Myth 12
Presented on: Saturday, September 23, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's emerge into Myth 12 and our presentations are a constant fresh occurrence of our emerging into an enquiry that has both a flow and nodes that synch. So that we have a mixture of dynamic and energised stable forms and as the forms in their stability undergo a rotation to a certain threshold, they change, they transform their polarity into a complementarity which releases a higher state, a higher dynamic level of a flow. So that our learning is a series of stages that have a parfait always of a process that emerges a form and a form that in its rotation gets to a certain threshold where it releases another dynamic, but the dynamic released is on a higher energy level, a higher level of dynamic. It has more amperage, more oomph. The first flow is always nature and it's not that nature is that flow, that nature occurring has that flow occurring in such a way that the dimension of time releases the three dimensions of space so that they can emerge existential form. And that release of existential form out of nature is the first objectivity that emerges and is the basic traction for the entire cycle of integration in nature. When the polarity of existentials is rotated to a threshold where it is nearly 90°, instead of coming through with the symmetry of the balance in a horizon, it tilts itself so that it's like a vertical that then releases a higher dynamic. And existence, when it releases a higher dynamic, that higher dynamic for us is called myth. It is the process of experience that has images, it has feelings and is characterised by language. And it is the mythic horizon of the flow of language, with its images and its feelings, that is cognate back to the ritual traction of the actual actions that we have taken. The weaving of those actions together into a pattern of activity and there is a furthering quality that language is able to carry images and feelings into an interiorisation and as it does so, it achieves a higher form than existentials. That higher form was characterised a long time ago by the term - cognate with existential - as essential. So that symbols, the mind, is an essential form; it completes the integral and thus is classically called the essence of what occurs in integration in nature. One of the earliest forms of expression for that is from India, from the Chandogya Upanishad, about 700 BC. And in the Chandogya Upanishad, the way in which it's expressed, is that plants are the essence of nature and man is the essence of plants and language is the essence of man and fourth, Om is the essence of language. But in the Chandogya Upanishad there is a quality of those four essences being condensed like a target, out of nature which is a field, to a circle of plants, which is the covering of the world, out of which animals and humans all participate with and become the essence of, but man is really the essence of that plant world. And that language then is another flow, it is the essence of man and Om as a word, as a symbol word, becomes the essence of speech. But when it is pronounced, it is always pronounced with an exclamatory silence following it: 'Om!' And in that exclamation the essence of the symbol Om, is the explanatory threshold delineated for the silence that follows. In that silence that follows is realisation. So that in the ancient Upanishads there are four natural essences and a fifth quintessential supranatural essence, which is realisation. And so this quality of realisation being quintessential, is that the dimensions of integral nature, the four dimensions, acquire a fifth dimension and that that fifth dimension is the consciousness of the process of realisation itself, that realisation is not an event, but is a higher dynamic, flowing like nature flows, flowing like experience flows, but flowing at an asymptotic, more powerful level. And that with consciousness, with realisation then, the process of ordinal magnification of integration occurs. Instead of there just being a completion and integral, the integration of everything completely, there now are ordinal powers of completeness that go beyond, by now retrospectively, the near completeness. That the integration has a differential ordinality to it and increases its powers. For instance, in alchemy, the normal elements' limitations is exceeded in alchemy and what one now has is something which is of a supranatural, quintessential quality, that is able to have more and more powers of projection of its efficacy. So that a really good alchemist will be somebody who has an elixir of life, or a gold which is able to magnify many, many times. Paracelsus, in his writings talks about how the beginning alchemist will have a hard time just making gold, but that the experienced alchemist may have a gold which is so powerful it can be projected 50 times what it is, or a 100 times what it is. The ordinality occurs, very simply, in the way in which counting goes from one to nine and the very next would be ten, which is a zero added to the one. And then if you count through the double digits, all the way up to 99, you get again to a one with two zeros, 100. So that your ordinality is by a decimal increase, one, ten, 100, 1,000. That ordinality, in terms of the natural integral, belongs then to the more complex five dimensional conscious time space, which is in our learning called vision.
What we're looking at here is the way in which myth develops differently from a ritual traction base, does indeed parallel the flow of nature, so that experience becomes very easy to be in its flow when it is in a synergy with nature. But we've also seen, progressively, in the 12 presentations, today being the twelfth, that it accesses not only a synergy with nature, given that the ritual structure allows for an interpenetration of the two processes together, a, 'Participation mystique,' as was once expressed by Lucien Levy-Bruhl about 100 years ago in France. The mystical participation of experience with nature, produces a deeper quality to experience and a deeper quality to nature. Man now, in doing so, becomes mysteriously affined, not only with nature, but anything that has emerged out of nature. One becomes mysteriously affined with the plants, with the animals, with the sun and the moon, with the air. And now all of those features of the natural, existential realm, become qualities through which he can tune his experience and participate with the way in which they emerge into their existence in the first place. Not to identify with them, but to live in existential existence with them and now man becomes a quality which is indeed the essence of the plant world, the essence of the natural field of occurrence. And at this point, our experience becomes acclimated with the fact that existence can be both nature and mysterious nature in our experience and so our experience also generates its quality to go forward as well as retrospective and this is when it becomes possible for the first time to access the higher quality, the higher amperage, of visionary consciousness. It is this visionary consciousness now which allows for mythic experience to gain its synergy, not only with nature, but with consciousness at the same time. And in doing so, the mind comes into form increasingly as a parallel to the way in which existence now not only comes out of nature, but becomes mysteriously more complex because of experience, the mythic horizon, influencing it. Now existentials are not just natural, but they have a quality where their ritual actions are now ceremonial. It isn't just that someone does some action, but someone does the action with all of the accoutrement of the images being included. That these feathers are no longer just on this eagle, but these two feathers from the tail of the eagle are brought together and wrapped with perhaps a thread from a yucca plant, from the [14:43 Mojave] yucca plant, where if you clip in a very delicate way the thorn at the end, you can pull a long thread out of a Mojave and you can use that to sew. But if you wrap those two eagle feathers with a sprig of evergreen juniper and you put a little bit of turquoise in that and wrap that, now you have - in the Pueblo language - a 'Paho,' you have a prayer instrument, which when you do your motions of a dance and incorporate the ceremonial paho with it, now you carry it into a realm where your activity creates an interior structure. Not just the mind of ideas, but the completion of the entire cycle of nature, ritual, myth and now symbols.
And symbols, rather than being a stopping punctuation mark which completes, it becomes transparent in the sense that the punctuation is that of like a dash, rather than a period and beyond the dash is the realisation. Beyond that is the quintessential quality, which now the ceremony is both hearkening to nature and to consciousness at the same time. So that its flow is like a centring flow between two vast fields, nature and consciousness. And our experience in doing this begins to have a characteristic quality to it. It either has a laminar flow because it's in synch, or it has a turbulence because something is interrupting the flow. And the whole object then of the more refined experience is to regain or to maintain the laminar quality of nature, experience and consciousness and to find where a turbulence that is occurring is coming from. The time-honoured choice of human beings is that the turbulence comes from not having done the rituals right. That something that should have been an action that's specific and exact has been done wrong. You have left something out, you have repeated something that should not have been repeated, you have not quite done it right. And so the emphasis is to do the rituals according to the way in which they have been found to contribute to that laminar quality of nature and experience. But the ceremonial existentials, those ceremonial objects, have an added burden because they have to also have the synergy with visionary, differential consciousness. And this is where the problem comes in, because while the body can tell the laminar quality of nature and experience, it is the mind that has to do the telling of the laminar quality between experience and consciousness. But the mind does not normally have a self-correcting criticality to alert itself that the turbulence is happening because of it and not because of the body. That it must be something in the body, it must be something in existence. It's something other than nowhere, it's out there somewhere. The quality then that we get to by Myth 12 is more and more we're attentive to the fact that symbols are a precarious stable form. They do complete the natural cycle, but they have the capacity to sabotage the laminarity of the flow of experience and also then, influence the flow of nature. So that when symbols become self-sabotaging, they create the sense of a projective magic, rather than a vision, or a visionary consciousness and the magic is aligned as if it were something that could be founded on rituals that the mind makes up and understands. And in this way the mind usurps, draws back into itself, the dynamic function of consciousness and assumes that it is a quality of its own structure. And in doing so, because there is a turbulence somewhere, it seeks to dominate experience by manipulating the ritual actions in such a way that the ritual actions co-ordinate with the structure of the mind in its self-assumption. This is a classical difficulty that becomes rare in cultures; on the tribal level, it almost never occurs. But as soon as our kind, as soon as man achieves the ordinal powers of civilisation, a fourth dynamic comes into play. Not just vision, but the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. And it is the extra, added ordinal powers of historical consciousness that becomes almost impossible for the mind to handle as a balance. And the reason for this is that in-between vision and history is a differential, prismatic form, the forms of art. And one of the forms of art is the person. Not the individuality of the mind, not the character of one's experience, not the figure who's doing the activity in existence, but the person, often referred to as the spirit, has a different quality of structure from the body and the mind. The body and the mind are both integral, but the spirit, the spiritual person, the art of person-making, is a differential form and instead of having a pragmatic base to its stability, it has a prismatic array of possibilities. And so the art of the person is the art of making a jewel which has a radiance and which has a very special kind of ordinal chirality to it, a magnetic, super magnetic quality to it. So that its affinity is not so much to the mind -although it can be for the transformed mind - but its affinity is for the cosmos. And so the spiritual person prefers the wide open possibilities of infinite jewelled qualities that the cosmos itself offers and embodies, again as a differential form, not as an integral. But the mind, untransformed, will not know that it is dealing in a habituated integral only mode. It does not know that it is not incorporating the complementarity of differential modes and differential forms, because by itself, without having made a very deep transformation, a very deep sea change as it were, it will tend more and more to assume that it has completed everything and therefore it's only the right manipulations of things and the right retuning of experience to conform to the way in which the mind has decided that it understands. And in doing so, it begins to not just complete the natural cycle, but to usurp it more and more as elements of its own structure. And this tendency produces a kind of a reductive abstraction, not just an abstraction to get down to the kernel of something, but abstraction that first weans itself away from nature. Then because it has manipulated ritual actions to such an extent that they now just conform to the code of the doctrine, experience becomes co-opted and is unable then to deliver images that are independent of the mind, feelings that are not countenanced by the mind and language which is structured in such a way that it only is understandable in terms of the logic of the doctrine. At this state this becomes a very chronic problem worldwide, planetwide. Every human population that has achieved a civilisation has undergone this crisis. We live in a time where this crisis is exacerbated to the nth degree.
And we're using Philosophy in a New Key by Susanne K. Langer, because it came out first in the early 1940's and was revised all the way to the mid-1950's. And finally she realised that she had to go completely beyond just revising and re-revising this original book and ended up writing a sequel, Feeling and Form and finally spent some 25 years doing a third sequel, like the trilogy, of a three volume, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The difficulty is first noted in its pristine characterisation by Plato in his Dialogues, based upon a tradition by his time that was more than 150 years old, the Pythagorean tradition. And that Pythagorean tradition was a jewelled art of refinement of several ancient traditions, one of them the Egyptian, another the Ancient Near East. As we said before, Pythagoras' family were Ancient Phoenicians. He was born and raised on Samos, but his father and all of his family on his father's side, were all from the Phoenician coast, based on Tyre. It was his mother who was a priestess of Apollo in Samos and so he was raised in the mother's cultural domain. He was named Pythagoras for the Pythian Apollo, who's a special child, a visionary child. And raised, as we said, along with a step-brother who had very superhuman qualities and was actually...Astraeus was his name and it meant 'star being.' And he was able to look at the sun without blinking and not go blind and there is some speculation that he may have been an extra-terrestrial. So that Pythagoras grew up in a very complex way. The main thrust of his background was in Egypt, in the Heliopolan area, which by his time was about 2500 years old. And in the Heliopolan tradition by Pythagoras' time, about 500 BC, it was understood that the cycle of nature is repeated by a counter-cycle of the afterlife, of the netherworld. And that where the netherworld cycle is completed, it emerges back into life again. So that if you successfully go through the 12 gates of the netherworld, after having gone through the twelfth gate of the netherworld, you rise back into the life of a new day. And if you can go do this, it's not dependent upon time, of taking a whole lifetime, but one could do this by the 12 hours of a single night. So that you would rise eternally with the sun in a new day. And thus the Egyptian Book of the Dead is actually...the Egyptian book is called 'Coming forth by day,' 'Rw nw prt m hrw.' And it means that at each dawn one rises fresh with the sun, eternally. Now one has an eternal life. In the laminar quality of understanding that, the central mythos was that of Osiris and Isis. And for Isis to bring Osiris back into life, he had to be re-membered. His body was cut into 14 different pieces and hidden all over Egypt and Isis was the one who collected the dismemberment of Osiris and then re-membered him. And the word is not just for putting the members back, but of remembering. So that the whole motion of a resurrection is that consciousness is the dynamic of a high-powered remembering and that that high-powered remembering, when it is brought into the mind, the mind accepts it and embodies it symbolically as the memory. It becomes a structure in the structure of the mind and now one has a memory and that memory, in order for it to come into the mind, in order for consciousness, for vision, to give up the dynamic of remembering so that it can become a structure, the memory, the structure in the mind that is cognate to the memory, called the imagination, transforms itself into creative imagining. And so now consciousness not only has remembering, it has creative imagining and when it has the two of those functions together, now it is possible for it to emerge the forms of art. So that the spiritual person is an art form of creative imagining and remembering, brought together in such a way that they interpenetrate differentially. And maybe the best way to imagine it if you need to have some way to do this, the resonance of a differential process will be like the resonant pools of waves coming out, where there isn't an object where the waves are, but the density waves are occurring. And wherever density waves interpenetrate together, in that complex field of cross-hatching of density waves, one has now the ability to raise existential matter to higher levels than it had in nature. The astronomical, astrophysics way of expressing this: a natural star can only make elements from hydrogen up to iron. No star can make an element heavier than, more complex atomically, than iron. So all the elements beyond iron come into play because of supernova. Because of a complete explosion of the collapsing star, one now has a capacity for almost a supranatural energy and pressure and density waves and now one can make elements all the way up to uranium. So that there's a peculiar quality that once one goes beyond the stage of natural limitation, one now gets into the precious metals, one gets into a very interesting kind of almost supernatural quality that comes into play. And myth more and more now reflects this and in the Pythagorean tradition the place where Isis brought Osiris back re-membered, was called Taposiris. And Taposiris was on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, right at the border, where the fertility of the Nile Delta ended and the beginnings of the Saharan type desert extended all across the continent, except for just a little coastal strip. And exactly there was the Taposiris, ancient re-membering of Osiris by Isis and it's there that one of the earliest Pythagorean communities was founded. The other Pythagorean community that was extremely famous was on the heel of the boot of Italy, at a place called Tarentum. When Plato was stationed in military campaigns, so that he was in Egypt, he went not only to the Heliopolan area and became initiated like Pythagoras in the Heliopolan recension of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but he went to the Taposiris Pythagorean community, which had a very interesting kind of a tone to it. In the ancient world, the only refining retreats that had men and women together were Pythagorean communities. In the Buddhist communities, in the Taoist communities, in Ancient Semitic communities...only in the Pythagorean did you have this balance of gender. And you find in the Pythagorean tone that the experience that refines itself, comes through in a way in which the mind's symbols become ambidextrous in terms of gender orientation. Not just balanced, but an ambidextrousness that it is able to chirally go both ways and so you have, as we saw when we looked at the Navajo ceremonies, of medicine ceremonies, there are both male and female versions of them. And there are both good and evil versions of them. One to learn what not to do and one to pursue what to do and one can do it in a male or a female version of this.
When we come back from the break, we're going to take a look at one of the oldest qualities of myth and symbols in the world and that is the Palaeolithic caves in southern France and the Pyrenees side in Spain. And one of the most interesting of all the people to write on this, was Gertrude Rachel Levy and her original book, 1948, was called The Gate of Horn. And she also is the author of the Pythagorean background of Plato in Sicily. And her quality was able to understand how the deep resonances of civilisation have roots that go all the way back about 40,000 years. That the very first civilisations, 40,000 years ago, faced their own version, their own level, of the problems we face today, of the problems that in Pythagoras and Plato's time were exacerbated. So that if we look back we can see...from our time back to Plato's is about 2400 years. From Plato back to the origins of written language origins is about 2400 years. Before 2800 BC there wasn't much written language other than just business forms. And that that 5,000 year period goes back in another double to about 10,000 years ago, which was the emergence from caves into the first proto communities in cities in the world above ground. Like Jericho goes back to about 10,000 years ago. And if you double that, going back to 20,000 years ago, you come to the high point of Palaeolithic cave art, Lascaux, about 20,000 years ago. And if you double that and go back to 40,000 years ago, you find the earliest caves, like Chauvet in southern France, down near Marseilles, which is the beginnings of the way in which the Palaeolithic civilisation first understood that the images and feelings are arranged in such a way that the language, the spoken language, is able to convey the dynamic of the experience of the ceremonial cycle, so that when one emerges back out of the cave, one emerges completed in such a way that you are stepping back not just into nature, but into an ordinal expansion of nature, in which you are now able to live in a more enriched way. Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
This is a photograph of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is the most famous logician of the twentieth century and whose place in philosophic history has displaced almost every other philosopher of the twentieth century as the major figure. He died in 1950 and his last work is called Philosophic Investigations. But his first work had the peculiar title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is a replay of one of Spinoza's great Tractatus books. It is numbered so that every single statement has a number, not just one, two, three, but there's one, one point one, one point 11, one point 12, two, two point zero one, two point zero one one etc. And goes all the way through a numbering system, so that at the very last, one has six point five four and the very last one is seven. And seven reads: 'Where of one cannot speak there of one must be silent.' So that the greatest philosophic logical text of the twentieth century has this kind of encoded presentation of terse little sentences and the first one, number one, is, 'The world is everything that is the case.' And one point one: 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things.' One point one one: 'The world is determined by the facts and it is by these being all the facts, for the totality of facts determines both what is the case and also all that is not the case. The facts in logical space are the world. The world is divided into facts.' The origins of this is in Plato at the core of its really first great presentation in the Phaedrus, which we're looking at along with Philosophy in a New Key. Its basic sense is that a philosophic analytic is able to divide, is able to initially address itself to a whole and that the structure of the whole can be divided into parts, into classes and that this division can carry all the way down to the level of indivisibles. These will become the fundaments, because they are no longer able to be divided further. It's like the atoms. But the way in which the division is made is not independently and singly, but always in a dialogue with someone else. So that Plato's philosophic technique is a dialogue of division that occurs and of course the greatest presenter of all time other than Plato, of this technique, was Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays are all about the division of experience in the interplay of the dialogue of the performance and that what the wholeness that needs to be recognised, is then the play as a prism which radiates out and presents an angle of truth about the world. That if one does not have a wholeness, then the prism is flawed, is cracked and you do not get the full spectrum of the world. That when you are in nature you can address individual things in the world, existentials, because nature in its wholeness of flow, conserves that wholeness. But when it comes to consciousness, which is a higher ordinal from nature, nature does not conserve in its way the wholeness and so the wholeness must be conserved by consciousness in its remembering. So that what happens as we come into the twelfth presentation on myth, we're realising that not only is myth the third phase in our integral development of four - Nature, Ritual, Myth and in two weeks we'll begin Symbols - so that those four phases will be a complete cycle, like the four seasons of a year. But consciousness will be a fifth, a quintessential phase and as we're moving through phase space rather than subjects, because subjects are an arbitrary division on the basis of the mind assuming that it is the central subject acting in a world of objectivity and that the objects of the world are fit neat for the subject to arrange them. And as Susanne K. Langer points out in Philosophy in a New Key, all of this, several hundred years ago, 300 years ago, hit a threshold where it could not go any further because the realisation, focused as she puts it, on someone like Francis Bacon, or on Rene Descartes, it was realised that there was evidently some subject-object split. The external world was external, the internal world was internal, how do they meet? How do they interpenetrate? And she says, 'In our time,' writing this in the 1940's, 1950's and carrying it on to the end of the 1980's in its full development, she says, 'We live in a time where it is obvious something in a new key must come into play in terms of the wholeness of our understanding of being wise.' She did a translation in 1945, right at the end, at the end of the Second World War, she was in New York City and she translated Ernst Cassirer's Language and Myth, a little monograph that Cassirer wrote for the Warburg Institute when it was in Berlin before the Nazis made them persona non grata and the Warburg Institute moved itself to London and has since joined the Courtauld Institute and is now the Warburg Courtauld Institute in London, one of the world's great vanguard education vehicles. She says at the end of the translator's preface, November first 1945, New York City, 'Professor Cassirer's great thesis based on the evidence of language and verified by his sources with quite thrilling success, is that philosophy of mind involves much more than a theory of knowledge, it involves the theory of pre-logical conception and expression and their final culmination in reason and factual knowledge. Such a view changes our whole picture of human mentality.' The following pages give the reader the highlights of significant fact which suggested, supported and finally clinched the theory and then she offers this translation right in the midst of the first edition and the second edition of Philosophy in a New Key, where she says, 'The new key is that symbols have taken an added impetus and that all of the interesting, challenging books' - and she lists about 20 of them here - 'All have something to do with symbols.' And the final book that she mentions is the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein. At four point zero three we read, 'Language disguises the thought, so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognised. The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated. Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophic matters are not faults, but senseless. We cannot therefore answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result in the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.' And she goes - this is a translation by C.K. Ogden and we're going to be using in the Symbols a little volume by Ogden and I.A. Richards, called The Meaning of Meaning - 'The problem is a very difficult problem because it is not amenable as a subject for the mind by itself to investigate, it is not possible to do this. And so in order to do this, the mind must deceive itself and inadvertently, out of a necessity, to make some correlation between the problems and the questions the mind would make of them and the answers that one would seek to find, the mind deceives itself in a very special way.' Plato has Socrates tell us in the Phaedrus, 2400 years ago just how this is. Socrates says, 'Do you know the best way for either a theoretical or practical approach to speech to please God?' And Phaedrus replies, 'No, I don't. Do you?' Socrates, 'Well, I can pass on something that I've heard from our predecessors. Only they know the truth of the matter, but if we had made the discovery ourselves, would we any longer have the slightest interest in just mere human conjectures?' Phaedrus says, 'What an absurd question! Well, tell me what you've heard.' And Socrates tells him in about a page of print, of the discovery of the invention of written language by the Egyptian god Thoth. That, 'The story I heard is set in Naucratis in Egypt.' Naucratis is on the far western part of the Nile Delta, on the Rosetta branch of the Nile Delta and it was a trading post for the Greek speaking population of the Mediterranean, to have a trading port there. And what's interesting is that that trading port goes back to the 600's BC. It's significant because in the 600's BC, Athens for the very first time, took control as the leading city in the whole Greek speaking world. And the reason why it did so is that it had a man quite a genius, named Solon, who reorganised the city polis of Athens so that it reflected a Greek prismatic transform of the thousands of years of Egyptian civilisation. That previous to this, the Greeks depended on their own culture backgrounds, whether it's the Dorian or the Ionic background. For the first time Solon arranged Athens on the basis of a Greek prototype and was followed very soon after that by Thebes in Greece being organised in an Egyptian mode, because there's a Thebes of course in Egypt where Luxor is and Karnak, extremely ancient and very powerful.
Plato in his dialogue about Atlantis, the sunken continent of Atlantis, begins it in a dialogue named after one of his grandfathers, Crito, who was old enough to remember as a youngster, stories that the old Solon would tell about his being in Egypt and the Egyptian priests saying to him, 'You Greeks are nothing but children because you do not remember large time cycles. You only remember one flood, where there have been many floods back through thousands and thousands of years. And in fact, you do not even remember that the most outstanding victory that your most distant ancestors had, was 9,000 years before your time, which puts it back to about 10,000 BC. That for the first time this tremendously powerful, dominating, tyrannical power of Atlantis was extending its rule over every part of the world, with its own brand of tyrannical empire and it was your distant ancestors that helped lead to the demise of that, not by just a military victory, but because you influenced the way in which nature, in a great earthquake, vanished the whole island civilisation of Atlantis in just a few moments.' Plato, in presenting this story of how the Egyptian god Thoth first made written hieroglyphic characters and presented it to the pharaoh at the time of...that this is one of the greatest inventions ever made and the pharaoh said, 'This is very disappointing because trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources. And so writing will make the things they will have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence.' We live in a time where the computer has done a very similar service and disservice at the same time. Remembering is a process phase, it is also a differential process phase; it is not an integral phase, its dynamic is not to integrate. So that if you train yourself to use the memory of just integrally organising things into its formal structure, you will be sapping away the conscious dynamic of differential remembering and recognition is a function of differential conscious remembering as a dynamic. Without it there is no remembering at all, there is no recognition. And what makes it pernicious is that when there is no recognition, there is no ability to emerge the spiritual person. The art of person making does not happen. Instead you get a mechanical reduction of individuality, which assumes that since it has completed the cycle and completes the cycle, then it is the be-all and end-all for which anything is made. And depends upon, because of the atrophying of recognition and the ability to remember, the ability to have a differential consciousness, the ability to emerge differential forms like the person, or later on, the cosmos, recognition becomes more and more sapped by mere cognition, distributed ever finer into its atomic, elemental constituents and the doctrine that supports this, becomes an indoctrination of ritual actions and begins to constrain experience so that is only able to function in very narrow meted out sandwiched areas where cognition is an identification between the thing and the representation of it in the mind. So that representation and thing, when they have an identification between the two of them, experience then must admit that this is true. That all experience then is reduced to that kind of sandwiching and what is pernicious about it, is that the more successful the mind is in arranging things, in arranging objectivities in the world to meet its doctrine structure, the more the more the indoctrination gets a hold on the level of an addiction. And from that addicted indoctrination, in the doctrine of the mind abstracting itself more and more away from nature and thus more and more away from an experience that would seek to have a synergy with nature and since the experience has no way to have a synergy with vision, you more and more get a fragility of bigger and bigger integral power, until it reaches a point of implosion. Plato, following the Ancient Egyptian wisdom, is that every civilisation ever made by man has imploded, none of them have worked, ever. And part of the Phaedrus is an attempt to explore in a dialogue why it is that the mythic horizon of experience, if it is truncated, if it is sandwiched in by the constrictions of an identification, even if it is successful and especially if it is successful, what then becomes the harbinger of truth is a tautological, 'A equals A.' And literally it short-circuits itself, not because it doesn't work, but because it does work to the point of extinction.
Logic is the way in which language is arranged between the things and the facts, so that the interpretation now, instead of being available for a critique, as in a work of art, or an analytic, as in a work of science, it is now on the level of the doctrine exuding its power over all other doctrines, so that it will work better and better the larger its spread. And any means needed to increase its stability by its spread are employed and this leads constantly to the turbulence of violence, the turbulence of revolutions, the turbulence of wars, the turbulence of not being able to find a stability. Not just a stability in your mind, in your sense of the identity of the individual and not just in the sense that the figure of the actions is being disrupted because there are people who are not doing it right and they're causing this turbulence, they must behave, they must do it just like all of us must do it, but the pernicious quality is that the character of mythic experience, the character which flows with the imagery, with the images, does not integrate to an imagination. The feelings do not have their sentience as a human-heartedness and their language shows more and more the false stylizations of a sales pitch, of an indoctrination. And so with all of this, the natural integral into meaning, developing the interior spatiality of the mind, becomes a source of deception in itself. And so the identity of whoever it is becomes one of a deceiver. If one were to put a language on this, it would be that one becomes a victim of one's own self-deception. In order to get rid of this by a scapegoat technique, it is others whose self-deception is creating the turbulence of the world and they must be reconfigured, their experience must be reconfigured. And the only way to do this is not for their experience to have synergy with nature, but they must learn our doctrines and they must do things the way that we do, so that it works the way it does for us with them. And of course because this is repeated almost automatically many times over, there are always competing doctrines, -isms. 40 years ago, when I was first teaching these kinds of things, I used to call it, '-Ismville.' There's a great film by Godard, 'Alphaville,' where all of Alphaville is run by a master computer and it has arranged everything so that it completely works well, except that one old French detective, cigarette smoking, with his little revolver, drives into Alphaville to go and bring a woman out - turns out to be the daughter of the man who programmed the computer - and bring her out so that she is freed of Alphaville. That there are other places in the world that are not Alphavilled yet and that for some reason he's been hired to go and do this. But anyone who has tried to be brought out of Alphaville, the computer saps their energy so that they are unable to move because their mobility is dependent upon an energising from what the computer controls. And the only person not subject to this is the detective and he uses the time-honoured tough detective techniques sometimes of just shooting someone, not playing the game. It's this kind of a quality that in ancient Palaeolithic times was not even suspected until about 140 years ago. Rachel Levy's Gate of Horn, written in 1948, written about eight years after Lascaux was first discovered in 1940: 'It was formerly maintained that the animal shapes which illuminate with startling beauty the solitude of remote chambers in these caverns, were the free expression gradually perfected by the huntsman's exactitude of hand and eye, of delight in the vitality, strength or speed of his quarry, indeed such personal joy and admiration is intensely present in these achievements, but the conditions of their portrayal, soon to be described, are deliberately unfavourable, both to the exercise and the display of art for its own sake. They combine most significantly to support the conclusion, now strengthened by an accumulation both of direct archaeological evidence and of ethnological material from elsewhere, that they formed an essential part of ceremonies conducted in those recesses which were removed not only from the physical energies of the chase, but almost invariably also from the domestic life about the hearth, by natural barriers consisting of intricate and frequent dangerous passages, whose meanderings seem to have to imparted their mystery to later legend.' That they were of a secret ceremonial cycle. In fact, some of the greatest of all of the cave paintings are so deep in the caverns that no natural light ever goes there. And that the colours that are used, the reds, the blacks, the limited palate of colours that goes into them, were extremely sophisticated. You didn't just get charcoal and grind it up, but there was a special white clay from the Vezere Valley region, that was mixed with manganese oxide and several other things in different stages, so that each colour had a very complex recipe, they were not primitive at all. And that the application of all of these took not only a special brushing, but the preparation of the rock to receive the colours, like a painter will gesso a canvas before he begins to apply. And like in painting, when oil painting first moved from the medieval fresco quality to the ability in the Renaissance to have portraits on a canvas, the artists had to learn to make their own paints, their own colours, their own brushes, to prepare their canvas in such a way, because it was a gestalt, an art that involved all of these techniques and technologies together. So that when one gets a Titian portrait of someone, you would not 100 years before have found someone who would be able to do that in that way. The quality of the presentation is not just that symbols - and 'Sýmbolon' in Greek means, 'Thrown together' - it's not just that they come together in some kind of integral, but that they go through a transform where the array of their differential gestalt becomes more and more enriched. So that the complexity does not come to a focus, but like an hourglass, goes through the focus into a new development. And we'll see in our learning that when we complete the symbols phase, we will have only come halfway. Almost anywhere on the planet you will find people still clinging to the old saw that has failed civilisations for 5,000 years. That you're supposed to have masterful, integral focus. I remember being offered a position years ago at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and the president himself came down with his wife, and I refused it, because you cannot have a truncated quality without eventually having it back-up where the mind is considered a mirror, and that as long as it mirrors a world in the accurate way, then everything must be compus sete. Everything then is fragile and deceptive. There's nothing worse than to be lost in a mind that is a house of mirrors; there's no relief for that.
In the Phaedrus Plato has a quality where a human being is able to emerge though the deceptive parfait of the false divisions and to finally come to an osmotic penetration of what seemed like the complete end of the form and to go outside of that form limitation. He likens it to someone who is able to climb on the outside of a great mechanical arc and for the first time to realise that there are real stars everywhere into infinity. And that where you were before was in a mechanical construct bubble and only now for the first time have you emerged on the outside of it and are able to have for the first time a recognition, not based on logical cognition, not based upon individual subjectiveness in its identification of success in its strategies. Now for the first time one is able to learn originally and the more that one practises an original learning, the more one begins to remember all of the aspects that one had once achieved already through past lives, through other avenues of approach. And now for the first time the individual transforms from visionary consciousness into the prismed jewel of the artistic person, able to refine more and more and to recognise the deep affinity in a harmonic set that we do not belong in a cosmos, that we are in fact cosmic in our prismatic spirit, completely. The resonance then leads into a quality of harmonic analysis. All of this comes to a core in the way in which in our ability to let our experience go through its integration, let language carry those images, let language carry the feeling, but to carry it through so that the images come together in an imagination which is able to transform itself into creative imagining. If it becomes a repository that is closed off, all of the images will then suffer a kind of a souring contamination and become increasingly revised by the rest of the structure of the mind, so that finally the imagination is not an imagination at all, but is a replay of the tyranny of the deceiver themselves, who discovering that this form of the knower is successful because everything now has fit and is identifiable by it, now one has something like this: 'The proposition is a picture of reality, the proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.' Realisation is the first burst of emergence into a whole ecology that acclimates us back into reality. Not that reality is a goal to achieve, but that it is an eternal context wherein actuality is existential, wherein the character is able to be the beginning of the person and when the process of the mythos of character is able to go through the transform of the symbolic mind and enter into the differential conscious dynamic, the art of person making links in a great square of attention, myth, symbol, vision and art. And what was originally the frame of reference, the picture which was only natural, nature, ritual, myth and symbol, now has a great diagonal through it, where one great Pythagorean triangle is of the natural frame of reference and the other is of the conscious ecology of referentiality. And so that great diagonal that is through, creating two Pythagorean right triangles brought together as a square, that diameter, that shared hypotenuse is the lightning where realisation frees itself, not from the mind, but carries with it the freedom of the mind into a further maturation. The ancient name for this in translation in English is, 'Rebirth.' More next week.