Art 12

This is Art 12. And what we're doing is a patient piecing together of 12 Saturdays in a row, punctuated by a 13th Saturday, which we call an interval. That interval is not only a space between 12 part sections, but has a recursive function of being a common denominator with everything that went before it and everything that goes after it. So next week is an interval, and we're going to use the poetry of Emily Dickinson. As our interval, we're not going to talk about art anymore. And we're not yet talking about history. But in between will be an interval and we'll enjoy Emily Dickinson. But the enjoyment of Emily Dickinson is not just to enjoy her poetry, but to appreciate the educational maturation which we're pursuing. This is a journey. Or it used to be 30 years ago, called a quest. It is an investigation. It's an inquiry. But we're not inquiring or investigating subjects. We're inquiring after ourselves, involved with a process of learning so that it requires of us a exponential awareness, not just an awareness that there's something to learn and we're interested, but that the process of learning itself is as interesting as what it is that we're learning about, so that we're learning how to learn at the same time that we are learning. But the technique of learning how to learn here is radical, and it has a quality of approach that not only engenders creatively, spontaneously something new, but at the same time dissolves the old, so that the old miss learning both as to subject and as to technique, we'll begin to dissolve so that there are two different processes that are weaving themselves together. One is learning something new and the other is unlearning something old at the same time. Now you notice that the mudra iconography of that is very ancient. It's Paleolithic, this is the sun and this is the moon. They work together to choreograph the way in which nature cycles nature for us as living beings. Cycles. It's the number one phenomenal strategy of the condition and situation that we find ourselves in. Nature cycles. Nature cycles in such a way that there is a constant repetition of the cycle, and within the repetition there are always minute variations, so that the earliest species of primates, several um species kinds before us. The earliest would have been something like Homo habilis, about 4 million years ago, learned that their survival depended upon and was successful to the extent that they wove themselves within the natural cycle, and that they were able to modify according to the minute variations, so that 4 million years later, by the time our species came on this planet about 200,000 years ago. It was a well-learned lesson plan. If you're going to live in nature, you have to know how nature works. Now, that is such a fundamental thing. It's such a ground level that in order to give it a designation, a proper designation, our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, when we became civilized about six 7000 years ago, had to search for names for this ways to to describe this. And the best way was found in China about 5000 years ago. In China, there was a sage named Fucci, who said, nature's Cycle for us emerges out of a mystery called the Tao, and that that emergence from the Tao emerges into a cycle that achieves form by what we will call. And 5000 years ago, he called it t, that there is a power of form that emerges out of the formlessness, so that it's not just sun and moon, that style, the cycles of nature, but behind them is something more profound, and that is that cycles of formal unity emerge out of formlessness. Naturally, this is what they do. So that thousands of years later, someone like Schiller, someone like Friedrich Schiller, could say that it's extremely important for us to understand how nature works. And he says in the 19th letter of his aesthetic letters on the Education of Man that we're working with, along with Stravinsky. He says about self-consciousness emerging, and that it emerges in a cycle that moves from sensation to thought with a middle ground, a middle ground that allows for sensation to become thought. And that this middle ground is able to take a direction from consciousness, from self-consciousness, and increase its ability to move sensation to thought through its medium. Now the sensation level is a ritual level. The thought level is a symbol level, so that ritual and symbol are like formative objective nodes. They really occur. The ritual node occurs as existence, with the proviso that we understand that existence is an ongoing action. There is no still point in existence. If existence were brought to stillness, what would happen in physics in the 19th century? The way in which existent action was measured was by heat, and so it was called thermodynamics. If you take a compound and you reduce its temperature to absolute zero, it would cease to move even on the molecular level, and that it would become inert in the sense of no temperature, no movement, no action. So that's its existence at that point of zero degrees Kelvin, it would cease to be. What? Existentially it wants. And in fact, we know today, in the early 21st century, that if you take a molecular structure made up of atoms and you cool that to absolute zero, the separate individual atomic structure of the molecules and the molecular structure of the compound ceases to occur, and you get what's called a Bose-Einstein condensate and then a Bose-Einstein condensate. The entire field of atomic and molecular material acts as if it were a single substance. It has the properties of what is called in astronomy, a black hole in the sense that it becomes a singularity. But whereas an astronomical singularity has no radiation, seemingly it actually has a very curious magnetoelectric radiation called Hawking radiation. But there is no light motion, and this ability to stop all light is what makes the event horizon seem dark black. The black hole in the Bose-Einstein condensate. The material acts as if it were a single substance. This is the penetrating insight that she had 5000 years ago. He said all that exists is fundamentally a unity, and that its discrimination into aspects, into parts is a discrimination on the basis of its movement. And because it has movement, existence is always an activity. And that that activity, because it is fundamentally a unity, follows a cycle which repeats. But he used a different kind of a term than repetition because he was wiser than that. He called it a return. And so 5000 years ago, the Chinese idea of nature was that it was a cycle of return, that it comes back to itself in such a way that it can go out again and come back to itself so that it can go out again, so that there is an ongoing cyclicity to existence. And 5000 years ago, looking for an image base by which to express this insight, Fucci used the image of a thunderstorm in the mountains and that if you were insightful enough to be able to observe the stages of this cycle, you would find it would make eight. It would be an eight part cycle. And so the trigrams that are the basis of the I-Ching, the Bagua, are the symbolic expression of the eight different stages Years of that cycle of the thunderstorm in the mountains. First the wind comes up, then the water comes down and it collects into lakes and the lakes. You see the mountains reflected, and it goes on so that the entire ecology of Tay, which includes its return, is the unity of existence, including its return. And that when you include the return in the cycle of all of the stages of existence, you not only have Tay which completes itself, but the completed Tay is absorbed back into Dao. That when you complete a cycle in nature so that the eighth stage is the summation inclusion of the previous seven stages. The eighth stage then commits the entirety of that unity back into formlessness, so that the ninth would be phase does not occur as a ninth, but occurs as the formlessness which allows for the other eight to emerge and for the other eight to then dissolve back in, so that the formlessness is like the neutral gear and the existential cycle of life. And if you can take something all the way through its cyclic development to the inclusive stage where all of it occurs as a whole. The next movement from that will be absorption into formlessness. And that's the principle of an alchemy. An alchemy presupposes not only that you have all the stages brought into play in their sequence, but that the last sequence of that is the unity of all of them together, and that that formlessness, that Tao is fertile and that the cycle can reemerge out of that spontaneously. So it's like the Western musical scale from ancient Hermetic Alexandria, the Greco-Roman idea of the octave do re mi fa so la TI do. The eighth note is the first note repeated one level higher, meaning that one has included all of it. And one of the most ancient Hermetic doctrines recovered with the Nag Hammadi material at the end of the Second World War is called the eighth, reveals the ninth. And what does the what does the ninth consist of? Of a silence where there is no sound. That the octave, when sounded together, is a return to dao harmonic, the entirety of the eight. And that it is absorbed into a ninth. And the curious thing, as the old Hermetic Treatise says, that in the silence of the ninth, when you acclimate to the silence, you again hear singing. But this singing does not come from man. This singing comes from heaven. The choirs of God sang in some beyond which sounds in the silence of the night with its fullness of its choir. So that man's silence is God's symphony, so that our incorporating of a zero interval where we stop counting because of a completion that includes the completed ness as a phase, by letting it be, by not tinkering any further, we allow for a transform to occur. And this is extremely important now. Schiller wrote a number of poems that are famous, and we're going to talk a little bit about his ode to freedom, his ode to joy that Beethoven used as the text for his Ninth Symphony. But we talked a week or so ago of his poem the The Power of Poetry, The Might of Song, and the very first stanza in Schiller's poem The power of Poetry is what Foushee said 5000 years ago about talent. It reads like this and a translation to English. English. A rain flood from the mountain riven leaps in thunder forth today before its rush. The crags are driven. The oaks uprooted, whirled away. Aud yet in awe. All wildly gladdened. The startled wanderer halts below. He hears the rock borne waters maddened. He does not know the source from whence they go. So stream they from mystic fountains along their earthly course. They are waves of song. It's incredible that one can, with a great differential consciousness, come to a stanza of a poem that's famous as one of the beginning declarations of the romantic revolution of the artist of 200 years ago. Schiller, at the time that he was writing this, was a young man who was understanding that the French Revolution was loosening pent up waters that had not been freed, possibly on that scale ever in the history of man. That the history of man up until that point had been a history of oligarchic fascist factions that commandeered power and wealth and control and mobility for themselves, but that the mass of humanity always lived as a hidden background a serf, a peasant, an ordinary, just the people on. What was different here was that you had a what was called by Heraclitus in antiquity it was called an anti-drama, or Nietzsche called it later on a transvaluation of values, or Jesus once called it. He said, the first shall be last. That the structure that was in place completely turned itself inside out, and not only inside out, but inside out and Backwards so that instead of being the opposite of what it is because it isn't as. Jung thought rather naively, it isn't that something turns into its opposite. That's very naive. It's that it turns into its diagonal because the frame of logic is not true. It's not true or false. It's not this and not this. That kind of polarity was pointed out 2600 years ago as being a dead end. Why? Because it has no action. It has no existential application whatsoever. A polarity that has only this and not this is actually in refined thought is disjunctive. It's a polarity that never meets the two aspects. Never touch. Parmenides was the classic voice in ancient Greece. And he said it very simply in a mystical poem called The Way. It reads very much like Lao-tzu. Parmenides had long white hair. He looked like a William Blake sage. He said, what is, is and what isn't isn't. And they never meet. A disjunctive polarity cannot be brought together. It does not resolve. It does not reconciliate. Instead of something and it's not. The frame of logic is always a four quality. It's always what it is and what it isn't in terms of appearance. But there is also two other complementary forms, such there's a pair of pairs. There's a quaternary always for whatever it is. It used to be taught with the hands. There are four different positions that you can use because of the hands of being the ancient wisdom way. The term that has been used for about a thousand years in English is chirality. Chirality, left handed or right handed and chirality applies to atomic structure. It applies to molecular structure. It applies to the way in which DNA works in an RNA messenger way. And there are four different possibilities all the time of chirality. It's the way in which existence structures itself. And what is the enantiodromia is not that it goes from one to its opposite, but that it goes diagonally to its contrapositive, as it stated in logic, so that these kinds of diagonal lines, this kind of diagonal motion, when it's put together in a sequence of diagonals, that gestalt together, you get the popular image in the mind of lightning, the jagged lightning. Now, if you if you look at lightning in nature and with sufficient fast cameras, now you can take photographs of lightning no one has ever seen jagged lightning. It doesn't exist. For one thing, lightning doesn't come down. It goes up from the ground and it always has a different has electrostatic fractal quality to it. It's never jagged, but the mind in its penetration sees the image of lightning as that. It's like the Captain Marvel Shazam! The lightning is always there and it transforms man. Because of that, capacity is not limited to the natural cycle. He knows. She knows that whatever is real for us extends beyond the natural cycle. That that natural cycle, though it is very complete, includes in its completion a summation which is its final saturation, and after that the final saturated existential is able to be reabsorbed into Tao and be available for a transform. And that our reality goes not only to the completion of the natural cycle, but extends into the transform beyond, and that there we go into a completely new cycle. And that that's what's real for us. So when they looked at the pair of pairs, when they looked at the natural cycle in our education, it's a restatement of that ancient wisdom, nature and ritual. Myth and symbol are that natural seasonal cycle. That's how it works. But there is a fifth phase that goes beyond the natural cycle. And that's the vision. That's the magic. That's the consciousness. And because it's not in the four, it's always a fifth element in theater magic. It's called the fifth business. Robertson Davies in Canada wrote a beautiful novel called The Fifth Business. That real theater is real magic. Magic Theatre. Not for everyone, for madmen only, says Hermann Hesse. It's for madmen only because the quintessence does not join the four. It doesn't factor in as more. It always factors in distributed through the four as something different, so that the quintessence always differentiates and doesn't further integration. And when that differential fifth comes into play, the four are transformed in a very special, specific way. It always happens that the fifth, when it comes back factored into the previous four, comes back through a root of the beginning of it. This is why Chinese hexagrams are always built from the ground up like lightning, never down. It always rises. The form rises. Consciousness, brought as a transform into nature, has an arising of new form. That's why consciousness always has a quality of like an arrow rising. Consciousness arises. Um. I wrote a poem 40 years ago, and this was the haiku that ended the poem. Sound of rising wind. Unmoving, high in the spruce. An owl is blinking. That's how it ends. It's in that kind of a fashion. Because nature in its cycle can only do what it can do. Nature doesn't wander beyond. The English word for wandering beyond is extravagance. Extravagance means wandering beyond. Nature never wanders. But man, when he is conscious, always wanders. He becomes a wanderer. In a very real sense. The very real sense is that his whole existence becomes a possibility of adventure, and that he wanders in the possible, in the possible range. Um, this, uh, formed a very, very important thing in Chinese poetry in the 20th century. One of the great Chinese poet, uh, the founder of the Crescent School of Poetry in Beijing in the 1920s. Xi Xu Uh, chemo. He said the essence of man is to acclimate himself, to have his life be ready for the adventures of the Apostle. And that if you're looking for a doctrine or you're looking for a philosophy, or if you're looking for an answer, you're looking in a ritual box for something that's not in that box. You cannot box conscious transform. It doesn't box. It re weaves and refashions into a, Schiller said. We move from sensation to infinity and that because man is capable of this extraordinary expansiveness, we need something to prepare us to not only accept the transform, the magical change of nature. But to understand that nature herself participates in that by exchanging places with vision. Nature is no longer the first like nature, ritual, myth and symbol, but nature allows for vision to come in and take its place. This is the secret exchange of selves. And by the way, they exchange at the centers. It's always thunder. It's that exchange. What are the centers? The centers are the locus of no dimension, which is the fulfillment of the saturate wholeness. The Tai Chi has. A center of dark in the light and has a center of light in the dark. Those are the exchange centers of the real in the trigrams of Fu XI. The two phases that exchange like that are fire and water. Fire and water exchange centers. Because fire and water are not opposites, they occupy diagonals and their diagonal diagonality is able to occur because it goes through a transform, which is a quintessence of it, so that you find in the Chinese typology you don't find earth, air, fire, and water. You find earth, air, fire, water and metals. And the metals are the exchange center that is the magical alchemical phase And allows for that whole natural cycle to come back and to reoccur, to reoccur in a transform, so that later on, after about 4000 years of Chinese civilization, of working with that instead of having a five quality to it, instead of having a pentagrammic scale, penta chronic scale of Chinese music, instead of having that, you had a pair of fives, and so you find in Chinese later on Song Dynasty I-Ching understanding, you find a universe in its expansion reality, including not only the natural, but the supernatural has, um, a ten quality that's operative. And because the center re-occurs in a very special way, there is a mode of the ten where the center not only is doubled, but it's quadrupled. And so you have a ten and you have a 12. And the way in which the ten and the 12 work together gives you a stylization of how the real develops in an ecology of the visible and the invisible, and has a very well developed in China, starting about a thousand years ago and about 500 years ago reached an apex in a Chinese philosopher named Wang Yangming, who lived about the time of Leonardo da Vinci and was a universal genius. He's the masterful voice of the development of a beginning of Chinese philosophy about a thousand years ago, called Of Confucianism, weaving Daoism and Buddhism back into Confucianism, and then it was brought to a maturation in the early 1500s by Wang Yangming. All of this is of interest to us, because if we can follow the ways in which ancient wisdom were developed and brought into maturation, and that that maturation developed into an array of favored possibilities which could be passed on, that passing on changed the cultural notion of tradition into the conscious possibilities of civilization, so that civilization as a form is real rather than existential. It goes towards conscious supernatural possibilities within nature, and is not limited to the natural ecology of mythic feeling. Toned experience. One can have an expanded experience beyond the tribal mythic level, and that means that between sensation and thought, that mythic feeling toned imagery is a key to the way in which that that transforms and registers not in the body as ritual or in the mind as symbol, but registers in the differential as art, so that art forms are real rather than just natural. They're distinctly different from the body or the mind, because art forms have a real context, which means that they have a conscious, magical, visionary dimension already working in them through vision. And because they are brought into form in this very special way. Art is actually six dimensional. And that's the title of today's lecture. Six dimensional art. This is a peculiar quality that Schiller 200 years ago, intuited and tried in the early 1790s to give voice to in the document that we're using on the aesthetic education of man, a series of letters. And the reason why it was a series of letters is that it goes back about 1800 years to a series of letters that occurred in the first century AD, written in Alexandria. And it's by a man named historically Longinus, and it's called On the Sublime. And Longinus wrote to a friend of his a series of letters on trying to establish that the sublime is more real for man than the existence in the body or the existence in the mind for him in nature, and that the sublime involves a dimension of possibility, which the word that describes that dimension of possibility, in whatever language it occurs, always turns out to be what we mean in English by freedom, so that art forms are structurally Engendering of freedom that human freedom is a prismatic rainbow that comes out of art, not because of some mental understanding of it, and not because of some existential comportment to it, but because that's the nature of the way in which the process gels into form in the first place, so that art breathes freedom supernaturally into the cycles of nature and changes it forever in the sense that it makes expansion of possibility and meaning infinite. Let's take a break and we'll come back. We're considering at this point, at this juncture, how this education works. And it works by accumulating A sequence in such a fashion that the sequence does not add up one by one by one as units, but that they accumulate as resonances and constitute then the possibility of a harmonic. The difference is that 12 units together can make a larger unit. 12in can make a foot by addition, but 12in cannot transform, whereas 12 in a set of waves can generate together a transform energy form. And this is what we're trying to do. To put simply, you can through some assiduous application. You can learn not to just listen to a lecture and then another lecture in another lecture, but to let them accumulate together and begin to form like an octave. They will form a 12 part of wave, which saturates its continuity and distributes evenly through the entire set. That capacity to absorb back into the general formlessness of the cosmos, as it were. And that's what the interval lecture is for, is to give a hiatus a space so that the forming Warming aspect of the education is no longer in gear, but what's in gear is a non gear and it isn't just coasting, but that the dynamic takes its capacity to do a transform. So that you can actually test yourself to see how well you're doing. Can you listen to 12 lectures in a set and then come to the interval and just let that interval be the interval? If you can do that, the next phase of the education will emerge naturally, as it were, out of the previous one. What emerges out of vision is art. The artist is a higher level of a magician. The magician deals with the process of transform. But the artist deals with the forms of transform. It's different. It's a higher energy. It's a higher differential in the sense that the possibilities are more expansive. Art has much more expansive possibility than magic. When the old Paleolithic magicians were able finally to emerge as artists 40,000 years ago, the nature of our quality of life on earth changed. And the emergence of art was always separated from nature in the sense that they didn't want to. At that tender stage, confuse it with the cycle of nature, and yet wanted to weave whatever that secret newness was back into nature so that Paleolithic art always occurs underground. It occurs under the ground in the caves. Paleolithic art is a cave art. But that art is not about being underground. That art is about the animal population of the world above ground, not reproduced underground, but presented underground in a transformed way, because, along with the animals, even at the earliest, Paleolithic art, even 40,000 years ago, along with the animals, is the impressive man's hand. Not the hand to grasp, but the hand to transform. And you find, like the underwater cave that was found near Marseille about six years ago. Cosgar. And that dangerous entrance to Cosgar 40,000 years ago. The Mediterranean coast was much lower down and further out into the Mediterranean. But as the water level rose, it covered with water so that today it's like about 140ft below the water level. And even though it's only maybe ten kilometers from the city limits of Marseille, no one knew it was there until six years ago. And French divers that had to go in underneath exploring. They found this, uh, cave entrance, which was submerged, and it became a tunnel about 400ft long. And it was two thirds silted up over the tens of thousands of years, so that three divers in the French navy lost their lives trying to go through this passage. But when they finally went through the murky waters, almost like a wisdom parable, when they went through, they emerged back up through the muddy waters into a pristine Paleolithic cave with all of its art intact, that had not seen human beings for 25,000 years. And there were the animals and the hand of men and women. Why the hand? Because the hand was the transform. It isn't just the animals, It's that a conscious vision has come into play not to grasp, but to transform. And so the hand is the earliest symbol of the transform of art. This capacity reached an enormous change when the Paleolithic level of life became Neolithic. Because men and women learned something, they learned that the transform of life could not only take place in an initiatory secret underground, and that initiatory transform of a secret underground is reproduced tens of thousands of years later as the pyramid tombs, but that you could also transform the above ground by taming the animals by taming the plants, and that when you tame animals and plants, you do it by a process of selection and that selective breeding made improved species of animals and plants. Because the species of nature took man's transform, that you could take the wild goat grass that had four little tiny kernels, and you could transform it by crossing it with another species of goat grass, and you could get Amur eventually, through two different transform processes, you could get bread, wheat, and you could grow that grain in enough quantities that you had more food than the population needed. And for the first time ever in the Neolithic. Human beings took over their own destiny in terms of their food supply. They no longer chased the animals or harvested by gathering in a random way. Following the natural cycles, they changed the conditions so that they would always win. They began breeding animals and raising crops so that they could eat at any time. All the time and feed more. And this was the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution. As Sonia Kohl once wrote a beautiful book on it. She was a protege of L.s.b. Leakey written for the British Museum a number of years ago. And it changed the way in which man, which men and women looked at themselves. They looked at themselves no longer as hunters who had to go after game, but as like agronomists or husbandmen, who raised their food to their own specifications, so that the Paleolithic hunter stopped being the synthesizing symbol for society and the Neolithic mother, the grain goddess became the synthesizing symbol. Not because all the farmers were women. That's not it. It's that that process was a mothering of the animals and plants, in a way, so that the food supply was not scarce as being out there distant from us, but the food supply became the child of our own endeavor. We raised these animals. We raised these plants, they are in a very real way, our children, so that the tamed plants and animals, the refined herbology of the Neolithic period is extraordinary. And yet all that went through an even deeper transform about 6000 years ago. It was as if the transform of nature from the Paleolithic hunter gatherer to the Neolithic husbandman, agriculture suddenly had a different transform that what had transformed was transformed again in a very specific way. In alchemy, it's called distillation. So that the water not only became wine, but that the wine became a liqueur. And that this second level of transform the Neolithic could become a third form, a thrice greatest form of of life, of reality, a distillation. And so 6000 years ago, men and women had to change again in a very radical way. They realized you have to keep the natural field full, and you have to keep the transformed field full, because only when those two are saturated and full is that third transform of civilization possible? So that this was not just that nature was mysterious and allowed for the magical vision to come in and act in nature's place. But there was a further Distillation, a further transform of the transform that happened and that this was a very special, precarious endeavor. Because while vision exchange places with nature, to make that Neolithic transform, art in civilization had come in and transform the way in which ritual action functioned in the natural ecology, so that existence itself gave way to a spiritual transform distillation of existence, so that civilization has a spiritual quality, not that it's assigned to it by the mind at all. But that's how that is made. That's how it's it's formed. 2000 years ago In Longinus letters that are like a background for Schiller's letters on why art is fundamental and revolutionary. Longinus, 2000 years before, points out to his correspondent, and he says this is an English translation done at Oxford a number of years ago, writing to you, my friend, my dear friend, with your perfect knowledge of all liberal studies, I am almost relieved at the outset from the necessity of showing at any length that sublimity is always an eminence and excellence in language. You have to be able to talk that talk, but if you talk mythic language. It hasn't transformed. And if you talk only symbolic language, it's only transformed. You have to talk a magical language that distills. In 2000 years ago, when this was written, this was written about about the time that Philo would have been living in Alexandria. Sublimity is always an eminence and excellence in language. That's why the preoccupation at the time was with the transforming of transformation into distillation, by getting the liquor of language into its ultimate transformed form, so that the practitioner of that would be called the word and was in fact used freely at that time. The eminence and excellence in language, and that from this and this alone, writes Longinus, the greatest poets and writers of prose have attained the first place, and have clothed their fame with immortality. For it is not to persuasion, but to ecstasy, that passages of extraordinary genius carry the hearer. Now the marvelous, with its power to amaze, is always and necessarily stronger than that which seeks to persuade and please to be persuaded. Mental. Symbolic. Aristotelian to be persuaded. It's a rhetoric. It's great. You can convince people it's not enough. To be persuaded rests usually with ourselves. Genius brings force, sovereign and irresistible, to bear upon every hearer, and takes its stand high above him. Sublimity, we know, brought out at the happy moment. Parts all the matter this way and that. Like a lightning flash reveals at a stroke, and in its entirety the power of the orator. That there is a curious quality to art is that its wholeness becomes real all of a sudden, because it is not a function of building up an acquaintance to an understanding. Nor is it just carrying the understanding over into an Intuition about what it would mean. But a further distillation of carrying it over to a realization, so that art is a form that calls out to us to meet it in a common realization. The work of art is not the property of the artist, but is a cooperation of the audience and the artist. To put it prosaically, they cooperate together, and that that middle ground displaces the middle ground of myth. For when the audience and the artist meet together, art engenders a further process that never happened in nature before. And that process is called history. So that art engenders a meeting which takes the place of myth in the ecology. And for the very first time, when history comes into play. And we'll see it in two weeks. In two weeks, we start with a new pair. Our first pair in history will be Thucydides, this edition of the Peloponnesian War and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, The Person and the history. It's interesting to see, and we'll have 12 weeks to explore this. It's interesting to see how the accumulated harmonic of the historical process, when it reaches its saturation, delivers a form hoped for, unseen, unsuspected, never before beheld. And that form will be science, not the science of an intellectual understanding and knowing. It's not that at all. Nor is it an intuitive knowing which would be like a gnosis. Not at all. It's on an expansion of possibility that extends to include the entirety of the universe with all of its conscious dimensions in play. And we'll see that scientific forms are really if we could call art six dimensional or eight dimensions. And that is not possible even for a six dimensional form to imagine an eight dimensional form. It just isn't possible at all. So that is really an unknown country that the cosmos. If one has an idea of it, you have reduced it from a personal art form down to a mental form. It's become a symbolic idea, and the difficulty is that almost all of the educational processes that have been in play hold as the ideal, the sine qua non of an intellectual understanding of form, and that this is a built in flaw is a severe flaw. The idea of a lemon pie is a reduction of the beautiful art of baking a beautiful lemon pie, and serving it and eating it with friends. The art of cooking is in the sharing of the meal. The idea of it is inferior to it, though powerful as an intellectual understanding. The use of this kind of analogy is very simple to understand what is precarious is that we labor underneath. As if addicted to a hypnotic sleep. The idea of mind and is a very big limitation. Even someone as clever as Gurdjieff became addicted to the idea of the mind, the idea of awakening the mind so that one had an idea of an awakened mind. This is pernicious, as they used to say in logic, and the perniciousness of it has a humorous quality because it becomes ridiculous. The sense of acquiring the ridiculous as a further dimension of one's humanity is one of the ironic beginnings of a spiritual existence. A Don Quixote is the ultimate knight errant. He lives as a ridiculous warrior going out for adventures that on every level are stupid, phony, wrong. He's trying to rescue a barmaid and thinks that this is a Dulcinea who is a gorgeous lady. Those windmills are giants. As we read Cervantes, as we read Don Quixote sallying forth, our reading of Cervantes makes Don Quixote a real knight on a quest for a larger dimensional existence. The reader and Don Quixote together are not ridiculous at all, but become humane on a vast scale. Cervantes only competitor was Shakespeare, and they were contemporaries. In fact, the pirated edition of Don Quixote was published in London. That's why Cervantes quickly wrote part two to co-opt those who had co-opted him, because he understood. That's how you play in the 60s. We used to call it the game of parentheses, and the game of parentheses gets around to where you don't argue anymore. But as soon as somebody says something very comprehensive, you just do that. What is difficult is building the tolerance to stay in a artistic form where magic language is being used by interrupting the flow. You lose your sense of the participation so that it becomes even more delicate than doing the dance steps right. You can't dance unless you do those dance steps, right? That's the ritual aspect. If the telephone book of DNA sequencing is not portioned out in just the right way, you don't have a pine tree. You might have a Beverly Hills apple tree, or you might not have a tree. You might have a flatworm. But even more delicate is the sequence in the nuance of a conscious form, so that art takes a lot of attentiveness to it. An education like this, which is not only an art form, but also delivers a cosmos. It delivers the cosmos. Schiller, in his hymn to Joy, writes it this way in translation he who one faithful Made can clasp shall hold with us his jubilee. Yes. Each who but one sinful heart in all the earth can claim his own. Let him who cannot stand apart and weep beyond the pale alone. Homage to sacred Symphony. All ye within creation's ring. Up to you, yon star pavilions. She leads us the unknown queen. That's why Beethoven chose it for his Ninth Symphony. It's that the motion leading from below the ground in a secret way to transforming the above ground nature in that kind of Neolithic way can be still distilled yet again, so that the ascent continues not just to go from underground to a paradisical reformed natural ground, but one can go from there into the heavens, the earth, the entire range of the cosmos become a possible adventure. They become a home possibility so that we learn this tremendous scale that we are capable of. As in the Renaissance, Pico della mirandola said that the soul core of creation contains a vertical corridor where all the levels of possible registry exist, and man is not limited to any particular level, but is free to roam, to wander through the entire corridor of all of God's creation. He's even. She's even allowed to come home through the top. And because we have this capacity to limit ourselves to a cycle of seasonal response is a beggaring of our spiritual capacity. We're going to come back next week to, um, to Emily Dickinson. But I want to read from Stravinsky a couple of paragraphs from his Harvard lectures, The Poetics of Music. Stravinsky by this time had seen a lot. He was nearing 60 years of age. He was tremendously insightful. This lecture was called The Composition of music. And he said, 1939 at Harvard, we are living at a time when the status of man is undergoing profound upheavals. Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportions. This failure to understand essential realities is extremely serious. It leads us infallibly to the violation of the fundamental laws of human equilibrium in the domain of music. The consequences of this misunderstanding are these. On one hand, there is a tendency to turn the mind away from what I shall call the higher mathematics of music, in order to degrade music to servile employment, and to vulgarise it by adapting it to the requirement of an elementary utilitarianism. It would be a further reduction of rap to rap, where every word is simply a rap and done in a real hip staccato. On the other hand, since the mind itself is ailing the music of our time, and particularly the music that calls itself and believes itself pure, the direct glance to the Nazis, the purifiers right carries within it the symptoms of a pathological blemish and spreads the germs of a new original sin. The old original sin was chiefly a sin of knowledge. The new original sin, if I may speak in these terms, is first and foremost a sin of non acknowledgement, a refusal to acknowledge the truth and the laws that proceed therefrom. The laws that we have called fundamental and that art is involved in a creative activity. Stravinsky's Sin of Non Acknowledgement in 1939, by 2001 has become planetary and about as deep as the neck. More next week.