Symbol 3
Presented on: Saturday, October 21, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Symbols 3 and we're looking at the way in which the mind completes both a circle and a square but not so much the mind. When we contemplatively go into the actual structure, we find that the mind has a different structure from what we usually call, colloquially, the mind. And so for us, because we are maturing ourselves in a recalibration, to go considerably, expansively, beyond the old education that wore itself to unusability; the best way to understand is that what is colloquially called the mind is really symbolic thought and that symbolic thought is a structure. To designate it as mentality does it a disservice and actually distorts the structure that symbolic thought really exhibits and has. For us, it's extremely important to understand that the structure of symbolic thought is deeply correlate to the existential objectivity of rituals, of ritual action. But it also has the ability, which it has inherited from our phase called Myth, to have a transparency which allows it to have not only a correlation, referentially to symbols in their object objective action forms but through the transparency of symbols to have a future possibility of referentiality to art forms.
So that when symbolic thought is transparent, it has a double paired quality: one of referentiality to existence and pragmatic actions and the other looking towards possibilities that could emerge. And those possibilities that could emerge as art forms are not integral forms like existence and symbolic thought but are differential forms and we're learning to call those forms prismatic. So that transparent symbols are both referentially pragmatic and future-possibility prismatic, so that art and ritual have a very large context related to the fulcrum of symbols as a centre. But in between these three kinds of form: ritual forms of what you do, your deeds; symbol forms of what you think, your thought, and art forms of a differential conscious expansive possibility array where they are, as differential forms, very frequently referred to in wisdom traditions as jewels, or into the early science form derived from Sir Isaac Newton, harkening back to the ancient rainbow covenant origins, that spirit forms are prismatic in that one can find the entire array through an experiment. Newton's experiment was in a darkened room with just a shaft of sunlight coming in, to put a prism in front of it and to see the rainbow prismed onto the dark wall and realise that light consists of a range of colour frequencies that could be mathematically expressed. His classic book that deals with this is called the Opticks, one of the great books of the world. I think Dover paperbacks does a reprint of Newton's Opticks.
For us what's important is that if symbols, if symbolic thought is backed by a closure - it's like a pane of glass that has been silvered on the back and it becomes like a mirror - if it is not closed off, it is open, instead of a mirror it becomes like a window. If there is a special kind of way of carrying experience through the transparency into consciousness, instead of there being a window, there is an open frame. One then will speak of the open mind but it's not so much the open mind, but it's the transparency of symbols, carried to the nth degree, to where the symbols now are open and there is a free concourse, not only without the reflective quality of a backed mind, a backed symbolic thought, a backed, what we would call now, a mentality. Because a mentality is actually the reflective capacity to referentiate back to things, things in the world and also to reflect on the language we use to bridge the things and the reflection of the closed symbolic thought of the mentality.
And so existence, existentiality and mentality set up a reflective relationship where, in symbolic thought, the images are representations of the things and only in mentality will the symbolic thought, the structure of what we colloquially call the mind, have representations. What they have, if the mind actually is occurring through a window, through transparent symbols, instead of having representations, the mind will have presentations. They will be spontaneously immediate and they deliver a spontaneous, though fleeting, images that are extraordinarily accurate. They are not based upon a mirror reflection, nor on an approximation of representation but have an indelible, almost instantaneous: the time delay is so small as to be almost inconsequential. If you go into a deep meditation, if you go into a deep yoga where the mind becomes evident because symbolic thought now is transparent and you energise it and carry it to where symbolic thought is now not only transparent but open, you will find that the mind has an indelible quality of not only having the instantaneous images but that those images will be available for a creative imagining and this is the realm of the artist.
It's also a realm of the sacred in the sense that for the man or woman who is able to do this, their sense of doing is not ritual but it's artistic. They do in a mode that we colloquially call composition, so that they do not work with any kind of perception qua ritual but they work with a composing seeing, a composing eye. Paul Klee, in his great volume, done for the Bauhaus art teaching called it 'the thinking eye'. The thinking eye is able to compose while it sees so it does not just see but it sees in a composing creativity. One of the most startling instances on film of this, there was a French film made a number of years ago, about 35 years ago or so, of Marc Chagall and the filmmaker was following Marc Chagall and the old Chagall in southern France was sketching a number of pigeons in a very large cubicle space. The filmmaker, Canadian filmmaker, went behind where most of the pigeons, against the back of this huge cubic cage was, and shot through the pigeons and shot Chagall sketching them and when he looked up for a fraction of a second, you could see in the look of his eyes, the composing instantaneousness of the spiritual artist. He saw Chagall sketches and paintings of those birds instantly. One of the sketches was very similar to an early Chagall painting from his Paris days and the Chagall bird is flying upside down. Of course a bird flying upside down has very often been the sign of a mystical elation.
One of the earliest Palaeolithic paintings of an animal upside down is in the back of Lascaux, about 20,000 years ago and the last images in the great axial hall of Lascaux is painted on a stalagmite coming down like a huge tooth, not quite touching the floor of the cave. On that stalactite coming down, at the top is the, what I consider, the Palaeolithic signature of the artist of most of Lascaux, we don't of course know his name but the signature is the head and upper neck and main of a black stallion, so I have called the artist of Lascaux Black Stallion. The first image you find when you come into Lascaux on the right is the black stallion head and the mane is like a curly-haired mane of the old Palaeolithic horse. It has a Polish name, Przewalski horses, and they still exist on some reserves in Europe, to this day. At the top of the stalactite coming down is the black horse, the black stallion and underneath it is a horse which is upside down and it's like the Chagall-like quality that here, by this time, one has entered into a transcendent state. That state, the usual suffix or prefix that we use for it is meta.
One enters into a meta-world and by entering into a meta-world you are absorbed by the visionary dimension of the flow. So that experience now is synergising itself with vision and still keeping in some kind of intuitive contact with nature but visionary experience is overriding, is the majority, is the largest element, rather than natural experience. And so nature lets the transformation go into the visionary and out of that visionary flow, out of that meta-state will come the work of art. The work of art now is a form, not a meta-form, but using the classic prefix that would be cognate with meta, it is a para-form, para meaning beyond, it is a form beyond. What is it beyond? It is beyond the extra dimension of visionary space time and has emerged from a quintessential alchemical five dimensional process of flow.
So the work of art now, having emerged from a five dimensional process, is a six dimensional form and so its dimensional prismatic spatiality allows it to be cut, not like a square, but like a hexagon surface of a crystal. The great all time description of this is that this form is now a diamond form and that the artist or the spiritual person who is doing the emergent-ness from differential consciousness, from visionary differential consciousness, he is a diamond cutter. The great Mahayana sutra of this is the Diamond Cutter Sutra, the Vajracchedika Sutra. That cutting of the diamond is a refineable process because one can cut a diamond in a certain number of shapes and you can become more and more refined so that there are more and more facets. When you get to a certain threshold of the complexity of the facets, instead of just being a differential consciousness, it now crosses that threshold and becomes a kaleidoscopic consciousness.
In that kaleidoscopic consciousness, a seventh dimension emerges. That process of that seven dimensional flow is actually what history is, historical consciousness is a seven dimensional flow. And out of that will come and eight dimensional form that we use in our learning, we use the old Pythagorean term cosmos; that science as the second differential form phase, the form of the cosmos itself, will not be an integral form, nor even just a prismatic form, like works of art, but will be called, to use the cognate term carrying over from the high Mahayana, it will be a jewelled matrix. It will have an infinity of facets that are all differentially, objectively possible: all possible worlds.
Now, in our learning, what we try to do is to align certain scalers so that when they become aligned through our progress of doing the learning, you can see a jump in capacity both a jump in how to integrate better and better and how to differentiate better and better. For instance, the four intervals in our first year, interval 1 for nature, we take Lao Tzu's Tao Tê Ching but Interval 3 we take the great development of Lao Tzu, not just the Tao Tê Ching but of Taoism, of poetry, of landscape painting, of Chinese language, or artistic capacity, spiritual depth and we use the T'ang apex of Chinese poetry, Tu Fu and Li Po. So Tu Fu and Li Po, 1,300 years after Lao Tzu, expand the integral capacity of what the Tao Tê Ching presents. The same for the relationship of Interval 2 and Interval 4, the interval for Myth, as you will see, is the Satipatthana Sutra, the Mindfulness Sutra of the historical Buddha, but Interval 4 will be Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, coming about 700 some years after the historical Buddha's Mindfulness sutra.
Patanjali will expand the integral capacity of mindfulness to a huge dimension of integrality where it is not just the Vipassana paying exact attention to what you do but it is the higher order of integral of being able to factor in language so that you have not just the Vipassana of what you were doing but you have, in Patanjali's terms, the Pranayama, the breathed language word carried into thought which now completes the integral and, in that completion, completes the circle and completes the square as well. The mnemonic for this in ancient wisdom was always a triad that assumes nature and the triad was thought, word and deed. Symbolic thought, mythic word - language, including images and feelings -and deed, the actual ritual steps that we really do do. So that thought, word and deed together, with the assumed primordial context of nature, give us the frame of reference, the square of attention, and complete the circle, not just of the four seasons, but our four phases, it gives us the annual cycle.
The Ritual cycle will follow the natural cycle but whereas nature's cycle is pure process, the annual cycle is the way in which existential forms accurately, objectively follow that cycle, making that circle and making it complete. The symbolic mind, first of all, notes the square and has to be reminded to note the circularity of it, whereas in ritual the circularity is what counts immediately and one has to be informed that this is also a frame of reference, it is a square as well. The ritual comportment looks towards the arching of things by keeping track of the steps by number, by counting, where as the square keeps track of the angles which are made by relationalities in language, in words. Geometricity is something which is expressed, not in ritual forms so much but in symbolic thought forms and this is extremely important because later on, when we get into the second year and we get to the very high seven dimensional flow of the phase of history, what will be the basis of the traction of history will be symbolic thought in its geometricity.
One of the most puzzling of Pythagoras' sayings, and his sayings were always collected under just, 'He said' 'Ipse dixit' 'He said' meaning Pythagoras, meaning the master, the master who founded philosophy in the Western world, founded the whole idea that he was a philosopher, that the world is composable by number and understandable by a special prismatic person. One of his sayings was that 'Geometry is history.' That is to say that geometry can be expanded all the way up to the high historical flow and its foundation is not in nature so much, it's not in ritual, it's not in myth, but in symbolic thought, so that historical kaleidoscopic consciousness has as its beginning symbols. This is why symbols are extremely important, not only do they complete the natural cycle, finish the natural frame of reference, establish the square of attention but they work all the way up until the highest flows of historical consciousness, where the symbols eventually must join what has happened to nature, what has happened to ritual, what has happened to myth.
They join them in a kind of a subconsciousness outside the square of attention and that happens when scientific analytics come into form because the analytic structures in the science phase will displace the symbolic thought structures. Now the forms, the cosmic forms, of science will take precedence over the forms of symbolic thought and this is extremely difficult to do. Without some kind of wisdom training like we are going through, some kind of complex extended maturation science will not occur, history will not happen. The highest aspirants, that normally would be achievable, are rare works of art based upon, somewhat less rare but still unusual, visionary capacities. Most human beings live on the level of rituals and myths and a little bit of symbols, 99% of humanity lives in that registry. We unfortunately live in a time when it's not enough. The problems facing us now are problems in historical consciousness and so we have to mature ourselves. Not everyone will be able to do this but enough will have to do this. Perhaps somewhat above 20% of the planet's population will need to at least have a chance to do this.
What happens when there is a recoil of not being able to have creative imagination emerge works of art, creative imagining synergised with remembering emerge the differentially prismatic person, is that there is an unsealed creative imagining that seeps back into symbolic thought. And when it seeps back into symbolic thought - having first done an exchange transform where the imagination and the structure of symbolic thought has gone into visionary process of creative imagining and remembering from the visionary process has gone into the mind as the memory - creative imagining that regresses in that it seeps back in, not to participate in the imagination, and not to participate in the memory, blurs both. It's like having a leaky faucet. It starts a drip-drip action that begins to corrode and one loses the capacity to have a crystal clear memory and one loses the capacity to have a crystal clear imagination, so that neither the imagination nor the memory function optimally and this seeping back in creates its own action where the regression continues. And it's like an illness that begins small and keeps growing and keeps expanding so that you get a watering down of the capacity for the imagination to be accurate and you get a turbulence in the structure of symbolic thought where the memory is functioning.
This regressive seeping of creative imagination now becomes fantasisation. The fantasisation takes several classic forms: it promotes illusion; it promotes the susceptibility to being indoctrinated and it contributes greatly to the staying power and durability of ignorance. Illusion, indoctrination and ignorance, to just give it a classic typology from Buddhism: illusion promotes lust; indoctrination promotes greed and ignorance promotes anger so that you have the three, lust, greed and anger and in Tibetan mandalas you will find at the centre of many mandalas three figures chasing each other around. You will find a snake, you will find a pig and you will find a rooster and the three chase each other around, anger, lust and greed. They make a kind of a turbulence, then, and that turbulence disrupts the stability of the structure of symbolic thought. It's not a disturbance of the mind so much but it is a turbulence of the structure o the symbolic thought, particularly in two areas where it focuses its debilitation: the imagination and the memory.
So that when you go into a very comprehensive therapy, a therapaea, it is ignorance and illusion and indoctrination to think that you are correcting the mind. The mind is a differential form, not an integral form. The mind simply will not occur. What has been distorted, what has been injured, to speak, what is diseased, dis-eased, is the imagination and the memory because of the seeping of creative imagining in a regressive, retrogressive way. The classic therapy to handle this is to begin making works of art. To begin utilising that creative imagining and that remembering so that they function in their expanded, quintessential way, expansion of nature into a like a super nature by making spiritual forms, by making personal forms, by making artistic forms, we reverse, we slow down that seepage and we exercise the creative imagining and the remembering and strengthen our process of visioning so that in the Gospel of St John the famous phrase is 'Without vision the people perish.'
Usually the population of human beings, of Homo sapiens, is to have confidence and trust in someone who is special, who is able to do this and they then assume that by going into whatever doctrines such a gifted person will deliver that they will be ok, they will saved, or that if they go into just a belief in them that this will bring them salvation as well or that if they consider that they now know, because they have been told right and that they are no longer ignorant, all three of these tacks are deeply flawed. If they work at all, they work on a very small percentage and they work for a very short time and they also increase the seepage back and they increase the illusion. By believing in illusion, you are more susceptible to deeper illusion, which actually, in its deeper form, becomes delusion. By seeking to think that you are OK because you have accepted a doctrine, the seepage increases and the indoctrination becomes deeper and deeper and instead of just an indoctrination you become a promoter of a tyranny.
As far as ignorance is concerned, instead of now becoming someone who knows, the knowing that you know becomes more and more regressed, not visionary at all, but mythic. The classic world case is the Gnostics. The Gnostics mythologised knowing and believe in that and promulgate that and so it is a classic case of being triply baffled. The old hermetic response to that was always that it's not about belief, it's not about knowing, it's not about accepting someone else's doctrine . It is about your own person emerging, about your own spirit emerging, about your own art of life emerging, out of your remembering, out of your creative imagining, out of your differential consciousness. And so there is a great watershed available there. The easiest way to keep track of this, if someone considers their mind to be a mirror of the world, a reflection, they have succumbed to all three of these seepages in a very dire condition.
The classical instance of this, maybe the greatest instance of this, was in China, in the case of the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Huineng. When his mentor, when his master, Mazu (Hun-Jen?), the Fifth Patriarch [37.57] was getting ready to pass on the begging bowl and his robe as the insignia of the Sixth Patriarch, he held a classic wisdom contest, as it were, who could write the best spiritual poem about enlightenment. And the head monk, whom everyone assumed, because he was an authority for a long time and because he understood ways in which commentaries of the sutra were and because he had such great confidence in himself, he wrote a poem that the mind is a mirror without a speck of dust on it. Of course the kitchen boy, Huineng, saw this and wrote underneath it, 'There is no mirror in the mind, where is there a place for dust to collect?' and the Fifth Patriarch took him aside about three o'clock in the morning, gave him the robe and the bowl and said, 'Now get out of town because they'll be after you, you're just a kitchen boy' and the head monk is supposed to be the inheritor.
It wasn't until about 20 years later that Huineng stopped being an itinerant labourer and was accepted as the great sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism. All of this comes from his final speech, the only one recorded, as the sutra of the sixth patriarch, 'If the mind is a mirror, reflection will take, will usurp the place of transparency and you will not be able to look through symbolic thought and not being able to look through symbolic thought you will look at the representation of the world in your mind and believe in it and act as if that were true and promulgate that as the source of truth. All of this is characteristic of more than 95% of humanity at the present day. Let's take a little break.
Let's come back. This is a reprint of a very famous book called Vision and Design by Roger Fry. Roger Fry was the oldest member of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf's coterie in London. He was one of the really great art critics and aestheticians of the early 20th century and Vision and Design is extraordinary he was born in 1866 and this was first published about the time that he became professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge in 1933. He writes:
In the preceding article I stated that artists always lead the way in awakening a new admiration for forgotten and despised styles, and in doing so they anticipate both the archaeologist and the collector. I also suggested that they were of all people the least fitted to report upon the aesthetic value of the objects they pressed upon us. Biologically speaking art is a blasphemy. We were given our eyes to see things, not look at them.
And by this he means not to look with a critiquable compositionality creatively rearranging while we look, that biology is based on the perception and the response on the ritual comportment whereas art is not based on the ritual comportment at all but on the creative composition of an array of possibilities of comportment, which is different. In a mere animal, that kind of compositional array would be undecideable for them, they would not know what response to give and would go into a limbo. And the same things happen with someone who is subjected to a seepage of creative imagining back into symbolic thought so that the imagination is weakened, the memory is weakened and their propensity for fantasisation increases to the point to where they become, the psychological term from Freud is 'neurotic' and can deepen from there. It's not just that they become neurotic but there is a whole development of fantasisation different from fantasy. Fantasy is a healthy, differential creative imagining vision or visioning and fantasisation is a sapping of symbolic thought, a weakening of its structure
One of the deepest differences is that the visionary flow will have a magical quality, whereas the regressive form of it, of the crimped mind, will have a magic structure to it, better known as black magic. There is all the difference in the world between someone who visionarily operates like a magi would and someone who manipulates like a sorcerer would, there is an enormous difference between them. A sorcerer seeks to compel and compels by distorting the way in which existential objectivity occurs out of nature so that it only occurs in the way in which the symbolic mind, now co-opted, directs. And so sorcery is always a manipulative co-opting of existentiality and forces experience into a compression, held between the manipulated existentiality of ritual action and the enforced directive from a regressive symbolic mind, so that instead of experience being a flow it is now a contained, under pressure process. Because it is under pressure it is always uncomfortable. It is not at ease ever, it is always dis-eased. Not just diseased, but dis-eased. Because of this dis-ease, it's like one's life, instead of operating as a flow, which could participate with nature, which could participate with vision, it's like a contained ball on which one is always falling off.
The experience imagery classically in symbols is that this is the wheel of fortune which is constantly ready to spin and never stays where it is or where it was or where it could be. It is always a gamble, it's always just chance and so change in the natural flow becomes conceived delusionally as just chance and one then seeks to manipulate the situation so you have better odds. It sounds simple or it sounds complex. It's actually an exactingness which is not normally discernible in this world at all. And so for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, our kind has had to go into a different presentation, rather than the symbolic thought completing the cycle, finishing he frame of reference, in our terms of establishing the square of attention, one has to go outside of that. What we talked about last week is that a deep transform that is a complementarity to the square of attention is the star of insight, where instead of four phases completing a square - at any one motion you can move it through the eight phases so that any contiguous four will be a kind of a square of attention - the star of insight, our five phases, where whatever phase you are concentrating on to understand or understand from is surrounded by two phases before it and two phases after it. The two phases, the one just before it and the one just after it will be a complementarity to whatever that phase is. If it's a form phase, the one before and the one after, the immediate context will be process. If it's a process, the immediate context of the phase before and after will be form.
The most exacting, simple presentation of this actuality is the Zen saying, 'Form is formlessness, formlessness is form' meaning that when you see it in its full array, the form is context by process without defining forms, or if it's a process it's context by defining forms, they may be all integral, they may be integral and differential, or they may be all differential. Without our phase form learning, there is almost no way for anyone, expect a super yogi, to characterise it in this way. It is almost impossible to do. The first formulation of it in this form was Lao Tzu in the Tao Tê Ching, the 42nd chapter where he talked about the five phase energy cycle but also put in the centre of that star of insight, the phase of Jen, of human heartedness and the two phases before it are Tao and Tê. The two phases after it are I and the fifth phase, which is the ten thousand things. The differential, called in Chinese colloquial phrasing, the ten thousand things. What context human heartedness is Tê, the objectivity of what you do, the ritual deeds; and I, the symbolic forms in thought.
So that human heartedness, the Jen, has not a bifurcation, not a duality, but it has a polarity and the polarity is based on gender. The polarity is yin and yang. It's not just that yin is female and Yang is male but that that polarity goes deep down and is in both male and female. The better way to think of it, in ancient times, was light and dark but even that begins to have its stylistic characterisation. For us, the easiest way to think of it is positive and negative like in electricity. When they are both working together, you have a flow of the current. If you short out either one, you do not have the flow of the current, it's shorted. Whatever is to work with that energy, with that dynamic cannot work, it's not that it will not work, not only that it does not work, it cannot work; fantasisation shorts out the yin and the yang of human-hearted experience in such a way that it simply cannot work. And so one gets into a frustration situation, syndrome, even, because no matter what you do it's not going to work and no matter what you think, that also is not going to obtain. And so you get into a frustration non-ratioability, non-proportionability, where thought that does not obtain and actions that do not work are condemned to be projected together because they need to be together and they are now forbidden, literally, to cooperate together. One gets a permanent disjunct on this level.
We've talked about how one returns to this in two fundamental basic ways. One is to go back to nature and start emerging one's life again, one's existence again, primordially, from nature itself, not just a return to the natural world but to return to what is best characterised as the wildness of nature, that the wilderness is not a desert place but a wilderness is a primordial process, one returns and Thoreau's great saying, 'In wilderness, in wildness, is the preservation of man's life.' The other way is to go into vision, to go into the visionary consciousness which has a characteristic remembering which is able to be sourced back, originally, in its dynamic so that the memory and the mind becomes re-emerged, reinstated. The way that this happens is not a retrojection from creative visionary consciousness but an exchange of focuses. The imagination and the mind must be exchanged with remembering in consciousness so that it becomes now the memory in symbolic thought and creative imagining in vision so that a form and a process exchange and they exchange not on the basis of equanimity but on the basis of complementarity.
The way that a complementarity is established in a most primal way is to take a polarity and turn it 90 degrees. Something that is a polarity on some equanimity, both rotated 90 degrees, instead of becoming a horizontal equanimiousness, they become a vertical quality of complementarity so that one now has not just the horizon of something but one has the apex of an ascent and the application of a descent at the same time in complementation. So that you have a very interesting way, now, through this learning of being able to recalibrate back into phases, into phase forms, so that literally, now, you are gifted with a capacity: you had a natural capacity to hum, now you have the introduction of a scale, like the octave, and now you can hum in tune and compose music. It is that scale of maturation that we are endeavouring, to gift your life with the capacity for tuning and for making music, not just a therapy to feel better or a therapeia to be able to have effective actions in your existence, nor even the ability to have the powers of symbolic thought that really do apply and really do work, really do complete and arrange, effectively.
All of these, but they are all of these in an ensemble which includes the opening of visionary consciousness to its incorporation so that you have at least a quintessential conscious time space as complex volume within which you live and not just a space time of four dimensions, out of which the dimension of time is usually left, out or if it is manipulated in such a sense that it become mechanical. One says colloquially somebody lives by the watch, somebody lives by the schedule and the classic question is, 'What time is it in the universe, anyway?' Is this the year four billion, six hundred ninety seven million seven hundred and ninety eight point one? What is that? What kind of year is that? The answer is it is the moving present which is not a moment but which is a flow. For us to occur, this quality of the star of insight, the first artistic evidence of its presentation is in the shape of a holder of a very special fire and that that holder has a handle which is able to be held by the human hand and the instrument that was found many places in Lascaux but especially at the bottom of the shaft is a clay fire holder that was the Palaeolithic lamp. That pitch and resin from coniferous trees could be put on that, bits of burnt vegetation into charcoal could be put on that and by flints, or by the fire sticks, one could have that ignited and you could carry that small flame lamp with you. With a number of these, this was the only source of light for painting the Palaeolithic art in caves.
Those holders of those clay lamps were used right up until classical Greco-Roman times. You see them everywhere in human history for at least 35,000 years. It is a symbol of the star of insight that one is able to understand how to structure the world in its completeness to include the capacities of visioning creatively and remembering and to produce works of art which now prismatically carry the spirit of the world into complementarity with the experience of the actuality of the world. The square of attention that includes art has as its founding the mythic horizon, myth. Experience is the traction process out of which art will develop itself and in between is the operative interface between symbols and vision. The key to that is that symbols need to be first of all transparent, which is an alchemical transformation, usually characterised as turning water into wine, it's a fermentation transformation meaning that what you work with initially has to be allowed to decay itself out of where it was back into a primordiality of energy so that it can be re-formed, then, and re-emerge as a transform.
The decay of that is absolutely natural. All the higher elements will decay into lower elements. All the very high-powered complex particles in the universe all decay and come back but they can always be re-presented, freshly and new again, if there is a high enough energy to be available. The most elusive particle in the standard model of the universe right now is the Higgs boson, referred to, as someone once said, as 'condensed vacuum.' We have not had a high enough energy to be able to produce a Higgs boson but it's coming online in 2007 at the new CERN instrument outside of Geneva. The instrument is like a cyclotron that is almost 90 feet high, its power will be to create energies that have not been seen in the universe since a few millionths of a second after the big bang. The Higgs Boson will be available to be, not created, but re-emerged out of its primordiality of dynamic into its energised form.
We are doing something here which in the history of our species on this planet was usually the province of only very special few wise men and women, the extraordinary sages, which is why all of our examples, exemplars, that we use, use the crème de la crème of the planet's heritage, which must now be made available to literally hundreds of millions of people because what is upon us, as we have said, several times, is not only a storm front that can be transformed from certain devastation, catastrophic, to a recalibration into a verticality that allows it, now, to re-emerge into a new complementarity. The persons who do this, now, recalibrate their very species: instead of being Homo sapiens sapiens, recalibrate to Homo sapiens stellaris, to human beings, men and women, who are at home in the whole star system, for beginners, and whose frontier are the interstellar vastnesses. Literally this needs to be in place as a beginning by 2012, needs to be well in place by 2015, it needs to be achieved by 2200.
What we are looking at here is the way in which thought forms are always integral, art forms are always differential and the phase that is in between them is vision, as a dynamic, but the interplay of vision with symbolic thought through imagination and memory, through remembering and creative imagination, has a primordiality to it that is literally a complementarity to the deepest quality of nature. The first deepening of nature is to mysteriousness, the second to magic. We are taking, as one of our pairs, William Faulkner, and for Faulkner the deepest natural mystery was the big woods. Here is a first edition of a collection of his hunting stories called the Big Woods and emerging out of the Big Woods is this spectral visionary bear, the great bear, because in Palaeolithic times, about the time when Palaeolithic art was first emerging, the primordial symbol that emerged was the great bear.
If we go back to the origins, just before Palaeolithic art, just before there was Palaeolithic paintings on cave walls, the first indication of it is not painting so much, which is very sophisticated, but sculpture but not sculpture in like moulding clay or moulding rock but sculpture in the sense of a placement of skulls, the placement of a great Cave Bear's skull on what would be a plinth, a pedestal. In the Draconburg [1.08.50 Drachenloch ?] area of European mountains, one finds just such a placement of about 45,000 years ago, right at the cusp when Homo sapiens developed as a sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo sapiens as a species have been around for 160,000 years by DNA calculation but Homo sapiens sapiens, man wise about being wise, goes back to about 50,000 years ago and no further back.
Curiously, the emergence from Africa into the Eurasian subcontinents is like the action that happened in existence exactly at that threshold at that time when this occurred. It wasn't the emergence that previous hominid species leaving Africa always left by the connection at the bottom of the Red Sea going from what is today Eritrea or Ethiopia into Southern Arabia, which is Oman, there. Homo erectus went that route two million years ago but Homo sapiens becoming Homo sapiens sapiens, when they left Africa, they left at the top of the Red Sea, right on the coast of the Mediterranean and the first place that they went to was what is today Israel, that land that was Palestine.
Exactly at that moment there was a catastrophic earth shift, not just an earthquake but a massive tectonic plate shift and where the Jordan River had flowed into the Gulf of Aqaba into the Red Sea, into the Indian Ocean, that tectonic plate shift sealed off so that the Jordan no longer flowed and backed up and became the Dead Sea. The creation of the Dead Sea coordinates with the emergence of Homo sapiens into Homo sapiens sapiens, exactly at that moment about 49,000 years ago. By going West, they went two different routes, one a coastal route, the other up great rivers like the Danube. And so you find in those areas a kind of tuning fork of the development of the capacities of Homo sapiens sapiens, identified by the evidence of the trail of art. And the earliest art that we have come across are the sculptural placements of special visionary found objects now made spiritual, like the skull of the great Cave Bear put on a plinth of the back centre of a cave, which was large enough to hold a population, palaeolithically, at the time it would have been a very large population - you hardly ever would have seen more than 50 or 60 human beings together at any one place - large enough to hold several hundred persons, a real auditorium, 50,000 years ago.
Faulkner's great story, The Bear, is reprinted in the Big Woods, but its original story is in a book called Go Down, Moses, written and published in 1942. It's important for us to appreciate and understand some of the humane Jen qualities of this. Faulkner, by this time, was 45 years old, he'd gone through a number of experiences, he had written five great books that didn't sell at all and in 1942, with Go Down, Moses, he now had twelve books under his credit, all of them now literary classics. None of them sold and within a few months Go Down, Moses was put on the remainder tables along with all of his other work and he was going to be completely out of print, never to be read again. Most critics paid no attention to him, his books didn't sell. If he sold a couple of thousand copies of something it was fantastic. He ended up with 60 cents in his pocket and in order to just live he went back to Hollywood to write screenplays.
He had first gone to Hollywood in May of 1932 because his novel at the time that was just beginning to be a bestseller called Sanctuary, which was a pot-boiler that had some very dicey, erotic scenes in it, that made him a cause celèbre because Hollywood is always after writers who are on the cutting edge of kinky, erotic scenes. Faulkner could provide them and write and so he was hired to go to Hollywood. His screenplays from that era are collected in Faulkner's MGM Screenplays, there are seven of them. The most famous of them was made into a movie Today We Live, directed by Howard Hawks, in 1933, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Robert Young, Franchot Tone. The publisher of Sanctuary went bankrupt and Faulkner didn't receive a cent of expected 4,000 dollars in royalties and ended up having to go to work as a screenwriter.
He never fit in. He was so terrified when he got to Hollywood, that after a few hours being exposed to the high-powered studio writer's intense insanity, he left Los Angeles and was driving back to, not to Mississippi but he drove himself to Death Valley and he spent a couple of days in Death Valley completely by himself, in like a Shamanic mode and faced back up to it and came back to Hollywood, and was able from that to develop a quality of toughness in him whereby his literary eloquence and exactness was balanced by a toughness. One of his great appreciators for this was the greatest film director of all time, Howard Hawks. It was Hawks who brought him back after the failure to sell of Go Down, Moses and the first screen play that he worked on was made into a classic movie, To Have and Have Not, based on a Hemmingway short story. Faulkner loved being able to rewrite Hemmingway.
This came out and the next screenplay he worked on was The Big Sleep and you can see what extraordinary qualities of films all of a sudden came out in the space of just a couple of years because Hawks understood Faulkner deeper than anybody except one figure and that figure was Hawks' script girl, Meta Carpenter, later her married name was Wilde and she has always gone by Meta Carpenter Wilde ever since. Her biography of his Hollywood days, A Loving Gentleman, this is inscribed to me from her, I knew her pretty well for some while, I had a bookstore in Hollywood Boulevard and we talked about Faulkner a great deal. She became not just a script girl but a script supervisor. She worked with many of the greatest directors. She worked with John Houston for 44 years. Her first script that she supervised for him was The Maltese Falcon and the last one was Prizzi's Honour, Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston. She worked with Hawks on all of his great productions of the 40s and 50s.
She was completely an interesting character because she was Hollywood savvy but she was also a Mississippi girl. She understood that Faulkner was a very special figure and one of the things, when he came, was the figure in Go Down, Moses, in the bear, of the young Isaac McCaslin at 16 being taken on a hunting expedition to hunt big animals, especially bears because the big woods at one time had covered a great deal of the hill country of Northern Mississippi. And he describes in Go Down Moses how at the base of this pine-covered hill, big woods country were the delta lands, the bottom lands, which were then like this ocean of fertile land that was developed into the cotton plantations and other things but that all of this land had belonged to Indian tribes, especially the Chickasaw Indians and the Choctaw. The protagonist sage in Go Down, Moses is Sam Fathers, who is half Chickasaw and half black, who has his roots in the nature of the land and has other roots in the mysteriousness of human nature that has been able to survive all this while through slavery into emergence of, at least the beginnings of a more humane life, by the time this takes place in the late 1930s.
He begins The Bear by saying, 'There was a man and a dog too, this time' because this is an ancient Palaeolithic story, 'Two beasts counting Old Ben the bear,' the last bear left alive because he is mystical in his uncanny savvy. He has a very special crippled foot that was once caught in a bear trap and he managed to wrench himself free. He leaves a squiggle bear paw print wherever he goes in the forest if it's moist ground. When we get to it next week we're going to take a look at Faulkner disclosing a Palaeolithic savvy which only Howard Hawks and Meta Carpenter Wilde were able to discern and understand because of the baffled resonance that Faulkner presented to the social world. He did not want to contaminate his visionary capacity with any kind of creative imagining seepage that would lead to these regressive fantasisations that we talked about in the first half of the lecture. He didn't want to slip into illusion or indoctrination or ignorance. He wanted to maintain his creative imagining remembrance which was the source of his art, the source of his sprit, the source of his personal form. Almost nobody in the 20th century was as palaeolithically adept as William Faulkner, an extraordinary being. More next week.