Symbol 2
Presented on: Saturday, October 14, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Symbols 2 and I'd like to begin it with a little philosophic story. Two of the really famous philosophers of the early first half of the twentieth century were Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore and they were both professors at Cambridge University in England. And they were two of the founders of mathematical, logical philosophy in the most strict form. And this little story is a vignette to convey something entertaining, but also a tab on something very deep, something that went deeply wrong in philosophy in the twentieth century. One evening, a little stormy, Bertrand Russell came into the living room of G.E. Moore, who was sitting with a Scottish plaid blanket over his legs and a basket with some fruit in his lap, by a fireplace. And Bertrand Russell was also Lord Russell and quite distinguished and very precise and G.E. Moore was extremely subtle in his own way and as Russell came in with his pipe, he said, 'Moore, have you any apples in that basket?' And Moore looked at him and his eyes gleamed and he said, 'No.' So Russell taking the cue looked at him straight and said, 'Moore, are there any apples in that basket?' And Moore, with a nice little cherubic smile said, 'No.' Then Russell, after puffing on his pipe, said, 'Moore, have you apples in that basket?' And Moore, with a cherubic diffidence said, 'Yes. Would you like one?' Some, any, the existential. The core of that is in the great three volume Principia Mathematica, published in 1910 by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Three great huge volumes from Cambridge University Press. Sets now if you could find them on the used book market, are $1,000, or maybe two by now.
In 1962, in order to facilitate the use of Principia Mathematica by universities, Cambridge put out the first 56 sections in paperback and it's just as unreadable in the first 56 sections as the thousands of pages of the three volume tome. But the core of Principia Mathematica is the first delivery of what later was developed by Bertrand Russell as the theory of types. And in philosophic history, the theory of types actually goes back and has its roots in Jeremy Bentham, an early nineteenth century genius. His theory of fictions which became extremely powerful, not only in philosophy, but economics and logic in the nineteenth century. Asterisk number 12 out of the first 56 asterisks, is the 'Hierarchy of Types and the Axiom of Reductability.' And this for the first time presented one of the fulcrums by which twentieth century philosophy squeezed itself dry out of vitality. With all of the best possible intentions, trying to ascertain a symbolic clarity which could not be misdefined and therefore would be trustable forever. I won't go into the entire aspect of it, I'll put it in the notes. The first three paragraphs of the asterisk 12. This is the topic sentence of the third paragraph, just to give you an orientation. First the topic sentence of paragraph two. 'The division of objects into types is necessitated by the vicious circle fallacies which otherwise arise. These fallacies show that there must be no totalities, which if legitimate, would contain members defined in terms of themselves.' In other words, a vicious circle would be that you have a tautological aspect: 'A equals A' is an identity serving as an identification, but is also tautological and that in philosophy and logic is a vicious circle. So in order to break that circle, one then has to have a definition that the meaning of this must be defined by something outside of this circle, of a different type. As it is explained in asterisk nine, 'Propositions containing variables are generated from propositional functions which do not contain these apparent variabilities, by the process of asserting all, or some values of each function.' Any apples, some apples, apples. The difficulty with this is that you get into a conundrum which is deeper than a vicious circle fallacy and that is that any expression containing an apparent variable must not be in the range of that variable, but must belong to a different type. The fatal flaw here is that different type is construed in terms of an integral. The recognition which we are working with, of a differential mode, the differential consciousness, is already a deep dimensional transform of the entire integral structure, into further indefinite, infinite possibilities. This becomes extremely significant in terms of our trying to discover ourselves. One of the easiest ways to get into this, not through mathematical logic, but through art, came with the arrival of the maturity of Paul Cezanne at the turn of the twentieth century. Cezanne's genius showed clearly in his artwork that there are no lines of outline in nature whatsoever. That as soon as you put a line, outline, you have entered into an abstraction which distorts through abstraction, the vitality of nature, the veracity of experience that can participate with nature and obviates the development of a visionary dimension out of which works of art could occur. Especially vision is that creative imagining dimension, out of which the artist emerges as a form. But that the artist emerges not as an existential form, which would be on our level of ritual phasing, nor does the artist emerge as an individual phenomenon, which would be in the symbols integral phase. But that the artist emerges as a prismatic form capable because the differential conscious structure of the artist has many facets, in fact, may have innumerable facets, because an artist can always re-cut the prismatic possibilities of their person and develop thus a more complex art, increase the possibilities of an art. One of the all-time great exemplars of this, if one is able to collect, even in reproductions, Rembrandt's self-portraits over a period of his life, one notices increasingly the ability of Rembrandt to re-present himself with ever greater complexity. And one of the last self-portraits is almost like a shimmering gold light that seeps out of the compositional dimensions of the canvas. He not only did himself in this way, but he did a portrait of Homer in this way as well. Whereas one looks at Rembrandt's work and one of his early great paintings is, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer and when you look at the face of Homer in that, you get a kind of standard seventeenth century artistic [12:01] portrait of Homer, whereas his final portrait of Homer, like his final self-portrait, is just a shimmering gestalt that creates a kind of a space that Cezanne featured. Cezanne did not like to have flat spaces and one of the best books on Cezanne's Composition is by Erle Loran, University of California Press. I think it's been in paperback for a number of decades. One of the qualities of Cezanne - and we know this because when he died, we had unfinished paintings of his - and one could see he did not begin, ever, with outlines. He did not begin with the highlights, he began with the darkest areas of the composition and working from the darkest areas of the composition, scattered and distributed over the entire picture frame, not plane, but a frame that now has visionary dimensions, which is a quintessential five-dimensional time space and artistic dimensions, which is a six-dimensional compositional volume. One cannot any longer say that there's a picture plane, but there is a picture volume which those watching over Cezanne's shoulder as soon as Cezanne had died in 1906, seized upon the volume and styled it as a cube, instead of a plane. And so you had Picasso and Braque and Juan Gris becoming Cubists, which was their way of co-opting Cezanne's great discovery for themselves. And then one had, instead of the volume of six-dimensional artistic-conscious space time, one now had a Cubist rendition of intersecting planes and in Cezanne there are no intersecting planes because the planes will generate eventually the same kind of reductability that the logical insistence in the theory of types on the fact that for each defining function, one has to go to a different type. So in Cubism one has no volume, one has many planes, but this is a mechanical distribution of something which is artistically vital in someone like a Cezanne. For Cezanne it is the range of colour modulations within this six-dimensional volume of his paintings, where our acquaintance with the work of art increases as we ourselves become artistic about our way of seeing, moving away from an existential perception and moving deeper than a phenomenal conception, to a visionary possibility of presentation. And so you find in Cezanne's work the mottled modulation of lights and darks in ranges of colour to gift anyone who can see deeper, finer, with more possibilities an increased capacity then for that work of art to keep emerging more and more as a work of art, with more and more possibilities, as not the observer, but the observer become an artist themselves. Someone who is able to appreciate art is also a part of the artistic process, just as somebody on the mythic level of having their experience, their ceremonies, participate with nature, on the artistic level, the observer has their experience participate with the visionary process, out of which the work of art emerges. It emerged out of a visionary process for the artist, but when you are appreciating it, that visionary, aesthetic, creative process includes you with the artist, so that the work of art now emerges just as your appreciation begins to hone itself and refine itself, it becomes more complex than existential, more complex than phenomenal. It becomes a living, instantly spontaneous, prismatic form in aesthetic volumes of six-dimensional, conscious, artistic space time. So that a work of art is instantly real when you are participating with the complexity of the visionary sourcing of that work of art. One way of expressing this esoterically at one time, was the great Turkish Sufi, conman, rascal, leader Gurdjieff, who did a couple of esoteric books and a third esoteric book which was only distributed to those who had gone through what he called, 'The Work' at the Fontainebleau Château outside of Paris. And the title of it, 'I am only real then when you are.'
We're looking at why it is that in the twentieth century the symbolic mind squeezed itself dry and left a series of reductive shoals upon which the bones of western civilisation lie forever, like fossils of a progressive extinction. And we have been left orphans in a shrunken pond where there is hardly any room to swim, or manoeuvre, or navigate. And so we are doing something that is not just in response to that certain extinction of our, not only ourselves, but life on this planet, we're transforming all of it from the darkest areas in towards the light, like a Cezanne composition. And so our two year learning civilisation is a great composition, a series of symphonic phases that come together in a very large composition. Its time duration for delivery is about 14 times Wagner's Ring Cycle, so it's very large. So you're participating with an artist who worked with huge forms and it takes two years of performance in order to deliver this drama. Our phases help us to recalibrate so that we do not get into the logical, symbolic, dead end thought, nor into the faux creative false aesthetics of bogus art.
One of the most poignant critics who understood Cezanne was Clive Bell and his book, Since Cezanne, came out in 1922. Clive Bell married Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa. And instead of being Vanessa Stephen - that was their original name - she became Vanessa Bell and as Vanessa Bell, became one of the world's great designers. She and another member of their coterie, called the Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant, designed the interiors of some very major homes in London in England and then they were commissioned to design the interiors of the Queen Mary. Their designs were not used, but they designed the enormous interiors of the Queen Mary, so she was really somebody in her own right. Clive Bell, in Since Cezanne says, right at the beginning, that Cezanne is extremely important to all of them. He says too, 'Sometimes I was writing of theory in this book, sometimes of practice, but by means of this preface I hope to show why at the moment these two, far from being distinct, are inseparable.' Theory and practice. Now, practice is a ritual comportment of action, the practical. Theory, from the Greek theoria, meaning, 'contemplation,' it means a dimension of contemplative space that is not in the phenomenal world and is not limited to focus in the existential realm. So that theoria is a visionary conscious process that has a creative quality to it and it also has a remembering quality to it and it is out of theory then, the forms that emerge are not pragmatic in terms of practice, but they're prismatic in terms of theory, visionary theory, differential consciousness. And so we have two distinct modes: we have integral forms, whose source is that existentially they are dynamic forms objectively because of their pragmatic presentation. And they can be represented in the mind symbolically, but only in an abstract way. Whereas art forms are never representational, they are always freshly presentational, in more dimensions than existentiality itself had and in transforms of the dimensions of phenomenality in the symbolic mind. One of the upshots of this is that in a practical world, the outline of the figure, of the figuration, is the defining boundary of what it is and that outline, that figuration, will generate in experience, in images, in feelings, in language, a configuration. And the configuration will be the process of the figures in their motion, except that there is a difficulty here. The original motion, the original movement of existential figures is not in the mythic horizon of experience, but is in nature. And what happens in symbolic thought, not being able to recognise this, rituals are retroactively projected from the mind and not developed in their originality from nature. And so rituals now become reductive, rather than their original quality of vitality. The original rituals of existentials are the traction upon which life occurs in the first place. It's the traction upon which existential unities appear in the first place. And they appear not statically, but iteratively, vibrationally, dynamic. If you have a volume of gas, say carbon dioxide, every molecule of CO2 will have its own, individual unity of response to the conditions, the thermal, the pressure, whatever it is. If you get a measurement that you have condensed this CO2 to such a coldness that now it becomes dry ice, becomes solid, every single molecule in that piece of dry ice had its own individual trajectory of becoming a part of that dry ice. It is an illusion to think that they all simultaneously responded abstractly exactly alike. The mind deceives itself in just this way, to not only have an illusion of what is existentially real, of what nature is fertile of doing, but it forces a belief of this illusion onto experience, not directly onto experience, but by corralling experience within the definitional confines of the ritual in symbolic objectivities, so that experience becomes an abstracted prisoner of the mind and its coerced ally of ritual action. In this way we become progressively jailed by the success of such a distortion and the illusion becomes a source of delusion. And the more that one not only believes in the illusion, but feels that it should be this way, that images that do not confirm that it is this way must be weeded out and that language must be very clear and precise, to not say anything imprecisely because it might to lead to questioning, 'Are these images right? Are these feelings in tune? Is our language correct?' And increasingly one gets into this kind of reductiveness that became catastrophically a nightmare in the twentieth century. We, in the beginnings of the twenty first century, have inherited a world of the living dead; it is a zombie landscape, unable to recognise anything creatively new.
And what we're presenting here is...a phrase in the Midwest 50 years ago used to be brand-new. It's a new brand, you've never seen it before, it's never been here before. It has heritages, it has resonances, it has a harmonic of many sets. It can be not just confirmed, but it can be sourced and harmonised on every culture on the planet, every language that has ever been used, including future ones. What is important here is that in order for us to have some way to generate, to generate what we are doing that is so new, that combines the pragmatic with the prismatic in a working complementarity, we have to pull a kind of sleight of hand, legerdemain on the source fulcrum, the favourite tool, the favourite instrument of the symbolic mind over the past 2,000 years. The favourite tool by which the symbolic mind has written not only its own development, but the social world that has come to occupy almost every square inch of the planet, the favourite tool was the book. And so we are taking the book and doing a ju-jitsu with it. Instead of taking a book as a text, we pair books together so that now their text existentiality is not sustainable and their phenomenal individuality is not sustainable, but only their ratioability and proportionateness. And so what we do is we co-opt the book into a radical recalibration that has both a fresh process and a freshly emerged form. And that freshly emerged form will not be existential, or phenomenal, its form will be aesthetic. And art is the most precise way in which this can be not only presented out of visionary theory, but is prismatically developable in works of art.
Cezanne, as we've been talking about, was indignant about being compared to certain artists that he considered illusionists. Someone, to use from Cezanne's Composition, Erle Loran, someone said to him that his work was compared to Gauguin and he just took great umbrage to that. Cezanne's dislike of flat areas:
Cezanne had a violent prejudice against flat painting of any kind, of every kind. When Émile Bernard told Cezanne that Gauguin was one of his great admirers, Cezanne replied in a fury, 'Well, he hasn't understood me! I have never wanted and I shall never accept the absence of modelling, or of gradations. It's nonsense. Gauguin isn't a painter, he has only made Chinese images.' The outburst did not merely express resentment that Gauguin should have stolen his little sensation and paraded it before the public, Cezanne expressed contempt for all painting that was not rounded, or modulated. According to Gasquet, 'He considered [ Cezanne considered] Cimabue clumsy, Fra Angelico, naive.' 'There's no flesh on those ideas. I am a sensualist,' he would say.' Perfectly justifiable it seems to assume that Cezanne's reaction to early Christian art and to Oriental pictures was very much like the traditional, conventional interpretation, namely, that such painting is entirely lacking in deep space." But it isn't just space, it is the scintillation of visionary space that is fertile through a creative imagining, remembering, differential conscious remembering. A differential creative imagination that is transformed out of the mind, out of imagination, where it was a structure. Now, instead of being a solid, like the imagination in the mind, creative imagination is fluid and in its fluidity it flows with the remembering function of vision, but they do not flow in lines. They flow in like scintillating qualities, as if it were like a snow of sparks in a completely velvet field of open darkness. I remember one time seeing in Berkeley, California, a presentation by Thomas Hornbein, who was on the first American expedition to climb the South Pole up to the top of Mount Everest. He lost his toes to frostbite and so-forth and after his presentation, talking with him, I had a dream that night that there was the sharp peak of Mount Everest and a golden spark snow blizzard was blowing off the peak of Everest. And I was like a large bird flying and seeing this and understanding it. And it was only a week later that I came to, for the first time, realise that the early Vajrayana Monastery of Milarepa was in fact on the slopes and caves of Mount Everest. That the quality of the creative space out of which works of art and spiritual persons emerge, is like a scintillation of sparks of light and of velvety darkness, but the sparks must emerge out of the velvet open darkness. It is dark because it is open and becomes light without a glare because the sparks maintain itself. Just like UFO phenomena do not glow like light, but they occur as light within a multi-dimensional dark presentationalness, which to sight is actually invisible. The infinity of the cosmos is invisible to us; it is not a function of visibility, it is a function of the complete complementarity to the electromagnetic spectrum. In modern twenty first century astronomy it's called dark matter, or dark energy. Only four per cent of what is visible in the cosmos is in that electromagnetic wedge of spectrum called perception. 96 per cent of it is in the dark areas and like Cezanne we work with the emergence from the dark infinities, not because they are dark, but because they are infinite and do not confine themselves to existentiality, or phenomenology. They are not confined at all, they are not defined at all. They have no outline, they are in fact the field itself out of which both process and form have their dance. Let's take a little break and then we'll come back.
When we come to our recalibration, our legerdemain, ju-jitsu sabotaging of the text, of the book, we start in Symbols with two of the really most interesting writers and two of the most interesting books of the twentieth century, that came out within just a few years of each other. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in 1930. So that they come clustered like at just before the first third of the twentieth century and they come right at an apex of the culmination of the first array of transforms that have come into maturity in the 1920's, but especially towards the end of the 1920's and verging upon a new ratcheting up of their amperage that occurred in the early 1930's.
One of the ways to understand this, when Virginia Woolf was born in 1880, was the Victorian era in the British Empire, not just in England, but all over the world because they were everywhere. They were in Australia, they were in India, Canada, everywhere. And so the British Empire, like the Roman Empire, whatever was happening in its eras/errors, was also a global phenomenon, not planetary, but global, everywhere on the globe. The globe is the geopolitical surface, the planet is the multi-dimensional actuality. We're learning to be planetary in our culture for the first time and learning to be stellar in our civilisation for the first time and that our frontier is the inter-stellar vastness, extending out as far as we can determine. We're not quite ready for galactic and inter-galactic dimensions, but inter-stellar will do. Within 50 light years of our star system there are more star systems than we could index if we started right now and started to index everyday some different star system. More than tens of thousands and it's just dipping our feet in. Our galaxy has 2,000,000,000,000 stars, terabytes. So what we're learning here and what we're looking at is a complex threshold which doesn't have layers, but it has scintillating energy registries as forms and it has a kind of like super wind of a conscious streaming. And early in the twentieth century the confluence of these two, the particality and the wave of it, were stylised by the term for the particality of it was called pragmatism. And the wave phenomena was called stream of consciousness. And the confluence of these two together where they began to make a modulation of form and process, came in the years just before 1910. And two of the most interesting figures in that are William James in a pragmatism way and Henri Bergson in a creative evolution stream of consciousness way. Bergson's stream of consciousness had as its salient dynamic time. And for William James, for pragmatism, it was the actual steps one really does take and the furthering steps that come out of that in their sequencing, that is precise and accurate enough that one can follow the periodicity and the cycling and the completeness - the pragmatos is the 'action' - can follow the actions through and determine what actually did happen. What is pragmatic because one knows in detail enough what it was that really happened and is happening, or will happen and therefore one can do a much more realistic modelling, rather than taking a sampling, or guessing. But the stream of consciousness is not based on the form particularity, so much as it is based on the temporal continuity. And Bergson used the French word for that, 'Duree.' The time is a duration, it's not measurable in instants. You can't measure it in seconds, or minutes. That in terms of the measurability of time, time is able to be condensed, or expanded, or even transcended. And so in works like To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, or As I lay Dying by Faulkner, or Ulysses by James Joyce, or Remembrance of Things Past by Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, if one remembers, that time is no longer past, but is re-presented and the present now becomes not just a remembering as a representation of that past event, but becomes a continuation of the time, the temporality, the creative time of that event. And the duree continues, that what was past is now again contemporaneous and could be in the future. So there's no such thing as a time which is dead, but can be dead. And like for Proust, the key was any poignant sensate, like the taste of an orange, the smell of a certain perfume, the noticing of a certain way in which leaf patterns of shadows in the sunlight will move, the remembrance of a woman's tone of voice, anything is enough as an, 'Image,' to bring back the duree and when it does there is an intuition that time moments are not separable out, but that all of them occur in an eternal thusness. So that the quality of memory is to re-member points and forms, the pragmatic quality of it, the practicality, the arrangement of it in an integral cycle, or system, or gestalt, but that remembering itself is a multi-dimensional process of consciousness and that it is always streaming and where it is streaming, it is streaming in an eternal field of openness.
One of Virginia Woolf's great friends was E.M. Forster, the great novelist. He wrote A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread, a number of other...he had a collection of short stories called The Eternal Moment and Other Short Stories. For Virginia Woolf, from moment to event, to moment to event in her novel To the Lighthouse, we are put into the stream of consciousness as the energy frequency of our reading it. And from moment to moment, event to event, there are junctures where the energy frequency has a little flash of insight, a little glint on the Möbius strip of its duree, its continuity, its creative evolution and at this turning, not a turning point, but at this turning event, one gets the glance, the glimpse, of what the mind would consider a form, a particle. 'Oh, it's there and if we put these particles together then we have the points that connect and they will make a form for us.' She is showing this is a convenience for an integral mind that does not yet have the further dimensions of transformative consciousness. And to the extent that that visionary capacity comes into play as a quality of dynamic, beginning to equal that of experience and to equal that of nature, then what emerges is an artist. The protagonist, the central protagonist, of To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay, is an artist in life, based on Virginia Woolf's mother, who is an artist in keeping together a rather disparate large family, with huge numbers of aunts and cousins and friends of her second husband. Her first husband was named Duckworth, her maiden name was Jackson. And Virginia Woolf's grandmother, Maria Jackson, was one of seven beautiful sisters who dominated a great deal of London's social life and so Virginia Woolf's mother, Juliet, came out of a household where there were not only her mother, but six aunts and they were called the Pattle sisters, P-a-t-t-l-e. And they were the most beautiful, complex household in London society; they knew everyone. And she had two sons and a daughter by her first husband and then he died, she was widowed. And Sir Leslie Stephen fell in love with her and married her and they had four children: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa - Virginia Stephen and Vanessa - Thoby and Adrian, two boys and two girls. But the three children from the previous marriage lived with them, so there were seven children and then out of all these complex families, you had a welter of people all the time where they were. And it was complicated to the nth degree because of the work, because of the profession of Virginia Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen and what he was involved in. He was the original editor for the Dictionary of National Biography, which was compiling...like the Oxford English Dictionary was compiling every word ever used in the English language in every variation of it, it took half a century to do that. The Dictionary of National Biography was to do short biographies of five, to ten, to 12 pages of every significant English person who had ever lived. Tome upon tome arranged into volume after volume, a huge, enormous set. He was the editor. And so every significant English person in all of history was his concern and so the household that Virginia Woolf grew up into had this complexity of 100,000 different kinds of people. And she took the cue that her father was great at editing this enormous intellectual endeavour, but that he left the running of the family, of the household, of the reality of life to his wife, who was very capable, because she had been raised to do this, she enjoyed doing this. She was an artist in life that she could bring together her children and her husband and their friends and relations and all of the different figures from whatever time and whatever social level and she could orchestrate events where everybody had something to love and to enjoy. And one of the great things that she was able to do was to introduce a duree, a creative evolution frequency in the home. And their home still exists. Was number 22, Hyde Park Gate in London and it became one of the great salons and locations in English history, in London. When the mother died, Virginia Woolf - Virginia Stephen still at that time - was only 13 going on 14. She had a breakdown; she was unable to psychologically function for quite a number of months. Later, the father became projectively tyrannical out of self-pity that his beautiful wife who had choreographed the life and was the mother of the children, was his delight, had gone and he was left bereft. And so the oldest girl, Stella Duckworth, took over managing the household and did the best she could, but then she fell in love and got married and went off on a honeymoon and when they were coming back, the by now grasping, old Sir Leslie Stephen prevailed upon her and her new husband to take the house across the street, so that she could continue to take care of him. And when she died within two years, it was left to the next oldest girl, Vanessa, the sister of Virginia Woolf, to take over this. And then they went on a trip to Europe, they went to Greece and the oldest son, Thoby and the older friend, Violet Dickinson and Vanessa drank raw milk in Greece and all three of them became sick. The two females survived, Thoby died. He was misdiagnosed as having malaria, when actually it was a case of typhoid from the unpurified milk and he died in 1906. And it left a complete vacuum, because Vanessa within two days agreed to marry Clive Bell and to get out of this increasingly strangled household. This confined domain of a self-pitying masculine figure, no matter how intellectually great he was and challenging he was, had become super dominating. And when she left it wasn't long before the father died and Virginia was left with her younger brother Adrian and so they moved to their own household. They moved to a place, number 46 Gordon Square, which is just north of the British Museum. The Hyde Park Gate residence was in a very high class area of London and just north of the British Museum in Gordon Square, it was like a little bit too bohemian for their relatives to go in that area, that district. Like moving from Beverly Hills down to Hollywood. It was a freeing moment for them because they were able finally for the first time to begin offering their own kind of salon to their own choice of friends. And the core of that was an interesting group that had originally had its seeds at Cambridge University, not in the city of London. London society, like New York society. Whereas the group from Cambridge was like a group of Harvard graduates getting together in New York and not being New Yorkers, ostensibly. The Cambridge group was a group that had been founded in the early 1800's and it was simply called among themselves The Society. It was the crème de la crème of the intellectual genius and only one or two people per year could ever join and they had to have the approval of everyone else. From the outside The Society was called The Apostles. Later versions of this would be The Skull and Bones Society at Yale, etc. etc. The cream of the cream followed the lead of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, with whom we began today's presentation. They were considered, especially Bertrand Russell, as the acme of the intellectual preciseness that the twentieth century was going to prove that all the previous centuries were absolutely superstitious compared to, now, the precision that was going to be there. And that the clarity was especially noticeable in the way in which their personalities were able to take 360 degrees whatever was happening to them and to be able to analyse it and come out with precisely and exactly what it was.
Virginia Woolf, in her permutations, in her travails, not only the breakdown on her mother's death, but an even deeper breakdown, almost into madness, on her father's death and coming back and back again from this, she began to look in-between the precision of Principia Mathematica points, to try to follow the flow, artistically, of the energy waves that were being choreographed by especially feminine, major artistic personalities, like her mother. And Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse is Juliet Stephen, her mother, portrayed in exactly the right way and Mr Ramsay is her father portrayed in just the right way, so that you get an incommensurate quality of the father's logical, intellectual symbolism and the mother's energy symbols of connectedness and flow. And when you mix them together, you get a colloidal emulsion that is able to record images, like a photographic plate. And in fact, one of the aunts of her mother, Margaret Cameron, was the greatest female photographer of the nineteenth century. And Virginia Woolf did a book with a preface, with a friend of hers, Duncan Grant, on Margaret Cameron's Victorian photographer work. Whereas she realised that even more refined than photography, with its silver nitrate emulsion plates, was the new scale of painting brought into play by artists like Monet and Cezanne. That they had brought into play a refinement of the artistic canvas, which was now a six-dimensional artistic conscious space time and that what was able to be portrayed in this, both as a portrait of someone, in great complexity, or a portrait of the complexity of an interpersonal, multi-portrait event. And To the Lighthouse has as one of the protagonists, Lily Briscoe, who is a painter who is trying to paint the event of going to the lighthouse. To include the family members that were going to go together to the lighthouse and were unable to go. The weather was not right, the tide was not right, the winds, the family situation and Lily could not finish her painting until years and years, decades later. That she found that she had got the painting right except for the synthesising symbol of one stroke, of a kind of white that would be the lighthouse. The actual lighthouse is in St. Ives, which is on a bay of Cornwall, on the north-west coast and it's called Godrey Lighthouse, but in the novel it's set off the Scottish coast, the wild west coast where the Hebrides islands are. It is a vision, not of the gestalt, of points, but of the great complementarity that is refineable and refineable beyond the colloidal into the instant, like an electronic instant, like a quality of just the ionisation of the atomic and molecular structure and that one gets now the refinement in a canvas by Cezanne, or a canvas by Monet. The refinement is enough to present, not the existential figuration of someone and not the phenomenal, mental picture of someone, but to present the six-dimensional person of the spirit of someone. And now you have art. And that in this way, the artist has a quality of being able to present the points and waves together in a deeper quality of reality, where it is midway between what it is integrable in the mind symbolically and what is real in the cosmos, actually. And so the work of art now becomes a prismatic form able to relate both back to the symbolic integral and to the cosmic differential equally. And in order to help us in our learning, to appreciate the deep resonant significance of this, the irreplaceable, irreducible harmonic of this, we now are taking a look at a new transform of the square of attention into the star of insight.
The square of attention are four phases that work together to give us the frame of referentiality, to give us the picture, but the five phase star of insight are five phases. And if our attentiveness is on any particular phase and of course in normal, everyday life all the phases are working together, almost all of the integral phases are working together, but in order for us to learn, in order for us to refine, in order for us to explore the further dimensions, not limited to the four dimensions of time space, or space time, we go into the phasing of it. And whatever phase we're looking at becomes the middle phase of the five. And the previous phase to it will be the mother phase and the second previous phase will be the grandmother phase. The phase following it will be the father phase and the second phase from it will be the grandfather phase. So we have a twentieth first century presentation very similar to the Taoist five phase energy cycle, where the middle phase of the five phase energy cycle in Taoism is Jen, the human-heartedness. And the mother phase to that is Tê, the power of unity, the unity of being existentially there completely. And the grandfather phase to the Jen is the Tao, whereas the father to the phase of the Jen is the 'I,' the symbols. And they father, not so much by the support for the emergence, like the mother or the grandmother a context for the support, for the emergence, but the father phase attracts, invites, elicits. But the context for the fathering phase, for the 'I,' for the symbols in this case, is that there is a context for that and the context will be vision, visionary consciousness. So that consciousness is like the grandfathering context for the human-heartedness. So when we did myth - if you will go back and review, especially the myth presentation notes, week by week, as is recommended in this - you will be able to see that constantly, this particular course, this cycle of learning, we're bringing in not only that myth merges participatory with the natural process, with nature, but also is able to merge invitingly with visionary, differential consciousness. So that experience has this quality: when myth is the central phase ritual will be the mother phase and nature will be the grandmother phase. Symbols will be the father phase, but visionary consciousness will be the grandfather phase. When we move, when we shift, just like with the squares of attention, when we shift to the next square of insight where the grandfathering phase will be art, the fathering phase will be vision and the phase at the centre will be symbols, where we are now. And the mothering phase to symbols will be myth, but the grandmothering phase will be ritual. And so one gets an interesting thing that with the symbolic mind, it is set in a complex, resonant focus, where its parentage as symbols, as a symbolic mind, its parentage is experience and consciousness. But its grandparents will be the ritual, pragmatic forms of existence and the artistic, prismatic forms of the creative person. So that now the symbolic mind, instead of being reduced, it is given a double resonant context. Now, we don't have to go any further than that kind of a complexity in order now to have a very interesting recalibration of everything. A recalibration of what the mind is, a recalibration of what action is and what it can do, a recalibration of art. Everything comes into play in a different way and one of the qualities that is important here comes from this book, Since Cezanne, by Clive Bell, the brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf, the husband of her sister Vanessa Woolf (Note from transcriber: Actually her maiden name was Stephen, as was Virginia's). He says of Cezanne and we read this previously in the first half:
Sometimes I was writing of theory, sometimes of practice. By means of this preface I hope to show why at the moment these two, far from being distinct, are inseparable. That movement in every turn and twist of which, the influence of Cezanne came into existence contemporaneously almost with the century - 1900 - and still holds the field - 1922 - sets artists thinking and even arguing.
His practice challenged so sharply all current notions of what painting should be, that a new generation, taking him for a master, found itself often, much to its dismay, obliged to ask and answer such questions as, 'What am I doing? Why am I doing it?' And now such questions lead inevitably, to an immense query, 'What is art?'
'What am I doing?' is a ritual phase question. 'Why am I doing it?' is a myth phase question. And 'What is art?' is a symbols phase and it's not about art, it's about the symbolic mind, 'What idea do I have of what art is doing?' Once the transform of quintessential visionary consciousness comes into play and is able to emerge art forms of the person, of the artist, of the spirit, now one has different transforms. The first question is, 'What could I be doing?' which is a visionary phase question. 'Who might I be doing it?' is a really aesthetic art phase question. And 'Whatever might such could be?' is a historical phase question. And they accumulate in their transform resonant questioning: 'So then what is thus?' is a science phase questioning, which envelopes not only the three conscious transforms questions, but the three questions from the integral as well.
The star of insight is as powerful an idea as the square of attention and those two together give us the beginnings for a much deeper quality to symbols. I want to read one paragraph from As I Lay Dying. This is from William Faulkner and we'll begin here in Sybil Street next week and take off from there to show. There is no narrative in As I lay Dying, there are only the characters, whose streams of consciousness occur as long as we reading just their sections and then when we move from one character to the next we're in someone else's stream of consciousness, so the book itself is like a tapestry of several dozen streams of consciousness, which are woven not in in the book, but are woven with ourselves, our attentiveness as the shuttle that moves on the loom, which the author has presented for us. The warp and the woof are all strung out and ready there, but it is us and our reading that is the shuttle that does the weaving.
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid-by cotton, to the cotton house in the centre of the field, where it turns and circles the cotton house at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision. The cotton house is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When I reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and onto the path again just as I come around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path towards the foot of the bluff.
Where their mother lies dying in their house, the little dilapidated hut. More next week, starting right from here.