Symbol 10
Presented on: Saturday, December 9, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Symbols Ten and I'm showing you a plate from William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. This is the plate where the three detractors are saying to Job, 'You must have done something wrong. God does not punish unless you've done something wrong.' And the caption is, 'The just, upright man is laughed to scorn.' The three detractors all put wonderful mental, well thought out reasons that Job is shirking responsibility for something. He's not owning up to it, or he is unaware of it, or he is lying. And the three detractors, when they finish and Job is unmoved in his suffering, a young fourth individual comes forth to say, 'You just don't have vision. You don't understand' and goes into further accusations. All of these are metaphysical, mental constructs, all of them are ego projections and none of them have consciousness, none of them have a visionary dimension of consciousness. And so they stack up as what we today colloquially would call advice, opinions, well informed opinions. Metaphysically sustained doctrines which are interesting because they're a structure that holds in the mind as if it were the structure of the mind. It's like a disguise that perfectly fits the structure but it's not alive; it's like a mannequin or like some kind of an android. Some kind of a quality that is different from the vibrancy of life and does not have the possibility of transforming into spirit. Blake never had a problem with the spiritual veracity. As a child he could vision other dimensions, he could see angels playing musical instruments in the trees and he would be punished by his parents for telling these garish lies, until they began to understand that he not only saw, but he could sketch them, he could draw them. And all of his life he would draw the spirit forms of beings as well as their physiological forms infused by the spirit. Yeats, on the other hand, was a doubtful, self-doubting, psychic genius who leapt over visioning and became extremely good at the art of writing, the art of poetry, the art of very interesting prose and he was constantly able to leap from a kind of a psychic experience, to a kind of an artistic poetic expression. And what bothered him was, 'What is in-between? What's the link in that?' We're taking his...one of his last great books in his life, published in 1937 finally, after working on it for 20 years and he died a couple of years later in 1939, in his mid-seventies. A Vision is all about automatic writing, which his wife Georgie, or George, as she was known, discovered that she could do four days after their marriage and they were in a resort small hotel, three storey hotel and she began, not channelling, but doing an automatic writing and it did not make immediate sense whatsoever. It was scribble, scrawls, not just a few scribbles, but page after page, ream after ream of this. And Yeats was convinced that this was his opportunity to fill in the gap between his brilliance at psychic experience and his brilliance at poetic expression, but he needed to fill it in and most of his life he looked for a bridge. And the difficulty is that the connection is not a bridge, it's not a thing. That visionary consciousness is a process, but it's a differential process, not an integral process. So that when you look to see what something is there, there is no thing there, nor is the field of visionary consciousness a field, it doesn't have a unity in that it can ever be brought together, it always has an expansion into infinity quality. So that one learns it can be tuned, but that the music possibilities are indefinite. And when visionary consciousness is brought into play by a spirit person, by an artist, what occurs is that instead of there being a centre, you have a pivot of chirality that generates the visionary field and instead of a centre, that pivoting comes through in its differential form, like a jewel, it has a prismatic quality to it. And with patience one can learn to cut the facets of that jewel, which in its rawness originally has a kind of an opalescent quality to it. Like a fire opal, it will have an iridescent quality to it. If you apply yourself to begin cutting the facets, it more and more morphs from a fire opal, to what is called traditionally a diamond. And it can be an enormously complex cut diamond, or sometimes it has the quality where the iridescent opal, not being cut by personal insight, will assume a quality of a very, very expensive pearl. So that there are a couple of different kinds of spiritual forms. One is the gift from the divine, which is a pearl quality of opalescence. A complement to that is the diamond that has been cut with many facets. Both are spirit forms. What the pearl does is it conserves and keeps in a kind of transcendent, amulet, differential form the spiritual quality of conscious time space presented as something beautiful. One of the classic works of world literature is literally called Pearl and it's by the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And the great editor of that was Tolkien and a lot of Tolkien's understanding about spiritual qualities is summed up in the character of Galadriel, the elf queen of Lothlórien. She is like a pearl, whereas Gandalf is like a diamond. He is a wizard who has applied himself over many ages to constantly recutting and recutting and his diamond quality is different, but related to, Galadriel's pearl. Blake was able to maintain himself as a pearl, whereas Yeats had to learn patiently over a long lifetime to keep recutting himself, to become a diamond. It's an extraordinary thing because the diamond form is able to leap into another expansion and that further expansion is the kaleidoscope of historical consciousness. The misunderstanding of history is infamous in legend. History is not a dead record of something, it is a very high powered kaleidoscopic visionary consciousness, whose beholding begins with the form of the spiritual person in the diamond-like scintillation, but reaches out harmonically to the form of the cosmos as an infinite differential form. Not unified, not integral, but infinitely differential. And so the person and the cosmos have a relationality through the kaleidoscopic consciousness of spiritual history, as we would say.
Yeats was someone who finally was able towards the end of his life, by trusting in his wife, to be able to come right on the verge of understanding a true relationship between his art of poetry, which was sourced by his visionary consciousness, going through a historical kaleidoscope of development, to behold the indefinitely beautiful cosmos. The key figure was Yeats' wife Georgie, George Hyde-Lees was her original family name. She was an extraordinary figure. When they were married Yeats bought an old ruined tower in the west of Ireland, called Thor Ballylee, but it was Mrs Yeats, it was George, Georgie, who did the complete redecorating of the tower, not just to redecorate it to refurbish it so that it was liveable again, but she took the old medieval tower...and a tower is to protect you from marauders that would come and you could seal off a tower, it's like a fortress retreat. She took the medieval tower and she transformed it into a setting where Yeats himself could fashion the facets of his own diamond. She was the one that made the transform because she was the genius at understanding what was in-between psychic powers and artistic excellence. She was a master of vision and her closest friend was a woman named Dorothy Shakespear, who was the wife of Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound's wife Dorothy and Georgie were moved by the death of George's father, November 22nd 1909 and it was an event that led George and her friend Dorothy to try and investigate psychic life after death. 'What happens to that person? What happens to that spirit? Where does that soul go? Can they be contacted?' And so they became quite interested in two aspects: one, 'What are the techniques by which you can contact the beyond?' And a complement to that, not a corollary, but a complement: 'What can you do to prepare yourself so that you could do this? What is the preparation? What are the techniques?' The most powerful group in London at that time, in terms of the techniques that one would have to find in history, was the Theosophical Society. The most powerful group that was there about what you have to do to prepare yourself was the Society for Psychical Research. The head of the Society of Psychical Research was William James. The head of the Theosophy Society at the time, in 1909, had passed, at the death of Madame Blavatsky - her secretary was G.R.S. Mead - but the man who took over and really, with Annie Besant developing the Theosophical Society, the man next in line was C.W. Leadbeater, who was the one who was instructing Krishnamurti and his brother. Except that Leadbeater was found by the Victorian, English, Empire society to be favouring young boys and not at all the schoolmaster father purely, but interested in other aspects of those relationships, though he was very discreet and he was quite wonderfully mature and capable with all that. G.R.S. Mead and about 700 members of the Theosophy Society withdrew from the Theosophical Society and they began to call themselves Questers. 'We don't know if there is a society that is available' and so they called themselves Questers and because they wanted to have some kind of a social group around the world, they formed then the Quest Society. And the Quest Society became the focus for W.B. Yeats and his wife, for Ezra Pound and his wife and for hundreds and hundreds of other individuals in London and several thousand throughout the world.
Now, Mead was an extraordinary character. He was born in 1863, so he was just two years older than W.B. Yeats, but when he was 21 he began working as an editor for Madame Blavatsky, who by this time was an older, quite mature woman and not at all the kind of Goody Two-Shoes character that metaphysical people would like to daydream about. She rolled her own cigarettes, she was a tough adventurer, she had gone to Tibet when it was almost gruellingly forbidden for anybody, she did her own kinds of travelling. She was a Russian and had that Russian toughness, but she was also one of the world's great psychic geniuses. But she kept trying to tease out from readings throughout all of the heritage of the world and she put together several large volumes, the biggest one was called The Secret Doctrine. But when the young G.R.S. Mead began to edit her magazine, which was called Lucifer the Bringer of Light, he changed the name to The Theosophical Review and he was the editor of The Theosophical Review for all the time until he left the Theosophy Society and it was like a Who's Who on people writing on psychic, metaphysical, occult events. But the Theosophical Society is an occult social group, whereas Mead increasingly was expanding into a kaleidoscopic historical consciousness. And so The Quest was a quarterly that was published and he was the editor, until he died in 1933, for about 27 years. The Quest magazine puts the emphasis on the fact that there is a kaleidoscopic, historical nesting that needs to be understood, rather like a complex musical work, like a symphony. And in order to understand it one has to learn to hear the music in such a sense that one could read it and one could then read the scores and play the music in one's spiritual mind. So that one would hear true music because it would have the timbre, the pitch, the tone and the artistry and would not just be an interesting artificial amalgam, but would be a musical work in its own right. That the - to use the Pythagorean language, because Pythagoras is the first to really style this in such a way that it was both artistic and cosmic - the art is to fashion the spiritual person who can hear the music of the spheres. The cosmos has the harmonic music of the divine and only when one has become a jewelled spirit person are you able for the first time to hear and to see what you are hearing as the array. Then the stars are no longer just stars that are in arrangements or constellations, but there is such a thing that the stars now are a cosmos. And in Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job one of the most famous plates, 'When all the morning stars sang together.' Now, when Blake did this in 1825 it was not known how long ago the morning stars would have had to go back to sing together. We know today, from advanced adaptive optics and astronomy investigations, especially over the last 20 years on the cosmic microwave background, we know that the first stars formed about 14,000,000,000 years ago, about 700,000,000 to 900,000,000 years after the big bang. It took that long for the initial plasma state of materia to find integrals and structures that eventually built up to the coagulation, to the threshold where they would burst into a fusion energy and become stars and the early stars are the first to have the solar winds that blew holes in the plasma, enough so that eventually all of these holes became what we today call space. And that space is not so much a hole in something, but it is the context of dimension within which the threshold of light has expanded itself. And as it does so those concentric spheres of not just the stars, but the sphere of the universe itself, through its thresholds of expansion, literally has a symphonic music. That the music of the spheres has many levels of actuality to it. We talked a while back earlier that every planet in our star system, as it moves through space around our star, has a bow shock that has a sound. And NASA at one time made little whistles and I had one at one time, the sound of the earth moving around the sun in its orbit in space. But not only do the planets have sounds, the stars themselves have sounds, but they are so enormous that we do not hear them. We know today from solar astrophysics that the sun itself has hundreds of millions of convection currents like tornadoes that come from deep down in the sub-surface of the sun and when they come to the surface they burst in such a way that the sun actually is like a great spherical bell that rings so massively that we do not hear it and that all stars have this quality. And that galactic structures themselves have immensely soundable qualities, so that the universe itself is a series of staggeringly immense, powerful sounds which cannot be tuned integrally, but which can be spiritually learned, differentially to build to the sense. The old Hermetic original illustration was...and one finds it in Ancient Egyptian archaeology, it is the son of Isis and Osiris. Their son is Horus and the little boy Horus has always got a finger to his lips. This is the ancient silence, not to silence you, but to enjoin you to participate in this silence within a silence so that you may begin to hear the music of the spheres in larger and larger compositions. This quality for Yeats was first piqued out of him, not picked, but, 'P-i-q-u-e-d,' piqued out of him by an uncle of his who was a psychic genius. And when he would take vacations in the west of Ireland the uncle would walk on top of a ridge and he would have the young boy Yeats walk in the valley and he would send him telepathic thoughts. And so the young Yeats was expected to pick these up. In ancient Scotland it was always called second sight, but the Irish is a little different, it's being able to hear the leprechauns dancing. And so the young Yeats was brought up that this was a normal, ordinary quality that he had and he was told, 'Well, not everyone is able to develop this, but we do in our family' and it was from his mother's side that had that particular quality. The father's side was always the artistry; the father was a painter. So he had the combination of the psychic genius and the artistic genius all his life, but he never had the interface of the two because he was always looking for something that bridged it, some kind of mental structure that would make the connection between them. And the difference between advice and wisdom is wisdom knows; it's an interface of complementarities and there is no connection, there is no bridge whatsoever. That if you try to go from the structure of thought to the dimensions of consciousness, you will never be able to do it. As the saying goes, 'Without a leap' and the leap is traditionally called the leap of faith. The Greek word, 'Pistis,' does not mean that you believe something and therefore you have faith in it, but the faith is that there's no way to believe it and yet it still happens, it occurs. And the way that you know that it occurs is that you are different, you have come out freshly different. How that happened you can recreate for yourself in the sense of learning how to do this again and again, like an artist will do, but you cannot then make a doctrine that says, 'This is the way that this happens for these and those reasons.' There are no reasons whatsoever. And thus the ancient wisdom was always that this fresh emergence, the opportunity for that was a gift, it was a gift of the spirit and your accepting of the gift was the pistis. And so in our course, in The Learning Civilisation, you'll find in-between the first and second years there are two pages. One is on acceptance: acceptance is the final act in integration, it's acceptance that there is no finality. The second page that goes with it is exactly, immediately on the other side and it's called absorption. That as soon as you have gone to the other side, the absorption can be such that you can absorb it indefinitely, infinitely, so that you become familiar with your own infinitude. And so acceptance and absorption are like an interface which is universal. Energy will always have a way to have an emission and a way for it to some together, to integrate. This absorption though, is not an integral absorption in the spirit, it's a differential absorption. And the emission is not a differential emission in the spirit, but it is the emission of integral acceptance. So that the spirit dimensions - beginning with consciousness - as they develop are a do-si-do of the way in which they happen in the world. The universe is a complement to the cosmos: in the universe absorption is something that happens here in an integral mode and the emission would be part of the way in which a differential energy would happen, it goes just the opposite way. And one of the proofs of this is that in visionary consciousness remembering is a flow of a dynamic, but in the mind that flow of a dynamic becomes the memory. It becomes a structure in symbolic thought, whereas in visionary consciousness it is the indefinite, infinite act of remembering itself and so remembering was like, literally, the origin of the ancient way in which Isis put Osiris back together, re-membered him. He was divided into 14 parts and Isis brought all of the parts and re-membered him and when he was brought back together and re-membered, he lived again, but he lived in eternity. He had lived in the universe, was killed, was dismembered, she restored him back to, not just his wholeness, but his prismatic wholeness. And so the re-membering is literally a quality that wisdom as a feminine will do. And Mrs Yeats, George, became the Isis for William, for W.B. Yeats. And one of the qualities in Yeats that you can hear...this is from a very famous poem by him. This was about 11 years after he was married to George and he was about mid-way working his way through writing A Vision. Just a few lines from a poem called 'Among School Children,' where he goes into an educational schoolroom and he sees and writes:
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning, a kind old nun in a white hood replies, the children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the best modern way. The children's eyes in a momentary wonder stare upon a sixty-year-old man smiling, public man. I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Leda came together with Zeus in the form of a swan and produced some wonderful divine children, Apollo, his sister.
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent above a sinking fire. A tale that she told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event that changed some childish day to tragedy. Told and it seemed that our two natures blent into a sphere from youthful sympathy, or else, to alter Plato's parable, into the yolk and white of one shell.
And so you have this whirled egg-like form that he's come to understand is another way in which this prism can be fashioned. That it will have a yolk and it will have a white and that the white shell will encompass both as a set. And that this whirled egg has a very special quality in that it can attract the whirled serpent, who in ordinary mythic qualities is the fierce dragon of combat that gods and men must fight against. But when the whirled egg is there the serpent, instead of being this colossal combative enemy, curls itself around the egg and when it curls itself around the egg, the egg is fertilised as if a spirit, cosmic spirit, had come to it. And the egg then can hatch into new life. So that what was originally the greatest demonic antagonist, the enemy of gods and men alike, is not only transformed, but recalibrated into the key for a new life. This is not only Ancient Greece, but everywhere in the world in primordial times you will find this. The great American Indian mound in Southern Ohio, near the Ohio River, the great Serpent Mound, has the 1300 foot Serpent Mound and where its mouth would be, there's the egg. And it was a way of expressing that is not a snake eating the egg, but this is a snake giving its special quality of spermatic breath to have the egg fertile. And out of this of course then from that great Serpent Mound...it's not very far and you can see the Ohio River massive in its great, sparkling, bluish vibrancy and you realise that this is like the serpent fertilising the land, this is that great serpent. It's not an enemy river, it's the source of the fertility of the land. And so the kundalini energy, instead of being something fearful, becomes something fertilising. And the brain, instead of just being closed off and trying to imagine on the basis of advice and to remember doctrines and principles, becomes fertilised to blossom out into consciousness. And the difference is that someone conscious now has more kinds of space than what mentality is able to consider. Mentality will always consider space three-dimensionally, it will always have that habit, that quality, whereas somebody who is spiritual, will understand that space is not three-dimensional, there are many kinds of space, many dimensions to it. And thus, a telepathic quality between spiritual beings is a natural quality. An ability to do automatic writing from different qualities of life, different kinds of life, at different times, is something that will be there. Automatic drawing...and when we come back from the break, we'll take a look at one of the early influences on Yeats and that is the writings of William James. He was one of the first people in the early part of psychical research. His first note on automatic writing is 1889, but his initial investigation in it was 1869. All of this is collected for the first time in 1986 in Essays in Psychical Research by William James. And we'll see that with Mead and William James and a third figure, R.M. Bucke, who was from Ontario, Canada, originally in Sarnia and then was the head medical officer for the asylum for the insane in London, Ontario and who was the closest friend to Walt Whitman and wrote the first biography of Walt Whitman in 1883. That Bucke and Mead and James, a Canadian, an American, a Brit, formed like this constellation of sage qualities that matured and brought the Yeats and many, many others out of a metaphysical conundrum, into a search for the connection between art and the fertile psyche. Let's take a break.
One of the most profound years was 1901 and in 1901 a number of volumes came out and were influential. Two of the most influential books that were published, almost back-to-back, one of them was by a Canadian named Richard Maurice Bucke and we talked about him before the break. He was a medical psychiatrist, but they did not in the early days call themselves psychiatrists. In Canada they were called alienists, they dealt with aspects of human behaviour that were not normal, they were alien to normalcy. And so it wasn't just that they were insane, it's that they were alienated, largely because they were possessed, or they were fractured in such a way that they couldn't come together normally. And Bucke got interested in the relationship of the sub-normal and the super-normal. And for him one of the most interesting figures was Walt Whitman. And he wrote once of Whitman: 'He was a completely average man that expanded almost to the being a god.' And so he was constantly interested in Whitman. In 1880, from London, Ontario, he wrote this letter:
I'm going to ask a great favour of you. I want you to write me a sketch of your interior life, especially in relation to the conception and elaboration of Leaves of Grass. The germancy and growth of such a product as Leaves of Grass is a psychological expression, almost unique in the history of man, of the race. And some record of it ought to remain if possible. I need not explain any further. And you must surely have often thought of putting it upon record. I hope you will take this matter into seriousness and favourable consideration.
So he took all of his letters from Whitman and put them together with a number of reviews of Leaves of Grass and penetrated psychological disclosures from his own genius and published in 1883 a biography of Walt Whitman, which was the first ever done and was extraordinary, it was about 236 pages. And eventually Whitman asked him on his deathbed, one of his last letters, he asked him, 'Please do not ever change that biography.' Meaning it was a living prism of him as he was before he was debilitated by the final wasting away illness that he died from in 1892. All this time, Whitman left his beloved New York City and ensconced himself in Camden, New Jersey, which is just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Now, from where Whitman's little, tiny house is, one could look across the Delaware and you could actually, in earlier days, see the area of Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin had owned a house. And the two great bridges from Philadelphia that go across the Delaware into New Jersey, are the George Washington...the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and the Walt Whitman Bridge. So you have this interesting kind of American icon quality, almost in eye contact, but because he was progressively physiologically debilitated, Whitman had a couple of men who were with him almost all the time. He had a medical practitioner and he had a very close friend named Horace Traubel, who did a seven or nine volume series of books of the conversations with Walt Whitman for the last couple of years of his life, Living with Walt Whitman Day by Day. And just assiduously put down this record of this incredible man, who when he was really in moments of health was almost like a super yogi. In fact, there are biographies of Whitman from India by yogic masters and one of them is called Maha Yogi. That he was extraordinary in the sense that he could expand his spirit person to a cosmic harmony, he could tune the cosmos in. And he used to say, 'I am not limited in my love by genders, by race, even by species.' And one of the famous lines from Leaves of Grass, 'Do I contradict myself? Therefore I contradict myself. I am vast, I can hold contradictions, it doesn't bother me.' And yet, at other times of the same day he would be a shrivelled old man, physically quite debilitated and drifting a little bit and out of this, Bucke was quite interested. And towards the end of his life - and Bucke was a very interested white bearded man towards the end - he wrote a classic called Cosmic Consciousness. And he took the crème de la crème of human beings throughout all history, all types and gave short, little vignettes of who they were and when they achieved cosmic consciousness. And he found a great many of them, by the time they were in their early thirties, had these experiences that were indelible, that opened up for them, not just the avenues to cosmic consciousness, but it was as if the old funnel blinders had worked the other way and instead of condensing things in, they fanned out, they opened out. A good early way of talking about differential consciousness. And Bucke is one of the classic figures at the beginning of the twentieth century, who held that variety is the actual truth of reality. And of course Whitman in Democratic Vistas very succinctly had said in 1875, 'Nature seems to favour two aspects of life: freedom and variety. She likes things to be completely new constantly and for beings to be totally free, with no constraints whatsoever.' That the constraints are constraints where thought has identified truth and truth then has funnelled belief to a single doctrine, or single idea and that what nature loves to do is to scramble that because she doesn't accept that.
And James, William James, in 1901 gave a series of presentations that was published early the next year in 1902. It's one of the great classics and it stands alongside Cosmic Consciousness. It's called The Varieties of Religious Experience. Where James, one of the great masters in psychology, his two volume Psychology, published in 1890, was the first textbook in the world on psychology and covered the entire gamut of human capacity. Varieties of Religious Experience went in again and again to every kind of quality that was possible and here's a photo of how James looked about 1901, when The Varieties of Religious Experience was published. Now, what was peculiar about James, he grew up force-fed by his father Henry James Sr to be a universal genius. Henry Sr...they grew up on the Harvard Campus in Massachusetts. The father wanted all of his children to be super-intellectuals, fantastic individuals and so by the time they were like learning to read English, they were learning to read Greek and Latin and French etc., etc. so they were like force-fed. Out of the boys, William James and Henry James - actually Henry James Jr - achieved this kind of a universal genius quality, but the sister, Alice James, ended up in an asylum, she had to be cared for, for the rest of her life. She didn't have this aggressive, masculine quality of grasping all of these high powered disciplines and putting them into some kind of an array. Whereas Henry James put them into an array where he would write different characters and different novels, so that the collection of Henry James' novels together, Dorothea Krook, a great critic, once called it The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. You get exhausted by the variety of motives and hidden, subterranean qualities and devious twists and turns of character and plot, so much so, that when they published the New York edition of The Novels of Henry James he did all the prefaces for it, 24 volumes, sumptuously bound in the whole thing. Someone said, I think it was Ezra Pound, 'It is a brutal thing to try and read Henry James. He gets so involved, as if he is trying to make an exorcism of aspects of himself to clear it out so that he can find out who he is.' Whereas William James, unlike his literature brother, unlike his sister who was unable to cope with it and unlike the other brother who died a little bit younger, William James underwent a shamanic transformation when he was a young man. He got to go to the Amazon Jungle with a scientific expedition and while he was there, when they were coming into Rio de Janeiro, he suffered from, I believe it was a scarlet fever attack. And he had to spend weeks and weeks in quiet, dark room care and all this time it was impossible for him to read, impossible for him to talk with other people and so in this kind of super-incubated, weird situation, as if some kind of cocoon of the death of the old surrounded young William James, when he came out he was a markedly different person, a markedly different kind of man. The leader of the expedition was the great Louis Agassiz and so the young William James - he's only in his early twenties - went to Agassiz and he said, 'I don't wanna go home again.' He wanted initially just to get back to the comfort of Harvard, back to his comfortable family, back to...he rejected it. He said, 'What I want to do is the complete opposite. I want you to give me an assignment where I will go with just a native guide and a boat, just the two of us alone and go into the upper reaches of the Amazon and do the collecting there without contact with anyone else.' And so James went into the Amazon Jungle with an Indian guide and for months did not talk to anyone in English, for months lived this kind of high-charged, visionary life in the wildness. You have to imagine now in the middle of the nineteenth century the Amazon was still colossally wild for thousands of miles. When he came back out of that is when William James realised that the capacities of a human being are unlimited and largely unknown. And it was only some 40 years later when he did the great volumes on psychology that he also came to understand, 'Well, now that we have a way of characterising psychology, what about parapsychology? What about psychical research?' And so the qualities in The Varieties of Religious Experience...and both these books influenced the Yeats and people of the time. They were two of the most famous, powerful books that sprang the twentieth century into being: Cosmic Consciousness, The Varieties of Religious Experience. One of the underlying keys in The Varieties of Religious Experience is James' taking of pragmatism, which was originally developed by Charles Sanders Peirce...Peirce's father on the Harvard campus was a great physicist and a teacher of Newton and he wrote a great book on Newton. And Charles Sanders Peirce became one of the first great logicians, logical geniuses in the world. And his technique was called by James, pragmatism and in pragmatism there is no final truth. James says, 'What you call truth is what your belief has put together in your mentality and you've been successful of using that to move from one part of your experience to any other part of your experience and be successful at doing this, prosperous at doing this, benefit from doing this.' In other words, prosperity, feeling good, success, self-confidence, all of the qualities that are now held to be avant-garde, are really rehashings of what in the nineteenth century was called self-help. The largest selling book outside of the Bible in the nineteenth century was by Samuel Smiles, who was an English engineer, but he wrote a book on self-help and it went through over 100 editions in the late nineteenth century.
The quality of William James was like a complement to Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness, whereas Bucke showed individual after individual who had this talent, who had this capacity, this technique. James' book was that the varieties of having this are endless; there are any number of human ways in order to do this, not just one way. And that one of the things that got in the way of being able to find your own, unique, individual way, or your own spirit family group, is that you make these projective assumptions that it has to be such and so and if it isn't, well, then you're not moving in the right way, not moving in the right direction. The genius at this was Yeats. W.B. Yeats became one of the most interesting magicians of the early twentieth century. I once did a 13 part lecture series on Yeats and Jung, C.G. Jung, two twentieth century magicians. Magic in the sense that Yeats knew: he had the psychic ability, he knew he had the poetic ability and if he found some way to interface them through some kind of visionary conscious exchange, he would then have the full complement, the full array. He has...in the poem that we began, 'Among School Children,' a very famous poem of his, he writes: 'Plato thought about nature...thought nature but a spume that plays upon a ghostly paradigm of things. Solider Aristotle played the taws.' Taws are leather strips that usually are bunched together like a little whip, like a flail. 'Solider Aristotle played the taws upon the bottom of a king of kings.' He was the tutor of Alexander the Great and as an adolescent he probably punished him.
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings. What a star sang and careless muses heard old clothes upon old sticks to scare away a bird. Both nuns and mothers worship images, but those the candles light are not as those that animate a mother's reveries, but keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts, oh presences, that passion, piety or affection knows and that all heavenly glory symbolise, oh self-born mockers of man's enterprise.
And the final: 'Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?' This is a pure vision, pure visionary where the dancer is absorbed in the dancing. And of course the all-time great symbol of this is Shiva Nataraja. The wheel of fire through which Shiva dances, but it isn't just Shiva dancing, it's that Shiva is dancing with an invisible choreography of his partner. And his Shakti is his partner who is in the pure movement, that the feminine is not a figure, but is the encompassing movement itself. One of the great dance couples in the 1920's, 1930's in the world were Ted Shawn and his dancing partner, but Shawn...Ruth St. Denis, but Ted Shawn wrote a book called Gods Who Dance and it later was a theme for Frank Waters after he finished The Book of Hopi. He wrote a number of other very interesting spiritual developments that would come out of this. One of the beginnings to one of his books, called Masked Gods, he recounts that as a boy he was taken down into one of the Kiva Ceremonies in the village square of the Pueblo nation and he was able to see that he had, with his father, had met a number of these men previously, but when they came dancing into the plaza they were no longer the men that they were in ordinary life. Because the dancing together, the line of men dancing together, now was like a divine lightning that was more real in the event of the dancing than it was in the existence of the individual men. That they had learned to transmute not just themselves into the dance, but that the line of the men now was the snake-like kundalini energy of the species that was fertilising the entire world, not just the tribe, but the animals, the land, the whole context of the reality. And that when a line of men dance this way, their maskedness of the divine is a special quality of mask and as we'll see next week, Yeats found that there were four, two pairs of antitheticalities and one of these will be the mask. That the mask is not something that you just put on over your face, but there is a special kind of a transformative mask that once you put it on and enter into the dancing, the mask becomes a transformed figuration of possibilities of yourself that go off the chart. It's like somebody who is experienced doing acting and after you have played a number of roles and you've done a performance a number of times, there are moments of high magic in the theatre where you embody that very character. One of the great performances in...about 25 years ago, was Alec Guinness doing some Dylan Thomas and just really was Dylan Thomas, no doubt about it. Not just that he was a great actor, but he had transmuted himself and the role was no longer a role, it was the expressive spiritual person of that person. Another great example is Hal Holbrook, who did Mark Twain Tonight and after several thousand performances, Holbrook finally had the performance filmed and if you get a chance to see a DVD of it, Mark Twain Tonight, Holbrook becomes Mark Twain. The delivery, the characteristics are not just indelibly a representation of Twain, they're a presentation of the actual vibrancy of the spirit person. Mark Twain lives again, lives right here. Dame Judith Anderson once did a performance of Medea where everyone was startled that she had become Medea, wasn't Dame Judith anymore. Or Anthony Quinn becoming Zorba the Greek. Good old friends would greet him, 'Zorba,' he's no longer just Anthony Quinn. There are transmutations where the mask is no longer a mask, that is...the word in Greek is a, 'Persona,' a false person, but it becomes a suprapersonal facet. Because a great actor can play many roles, inhabit many characters and becomes more and more scintillating in that ability to create the magic of the theatre which is not a performance of something else, but is a presentation of what it really is occurring now and the dynamic is in the visionary energy. The visionary energy becomes palpable, so that those watching, who are able to tune that, they experience that energy consciously as a reality. And in this way art adds dimensions to life that were not there before. They are now there and the ability to appreciate this is what leads to the value of a critique of a work of art, the critique of a performance of art. Because the critique is recognising that these facets are now real; they have occurred, they are part of reality. Someone...Miguel de Unamuno wrote one time, he said, 'Don Quixote is more real than anybody who lived in Spain in the late 1500's or early 1600's.' He lives for us as a spiritual person with a history, with accomplishments, with qualities. We know when somebody is Quixoteesque. Jon Dos Passos, when he was experiencing this kind of transformation in Spain, called his travelogue Rosinante to the Road Again, Don Quixote's horse. That once one has done this it now is available, not as a type for other people, but as another facet to the spiritual qualities of a transformed person. So now the spiritual person is able, throughout all time and all space, no matter what planet, or what star system, to absorb and accept those facets of that way of being into oneself.
One of the books we took earlier in our education was Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, where she took three different ways of being human: the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, the Zuni of New Mexico, the Dobu of Melanesia. Not so much to look at them anthropologically as specimens of other than ourselves, but that by acquainting ourselves with these three others to such an extent that we are able to absorb their transformative humanity, we add those capacities to ourselves. And after we have added dozens and dozens of other cultural possibilities of ways of being human, our own capacity now becomes jewel-like, multi-dimensional. Someone like a William James, who had absorbed 50 years of psychological interfaces with thousands of people on some of the most sophisticated levels imaginable, was able to write in such a way that when you read deeply into Carl Jung, you realise that he was not really influenced so much by Freud as by William James. He understood that when one goes deeply into the varietals of transcendental experience, human beings now become shimmering in the capacity to not be seen in this world except in reductive ways. And so one learns to move in such a way that you are not co-opted by the labyrinth of the world and you keep alert and alive your paradisical possibilities of affinity with other beings. And if there are no human beings, there are animals, there are dolphins, there are plants, there are trees, there are flowers, there are special qualities. And one can become friends to such an extent that the old transcendental quality of friendship is that one now feels that a spirit family is not limited to human beings, but includes many kinds of species in layers. And instead of being aliens who'll abduct you from another star system, some of them may be family members just recently arrived. In this way, twenty first century man is going to not only grow up, but grow out into the full garden that the varieties make possible.
One of the qualities in Cosmic Consciousness, he has a quote from Henry David Thoreau right at the beginning of it and it reads this way:
I hearing get, who has but ears and sight who had but eyes before. A moment's live who lived but years and truth discern who knew but learning's lore. I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, new earths and skies and seas around and in my day the sun does pale his light.
One travels with Thoreau transcendently so far that our sun becomes but another star and instead of being afraid of those interstellar distances, one is at home in a long leap of a great ballet called interstellar. The latest issue of Nature: International Journal of Science had a little box: 'Eight more organic molecules identified in the interstellar medium.' That in-between the stars is not just space, but there are molecules, free-floating, sometimes in great clouds. How many organic molecules have been identified in late 2006 in the interstellar medium? 141. Life is everywhere, it doesn't have to have a planet, it doesn't have to have a species, it is a quality of what is real.
We're enquiring now, with Yeats and Blake, a curious double transform. Blake lived at a time where the revolutions transformed society, Yeats lived at a time where the transformed free individuals of those transformed societies discovered that one can go even further. It isn't about just transforming societies, we can transform the entire species, we can transform ourselves from critters who play in a sandbox to beings who are free to travel wherever they want to go, whatever the dimensions. More next week.