Symbol 7
Presented on: Saturday, November 18, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Learning Civilization (2006-2007)
Presentation 46 of 104
Symbols 7: Verbals and Meaning
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Transcript:
We're here at symbol seven. Which means we're crossing a midpoint threshold. And whenever we do this, if we have been following the dynamic, we not only get the tailwind of the presentations that have accumulated behind us in the dynamic, but we are positioned to be able to, for the first time, to really look ahead as well. And so foresight and accumulated acquaintance work together to make a very special motion at the center of a phase. At the center of a phase will be its energy. High point, its frequency high point. It will be the crest of the wave. If we were to be really super yogis, each phase would be just one sine wave. It would have one crest and one trough, and it would return back to the line of, uh, calibration. But because we have made each phase into three sets of four, there are at least three crests that occur, and the first crest that occurs would be in the middle of the first um four ending and the second four beginning, so that you would have something around five. You would have something around eight, and then you would have, um, the, uh, the collection together as a frequency. But seven is in the middle. It's a fulcrum which has an abstract quality to it, which means that it shows up clearer in the mind than a dynamic, uh, actuality. A dynamic actuality will always deliver, will always emerge a form, whereas the symbolic mind does not objectify itself in a form, but objectifies itself in a structure.
And it's extremely difficult to appreciate and understand the difference between a form and a structure. Because the confusion has been so rife for so long that we today still speak of a symbolic transformations, whereas there are no symbolic transformations, actually. To transform a form which is an existential thing. It's an objectivity of ritual and not at all an objectivity of thought. The objectivity of thought is a symbol, a symbol structure. And so thought has a symbolic structure, but existence itself has a ritual form, and the way in which the form is established is by completing what you do and whatever it is that you really do, that is the actual form that has been made and is objective. Now, if you're not following what you're doing, you don't get the accurate base of what it is that you actually have done. And so you get surprised. Then at some of the outcomes that come out of this. And of course, the classic case in this is karma. You don't realize that it isn't that you incur good karma or bad karma, but that karma objectifies on the ritual level into forms and only through further integrating it. Bringing it out of the ritual action forms into the higher integral of symbolic thought. Do you actually then bring the transform of things in to being, and its transform is always that it no longer stays ritual, but it integrates into the mind.
It integrates into structures like ideas, into a structure, like the imagination, into a structure, like the memory. So that the mind has a memory. It has an imagination. It has ideas that are centered on symbols. And all of this activity is in an objective wholeness that actually occurs and exists. And if someone were to take themselves into a long meditation or a long contemplation or a deep analytic, you would discover that this is in fact the case. And what emerges out of this is that the search for the individuality that would center the structure of the mind turns out to always be fictive. It is not really there. What is there is a reflection of an idea, of a synthetic idea, and not an individuality per se, as an objective center of the structure of thought. This has always been called a mystery. The idea of self covers that up so as to distract us from realizing that. Because if one realized that there's no individual there, the question immediately, well then who am I? What's going on? It's only in an abstract reflectiveness that one comes to have the picture of one's self, which is confirmed by the imagination, imagining what you look like and the memory. Projecting that this is the same you that went to sleep and now wakes up in the morning.
It's the same you from event to event, and it is rather disconcerting that if you look at your images over some time period, you will notice that there are really very radical, important changes that take place in you are recognizable, but you are not at all the same individual. And if you have lived long enough, you recognize that yourself in the 50s is a radically different you from in your 20s. Or that thinking back, reviewing things that charmed you when you were ten and now you're 60. There's a deep nostalgia because not just for those things, but that they refresh and bring back the you that was there when you were ten. The recovery of our childhood is dependent not so much upon our memory, in our symbolic mind, but on memorabilia which reconnect us back to the existential forms, the existential things which at that time our experience was founded on. Our experience grew out of those things, out of those events. One remembers the first time you learn to ride a bike. One remembers, uh, perhaps a special birthday where for the first time, you had all of your friends together and a big cake and ice cream. These kinds of events, when they're brought back, they have an indelible quality that they reoccur in our symbolic thought. With out any trace that time has gone by, they're there again.
One can be ten again for a moment. This is an important indication for us. And one of the individuals that we're looking at, Roman Jakobson, who was one of the one of the greatest linguists of all time, he founded the science of linguistics in such a way that almost all of the developments in language studies in the 20th century are founded on him. He was. Just to recap, he was Russian. He was born in Moscow, and he founded the Moscow Circle for linguistics. He went from there to Prague and Czechoslovakia, and for about 20 years he founded the Prague Circle. When the Nazis finally came in to Czechoslovakia in 1939, he was persona non grata and he went through Scandinavia and went to the United States, to New York, where he taught at the Free French and Belgian School in New York City, affiliated with the New School of Social Research at Columbia. And then he went to Harvard and became the famous professor there. And then he moved across the street to MIT and became the famous professor there. And in all of this time he lived to be in his mid 80s. This was one of the last interviews that his wife was conducting, and he said this. Here it is necessary to distinguish between the experience of the formal components and their abstract cognition. The form and the cognition is very important here. The essential difference between these two modes of apprehension is seen with special clarity in music.
In an audience which is intensely experiencing a piece of music, the percentage of those connoisseurs who know to what elements of composition they attend, and who understand the secrets of their workings, is quite small. One must also take account of the fact that there are differing degrees of awareness upon hearing two variants of the same stanza, one of which is endowed with a denser and more purposeful form than the other. Many people can easily tell which is the more effective, but these same people are often incapable of answering the tricky technical question of why this is the case. The musical experience has a very interesting quality to it, because the musical experience is not just simply a perception of ritual comportment that then generates a mythic horizon of images of feelings. Um, the language of sound brought into music, but is also an art. And music as an art form is not an existential form, nor is it a mental structure. An art form is like a jewel. It's like a prism. It's like a lens. And what it discloses is that its origin is rather magical. Its origin comes from a higher dimension of the world than the existential forms or the symbolic structure. That extra dimension is consciousness, and that five dimensional flow of differential visionary consciousness is able to emerge. This prismatic form, it's like a jewel that has been cut so that it is scintillating, it's prismatic rather than pragmatic, or it's like a lens which has been specially shaped so that it delivers a penetrating magnification or a penetrating microscope.
Seeing it is a lens that restores a maimed or damaged vision back to its ability to carry a focus, and sometimes even sharper than what one had naturally. What interferes with the jewel cutting is the mind closing itself off to the further dimension of visioning. It isn't just as Saint John wrote one time, without vision, the people perish. It's that without vision, the mind becomes closed. It becomes opaque and becomes like a mirror. And what opaques it is the phenomenon of abstraction. Now abstraction, when it's used as a tool of application later on, is actually quite useful. But in order to use abstraction as a tool, as an instrument, one has to have more maturity than just simply the integral mind. Because the integral mind is not capable of using itself as a tool. It does not recognize that it is an objective unity, and that its use as a tool would take more dimension than the mind itself would have as a symbolic structure. The person who can use their mind as a tool and use abstraction with proportion and make use of it, is a differential conscious person who becomes literally a spiritual work of art. It is the spiritual artist.
That is the transform of our existential body and is the recalibration of our symbolic structure. Cut into the multiple facets of a spiritual personality, a someone who can do this. If that is cut off, the mind only can reflect upon the world, and when it reflects upon itself, it has to have some kind of auxiliary structure to the mind, which is like an artificial structure, which is like a doctrine of beliefs, which is like a political economy, which is like a theology. It needs to have these kinds of mental structures in order to give it some kind of a purpose and purchase, to do the reflecting on the world. We're used to thinking that we gain a great deal by reflection. And if reflection is used as a tool, this can be the case. But when the mind does not know that it is completely lost in continuous reflection, it's like somebody not ever knowing silence. One always has the earphone in and the radio is always on. One is always got one's eyes into some kind of virtual reality imagery. And this nonstop conveyor belt is an illusion, which is encouraged by the reflective mind that is abstractly cut off. The classic way of talking about this is that one now needs to purify, and what you purify is that you fade away by application. The density of the opaqueness. It's called parting the veil or getting through the veil, clearing the mind.
And one can clear to the point to the threshold where now there is a pristine flow, where experience does not stop in the mind but goes through the mind. And we call this transparency. This is the source of the open world and the source of the open mind. The world that is open is the social world. It now does not have a political doctrine, a theological dogma that gives it an artificial shape, but rather the flow of experience going completely through a transparent symbol mind is able to engender now a new quality of life. And the time honored word for this new quality of life is love. Love is the experience of life, not transformed but recalibrated so that its occurrence is not individual but is always shared. It's shareable. The beloved is as important as oneself, and there can be an expansion of the beloved to include many. One can have many children. One can have many who are beloved of oneself. This basis of person, resonant community has a real quality to it, a real value. And what comes out of this is the generation of a historical kaleidoscope, a kaleidoscopic consciousness that has a historical dimension. And when you add this, it becomes like another dimension to what is now possible in the world. And by keeping track of this, we find that there is an enormous advantage to us. We not only become realistic in the sense that our lives, the whole cycle of what we do, what we say, what we think becomes realizable to the point to where the realistic development of ourselves is also able to go through a second recalibration, a second kind of a transformation and become real.
When we become real, we are now. Not just a part and not just an integral. But we are prismatic of the cosmos itself. This shows up because consciousness as a dimension adds to the way in which events occur in space time. Consciousness can influence space time very, very easily. And the way that this happens is that in that structural change, what was space time turns itself inside out and time becomes the first dimension, so that instead of space time, one has a time space. And consciousness is a fifth dimension adds to this, so that a conscious time space is able to weave itself in at the very level of the dynamic of nature as a process, so that whatever existential forms, whatever actions that are done, they now include the fifth dimension of consciousness. And when we bring in the kaleidoscopic dynamic of history that raises the order, history is actually a seven dimensional, kaleidoscopic, uh, conscious dynamic. And what comes out of that is the real cosmos, not a universe, which would be an abstract idea of it, but the eternal cosmos, which is quite real, quite extraordinary.
Last night, after a friend's for for dinner, even with all the glare of Los Angeles lights, it was possible, because we're up in the hills, in a small canyon, it was possible to pick out the Pleiades. Not as clear as one would see it in the desert sky, and from there, to allow those people clustered together with a little guidance of being able to point out to them that these are the constellations that occur with it. The base of it includes Orion with its huge stars and the biggest one, Beetlejuice has a triad quality of composition with Sirius and Procyon, and that above, um, the Pleiades, one finds the great Taurus constellation headed by the red orange giant Aldebaran. Aldebaran and, uh, Arabic means the one who goes forth, and the V of Taurus was almost perceptible. Finally, after looking into the night sky and suddenly someone picked out because of the ordination of everything coming together in its accumulated gestalts and recognized the big W of Cassiopeia, and then the beginnings of the Big Dipper, the Great Bear. And suddenly the night sky was collected together into a symbolic structure where the constellations were abstract forms. But the heavens themselves were a symbolic structure. This is important. We're using not only Roman Jacobson, but we're using the meaning of meaning by two men who were one was a polymath C.K. Ogden, who edited about 90 books in his lifetime, including Carl Jung's Psychological Types and Books by Bertrand Russell and so forth, was a monster of intellectual prowess, and the other, I, a Richards, was one of the most courageous, um, uh, professors of all time.
He and his wife used to, when they went to China, uh, half a dozen times. They used to climb 19,000 foot mountains just to enjoy their companionship in conditions that were very difficult to go through. At the end of their book, Bronislaw Malinowski, in the second edition of The Meaning of Meaning, added a supplement to it. And Malinowski was one of these individuals who was a very peculiar man. He was an anthropologist. He liked to call himself an ethnologist, and he had spent a great deal of time in New Guinea and some of the island chains off New Guinea, the Trobriand Islands, um, which includes a dobu and so forth. He was Polish, and when he was there, he was trapped by the First World War. He could not leave. And so he had to, for four years, learn to live with the Papua New. Guiny cooler people. And he slowly began to purify his European indoctrinated symbolic structure, thought to acclimate himself to the rituals that one had to do in order to live. There were no supply ships, so he had to live like the people lived. He had to begin tending yam gardens to raise food to keep alive. And as he did so, they taught him that you cannot just plant seeds.
You have to sing over the entire situation of the land to make it ready to receive over the seeds that they're ready to grow, and you have to protect all along the way with special, uh, spells and chants, because there are other individuals who will try to get control of your garden, of your produce, and they will try to sabotage it, not through just simply stealing yams, but sabotage it by putting spells and chants to make sure that yours don't work, and that in this, uh, melee of things, he came to understand that there is a particular watershed, that if you have a mind that is closed off to vision, you will use powerful symbolic language in this kind of sorcerer's way where your, uh, uh, concern here is with a completely different thing from having, uh, a beautiful, uh, openness of of life. He writes this this is in a collection called Malinowski and the work, uh, of meth, uh, in the mythos, uh, series of Princeton University Press. He says the conclusions to be drawn with regard to contemporary events. I shall leave to the readers own reflection. Is religion in the sense of which we have just defined it the affirmation of an ethical providence, of immortality, of the transcendental value and sense of human life. Is such religion dead? Is it going to make way for other creates less exacting, perhaps, perhaps more immediately repaying and grossly satisfactory, but creates, which nevertheless fail to satisfy man's craving for the absolute, fail to answer the riddle of human existence, and to convey the ethical message which can only be received from a being or beings regarded as beyond human passions, strife, frailties.
Is religion going to surrender its own equipment of faith, ritual and ethics to cross-breeds between superstition and science, between economics and credulity, between politics and national megalomania? The dogmatic affirmations of these new mysticisms are banal, shallow, and they pander directly to the lowest instincts of the multitude. Those of us who believe in culture believe in the value of religion, though perhaps not its specific tenets, must hope that the present day misuse of the religious apparatus for partisan and doctrinaire purposes is not a healthy development of religion, but one of many phenomena in the pathology of culture which seems to threaten the immediate development of our post-war Western society. If this be so, these new pseudo religions are doomed to die. Let us hope that our whole society will not be dragged with them to destruction. Now, this is particularly poignant because he wrote this at the end of World War One, and within two years of that, the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, the Nazis resurged again, again with something that was even more abstract and virulent than what had caused World War One.
And for those of us in the early 21st century, we recognise that the at the end of the Second World War, almost in the same kind of incremental rhythm, it took about two years. A whole new echelon of terror emerged that dwarfed what the Second World War had dwarfed in the First World War, which already had dwarfed all previous wars. The First World War was called the Great War. The second war was for the survival of. Freedom everywhere in the world. And the third level was the survival of the species itself. We live at a time where that third cycle ended. About 1992. And by the same rhythm. By 1994, a tsunami, a tidal wave of terrific, horrific ness began to build itself, and now, by the end of 2006, is discernible on the historical horizon. The old wisdom was that you cannot quell that kind of tsunami, but you can learn to ride through it. And this is where something like what we are doing here prepares us. What rides through this is not some idea of an abstract individual who stands to challenge it, who wants to own it, who wants to make organizations that will somehow take advantage of this so that what one has is a profit and success? In terms of the world, that world is going to go completely. It's already being undercut by the undertow of those. There is a time honored double transform that allows for us to take what would be a wall of doom and to make of it a threshold for a recalibration, for a change not only of the forms of existence, but of the structure of thought itself, and to emerge not victorious so much, but to emerge freshly new, iteratively original.
The name that I have given to that species of ourselves that's emerging is a play on the original name for our species, Homo sapiens, which 40,000 years ago became Homo sapiens sapiens, not just wise man, but man wise about being wise. And the new subspecies coming into play now is Homo sapiens stellaris, star wisdom man, whose home is not some geography that one fights over, but the entire star system, which resonates like a bell and its resonances carry the entire population of sentient and intelligent beings. Of all of the planets and moons, all of the celestial qualities of energy and radiation, resonances, possibilities, potentials, and carries that as a ringing of the bell of truth out into the interstellar regions. There are many Star system civilizations who prize. Every time this occurs and happens. And so instead of a dome, we may have a very large picnic. A very large family reunion of relatives we didn't know we had. Let's take a little break and we'll come back. We're looking at ways in which symbolic thought is a structure and not a form.
If it were a form, it could transform. But it's not a form and it doesn't transform. Symbolic transformation is something which is retro injected into our living experience. And we say colloquially, well, we've had a transformation. We don't have transformations. They have us. The US who has a transform. The old way to talk about it was a transcendent sense of self. And what got transformed is now your life. Your experience has an eminence in it, and that somehow the transcendence and the eminence were related, went together. And this is a confusion of myth and vision, of experience and consciousness and the way that that gets mixed together because they're not miscible in the sense that they participate together because they have different modes. Experience, always in its purpose is to bring together the things and actions of the world which have generated our feelings. Our, uh, images or language is to bring them to a focus so that we can think about them. But it isn't just thinking about them. There is a whole quality here where the language founds itself on what people do, and not at all. Is it, um, part and parcel of of something else? Um, Malinowski, when he was there in New Guinea for years on end, learned that the mind of primordial man does not relate to the structure of thought at all, but relates directly to the pattern of their procedures, what they do, what is there, and they pay minute attention to the world and its things and what they exactly do.
And so their language in its referentiality is never a symbol referencing some kind of thing, but it's always that the very, uh, things of existence generate the language. They would consider it. Primordial persons, primordial men and women would consider it a possession that you're possessed. If you would get reliant upon your mind, upon your thinking of being who you were, you are the character of your heartfulness, of your participation in your life with what you're doing and what happens and with the things that are there. The attraction is always a ritual, comportment, attraction. To. Think so much that it becomes dominant would have been considered something which is out of kilter. It's out of the picture. One of Black Elk's great comments on white civilization overtaking the prairies in the 19 century. He said the white men get lost in the dark of their eyes. They don't see what's really there and what they're really doing. They see what they're imagining they would like to do and take and get and put together, and that we're in their way of doing this because we don't have the land, we don't own the land. We live with the land. And we're a part of the whole way in which animals and plants, two leggeds and four leggeds, and wings and roots and so forth, all participate together in the world, which has a veracity.
So that what one does in a ceremony is not to abstract yourself from that action, but to emphasize the iteration of it. Thus, in most American Indian ceremonial comportements, you redo what you're doing, usually about four times, so that you set up a set of these actions? Not all the same, but they are all iterations of that action, not an abstraction of that action, but it is to bring into the sense of awareness, not the imminence of something, but your participation, that your experience is flowing with nature in such a way that you really do these actions specifically in this way, and that their integral is that the mind is able, because it is open to recognize the deep, secret truth of all of this, that one has not to rely upon esoteric masters, that one does not have to have some kind of sage teachers, but that the actuality of living in this participation with this ritual awareness. It comes out the mind so that it does not get lost in its opaque reflectiveness and becomes simply just a mirror of the world. It's no irony that in the deepest centuries of the medieval period of the Middle Ages, of what used to be called the Dark Ages, whenever you would find learned treatises on something, it would be called the mirror of something.
The mirror of alchemy, the mirror of this, of that. That the self reflective mind was the individual exercising their control over the world. And in a way, using intelligence in this way is a kind of a doctrinaire sorcery. One using the individual as the source, as the identity of this mirror that one holds up to the world. And that this reflectivity then is thought is closed thought. And we talked last week about a closed mind and a closed world being perennially in periods of human history and human life, of reaching points where the challenge requires a new response that no matter how. Effective. Previous responses to forms of this challenge were. This challenge now is new and requires a new response. Our situation in the early 21st century is that it requires not just a new response. It requires a dosey doe of the challenge and the response. We need to have not just a response to conditions which are challenging, which indeed they formulate in that way, but they only formulate in that way. If we have an exchange where we present the challenge ourself, what responds to that? Is the cosmos. And the cosmos responds instantly, instantaneously, spontaneously and comprehensive to the extent that one would use not the firm comprehensive, but encompassing. Encompassing means that it encompasses comprehensiveness as well. That issuing of the challenge ourselves is not a challenge from the mind in its limitedness, but by using transparent symbols, we challenge ourselves to be free.
To be free, to be real. And this elicits from the cosmos a response of infinity. And when do you have that cosmic response of infinity? All limiting endangering boundaries are absorbed and they disappear. They're no longer there. They are no longer the threat. They are no longer a challenge requiring a response. They are no longer a limited response. But the field of responsiveness opens into a infinity. And this was something I put in the symbols notes. And I want to give it to you now, because you won't be able to get to these for another couple of months. To write of symbolic forms was the privilege of early 20th century philosophy. To discuss symbolic structure characterized later 20th century concerns of the first set. Alfred North Whitehead and Ernst Cassirer were vanguard and of the second set. Jean Piaget. And Claude Lévi-Strauss stand out. Between these sets we find the genius of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Carl Jung. Heading the relationality between forms and structures, the one specifying exacting concern. Wittgenstein. And formal silence, the other young, delineating the symbolic life and symbolic psyche. Both forms and structure are important, but structure is more difficult to understand. We express our familiarity of form when using a worm like transformation or the classic analogue metamorphoses. The words reincarnation or transmigration as of souls indicate the existential form to be primal, as a natural locus of life or mind.
But the radical change of structure. Is a real alchemy, the veritable wisdom hermétique. If the proton and electron pair even mediated by a neutron, so that hydrogen becomes deuterium or two neutrons, so it becomes tritium. Change structure by the acquiring of another proton electron pair. And this pair of pairs is now helium, not hydrogen, and any of its three form states. The form is not transformed, but is new. Helium is not a transformation of hydrogen so much as a new element. This new form is stable in its own unity, which preserves itself even if you ionize it. There is such a thing as helium three where you take one of the electrons away. But helium three is not hydrogen. Tritium. This is like a very profound, graphic way of understanding that the existence of things. Including the objective actions that we do is characterized by unity. And when it achieves unity, no matter what variety or variation of that you have, it will still have its unity. As such, helium, even ionized, will always be. Helium will act as helium. And if you reorganize it, if you bring another the electron back, it will indeed be helium, extraordinarily stable. Thus the form may be morphed, metamorphosed, transformed, reincarnated, transmigrated. Yet all these are ritual phase based existential unities. They all exhibit a tae with its symmetries yin, yang, left, right, positive, negative, etc.
each Tae symmetry can enjoy a complementarity with Tao. No matter what unity there is, it can always have a complementarity with the with Dao, so that what emerges then is the ability to generate that kind of experience that we call gen human heartedness. Sentient life, and in this the integral of those three is a fourth stage. The Chinese terms for it is e symbols like E ching, the book of symbols. The symbols complete that cycle, the completeness of that cycle. If it is left only just to that activity of completion, the period of that becomes the fulcrum upon which an abstraction is able to be made. And if you don't have a further quality of being able to continue that, it stops right there and the mind becomes closed, believing that it has completed everything. This is a huge danger. It's like saying one will never grow further than this, one will never mature further than this. And one of the classic statements in Victorian England in the 1890s was a comment one woman made about Africans. She said. They're still in the throes of evolution, trying to come up to where we are. We're exempt from evolution. We have crawled ashore, we have arrived. And so the phrase in Victorian England was we have arrived. Now there's only for us to enjoy, to dominate, to control, just simply to be arrived. And it was only about ten years later that World War One completely tore that up.
No one had arrived anywhere except at an impasse because they could not see what was coming, whereas it was evident in the late 1890s, uh, enormously evident. And in fact, just before the breakout of World War One in Edwardian England is the greatest occurrence of psychic phenomena that the world had seen for a long time. At that time, from 1904 till 1914. In that decade, you found some of the most avant garde people in the world absolutely entranced with psychic phenomena, not just seances and and other aspects. The head of the Psychical Society in London at the time was the American psychologist William James. His brother Henry James. All of his novels from that time period deal with psychic dimensions of what was going on in very complex minds and very complex human beings. At the end of the Second World War. You find, again, this kind of recognition that there had been a psychic phase in the 1930s. Just as there was in the ten years before the First World War. There was a psychic phase before the Second World War as well. And throughout the 1930s you find again. This sensitivity, that all this psychic activity is somehow a presage for something which indeed it was. As soon as the Second World War was over, as we talked about this morning. By 1947, you began to have another decade. From 1947 to 1957, the psychic phenomena gathered itself around UFOs, where there had been sporadic episodes of unidentified flying objects of flying saucers before then.
In that ten year period, the world was deluged so that one of Carl Jung's last books was On flying Saucers, a modern myth. Came out in 1957, exactly at the time that Sputnik was launched. And the launching of Sputnik raised the whole specter that not only are there going to be nuclear bombs, atomic bombs, and then hydrogen bombs, but there will be missiles, rockets able to carry them anywhere on the planet in, uh, less in minutes rather than, uh, hours or days. And the Cold War, which had been simmering all of a sudden, took on this ominous quality of a planet in peril. We live at a time where the proliferation of this capacity is going to be, by 2015, in the hands of at least a 25 or 30 nationalities who have cultural discontinuities with each other to the extent that they are not resolvable. It's clear that there is a recalibration classically needed, and the recalibration founds itself on our issuing a challenge to ourselves to do this. And the response from the cosmos will be positive, not just positive, but encompassing, and happens very, very quickly. The key that we're looking at today is that as long as we think of symbolic thought as a form and don't recognize it as a structure, we get lost in assigning it existence on the level of ritual, rather than being able to understand that it has a very special quality.
Not only can it integrate the whole natural cycle together, but it can become transparent and open a threshold into a complete complementary ecology, that of consciousness, which includes art and science, which includes vision and history, and that all of this is a response to our invitation, which is not issued as a please do this. But the very openness of mind itself is is the challenge which the cosmos responds to. This has been verified by men and women across every nationality for all time, on this planet, for tens of thousands of years. Whenever a man or a woman has come to have a transparent symbolic structure of thought immediately the gift that is apparent is a blessedness, is a quality of encompassing ness and a vibration where the sense of presence raises awareness so that the awareness of our bodies. Generating the character of our experience. Comes to an openness of symbolic structure, and the mind that comes out of this is called the mind of light. The mind of light in the sense that a whole dimension of possibility opens up. It's not a perspective. Of perception. It's not some kind of idea of conception. It is an actual inception into not only a wider world that has more dimensions than space time had, but now is able to multiply the possibilities of that dimensionality by weaving it back into the world so that the world, instead of just being natural, now, is able to receive.
The ancient way to talk about this 4000 years ago already was to use the Indo-European word for those who could do this, and they were called Magi. Out of this we got the terms magic or the terms majestic or magisterial. The Magi by 2000, before the common era in Central Europe, in Asia, learned that they could travel long, huge caravan distances by two things. They learned to tame horses, and they learned to read star patterns so that they had the ability to have mobility that was many times greater than simply the old style beast of burden, which was the black haired donkey. A horse can travel about five times what a donkey can travel, and by moving in the night time under the stars, one can travel in such a way that you know where you're going, anywhere on the earth. And those who would gaze at the stars to guide those caravans. Um, the seer who taught them first was named Zarathustra. And his name in Greek, Zoroaster means star gazer. Able to look, as we talked about earlier in the first half of the presentation today, able to look in such a way that the perception accumulated not to a conception, but accumulated to a penetration, one could look through the symbols to the vision of a multidimensional, conscious time space.
The clearest exemplar of how this works is learning to read. There are no hieroglyphs. There are no pictures yet. We can read alphabets and make for ourselves a living theatre of conscious time space. And this is something which a symbolic structure will do. It has the ability to be transparent. The words on the page are obviously there as ink on paper printed. They're existential things like that. But if they are transparent symbols, one reads through the written language to the conscious time space, which now is able to come back and weave itself with experience, so that when we live with this transparency of symbols, we know now that we have acquired a freedom which is fundamental. It is not a transform, it is a complete recalibration. That's why I say of this work that we're doing here. It's an enquiry to recalibrate. What the recalibration does is it moves the limitation of zero and one. To another pair, zero and infinity, which together give a special kind of a quaternary, not a quaternary, which ends one, two, three, four, but a quaternary that is expressed was expressed most beautifully by the title of one of the books of George Gamow one comma, two comma, 3... infinity 123 infinity. I think you can still find used copies on on the internet. When I first met George Gamow about 46 years ago, I was a was my first season as a head porter at Giant Forest Lodge and Sequoia National Park.
And among the many, many guests driving in here in a red European sports car with matching big luggage leather, beautiful blonde with big, jovial George Gamow, one of the world's greatest physicists, having a good time. And I had my little copy from mentor paperbacks of one, two, three infinity and got it signed by him, long since lost in all the moves. And it was interesting because the first thing he said, can you read it? And then he said, did you read it? Then he said, what are you thinking about these days? And it was like someone who understood exactly what happens in here, not did you understand it? But if you read this, then what else are you reading? Because you will have gone through that threshold. If you can read and you read this, what is interesting to me is what are you exploring now? Because it will be something maybe I would like to explore as well. This is a different basis of community from politics. It's different from theological dogmas. It's different from the arrangement of effective organizations just to be successful. It isn't about success, it's about the exploration of an infinite freedom for which the response is not to look at the tally sheet, but to make a Thanksgiving hymns. And poems of praise. Thank you for the gifts. We're happy to have an eternal, infinite realm to be real in. It beats success. More next week.
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