Vision 1

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Stellar Civilization (2002-2003)
Presentation 53 of 104

Vision 1: Poimandres Unbound
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 4, 2003

Transcript:

In our educational process, we are using pairs of books which initially serve as coordinates – goal posts, if you like. In a differential mode, these paired texts act more like tuning forks. The two texts for this chapter come from two classic wisdom traditions with a lot of similarities, but no cultural contact. From the Western tradition, we will use the "Poimandres," the first of the Hermetic treatisies. From the Chinese we will use Chuang Tzu.

With our study of the unfolding of Vision, we now stand at the beginning of the differential cycle. The first four aspects of our education concerned the natural cycle. Initially, we built a picture of the world in which we live, a picture with four aspects, or sides like a frame, akin to the proverbial "Big Picture." This "frame" was comprised of our studies of Nature, Ritual, Myth and Symbol, which could be characterized as our 'square of attention." As we have learned, the four sides of our square of attention were the completion of the following of a certain boundary delineation. That boundary gave us the frame within which we composed a world as a picture that had order.

Consequently, that square of attention, that frame of the ecology of the natural cycle became a way in which to define our world. The running of that boundary – delineating those four lines which constituted in a frame in ancient Greek philosophy – was called a definition. A definition establishes the boundary of something. If you have a completed boundary, the definition it provided would reveal what the object of attention was. Applying this process allows us to see the world for what it is.

Since time immemorial, the boundary of something has conveyed a pictorial quality when applied to human beings like ourselves. This pictorial quality always keyed to an existential quality of action. What you do links up with what you are able to see. If you complete a 'picture' by defining the pictorial boundary, then one is able to know not only what the world is, but where one is in that picture, in that image of the world.

So powerful were definitions and frameworks as a model of education, that it served twice in ancient Greece. The first occurrence was in the Pythagorean tradition, the second in

In its maturity, the Pythagorean phenomena obtained in Greece Major, but on the southern coast of Italy and in the Island of Sicily. Those were the 'wild west' venues of Greek civilization circa 500 BC, areas referred to as "Magna Gracia," or greater Greece.

In that era, the origins of a particular style of education came into play as a way of teaching oneself about the picture of the world. Its main thrust was that the world had many different resonances – many different vibrations – and that one would not only have to have one picture, but a series of pictures like a concentric series of circles that would make up a target. This concentric frame of the world comprised a harmonic way of seeing the relatedness and order of all things. In total, the first frame of the concentric bull's-eye gave the boundaried definition of 'this world' and the total of all the frames together comprised 'the cosmos.'

The Pythagorean outlook on the world was a picture composed of resonant, ever expanding frames of vision. Largely, the educational process that taught the Pythagorean view was only delivered orally. It was not written down. It was not ascribed in a written language form because the emphasis in the Pythagorean ancient-wisdom education was that one could not learn to be real vis-à-vis the limitations of the mind, unless one had a depth of experience that was larger than what the mind could frame. In wisdom learning, one's experience must exceed the boundaried definitions of the mind. The capacity of the mind to put frames on the world had to be opened out to that which was larger than mind itself.


The educational emphasis was that a person could clearly know the shape and order of this world if one could put an exact frame around it, and the way to tell that one's boundaried frame was complete and exact was to have a broader experience in which to place one's framework in context. A person's broader, expansive experience let one know where the limits of the frame were.

The Pythagorean perspective was one of complementing the limited and the unlimited. What should be unlimited, according to ancient Pythagorean education, was human experience – whereas the human mind should have order and limitations which are exact. In that way, one would know what you are thinking of and how to think clearly and exactly. That could only happen, somewhat paradoxically, of experience was unlimited.

As delineating frameworks grew in the Pythagorean education, one would have to expand one's unlimited capacity for experience to embrace wider and wider fields. As the mind's frames expanded in their harmonics, one became clearer and clearer about all the many levels of the world, and finally one obtained clarity about the cosmos as an order which had a shape. One's experience grew to supra-cosmic proportions in order to understand that one's framed square of attention contained this great cosmic harmonic, but that one exceeded these frames in the mysterious scope and depth of one's person.

Orally based educations were largely derived from mystery initiations. Only after written languages did the second level of education come into play. The instigator of a complete, written language education was Plato. Plato's written transform comprises a secondary level of the old forms of education. Plato's dialogues were a written version of the previous, orally performed wisdom education. Written language set down not doctrines, or treatises, but dialogues, conversations between teacher and student that captured the dynamic of walking through a field of inquiry. What would be said in a living oral wisdom education was now transcribed and put into a written dialogue form, one which held for about 500 years, from Plato until the end of the first century AD That form of Platonic education held that the frame of the clear mind required a written language within which to explore it's exactness. Written language gave humanity a basis upon which the mind could learn to be more and more accurate about what it knew, and aware of what it knew it knew, and aware of what it could teach.

The Pythagorean and Platonic wisdom traditions layered together in a kind of parfait toward the end of the first century A.D, primarily in the city of Alexandria. In about 90 AD the first of the great Hermetic treatises were committed to written form. They are Platonic dialogs in the sense that they are a written language form of wisdom teachings. Also, as in the Platonic dialogs, Hermetic treatises emphasize the mystery initiation of oral wisdom lying behind the written language, and through written language and beyond it. However, the Hermetic treatises do not convey the Pythagorean initiation of expanding experience beyond the mind and even beyond the cosmos. Instead, the Hermetic treatises hearken back to the teachers of Pythagoras.

It was quite well understood that Pythagoras had learned, not in Greece, but had been educated in the mystery traditions in Egypt. So the expansive field of experience described in the Hermetic doctrines, treatises and books, comes not from Pythatoras, but hearkens back to his Egyptian teachers.

Pythagoras' Egyptian teachers were of a particular tradition and lineage first known through a text compiled in what we call the "New Kingdom" of about 1900 bc. This text is called "The Heliopolan Rescension of the Ogdoad." It refers to the eight gods that belonged together in a set of pairs of pairs that make four and a pair of fours that make eight. The Ogdoad – the 'eight' – when clear, ordered, and exact, reveal the unlimited context within which it has its shape; and that that eight part form reveals, the ninth. In fact, one of the lost Hermetic treatises is entitled "The Eighth Reveals the Ninth."

(And so we trace the stream of development of Wisdom Teachings from the Heliopolan Rescension, to Pythagoras, to Plato, and follow it's waters into the desert of the European Dark Ages.)

During a time of persecution after the Roman Emperor Julian conveniently died in his early 30's (arranged, I should think, during a battle) adherents of the wisdom schools buried the Heliopolan Rescension material, along with many other treatises. Julian had revived the so-called 'pagan' schools of wisdom such as the Pythagorean, the Platonic and by that time Plotinus also, reviving the whole great wisdom tradition. Upon his death, immediately tolerance for the pagan schools was rescinded. By 365 A.D. one had wisdom treatises only under penalty of death.

So materials pertaining to the Wisdom Traditions were buried. The material that included "The Eighth Reveals the Ninth" were buried in Egypt, along the Nile River, to be found millennia later in 1945, in a little village called Nag Hammadi. 13 books – 13 Codices were recovered. The Nag Hammadi find has many treatises in it that no one had seen for some 1,600 years.

When the ancient world became doctrinaire Christian – in the sense of authorities killing someone who was not a member of the ideological community – the ancient wisdom was restricted to and only survived in certain oral traditions. Very little non-doctrine wisdom could be recorded, because written things were evidence which could be brought before a court of inquiry. So the Hermetic traditions shrank for about 150 years, becoming truncated oral traditions that had to cover the teachings up with all kinds of disguises. To evade recognition, those traditions would clothe themselves with all kinds of other qualities.

The very last thinker in the ancient wisdom tradition is no longer even recognized as a thinker in that tradition, but rather is considered a 'medieval philosopher', known to us by the name of Boethius. When Boethius died in 524 AD, that was the end of living appreciation for this kind of understanding. There was no-one at all, in the ancient Greco-Roman world left to teach any of this. Indeed, almost no-one retained knowledge of this tradition.

The first person to reknit that string of Wisdom back into the fabric of Western Philosophy was Geoffrey Chaucer, 900 years after Boethius died. Under Boethius' influence, Chaucer realized that there was a deep visionary transform possible to civilization.

Chaucer took it upon himself to completely transform western European civilization. He was learned enough. He was scholar enough, and magnificently poetic. Using the Boethius key, Chaucer rewrote the two great epics upon which Greek civilization and Greco-Roman civilization had based themselves – Homer's "Iliad," and Virgil's "Odyssey." Chaucer applied a humane, Boethian, Christian humanity on the surface of his literature, but underneath deployed a deep wisdom perspective in rewriting the Iliad and the Odyssey. His revision of the Odyssey, the "Canterbury Tales" is the journey through a fantastic array of humanity and events and live, to come home to a homecoming. Just as Odyseus returns to Ithaca, the Canterbury pilgrims make their way from London to Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury England.

The other epic Chaucer transformed is the Iliad, transformed into "Troilus and Cressida." The dynamic that powers both the "Iliad" and "Troilus and Cressida" is the personal love of a man and a woman. Man's great befriender, which acts as a go-between to help communication between these two pairs is a special kind of human love. It's not the love of the church. It's not the love of the royal set. It is simply the love of two ordinary human beings, so that a kind of secular 'heiros-gamos' or sacred marriage is reintroduced into the middle of a war. In the Iliad, the war is the great siege of Troy. In Troilus and Cressida, the story is how, with the help of Pandaras, they find each other and bring their love into being – bring the experience of love into being.

It is primally important to understand that personal love is one of the most important qualities of Wisdom. Without it, Wisdom does not happen. What happens instead is that the mind seals off all access to any kind of further development. The dimensions of consciousness and personal spirit and history and science are truncated, and the mind assumes for itself the arbitership of everything that counts and is real. The mind consistently then looks just to existential 'things' to have, to acquire, and to hold those things so that they give the experience of pleasure and they get rid of the experience of pain. And in that way, you have 'mastered' life. All this is, of course, an illusion. Believed in, it's a delusion – the Maya of classical Yoga.

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the very first thing Patanjali said after announcing, "Here are the yoga sutras," is that the first discipline in a yoga is to stop the turnings of the mind. He taught cessation of the turnings of the mind for a specific purpose. When the mind has its quiet, its equanimity – no matter if its frame of reference is complete or not, whatever is there becomes quieted and becomes a frame. Whatever is there becomes a 'square of attention." When quieted in yoga, one ceases to identify with the turnings of mind, or turnings of thought. Thought's form then becomes a definite objective form without any particular content. What comes through then is no longer pictorial on the boundaries of that frame, nor is it a content within that frame. What comes through is the great oceanic experience beyond – not that which you are, but that which you can be and will be when you explore it. That comes gushing through the open frame of reference, the open objectivity of the symbolic mind.

This experience is still described by use of a Pythagorean Greek term – Epiphany. This is still the only word that works in our western language cognate vocabulary.

A spiritual person is a presence of spirit greater than the capacity of the mind to objectify. One is more in spirit than the limitations of what Mind can frame. An education can help factor in that conscious spirit back into the frame of the square of attention of Nature. A wisdom education matures the student by factoring consciousness back into the frame of attention, creating openness to the square of nature, changing each one of those sides of that square in turn. As they change, each side that was a limitation becomes capable of delivering an unlimited array and range of possibilities. Each side of that square, in its turn, acquires a new dimension.

Consciousness adds a fifth dimension to symbols, but when applied to experience, to myth, consciousness adds a sixth dimension. When applied to ritual it adds a seventh dimension, and when applied to nature it adds an eighth dimension. Consciousness is a transform that takes the limited order of the mind and allows it to open up the unlimited field within which the mind gains its order, its clarity, its exactness.

(Gotta have some transitional material here to 'bring this all home, baby', to link Epiphany and consciousness expansion up to Our Boy Chaucer. How did Chaucer's exposure to Boethiius open his frame of reference, allow him his epiphanies, and get applied as conscious transforms of the English Language?)

Chaucer only lived for about 60 years, but in that time took the English language as it had been for 650 years and transformed it. PreChaucerian 'Old English' had it's variants and its developments, but in the 14th century Chaucer's transforms evoked Middle English, which even requires a different dictionary. The Middle English of the 14th century is one of the great transforms in world history.

Previously, Old English was founded on "Beowulf," an epic written in the early 700's AD It's Old English themes are a reworking of the heroic Gods of ancient mythology, braiding them together with the humane Christian virtues like charity. The wedding of pagan gods in heroic conflict with the resolution of Christian humane values in 'Beowulf' is one of the great mysteries of world literature.

J.R.R. Tolkein wrote a series of essays called "The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays," published in 1984. The very first essay of the book is about Beowulf. His great capacious understanding describes Beowulf, "But if the specifically Christian values were suppressed, so also were the old gods." In other words, it wasn't that these things were woven together to make them be forced together, but they were woven together so that they would cancel each other out.

"But if the specifically Christian values were suppressed, so also were the old Gods. Partly because they had not really existed and had been always in the Christian view only delusions or lies – fabricated by the evil one – the gaspona to whom the hopeless turned to especially in times of need. Partly because of their old names, not completely forgotten, which had been potent and connected in memories still, not only with mythology or such a fair-tale matter as we find, say, in Guli Fennening, but with active heathendom, with religion, but most of all because they were not essential to the theme. The monsters had been the foes of the Gods, the captains of men and within time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat, men and Gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures the men of old, remained and fought on still until defeat. For monsters do not depart whether the Gods go or come. The Christian was aware that he was hemmed in by a hostile world." Tolkein goes on from there.

The unlimited, the natural world, had become by the early part of the 700's AD, a hostile, savage wilderness – and the cosmos an unbelievably awesome terror. One sees in maps of that time that the world has at its unbounded edges, beyond where we nave control, oceans full of monsters. Tolkein's map of Middle Earth, in "The Lord of the Rings" has, in the far north, south, west and east, difficult places. On one of the maps it says, "Beware, there will be monsters here." The only place in Middle Earth that is still open is the Fairytale West where the Elves will go, carrying their quality of Elvish order. But beyond that, again, would be the wilderness that is difficult and hostile.

Chaucer's time was the first time since antiquity that there were a few European individuals who were able to step off the fear bounded maps of the world and find that there were human beings of great quality 'beyond the pale' of the known, and to return to tell about them.

He was an artistic person whose spirit operated in at least a sixth dimensional realm. He could see that the old epics did not have anything more than just a few pilot lights of insights, just a few smidgins of consciousness. The Oddessy and the Iliad were largely four dimensional creations – three dimensional mythologies brought into oral experience then ordered by the mind of the time. Compared to that pictorial level of mental framing, Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida" and the "Canterbury Tales" are magnificent opening symphonies, music welcoming in a new style of humanity. Chaucer's humanity is one of personal, individual love – more important than the godds, more important than royal courts of authority, and more important than churches and eccleasiastical authorities.

Chaucer's transforms so accelerated the English language and culture that it sped within 200 years to a second transform. If Chaucer's works are like a transformation by fermentation, 200 years later a second transformation of the English language occurred, one we could describe not as fermentation, but distillation. The great author who did that was Shakespeare.

When you examine Beowulf's Old English, Chaucer's Middle English, and then Shakespeare's Renaissance English, you see an unfolding quality of language wich is able to engender an ordered mind, a frame of natural ecology. Through the process of the double transform, English increasingly developed the facility to let unlimited, deep, conscious wisdom thrive through the differential forms of the person in the cosmos. This liqueur of English opens out prismatically, making possible a spiritual person that operates on any scale of the spectrum whatsoever.

200 years after Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelly created a third transform of the English language. The reopening to wisdom traditions that occurred in the Renaissance had run into a dead end with the Enlightenment. In a very peculiar way, the Enlightenment had sealed off the unlimited, declaring that the mind's limited order would be sufficient. Mind alone was now deemed large enough, with a Newtonian physics and a Voltaire kind of wit. The square of attention of the mind was so vast that it was believed it could encompass everything. That confidence was demonstrated by the ability to make extensive Encyclopedias of everything. In France with the De Iteral and De Lumbert Encyclopedia, and Bouffant and his great Encyclopedia one catalogued everything completely, so humanity could know and have it all. Even literary forms of the time – the 'treatise' and the 'essay' are like 17th century seeds grown into 18th century literary forms that only appeal to a mind that is a mirror. They do not work with minds that have transparent symbols, and open up. That revolutionary who broke through this fixed preeminence of mind and changed the English language with the third transform – into a fourth state of English – was Percy Shelley.

Shelley's Romantic Revolution reached all the way back to Shakespeare, all the way back to Chaucer, then brought something new of his own into play. Part of the quality of romanticism – of the Romantic Revolution – was a deep vision which came back into play in the mind in such a way that it penetrated through the mind all the way back to myth, and changed the way in which experience was felt. This deep vision changed the very way in which imagery occurred. It was very easy for Shelley to destroy the enlightenment hubris that it 'knew everything.'

What is being offered here is yet another transform of the English language. To accomplish this, we have to reach back through all the levels, of not just the English language, but all the languages of the planet, back through all the great traditions – not just 1,300 years of English, but 1,300 years of Greek, 5,000 years of Chinese, and 7 or 8,000 years of Sanskrit. We are reaching back through all the wisdom systems of the entire planet, all the great levels of all the languages to bring something new into play that has never been there before.

The last time that a great wisdom education was assayed was 350 years ago with John Amos Cominius' search for a universal, single language in which to educate. He created the world's first educational textbook, called "The World in Pictures," the "Orbis Pictus," and it sold all over Europe. Because it used pictures to educate children, for the first time universal public education was able to reach down to the grade schools. For the first time grade schools could share the same textbook no matter what country you were in, which could teach children in a very basic way. "These are our hands, everyone has hands, these are fingers' and Comenius built up, from a harmonic of pictures, an increasing sense of the old frames of reference, and encouraged the student to see there was something broader behind to old frames of reference. In this form of learning, the learner was not captured by the forms of the mind alone.

Shelly's "Prometheus Unbound" reaches all the way back to the Pythagorian origins of the way in which the wisdom initiations, when writing asssumes a form originally created by Aeschelus – Greek Tragedy. Unfortunately, the only play from Aeschelus' trilogy that survives is "Prometheus Bound." Shakespeare's last great play, "The Tempest" is deeply related in a broad wisdom tradition – the history of ideas and big …? "Prometheus Bound" and "The Tempest" form the first two plays of what became a trilogy with the completion of Shelly's Prometheus Unbound." It's theme is that there is a creative spark that can be brought to man, so that man has the capacity to learn more than what the Gods know.

This is not to challenge the Gods with disbelief, but rather to show that they are not adequate for the true spiritual cosmos. The Gods are wonderful streams in the mythological river that flows as expereince and with feeling and with images; but Spiritual Man lives in starry fields so vast that no rivers except great currents of neutrinos flow there, and Spiritual Man also has the capacity to live there and be at home. Shelly wrote to take us beyond Mythologized Gods and out into these starry realms of human infinity. So "Prometheus Unbound" became the culminating play of three great transforms of wisdom unfolding.

Ancient Greek tragedies were presented in fours. There were three plays in a trilogy, and the fourth was a 'Satyr' play, which brought in a ridiculous element. In that way, the monumental quality of the three tragedies would be leavened with the ridiculous, demonstrating that life is sublime, a sublimity that belongs with the deepest of tragic forms.

600 years ago Chaucer worked with this dynamic as well. In the introduction of his book it says, "It is remarkable, too, how often Chaucer refers to his hero as 'this Troilus,' as though he were an exhibition piece. I have not dared in this translation to use this phrase as often as he does, for I think it is more noticeable now than it would have been to Chaucer's audiences. But Chaucer, in making what I think is a modern point, is seeing the ridiculous included in the sublime. But the comedy is kindly, and like so many of Chaucer's ironical observations as offered, 'All grands to you – in all grand seriousness."

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