Myth 11

Let's come to Myth 11. We are doing something that is akin to magic. Legerdemain is a sleight of hand trick but real magic is a wisdom dimension. We are learning by phase space, rather than by subject. This was always the esoteric core of the higher civilisations. It needs to be made public in a massive way because the capacities of almost any individual in the 21st century is to have the facility to amplify themselves to the scale of entire countries in previous history. For someone already just in 2006, and were just beginning, for someone to have tens of billions of dollars at their disposal and the technology which is able to be purchased now, they can broadcast themselves and their opinions and their ideas to the extent that you could have people in the Gobi Desert humming the advertising that you wish them to hum. By 2020 the capacity will be about 1000 times what it is in 2006. If we do not transform through a recalibration, we are going to have a chaos because there will be literally millions of people who are going to have that capacity. If it is a competitive shouting match, already by 2020, one will be able to see that this is not a workable way to have a life.
So we are shifting our learning from subjects that are categorised, that have information, that is instructed, and this was something that surfaced first in a major way in the, as we have been saying, in the sixth century, before the Common Era. As we have indicated, and this is not just to repeat but this is to give the resonance, so at the beginning of Myth 11, we'll have resonances with the previous Myth presentations.
There is a famous quote by an English composer, Gustav Holst, who wrote The Planets among other things. He said one of the virtues of being over 40 as an artist is that one knows that there is a great deal of difference between knowing and realising. Realisation has a transparent quality to it whereby the mind is open, not only to knowing cognitively but to realising recognitionally, recognitively, and that recognition is a remembering function of consciousness, of conscious vision. When the mind is opaqued, it no longer has the facility to recognise through conscious remembering and it seeks to focus its attention on what it knows that has been determined, that it has been written down and so the opaque mind becomes a closed world. In this closed world remembering is reduced to a static stable functioning form called the memory.
One of the classic Roman techniques was to develop the art of memory as if it were an art and the basic book on that is written by Cicero, where the mind is trained to divide its tabulets into little compartments and to put any image that one wants to remember into these little compartments and then to arrange those compartments and make larger and larger arrangements. In this way, it is said that the mind learns to remember by cueing in the various tabs. One recognises that this is exactly the model that computers use. They have memory which tabulates and is able to be cued in but computers do not remember. They do not participate in remembering and so the whole object of facility of computers as a tool, which is fantastic, becomes increasingly obviated by their distortion of the ability to have visionary consciousness operative.
So you will find hundreds of millions of people using a computer programme simply to learn, as they would say, how to do such and such a software task on this monitor and very few people come to an experience like this, a situation like this, where that is being held lightly as a tool, an adjunct to something which is of indefinite more importance; that is to mature ourselves in such a way that we could look at subjects, we could look at categories, we could look at arrangements and manipulations of images and their concomitant feelings and we could use that kind of language if we needed to. But we would use that kind of language and comport in that kind of way as if we were using tools and not expressing ourselves and not addressing each other in terms of that reductive sieving.
The earliest genius in the Mediterranean West at this was Pythagoras, as we've said before, and it is the development of the Pythagorean generations of wisdom teaching and maturing as a way of life that one becomes a lover of wisdom, one becomes a philosopher. A philo-sophist, one loves wisdom and that this is an interpersonal activity form; that philosophy is not for someone by themselves, isolated, but is a living interchange together. In Plato this is emphasised by the dialogue. It is only when two or more are gathered together to interchange that they both then mature further together and that this is the love of wisdom. One becomes a lover of wisdom. People then are capable of having not just two in a love relationship of maturing and wisdom but that many can be capable of joining into this, not just a circle, but a cycle of maturation.
Over the last 2400 years the numbers of men and women who have learned from Plato's dialogues must reach close to several hundred millions by this time. Perhaps in our age with a population of seven billion people, there might be still 50 million people on the planet who still have a sense for this. It is the communion of the community that is brought forth and emerged in philosophy in this sense. The classic way of teaching this is important for us to refresh and to pair with it some very current presentation of its modes and of its achievements but with a slightly different twist that 2400 years makes and also gender makes.
So we are using as a pair, we are using Plato and we are using The Phaedrus because it is a dialogue of Plato's that specifically teases out not just the meat and the juice of this but teases out our capacity to participate in it. The more that we participate, the more mysteriously we receive the recognition quality, the visionary consciousness that has the amperage of anyone who has ever done this and we join that community, so that we have the ability to participate mysteriously not only in our experience naturally but in the ability to manifest a realisation that there are more dimensions in reality than there are in simply knowing. Knowing will flash in a realisation but a realisation will allow us to resonate beyond its flash into newer and newer possibilities, realms that are as real as this world purports to be. This is an extremely interesting situation.
Plato, in his life, up until he was 40, did not found an academy, the original academy, an educational place in Athens. Before that Plato was learning, like Pythagoras spent at least 33 years educating himself, learning in Egypt, in Persia, in Phoenicia, where his family originally came from, from the Aegean Island of Samos and finally was able to take himself to the wild west of what they called Magna Graecia, Greater Greece, which was in Sicily and southern Italy in the 500BC era.
The most powerful city at that time in Sicily was Syracuse. Syracuse was so powerful that in the Peloponnesian war between the confederation headed by Athens and the anti-confederation headed by Sparta, it wasn't Sparta so much that crushed the Athenians but it was the extent where Athens tried to extend its power over Syracuse and thus over Sicily, over greater Western Greece and they were crushed militarily. It led to Athens being shrunk so that by the time of Alexander the Great, he considered Athens like a university town, no longer a political power at all. Somewhat as if someone would be coming from, say, the New York of 1960, taking a little vacation and going to Cambridge, Massachusetts; yes, they have Harvard, they have MIT but they are certainly not on that level of power of New York and Athens became just like a university town quality, a place to visit and see the sites and maybe go to be schooled but it was never again a power in the world.
Plato tried to transform a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius. In this he was unsuccessful, not only for the original Dionysius but for the son that came in. All the time there were people who were friendly to Plato's maturing Pythagorean method. The chief figure in that was named Dion who kept inviting Plato to come and try to educate, especially with the new young ruler coming in, that he had to be introduced to a broader maturity, otherwise there was going to be a greater amount of projected tyranny in the world because here was an example of the young rulers coming in who were very powerful, just as in our own time. The young people coming in are going to be enormously powerful and there is such a lack of maturation that the outlook currently is that we will not make it.
Plato wrote a series of eight letters and the seventh of them is about 40 pages long and obviously was like a public letter so that anyone who would read it ever after would be able to understand why it was that he had done things the way he had done. Why did he go three times, and fail three times, to Syracuse? Why did he set up an academy in Athens? Why was it so difficult for people to understand what he was doing, what the teaching was, and continuously misunderstood, just as here in this situation, very few come in and participate in the actuality of what is occurring. They come to hear a lecture or they come to hear maybe a few lectures or they pick and choose, 'Oh well this topic interests me' or 'This subject doesn't interest me.' It's as if one were trying to sing along with a song and you might utter a syllable every five or six minutes or maybe after an hour you might say a couple of words; there is no song, there is no music because phase space is a quality of opening which is very difficult to appreciate except for understanding an art like the art of architecture.
In our comparison with Plato, we are taking Philosophy in a New Key by Susanne K. Langer because it was generated in a time when the world was on the brink of oblivion of tyrannies. It was written and published by Harvard in 1941, written in 1940, right at the time when not only was Europe poised to being completely swallowed up by the Nazi fascist juggernaut in late 1940, the entire nation of France fell to the Nazis. It was apparent, all of a sudden, that it was only a year before that Poland had fallen to the Nazis and that Poland obviously then was not militarily prepared but when France fell in late 1940 it was understood that a generation before, France and England had held off the German Kaiser forces in World War I for four years. There was no way that France was going to fall and yet it fell to the Nazis as if it were just an overripe plum. Immediately the impress was that England was not far behind.
It was then that Susanne K. Langer wrote Philosophy in a New Key. What was curious was that one of her teachers was German and one of her teachers was English. She had been given a focus of the finest German philosophic mind of its time, Ernst Cassirer, and of perhaps the finest English philosophic mind of that time, Alfred North Whitehead. The difficulty was that at the maturation of their philosophic careers and works, their works were so complex as to be almost impossible to read comprehensively. Ernst Cassirer's three volumes, actually the fourth volume was published for the first time just about five years ago, was never published in his lifetime, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The great magnum opus of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, was published in such a distorted, cribbed form that it was almost impossible to read, like a Finnegan's wake and the revised, thoroughly edited version of it was not published until about 15 years ago.
But Susanne K. Langer wrote in 1940, and published in 1941, Philosophy in a New Key and immediately it was apparent that here was a young, budding philosophic genius who had a completely different take on something that was yet recognisably going back all the way to the core of the Mediterranean wisdom tradition in Plato, in Pythagoras. The key to this was that the Pythagorean source of it was like a music art whereas the Plato, the Platonic expression of it was like an architectural art. In a way the relationship between a music and an architecture is exactly what Susanne Langer was trying to bring out, that there is something where there is a feeling-toned process, that is able to be brought into a stable form and that the form is not so much the outline but is the actual space that is presented, so that the architecture is a presentation of a quality of spatiality in which one can move and live and share.
And so in a very deep wisdom way my teaching here of how to navigate through a phase space learning is like a complete new architecture of maturation; it is an architecture of maturation in which one can share it on any scale. It's not that you're learning alone but you and I are learning together and anyone who participates in it is part of that community of learning no matter when they do it or at what pace they do it, as long as their participation carries through the process will emerge its reality. The music of the oral language will bring a space of architectural form into being and this larger form will be the feeling process of a planet brought into a star system civilisation as an architectural space.
It will probably take a couple of hundred years before the star system has its own architectural space as our home. There already was a book about 20 years ago called The Home Planet. We are looking forward to seeing, about 2200, that any young human being will consider this their home star system and be ready for the interstellar frontier as if it were a natural quality of their neighbourhood. All of this is not developable or realisable given the current limitations. They are not even able to work on a planetary level. They are not even able to work on a continental level. They are not even able to work on the level of an individual struggling all their life to try to realise who they are and to have a life that expresses that. All of this is being ground into reductiveness so that you end up with what Wallace Stevens in one poem, Asides on the Oboe, called 'the granulated gods that false artists like Boucher killed.'
Plato, in the seventh letter, says, 'When I arrived I made it my first task to discover whether Dionysius was genuinely on fire with enthusiasm for philosophy or whether the frequent reports to this affect had come to Athens, were baseless. There was a way of testing this which involves no loss of dignity and is quite suitable of absolute rulers so that they will not take umbrage and kill you, especially such as our full of second hand ideas which I perceived as soon as I arrived to be very much the case with Dionysius.' Second hand ideas have an insidious quality to them that is not immediately perceptible or ascertainable and that is they prearrange for you what you are going to be looking for, so that when you find what you have been predisposed to look for you will identify it as the thing you were looking for. In this way you become used to following the inculcated manipulation that has been spread upon you before you knew any better because this kind of inculcation happens before anyone even learns to speak.
It's not only in the ear, but when we get to Symbols we will see, it is in a false social world and in a traditional false mentality that has been going on now for at least 5000 years. It is so layered and deep as to be almost impenetrable unless one learns how to turn walls into membranes, so that there is an ability to develop an osmotic quality of going through what seemed to be the barriers of stability and being able to see through them in a way that you accumulate the quality of penetrativeness and eventually are able to come out into the largest freedom that there is and that is the reality of the cosmos, is a phase space that allows for nature to be generated out of it and to occur naturally. This is an extremely difficult thing to appreciate.
If you try to follow and you do just limit yourself to following what someone is saying, you are lusting after the addiction to instruction. And so a wisdom teacher will also do you the courtesy of breaking up, of showing you that it isn't that piece of paper; that there are different ways, you can show that it isn't that but you could also show how you can fold and then unfold, and that is what we are doing here. Each presentation, not at a time, but each presentation of a flow of a phase, and that by arranging the rotation of four phases we establish a quality of focus that is open rather than something, which then we point at, is the centre.
The rotational pivot is an open focus because it is then able to generate a quality of weaving and it's as graphic an image as the way in which weaving is done. We talked about it when we talked about the Navajo, when we talked about Gladys Reichard, learning how to weave a Navajo rug and when she did she was immediately accepted, not only into the family of one of the greatest Shamans of all time in the Navajo nation, Red Point, Miguelito, as he was called by a Spanish time, but Red Point. She was adopted by Red Point and his wife to be their daughter, a spirit daughter, that the spirit family quality is there.
She learned that in order to weave the rug you must raise the sheep so that they are ready with their wool, their fur, to be sheered and then one takes the sheered fur, the sheered wool and is able to cart it, is able, then, to take a distaff, spindle, and to tease out from the mound of sheered wool, to tease out the threads, the wool, onto the spindle, onto the distaff and the pivot of the open centre is a kind of transcendental spindle just like that. What it pulls out of the tangled melee of just the natural ebullience of wool growing, being sheered and put there that one teases out the thread, the Greek word for thread is clue, one teases out the continuous clue of how, then, one may take this and if you know how to make a loom, and how to weave, you can take those threads, dye them different colours, and weave a patterned saddle blanket or a patterned rug.
In this way the process takes about a year to do this, from sheering the sheep to the finished saddle blanket, or to the finished rug, so that the Navajo blanket or rug is an annual cycle that one would go through to mature oneself. Each time one did this, the accumulated penetration of this deepens the quality of the membrane so that one is not stymied by circumstances that seem intractable as if they were walls. They are simply circumstances through which your creative consciousness can create a new space of person, a new space of your living. For that space there is no limitation to size or actuality, the cosmos itself is real and invites each and all who may do this indefinitely.
Plato says, 'Those who are not genuinely lovers of wisdom and whom philosophy is no more than a superficial veneer like the tan men get exposing themselves to the sun once they see how much there is to learn and the labour involved and the disciplined way of life that the subject requires, decide that the task is too difficult for them and beyond their scope. They are not in face fit to practise philosophy though some of them persuade themselves they have a sufficient grasp of the whole matter and then give themselves no further trouble.' They got it. This is what it is and many who do that then teach what they got and want you to get what they got so it confirms the identification that they got it. This is absurdity, friends, absurdity. If you can follow in a sequenced order everything that's being said as it's said in one of these presentations you most certainly didn't get it. What you got was what you were looking for, not what is occurring because what it occurring here is a transparency of phase space that not only is continuous indefinitely but has an eternal resonance to it, a harmonic song without end.
It is a peculiar quality; Gustav Holst, that we mentioned previously, in a letter to Ralph Vaughan Williams, another great composer who was a lifelong friend of his, said, 'I never understood when I was younger why angels play harps and sing until now I understand that eternal singing is the state of the divine in its cosmic scope.' This quality is important because when Susanne Langer finally came to try to write a fourth revision of Philosophy in a New Key she couldn't and so she wrote a second book, a sequel, called Feeling and Form. When we come back from the break we are going to talk about the modes of virtual space for a moment. But she didn't stop here. This was in the early 1960s, 1956-1960 that she brought this out, then she realised that she had only begun, and from 1967-1982 she wrote three volumes and their general title is Mind: an Essay on Human Feeling.
In one of her little essays on art, collected in Philosophies of Art by her, she had a phrase, she said, 'I am scouting the possibility that thinking is an elaboration of feeling and that if we can have the experience of feeling, the images that occur have a scintillating quality to them where they are at once natural and they are also visionary at the very same time' and because they participate in the process of nature and the process of visionary consciousness, in the process of our experience, our experience, then, has a mysterious quality that what we see and what we feel are linked to what we hear. It's the hearing of language that allows the bubbles of the images to carry the nourishment of the feeling into thought where it is brought together temporarily in a gestalt where it will hold its stability as a form but the thought will be alive, organic and not dead, mechanical. Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's come back to a quality of movement, not only in the three-dimensional space that would be here naturally but one can put more dimensions and in fact instead of just having the three dimensions of space, you can have three different kinds of three-dimensional space, with a time dimension that is variable, that is expandable or contractable, pliable. If that occurs an extra dimension of complementarity occurs where it is not only stable in its completeness on several different levels but that the different levels are able to work together in a complementarity and one gets an extra dimension in this way of complementative reality, and these are the eleven dimensions of string theory.
The depth of this is learning to concourse through a multidimensional phase space in which you will not learn this by identifying or by instruction but you will recognise. You can, by knowledge, learn to be able to realise a truth by accepting its meaning. But if you arrive at it through what Plato shows is a dialectical cooperative, you will not just focus on the truth but you will arrive at what - the Greek term is aletheia - what is true in the sense that one can use that truth as a threshold through which one can go, a gate, of furthering, then, your ability to recognise and that on this level, in this state, one begins to have access to the eternal. The mind, naturally, as we will see when we get to Symbols in just a couple of weeks, the mind naturally will make forms because it is a form. It does this. But its forms are satisfied by completeness and the only augmentation that, generally, in the natural realm is that it also be necessary. And so the time honoured criteria by the time of the Rationalists like Leibniz and Newton, was that something is true if it is necessary and sufficient.
But hidden in that is the kernel of a transform which raises another criteria that was not there initially in nature and that third criteria will be that it's perfect. That perfection begins with realisation. It doesn't end with it. So that while completeness and the practical necessary, well, necessary and sufficient come to a focus, a truth, truth itself will be the beginnings of the development towards perfection. This threshold is the sense of wonder and that sense of wonder is not individual, but is an interpenetration of our characters, so that when we are talking together in a phase space where we are realising as a point of gate, of openness of departure, we are able together to go through that gate, to cross that threshold together.
Socrates, many times, and Plato, says we cannot learn anything in terms of recognition unless we are able to be companions together. It is the companionability between us which is the love of wisdom. Someone who is selfish, for just themselves, are unable to go through that gate with anyone else and so they never love wisdom, they only want to get it and to have it, to package it, to merchandise it. All of this creates eventually a deadening of the ability to realise, the facility to envision, the ability of life to be creative. Individuality becomes more and more abstracted and in this sense self-destructive.
Instead of the character which is the feeling tone in your experience, that is recognisable, one returns to it again and again, comes in with that character, and not only human beings having a character, as we have talked before, animals will have a character, 'This horse is that horse. Never will take an apple out of your left hand, if it's the right hand, might deign to do it.' Plants have a character, so that all organic forms have a character, including the inorganic elements will have a character. That's why there can be families of elements. Helium and neon and argon and radon, they are all of the family of inert elements because they have completely packed their electrons in all the different shells, so that they are complete and they don't interact with other elements very much at all whereas all the other elements have different ionising capacities and they will make molecules. Hydrogen loves to be with oxygen and they make water, together.
When our kind has a love of wisdom companionability together, animals and plants and other beings can all join our community and not only things like this but the elements themselves are able them to have their natural interchange but also a transformative quality of interchange that will be stable. It's a peculiarity that the first trans-uranium element which is stable to some great extent, plutonium, is a deadly poison and that most of the other trans-uranic elements are so fleeting that you can only make an atom every couple of months for some of them. It would take a year to get four atoms of something like einsteinium before you could do anything of trying to understand what it might be. And yet there are, distantly, elements not yet able to be found but able to be understood, that they will have a stability, they will have a half life that is quite considerable because not only do electrons come into shells but protons and neutrons also pack themselves in layers and shells, and when the nucleus has a completeness to its packing, it also has a perfection to its resonant ability to carry its stability into the real.
To emerge extant, in existence, to have that unity which is not just a unity of one but has a unity of - the best term ever on the planet that was found to express this was in Sanskrit, in the most profound transformation of it, the first person to use it with a pristine accuracy was named Nagarjuna and the Sanskrit word was tathata. When the first historical Buddha referred to himself, he never called himself Siddhartha. Siddhartha would be the character. He never identified himself as the individual, Gautama. He said of himself that he was tathagata. That his tathata had gone. He was there, his character was there, his individuality was there. He had to eat, had to sleep. He did die. But the thusness of him was gone from the limitations of the flow of his character. His spirit person was not limited to Siddhartha. His spirit person was not stable only as Gautama. He was free from those constraints permanently and thus he said of himself that his tathata was gone, not that it was missing but that it was freed. he phase space in which was freed, the term nirvana, was that it was of an indefinite creative space.
We're learning how, through this process, to put the presentations into like a resonance and our attentiveness is like a condensing quality of bringing those resonances together so that it charges and what does it charge? Because the condenser is not something that is statically there but is like that spindle, that pivot, that its charge becomes capable of penetrating through the illusionary walls of limitations, so that by the accumulation of that penetrative conscious visioning we can see the stability of the form of our spirit person and that that spirit person has a generative ability to raise visionary conscious dimensions into an even higher dimension, that of a kaleidoscopic historical consciousness. That kaleidoscopic consciousness of history is so powerful that it can be a springboard of resonance whereby our spirit person can actually participate now in the stability of the form of the real.
This is an amazing event of actuality that uses realisation as the pivot, the access, and not as the end point. Not as the completion, so that if you were writing it out, you would write it out instead of putting a period at the end of the sentence, or an ellipse, or a dash, you might just leave a space and then begin again, with something further or something else so that the punctuation is an intervalling which allows, then, for whatever emerges after to emerge freshly again just now. What this turns out to be in experience is an experience of floating, of flying, of having the freedom within phenomenal space of a phase space eternity.
When we get to Symbols we will read, as one of our first pairs, along with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, where the lighthouse is the pivot of an eternal moment within a life space. That it really does occur and that there are persons like Mrs Ramsey in To the Lighthouse who create the artistry of interpersonal sharing to the extent that there are moments where everyone for a split fraction of a time experience a beatific epiphany. They cannot remember exactly what it was but they have this sneaking suspicion that it did and that everybody knows this and just don't have the facility to talk about it, don't have the background to know much about it but that it happened as a magic of moment. It is a magic, like in To The Lighthouse, that Mrs Ramsey is an artist of inter-human penetration, creates this by the choreography and by her letting her own intervalled openness act as the pivotal spindle upon which the threads of everyone's life are able, for a moment, to collect together and all the different colours and all the different textures, for a moment, are there. Were it possible, like the artist Lily Briscoe will feel that she can do a painting in which all the different threads, all the different colours, all the different qualities of spirit and person are teased out and one now will have this composition, will have this painting.
The deepest quality of this was always in architecture; that however powerful sculpture or painting, poetry, even music, it was in architecture that was the fount. And so one finds, in Feeling and Form, chapter six is The Modes of Virtual Space and she writes here, our friend Susanne K. Langer, 'Architecture is so generally regarded as an art of space meaning actual practical space and building is so clearly the making of something that defines and arranges spatial units that everybody talks about architecture as spatial creation without asking what is created or how space is involved. The concepts of arrangement in space and creation of space are constantly interchanged and the primary illusion seems to have given way to a primary actuality. Nothing is more haphazard than the employment of the words "illusion", "reality creation", "construction", "arrangement", "expression", "form" and "space" in the writings of modern architects. But architecture is a plastic art and its first achievement is always unconsciously and inevitably an illusion, something purely imaginary or conceptual translated into visual impressions. The influence or the underlying idea shows itself in such key phrases as "functional form", "life in space", "taking possession of space"'
She then talks about Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, one of the books that was used in the Bauhaus when it was founded in the 1920s, 'A constant fluctuation sidewards and upwards, radiant, all-sided announces to man that he is taken possession, insofar as his human capacities and present conceptions allow, of imponderable, invisible yet on the present space.' And she writes, 'This mystical conception of space is merely an ecstatically heightened form of a notion current and quite accepted among architects; the notion of space as an entity with internal relations, sometimes described as dynamic, sometimes as organic. One reads about intersecting spaces and interval tensions of space.' And she goes on from there.
The clearest quality of the magic of this is brought out by Plato in The Phaedrus. He is of course walking outside the city with Phaedrus, and for those who need, I've completely outlined the arguments of The Phaedrus years ago and I'll make copies for you, in the Myth presentation notes you'll find them there, just on The Phaedrus all of Plato's dialogues I did this for, years ago. What occurs, and it behoves you to read The Phaedrus yourself, because I'm not teaching a text, this is not a subject course, this is an interpenetration of learning and sharing a phase space together. I'm merely setting the architecture of the hall resonating, the hall will be an architecture when we do it together, then it will be created. As she says in here, this will be a created space that we have mutually done together and because it has occurred in this way it will forever be accessible to anyone who does this with us, so that the mysterious participation of experience is now expanded into a conscious dimension, which will allow for any and many others to participate with us and to enrich this architecture. We may join all those architectures that have already been achieved in exactly this way. The phrase is that, 'In heaven the house has many mansions' literally rooms without end because they are not room, they are creative phase spaces that interpenetrate infinitely.
This is freedom; to think that freedom is freedom of choice, when you are given some set of choices, beggars the whole notion of language. Freedom is not about choice, it is about perfecting unlimited participation in the real so that our maturation here is such that it will be consciously natural for us to expand our sense of home to a whole star system. It will seem as if it has always been this way because the recognition is that it has always been this way. There have been beings like ourselves who have done this so many billions of years before that the range of possible communities would stagger the most brilliant computers. There was an estimate by Isaac Asimov one time about the capacity of the human brain and he wrote this in the late 1970s, he said if you would take the most powerful computers in the world and run them for 6000 years they would only begin to approach the initial capacity of a five year old. Our capacity is not limited to our brain, though, because the conscious harmony of those space dimensions exceeds this by asymptotic qualities.
Socrates is talking with Phaedrus and Phaedrus is trying to deliver a scrolled up speech by a great speech writer named Lyceus about being clever in a presentation of saying it's better to love someone who's not in love with you than to love someone who is in love with you because love is a madness. Somebody that is not in love with you is very common sense and it'll be very straightforward and it'll just be pleasure, won't it, and none of the swirl of love. When he finishes this speech he asks Socrates if he couldn't write a better speech like this and Socrates tells him this is an ignorance to try to do but Phaedrus turns the tables on him and says, 'You have shown that you really do want to give this because what you have said, you noticed I had the speech rolled up in my robe and you have admitted to me that your breast was full watching me.'
Socrates says, 'Well, not because I was listening to the speech by Lyceus but I was enjoying your enjoyment of it, your reading of it, and your enthusiasm was something I participated in to such an extent that now my breast is as full of that participation of your glow of your enthusiasm. I feel the loveliness of you in my breast.' Phaedrus says, 'You need to express this, there is a speech that you haven't delivered that's rolled up in the vibrancy of your glowing participatory breast with me, you owe me the speech.' Socrates says, 'I will give you this speech but I will cover my head' and he takes part f his robe and he covers his head because this is a mourning. This is something which you cannot do without peril. He imitates the style of Lyceus' speech but takes a tack that it's better to love someone in a secret love rather than just in a normal way.
When he finishes this, he takes off the veil and he says, 'Now I must cleanse both of us in our hearing because by hearing Lyceus' speech and the one I have just delivered to you in that mode, I have only made impressions that are erroneous and those impressions will leave, like bad images, like bad feelings, will leave' and I will paraphrase here, 'they'll leave blurred qualities within us, skewed images, feelings that are not resonantable, they are not harmonic, and I must clear the air' because it's well known, he uses an example of an ancient Pythagorean poet named Stesichorus in the 6th century BC who made up a poem of saying, 'Well, Helen ran off with Paris to Troy because she desired him and the Trojan war was like a fiasco and then he was blinded until he cleared that lie from the world, that he had made this up and this was not true and his sight was restored to him.'
And Socrates said, 'Now I must show that there is an openness of love' and that is this openness of love that we have been talking about in the entire presentation, the philo-sophers, the lovers of wisdom, who love together in this wisdom phase space expansiveness. If we do this, this will be a new way to raise the quality of spoken language, so that it doesn't get stuck into the forms of a professional rhetoric, like the false teachers have, like the sophists, who claim that they can instruct you in wisdom because they have perfected, completed the techniques of the rhetorical delivery, they know exactly what buttons to push and how. You will, by expectation, be able to have those buttons pushed in just that way and you will identify them as wise teachers because they have taught you in just the way that you were expecting to be taught and it's a self-confirming tautology, closed circuit, and life does not flow in that way. The only thing that flows in that way a mechanical dead end.
In order to restore the creativeness of language, a rhetorical form must be able to deliver a transparency of itself, so that through that, now, language will become poetic and when one is poetic, the first thing one does instead of arguing, you begin singing and those who can hear your singing will join you and this will be a chorus, this will be a choir. One, as one deepens one's acquaintance and ability to do this, you will hear the music of the spheres because it is already vibrating through the grand symphonic singing of eternal beings of whom we all are already. And so learning is a recognition, a remembrance rather than a cognition of the completed details of what was instructed, satisfying the necessity and sufficiency of what you were prepared to accept in the first place, which is just a tautological education and not at all a real education, not at all - the word in Greek, in Plato, was paideia. It means a maturing of the person so that they belong, consciously and naturally, in the community of matured beings for all time and that that can be deepened to the extent that one participates in the cosmos as a community. The cosmos is, in reality, a community of all of us eternally exactly in that way and that by re-achieving that, we finally begin to no longer put walls around others as ourselves and we begin to understand the complex shareability of the real.
At this point Plato, in The Phaedrus, gives us something which we'll come back to next week; the origins of written language by Thoth in Ancient Egypt and of how the invention of a written language for the first time gave an advantage to those who had come to believe that they didn't have to learn the wisdom. It was already written down, all they have to do is go to it and they can read it because it's there, it's in that book, it's in that inscription. And so the key is just simply to learn to read and then you can have access to it and that somehow wisdom is bottleable, it's packageable. You can put it on the shelf and the text now has your instruction, you just have to follow somebody who is able to instruct you in this.
One of the models of this that was extremely precarious was the Essene community at Qumran that reduced itself down to instructors and instructions, 'This is the Torah, this is the scripture, these are the prophetic remarks, these are what we study and just exactly this way' and that entire encasement came to a frozen status of deadness, exactly in 31BCE, Before the Common Era. A tremendous earthquake hit the Qumran community and split the architecture of the community and sent a lightning jagged break exactly through the centre of the communal baptising pool so that would never work again. That's why when the Essene community at Qumran was revived by John the Baptist he had to do the baptising in the Jordan River, about where the Allenby Bridge crosses over near Jericho, because they couldn't baptise in the community architecture anymore. In fact, the split went up the stairs that went down into the community pool, so that not only would it never work again, it was obvious to anybody who even tried to just re-enter that structure that this had been negated. It had been scratched out, it had been broken by the earth itself.
It wasn't the baptism by rules, it was the interpenetrative sharing by spirit that was the higher form, the better covenant and so those who could do that realised there is such a thing as baptism by spirit, holy spirit. This quality is not only there indefinitely back in all the wisdom traditions, is here, still, today, but expressed so poorly, so inarticulately, so cramped, because it takes an annual seasonal cycle in order to go through, just to acquaint oneself with how you go through a year and a second time, so that you can go back through it with more and more dimensions, and you can see how the transform of it leads to something.
The noble eightfold path, the eight notes of an octave, the eight bodes that a complex mandala will have, that a medicine sand painting will have, that all of these forms, that form itself, as we will see, ha s a universal capacity for variety without end. The first mathematician capable of understanding this in a physics form was Johannes Kepler, about Shakespeare's time, and he wrote a monograph on the snowflake saying that there is no end to the infinite variety of snowflakes and no two will ever be alike, and proved it mathematically. There are no two spirit persons exactly alike but all spirit persons belong to a very large family, which we are learning, as we go through phase space, to re-approach through remembrance. More next week, thank you.