Symbol 5

We're here at Symbols 5, which means that we're entering into the centre of the fourth phase so that we are in a very interesting situation in our learning. We're right at the balance of the fourth phase that completes the square of attention, the first frame of reference that will hold, almost indefinitely. A great deal is made, I think, currently, about attention and lacks the experience to know that attention is different from response. Just having a reaction or just having a response is not attention. Attentiveness is a quality that has a time-honoured accrual of energy.
The ancient India word for this was yoga, yoking. As you yoke anything that has to do with us as you deepen the attentiveness to that yoking of it, it will accumulate energy, so that if you do a Hatha yoga, your body will accumulate energy. It is a particular kind of energy, is a magneto-electric energy. A Hatha yoga, with its asanas, will make of your physiology a condenser. Your bones, your skeletal structure will be able to tune in the electromagnetic energy but the functions within your physiology will be able to tune in and condense the magneto electric energy. One way to express this in archaic times was that a shaman or a shamaness who was successful at doing this kind of a Hatha yoga, to its point of transcendence, would then wear, on the outside of their costume, embroideries that were like the bones, or actually attach bones to the outside of their garment, to indicate that they were turned inside out: that the inner structure, now, was of a magnetic resonant quality and the old inner structure that was electro, electronic, electromagnetic, is now on the outside.
If you did a Karma yoga, your action patterning would acquire, not just a death-ness, because you've done these actions now a great deal but it would acquire power. Gandhi is a perfect example of a contemporary karma yogi. If you did a Jnana yoga, your mind in its structure and functions woud acquire something which was akin to what we would today call accumulated penetration: the mind's energy would give it a clarity in terms of the electromagnetic scale but it would acquire the ability to penetrate through the veils, as it were, into a beyond. And this accumulated penetration would allow you to have paranormal powers: telepathy; remembrance of past lives; clairvoyance; many yogic powers would come from the accumulated tapas of a Jnana yoga.
Of course then there was always the Raja yoga which was all the yogas together in their array and what we are doing here is a 21st century expansion of a Raja yoga. This, then, would be technically in Sanskrit traditions a Maharaja yoga but, because of the double transform that's built into it, the better term is not to call it a yoga or a maha but to call it a parayana. Yana is a way, rather than yoga, which is just a yoking, a yana is that yoking brought into its dynamic application and para means beyond, not just great, but greater than whatever could be designated, one goes beyond. So if you needed to have some way to speak of what we are doing, this is the yoga of civilisation, which is a parayana, which means being able to consistently refine ourselves to go beyond wherever it is that we have reached or achieved or are familiar with or comfortable with.
The middle of the Symbols phase, 5, 6, 7 and 8, that square, because within all of our structuring, I am constantly using a different scalar for very similar structures, very recognisable flows so that what you will get is an ability to, once you master this, is to instantly, spontaneously be able to factor in or ratio any of the phases and any of the details in all of the possibilities. It's akin to learning your alphabet and once you master the alphabet, now you can put those letters together and make words. Once you expand your vocabulary so that you get past a certain threshold of words, now you can speak. Once there is a transform of speaking so that you'll be able to visualise ad make a written language, that's the first transform. It all began with learning your alphabet, your ABCs. Now you have the ability to pick up a book and read it. This is a very complex application, which all of us have long since mastered. We mastered it by the time we were four or five years old. We were able to read enough to at least begin the process of reading.
The first time that I was aware that I was able to read, I was sitting on my father's lap, he was reading the comic strips to me in the early 1940s and it was a Red Ryder, Little Beaver Western comic strip. I began to notice that he was leaving out whole sections and I said, 'Well what about that, what did they say there?' and he said, 'Well how do you know I didn't read that?' I said, 'Well it doesn't say anything that you said,' I was three years old. So then I got the idea that I could just read comic books on my own and after that I was pretty much a free recluse, a kind of a little boy Marcel Proust. I was always ill with bronchial asthmatic conditions and almost always in bed but when I learned to read comic books, there were plenty of comic books.
We're taking a look at a pair of books, as is our usual tuning fork, setting the tone for ourselves. It's like a pitch pipe that sets a tone of relationality but it also is like a pair of pillars that sets a gate. The ability to take your motion of maturity through a series of gates is one of the most confidence building activities that we are capable of. We talked at the beginning of the whole series to do with myth about the Egyptian Book of the Dead and how one of the origins of that was the book of the Twelve Gates of the Underworld. Passing through those gates, one of the most profound revolutions in learning on the planet occurred about 350 years ago and it was by a man named John Amos Comenius in Bohemia, which today is the Czech Republic. He used a term which is used by one of our figures, Roman Jakobson. The term in Latin is Janua Linguarium, the Gate of Language [11.36 Gate to Language].
Comenius who was commemorated by a UNESCO selection, that was put out in 1957 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his bringing out the world's first pictorial textbook. It's called the Orbis Pictus, the World in Pictures and, right away, you find something that had never been there in the world before: the ability to learn a language by pictures that are extremely simple and sometimes jumping right away to complexities. One learns that all these pictures can be very complex and then they become emblems or emblematic, and put together. Comenius was the first person in the world to make it possible for ordinary children to learn how to read and write. Before that reading and writing was the private activity of the very wealthy, of the royal, of the special. After Comenius brought out the world in pictures as a textbook, hundreds of millions of boys and girls from ordinary families all over the world, in various languages, learned to read and write.
Another one of our figures that we are taking, I. A. Richards, developed with his great idea, a modern version of this. The easiest way to learn English, basic English, in pictures, even more simplified than before and that when one mastered these little pictures, he, she, they; once one mastered these little pictures and you got through a very interesting little look and see, you had a vocabulary of 850 words which would allow you to be able to read newspapers, to read magazines, to read beginning, non-technical books and to be able to write on your own on the level of at least a newspaper competent human being. The reason that Richards did this Basic English and then the system of Basic English was enlarged by his friend C. K. Ogden so that you had all of the words developed by all of the pictures but now you had a linguistic philosophy: the System of Basic English. So that people who were able to think things through and direct programmes and make an advance in the world, were able, for the first time, to have a quality, this came out, the Orthological Institute, 1934, 'The purpose of this volume is to present in a connected, and as far as possible complete, form the System of Basic English for English-speaking readers.'
The core of that was that Richards and his wife Dorothea, through the late 1920s and through the 1930s, spent a lot of time going to China and teaching in China. He was a Cambridge University famous figure. His lectures were so popular that they frequently had to be held out in the street because there were just too many people for any size of classroom whatsoever. He was one of these dazzling figures that when he would get excited he would leap up onto a table and start just like a conductor, conducting a Stravinsky Rite of Spring. He would get so excited and he would pace back and forth and someone once said, 'Well, he could fall off' and the person responded, said, 'No he's a mountaineer, he'll never fall of that table.' He climbs really big mountains, in fact one of the most daring climbs in his life, he and his wife climbed an 18,700 foot peak in China and the Yùlóng Shān, the Jade Dragon mountains, and when they were about two thirds of the way up, a huge storm came up, the winds were over a hundred miles an hour, blizzard-like conditions but the two of them toughed it out, were capable, English people being seen by the Chinese, 'We're gonna make it to the top' which they did and came back down, they were almost frozen but he insisted on going ahead and teaching that evening.
The quality of Basic English came out in the early 1930s because it was apparent that English was now spoken natively by over 300 million people in England and North America, Australia, Southern Africa but also by 500 million people in India and another 3-400 million people around from Europe and south America and so forth so that by 1934 it was apparent that English was going to be the new universal language for the planet; not French, not Spanish, not Chinese or any other but that it would be a common denominator for the entire planet. And it was necessary to teach English in such a way that it was a basic communication facility and structure and not have embedded in it prejudices of any kind of religious, political or philosophic or dated back to other centuries or any kind of sect or -ism quality to it. Richards and Ogden together were an extraordinary pair to be able to present English as a universal planetary language for human beings, regardless of what traditions they came out of, regardless of what kind of ethos they lived by.
For the very first time, it was apparent that language, now, had refined itself to the point to where human beings had to understand exactly and precisely and comprehensively what it was they did when language interiorised and developed into meaning and the meaning generated a structure called symbolic thought which then created a space, an amplitude, whose functioning, generally, is called the mind. So one had to understand, for the first time, exactly how is it that the mind occurs. In this, I.A. Richards was one o the great genius stars. He applied himself in China and by New Year's Eve 1930 he was able to write the foreword, in Beijing, to one of his great books called Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition.
Now, we took in learning, in our education, right at the beginning, with Thoreau we paired up the I Ching and that when we started in Ritual we paired up Confucius' Analects so that we constantly were having a touchstone back to include the other side of the world from Europe. North America, where we are, and between Iran and Western China, is exactly on the other side of the world. If you pushed through the entire planet, a diameter axis, you would come out around where Kandahar, Afghanistan is, from Los Angeles, it's exactly on the polar opposite side of the world. It's interesting because in Mencius on the Mind, he points out, p.47,
The point I wish to suggest with this imaginary conversation is that the kind of scrutiny and development of the analogy that is most natural to us was one that never occurs in Chinese discussion. Chinese commentators, I believe, have never taken this kind of interest in the passage and our general problem is what did Mencius' disciples and opponents, why did they not carry their arguments further along a path which would have led to an analytic logic?
The classic Chinese mind, very refined, extraordinarily intelligent, never had a care for analytic logic. Their care was always for a resonance building quality that was able to expand itself beyond any kind of definitional or bounds, where the mind would have a specific definite shape. And yet, the Chinese society had just the opposite take with the Chinese civil service: the social world of the Chinese was always circumscribed. It was always highly structured. It was always highly ritualised, habitualised and your success was in being able to know what he rules and techniques were that were passed on for centuries and finally by the time it was discontinued in 1911, it had been in operation for 2200 years, unchanged. Why was it that the Chinese mind was able to be free without bonds but the Chinese social world was highly bureaucratic and structured? Dynasties would come and go, it was the same empire shape, just with different dynasties. They would rule the same way, it's just that we now have these thrones, we now have the armies. Somebody would come along, well, no, now we have them.
Whereas in the West, the mind received the strictures, the bounds, the definitions, the habituation towards thinking that if you don't have a logical structure to your thought, a boundedness of your mind that conveys, then, the certainty of your individuality, you are either crazy or immature or lazy or dying. The Western mind was as constrained as the Chinese social world but the Western colouring, outside of the strictures of the social world, constantly, made of the Western world adventurers to travel, to do different things but always carrying with them the same, or similar, or linear, recognisable kind of mind.
We live at a time where both the frozen social world of the East and the frozen Western mind have created an opposition of terminal jeopardy if not transformed. The transform is easy because there are qualities on both sides which can be brought together in a different way: instead of a Western constriction of mind, like in Marxism, put into a Far Eastern stricture of society, People's Republic of China, one can reverse that very easily by putting a questing, Western open mind into a Taoist flowing society and one all of a sudden has a combination that' in literally the twinkling of two eyes, two transforms, one gets a new world. One gets a new world where it is possible for the individual to reach out and become capable of possibilities that they would never have been able to think of and actually not just think of them but do them and apply them and share them. Possibilities of community reaching out to possibilities of a social world that is truly free, not free because one has choices and you're free to make choices but one has an indefinite array of possibilities and you don't need choices at all.
One of the difficulties is pointed out by the other figure, Roman Jakobson, who we're taking, along with Ogden and Richards. Roman Jakobson was one of these geniuses, he was born in Moscow in 1896 and he came out of this era of genius that the Russians had at the time, including Stravinsky and Sorokin and many other brilliant Russians all at the same time. By the time he was 19 years old, he founded a Moscow Linguists Circle and was instrumental already as just 19, 20 years old, of being able to go around and understand that by refining language to the point to where one was able to symbolically understand the linguistic universality to the structure of language and how it worked with a completely open variant range of possibility, how those two aspects created a living language that could not only have a structure so that one could say something very clearly but one could open up the possibilities.
An early example that he used, he said, 'If you think you have an idea on your mind, that is totally different from having an idea in your mind.' If you have an idea on your mind it is a content which is pressing on you, pressing on your feelings, pressing on associative images, pressing on being reiteratively not forgotten, remembered. But if you have an idea in your mind, now that idea is suspended in a creative space and you might do some very interesting manipulations of it or relationalities of it and you might find that there are abilities, not just to have this idea in your mind, but it will have its own internal structure which you can creatively take apart and rearrange so now the idea itself is rearrangeable in your mind. And the mind now gains a tremendous facility: language becomes not just a tool of the kind of communication that cinches people together into a culture, keeps you exclusively together as 'us', or powers itself up into structure of arrangements of these us' into a very large group called a nationality or an ism.
One of the isms that young Roman Jakobson had to deal with was Communism, the Soviet Union, powering itself up through the late 1920s, saying, 'We are the new advance, historically, of humanity and we are going to do it our way and this is the way it's going to be done.' The world of the Soviet Union received a shock in early April 1930: Its poet laureate committed suicide in Moscow and sent shudders through the entire system. He had been handpicked by Joseph Stalin, he was one of the most talented, wild creative poets who was convinced that he had to lend his poetic talents and services to the state, to build up the state, to make the Soviet Union a really powerful new social world for man and increasingly what got in the way was the reoccurring nightmare of bureaucracy, of people being excluded.
Here's one of his poems, his name was Vladimir Mayakovsky, and was a very close friend of Roman Jakobson, as a young man, Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love:
Forgive me. Comrade Kostrov, with your usual generosity for squandering on lyrics part of the lines allotted to Paris, picture this: a beauty all inset in furs and beads enters the drawing room. I seized this beauty and said "Did I speak right or wrong?" Comrade, I come from Russia. I am famous in my land. I have seen more beautiful girls, I have seen more shapely girls. Girls are partial to poets. I am clever and loudmouthed, I can talk your head off provided you agree to listen. You won't fool me by talking cheap. With a fleeting pair of feelings, love has inflicted on me a lasting wound. I can barely move. Marriage is no measure of my love. Comrade, to Hell with cupolas, but why delve into details and into this joking? My beauty, I am not 20, 30 and a bit. Love's sense lies not in boiling hotter or being burnt by live coals, but in what rises beyond hilly breasts, above the jungles of hair. To love means this, to run into the depths of a yard until the rook black night, chop wood with a shining axe to give full play to one's strength. To love is to break away from bed sheets turned by insomnia, jealous of Copernicus, because he, rather than Marina Ivana's husband, is the true rival.
It goes on to find that more and more, one comes into service of the state which becomes everything and the social world of strictures begins to assert itself. What has happened is that the strictured mind has become stronger than the natural base upon which the social world, for almost all time, had developed. That the ritual comportment of human activities that had been recognisable for dozens of millennia, had irrevocably shifted its balance so that the mind now was more powerful than nature, more powerful than ritual, basics, more powerful than the cultural mythic language that myth used to be. And now the powerful political doctrines, the theological structures coalesced together to become, for Jakobson, for Mayakovsky, for Pasternak, for that whole era in that Russia, it was a theocratic political empire. Communism was a new religion, it was a political religion.
Jakobson left, he went to Prague for 20 years and an even more powerful political theology came under the horizon and in 1941 he had to flee the Nazis. He was able to jump up to Scandinavia and get passage to the United States and he ended up in New York City. There were so many Europeans making this route that in New York City the New School for Social Research set up a French speaking sub-school in New York City so that Europeans who did not yet know enough English to do a university level could study and keep their studies up while they learned enough English to go on. Roman Jakobson eventually went to MIT in the Cambridge-Harvard Boston area but for four years he taught at this European French speaking school in New York City and realised that there was something about New Yorkers that was completely different from the Europeans that he had been used to. He was used to Europeans who were already avant-garde and creative. He was especially close to the Cubists, Picasso and Braque and so forth, to all the avant-garde new, to Stravinsky, to Le Corbusier.
But when he got to New York of the Second World War, 1942-1946, he found that there was so much social energy of experiment, so much of a can do quality in New Yorkers' personalities, that, 'We'll take on the Nazis, the Communists, the Imperial military of Japan because we know how to work together, we know how to think our way through and we know how to get going and get it done.' This quality infused Jakobson's linguistics with a revision of the way in which linguistics in Europe had been framed in a classic, by 1946 it was almost a hundred years of inheritance of European scholarship and language and Jakobson put it through the transform-wringer to change it completely. His follow up was Noam Chomsky, whose great book was on transformational grammars: you can learn to speak in such a way that your creativity can remake your grammar while you're speaking, if need be. Let's take a little break.
Let's come back to a very interesting development for us; we're coming to the middle of the fourth phase that completes the frame of reference, the square of attention. In classic times, it would have been a moment of great concern to complete this and finish it. Our great concern is not to complete it, not to finish it, to leave a gap, to leave a space open, like a gate, through which one could go, not to escape, but to further, by an essential transform. But if that gap, that gate of openness, is closed, the space of the mind now becomes enclosed and the function of symbolic thought is to structure and fill out a stability, which it will do, not automatically but naturally. The only way to hinder symbolic thought from doing this is to impair it, which is not advisable.
The normal thing that happens, all too frequently, is that the mind becomes enclosed and the space, instead of being a mind, which is expandable, or shareable, or transformable indefinitely, now becoming closed, the sense of the unity of symbolic thought focuses upon an idea of self, which it will then style in terms of its extension into the social world as an individual. The classic designation of that individuality in the Western tradition was always the Monad and got translated, because of an Aristotelian emphasis in logic in the sense that the Monad is my oneness, me, the I. And so the I becomes a projective idea of the enclosed mind. Its insistence that not only am I individual but damn proud of it and you are individual and each of you are individuals.
And the only way that we can make a relationality, a community together is on the basis of thought out doctrines, of doctrines that put the best match of the arrangement of the structure of symbolic thought with an arrangement of activities and things in the world and now the social world will be completed if we can bring that into a kind of referential alignment. So that the enclosed mind has a peculiar quality to it, it's like a mirror but it's like a whole sphere that now is opaqued so that the sense of reflective space will have a single possible centre, a central point, so that the self will self-nominate its individual centre as its soul, as the core point, the inner point of its individuality. This is of great difficulty because that point is not a living organic point but is an abstract geometric which is capable of a neuter and this is the very essence, in classical wisdom, of a false person, a sham being, an abstract neutered, not having any gender whatsoever but an abstract being who now is the focus of the social world's structure and order.
In Old Testament wisdom, such a figure was called the Satan, a neutered being, not interested in male or female of any quality, interested only in the neutering into abstracted completeness, without any further developments. In the early 20th century, between, roughly, 1920 and 1940, the capacities of questioning this kind of individuality, this kind of identity, this kind of self-ness, this kind of abstracted soul point structure, jumped enormously. The capacity was furthered, as we have seen in our work, by a fantastic array of men and women from everywhere on the planet. Our learning, our inquiry, our way of developing ourselves and maturing ourselves is greatly at stake in not closing off the mind and closing off the world.
By the early 1940s the most outstanding individual who was representing to the planetary community the need for an open world and an open mind was Niels Bohr. I'll bring next week a symposium on the open world that was held a couple of decades ago. But in 1942, about the time that Roman Jakobson was beginning his new world quest in New York City, Niels Bohr addressed in a world public letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the need for an open world, not just to overcome the Nazi fasc-ism, or the Soviet Commune-ism, or the Japanese Imperial-ism, it wasn't a question simply of gaining a victory over isms because the standard historical technique was to create, in reaction, a stronger ism. If you fight an ism to beat its ism-ness, you will always great a stronger ism. We have come to see that stronger than fascism, stronger than Communism, stronger than Japanese Imperialism, is an Americanism. Whereas the whole purpose of the United States was, for 300 years, to be the outstanding beacon of an open world, a new world that was not commandeered by the old at all and to have not just individuals, who are capable of reflecting and setting up doctrines, that would rearrange the world, but the ability to explore and develop capacities, literally, off the world.
The great all time historical example of this is that in the race to the moon, Americans were able to go to the moon many times, no Soviet ever went to the moon. Even two generations later, they have never been to the moon. They cannot go. It's not that someone has forbidden them passports; they cannot go in that closed mind frame: 'You cannot go.' And since the development of an Americanism, rooted in the 1950s, that took hold in the 1970s and especially in the decades since then, no Americans have gone to the moon either, much less to Mars and beyond. Literally, the globalisation, like in multinational, like in Americanism, is a closed off world, that does not relate to all the rest of the worlds that there are and there are worlds without end. The closed off mind and the enclosed world is exactly what the figures that we are dealing with now dealt with from that crucial period beginning about 1920, all the way through - Jakobson died in 1982, at MIT, and his wife and his good friend put out a collection of conversations with him called Dialogues in 1983.
There was a beautiful volume put together on behalf of I. A. Richards in the mid-1970s to thank him for the tremendous vitality that he brought into being. C. K. Ogden bequeathed his library, the C. K. Ogden library, 5000 volumes and 500 manuscript boxes, not just manuscripts but 500 boxes of manuscripts. A lot of his material is absolutely impossible to duplicate. He, among, a collection of 2000 letters, he had letters from Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West who married H.G. Wells, Andre Gide, etc, etc. He knew everyone. Now Ogden, among the brilliance of these individuals was what we would call a polymath: he was one of the most extraordinarily intelligent human beings to ever live on the planet. Somebody once said if you calibrated Goethe, he had an IQ of 200, C.K. Ogden is up there.
His speciality, when he was a young man, was to challenge himself with almost impossible intellectual feats and so one of the first things he did is he translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. It had been published in 1921 and almost no one could read it, it was so complex in its Austrian German and Ogden just simply translated it and made it available. Then the letters, Wittgenstein to Ogden were collected and published by Basil Blackwell in England, a little while later. One of the qualities of Ogden was that he set himself these tasks to see how wide he could spread his intelligence, so he talked a published, Routledge Kegan Paul, into letting him design an international library of psychology, philosophy and scientific method. He personally contracted for all these volumes, oversaw the editing, the publishing and it reads like a Who's Who and you'll find your people like C.G. Jung, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, etc, etc down the line. Each volume became a world class exemplar.
But he wasn't satisfied with that, he wasn't satisfied just to do the system of Basic English. He put out a magazine which he called Psyche. Psyche was published for quite some while and An Annual Review of General and Applied Psychology. It's a Who's Who of people, from Alfred Adler on through everybody including Malinowski etc. His little contribution was on Jeremy Bentham who was the founder of the science of political economy back in the early 1800s. The contribution by Malinowski was called The Father in Primitive Psychology, these are little monographs from the Psyche that were long enough to be put into little volumes. The Basic Rules of Reason by I.A. Richards was one of these volumes and they were all published in the early 1930s. Ogden and Richard's book that they did together because of an almost unprecedented blending of types of intelligence - C.K. Ogden is like a polymath to be able to look at the whole spread and array of everything there is to know, and Ricahrds of having this uncanny capacity to get inside of any subject and find out how it feels when one understands this: what then do you feel like? How do you think and how would you speak? What would you say, what would you write?
One of the exemplars that he used, just to test his method, was the great poet Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was so profound that college English courses have had little selections of Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and a few other poems or occasionally you'll see reprints of his essays on Shakespeare or on other little aspects. The complete publication of Coleridge's work was not finished until just a few years ago by the Bollingen Foundation and it runs to somewhere around 35 volumes, huge thick volumes. The editor of all those was Kathleen Coburn, a Canadian. The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards was published 1st January 1923. They had worked on some of ... the ideas went back to about 1910, 1910 William James died, Mark Twain died, the English Edwardian system was for the first time shaken.
When Richards began at Cambridge University in 1911 it was like the pinnacle of intellectual brilliance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 is always held as the greatest encyclopaedic accomplishment that anybody on the planet has ever done. You can read in the articles of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Who's Who of the authors, the excellence of the writing, the depth and scope of it, make it not just a collector's item and not just a historical quality but it exemplifies a quality of intelligence like Sir James George Frazer's 13 volume Golden Bough came out about that time. The development of Cambridge included such students as the young Sri Aurobindo, Bertrand Russell, all the people that became the Bloomsbury Group and Ricahrds and Ogden among them. By The Meaning of Meaning coming out in 1923, they say this:
Now, if instead of the name this speck, we use the more luxuriant symbolic growth, this which has the property of being a speck. We shall be tempted to suppose that the theses on different occasion stand for different referents but that the property of being a speck stands for one and the same. In this way, universals, universal qualities, arise; phantoms due to the refractive power of the linguistic medium.
In other words, the closed, enclosed mind, does not know that it is enclosed and that its reflectiveness is just the natural filling out of the symbolic thought structure by the integral cycle. It's not an automatic, it's what it does, and it does it very, very well, to the point of completion if not given an alert which is not within the range of space time. The alert must be given to it in a different dimension from the four dimensions of space time. That fifth dimension is visionary differential consciousness and when differential consciousness of vision comes into play, it turns space time inside out so that it, now, is not that time is the fourth dimension of space time, it's not the fourth dimension of existentials in three dimensional space but turned inside out, that dimensional continuum now is time space but it is always mediated by a fifth, like a thumb of a hand, so that it's conscious time space.
Now time is not just a first dimension of four but time is preceded by a quintessential fifth dimension of consciousness that allows for time and space to be indefinitely, infinitely varied. That the continuity, the contiguity of space time, is preserved in a complementary fashion as a conscious time space and that in this way the binary that goes to make up space time - which can be characterised logically in terms of ones and zeros, like a computer programme - now, the binary has transformed and instead of zero and one, it's zero and infinity. It has a completely open quality which does not allow it to ever be closed off, rather it is, instead, opened out. But the opening out does not stop its ability to have defining shapes, to have stable forms but instead of being defined by boundedness - that can be paced off by defining metric boundaries and rules and so forth - now it's the complement to that, it's defined by the ability to remain open, to remain refinable.
And so these kinds of forms are forms of art and instead of being based upon a pragmatic coming together, they are based on a prismatic defraction of possibility. And so art forms - and the human person is such a form - is capable of being, prismatically, the entire spectrum, not just the spectrum of the rainbow and not just even the technological spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum but the complement to it which is the magneto-electric spectrum, as well. Now our sense of person is not just an individual that is able to have ideas on the mind but for someone who is able to have the idea in the mind, of the open mind and to bring that into actual application.
This transform, people like Jakobson found in New York City and New Yorkers and I A Richards found in China among the Taoists and some of the esoteric Neo Confucians - they base themselves on Wan Yangming rather than just on Confucius - and C.K. Ogden found it in the developments of modern psychology, like Jung's psychology, modern physics like that of Einstein and Bohr and in his own protean capacities to expand. In The Meaning of Meaning, the little paragraph that we are just reading to just get the little tab on this, the way in which we speak needs to have a careful language so that it doesn't close off and project that the referentials are limited to simply an identification, that the images are not simply boxable as a representation and that the feeling toned scalar is not limited to an individual social habitual preference.
In the 1960s there were very few people, for instance, who could listen to Indian Ragas. One of the first Indian musicians to come to the West, Ravi Shankar, played at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1970 and it was one of the first times that an American audience of several, many, thousands of people were able to sit through a complete Indian raga and hear it completely. One of the reasons was that Shankar, who was instructed with Ali Akbar Kahn's father, Usted Akbar Khan[1.09.14 Allauddin Khan?], for about 30 years, both of them studied for about 30 years before they were allowed to go out and perform in public. Ravi Shankar played an American bluegrass rock version of a raga verse called Dhun, then he played a classic evening raga and the audience was tuned emotionally and musically and communally to it. They were able to sit, for the first time, through a very long, complicated evening raga.
In the Fall of 1970, when I gave my first lecture in Canada, the new university hadn't been built yet, they were building it, just putting the finishing touches on it, so my class in symbols had to be delivered in downtown Calgary where the old college grounds were and the only building that was new enough to handle what I was trying to deliver was the city planetarium, just newly built by that time. I commenced that whole programme by lecturing on the Bhagavad Gita in the planetarium and I used Ravi Shankar's Dhun as the background to get people into the imagery of the whole starry expanse put on the planetarium dome and spoke in this kind of like campfire small way. By the time the presentation was over, instead of seeing the familiar stars in the planetarium sky, now all of a sudden you saw galactic cluster structures that the human eye would never have been able to see before.
When the cluster that he used at the time, Sig, who was the planetarium director, used the Coma Berenices cluster that's in between Leo and Virgo and it happens to be that galactic North is in exactly that area of the heavens. And so you've got this very interesting thing that if you did a magnetic pivot of the galaxies in the Coma Berenices group on a magnetic structuring, you would get them rotating as if the stars were rotating around Polaris as the pole star, only you were doing it with galaxies. Rather large, the Coma Berenices cluster relates to our cluster over several hundreds of millions of light years, so we are looking at a good portion of the universe visually pivoting. The same time I was concluding the Bhagavad Gita and Ravi Shankar's Dhun, the conclusion of it came playing in. The planetarium director wanted to hire me. He said, 'There's not a dry seat in the house' there were 700 seats.
The quality of presentation of language doesn't just refine itself but it becomes transformable like an art and the art of speaking extempore, spontaneous is also not just that the speaker speaks creatively but that there is a preparation where the hearers are also in a creative receptivity. What we are going to look at for the next couple of weeks is this incredible dance that oral language does between speaker and hearer where both are creative together. To be able to hear a wild, open language is a very, very high transformative art. It's much more difficult to do that for us than to be learning to read, we're habitually ready and even at age four-five, little boys and girls can read.
There is almost no one alive today under the age of 60 who has the ability to have a creative listening. Those who grew up with radio have that almost built in naturally. Those who grew up with a visual medium like television or computer games which exacerbate the entire situation, they cannot hear except in a sound bite response reaction, and to them that's attentive. That you're following the action is not attention at all, it's an attention deficit illness, it is a classic sign, to doctors of civilisation, of terminal illness, because you cannot have enough attention to recognise that you are not able to realise beyond simple instructing games. And so the preference is for what you can do and you become addicted to games and gamesmanship, to appearances rather than actualities, much less transformed actualities.
One of the classic statements of this in 1946 was by David Riesman in his great volume on Individualism Reconsidered. He said, 'By our time, Americans seem to be satisfied just to have the appearance of freedom rather than to be free.' This was right in the face of the beginnings of a backing off of the ability to remain open as most Americans had remained for over 300 years by that time. One found, increasingly, this kind of an encroachment, which unfortunately has mischaracterised the way in which the United States tradition has extended itself throughout the world. It isn't that there are McDonalds everywhere in the world now in almost every city and that somehow this is America, this is an Americanism, it isn't that at all. You find that there is hardly anyone anywhere who is able to appreciate and read what we would call classic American wisdom. You do not find, anywhere, a deep appreciation of the attentiveness to the special open minded, open world quality that characterised the United States for almost all of its history up until just a generation ago.
'In this way,' write Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, 'universal qualities arise, phantoms do to the refractive power of the linguistic medium. These must not be treated as part of the furniture of the universe but are useful as symbolic accessories enabling us to economise our speech material.' Only the economising is by people who are manipulating. The social world is a very large complex game and the language as a salesmanship, convincing indoctrination. The deepest non-response to this are non-Western fundamentalists who go back to different styles of tradition and culture, like medieval Islam who consider this the essence of the devil. Our learning is a way, not just to mitigate and cure this, but to recalibrate it so that it turns itself inside out and the ability to have complementarity phases that not only naturally but consciously lead back into the openness where we can look at clusters of galaxies to an American bluegrass rock raga in a presentation of the Bhagavad Gita and that all of it works well for us, without any difficulties whatsoever. It's not that we get it in terms of like an understanding intellectually, it's that we flow with it in terms of our experience which we are personally able to be prismatic enough to allow it to flow. Instead of having somewhat of a performance on a stage, we have a participation and an expansion of the transform of the entire social realm, the social world possibilities.
We're going to come back to this next week and look deeper and bring Malinowski in because the appendix to Meaning of Meaning is Malinowski, that after the 1923 January publication, he was struck by the fact that he had just come back from researching for many years in the wilds of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, and the Melanesian, the black South Sea Islanders, and that what he found, because he learned to speak their language, he found that there were so many similarities between the sophisticated quality of Richards and his leanings towards Chinese, Ogden, his leanings towards polymathy and the beginnings of Roman Jakobson, that what he found among the Papuan New Guineas, in their language, is that they participate creatively already, they are not primitive peoples. Someone like Jakobson recognised right away that it was exactly the experience that Picasso had of looking at African sculpture and bringing Cubist paintings into play, that if one looks at primordiality of human beings, it is always current in a creative expansion. It's never out of date and so one of the things we are going to look at next week is the way in which the future and the new past, the most primordiality qualities of human beings and the farthest reach of future visionary possibilities come into play together and give us a new choreography and the language that we are using here is a poetic for that. We will get to that in Symbols 6.