partitions of fictitiousness. As if they were not there. That a man or a woman acquires like a spiritual x ray vision of truthfulness. Even though they don't completely understand it, they know that they can see through things. They can see through deception. Especially one's own deception. So that the polarity between truth and lie is a very fundamental polarity becomes transparent. And likewise, the two other polarities that, along with truth and lie, occupy the geometry of coordinates of normal human concourse. The cultural world. The social world. Truth and lie. Life and death and heaven and hell. And those three sets of polarities are the coordinates the x, y, and z coordinates of the geometry of cultural and in social worlds. And that one can master that kind of geometrical three coordinate quality and become very clever and very good and very successful at cultural and social realms, and never once be real. And so 200 years ago, it became an issue. Will you choose to ever be real, or will you choose to be successful in a fictitiousness, which you must then endorse by consciously forcing yourself to lie by consciously polarizing heaven and earth and life and death. And so the threshold which becomes crucial in this is not heaven and hell. It's not even truth and lies. The crucial threshold becomes life and death, so that the threshold beyond which death obtains, as the condition becomes the sort of upper threshold by which someone living in a fictitious cultural social realm faces the music, so to speak. Now we have to be clear about this. The nether world, the world of beyond life, of death is not the same as hell. The nether world of Hades is only scrambled as hell by someone acculturated to a fictitious cultural and social realm. Hell and Hades are quite distinct. The most powerful of all the early literary epics, poetic epics of truth, finding of reality, Finding in this world was written about 2300 BC by a woman, the first great female poet in the world, and her name was NEA Diana, and her father was Sargon the Great. Sargon, who was a king of Akkad and who extended his kingdom to include many other kingdoms and eventually established the first great international empire in the world. It stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, and because it stretched in an arc that was inhabitable all along its scope, it's called in history the Fertile Crescent. And so the Fertile Crescent, as Sargon the Great's early empire was in its sign, in its insignia was always the crescent moon, and at the at the crest of the Fertile Crescent, at the apex of the curve was an ancient city called Haran. Haran and Haran was dedicated, of course, to the moon goddess. And it wasn't the full moon, and it wasn't the new moon, and it wasn't any gibbous phases of the moon. And it wasn't the half moon, but the sliver of the first appearance of light as a crescent was the symbol for ancient Harran, and it's sometimes still called 40. 400 years later, it's still called the ISIS moon. Isis, who is the giver of life. And her symbol is that first sliver crescent of light that's available. And that was the symbol of Enheduanna. And her great epic was Inanna. The way in which a queen of this earth can penetrate into the underworld, the netherworld, to visit her sister, who is the queen of the netherworld. And of course, in the descent of Inanna, she must divest herself of the seven symbols of her earthly power her crown, her sceptre, her cloak, so that she can only arrive at the centre of the netherworld completely naked. Nude, completely. And there she will die. But she will be brought back to life because of a substitution, because her consort Dumuzid will come and take her place. Now all of this goes back to uncounted tens of thousands of years of wisdom. This is not new with nada 4400 years ago. It's not new with the Sumerians of 6000 years ago. It goes back into Paleolithic times. We know this because one of the first art images available in human history is a Paleolithic woman, full so that her breasts, her belly, her thighs and her rump make a seven circle cluster around which the belly is in the center. The womb is in the center, and she wears on her head the crescent moon. There's a clay sculpture made somewhere around 35,000 years ago of this figure. She's not an Earth mother. She's not an Earth mother. She is a transformation mother. She facilitates the passage through the liminal objectivity of existence, which alone can come to an end, and its pair, its resonant pair, the mental liminality of the idea of death, the idea that life will come to an end, which is tied to the existence being limited so that the idea of death holds firmly because of its correspondence to the existential death. And what the ancient ISIS did. Who knows how long ago our species has been around for 200,000 years. She Makes transparent that opaqueness of existential action in ritual and symbolic thought in the mind, and shows that when they are transparent, we can move through both those liminalities with ease because they are not walls, they are membranes, and we are of such a nature that we can move osmotically through them. That existence is not a wall to to us, beyond which there is nothing like no more life, nor is the mind in its structuring boundaries and limits a equal cage for us, that we can move through both, but we cannot move through either one until we have the ability Two. Look through their walls, their boundaries, to see them transparently. And that can only happen if we have a basis of objective form, outside of existence, outside of the mind. And that's where art comes in. And that's why there was art 40,000 years ago, making a not an image of the Earth mother, but by making an art sculpture of the transformational goddess of the crescent moon who shows us how to move through, penetrate through. Because life goes through membranes all the time. Every cell in our body has a membrane, and life deals with membranes all the time. It's the way in which living forms Rooms are. Cells communicate with each other all the time. By the way, they usually communicate through ionic channels that are made by elements that go into salts sodium, calcium, potassium. Those kinds of atoms are always constituents of of salts. So that when someone in a deep understanding talks about an alchemy, dealing with metals and dealing with salts and dealing with other aspects, they're not just talking about material things, nor are they talking about psychological ideas that are beyond those material things, but about spiritual art that goes completely into a trance form that beggars the limitations of the mind and of existence. So that alchemy, for instance, is an art. And has a higher cosmic registry. It is also a science. One can learn the science of alchemy. There was a famous thing in the in the late 40s when, for the first time, they made a lead into gold in a nuclear reactor, and they realized it took an awful lot of energy and it wasn't commercially viable. But nuclear transformation is a reality. One can move an element up the chain of its complexity, and one can change elements into new elements and in fact bring elements that never occurred into nature, into registry, into existence. And I think we're we're close now to understanding there is many elements beyond uranium, as there are elements up to uranium. So that the family of elements that exists in physical nature in the universe has a symmetrical mirror to trans uranium elements that occur in a conscious time space registry. All of this is deeply tied up in the way in which human history has unfolded, has developed, for instance, to keep the Fertile Crescent going. Took a long established caravan route sequence and about 2000 BC. The man who was in charge of the caravan routes of the Fertile Crescent, going from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. His name was Terra Terra and he's unknown today, but his son is famous. His son was named Abraham. And Abraham is the founder of the Jewish tradition. So that there is a quality of revelation that occurs when one understands deeper that a conscious time space, like in a vision, is able to be expanded to at least a seven dimension continuum like history. And that someone who is masterful in that looks upon a simple four dimensional mentality as thinner than sheets of paper. That someone who lives by the limitations of a four dimensional mentality is actually on the level of flatworm nematodes. And just as if you were a four dimensional being, you would want to help people limited to two dimensions. There was a science fiction novel called flatland by a guy named Abbott of three dimensional beings trying to help the two dimensional beings off the page, and they would get nothing because they mistranslated. Every time something was said, they would translate it back to their two dimensional realm. And of course, the standard response. When they would hear something from dimensions beyond their Ken, they would say, first of all, that's not true. And second of all, it's not new. It's neither true nor new. And this is the way in which the dispersion by ridicule always happens, so that one of the curious things in high wisdom, overcoming death is not as big a problem as overcoming ridicule. Don Quixote showed he's the bravest knight in world literature. Don Quixote showed that it's more difficult to face madness than it is to face death. And to come through and understand that sometimes the pristinely real is considered by the world. To be mad means that you have to choose between them and The real. And of course, this is a very difficult thing. Here's how Schiller and the Power of Poetry writes it. And then we'll take a break. As when in hours. The least unclouded, portentous strides upon the scene. Some fate before. From wisdom shrouded and awes. The startled souls of men. Before that stranger from another. Behold how this world's great ones bow. Mean joys. Their idle clamor smother. The mask is vanished from the brow and from truths. Conquering flag unfurled. Fly all the falsehoods of the world. Let's come back to two themes. Time and space. We're using Stravinsky and Schiller together as the third pair that we're presenting in the art phase of our education, which has a pair of years. And each of those years has four phases to them, so that we're working all the time with a kind of assumed symmetry. And the reason that we're doing this is that symmetry characterizes the way in which existentials maintain themselves in a four dimensional time space. So that existentiality itself has a symmetry to it. One can emphasize asymmetric reality like in Zen. But symmetry is important. And the reason for this is that the first dimension, which calibrates the way in which the pace of space unfolding, the first dimension time. Time itself has a symmetrical balance. It almost has a bias towards separateness. And this is brought out in the second of the six lectures that Stravinsky gave at Harvard University in the late 1930s. And he said it in this way. He was trying to tell this audience who were not paying attention and couldn't pay attention. They weren't they weren't getting it. That here's somebody who is nearing 60 years of age, who's the maybe the greatest composer of the century, trying to tell them the fundamental about his art. What is fundamental about music as an art to someone on the level of Stravinsky, that time must be ordered in a transformative way, because if time is not ordered in a transformative way, the music will not have a memorable feeling tone registry and there will be no experience of it. So he says this. We're going to speak first about time the plastic arts are presented to us in space. We receive an overall impression before we discover details, little by little and at our leisure. But music is based on temporal succession and requires alertness of memory. Consequently, music as a chronologic art. The laws that regulate movement of sounds require the presence of a measurable and constant value. Meter. Meter meter A purely material element Meter is a purely material element through which rhythm which is a purely formal element, is realized. So that meter and rhythm are different. Meter is the fundamental parts that go to make up a material. What is the material? The material is time, but it is grouped by rhythm so that rhythm groups the meter. The meter is like the beats. The rhythm is the way in which the beats are grouped. Some Indian ragas have such a complex rhythm that you're almost stymied to be able to hear it. But the fundamental early ragas usually have groups of like three three, whereas Western music tends to be two two. He says or said. In other words, meter answers the question how many equal parts? The musical unit, which we call a measure, is to be divided into. So the measure is what is given. The composer. Says you have this measure. Here it is. And within that there's going to be this arrangement, this rhythm, so that they measure in the meter has what we would call in the Greek language a dynamis. The dynamic aspect of music is in the meter. But the energy. The energy is in the rhythm. It's very important when we get in a couple of weeks to moving into history. And we start with Thucydides. Thucydides, who founds history as a conscious discipline. He's the world's first great conscious historian. He will say that the difficulty for human beings of making forms in history is that force from the dynamic of existence overpowers our ability to group it into rhythms, which then are available for us to live consciously. In other words, the Driving fundamental element in the dynamic of history overcomes our ability to make a grouped rhythm out of it by which we can live. Now, this is a very, very big problem because if you fall back on the dynamic meter of history, what results are tyrannies, whether fascist by the far right or by the far left? It doesn't make any difference. And that all political forms tend to fall to a common low denominator of dynamics. So it's a problem. Whereas consciousness deals with the groupings of energy into frequencies which are modulated so that we can live better, and that we will discover that this is not a property of political forms. It is a property of artistic forms, so that to realize human lives on a large scale in history requires art and not politics. This is obvious, crucial error, then, that human society, especially over the last 10,000 years, has been laboring under the delusion that if they have strong enough political forms, you can live a good life. It is a severely flawed idea on many counts, but especially on the fundamental count is that it is never real. It is only a fictitiousness, so that some one 200 years ago, like Schiller or his contemporary Jefferson, both went back to a founder of Greek civilization, Homer, and realized that there is a fundamental quality in the return to nature, which is not available unless you immerse yourself. Like we talked about earlier this morning of Rousseau not just immersing himself in nature, but allowing nature to absorb you so that you can recognize yourself without the cultural or social clothes, that you can see yourself nude. And that especially the ability to see oneself nude, divested of all the costuming of all the cosmetics, is the sine qua non of being able then to go back to the mystery of nature so that you can re-emerge fresh and not only just fresh, but originally. That it's not a question of going somewhere geographically to find the paradisiacal form of man. The paradisiacal form of man is available to you yourself. If you can go back into the absorptive quality of nature long enough with the memory, the memory capacity to recognize yourself nude. And most people have never seen themselves nude. They don't know what they look like. Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem called The Good Man Has No Face, and the concluding line is that in this social world of pretend. People talk all the time about being a person who knows what it's like to have no face, as if they knew. The process of divesting is just that process that Inanna did of her descent into the netherworld. Inanna, the ISIS moon, Fertile Crescent, not Earth goddess, but transform woman brings the capacity to not only go into another world. It's never of interest when you have things to do. When she goes into the netherworld. She can't leave through some door. She has to stay there because you cannot leave the netherworld once you go into it. Because the netherworld is the afterlife realm. You belong to that. Then it's as if your whole life being is repolarized, so that you cannot come back into life because you've been repolarized. Now you belong to the realm of the dead. The only way that you could come back to life is to repolarize the repolarizing. Or in mathematical physics it's called renormalizing. You have to find a transform that not only reverses the reversal, but can do so without damaging the structure. You want to be able to come back into life and not as a zombie, not as some kind of vampire living dead. You want to be able to come back as a viable living being. How do you get reborn? How do you get resurrected? How do you come back? And the whole ISIS Osiris theology is the ancient Egyptian religion of resurrection. How do you come back? But it was old, thousands, tens of thousands of years before Egypt was ever founded. Before men, as Narmer ever united the Black Land into one thing called the First Dynasty, tens of thousands of years before then, in Paleolithic times, and it was done in such a fashion that the threshold of going into the death and coming back into the life had not to do with men, but had to do with women. That it was a feminine quality of birthing. That was the clue into the wisdom, feminine, rebirthing, resurrection. So that it was a wise woman who knew it was a Sophia, who knew because she knew the transform energy by which the dynamic that was irreversible could be recalibrated so that it was reversible. Time is not reversible, but there is a transform medium that not only reverses time, but absorbs it's irreversible dynamic into a much, much larger, more powerful ambient of both dynamic and of energy, and that frequency is usually called. In Greek it was called Philo, and we call that love. So that the discipline of knowing that was called philosophia philosophy. Now no one in this town is teaching this now. So walking out into the sunlight is not such a very good idea. You may never hear it again. That ancient wisdom has a curious, pristine quality. It's not right or wrong because it's not in that polarity, because one is not talking about heaven and hell. One is not in that polarity, and one is no longer talking about truth and deception. Because the power, the harmonic of love, like high powered gamma rays or like tau neutrinos, goes through the borders of life and death, of heaven and hell, of truth and lie permeates all of it all the time. Very easily. All of it becomes osmotic. All of it becomes membrane, so that the cosmos is like a living tissue rather than a compartment compartmental universe. To think that the universe is a complex. Compartmentalization is only an idea. Whereas the universe is quite alive when it is cosmic and alive it constitutes. A curious conscious entity that is permeable by love everywhere, all the time. So that one saying a truism God's reality is love is so astoundingly precise that one could not even believe the exactness of it. But to know the exactness of it requires a great sophistication. Now, if music has a time element rather than a space element at its basis, it has meter, which is the dynamics. It has rhythm, which is the energy, so that energy is grouped. How is it grouped? What is the rhythm grouping of that energy that applies itself to the dynamic meter of time? It's the frequency. The energy frequency. Energy always registers in a frequency. And frequencies can be calibrated. And they can also be changed. They can also be transformed so that there's a very deep arcane if you want to make it arcane. But it's essentially fundamental, is a fundamental understanding that there are harmonics of love that transform, and they transform very easily, not only physical existence, but also Symbolic mental objects. So Stravinsky then says Wright's second lecture, second lesson of six on music. The laws that regulate the movement of sounds require the presence of a measurable and constant value meter, a purely material element through which rhythm a purely formal element is realized. In other words, meter answers the question of how many equal parts. The musical unit, which we call a measure, is to be divided into. And rhythm answers the question of how these equal parts will be grouped within a given measure. A measure in four beats, for example, may be composed of two groups of two beats, or in three groups, one beat, two beats, one beat, and so on. Thus is the kicker is, Emerald says, kicking it up a notch. Thus we see that meter. Since it offers itself only it offers in itself only elements of symmetry. This is astounding. Time only occurs in symmetries. Yet in terms of space is irreversible and only goes in one direction. The arrow of time. It's a famous thing in physics. Yet time in reality is always symmetrical, whereas time in the world is always irreversible and only goes in one direction. One of the most profound yogic realizations that comes out of this is that the world is always illusionary, not because someone makes it up, because that's the only way it can exist. If t were not different from T, there would be no world. So to bemoan the fact that the world is appearance and illusion is stupid. Of course it is. It needs to be that way. And thus there's a famous phrase. In fact, the old British literary magus Owen Barfield used it as a title of one of his books, saving the appearances. Don't throw the appearances away. You're throwing the baby away with the bathwater. We need those appearances. It's fine that the world is just appearance. It's not a question of appearance and reality and oh, we've got to squeeze out all the appearance and get only the real. If you did that, you would come up with exactly nada. And if you want to have nada, there are some yogis. There are ways now. They used to be trails 10,000 years ago and now they're 20 lane superhighways. You can get to nothing in a hurry. Just live them all existence. Be a mall rat for a while. You can get to nothing in no time. So here's Stravinsky saying. Thus we see that meter, since it offers in itself only elements of symmetry, and is inevitably made up of even quality quantities. It's necessarily utilized by rhythm, whose function it is to establish order in the movement by dividing up the quantities furnished in the measure. One of the easiest ways to get the gist of this is to realize that sitting as a yoga is a mental appearance of yogic activity, and that in ancient times one didn't sit, one walked. Walking is the correct pace of thinking. Walking is the correct pace of thinking. It's only someone who learned by by deep, contemplative hiking would know this. Here's a poem written 40 years ago. It's a section seven of Sequoia matrix Sutra. To express this, I'm using 40 year old language because it's still viable. Behold your shadow on the rocks. Shadowy motion up towards the summit. Detached sensation. Up. Behold your own form. Moving. Formed from the sun's limits. Moving upon the mountain. Converging upon the peak. Driving on. Stubborn. Make this journey. On altars. Pyramid crest. Old thunder looks his best. And knows it well enough. And recognizes the pause, the falter and the fall. Behind him now on the upper slopes. The failing of physic. Played out to emptiness. This hallowed wildness. The tether of human strength. Taunt. Make this journey. In very ancient times, before there was the luxury of sitting quietly and doing nothing. There was the yoga of going through the pace of life with equanimity, of walking yourself through the complexities of everyday life. And this is how it would come out. And what occurs then is that you have a conscious compositional freedom in terms of the rhythm of how you live. Nature does not give you the rhythm of life. The whole idea of a bio rhythm is an anachronism. This misuse of language. Biometer. Yes, there is a dynamic to existence that registers. And by the way, you can, and molecular biology and atomic physics come to an exact understanding to any degree of specificity, specificity that you want. You can get down to a vibration of a single atom and know exactly its atomic structure and registry, if you want. It's available. But what is not available are an index to the varieties of the rhythms of living, because it becomes apparent immediately that that's always wide open. It's always free. That freedom and variation can also not only be accessed, but can be woven back into the meter of existence so that one's actions change. They become not just the actions of existence, but they become a dance of life. And that what one learns to dance, then art has come into play in a very real way. An art forms no longer are luxuries, they're necessities. And one of the keys to all of this is the ability to go into another world and a death realm and come back out. And that's something about that threshold has to do with the feminine. And forever and in all ways. Greek mythological types that have held this high have been Persephone and Orpheus. Persephone is the female who must go into the netherworld, and who is brought back by her mother, Demeter, and brings her back, not to bring her back, but to bring her back in a cyclic way so that she can be above ground half the year and below ground half the year. And it's not some primitive thing of winter and spring, and then summer and then fall and then winter. It's not a primitive seasonal thing. Our species was never primitive, seasonal even 200,000 years ago. It has to do with that ISIS moon A transformational realization that the threshold of death is not broached in a sense of breaking it, but is penetrated in a sense of osmosis, and that you not you, don't do it to do it once, and then you're a victor over death. You do it so that the osmotic membrane works both ways, so that life and death no longer exist. But there is this earth and the netherworld that exist together in a cycle of mutual osmosis, and that not only when that happens does the Earth and the netherworld have a mutual osmosis, but that the earth in heaven also have a mutual osmosis. One can go to heaven and return and go to heaven and return. And that there is this double cycle, this infinity sign, this figure eight. Always. When you look at the earliest of the hieroglyphic murals and Egypt, you will find the ancient Egyptian wisdom, because the figure eight is made by the royal cobra. The royal cobra, who makes the figure eight sign with his entire body. The Naga king. And not just one, but a whole accordion row of them. Because it is the interlinking of these dozens of figure eight king cobras, all interlinked together, that make the movement energy register of the rhythm of living time, which is eternal. And if you can calibrate your movement to that energy frequency, you can inhabit the netherworld and earth and heaven ambidextrously forever. What death says Jesus, when they put Lazarus in. He says, Lazarus, come out. What death? It is a quality of penetration not to victory and some kind of superficial triumph, but it is a penetration to the ongoing ecology of the real, which is just very quietly obtaining everywhere all the time. When Schiller writes in the second great poem of his, usually entitled Honor of Women or Dignity of Women, he says that men who get the dander up to go after this high wisdom get carried away by the very process of the energy of triumph. And they mistake that for the real. And so they are called back by asymmetrical balance of the wise feminine, whose wisdom is her beauty, not just a physiological beauty, but her presence as the truth of her being is the beauty that art beckons and heeds. He writes. Schiller writes, but woman with looks that can charm and enchain lures back at her beck. The wild truant again by her spell of the present beguiled true daughter of nature. She loves not to roam, but quietly with nature. Be forever at home. Not at home. In some geographical spot. Not in a choice neighborhood. In an expensive real estate. Not talking about that at all. At home in the mystery of nature. Because the mystery of nature is only that absorptive quality whereby her deep wisdom comes back into the cycles of life all the time, and the moon as that regulatory quality of how the truth of that is always the node of neither full nor new, the dark moon or the full moon. But the ISIS crescent is the finger snap that the return is real, not by some preordained plan, but because it just now happened again. And that reality moves by a energy rhythm. Of reality which modifies the dynamic of existence. Existence is always going to move by ones. Always. It has to. But we cannot live by ones. We have to live by a composed music of dance. In 1927, a famous dancer named Ida Rubinstein commissioned Stravinsky to write a. A ballet based on one of G-ds poems, and it was called The Fairy's Kiss. And she gave Stravinsky a very hefty commission, $7,500. And that was in 1927. That's a lot of money. And she was forming a ballet company at the time in Paris. And Ida Rubinstein had wanted to put on Stravinsky's great ballet, Apollo, which was the last great ballet that Diaghilev lived to put on with Stravinsky. They had started with, um, The Rite of Spring, Le Sacre du printemps. Here's another cover of The Rite of Spring. The Rite of Spring goes back to Paleolithic cave art. Man costumed as an antlered predator, the feminine as the sacrificial Nude victim who turns out not to be the victim, but the love transformer, so that life occurs again and again, whenever it will and whenever it does. This whole quality becomes a part of not just a return to the nether world, but a return to the upper world as well. And that larger ambit of upper and nether together forms an ecology of the fairy realm, the realm of the fairy tale, the realm not where myth is tied to ritual, but the fairy realm is untied to ritual, is tied to realization, is untied rather to realization. The realm of the fairy tale is where there can be a sudden change of everything at once in an impossible time. When time has run out for everything in terms of the dynamic plan and everything has failed, and evil has triumphed and the demons have won because they've closed every god damn exit, sealed every window. There's no more hope. That man is finally caught in the fairy realm. Everything changes all at once. And from the jaws of defeat. Victory is snatched and snatched every single time by the kiss, the fairy's kiss. And Ida Rubenstein, six years later, offered him another $7,500, and this time, instead of the Fairy's kiss. Stravinsky was asked to write a ballet, an operatic ballet on Persephone. And this he did. By the time of 1934, when Persephone was brought out. Europe was going into the night of the fascist threat. The Nazis. And Stravinsky eventually left, came back to his life by rediscovering the United States, came here to Los Angeles, came here to Hollywood. Lived on Wetherly Drive, just off Sunset Boulevard, and it was there at the end of the Second World War, that he composed one of his really great pieces of music, and it was his final great ballet. It was called Orpheus. Orpheus. He composed this because the male who goes to the nether world to bring back through love, his Eurydice, is unsuccessful, and he dies and must go back. And he joins her because only by accepting death can he go back. It's a different way in which it plays out. Persephone, the feminine plays out in one way, and the masculine Orpheus plays out in another. And it's interesting because very early on in the 20s, one of the closest friends to Stravinsky was Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, who did the sets, the costumes, the illustrations many times. And when the Second World War was over, Cocteau remembered that in the late 20s he had done a play called Orphee, and he was very happy about that play and the way that it worked out, I think it was 1926. So in 1946 he decided to make a film of Orpheus. And it's one of the world's great films. In fact, it's a whole trilogy. Eventually, because he linked up his 1946 Orpheus with a 1930s film called blood of a poet. And then a few years later, in 1949, he brought out a third film called Testament of Orpheus. Stravinsky's ballet Orpheus came out in 1947 and was produced in early 1948 for the first time, and it was exactly at that time that Cocteau began working on his film Orpheus. And it's interesting, because the way in which one goes back into the netherworld is such that you cannot just go back into the netherworld in a masculine version because it leads to a tragedy. It leads to a death for Sophia, for high wisdom. It leads to an enlarged ecology of the real. But the male achieves that through a second transformation and not just one. That's why the masculine energy has to be not only transformed, but distilled. You can't just have wine. You have to have cognac. You have to distill the transformation. And so most masculine spirits never complete their work. They settle for half way. And of course, that's. I guess most women understand men are half assed by nature. And the smarter they are, the more so. So that there's always a strategy of what was the old British Empire thing. There's always one more thing for men. You have to keep in mind, there's always one more thing. Be ready for yet something else. That kind of equality in. The Return in going to the netherworld and going to the primordial ness of nature. Cocteau. Following Stravinsky's Orpheus brought out the beauty and the beast and the beauty and the beast, like Le Sacre du Printemps is a quality of the feminine learning to be with the beast, with the masculine who can transform but doesn't know how to further distill. In Cocteau's Beauty and the beast, one of the really great films of all time, the beast can become a man again only by the powers of love sacrificing herself, and that when she does, it isn't a sacrifice to death, it's a sacrifice to a larger wholeness which carries him with her. And it's like the ancient Egyptian wisdom you don't resurrect. Ra resurrects. But if you are modulated to the energy of RA when he resurrects in the morning, you will go with him. You will be there as certain as the sun rising. So to have the egotistical idea that I'm going to beat death is a sure sign that you're going to stay in jail. More next week.