Symbol 12
Presented on: Saturday, December 23, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to our Symbols 12 which means that we rounding out a whole cycle; it's an annual cycle that has for its measurement, classically, the sun as a whole cycle and the moon as a series of twelve cycles. That pace of the sun and the moon reoccur throughout history, throughout computation and calibration. One of the oddest presentations of that was done by W.B. Yeats from 1917 to 1937, for those 20 years. We're taking his book called A Vision and in A Vision he brings the sun and the moon, in their cycles, into play with a very complex kind of cosmology that was teased out of automatic writing which his wife Georgie was able to sustain.
Then they made a discovery that both of them, each of them, could keep a dream notebook of the dreams that they had that meshed with the automatic writing that was produced. Then over a long period of time Yeats made note cards, 3x5 cards with which he was able to index the dream notebooks and the automatic writing. With his note cards and those three calibrations allowed him to bring into play his enormous symbolic thought with his tremendous psychic talent and his very careful monitoring of his ritual comportment in the world: the things he did, his behaviour, his relationalities. Out of all of this, the crown to it was a vision, visionary qualities, so that when you looked at it, from a symbolical standpoint, there were four qualities but those qualities are not the four that we have understood in our learning but they involved phases 2, 3, 4 and 5.
The phase that was left out was Nature, and left out in a peculiar way, because most of the learning throughout history has been to, not be able to sense the occurrence of nature but, rather, to import to nature the qualities of things that are extant, existential. And so existence, de facto, became the beginning of the counting and its count was one, oneness, unity. From that unity developed the two, the three and the four. It was very rare that you found a high wisdom, a deep Dharma, or a deep wisdom, a high Dharma is how I learned to talk about it 40 years ago. The high Dharma is that though Tao can be talked about as a zero, the zero computes: it does not count but it computes.
What the zeroness computes is that all of the developments from unity, from oneness constitute a set which is punctuated again in whatever ordinal repeat that it has, the zeroness computationally comes into play, so that while you can count from one to nine, ten is a one again with a zero. If you count through its cardinality, by the time you get to two zeros, 100, you have now counted, not nine, but 99, so that the ten-ness of the reoccurrence, computationally, of zero has also jumped the cardinal sequence by that factor, so that ordinality, now, has become an extension of cardinality. If you compute the zero three times so that you get 1000, the cardinal sequencing will have been 999, or 100 times the nine.
In the high Dharma you cannot count zero but its occurrence is always there, not as a factor of computation but as an ordinal of computability, so that the computability, actually, in terms of an integral cycle, is that with a zero and a one you can express any aspect to an approach of its actual appearance, it's actual, though it may be an illusion, it's a very close approximation. The phrase used about 50 years ago by a very distinguished critic Owen Barfield, who was very esoteric and also very learned, one of the titles of one of his books is Saving the Appearances. By saving the appearances, we now have a source which is not descriptive of something in terms of its identity so much as it is a very rich description in terms of its possibilities for metaphor.
Thus what comes out of the transformation of the dance of illusion, ever approaching actuality closer and closer, what comes out of that is an ability for language to undergo a massive, deep-sea change from rhetoric to a poetic. From a rhetoric where one is rhetorical in terms of the way in which symbolic thought would structure out the forms of things in existence, in accordance with how the experience is generated from them, and the vision of what this meaning might expand to and carry to. So that when you get into a high Dharma teaching, vision is always a quintessential, not a completing quality, it's not a part of the completeness of the cycle, but it is a transform of the forms in the cycle and it is a recalibration of the structure of the integral.
So that visionary consciousness has, in the high Dharma, a very peculiar and distinct quality, best appreciated in the following way: nature, as it occurs in its zeroness, is a field, a very special field. Vision, in its phase, is also a field and shares with nature an ability to have a zeroness. Though it can be quintessential and one could count it as a fifth, it actually occurs with its zero being a different zero from the zero of nature. Graphically, literally, symbolically, if you put those two zeros together, their continuity will be an infinity sign, so that in consciousness in the high Dharma, the way in which the binary would work is not zero and one but zero and infinity.
The field of conscious vision can so absorb with the field of nature that the classic way to speak of that is 'This now occurs as an eternal eternity' and that the oneness, that definitely existence is, its is-ness, is a fulcrum that balances perfectly between an eternity and an infinity. Thus, in a really deep wisdom teaching, like the I Ching, the classic phrase translates 'Heaven suspends its emblems.' They do not rest on anything, they rather are suspended in an eternal infiniteness that is a complementarity, not a singleness, but an interpenetrative complementarity.
All through our heritage, the truncation and the reduction of these high Dharma exemplars into exemplars that could be expressed symbolically and acted out ritually, and be given a character of experience, have reduced this down consistently and constantly so that most of the occult heritage of the world, most of the philosophic so-called heritage of the world, most of the world's wisdom is actually a misrepresentation and Yeats' A Vision is a classic exemplar of something that is a massive complicated, complex reduction.
It's very similar to the way in which William Blake discovered that he was not able to translate what he was able to vision unless he took a complementarity tack on his expression. So he came upon a tried and true high Dharma technique that has been used for ages without end. The technique was this: whenever he wrote or he illustrated to deliver reality, he would engrave the words and the images inside out. He would engrave them on copper plates so that when those copper plates printed, they would print out their not so much reverse but the reverse and the obverse as well.
This technique, classically, was used to great advantage by, say, Leonardo da Vinci. All of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are written with this mirror type script; upside down, backwards so that one would have to present it to a mirror. It's this mirror image, then, that one could read. Leonardo learned it from a high Dharma wisdom person who had lived several hundred of years before him, his name was Roger Bacon. And because Roger Bacon was arrested many times in his life, kept imprisoned for, sometimes, decades on end and had he been understood of what he was exploring and doing in his science and in his philosophy, he would have been killed. So he wrote all of his great books in this mirror script that had a special encoding on it so that only somebody who understood the deep impress of the actuality of how wisdom is delivered would be able to read and understand.
One of the great triumphs in the 1920s, when A Vision was being done, is Roger Bacon's great Magus Opus [?15.52 Opus Majus] was translated by a man named William Newbold who was at the time associated with Yale University and had trained himself to be able to read Roger Bacon and made beautiful translations of it. For the first time, Bacon lived in the 1200s, so after 700 years, it was possible for the very first time to be able to appreciate the enormity of the genius. One of the surprising things was that in the notebooks of Roger Bacon from about 1260 AD he had mastered the obverse of the telescope to the microscope and there are drawings of microscopic organs, like the ovum from a human female, and the sperm and beautifully given an exactness and a description that no one would have been able to do until the 20th century. He did this 700 years before that.
The quality of our life in the beginning of the 21st century is that high wisdom is almost nonexistent, because of the briar patch and the welter of overlays of rehashed difficulties, which distract us from the patience that is required in order to be able to allow ourselves to go deeper into this style of presentation. Classically, the description of that technique of engraving the words, the words when they read out, read out real, is in Philo of Alexandria, in his great classic treatise. We have 30 or 40 of his treatises, thankfully, that are still extant, but the one is called On the Contemplative Life.
He gives an exemplar there, where the president of the Therapeutae community, outside of Alexandria, would speak in such a way that the context o the sound of his voice, the context would not be the drone of the voice, but would have a silence that's carried with the voice, to give it a punctuation and an articulation in a flow of a particular kind: the flow of experience, that one is understanding what he is saying as he is saying it. One then has ears to hear that. But also Philo says that there was a space of silence within a silence, so that not only was there an articulation of the words in the experience of hearing it, but that the silence within a silence gave it an ordinal jump another zero, as it were. So that the understanding when you were able to not only hear with your own ears what was being said, but you were able to hear it within the silence of your silence, you would hear the ordinal eternity of what was being said.
That is what the logos is; it is the eternal word. And so the speaker identified himself as the word, the word which is engraved on the minds of the hearers so that when they were able to transform their body and to recalibrate the structure of their minds, the transform and the recalibration would carry the engraved language in the mind, into a realm where it could be read out in a spiritual way. This was 2,000 years ago. One of the great difficulties is that the modern world, especially because of the weight of the occult movements that proliferated from the 16th century through the 20th century, overlaid a distortion so great that by the time of the late 20th century it was almost impossible for someone to really understand.
We have here a little comment, commentary, a Jungian commentary on William Blake's Illustration of The Books of Job, entitled Encounter with the Self, Edward F. Edinger, a very famous Jungian, a wonderful writer and completely unknowing of the scale of his ignorance. For instance, just to give you a paragraph, the illustrations are given on one side and the commentary on the other. This is Plate 15 and the end of the commentary reads like this - and if one were psychologically oriented, not necessarily, but, even better, if one was Jungianly oriented, this would sound exactly right. It is irrelevant - it reads,
'Unconsciousness has an animal nature. Like all old gods, Yahweh has his animal symbolism with its unmistakable borrowings from the much older theriomorphic gods of Egypt, especially Horus and his four sons. Of the four animals of Yahweh only one has a human face. That is probably Satan, the godfather of man as a spiritual being. Ezekiel's vision attributes three-fourths animal nature and only one-fourth human nature to the animal deity, while the upper deity, the one above the sapphire throne, merely had the likeness of a man. This symbolism explains Yahweh's behaviour, which from the human point of view is so intolerable. It is the behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is the phenomenon and as Job says, not a man.'
All of this is drivel. We have been giving ourselves a yoga and in the continuity of that yoga we have understood that the set of an annual cycle, the sunset of a completion, which is universal in all cultures, all civilisations on this planet, or on any planet in any star system, it will have some complex variant of the way in which the planet, vis-à-vis its star, completes an annual cycle. We talked about it in Nature where it is not only that the planet has an orbit, not around the star, but a shared orbit around a barycentre, which is shared by the star and all of its planetary bodies, proportioned out so that the entire planetary and moon and astronaut-seeking vehicles and everything, not as a part of the star, will contribute, however microscopically, to where the barycentre will be in pure space, in pure vacuum.
The balance can be computed almost to any degree of specificity and the balance will always have with it an ordinality of proportion and ratio which can also be understood to any degree of specificity. One can even compute where the eccentricity or the obliquity or the progression of nodes and many other kinds of calculations of computationals can be delivered. The quality of nature is a zero, as a field, is an integral field. The quality of vision as a field is a differential field and you get a different kind of aspect in our learning when we have paid attention, again and again, in our yoga, to developing the square of attention, the frame of reference, the way in which the picture is made.
That square, that rectangular, if you will, that way of seeing, that attentiveness with a geometricity, a geometric of composition will always, when it fills, jump to a different square of attention if you add one more phase to it so that if you add visionary consciousness as a phase to your square of attention, the most previous distant phase will go out of the square of attention. It will become, as one would say colloquially using appearance language, it would become unconscious. It is not unconsciousness; it is simply not in the square of attention currently.
Blake, like any artist, like any spiritual being, understood and found that if you move to the next phase, the next differential phase, that of art, what goes out of the square of attention is existence, ritual existence. As soon as you bring the sense of the spiritual person into play as the art, now, of being a spiritual person who has emerged from the visionary consciousness into a differential prismatic form, now there is no nature in the square of attention and there is no ritual. There is no ritual comportment, no existentiality. It is not unconscious, it is not vanished, it is simply not in the attention.
One of the most interesting volumes that was published in the great year of 1892, right after his friend Walt Whitman died in 1891, was by Edward Carpenter, an Englishman who was extraordinarily intelligent and he went on a pilgrimage tour of Ceylon in India. He published in 1892 a book called From Adam's Peak to Elephanta. Adam's Peak is one of the great original mountains on Ceylon and always talked about as the original place in which Adam was formed. The reason it was taught that way is that 2,000 years ago the most poignantly succinct apostle of Jesus, St Thomas, went to Southern India and went all across Southern India to where Madras is today, and went across the little isthmus to Ceylon, and identified Adam's Peak there in order to give some kind of a grounding for the beginnings of a Hellenistic Jewish Christian understanding to the innate Buddhists who were there at the time, so it got that name.
Elephant is one of the great cave, art cave sequences in India, in Maharashtra, Pradesh, where Mumbai, used to be Bombay, it is on the coast, it's inland from there. He has, in his book, From Adam's Peak to Elephanta in chapter nine, the chapter is entitled Consciousness Without Thought, because one can keep moving in terms of the phases which our yoga is developing so that if you move to a historical consciousness, which is kaleidoscopic, what goes out of the frame of attention is mythic experience. It transforms and becomes the kaleidoscopic historical consciousness.
If you move one phase more, to a cosmic science, what goes out of the square of attention is the symbolic thought structure and you are left with consciousness without thought. So that a very advanced super yogi does not think with his symbolic structure, he thinks with a whole ecology from the zeroness of consciousness to the infinity of the cosmos as a complementarity ecology that when it fits in with an integral cycle of the natural four phases, those eight together disclose a complementarity that is always described as real, the real. The real will be a nine quality, and will have, for its sustainability, the two zeros, the field of nature and the field of vision together. But look here; we also, we're going alternate phases. A phase of process will generate a phase of form.
There are two kinds of processes: fields and flows. They generate two different kinds of qualities in the integral, one forms, forms that are existential, they exist. The other structures that symbolise and hold their unity as integral structures, but the differential forms of art and of science are graduated as well, because the forms of art will come out of the field of creative vision and the forms of science will come out of the flow of historical kaleidoscopic consciousness. Each from, in its kind, in its way, generates the next phase, so that the cosmos is the infinite prismatic differential form, generates the field of nature.
So that one gets a very interesting kind of a bi-play here, that what was perhaps initially in some dreamable way, what was appearance and accepted on the basis of necessary illusion, once it has been brought full, double circle, all the way around, it becomes, not illusion, but becomes real by virtue of its participation as real. Now, whatever is emerged from nature has not only its natural quality of being able to exist, not only its transformed quality of being able to be possible variations of what exists but now it also has the third quality of being, not only existentially possible, as a form, and tranofrmationally possible as all possible forms but of also being real.
One of the deepest qualities of this was in the way in which it used to be phrased. The phrasing was kept all the way into the late 19th century. A document which was written at the time that was quite famous and fabulous was called All Worlds. Later on in the mid 20th century, in trying to put together science fiction visions from every conceivable new angle of kaleidoscopic and prismatic writers, Groff Conklin entitled a big collection of All Possible Worlds. It is this quality that one finds in Zen. When we talked about, last week, the koan Mu, 'Emptiness is form; form is emptiness' the deeper source of that is not in Japan but in China.
The Japanese who carried it over from China in its most pristine form was Dogen, who lied about the time of Roger Bacon and was extraordinarily apt, in his large work, the Shobogenzo, is about the eye of enlightenment that is able to see for real. But the origin of it in China goes all the way back to the way in which there was a deepening of the meaning of the original I Ching of FuHsi to the second level of the human I Ching of the Duke of Zhou and King Wen to the third level of Lao Tzu's Tao Tê Ching which was the angle of recalibration for both I Chings - the celestial and the human - into a field, double field, where one could, for the first time, emerge real and not just celestial or well-balanced human, but both together in a synergy, as we would say, but a synergy that weaves, rather than lies parallel.
The figure that we are going to take at the beginning of vision is Chuang Tzu who was the first real, emergent, new kind of man in China from this triple, this double transform, the triple level: the transform of fermentation, the recalibration of distillation and then the emergence fresh into the real. We're going to take Chuang Tzu. We are going to pair with Chuang Tzu the most powerful classic statement of the way in which all of this happens and that is the hermetic original treatise, the Poimandres, the mind, creative mind, shepherd. So that with Chuang Tzu and the Poimandres, we are going to begin the way in which the gate of emergence into the transform and the recalibration actually do occur.
Now, Tao as a zero field will present, and does present, presents a perfect emptiness. In reality a perfect emptiness is also completely fertile so that the ancient way to talk about it is that it is a pleroma in the sense that it is so full up one cannot point to anything in it. One cannot point to it as the sum total of every part that's in it, that its fullness exceeds the ability to point at it. So that in China one of the great exemplars of this are two Taoist mad hermit monks who didn't meditate with the other monks but they always were sweeping the grounds of the monastery so that here would be open spaces for the other monks to walk among. One of them stopped sweeping and pointed at the full moon and the other one, leaning on his broom, laughed so long and so loud that he continues laughing forever.
The phrase in Zen that came out from this is that, 'Fingers pointing at the moon are not fingers; it is not the moon, there is no one pointing. Hence the laughter is eternal.' This quality of speaking is not mystical, it's not a conundrum; it's simply speaking in such a way that you will not think about it with a normal structure of symbolic thought, you will not reduce it with a characteristic illusion of experience and you will not imprison it in some kind of reductive ritual of sustainability but rather let it be free. And so we will discover that freedom is the real dimension of whatever does occur and does not ever not occur, both at the same time. Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's come back to a quality that is real and not ignorable now that by the 21st century we are going into a new millennial expansion which is going to carry our species beyond the current styles and limitations very quickly now. Every year will be like a decade. Here's a quotation from the latest issue of the International Science Journal, Nature,
'Most organic semiconductors are intrinsically ambipolar, meaning that they allow the movement of both electrons and so-called holes. Holes are positive charges, equivalent to the absence of an electron. This property has been difficult to exploit with thin organic semiconductor films, and single crystals might open new avenues towards this end.'
So that 21st century transistor restructuring will be field effect transistors, made of organic single crystals, positioned in a field display so that they constellate only where a pre-selected mask of intensity will allow them to emerge and occur.
What we are looking at here is a very advanced yoga of civilisation, a learning which is indefinitely refineable and very quickly brings us to a maturity where we can, again, listen to just a little bit of this paragraph that supposedly is intelligent, and 20 years ago cutting edge, and even now today would be cutting edge for most people, 'Unconsciousness has an animal nature.' Animals occur so recently that there are at least four and a half billion years in this star system alone before you can really confidently talk about the kind of animals that one is putting into the picture here. To say that the human face of the four visionary icons in Ezekiel's vision is Satan is to completely misunderstand. We could go on with this. The likeness of 'the one above the sapphire throne,' the likeness of a man, that phrase actually occurs in Daniel as well as in Ezekiel.
One of the qualities that we are developing here is a refined sensibility of our heritage and without understanding what things are and what they do and what they can do, it is useless to suppose that there is going to be anything other than rumour and largely rumours of wars. When Blake is illustrating, and here is a beautiful book by Kathleen Raine, who is a Jungian in orientation but she is a poetess, not a therapist, Irish and understood Blake extremely well. Her book is The Human Face of God. In it, this illustration shows God behind male and female as a tuning pair. Blake's caption is that this is the angel of the divine presence, clothing Adam and Eve in coats of skins, not for them to be animals, but to have the appearance of a style of character that brings them out of an eternity into a worldly appearance so that they can live and experience in the world of appearances.
The phrase, 'Man and woman receive coats of skins' comes from Genesis 3 verse 21, as they leave Eden for the mortal world. Blake writes, 'Some find a Female Garment there, / And some a Male, woven with care; / Lest the Sexual Garments sweet / Should grow a devouring Winding-sheet.' In other words, if there were not a polarity of genders the worldliness illusion would become a delusion of continuity without any articulation, without any coming together of opposites, without any kind of a polarisation that allows for a stability long enough for the transform and the recalibration to actuality occurs. What would occur is that the illusion would be believed in, in a superficial way, and it would result in delusion.
So that genderability is not a function of animals at all but genderability has a different quality. It goes as deep as cells, as bacteria, one can go down to the very beginnings of organic relationalities, it is not a characterisation later on, purely. In Blake, two illustrations, one from Illustration 7 where the calamities have happened to Job and he and his wife are confronted with the arguments of three detractors to Job. He is castigated by the three that he must have done something wrong, God will not punish with no cause. After the three detractors comes a fourth, a young, very mobile, very avant-garde detractor who pursues even further, and finally one has a deep transform and recalibration.
And by Illustration 15 at the top the three detractors and Job and his wife are no longer the centre of the tableau but they are in an upper registry and down below is a quality where there is a complementarity of the ocean, symbolised by the Leviathan, and the Behemoth, who symbolises the land, so that the world is presented with these two icons symbolically. The author, Joseph Wickstead, who is extremely famous for this book, it was the first time that anyone took a deep look at the minutiae of the iconographic presentation of Blake and found that the placement of the feet, the placement of the hands, every detail of the composition was a presentation of further meaning. His initial statement here, on Illustration 15,
'The design shows us the creation of the outer or natural world which to Blake seemed but a shadow of the world within. In the foregoing the deity points with right forefinger towards the stars while the mortal men below gaze up in rapture. Now he points with his left hand down to the regions below man, though included in the mundane belt of clouds.'
As we spoke before the break of the Zen fingers pointing at the moon evoking the humour of the two Taoist monks, here what is generated is the deep delight at the revelation of ordinality: that the stars are not an object but an indefinite constellating of objectiveness in the velvet openness, of not just the spaces in between but of the field out of which those stars have emerged themselves. And, deeper, by the 21st century we understand that space itself is a form and has emerged out of this mysteriousness of the Tao, which nature as an occurrence, in its zeroness, has the ability to generate.
The other pointing is that not only above but deeper within there are these expansions and dimensions, the telescopic and the microscopic, and that our appearance of life is a surface. It is a surface that has a depth to it, that has a height of context to it and that the contextual expansions, both together, form not so much spheres but form ordinals of possibility. So our learning, our education, our quality, is not just an investigation to follow a path or to follow a line through its geometries and even to transform those geometric computations to trigonometric functions but to acquire the ability to see that all of that arranges itself only in the phase of symbolic thought and that symbolic thought is a structure rather than a form. That existentials, rather being forms, can transform, but symbolic thought, being a structure, does not transform, it recalibrates and not just revaluation but a recalibration.
Its calibration, originally, for its integral is always from the ritual patterning of action that goes to make up the unities that occur in existence and existence itself is such a unity. That existence itself is a unity that can be recalibrated traditionally has the name of a theophany. It is theophantic [?56.05 thophanic] to come to, not understanding, but come to an acceptance of the inability to point at and know and that acceptance of the inability is not that one cannot point and refinedly point but that pointing itself is insufficient means. Identification itself is an insufficient means for an integral to carry itself all the way through to completion, and that the completion comes from the ability to accept.
In our learning at the bridge between the first and second years, between the integral and the differential, the page that you would come to is a page on acceptance; that the final stage of integration is not to dot the i's, not to put the period, not to end it, but to rather place, if you are going to put a punctuation, a dash or an ellipse, or just simply leave it open, not so much to be continued but to be accepted in its completeness, as complete as it can be. That acceptance is like the Zen brushstroke that does not complete the circle but in its vitality will make a Zen circle that has an openness to it, or the weaving of a Navajo rug, as we talked about earlier in the year where one thread will the spirit trail that leads off the rug out of the composition to give it breathing space for the spirit.
That the whole comportment of integral in its completeness is, like Lao Tzu, to realise that the utility of a cup is its space and that by our leaving ourselves open, especially at the apex of the symbolic structure of thought allows for acceptance, then, to receive a breath of freshness, which then absorbs through that acceptance the completeness of the integral and brings it into play so that it is now free in a differential mode, where its binary is no longer zeros and ones but zeros and infinities. Those two zeros, the field of nature and the field of consciousness, overlay in such a way that now consciousness as a fifth dimension, a quintessential dimension has absorbed all of the acceptance of the entirety of the cycle of integral nature and has delivered it over to this next ecology of developing the possibilities into infinity.
Those two together, in their complementarity, are what were called in ancient times the eternal. Not that eternity is a thing, it is at least five or six phases beyond thing-ness. But there is a quality that in ancient illustrations, because Blake was not the first, there have always been illustrations, the Tabula of Cebes, who was a Pythagorean, who is featured in one of Plato's dialogues. We have here on the Tablet of Cebes, one of the earliest, about 2,000 years ago, 2,100 years ago, about 100BC, we have the presentation here of a depiction. The old man in the centre is the spiritual teacher. In ancient Greek the word is spelt D-a-i-m-o-n, daimon, not demon, but is the inner spirit who is a tutor, and a tutor in a special spiritual way.
It is actually a Pythagorean development which Plato learned first of all from Socrates, who learned it from his Pythagorean teacher Diotema, who learned it from Pythagoras. But also Plato learned it a second time when he was about 40 years of age, from a Pythagorean named Archytas who lived in Southern Italy at Tarentum, who is the one who said to Plato, 'Now that you have become mature as a man at 40 and you have understood both how to transform the ritual physicality of the world and how to recalibrate the symbolic objectivity of your thought, you must found a school to deliver this in your own way.' Out of that Plato founded the Academy in Athens.
The old man at the centre is the daimon, he is giving instructions to those on his left. These are identified by the inscription below the daimon's feet as those entering into life. Those who are emerging from nature, from the zero filed of nature into the corporeal ritual existence. On the daimon's right sits Deceit who is giving her portion of ignorance and error to the young man as he enters into life. Above Deceit is Tyche standing on a ball. Tyche is the forerunner of what in medieval times became Dame Fortune, Lady Luck.
You find the same iconography in a different expression at the centre of the Tibetan Vajrayana mandala The Wheel of Life, the serpent chasing the pig, who is chasing the rooster, who is chasing the serpent. This wheel is the wheel of fortune in the tarot cards, it is always going around. In the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Aunty has this wheel for those who break her law and you have to face the wheel, 'Bust a deal, face the wheel.' This Deceit and Tyche, as we have been talking about, this is the beginning of the overlay, the briar patch that occurs because a reflective closing off of symbolic thought has produced a mirror quality where one looks for things in the world to establish what things are going to be identified in the mind.
The carrier is not so much the images , nor is it the feelings. The insidious character of that kind of deceit is language, and is the misuse of language; the closing off of meaning so that the meaning now is established by doctrines, by laws, by codes, by the binding of action as a religio, by the binding of meaning as a theology, so that one now is not able to be open to the real but one is in a closed circuit, in an ambit that, in order to sustain itself, must constantly extend its base in the world, so that eventually there is no one left who does not believe this. There is no one left that does not live by this. The expectation is that when we are 100% unified then we will have achieved the completeness which was our right to expect all the time.
The Tablet of Cebes goes on, briefly, above those on Tyche's left are begging for her gifts while those on her right have already received them. The identity of the figure standing above the wall of the place where [ break in recording 1.06.07] life, Zoe in Greek, [Bioc 1.06.13] in Latin here, where Life is written, the figure is a male personification of life and understands it, then, that it might be also a personification of Paideia, which is the learning which a whole civilisation has, not just in education, but the learning which a civilisation embodies.
This quality of illustration, using emblematic and symbolic structures to convey a very complex and deep teaching, goes all the way back to Palaeolithic art, as we have shown earlier this year. The earliest Palaeolithic art arranged like this was about 33,000 years ago, in Southern France. The cave was discovered about ten years ago, called Cosquer, it's on the bay where Marseille, France, is located. It's only about 20 - 30 kilometres from the port of Marseille. But the difficulty is that 35,000 years ago the coastline was much higher, several hundred feet higher and the subsidence meant that the entrance to the cave was 140 feet below the water. Only because of the fantastic adept French divers - who pioneered aqualungs, by the w ay - were able to discover the entrance to the cave, to brave the 400 feet through murky tunnelled water - three divers lost their life - and to surface in a cave that had not had anyone in it for over 25,000 years. There, in the cave, arranged, were constellations of images that obviously were an initiatory path of relationality, of someone being walked by the little handheld animal fat torches that they had, they have been found in caves, they were used, even in to recent times in the Middle East. They were shown, in the midst of the subterranean darkness, the brilliant coloured imagery of what was on the surface of the world now has been brought underneath the world. But you were shown in a mystical way so that it was not that you were looking at those images but those images were dramatically engraving themselves into your imagination. Those feeling tones were being gifted to you; those weren't your feelings, they were gifts of feelings to you.
The language that would have been used, like the language we talked about of a Philo of Alexandria, words engraving themselves on the mind so later when you thought of them the words would leap out into reality. Or Roger Bacon or Leonardo da Vinci writing mirror scripts so that you would have to hold a mirror up to be able to read them. The language, the images, the feelings were impressed, were gifted, were bestowed, were given to you, so that when you re-emerged out into the surface of the world and you saw those animals, you saw those configurations, you now had eyes which not only looked at something but looked through them to a realisation that there is a pattern that you had not seen before that unites them all. They do not just work together in the rituals of existence, but they have a character of shareability of experience that is interpenetrative and is also a level of unity, and, even deeper, that there is a meaning to all this that also has a pattern that is realisable.
So that realisation was the completeness of the integral pattern in such a way that the openness allowed for sparks of insight to occur now, not just as fleeting sparks of insight but they occurred in such a way that they left, also, a trail of meaning, a trail of characterability, a trail of actual ritual actions of comportment that now you could experience, you could do. These are called, in the Greek term, epiphanies. Instead of just an insight that was fleeting, it was an epiphany that lasted in its resonance. The more epiphanies that one had, the more the lasting resonance of them were like inner conscious torches that illuminated a quality of hidden-ness that was not within but was without. Now one could look out and understand that those stars were like those torches in a celestial realm of immensity, which you were affine to. Not just because you were good and deserved it but because you were emerged freshly, originally, from the very foundations of the earth, from the very foundations of your integral-ness as a being. And that that was home just as much as the valleys you hunted, as the forests you gathered in, this was home also. That eventually becomes a visionary dimension which transforms all of space-time.
We're trying to encourage for ourselves not to be suspicious of appearances, that there are illusory qualities to perception. It is true that they are. But it may not be deception because there is such a thing as legerdemain. There is such a thing as the magician who is showing you, not just for tricks, but revealing that the quality of your attentiveness is not refined enough to be able to see how this is done, though it does happen. Someone pulls a bird out of your ear, or, like a David Copperfield, will suddenly have a scarf of 30 yards just unfold from a hand that was open a second ago. Magic in the sense that now what is being conveyed to you is that someone has refined their ritual comportment enough to put on this performance for you and that even on this early level of ritual one can learn, even if you can't do it yourself, there are others who can, for the performance, for not just entertainment but for reminding.
There are more dimensions than you would suppose at any time and so you must let supposition rest where it is at home; in the symbolic structure of thought, not in your character of your experience. Not in the way in which you live, to be existentially objective and certainly not in nature, and neither in visionary consciousness. So that one of the qualities of structure of thought that we have seen with Symbols is that that structure allows for a play which, if closed off, becomes the taproot for deceit, the taproot for a belief in some kind of magic of fortune; that the randomness is actually what is there in between everything after all, and any conviction would be a vanity of vanities. That vanity of vanities includes itself and winks its own ecclesiastical suspiciousness back into the flow and the mix.
If you remember at the beginning of the year, we began with random walks à la David Thoreau and we took three random walks: from where you live; around your neighbourhood and back home. From where you live, keying it with some element like fire, water, air, earth, again random, but keyed with an element, tethered with one aspect that you would pay attention to. The third random walk was to do it with two elements, with something paired. Three random walks stacked like that is the beginning of the way in which an emergence occurs, not just once, but iteratively, resonantly, and that all things do not just happen but they continue to iteratively happen. When one gets the rhythm, the energy frequency of their happening, of their iteration, that quality of existentiality now becomes a quality of your existentiality. If you have danced that rhythm, you have an affinity with everything that is rhythmic in that way. If you have then later put those images on your body in your dance, that imagery, now, is a part of, not just the clothing of a ceremony, but becomes an image base which continues to expand for yourself.
One of the most surprising aspects in Plains Indian culture were the tepees. Every tepee had its own individual painting on it, its own symbols. One could buy those symbols only if you could learn the delivery of the mythos of those symbols, not just the images but what that entire tepee, as a cone of wholeness of vision, would amount to. That is the only way in which you could then receive it, not as the purchase of a possession but receive it as a gift of bestowal. You would in reciprocity do that gift to those, that, whomever bestowed something commensurate. Not just a fee, not just a price. The term in British Columbia was a potlatch, it meant the gift of exchange, of reciprocality. That reciprocality on the ritual level is an openness that carries all the way to the openness of the structure of symbolic thought. Otherwise one would never have the ability to complete by acceptance and to be swept into freedom by absorption. Not absorption into an oblivion but absorption into a whole new presencing quality that is based on the field of differential consciousness rather than just the field of integral nature.
That carries all the way through to the second year where we'll see that the cosmos itself generates the zero field of nature in such a way that it is always full. Out of its threshold of fullness, spontaneously, the existential will occur, is a quality of fullness, for this to happen. Our phases are threshold, they are what we called field effect transistors of a distribution so that one is not stuck in a superficiality, on a surface only. One can go into the depths and one can go into the heights as well. We are delivered, then, from a superficiality which otherwise would be so large, and curve so gradually, there would be no way, as long as one walked on the surface of that world, to understand that this was just the surface.
One of the great discoveries, of course, is that in the earth there are crystals that occur, and not just crystals like onyx, crystals of metals, of many different kids, even liquid crystals. These can deliver qualities of transcendent experience and of immanence that would not be there, observable. One of the classic cases of this is a bush that grows in parts of Africa, in Arabia and India, which if you scar this bush the whitish sap that comes out is frankincense, and has a particular crystalline molecular structure that allows for a quality of olfactory sensation that has a peculiarity to it. Frankincense activates two different levels of response at the same time. It is in effect a natural allegorical organic crystal. Next week we are going to look at Patanjali's Yoga Sutra which will be the completion of our first year and opening us to experience, then, the differential conscious ecology of vision, art, history and science.
More next week.