Symbol 11
Presented on: Saturday, December 16, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Symbols 11, I'd like to start with a very short poem that Yeats wrote when the First World War had dragged on into its third year and it was apparent that Europe completely was stuck in a meat grinder of staggered charges by both sides that went nowhere and finally ended up in this great trench, the Maginot Line that ran from the North Sea all the way across most of Europe. Millions of young men died on both sides through being put into what was a meat grinder of the failure of civilisation. This poem is called The Cold Heaven,
Suddenly I saw cold and rook-delighting heaven /That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, /And there upon imagination and heart were driven /So wild that every casual thought of that and this /Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season /With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; /And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason, /Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro, /Riddled with light. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken, /Confusion of the deathbed over, it's sent /Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken /By the injustice of the skies for punishment?
1916, the world just three or four years before seemed rock solid in achievement and one looks at the period, especially 1910 - 1912, you see an incredibly great superficial - as we see it now - confidence. The phrase was, 'We have crawled ashore, we have got it made.' Of course by 2006 there are many people in the world, financially successful, socially happy who too say, 'We have it made.' This is a presentation for them. Our inquiry, we are going to refine, now, in a very deep way but simply done.
We have gone through a recalibration of weaning ourselves away from all of the previous diagrams of the way in which our lives have got to be what they are: all the different chronologies of heritage; history; all of the different beliefs and certainties of culture. Not to criticise any of them but to bring ourselves to a new traction for a new calibration by taking phases which are essentially universal. They alternate, these phases of ours, they have syncopation. The initial phase, Nature, we characterised as a process. The second phase we characterised as a form, the rituals, the ritual action sequences of what exactly is done so that things really are what they are.
This alternation of a process phase and a form phase is doubled, not only because the first pair have a kind of a symmetry to them, there is an asymmetry also in the sense that the fertility of nature conveys the ability for things that are to reoccur because in the first place they are not statically what they are. Existence is not a stasis, it's vibrant. We'll see, and have seen, that it's vibrant because it really has a scintillating iteration of its occurrence and, because of this, the ability to be fertile for all creative things to be able to develop their kind and to develop further variations of their kind. It goes all the way back to the original quality that we understand now is almost a midway in the cosmos of size and actuality; the hydrogen atom is able not only to be hydrogen and to have several variants of itself, but to generate helium, eventually, and all of the other elements.
The process of nature is akin to the process of myth, our third phase, and the phase of ritual form is akin to the phase of symbol form, but here is the refinement: nature a s a process is a field whereas myth as a phase, as a process, is a flow. The easiest rule of thumb by which to fist imagine this is to think of the Atlantic Ocean and of the Gulf Stream as a river in the ocean. A mythos is a flow of narrative language and images and feelings in the field of nature, so that it performs the process function of being able to be a circulation by which, eventually, nature is able to be returned to and emerged from again. Not just the sense of a return but deeper, the sense that this is an eternal return. It is always a part of the cycle; that the cycle continues.
To put it into a static geometry, one makes a circle, so that the natural cycle from nature to ritual, myth and symbol, is a cycle like a circle; it returns, like the four seasons, it comes around. But in coming around it generated, in the meantime, time, so that when it comes around it does not come around exactly right but moves in time just enough so that the return is an occurrence that has a time jump in it and the circle becomes, however minute, it becomes a spiral. The old 78 LP records, when you looked at them, you could not see that the soundtrack was a very tiny, graduated spiral but it was and one can play music on an old 78 and the needle will record the continuousness of the flow because it has a spiral, helical quality to it and is not just a circle. If the spiral were interrupted by a glitch then you get a repeat which everyone hears as 'something is wrong', it's an error.
In the Chinese sense, the flow is the qi, the qi, the energy, it is the energy that has moved through the entire cycle. The final fifth quality of the Taoist energy cycle is the return of the qi back into Tao, not to stay there. Where can it stay? Nature is a field, it generates. What is generates is the unity of all things: the Tê. And so the qi comes back through the Tao and regenerates so that what you have, instead of just an iteration, you have the next generation. You have the next emergence, which is also shimmering, which is also having the sense that a field, like nature, is fertile for existentials, as unities, but the flow of experience, like in the mythic process, does not generate existentials but integrals.
So that symbols are integrals and their whole structure is to complete the process by which form in existence, all forms, all objective forms, that those forms, having an existentiality have emerged from nature and generated experience, generated the quality of a mythic flow. The symbols as integrators, as integrals, bring all of that to a completion with the proviso that the completion is left in its dynamic spiralling so that the cycle not only continues as a circle - which would be something stuck - but continues as a spiral occurring as a double helix.
One of the difficulties that occurs for us is that we do not believe, culturally or generally, in our own individual assessment as beings, in our own cultural experience as groups. We do not believe that continuity includes gaps and spaces, includes the zeros of the Tao of nature all the time. This is most evident when one comes to consider music, especially in its symbolic written form, a musical score of notes that makes it very clear that this note is existentially itself and the next note is existentially itself and in between there is the most minute hiatus which allows them to be what they are. F is not G, it doesn't slide into it. G doesn't slide back into A; they are all existentially distinct, they are quantitised. That quanta of those musical notes in no way negates the continuity of a music piece.
One of the most beautiful ways of expressing this was done by a man named Victor Zuckerkandl. Zuckerkandl was born in Vienna about 1896. He was a musical prodigy, he was a musical performer, he was a conductor, he was a professor of music and of philosophy. Because of the Nazi occupation of Europe he came to the United States and from 1942 to 1944 the only job that he could hold was that of a machinist in a war defence plant. For two years, this great Viennese concert musician, philosophy professor, worked as a machinist. In doing this, he came to the attention of several people who were designing the Bollingen Series in New York City.
The Bollingen Series was financed by Paul and Mary Mellon. Paul Mellon was one of the richest men in the country and his wife Mary, whom he loved extraordinarily, had had a great psychological difficulty, and a crisis, and Mary Mellon had been helped by Carl Jung in a very big way. And so the Mellons asked him what they could do with their tremendous resources of contacts, with their financial capabilities, and Jung brought together a number of people to make the Bollingen Series that eventually would publish a hundred numbered sets or volumes that would cover the entire range of the heritage of civilisation at a crème de la crème level.
They found Victor Zuckerkandl at the machinists' factory and they asked him if he would do a book on the philosophy of music. The book that he did for them is called Sound and Symbol. In Sound and Symbol he has a couple of pages, about 120 pages into the book, that characterise for us what we are trying to understand about how continuity can occur even thought there are minute gaps and spaces all the time between things that are. That experience in its flow incorporates not only the existential things of objective existence but incorporates the zeroness of the Tao field of nature all the time, every time. Whenever there is the slightest particle of bit it is accompanied also by a gap, a space, that we would characterise as a zero - zeroness. Part of the flow of experience is that we are able to naturally absorb that the continuity of the zeros and ones constitute a seamlessness and we find this very much in computers today.
The binary code of zero and one can be written as complexly as you would like to have and it comes across so that it is a flow of experience such that it can be integralled symbolically in thought to almost any degree of specificity and holds stably. One can understand, almost to any degree, a stable certainty of symbolic completeness, even though, at the root of the presentation, you are dealing with zeros and ones equally, in a symmetry. Our learning is like an ancient wisdom pattern, in that we are alert to the fact that for every existential and integral that we can put our attention to, our attention must also have the blinders off, that we are aware that it includes empty spaces in between that in no way sabotage the flow.
It's like the qi moving through the physiological system does not move from point to point on a meridian. The meridians are not there. They are there courtesy of the flow of the Tao punctuating the Tê of the neural cells all the time, in every case, so that the only way that qi generates and has its flow is that the field of nature, being a zero field itself, must occur in reality with whatever forms have been emerged out of it. This is evident even on the subatomic level, on the molecular level; that existential occurrence is always an iteration. It can be billions of times per time unit but it does occur. But it also occurs on a very graphic scale like musical notes, like frames in an old motion picture projector. So many frames per second will give you the illusion that the action is continuous but it is most apparent in a musical score. Victor Zuckerkandl, in Sound and Symbol, about p.119 in it - the old concert musician turned machinist, now turned professor of philosophic understanding of what music really does and what it really is - says:
It is an old article of belief that nature makes no jumps. To the principle support of this belief was the conviction that all natural phenomenon could be referred back to motion of bodies. For motion, a thing changing place is obviously a continuous process; one cannot get from one place to another without passing through all the intervening places. The motion traverses the space between one place and the other in an uninterrupted transition.
The difficulty is that our attentiveness, our focus, through several thousand years of stylisation is always on the things, is always that 'This thing has moved its place in space and that place was also a thing.' This smears and it blurs the deeper recognition that something has moved from one place to another place from a form to another form without there being an intervening connection necessarily existential. Because it is an existential it does not normally integral in thought. Thought will only structure what you have paid attention to. If you pay attention to the zeros and the ones, thought is subtle enough, it will integral the zeros and the ones together and produce not only a clear thought of what something that is turns out to be in its essence, but also the context that permitted what it is to continue to occur, also will occur in thought. And one says, then, 'thought is alive.' Instead of it being a static conclusive thing, it now is something that continues in the return back to Tao and its aliveness generates a resonance quality which we call consciousness.
Consciousness is not, initially, in the integral of thought: it is in the further resonance of thought returning back to nature in the Tao so that consciousness has a quality, it has a qi-like quality. It is a flow based quality but it also is very much a parallel to nature as a filed. While nature is a field and experience is a flow, consciousness is another field and because consciousness is another field with a higher dimension, nature permits an integral cycle with the four dimensional field, space time. But consciousness adds a fifth dimension, a quintessential dimension so that when the conscious field comes back into play, nature as a four dimensional field yields to consciousness giving it a transform. Now, the existentials do not just come out of a four dimensional space time nature, they come out of a five dimensional consciousness and then one has to transpose space and time. Because of the existential quality we refer to it as space time, and even in the integral we understand it as space time. But when it undergoes a transformation, it's returnability generating a fifth dimension, space and time do a do-si-do and they exchange their places so that one now has a time space, so the five dimensional continuum, its field, is conscious time space rather than just space time.
Because of this, whatever now emerges existentially out of conscious space time, will have an ability, not only to be what it is but to continue its is-ness, even though it goes into variations that were never there before. Thus new variants of actuality are, now, not only natural, the old word was that they're supernatural: they are charged. And men and women, even 50,000 years ago, even 200,000 years ago, understood that when existentials are supercharged, they are able to carry, in what they arrange as forms, anything in that form all the way back through the cycle of nature so that it is able to return: so that it does not die but it reoccurs, and reoccurs, by the way, indefinitely.
As we'll see later there is a way of double-sealing that so that it reoccurs eternally. One of the earliest expressions of this is in what is today Israel, on Mount Carmel there are caves that have been inhabited by Neanderthal forerunners to our species, tens and tens of thousands of years BC. On the top of Mount Carmel was a Neanderthal burial from about 200,000 years ago. That woman who died there 200,000 years ago, her body was surrounded by flowers outlining her physical form, because we, in archaeology, found the pollen grains of all the different kinds of wild flowers arranged around her form so that her form was carried, by a supernatural outlining of herself with flowers, so that the seeds of the flowers would envelope and carry her spirit back into life again. This is one o the earliest forms that we have evidence of, of this is the way that it happens.
Zuckerkandl shows that if you arrange the notes of music in a graph, and on p.119 - I'll put these in the notes that we have for the phase - he arranges the notes without the note diagram, just as streaks of calibrated line. He says here, 'When we look at it in this graphic way, where is the continuously progressing line, the symbol of continuity of motion? It's in stasis-gap-stasis-gap. Our graph is the perfect image of discontinuity. One is at a loss to understand how this can ever be heard as a continuous process.' He goes on and after several pages he comes to this conclusion in his presentation, 'So little heard motion and illusion, a conjuring up of something where nothing is, that the frank recognition of the fact nothing does not cause the slightest break in the experience of motion.'
One finds this in Zen. The most powerful koan in Zen, it's in Japanese, given the name Mu, 'Emptiness is form, form is emptiness.' It is a do-si-do quality that identity is not a bar but is an infinity sign coming back around again in a return, in such a way that the return, if it is time-bound it moves forward so that you get, instead of an infinity sign, you get a moving connected series of infinity signs. In Ancient Egypt about 3000BC, 5,000 years ago, the first great mural in burial tombs in the pyramid, one finds the royal cobras arranged such that the cobras make big figure eights standing up and they are all linked together like an accordion of king cobras. This was, for the Egyptian wisdom 5,000 years ago, was called - in translation the best English phrase is - 'living time'.
If one is able to join into the flow of this time, this space-time, and undergo the transforms so that the integral is not just the completion of it but includes the further conscious fertility of it, one does not just go into that flow, but one goes into the field of eternity. One finds in the Osirian religion, where is Osiris when he sits on his throne? In the eternal heavenly afterlife he sits before a field of renewal, which the person having achieved the flow from their bodily form - having integralled their experience flow in their symbolic thought and allowed the conscious mind to occur as an eternal renewal field - they now will live forever in the realm of eternity. They can return to life if they choose, they can remain in eternity if they choose, but they never again will die.
The ancient wisdom was truncated for several reasons. One of the reasons is that it has a subtleness to it that takes getting used to and for most men and women, they didn't have the largesse of time, they didn't have the background, they didn't have the training, so that this had to be a secret wisdom. It was only for the rarefied few and at the head of the rarefied few was always the pharaoh, the divine king, the royal apex. They had a need to know and anyone advising them had a need to know. The builders of the pyramids, the writers of the hieroglyphs, they had to know but outside of that was a vast, massive ignorance.
And so what was presented to them was a mythological overlay like the surface of a bubble. They were taught that there is only this surface to pay attention to and that this bubble, the imagery of it, the arrangement of it was very much like the landscape of the earth and it is the surface of the earth on which we live, 'Do not trouble yourself with the underworld, the inside of it. Do not trouble yourself with the overworld, the heavens above. Those of us who do can confirm to you that your life is real here and we have taken care of what is really deeply below and what is really high above.' The difficulty with that is that progressively fewer and fewer people really understand and there are times where the lineage breaks and there is no one alive who understands. Now you have a real crisis. You have to have someone who can generate, from scratch, the ability to refigure that out and understand what they were talking about, what they were writing about, what all these things are, what really does occur.
One of the severest breaks in the tradition happened in the 1600s, the 1640s. Almost no one alive at that time, in that generation, understood what anything was about and so you had a lot of people promoting fantastic geometric metaphysical doctrines that seemed convincing. One of the most indelibly important exemplars of that was a Frenchman named Rene Descartes, he was born about 1596, he died in 1650. He was touted as being the genius of his time and he was under royal demand to come and set up these new ways of learning and understanding. He was invited by the Queen of Sweden but when he went to Sweden, as a Frenchman he wasn't used to the Swedish winters, he caught pneumonia and he died at 54. The Cartesian world was a mechanical world where everything had to fit in and work like clockwork.
Two great religious visionaries later took umbrage at the way in which Descartes' mechanistic geometry world was ignoring the spirit world, the higher realms, the deeper mysteries. One of them influenced William Blake, who is one of our pair that we are taking, he was influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg. The other is W.B. Yeats who was influenced very deeply by Giambattista Vico whose New Science was published about the same time that Swedenborg began publishing his great works. So you have two great visionary influences on two individuals that we are taking, not to compare them but to ratio them, William Blake and W.B. Yeats. They came out a hundred years apart, almost to the day, with the two things that we are presenting. One of them is Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, the other is Yeats' A Vision. Now you can see it take a great deal of patience to hear and to learn and to just bounce off it serves no purpose whatsoever other than continued confusion. Let's take a break.
Let's come back and immediately come into play. With nature as a field and myth as a flow, existentials will find their completion in an integral. If the integral is closed off, the integrals will identify on the basis of having a connection with the existentials. This is called causality. That causality is a delusion. We need to be specific about this so that we can understand. It is in actual practice an illusion but it's what Wallace Stevens once called the necessary angel. It is an illusion that they are connected but to believe that they are connected is a delusion. Not only that, but the mind that is deluded because it is closed off and believes in the illusion, not as an appearance but as the causal connectedness, will assign an agent mediating the existential and the integral. This is where the ego becomes an assigned agent of the closed mind.
The ego, in its assignment, takes over the function of the character in the mythic experience, so that our character of - not he who experiences but the character of experiencing as a flow - now becomes delusionally coagulated around an experiencer who is my ego, who arbitrates between the two points of identification and thus my identity is bound up in the way in which my ego has authority as the experiencer. All of this is a syndrome, to give it a psychological term, it is a syndrome of delusion. To try to see through it by not having an illusion occur is itself one of the pretzels of delusion. One of the most delusional things we can have is to think that we have become freed or emancipated because we no longer see an illusion. This is literally to lose the magic of the show of life. We no longer have any illusions, we know the mechanics, the mechanism by which this connectiveness occurs and he connector testifying and witnessing to that is our ego. The ultimate appeal, the authority, is that we have a symbolic self who has control over this ego, who completes the entire cycle and aren't we then important.
To try to see through this in terms of dispersing the illusion, being delusional, is one of the characteristics that promotes a doctrine to becoming, then, a metaphysic. One of the great problems in human civilisation, human life, is that we are tyrannised by doctrines, but we are sabotaged by metaphysics. It is a real, consistent problem, pair of problems, that occur. Consciousness, like nature, is a field, but is a differential field, not an integral field. Its differentiality is that it is able to do an exchange with the structure of symbolic thought so that one of the energies, one of the dynamics of the field of consciousness - remembering - is able to come into the structure of the mind and recalibrate it by giving it the ability to have a memory. To make the exchange equable - which is the ancient way of understanding this - to maintain the equability, the structure in the symbolic thought, that is the imagination, exchanges places with remembering, in the sense that now consciousness has the ability to have creative imagination as a conscious time space field dynamic. It is now a process, whereas in symbolic thought the imagination is a definite integral of, not form, but of structure.
In consciousness it is a free differential flow. It is out of that free differential flow that art forms come from. It is the play of conscious imagination that allows for art forms to occur and one of the most prized art forms that we know of is the creative person, the artist. The artists themselves are an art form. The spiritual person is an art form, in the sense that they are not an integral form, like an existential, that is generated by pragmatic steps, but works of art, spiritual persons, are prismatic forms. The time-honoured way to describe that is that they are jewels. Those jewels have a further differential, just like existentials will have a further integral, being able to be pulled together in symbolic thought, in its structure, like an idea, or like a centre of one's self, the idea of one's self. The further differential form is actually the cosmos. Not the cosmos as a thing, as an integral, but the cosmos as an infinite differential.
So that consciousness has a very peculiar quality; it can do a do-si-do with the structure of symbolic thought so that memory and imagination interchange the centres of their structure and their dynamic with each other but at the same time consciousness, as a field, is able to come into a synergy, as we would call, with the field of nature. Nature allows, then, for consciousness, conscious space time, for a five dimensionality, to come into play and when it comes into play it comes into creative play. One of the noticeable things is that the forms, the existentials, the forms that come out of a creative, playful nature, will participate in play.
One notices this almost everywhere in what is called the world of natural history. Young things of almost any species of variety play. It's a characteristic. Not only do young human beings play, young animals play. I talked, a couple of months ago, about when the LA Zoo, years ago, had a baby rhino, and it was extraordinary to see a baby rhino play. Its play was to nudge its mother as if to try and push her out of the way and then scamper around, and at one end of the pen there was a big mud place, slide into the mud, get all muddy, go over to the mother, nudge her and get her muddy, then go and play again. To see a rhinoceros play, a baby, is extraordinary.
What is revelatory in natural history, the more one gets into the qualities of life, living things, they all play: plants play; animals play; birds play. I remember one time taking my daughter to the Huntington art gallery and gardens. We were having a nice little lunch on one of the benches way out on one of the trail roads under the big pines and this baby hummingbird would fly really high and then drop by folding its wings. The pressure would give a little 'Peep!' And it would go fly back up and again go through this thing and play. We know now that all organic forms of life play. They love to play, which means that they have a conscious dimension that has already come into play in nature when the earliest stars formed 14 billion years ago.
The earliest star systems with planets or moons able to harbour life are at least 13 billion, 14 billion perhaps, maybe only twelve billion years old, so there may have been conscious time space quintessential dimensions in the cosmos seven billion years before our star system even formed. But not only that, we know now from astrophysics, just by the end of 2006 the list was bumped up, that in interstellar clouds of hydrogen and helium and a few other elements, that there are organic molecules. The list now is 141. In between the stars, in between galaxies, there are molecular clouds that have, now the list at 141 and there will be more, organic compounds already at play. Life is, organic life, is molecularly as freely distributed as inorganic matter, everywhere in the universe.
Its original matrix out of which is came - the quark-gluon plasma before particles and elements and atoms were even formed - that the plasma state of matter is in constant play, constant dynamic seething joy, as it were. And so it isn't just the mystics and the artists and the poets but it is any and every species that really looks at the way in which existentials iteratively, vibrantly, occur, are really structured into integrals and really transform into conscious time spaces and bring prismatic forms, differentially, into being. The cosmos is the infinite array of this. One of the high Dharma terms in advanced Vajrayana is that it is a [59.48 dual/jewel] matrix. In the ancient original sermons of the historical Buddha, he called it a triple levelled cosmos.
When we take a look, in our Symbols phase of our learning, we are constantly giving ourselves the attentiveness that while this is a completion of a cycle, it is also preparing a threshold opening, a gate. Not just a doorway, but a gate, and not just a gate but a horizonal gate which is a threshold. That threshold extends initially around the shape of the entire integral in our mind. If the mind has no boundary lines within which the form is coloured, then the colour is able to be distributed everywhere in a new creative imagining space. About the turn of the 20th century, you had two powerful artists who saw this in a spiritual, personal artistic way. One of them was Monet, the other was Cezanne. Cezanne saw that you can stagger the outlines of forms in such a way that you will not miss a clear, static form but you will kaleidoscopically be able to see facets that were originally hidden in nature but are teased out by the prismatic presentation in a painting like Mont Sainte-Victoire. You can stare at the physical, natural Mont Sainte-Victoire forever and never see it in the glory of a Cezanne painting but once you see the Cezanne painting, you can look at the mountain and there it is. It's shimmering. It's unbelievable.
I lived for a while in Berkeley on the corner of College in Derby. Across the street from it was a new Protestant church building that was built as a Bernard Maybeck type structure, like a green and green, with all the nice little Japanese qualities to it. The grass would dry out in the front of it and we were positioned so that the full moon would come up over the Berkeley hills. There were moments where the pale blue of the evening sky and the full moon and the Japanese architecture looked exactly like a Hiroshige print. You could look at Hiroshige and develop the differential jewel-like visionary eye and see them. Once you had seen that you could look with Hiroshige eyes everywhere. One could be in the Presidio and be watching the fog bank roll in so that the Golden Gate Bridge only showed two spires above this incredible billowing white fogginess within which one, for the first time, heard not only the foghorns of the ships but because of the air refractions, one could hear the buoys clanging out by the Farallon Islands 30 miles away, and realise the phrase, 'The doors of perception have been cleansed.' The eyes have been opened.
The quality of consciousness, now, has found a prismatic differential form of the artisticness of the person who is enabled to never be trapped in static delusions ever again. Once one is out from there, you are indeed free. So that the issue of art is that it is freed from tyranny. The issue of science is that that freedom is cinched in a double distillation to be made eternal. Once one has returned one's jewelled spiritual self to inhabiting the cosmos, nothing will ever bring you back into tyranny again. Now this is an ancient wisdom, it is what we are working on here ourselves. But we need to turn away from the tyrannies of trying to ignore illusion as a necessary part of the way in which integrals will occur and to not allow for the sabotaging of our minds, not only by false doctrines, but the belief in them, which is delusional.
One of the qualities, at the turn of the 20th century that came out of the work of artists like Monet and Cezanne, had a cognate in science of people looking at psychic research. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, figure in that was William James, His essays in psychical research have been published in the collected edition of James, 1986, Harvard University Press. One of his earliest experiments was with automatic writing and of course we are taking a look at Yeats' A Vision, which his wife did with automatic writing. James, in 1889, found a man who could do automatic writing and that there was a persona who was expressing itself, himself, in the automatic writing. And so James, being one of the world's great scientists, he was a psychologist, one of the first great psychologists, he wrote the textbook, the first textbook in psychology, to big volumes. It was published in 1890, just the year after.
'One phenomenon,' he writes, 'of which Mr Hodgson and I have been witnesses, is both new and important. The hand and the arm of the automatic writer are, in certain instances at least, anaesthetic', so that as the man was doing his automatic writing, William James would take a pin and poke his hand, he would not feel it. But the persona that was doing the automatic writing felt it and was castigating William James, saying, 'You want me to continue writing and yet you're pricking me with this pin and now you have done it 19 times' to an exact specificity. The arm, the body, of the man, his corporeal, existential body had been transposed to what, at the time, was called an astral body. His body had been transposed but it wasn't moved, it was still in the room.
What had happened was that in the circulation of the psyche, through the structure of symbolic thought, into the differential cosmic initiating conscious time space had come back in such a way that, naturally, this body now in its iteration was not only existential but was magically existential and that its focus was on the astral aspect of it, as they would say at the time. So they gave him a planchette. They used to have Ouija boards in the 20s that came out of this sort of thing, where you could do writing with a planchette and move the planchette around and it would go from letter to letter and spell out words. 'The planchette began by illegible scrawling. After ten minutes I pricked the back of the right hand several times with a pin, no indication of feeling. Two pricks o the left hand were followed by withdrawal and the question, "What did you do that for?" to which I replied, "to find out whether you were going to sleep." The first legible words which were written after this were, "You hurt me."'
In other words, it was scrambled in terms of the synthesising symbol quality of the writer but it was scrambled because the astral writer didn't want anything to be communicated until it was ready and it communicated, 'You hurt me' and 'You want me to write for you?' One of the peculiar things about Yeats' wife is that four days after their marriage, because she realised that he was really, not only one of the world's greatest poets but he was also one of the most magical occult figures of the time, a psychical genius, in fact: telepathic; clairvoyant, etc. She began to do the automatic writing to make sure that he would keep interest in her and after a while the writer of the automatic writing took over and began communicating to Yeats in a Yeatsian way, not in her way. She was not a poet. She was not particularly a psychic genius.
What the communicator communicated was the seeds, the words, the phrases, the odd angles which became the basis of Yeats' poetry, which after this began in 1917 for the rest of his life, the last 22 years of Yeats' life, his poetry blossomed, in a way. Where before he was like a very good poet, he now became one of the world's greatest poets. He's always considered the greatest poet of the 20th century. His ability was not to be influenced by the figure and the automatic writing, but to have those kinds of seeds, in bits, out of which he could grow, in himself, in his differential artistic personality the way in which the creative imagination, now, instead of being channelled in old poetic tropes and ways, began to experiment with huge new qualities of proportions and ratios. Yeats' later poetry is a wonder to behold. Here's a poem from 1938. He's in his mid 70s. Imitated from the Japanese,
A most astonishing thing / Seventy years have I lived; / (Hurrah for the flowers of Spring / For spring is here again.) / Seventy years have I lived / No ragged beggar man, / Seventy years have I lived, / Seventy years man and boy, / And never have I danced for joy.
He danced, to have that experience. Now there are resonances that go back, creatively, to this that Yeats was very familiar with. For instance the archetypal figure who danced with joy was King David 3,000 years ago: David, who 'Danced before the Lord with all his might.' It was always remembered because at the time David was older, he was, if not 70, close enough to it. He was at the end of a distinguished life as a warrior, as a fighter, as the king - the first really powerful king that that part of the world had seen for a very, very long time - but he had been told that he could not build the temple to God because of the way in which he had lived, the way in which he had gotten to be king, the vicissitudes by being a warrior and a general for so many years. But that he was permitted to buy the plot of land upon which the temple would be built.
This plot of land was outside of the city of Jerusalem at the time, just to the North of it and it was the threshing floor where the grain was brought in from all the different outlying farms and was threshed there on that ground so that one then had the staff of life: the grain to make bread. He bought the great huge threshing floor to be the site of the temple. His dancing before the Lord with all his might was a dancing to celebrate on that threshing floor that here man's entire harvest of history would be presented to God and he danced so fiercely that his loincloth came off and he danced with his genitals swinging in the wind. It was always remember for 3,000 years. He did this not out of vulgarity, but out of a supernatural joy, because he was dancing for the Lord and not for man. That's what Yeats' poem here, 1938, is about.
We are taking a learning that does not stick us in the tar babies and the sandpits of the past. By now the world is a minefield of things left over from the delusional past. Almost anywhere, in any way that you step, you are going to be co-opted, trapped, sabotaged, tyrannised over. It is not necessary to do this and one of the most necessary aspects is to stop seeking for a way to dispel the illusion: that just because things have no causality, that they do not resonate together. They do. By carrying our zeros with us all the time, the ones and the zeros together will do a special transform, a special recalibration. The transform is in the body, in the existential body, the recalibration is in the symbolic thought.
What happens here is that we move from a binary of zero and one to a binary of zero and infinity, and that those two binaries together weave, in such a special pivotal way, that we now have a four-polar quality of chiral magnetic pivoting, that produces, in fact, is, real. And so we move from the mind, even the conscious mind, to the real. Not only does nature accept this, existence itself exemplifies this, experiences itself vibrantly, flows with this. The symbolic structure of thought not only is open in a gateway or a threshold but is completely open everywhere that it has for its orientation. In this way, freedom is jacked up of freedom from this to that, through this gate, beyond the freedom of always having the gate open, to having no definitional limitations whatsoever.
Wallace Stevens had a very interesting poem. He was the Vice President of Hartford Insurance Company and he used to write the Poem for the Day when he was taking the commuting train from Hartford Connecticut into New York City. And his Executive Secretary would take the Poem for the Day, first order of business. One of them was about the good man has no shape and also has no face. One of the concluding lines in the poem was that 'people will say the good man has no shape and has no face, as if they knew.' More next week.