Myth 9
Presented on: Saturday, September 2, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to myth 9 and we're using for one of our pairs of books, one of the most interesting of all, Plato's Dialogues. This is an illustration that was accompanying a whole series on Plato's major dialogues that I presented at the Philosophic Research Society here in Los Angeles in the early part of 1990 and it was so successful that I repeated it with further dialogues and going deeper into some of the dialogues that I'd covered in the first part and I did that in 1991, the following year. They have all been collected together, 23 dialogues which was 26 90 minute presentations plus a 27th presentation on Plato's Theory of Education, that was a special lecture. Had Manly Hall not have died I would have presented a very special 28th that would have been on his 90th birthday in March of 1991 and would have been a culmination of the second Plato series.
In the first series I presented the Phaedrus in a single comprehensive lecture but in the 1991 series I made two further presentations on the Phaedrus because it is one of the most interesting and important testimonies in the ancient world to an extraordinary quality that was introduced into human civilisation sometime around 500AD, BC excuse me, 500BC. There were an array of extraordinary individuals, three that are outstanding and are seminal archetypal figures in human civilisation and a fourth who was revived at the time in a very powerful way. The revival fourth one was Zoroaster. And the historic Zoroaster lived in Scythian Central Asia nearly 2000BC but his great revival in the Iran of the Persian Empire was around 500BC as well and he was revived by Cyrus the Great who founded the Achaemenid dynasty that built Persepolis and raised the Persian empire into something that spread from Egypt to India and from Central Asia all the way down to Arabia.
The other three figures, one of them was in China and he is Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching. The second was in India, was the Historical Buddha and the third was in the Mediterranean world, largely assumed to be just Greek but as we will see was really comprehensively Mediterranean was Pythagoras. Plato is the inheritor of the Pythagorean in Caucasian, his transformation and Plato receives his Pythagorean lineage as it were, twice over.
The first time is from his old mentor Socrates in Athens, the second time more than a decade after Socrates had been put to death by the state in Athens for teaching young men not to believe in the old gods and for teaching young men to think tighter than their sophistic teachers were teaching them so that instead of just playing the political game, they were out to change the nature of man so that he did not play games anymore with politics.
The second Pythagorean teacher for him was a man of his same age named Archytas and he was the philosopher king of a city state that had a lot of territory along the Adriatic Sea. The city state was called in Greek Taras but is known in world history as Tarentum. Italy is shaped like a boot and the heel of the boot is the bay of Tarentum and Tarentum itself and it was one of the bright Western Greek cities 500BC and Archytas was the king, philosopher king, the Pythagorean leader of that city state and of all of it's ports and contacts along the Adriatic and also all the way into Sicily. And this would have been around 380s BC. Socrates himself did not study with Pythagoras, Socrates was born about 469 but Pythagoras had died around two years earlier, 471, and when he died he was 99 years old. But Socrates learned from a Pythagorean teacher who was a woman and because it was women she was largely left out of and has been ignored by academicians by scholastic, people who make lists, on the basis of gender bias.
The great Pythagorean teacher of Socrates, her name was Diotima and we would not have any registry of that, were it not for Plato's dialogue The Symposium. Andin The Symposium almost every major bright figure, the most fashionable people of the age in Athens which was the New York, the London, the Paris of its time, all of the famous figures are here in The Symposium, the beautifully vain General Alcibiades who changed sides in a war several times and fought on either side and was a hero on either side, who was considered the most beautiful man alive, a fashionable soldier of fortune.
Also in The Symposium, one the great founders of Greek comedy, Aristophanes, who had made fun of Socrates in a comedy called The Clouds, Nubes in ancient classical language in which Socrates is lowered in a basket from the ceiling where he has been contemplating, not his naval but the heavens and he is lowered in this basket to be able to teach for a while and then they raise him back up to celestial heights to the ceiling where he can commune with those who are not really there visibly. Aristophanes, Alcibiades, Agathon, who was one the great, great tragedians of the age, Phaedrus is there, Socrates is there and in the mist of all of this they're talking about love. About whether love should be bestowed on someone who really loves you or on someone who doesn't really love you and thus it has a more deeply possible, meaningful relationship that could be developed. And after all of the arguments on this Aristophanes say the reason why people come together is that the original human being was spherical and was parted into two parts and when the two parts recognise each other that they belong to the same spherical unity they come together and then stay together. After all of these statements Socrates finally stops the play of the dialogue and says, ' I was actually taught the reality of love by a woman from the Peloponnese, from Netanya in the middle of the Peloponnese, and her name was Diotima' and it turns out that Diotima was one of the great feminine sages of the ancient world.
In order to understand how unusual this is we have to be able to appreciate how unusual Pythagoras was because only in a Pythagorean community would you have had women sages equal to men sages, and the equality of gender in a spiritual community is always an indication of a Pythagorean heritage and lineage.
We're pairing with Plato's Phaedrus the wonderful book by one of the great sages of the 20th Century, Susanne K Langer. And in many ways Susanne K Langer is a Diotima of the 20th Century. She was the prize inheritor of two of the greatest philosophers of the early 20th Century, two men who almost dominated the early 20th Century and the greatest presentationer, being able to present the philosophy of a third great figure in early 20th Century philosophy. The third great figure was Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest logician and the first half of the 20th Century.
The first teacher was Alfred North Whitehead who was not only one of the world's great mathematical logicians, he wrote the great Principia Mathematica in three volumes with Bertrand Russell. When it was published in 1900 it dominated western thought. It literally shifted the foundations of philosophy showing that mathematics and logic were the very same field from different angles of approach and of application. It was Wittgenstein who, in two incredibly insightful books, criticised the validity of the Principia Mathematica and shifted again so that western philosophy in 1900 was suddenly set askew, the whole frame of reference was set askew and Wittgenstein came along about 30 years later and erased the lines that made that frame, saying there is no permanent frame of reference in the applications of math, the applications of logic, in the way in which the form of the mind applies itself.
Between Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, and Russell was a teacher of, he was the mentor of Wittgenstein, between the two of them they would have dominated thought in philosophy in the western world in the first half of the 20th Century except that there was a formidable German thinker, his name was Ernst Cassirer and Ernst Cassirer was also one of the great teachers of Susanne K Langer. So she received from Whitehead and from Ernst Cassirer, she was their prize student and she was also the inheritor in a way of the peculiar and particular genius of Wittgenstein. And so Susanne K Langer is one of the most interesting and conspicuous figures in 20th Century thought. So we're going to take her and pair her with Plato's Phaedrus not to compare but to make a ratio between 500BC to 400BC and the way in which the 20th Century developed itself all the way until the beginnings of the 21st Century.
In a way that 2500 year period is about half the time, it's the half-life of the radioactivity of the form of civilisation on our planet. Civilisation as a really powerful form, only goes back about 5000 years. It goes back to about 3000BC. You can fudge and you can find indications of sophisticated cultures but they're like high medieval which are still medieval whereas a Renaissance is a completely different, conspicuously different tone, energy to the medieval, even the high medieval. There is a great world of difference between a painter like Giotto who was the high medieval contemporary of Dante and a painter like Botticelli or Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci. One knows that Fra Angelico and Giotto are great painters but they are great painters in the high medieval tradition and style, whereas when you come to artists like Donatello or Botticelli, Michelangelo or Da Vinci, there is an enormously different energy to their work and there is no way to mistake it. One can look at the best of the Fra Angelico portraits and when you compare it to a Raphael portrait you know immediately that something major has changed and what has changed is that the art form of the person has not only deepened but expanded many times over from what it was. The radiance in the Fra Angelico gold spiked background halo things is quite loveable, accurate, has its place but when one sees the portrait of a Raphael woman, all of a sudden the incredible array of feeling tones and artistic mellowness is like an exquisite thing. One finds the same thing in music; you can go to some of the finest high medieval musicians like Michael Praetorius and as soon as you play a Praetorius Galliard Dance you'll recognise musical genius and as soon as you play a Mozart Eine Kleine Nachtmusik you recognise that Mozart is a completely different artist from Praetorius, great beyond believe.
Many orders of energy, so that the forms of what they present, their art forms have more dimensions than the art forms of the others before. The others before have limited themselves to this world and a speculation of a beyond. The Fra Angelico shows that yes, there are visionary possibilities of golden radiance beyond this world but it's presented in a such a way that it is like a projection on the basis of a four dimensional world whereas a Raphael shows there are at least five or six dimensions on time space and they are not just extra dimensions, each of those dimensions transforms the first four over and over again so that you get an alchemical quality of relationality that it isn't just things that are fitting together, they generate together. And they generate not only a radial quality but a rotational chiral quality which is magnetic so that you have an electrifying radiance, you have a magnetic chirality and you have a third quality, a hidden spin in relating the chirality with the radiance.
It's like in the early 20th Century of discovering there are such things as electrons and there are such things as x-rays and there is such a thing as radiation. There are such elements that are not just like gold and silver and lead but something called radium which glows in the dark and is mysterious and the only person in the world for a while who could handle it intellectually, spiritually, was a woman, Marie Curie. Brilliant as her husband Pierre was, it is Marie Curie coming from Poland to France, to Paris, who was the genius, who understood, was the first one to understand that a transformational dimension to the whole element quality of the world had been changed forever. The same thing happened in the 5th Century BC. The Historical Buddha, Lao Tzu in China, Pythagoras in the Mediterranean world and the intense Renaissance and revival of Zarathustra by Cyrus the Great and his Achaemenid dynasty, transformed the world so that by the time you came to the birth of someone like Plato, he's born about 427BC, and he was born into a privileged household. His family went back several hundred years and they were like some of the founding powers of not only the city of Athens and the Athenian Empire but the whole glory of the ethos of the Greek assumed superiority over all other peoples. That all oriental things are superstitious and we are the ones that have the clear sight that is not only practical but is applicable. We not only have a government based upon human beings who are mature in themselves and understand that without superstition and also we have the ability to develop a scientific, technological application of this and that with those two things, with a mature human clear-eyed way of governing ourselves and of applying a science and a technology to expand that and to make the application of it very detailed and quite explicitly practical and improvable, we're superior to all other peoples.
The difficulty is that the deep transform of that time was Pythagoras, and Pythagoras is mysterious and needs to be looked at in a very special way which we can do because we're learning to disregard the scholastic textbook qualities of education. We're learning to hold very lightly those kinds of self-improvement things that can be done in a weekend or can be done by a self-appointed or a community-agreed appointed teachers who know, who exemplify, who have the white garments, they have the artific smile, they are all Fra Angelico portraits of teachers of transform. The more mature Raphael teachers of transform do not show those kinds of out-dated smaller dimensional accoutrements because they're irrelevant. And the irrelevancy is that most of what really is dynamic in reality does not register in any kind of way on material world-based instrumentalities. Most of what is real in the cosmos is not visible, it's invisible. The current cosmological estimate is that only 4% of what is real is available to visible spectrum fulcrum of the electromagnetic spectrum. 96% of the cosmos is invisible, you cannot see it. And one of the deepest qualities in Lao Tzu, in the Historical Buddha, in Pythagoras, in the revived Zarathustra, is that human beings if they are carefully crafted in their learning, learn not to be just full rounded and nice little spherical things but to have facets cut in such a way that they become crystalline jewels able to have unlimited numbers of facets and thus their personality is not just well rounded but it's scintillating because it's able to go into arrays not only of the visible spectrum of integration but the much more vast and no less real arrays of possibilities of the differential forms that show the invisible. And that the first time that one gets a sense that the invisible is quite real is when the mind stops looking at things as things and begins to put two seemingly disparate aspects together and learns to make a ratio. Learns that there is a proportionality and that the proportionality is not on the basis of geometry but on the basis of resonance. Such and such resonances with this therefore there is some relationship to this.
If you have a photon hit a zinc sulphide screen, as that photon hits that zinc sulphide screen it will make a black miniscule point on that screen. If you keep firing photons exactly at that same registry of photonic energy, exactly at that same point on that zinc sulphide screen, that black point will create a diffraction pattern. Now where does that come from? Because the photon when it hits one at a time is a particle, when it hits in a stream of those particles it is a wave front and a specific wave front will make a diffraction pattern that is recognisable anywhere in the universe, on any planet in any star system this is what happens. The diffraction pattern will always have waves which will be visibly there and gaps which will be dark. But if you take that diffraction pattern and you put it on a linear spectrograph, if you take the visible light, you will have a rainbow spectrograph going from the infrared to the ultraviolet with a yellowish green somewhere in the centre. But if you take the opposite, the negative printout of that and you have a black spectrograph where it does not show that particular light but only shows if there's an interference, that black graph will have, if there is an element that has been calibrated to in the generating spectroscope, that element will make a line of whatever colour in that rainbow graph would have been there for that particular element. And if you use that same technique then on the original rainbow graph, that element that is there will make a black line in the rainbow. These are called originally Fraunhofer lines from the first man to discover this, it's one of the basis of astrophysics. Every element in the universe has a specific registry in the electromagnetic spectrum and if you tune your spectrograph to that element you will see a dark line on the rainbow graph and a colour from the rainbow graph as a line in the dark spectrum because there is a quality here of the complementarity of what is visible and what is invisible and their complementarity is based upon a fuller sense of reality.
2500 years ago before there were such things as spectroscopes there were still sophisticated men and women who were able to power themselves up and to take the focus of what for who knows how many millions of years, the patience of the hunter, the patience of the gatherer, the patience of the scavengers even to keep focussed on the game, on the fish, on this world, on the ripening of fruits, on the availability of food, places to take shelter, caves or whatever it was, the ability to keep focussed on the world generated a patient awareness that later on when cultures developed for our kind, Homo sapiens, that deepened so that there was a quality then that could be stepped up and it became a quality we know today as meditation. And that meditation was found to be directly linked to the ability for language to bring images and feelings together in the language such that if you styled your language in a particular way, a prayer, a hymn, the meditation quality improved.
The form of the meditation was the mind's ability to stay attentive, to keep its structure honed so that what one meditated on one looked only and exactly at that and learned to stay with it patiently so that one's perception was not perception of a thing but the dynamic energy of continual meditation produced an accumulated penetration like a diffraction ring around what one was able to meditate on. And that diffraction pattern was always the whole visible radiation and resonance of whatever that was. And men and women learned that in that technique one could hone one's language in such a way that your meditation could be focussed on yourself. And when you were able to hold that patient meditating language-communicated focus instead of there being a centre to the mind, there was instead a diffraction pattern to the mind. Its entire structure was illuminated. And one saw very clearly that there was no centre to that pattern, it was a de facto of, we would call it today in astrophysics a berry centre. It was the centre of the structure alright but it was open. At the centre of the mind is the centre of a very definite structure that is open, an opening which was obviously a gate through which one could go. And if one went through the centre of the mind, that gate, one left the four dimensional confines of this world and entered into a quintessential five dimensional quality of consciousness, conscious vision in our education takes us all the way through patiently, like good hunters, good gatherers, who are now on the verge of not just living on this world but of living on every single body in this whole star system. Just a couple of days ago Project Orion was funded for the next 25 years. Men and women are going to go back to the moon permanently. They're going to go to Mars permanently. They're going to go to all of the asteroids, all the moons of Jupiter, all the moons of Saturn, all the moons of Uranus, all the moons of Neptune. To all the Kuiper Belt objects, there's at least 50,000 Plutos out there, two Mercury, two Venus, to the entire star system.
Our species is changing. We're not going to be Homo sapiens sapiens, we're going to be Homo sapiens stellaris, a new species which is already here. The young ones are already here. They're growing up now and one can tell they're a little different. They don't go hunting by trying to identify something. They go to their nets and their computer friends and they explore possibilities of what might be out there. So they're after new ratios largely of the forms of things unknown as yet. By processes that have more dimensions than just simply the doctrinal identification that this is that and that that is not this. Such miniscule, primitive exclusiveness belongs to those who are satisfied by getting their weekend's wisdom from somebody who is famous and therefore it must be good.
Pythagoras was extraordinary in several different ways. His father was not Greek, his father Phoenician, Mnesarchus was from Lebanon, what is today Lebanon. And he married a sacred priestess of Apollo, and she lived with her family on Samos. That's why Pythagoras was brought up in his mother's island, but Pythagoras was conceived in a very special way by his mother and father, not in Lebanon, not in Phoenicia and not on Samos but at Delphi, at the Oracle of Delphi, and so he was named after the Pythian Apollo Oracle of Delphi, he was name Pyth Agoras, Pythian Agoras. And his father was in charge of, like many wealthy Phoenicians , of shipping ports and routes all through the Mediterranean, all the way not just from Lebanon and over to the new western Greek sites of Sothern Italy and Sicily but to Carthage, the Carthaginians were Phoenician, all the way to Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules, all the way outside into the Atlantic coasts of Spain and up to Britain and down along Africa so that Pythagoras' father was one of these international shipping magnets and in his travels he adopted a very strange young boy who was very odd. And we're going to talk more about him next week. One thing about this boy, he was not quite human. He could stare at the sun without blinking and not be blinded. He had extra-terrestrial qualities. And Pythagoras grew up with this strange brother and in watching him he learned to see that there were radical differences in comportment that made an enormous difference and still belonged to the ratioing of the real but were extraordinarily different in terms of this world.
Let's take a little break and we'll come back to some of this.
Let's come back to what we're considering. We're not learning by subjects anymore. We're learning by phases which are universal. It's like being able to at last have an alphabet and instead of having to depend upon pictographs or ideographs, one can now shift to an alphabet that characterises and indexes in such a way that it opens up the possibilities of language, which was for 150,000 years for Homo sapiens sapiens, the oral communication mode. Our species is neurologically distinct, anatomically distinct from all the other cognate hominid species. They could make sounds, they could make intelligible sounds, but they did not have the range that we have physiologically and neurologically and thus linguistically, so that Homo sapiens compared to other hominid groups, Homo neanderthal, Homo erectus, it's as if they were able to have tom toms and drums, they were able to have point talk, they were even able in very high medieval ways to have their own qualities of greatness but Homo sapiens are like all of a sudden you have a Mozart in music. But it took a long while. It took at least a 100,000 years for our species to learn to talk, to use the function of being able to refine spoken language enough to convey, not only accurately but completely, the transcendence of the world. And when the transcendence of the four dimensional world of visibility, of practical activity becomes transcended then one has the ability to not only go through a threshold into the realms of visions but to be able to bring back from those rare visionary experiences and make an application of what one found out, what one learned, what one experienced visionarily and to bring it back and apply it so that now one could apply what rare individuals had learned in visionary experiences and bring it back and apply it to dreams which everyone has. And not only all us have, animals have dreams and as we've talked about early in the programme for people like Thoreau and so forth, mystics like Rumi.
One understands that plants have dreams as well. Minerals have dreams as well when they're bacteriologically alive. One can bring a visionary consciousness back and apply it in this world. First of all to dreams, second of all of being able to open up feelings so that now one's rituals, one's rites become informed with special qualities and characteristics. They now have symbols and when you add symbols to a ritual now instead of it just being a rite of action that is repeatable and must be done right, now it has a symbolic dimension as well. It has an indexing and so it becomes a ceremony, it becomes ceremonial. And the meditation as we were talking about the in the first half becomes not just a meditation of the mind but it becomes a contemplation of the expanded consciousness that now is like a diffraction pattern radiating out from the mind and one finds in world art, even back to Palaeolithic times in the centre of the Sahara Desert when it was a fertile grassland some 25,000, 30,000 years ago, the great mountain range in the very centre of the Sahara was the home of very sophisticated Palaeolithic culture who left paintings and drawings. The Tassili n'Ajjer mountain range and a Belgian, Pierre [48:22] led an expedition there about 35 years ago, 40 years ago, and found that there are halos around the heads of some of these figures. Many later ufologists said well these are aliens from another planet with space suits on. No, they are special visionary transcendent cultured people who know that there is a special space now, that the mind is able to encompass more than the size of its structure in the cranium. It's able to have an extended space and we recognise that this is like a thought bubble. This is like the nimbus, it's like the halo which is a cross-section of the nimbus and that this is an extension of visionary consciousness so that human being now is radiantly more than what they are and with aural photography one can register that there are rainbows hues around the body that radiate out and that as one can see deeper and deeper into the electromagnetic spectrum beyond visible light, we actually are radiant beings.
There is much more to us in the extension of our four-dimensional worldly physicality than there is in the physicality. If the proportions are the same, 96% of what you are is in the expended conscious dimensions of yourself. Pythagoras, watching his adopted brother, Astraeus, named star being by the mother and father because he was unusual in the extreme. Pythagoras learned to look at the world through his brother's eyes, at his own genius and he recognised, even as a young man, that there was much more to learn than just being on Samos where his mother was from or being in the coastal Lebanon, the Phoenicia of his father, and so as a young man he began to look for wisdom centres that he could go to, to live in, to study at and the first one that he chose was in Egypt in Heliopolis. And he studied there for 22 years. Patiently, [51:25], building up the accumulated penetration of a universal genius that had been exposed to almost an extra-terrestrial possibility of life, and the Egyptian wisdom showed him the way in which a contemplation radiance extends not only out into other dimensions from this world but that those other dimensions carry over beyond death back into life again so that there is a reincarnation possibility. And not only that, there is a refined possibility of not just a reincarnation in another life but there is the possibility of a rebirth within this life so that one is literally born back out of the chrysalis of the old you into a, I guess the phrase new you would be accurate but it's been trashed by science fiction and advertising so much I hate to even suggest to you that the new you is available. But what it is, is more likely an exponential quality of your possibilities that are now not only searchable but they are able to be brought back and applied.
The finding of the forms of further dimensions of yourself produce works of art. The finding of their applicability back into transforming the world are works of science. And so the arts and sciences belong to the further dimensions of conscious time space whereas this world can be very completely summed up by the symbolic thought of the mind once it learns not only to have coherent language but to write it down, and the alphabet is one of the first steps to great civilisations. Not just high cultures which can be oral, but a civilisation must have a written language in order for it to sustain itself. Cultures are mythic; they're on the mythic horizon. Oral language, feelings raised to comprehensiveness of humane sentience, images raised to the possibility of constituting an image base which can be then structured into the imagination, and once the mind has a written language, has the imagination, it is able to work with those two aspects and be able to then hold ideas. And so ideas, images, feelings, all of this characterised in its expressiveness by language finds a way to be written and following the myth phase we'll get to symbols and we'll see what a powerful completion this, is but also that it has it's peril because for this world, for the four dimensions of time space a very high culture raised to the point of a written language civilisation seems to be the final missing piece. And indeed it has a stability to it, but its stability increasingly precludes any further growth, any further experiment, any further development. And so civilisations, while they become extremely successful early on, they are all fragile, they are brittle forms and like all integral forms they then show the characteristics of a life form. They are born, they become very vigorous, they become adolescently fertile, they become aggressively successful, they become less successful through competition, they begin to age, they begin to become infirm and they die.
Arnold Toynbee, in his study of history in the first third, second third of the 20th Century, studied world civilisations, not cultures, not countries, not nationalities, not religions, civilisations. He counted 27 of them, 26 were already dead and the 27th moribund, and dying. None of them had the ability to either live indefinitely or to live again or to live in a more refined transform of itself. What we're doing here is preparing a population of adventurers, of pioneers, whose refining and critiquing and analysing and sharing in the community of all of you, the ability to emerge a new civilisation, a completely different kind. A civilisation not meant to have a volume of laws and doctrines but to have the scintillation of like a jewel matrix of possibilities and this is the realm of human freedom and the future.
Pythagoras learnt in Egypt that there needs to be some kind of intermediate realm, a space of place, a duration of time, within which a human being can learn and unlearn at the same time. Can unlearn the world and it's addictiveness at the same time as build up accumulated penetration of something exploring and new. And that this double experience requires some natural time period where they can be quiet. That most people in the world are not quiet, they are just absorbed in the world and what it's doing. Doing to them, doing for them, doing without them and they need to get in or they need to get out and don't know how or they need to be with others who can make a difference and change and yet those changes over some duration of time, one finds that they go through a cycle and they're back again. Like the politics in the United States now is the politics of the 1950s all over again. The same kind of haunted '50s cold war thing only now it's not the communists, it's the extremist fundamentalists of Islam. And waiting in the wings are the new competition from China and waiting in the wings beyond them in the late 21st Century it's going to be dangerous because India's going to be so successful and so technologically sophisticated and who's waiting beyond them, etc, etc. All of that is a nightmare of dismal repetition of fragility where there is no learning, there is only the doggedness to win again, just like we used to do, hooray, hurrah aren't we powerful. This is madness. It is excessive arrogance. Our learning is to acquaint ourselves with all of dozens and scores and hundreds of different angles of vision given a diffraction patterning. So that all of the phases will register in themselves but we also have intervals in between all the phases which are like the dark areas that don't show up in visibility and for that we don't have pairs that ratio together of books, we take a single world classic of high conscious visioning. Not just visionary consciousness but what we will learn later on is kaleidoscopic consciousness. That the energy dynamic of civilisation is to be able to use a kaleidoscopic consciousness. You're not only equated with this situation but you know several dozen versions of it historically not only in the past and in the present, comparatively but in possibilities of the future already, and so one has a trans-time conveyor belt approach and that there are many different kinds of spaces.
When we get to symbols, the first two things that we're going to read together are Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, stream of consciousness works that indicate that there are many different kinds of time. Virginia Woolf has regular time, she has a cultural time, she has a psychological time, she has an intellectual time and she has a timeless moment that only an artist like Mrs Ramsay with people, like the young Lily Briscoe with her painting, that as soon as a work of art has its composition down to the very last aspect that is put in which then carries the transform all the way through so that the completeness spirals itself into infinite ranges of possibilities. For Lily Briscoe it would be putting the last stroke on her portrait of the landscape in which the family that she has been trying to understand for decades, she puts the last stroke in, she puts the lighthouse in. And that finishes her painting. It is now a work of art. It finishes the book that Virginia Woolf is writing, it is now that this lighthouse with its sweeping beacon illuminates progressively though it is limited to just a beam of light because it circulates around the entire landscape. If you're patient and accumulate the vision, the penetration, where the light showed is where four dimensional time space world is illumined for a second but if you follow its entire path the whole field, the entire landscape is now remembered, is envisioned, is imagined, is able to be put into an expressive language in a work of art and now not only has the artist produced a work of art but anyone who appreciates that work of art becomes an artist of themselves. And there isn't just one work of art, there are works of art without limit. There are ways in which human beings have learned to express themselves almost beyond believe. And the future is that there are more ways yet than could ever have been imagined before.
The quality of Pythagoras was that when he finished 22 years in Egypt he recognised that the Egypt of the time was not the ancient wisdom Egypt but was a part of the Persian Empire. And so he arranged to have himself taken into early Achaemenid Persia, to the Medes to the time not of Cyrus, he was gone, and Kambyses who was gone but of Darius the Great. And into that Persia, Pythagoras spent another 11 years studying. So that when he returned back to Samos to his mother's home island, he came back with a third of a century of contemplative depth and experience that was unheard of in that part of the world. The only figures in the world who would have been able to see consciousness to consciousness within were the Historical Buddha and Lao Tzu, one of the rarest of all human being. He realised that he could not plant what he knew in an old place, you can't put new wine into old wine scales. And so he left the Lebanon Phoenician Coast of Asia Minor, he left the Aegean Greek Islands of Samos and he went to what was at the time the far west, the Greek far west was like the new western lands, like in the United States of about 150 years ago, 'go west young man'. And far west was the southern tip of Italy and the Islands of Sicily and the development along the North African Coast that eventually stretched from what it today Tunisia all the way to Morocco. So Pythagoras went there to found new types of communities and radically different from those of Buddhism, there was no Taoism as in Lao Tzu's time, there was only the sage tradition of rare figures, rare beings. Mountain recluses, urban geniuses, just a few but it was Pythagoras who set up the first masculine, feminine balanced communities of spiritual seeking. That there was something in the way in which gender was not a controlling factor in spiritual development, because one of the qualities was that one needed to transform one's sense of person beyond the gender characterisation of your worldly life. That this was an indication that you were still identifying yourself, whereas it was not a matter of identification but of recognition of further possibilities.
The Pythagorean communities that were set up began to register in rare spots all over the Mediterranean world and one of the earliest spots where it registered was not in Southern Italy and not in Sicily but it registered on the border of Egypt and Cyrene, on the border of what is today Egypt and Libya. And right where that border was at the time, there was no city of Alexandria yet, it was just an area in between classic Egypt and the next Mediterranean coastal land, not Libya, at the time it was called Cyrene and went all the way over to where Benghazi is today in Tunisia. That particular realm was at the end of a very large lake called Mareotis which was about three times the size it is in our time and at the very end of Lake Mareotis the land forms change and in between Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean Sea is a single ridge and that single ridge has a little river-let that goes out from Lake Mareotis into the Mediterranean and there at that particular land form change was one of the earliest of the Pythagorean communities. And that community was classically called the Community of the Therapeuti. That's the community that Jesus was the master of for more than 20 years in his time. But it was established back about 500BC. It already had this quality of being in a very quiet spot that was yet related to easy sea access, easy access to a very large inland lake, fertile grounds, one could grow grapes there and have wine. In classical times some of the best wine in the world was made there in that part of Egypt. You could grow olives, you could have oil, you could grow all kinds of crops, you could have animal husbandry. You could have privacy away from power spots in the world.
Alexandria was placed largely where it is because it was midway between that area where the Therapeuti community was and the original Greek community in Egypt which was the City of Naucratis going back to Pythagorean times as well but that branch, that Rosetta branch of the Nile that went up to the Mediterranean from where that touched the coast over to Alexandria then to where the Therapeuti community. All this was like geometry that Alexandra the Great understood and placed Alexandria to be a world city, one of the first great world cities where it was because it had enormous advantages, and when Alexandria was put there it powered up the capacity for that Pythagorean community to draw people not only from the Mediterranean world but from everywhere in the known world. From India, from Scythian Central Asia, from the British Isles, Ireland, from Northern Europe, from Ethiopia, from all over the North African and Arabian and Indian Ocean areas and so the Therapeuti community by the time that Jesus was teaching there was one of the high spots of spiritual refinement in the world, absolutely the best. Philo of Alexandria, about ten years into the Common Era said this is the father land of this type of community, distinguished particularly because men and women were not discriminated against whatsoever. They were able to participate together. And so a woman like Mary Magdalene could become a spiritual teacher of the highest order and write spiritual poems of the highest quality of all time and we're going to use her poems when we get to vision, because 41 of the 42 still survive as a collection and were found again in 1909 just about the time that the historic grail was found in Antioch.
Plato was the way in which the Pythagorean tradition, because by Plato's time it had been going on for at least 100 years, Plato was the way in which it was written for the first time, given a written language.
Pythagoras always taught orally like I do, like the Historical Buddha did, like Lao Tzu did, Lao Tzu proverbially did not write the Tao Te Ching, he quoted it when he was over 100 years old and heading west. In China a paradise, like in Egypt is always in the west. The wisdom begins in the east but it refines itself into infinity in the far west. Our far west today is the moon, Mars and beyond, really far west. West of the sun there are many stars.
Plato was the way in which that language orally was given a written form and the written form was the Platonic Dialogue. And the Phaedrus that we're taking and I'm recommending Robin Waterfield's translation of the Phaedrus made for the Oxford World's Classics, Waterfield is quite an extraordinary man. He's one of the few people that read a copy of my translation of the Tao Te Ching and liked the conscious language very much. The way in which Plato came to writing dialogues was influenced by Socrates, that Socrates never wrote anything out but he always spoke in such a way that he didn't speak at someone, he listened to what they said and wove what he said with what they were saying so that the dialogue is not of dialogue between two or more people but it is a ratioing that is built of the weaving of what we orally say together so that dialogue is a woven community of enquiry. And this woven community of enquiry, if we are all meditative together in the same duration, in the same place and raise the energy of that to a shared contemplation that transcends that place and that duration of time then the conscious resonance will have its own harmonic what will show in the diffraction pattern that emerges and in every single diffraction pattern there will be a centre which is a hidden seeing through which one could go to other dimensions. And that that point is no longer a point that has the symmetry of pro and con of any kind and is a moment of openness which is an infinite equilibrium through which consciousness then can step together and that all may emerge together through that gate. Not only at the same time and in the same place but at any time in any place anyone who follows that dialogue with them joins that accumulated penetration through. And for the last 2400 years hundreds of millions of men and women have gone through those centres of Plato's dialogues and they have all gone through together and formed a very large transcendent community by now. Much more populous than any state on this planet at this time because it includes also all future beings who will be able to do that as well and not just Plato but all spiritual patterns have this shared capacity of an emergence into infinity, indefinitely, continuously, shareably.
I will try to make copies for you of some of the pages of both my lecture notes on The Symposium and on the Phaedrus and just to show you the cover The Symposium notes, this is a Labyrinth Mandala and the photograph here shows the Mandala on the floor where it is, the building where it is. The building is Chartreus Cathedral, built in the still wild fields surrounding the little village of Chartreus, and the great cathedral was put there because it was meant to rise immediately out of the beautiful fields, not in a great city but out of the simple fields of the earth, the lilies of the fields are the right landscape sometimes for the greatest spiritual architecture. In the centre of the floor of Chartreus Cathedral is this Labyrinth incised into the stones of the floor. It's a particular rosette type of a labyrinth. In order to get to the centre of this labyrinth you must patiently cover the entire surface area of the Mandala. You cannot get to the centre directly but if you follow through you will cover every square inch of that Mandala so that when you get to the centre it would culmination of completeness as well as the penetration through to perfection right at the centre where the nave and the isle cross in Chartreus Cathedral. The original Chartreus when it was first completed after many generations and 100 years of building had a catastrophic fire and burned. The floor remained and so several more generations rebuilt and the Chartreus that we have today is actually the rebirth of Chartreus Cathedral and it's been there for about 1000 years.
Our learning is a patient going through a medicine wheel, Vajrayana, Mandala Labyrinth of transcendence and it will include not only ourselves but who knows how many beings will make use of this, not only into the far future and far places but it has a recursive reverberation so that those in the past who did this will be included as well. In this way there is good news indeed.