Vision 3
Presented on: Saturday, January 20, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Vision Three and we're attentive here to the field of consciousness. It is a field like nature is a field and as a field nature is a phenomenon, it is a phenomenal field. It has the ability to emerge existentials out of its field and the first phase - they used to say manifestation, emergence is better - the first phase is that of a plasma. And the plasma is able within its pressure wave changes, it is able to continue an integration, an integral cycle and so the plasma polarises and as the plasma polarises, you get a number of phenomenon characteristics that emerge. One of them is charge, positive and negative charges in existence, in existentials. Another is spin: there'll be a right and left hand chirality to existentials. And all of this deepens and we know now, with quite advanced particle physics, that there are indexes of emergence in the integral cycle that include such things as quantum colour. But the characterisations that stand traditionally are that of a positive and negative, of a right-handed and left-handed, so that there is a polarised ability in its symmetry to have a balance, to have an equilibrium, an equanimity, between the charges, between positive and negative. In traditional Chinese civilisation, as compared to the Egyptian, Greek, western, in Chinese civilisation this was constellated about the time of Zhongshu, by a very powerful scientific thinker named Tsou Yen. And Tsou Yen founded what was known as the Yin-yang-chia, the Yin-yang school. That what cinches the polarity of existentials is yin and yang, which in the population of organic life would be male and female and that cognate with this is a rotary cycle of five phases, characterised each phase by an element and so there were five elements as well, 'Wu Xing,' in Chinese. So that you had a yin yang, which is a positive and a minus, which is a male and a female, which is a creative and a receptive, is a polarisation and that polarisation maintains itself all the way through a wheel of five phases, each phase of which can be symbolically characterised by an element, the five elements. That the cycle had five did not mean that the perimeter was that of a pentagon or a star, but that the centre was counted as one of the points. So that you had a square which emphasised the centre, so that you would count one, two, three in the centre, four, five and the fifth would go back up to the one. So that the centre became, not only the centre of the square, but became the centre of the circle of the cycle and this became formative in China about the time of Zhongshu, about 350 BC, about the time of Tsou Yen. Another great contemporary of theirs was Mencius, who was the great expander of Confucius. And Confucian classics largely owed a great deal of their success to Mencius, who explicated them to such an extent that they were much more understandable, more unfolded as principles, more textured and deep as ideas and after that progressively, very quickly Chinese civilisation went through a sea change.
We're taking today the two great cities of the Chinese and of the Egyptian, Greek, western. The Chinese is Chang'an and the Egyptian, Greek, western is Alexandria. So our presentation today is Alexandria and Chang'an as indicators of the way in which vision as a field does not emerge phenomena, but emerges numina. Nature, when it produces out of its fertility, produces something which is phenomenal, it's existential and it has a further integral in that it can be symbolised in thought to the extent that an idea is as real as any kind of a gestalt of existentials are. This is colloquially called the mind and it is part of the recalibration of that colloquial language misstatement that a great deal of our learning is posited on. It is not the mind, it is what we would better call the brain. The brain is a physiological structure that has neurological integral that raises it to a higher order, a higher level, but it is not yet the mind. The mind emerges in the field of differential consciousness, in the field of vision and because it is a differential field what emerges does not integrate, but further differentiates. So it is characterised by a different kind of a language, a different kind of a talk. If you want to make sense in the integral, your language will be refined eventually by a rhetoric, by the skeleton of a logic which when fleshed out into its persuasiveness, will be the rhetorical structure of a symbolic language which is able to have a cognate alignment with the things of the world, the existential things. So that when one talks with a rhetoric, the shape that will come out of this, strategically, will be what we call politics, will be a politic. It will be a raising of ritual comportments, of experiential flows and images, into a very large, comprehensive sense of a political structure which then, when it works, is the social world. So that the social world becomes the completed square of attention of the entire natural, integral cycle. And what is specifically countable in China as the centre, as a part of that cycle, in the Greek Egyptian west it was never posited so much as a centre, but as the soul that animated the entire structure.
We're looking at the Hermetic tradition and the Taoist tradition, which east and west are the two alchemical traditions of how forms transform, of how structures recalibrate and thus change their valuation. That an integral structure will always have a confirmation that this is the way we do things and if we do things this way, this is the qualities of experience that will come out and if we integrate them further with these ways of thought, we will then have a completed structure of the cycle, of nature, of our life and of our place in it. What occurs though is that there are moments where one goes deeper than what has been allowed, or one goes higher than what has been computed, or one goes expansively beyond the liminals and the limitations, the rules and we colour outside the lines. Many times in western experience this has occurred with an abruptness that is almost shocking. When one looks for instance at nineteenth century art, at the beginning of the nineteenth century you would have had a clear outline of what form is, by someone like Flaxman's Illustrations to Homer, which are very clear, simple lines and the colour within those very crisp, presentationally integral lines would have been characterised say by someone like the painter, the French painter David. And one would have looked at the graphic art of Flaxman and the paintings of David and one would have had the comfort that this is what great art is in the best of a social world. All of a sudden you have something different that occurs with a Matisse and a Monet; they do not colour within the lines, in fact the lines disappear, it is just the colours shimmering. Or one has the wild line of a Matisse that does not complete its form like a Homeric illustration by Flaxman and still one begins to see that this is revelatory. One can have the Matisse line, one can have the Monet colour palette and that all of a sudden art now has been taken out of the social realm and has been put into the personal, spiritual conscious realm, which is not in the integral at all, but occurs out of the vision of differential consciousness, is not a part of a cycle at all, but as part of what we would today more personally call an ecology. So that consciousness has a whole ecology of its own and its ecology is such that it steps up the dimensions of nature, it steps up the dimensions of an integral world and of an integrated social world, so that now everything in that world, including the world itself, is changeable, transformable, recalibrateable. When this happens the artist has a particular place and two kinds of artists become primordial. One is the poet who no longer uses a rhetorical language that will create a social structure known as the politics of that day, the politics of that structure. The poet will use a poetic and instead of a politic, will generate the sense of form as an aesthetic, so that the forms now become aesthetic in the sense that they have multifaceted, radiant qualities, jewel-like qualities, rather than the definite, assignable perimeters of a political structure, of a political world. And so the artist emerging out of differential consciousness will be more and more perceived, not by themselves, but by the previous social world, by the previous methos, by the previous ritual comportment, by the entire integral structure, the artist will more and more become seen as antithetical. That what now has been opposed is the place of vision versus nature, of art versus ritual and this becomes exacerbated because the next phase in the ecology of consciousness is history, whereas the next phase in the cycle of nature is myth. And when history is opposed to myth, one has a, not a breaking point, but one has a storm front of the threshold of the movement into historical consciousness. Whereas vision is already radiant in its differentiality, historical consciousness is kaleidoscopic and produces not just jewels like works of art, like artists, like spirit persons, but produces an entire, unlimited, infinite array of such jewels and one would call this...in high dharma, late Asia about 500 years ago, it was called the jewel matrix, the universe is a jewel matrix. Not only are there jewels, but there are an infinite number of jewels, arranged so that interpenetrating radiances are complex to any degree, not just an nth degree, but an n to the nth degree.
Vision is important for us then to understand that we must shift our language from being dependent on a rhetorical sense of structure, which is integral and meant to persuade, to a poetic use of language, which is not meant to persuade, but to disclose possibilities. And so the poet will open up the possibilities of language, which has been the key integral thread all the way through, as long as experience brought itself into play as a flow. Now experience will still have its flow, its flow of images, of imagery, its flow of feelings, of feeling tones, its flow of language where one would speak the discourse of communicative language, but instead of that flow of myth, of mythic experience flowing through nature, it flows through a changed nature. Because that field of nature has been influenced by a further dimension of the field of conscious vision. And experience also finds that it is ambidextrous in its balance, it is ambidextrous in the symmetry of its chirality and that it cannot only flow through nature and even a nature that has been changed, but it can just as well flow through the field of conscious vision. Now, this is an enormous watershed and the reason why it is able to be sustained is that, that square of attention, which was originally the square of the four phases of nature, ritual, myth and symbol, that frame, that picture, that square of attention, is a moveable feast and can move one place over and include vision within the square of attention and let nature subside out of the square of attention and let it occur as a field now that does not register and attention is still there, but because of habit the mind will now consider nature, not being in the frame of reference, that nature now is an unconscious, an unconsciousness. And now the idea of the structure of mind includes an idea of unconsciousness. If you get interested, there are several really excellent histories of the idea of unconsciousness. Franz Hartmann did one about 100 years ago, Carl Jung's work in the mid of the twentieth century is probably the most famous to most people today. But it goes back into classical times of 2,000 years ago, because in Alexandria at the time when vision became so powerful as to occupy a full place in the square of attention, people whose minds were still emphasising the mythic and confirming it by its traction in ritual, considered that nature now, because it was no longer necessarily in the frame of reference, that nature must now be seen and thought of as flawed. How could it not be in our attention if it were complete? And so nature must be flawed. Out of this in Alexandria came the movement called Gnosticism. And Gnostics are those who prefer myths that include the myth of the flawed creator of nature, of a flawed demiurge, that there is a flaw in the universe. Whereas the other threshold of that is to consider the complete change of the mind, of the symbolic, integral thought into the differential field of visionary consciousness. That it isn't that nature now is flawed, but that nature is invisible to attention and thus it is characterised in the Hermetic tradition as a mystery, not as a flaw. The Gnostics see nature flawed and prefer myths, the Hermetic tradition sees nature now invisible and prefers the development of vision into art. And so you will find that in the Hermetic tradition the emphasis is clearly always on the art of transformation, the art of alchemy, the art of the patterns of astrology, or astronomy, or of temporal calendric cycles, the art of the person. That the spirit now, the spiritual person is double transformed: transformed once out of the limitations of a supposedly complete social world into a visionary field of possibilities and that that change, that transformation has a refinement, a distillation of itself, so that what comes out now is a...in alchemy the term is a liquor, the art of the spiritual person is the art of making the liquor out of the transformation. This in alchemy had a couple of traditions: one, the red lion, one, the green lion and the red lion is about the first transform, the green lion about the second. It becomes complicated if one wants to go into the historical characterisation. What's important for us is that in both Alexandria and Chang'an, in both the Hermetic and the Taoist traditions, both east and west, there was a parallel, almost like a resonance, arranged into differential sets of a harmonic that understood each other when there was contact between them finally. The first contact between the two sets was due to the early Buddhist merchants who went into China from the south and the early Buddhist missionaries who went into China from the west and they met sometime in the 400's of the Common Era, 400's AD. They met in classic middle China about that time and you find for the very first time a Chinese - his name was Kum?raj?va - who was able to not only think and read in western languages like Sanskrit or Poly and eastern languages like Chinese, not only to read and write and think, but to meditate in a deep poetic so that the translations that Kum?raj?va made from west to east and a few from east to west, were themselves works of art. Now, Kum?raj?va was very, very strange, he was a Chinese with blue eyes, because his mother was a descendant of an ancient Greek princess. In Ancient Chinese they were called yavanas. They were Scythian Greeks from central Asia, above Iran, above where the Alexandria...Alexander the Great had established kingdoms in regions known as Sogdiana, Bactria, Gadara. All of these over the centuries produced a population of people who were at home both in east and west. And you find about that time in all of the oasis communities across the northern part of the Gobi Desert and across the southern part of the Gobi Desert, you find a fantastic explosion of art that looks for all the world like Matisse and Monet and Cezanne and Chagall. And one finds...the most famous site that still is extant, with large numbers of examples, is Dungwan, sometimes spelled, 'T-u-n,' Tungwan, Dungwan. And Dungwan was the place where the northern Gobi and the southern Gobi caravan routes met and from Dungwan they went into classic western China and the great city that dominated classic western China and linked it to the rest of China in the east, over mountain ranges, out to the Pacific Ocean, that city was Chang'an. And so Dungwan is the first indication of the sophisticated quality of Chang'an and its first registry as the capital of dynastic China is about the time of the Trojan War, about 1200 BC, the Zh?u Dynasty. And they're the makers of what we have today as the Zhouyi, which is the I Ching. So that Chang'an became this incredible focus about the time where in the west the city that was raising itself up was the nascent, small city that later became Athens. And so Chang'an is very much in the Zh?u Dynasty tradition what Athens was from its beginnings of visionary experiences from Egypt and from the ancient Middle East, about the time that the ancient Eastern Mediterranean was transforming from a previous civilisation, the previous civilisation being controlled by Sumero-Akkadian descendants, which became then Syrian or Neo-Babylonian Empires, but the coast was being transformed at the time from being an outpost of a Mesopotamian civilisation, to being a cutting edge threshold of itself, of its own and out of that comes the transform of the Phoenicians. And the Phoenicians do not look simply to being an outpost at the far western end of a Mesopotamian civilisation, or the northern outpost of an Egyptian civilisation, but they look further west to colonise the entire Mediterranean Sea and out through Gibraltar, up and down the coasts, for three, 400 miles. Down the African coast, not just Morocco, but eventually all the way down to where Dakar and Senegal would be today, quite far down and up the European coast. Their largest community in that part of the world was Q?dis, today is Cadiz, Spain and from there they extended themselves up, not only along the Spanish, but along the French. And if you take a look at the northern Galicia part of Spain, if you go on a straight line in the Atlantic and not follow the coast, next you come to Brittany and France. And if you continue that navigational line the next thing you come to is the Cornwall Peninsula of south western England. And if you continue that line you next come to Ireland. And so the Phoenicians now related themselves...their central ancient home was Byblos, which was a commercial trading centre by 3000 BC. All of the Egyptian pharaohs ordered their timber from Byblos, from the mountains of Lebanon to build their ships, because there are no trees in Egypt to speak of. But Tyre, 'T-y-r-e,' about 1200 BC became the centre and they carried with them a quality of written language that had been pioneered by the ancestors, the Canaanite ancestors of, not only Byblos, but of a more northern port called Ugarit. And it is in Ugarit that the first alphabets were made for a commercial basis of doing business all over a wide swathe of the world that was unimaginable before that time. The swathe extended from Ireland to India and by 1200 BC this was already in place. The quality of a written language when it becomes alphabetised, is that it is able now to written in such a way that you will have a scroll - or later on the scrolls became a codex, a book - but you are able to read with a finite, integral set in a differential, conscious, visionary way. So that writing, so that it can be read silently, was the epical transformation of the mind emerging out of a symbolic integral structure into a recalibration of a visionary possibility. Where now the flow of experience flows in the conscious, visionary field of the book. And now books become, symbolically, the harbingers, the gates, the gateways, through which the entire integral cycle, the entire cycle of integrality can be taken into a deep transform of the way in which it ritually comports and a recalibration of the way in which it symbolically structures. And so being able to write so that one could read this out of a book becomes one of the great alchemical experiences on the planet. In China this transform occurs about 100 years after Zhongshu. Before then everything was considered to be self-taught orally, everything kept exactly the way in which you would learn it and you would memorise it, because vision has to do with remembering. And so the whole visionary experience is one of creative imagination and remembering a field, like a plasma, which is able to be brought out of that field. That plasma is able to be brought out of the field of vision in two distinct ways: one, that the structure of thought now becomes a mind with a memory. It is able to memorise structures of not only images that occur in the world and feeling-toned images that occur in experience, but is able to see images of things that have not yet happened. Of things that have not roots in the world and have therefore no origins in experience flowing through nature, but of experience flowing through a visionary world of possibility. For the first time, instead of just myths, one now has the capacity to have fairy tales. The development of the ability to have future events that one, no one, has seen, of fairy realms which no one has seen yet until they are introduced to them and many other aspects that come out of this, gives the whole basis of myth a different position. Instead of it being the major process of the integral cycle, it is the beginning of a square of attention that runs myth, symbol, vision, art. So that works of art, while they emerge out of vision, they pull with it the capacity of methos, of experience now to participate in, not only itself, but in the visionary recalibration in transforms of itself and so a work of art introduces us into complete new dimensions of possibility, of taking experience from where it was and where it could be, into expansions unlimited. This produces a very interesting kind of architecture, which is the other basic art that complements poetry. An architecture working on a poetic redesigns, by visionary composition, all of the structures, all of the forms, all of the geometries that had been previously used only in an integral way. Now architecture is able to bring a prismatic quality that absorbs the pragmatic origins, but transforms them and recalibrates them into prismatic sources.
One of the classic structures in ancient Chang'an, done about the turn of the millennium, done about 1 AD, or I used to call it, 0 BC. When the whole nature of civilisation in China underwent a breathtaking hiatus for about a dozen years and the Han Dynasty split itself into the earlier western Han and the later eastern Han and almost as if nature itself showed that the Chinese experience had completely gone outside of the previous nature to such an extent that it was proved by a cataclysmic occurrence. In 11 AD the Yellow River changed its course. It had flowed for hundreds of thousands of years in a certain way and in 11 AD it massively cut a new channel through to a completely different coastline on the Pacific Ocean. It was as if the heavens and earth themselves had confirmed man in China has changed permanently so that his change has influenced the change of the earth and does not that then mean that heaven has changed as well? Now, what was extremely difficult was that the original mandate of heaven to rule on earth by the man who was the focus, the emperor, his basic confirmation that he was the one that could do this was to go to a structure at the top of one of the great mountains of China, Tai Shan. And at the top of Tai Shan he would perform by himself a ceremony that sounds very much like Moses going to get the Ten Commandments at the top of Mount Sinai. He goes up, communicates with the Divine himself, brings down the mandate from heaven himself and reads it out to the people, 'This is the ways things are going to be.' And Chinese emperors for thousands of years had gone, either to Tai Shan, or sometimes Hua Shan if they were from further west. Now instead of going to a mountain top, a new kind of architecture was made that had never been seen before in Chang'an. The saying was that, 'When nature gives you circles, the mind can put a square in that circle.' And the old, ancient phrase, the way I was taught 40 years ago is that, 'You can always tell a Taoist master because he had square pupils.' That is to say, he composed in the seeing of something, so that he not only saw perceptually what was naturally occurring, but he saw the possibilities of its hidden, secret structure at the same time. We're gonna take a little break and come right back.
Let's come back to where we were. We were talking about how you could tell a Taoist because of the pupils of the eyes being square. In the High Renaissance 500 years ago, the Florentine Renaissance, one of the Hermetic qualities that was a challenge for architecture was how to square a circle, or how to encircle a square. In the Taoist tradition in China, just outside of one of the big 12 gates of Chang'an, the gates were generally wide enough for four chariots, but the major gates were wide enough for 14 chariots. The main east-west canopic boulevard of Alexandria was wide enough for 14 chariots. A chariot being somewhere around six feet, so you're looking at something that's about 90 feet as the width of a gate, or the width of the major east-west boulevard of Alexandria. And also it was crossed by another major boulevard. If we can go over here to this 1838 diagram of Alexandria, it's rather wrong and unlearned really, but the best that was available for about 157 years. The major cross of the canopic boulevard, which went not down here to the Necropolis, but the major boulevard came down to a port called the box. In Greek, it's, 'Kemotos' and the kemotos was an inset from the Eunostus Port, Heptastadion, the seven stadia bridge mould that Alexander built, created two great...a great harbour and a second port. And the kemotos was a little box port off the Eunostus Port and actually the canopic street went all the way out through the canopic gate quite a long way. We have a dramatic play from Alexandria written about the middle of the Third Century BC and in the play one of the women comments on her friend that she lives so far out that it takes almost all morning to get into Alexandria from that suburb, so it was huge. Alexandria had a population about the turn of the millennium 2,000 years ago, of about 2,000,000 people. It was a metropolis only equalled by Rome, which was about the same size. What was curious is that the canopic boulevard extending out extended in such a way that it pointed to the canopic branch of the Nile and the star Canopus that rises there, a big yellow supergiant star, rather like in our part of the world you will see Venus sometimes looking so large as a morning or evening star. Canopus had that quality as well. And its beacon yellow light is an invitation into a kind of a quality of an earth mysteriousness, whereas the star Sothis we call Sirius, which is a blue white giant, has a different quality. It is not so much the mysteries of the earth, but it is the mysteries of the heaven. Sirius is sacred to Isis. There are different qualities: the earth has a particular ability to be naturally mysterious, but the heavens have a distilled, refined quality of being magically mysterious. So while nature is great and the mysterious earth is twice great, the magical heavens are thrice great. And so the great teacher in the Egyptian, Greek, Hermetic tradition was always addressed as Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Psychopomp, the messenger of the heavens to man, the psychopomp leading man through the netherworld to rise up again, not on earth, but in heaven. So that the ecology of consciousness is to be able to go deep down within, carry oneself through by the keys of a poetic language to unlock the 12 gates so that one can rise again, not back into this world, but back into eternal life in heaven. This quality in the Chinese iconography is exemplified by four colours associated with four creatures and they make four sets. The traditional major beginning of this is always the green dragon, out of which we get in esoteric western alchemy the green lion. Sir Isaac Newton's alchemy, as opposed to the red lion, which would have been the earlier, thirteenth century Roger Bacon alchemy. The green dragon is paired with a white tiger. The green dragon is the heavenly mysterious creature. You can think of it as the Milky Way in its sinuous movement across the great primordial, starry night sky and it has a particular hump, a dip, where if you drew a line from the north star, from Polaris, through bisecting that little dip of the hump of the celestial dragon, where it touches the horizon of the earth, this is the pivot, this is the polestar, this is the pivot of the way in which the entire ecology of heaven rotates and has its pivotal drilling point upon the earth. The white tiger is not only paired with the green dragon, but the white tiger is a courage, which can be ferocious, the independence, the incredible verve and elan and in ancient Chang'an whenever there would be discussions of art they would be held in the White Tiger Hall. And in fact about 60 years ago there was published in the Netherlands, in Leiden, by E.J. Brill, two volumes of the discussions held in the great White Tiger Hall about the nature of Taoist alchemy art and I'll bring next week a set of those, a copy of that set so you can see. The green dragon, being a celestial and the white tiger being an earth, are mitigated by another pair and the alchemy of that other pair is not only heaven and earth being mitigated by two other elements, fire and water...the fire is always presented as a red bird, as a red phoenix and the black turtle presents symbolically the deep mysteriousness raised to a magicality of the depths of water, yet being able to host something which can submerge and still living appear, re-emerge back out of the surface. The black turtle, the red phoenix, the white tiger, the green dragon, where they cross is a quality in Ancient China of there being a pivot and so the fifth actually occupies the third place in the centre and occupies it in such a way that it can pair itself out of its own integrity and this gives now a very special kind of a quality where you can now pair the five and have ten. Where each point of those five, the four corners and the centre, now has a paired quality and this is the origin of the ten stems and later on it becomes magnified that the pair of the pair at the centre is itself the square and it leads to another complementary ecology of 12.
We don't have to get into the details of I Ching, Taoist, Yin-yang-chia symbolism other than just to note that in Chang'an the quality was exemplified by building a very special ceremonial palace just south and a little west of the main gate of Chang'an, the Anmen Gate. In Beijing, the Tiananmen, the, 'Heavenly Anmen Gate' is a descendant of the Anmen Gate of ancient Chang'an. When the Yellow River changed its course, when the Han Dynasty split...and you have to understand the Han Chinese are like the Chinese Romans. They were powerful beyond belief for their time, just like the Romans were in their time. When that Dynasty split it was like the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire and you had this watershed where what went before had a certain kind of a character and what came after had a different kind of a character and increasingly skewed off and the more that it tried to make believe that it was carrying on, the more surreal it became. The more that they assumed that they were following tradition, the more garish the social world became. In Rome every emperor after Augustus Caesar for 100 years was certifiably crazy. Went to such terrific, brutal extremes that many of their reigns are pointed out as being some of the most catastrophically surreal human environments ever experienced on the planet. In the year 68 there were four different emperors, nobody could sit on the throne, so that they junked the entire Caesar line. A complete new Dynasty, the Flavians, came in and the Flavians became even more terrorising. The last Caesar was Nero. The last Flavian was Domitian and his long reign was called, 'The Terror.' But there was one person Domitian could not terrorise and though he was brought to Rome to be terrorised, he frightened Domitian to the extent that instead of having him killed he had him exiled and that man was St. John. And he was exiled to a rocky island, Patmos, in the Aegean and that's where he wrote The Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation as a warning and as a sign, 'These times have not carried on any tradition. They have not carried on any natural integral whatsoever, nor have they participated in the new differential ecology.' And so they will end, not that the world will end. The Book of Revelation is an apocalypse not about the world and not about our time, it is a watershed that at that time that false social realm had become so skewed that it could never again be natural, nor could it ever be conscious and so it was caught in a never land, a limbo in-between.
In Chang'an when the Han Dynasty split, the vision was that we need to have a new contact with the powers of the celestial mandate and a new way to register it on earth. And so a very brilliant usurper named Wang Yang built a structure called the Peyong, which was a special palace grounds and while it was surrounded...south of Chang'an at that time 2,000 years ago, there were still lots of forests, the forest was cleared in a great, huge circle. And in that circle was put a structure of a square and in order to emphasise the squaredness of this structure, four L-shaped, elbow shaped buildings were put at the corners, very long on each side, but nevertheless the square was so huge the entire squared area was 36 square kilometres, so you can imagine how enormous this was. And in the centre of that elbow building square was placed another circular structure and that circular structure was meant to be the inner cycle. The outer circle is the natural liminal of the cycle of nature; here the trees end, here the ceremonial openness begins and occurs. And within that a square now is positioned and placed and within that is a circle that has within it another square and it is this square that is the new architectural mountain, the new temple by which the ancient ceremonies are bringing heaven's mandate to earth...will take place. The emperor will not now go to these mountains, but will come to the structure in Chang'an. It is very reminiscent in Rome of Augustus Caesar not only having his beautiful palace on the Palatine Hill just above the Roman Forum, but a building, a structure, that took four years to build, from 13 BC to 9 BC, called the Arapatchis Augusti, the Temple of the Eternal Peace of Augustus. And it was placed, much like the Peyong in Chang'an, it was placed to be that repository where our historical energy power now supersedes the old natural powers, the old experience that was mythic, the old comportment that was just ritual and now our comportment is not ritual but principled. It's based on principle, on law. And our structure of thought is no longer just symbolic, but is a completely changed symbolism and the symbolism is changed not on the integral, but on a doctrinal basis. And so you have a supercharged social realm, imperial power that pretended and paraded itself as if it were a conscious transform, but really was a supercharging of the old integral, of the old cycle. The rituals became laws and codes, the experience became controlled and expected and the symbolic structure became doctrinal, based on the ordering of principles. So that the ancient Taoist energy cycle, which was five phases, which originally in its Tao ran Tao, Tê, Jen, I, Chi. The Confucian order that was exemplified by the Qin Emperor taken over by the Han Dynasty, the five phases ran Tao, Tê, Jen, I, Li and one of the Confucian classics became the Li Chi, the Book of Principles, the Book of Rites. We no longer just have rituals, we have prescribed rituals according to law and they are now rites, r-i-t-e-s, not r-i-g-h-t-s. Later on, in the eighteenth century there was a great deal about the rights of man by people like Rousseau and so forth, Thomas Paine, but the rites of empire are the law prescribed, encoded rituals that must be obeyed because they are directed by a symbolic, doctrinal structure and as long as that structure is followed up by the rites, then the experience will be contained in ways that are predictable, in ways that are understandable and now one has a cycle of integral that is an imperium. And that those who are in the imperium consider that they are living in a better world. They have a security as long as they stay within that structure, as long as they believe experientially in a methos as a belief. As long as you believe in the doctrines, as long as you do the rites, then the cycle of the integral should be complete and that is all you need to know. And if you follow this we will take care that your following is rewarded by security, by success, proportionate of course to your place in the social order. The quality in Chang'an though was always mitigated by the fact that the structures like the Peyong were outside of the original gates of the city, outside of the 12-gated city. And within the city the whole perimeter was not a perfect square, because the two great palace constructs were there in that area before the city was walled. And the walls of Chang'an, by the time we're talking of, about 100 years after Zhongshu, the walls were over 12 metres high - puts them about 40, 45 feet high, about 20 feet thick - and there were only 12 gates that went through it, but because the two big palace areas...the Chánglè G?ng was the first palace area that went back into the early Zh?u Dynasty, some thousand years before. The walls of Chang'an were skewed so that they could accommodate the two southern palace grounds and because there was a branch, not the big Wei River, but a smaller river that came angling down, the walls were staggered in such a way that instead of being a square, you had sort of like a little bit of parallelogram. Other palace structures and grounds and parks were created within those huge, massive walls and largely within the walled city of Chang'an were large, huge parks, stocked with wild animals and wild birds that could be hunted at leisure there. The parks of the palace grounds were large enough that one could go on hunting expeditions and there were several of these within Chang'an. All of the ordinary people lived outside the walls and anyone who lived within the walls was servicing the emperor. The longest reigning Han emperor, Han Wu Ti, reigned 54 years and it was pieced together how many people were on his staff, 130,000 people served him because he had the mandate. And one of the apocryphal stories of Han Wu Ti is that he reasserted a very powerful mandate of heaven that rewarded his family. The family's ancestor was actually a peasant, but he was one of the cleverest peasants in Chinese history and he's the one who took over the imperium that had been set up by Qin Shi Huang-ti, out of which we get the Chinese people, 'They're my people. You're all Qin from now on, Chinese.' When he died in 202 BC a man named Cao, who became Cao-ti, the founder of the Han Dynasty...today in Pinyin, you do not pronounce it Cao, but Gao and so the Gaos are the inheritors of the Han Dynasty 2,200 years ago, they're the ones who set up the Chinese Roman Empire, the imperium. The family still lives. One of the descendants of Cao-ti was an extraordinary woman and she was known and is known in Chinese history as the Empress Liu. And she took away the power of the Gaos, associated with the Lius, L-i-u and she had very young emperors, one was just an infant and for about eight years she ruled China. She had her own imperial stamp as a power behind the lines and tried to further a complete new dynasty and when the Gaos and the Lius came back into power, after a couple of short reigns Han Wu Ti came and he's the one who made Chang'an the great imperial capital that it became ever after in China. The person who expanded Chang'an, the founder of the Tang Dynasty, Tang Tide-Sun, built an even larger palace area just south of the one that was built by the Gaos and the Lius. And so ancient Chang'an was spread out enormously like ancient Alexandria, even more than Ancient Rome. Was an enormous spread south of the Wei River, W-e-i. Modern Xianyang is north of the Wei River, Chang'an was classically south and spread and spread and became something which we're understanding today.
A vision will mature itself so that an art of differential forms will come into play. The field of consciousness emerges works of art, emerges persons, spiritual persons as works of art. So that a spiritual person is not the individual in the symbolic thought, is not the character in mythic experience, is not the figure in ritual actions. Though it will have in the transform a cognate all the way back to the character, it's not the character in the experience conditioned by the social world, but the character which is there flowing naturally out of the field of nature. One's natural temperament will have a flow of particular character that belongs uniquely to that living being. You can see this in babies. Human babies will have a particular character to them. Animals when they are young will have a particular character. 'This puppy plays that way.' 'This little kitty scratches that way.' 'This small, young colt will do such and so.' It is the character that flows in the natural field that is the source of the artistic, spiritual person. And so the greatest care is taken to mature character in a civilisation, but you cannot mature character unless it occurs naturally, because you don't know what you're maturing, what you're dealing with. If you mature an artificiality, you mature it into a really mature artificiality, it will become really demonic. And so the whole quality of the art of person making, the spiritual living, is to make sure that the source is a natural character flow that occurs in nature. And how can one find this? How can one, not determine it, but how can one delve into discovering it? One has to have qualities of nature that are left natural. Because only by putting the young person into a natural field will the natural character begin to occur in the flow in which they're experienced, the way in which uniquely their experience happens. And without that one has a photograph from a doctrinal basis and a rite comportment and a cribbed, cramped experience and you keep showing that person how they're supposed to act, how they're supposed to look, what they're supposed to believe in, what they're supposed to do. And if they don't measure up they are progressively considered delinquent, recalcitrant, unwelcome, dangerous, enemies. And so the demonic has a particular way of integrating and making sure that anything natural is not a viable field and anything of a natural character flow is not able to have enough of its concourse to establish itself. And in this way it is impossible then for a maturation out of strictured thought to occur and more and more the only way that that occurs is by artificial means. You have to find something pharmacological that will take you outside of your body and mind temporarily so you can have a buzz, you can have a high. Whereas the natural flow of one's character in the field of visionary consciousness is permanent elation. It's called delight, it's not a high, it's the highest. And so the quality of celestiality now becomes most high. This is a phrase used both east and west. In the Chinese understanding the shen, the spirit person, who has the ability to, not only go back to the source of one's flow of character in the field of nature, but to have that flow of character matured into the flow in visionary consciousness, so that now the shen, the spirit of the person, has the ability to generate through works of art, including other people, including artists, that higher flow of the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. And now history, when it comes into play as a phase, will allow for myth to go out of the square of attention, mythic experience. And when it does, a mind that is doctrinally addicted, rite co-ordinated to having that kind of mythic experience in that way, panics. The word is because the original temple of refuge for that was dedicated to the god Pan; one is in a panic, one flees to Pan's temple. Why? Because you are now threatened in the most primordial way. You may not have your natural character, but you do have your assigned expected characteristics and letting them go out of the square of attention is tantamount to death, it's tantamount to being erased, not just killed, but erased. And so the mind throws up as a defence for its doctrinal structure a scare tactic that you're going to erase your basis and you're going to suffer oblivion, you will no longer be there. And the worst punishment, east and west, was always that if a new power structure comes into play and you want to get rid of the heads of the old power structure, you take hammer and chisel and you knock their portraits off the hieroglyphs, off the monuments. You erase them so that they no longer occur, their face is no longer able to be seen. And when we get to Art one of the two art projects that we have is to make a self-portrait. And the self-portrait will be the emergence of the person in your art of person making jewel. And the other will be to make a landscape, because a landscape is the visionary nature out of which the portraiture will be a jewel matrix possibility. And in-between the two, the landscape and the portrait, one has a realm that develops, which is the way in which art generates the kaleidoscopic conscious space of history. Then what becomes important is not only this portrait, this landscape and all that is critically engendered from them being there, but one now has the interest in the art, the artist, the development of it, an art history, the history of that artist. And not only that, but the largest cognate of that person will be a community that now reflects itself in a city. And so history is that energy process differential of civilisation. Civilisation turns out not to be a structure at all, but it turns out to be a double, a fermented transform and a distilled recalibration of what was at one time a symbolic form of thought, now become a mind, now become a shareable mind, not on the basis of a politic, but on the resonances of an aesthetic. Not on the basis of a language that seeks to persuade, convince, or cajole and dominate, but a poetic in an architectonic that invites possibilities and sharing an experiment and development. Out of the one, out of political structures will always come a closed mind to protect itself. Out of a poetic will always come the analytic of an indefinitely interesting enquiry that leads to the exploration of the cosmos. More next week.