Vision 8
Presented on: Saturday, February 24, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Vision Eight finally and we're looking at a challenge that has come over the last several hundred years and over the last 60 years in a very concerted way. The challenge is one that exceeds all of the credibility of challenges that we have had before. Within the last 60 years it has become apparent that our entire species is undergoing a sea change and we know now from the past 60 years of palaeontology and various other investigations, that our species is only the most recent of a complete set of species going back several million years and that that complete set of hominids is nested, evolutionarily, in another set that goes back another four or 5,000,000 years and that that set is nested within the great primates, like gorillas and chimpanzees, orang-utans, that goes back 70,000,000 years. And so we find ourselves aware by the early twenty first century that we as a species of beings are like the bullseye of the target of previous sets of existence and that those sets do not just begin with the primates 70,000,000 years ago, but as we saw at the beginning of our learning last year in Nature, that you can put parentheses and sets within sets, within sets, back to the origins of life on this planet with the bacteria, some 3,500,000,000 years ago. And that that nestles into a context of the creation of the whole star system, out of a protostellar disc, some 4.7,000,000,000 years ago. And that our star system is in a cluster of other stars, not many of them normal stars like our sun, but smaller, red dwarfs, occasionally larger blue giants like Sirius, or Psion, but within a space of about 25 light years there are several hundred stars, many of them having star systems, as we will discover. And that our star system, at 4.7,000,000,000 years old nestles within the universe of so many star systems that they collect into galactic structures and so many galactic structures that collect and all of this goes back to a primordial, really primordial plasma of about 13.7,000,000,000 years ago and that within that there was a moment about 9,000,000,000 years ago where the gradual slowing down and entropy of the original stars, the original galactic structures, received a sudden acceleration, a boost and instead of slowing down, they began expanding at an accelerated rate. And that our star system was formed about halfway in that enormity of someone stepping on the gas. And that an expanding universe is now guaranteed to expand indefinitely, the word is forever. And it has a peculiar quality to it, in that in the normal astrophysics of space time, there would not have been a way for the acceleration to expand the universe without there being further dimensions that space and time brought into play. One of the deepest wisdoms of our species, translated into twenty first century talk, is that our ability to become conscious introduces, evidently, a fifth dimension to the four dimensions of space time. That something quintessential comes into play, like the thumb and the four dimensions of space time acquire a fifth dimension that allows for this expansion of whatever occurs as existential in space time, to have the ability to transform into an infinity of possibilities. So that consciousness comes as an extraordinary dimensional effect at a certain level of complexity and seems to flame into, not just existence, not just into the thought of it, but into transcendent quality of being it. This is definitely something that happens universally and that in the 9,000,000,000 years in which this has obtained, there must be star system civilisations without count. Not just millions of them, or billions of them, but without count.
Sixty years ago this summer, in Roswell, New Mexico, the crash of alien spacecraft came as an abrupt surprise and shock, not only to our species and the few people who understood what was happening, but to other species that suffered the crash. The details are exotic, but what has happened is that we are facing a threshold that could very easily be an extinction crisis for us, in the sense that we are facing something that our species survived some 45,000 years ago and that is the development of a variant of Homo sapiens and the high watermark of that development of the new variant of Homo sapiens is that we became not just wise hominids, but we became wise about being wise and the way it is expressed is you double the word sapiens: 'Homo sapiens sapiens.' Not a subspecies, but a variant that now takes the lead. And that just as Homo sapiens was enormously more capable and complex and viable than the hominid species just before us, called the Neanderthals...the new discovery of little hominids in the island of Flores in Indonesia, Homo floresiensis, the realisation that Homo erectus, viable for almost 2,000,000 years, gave rise to the hominids like Neanderthal, or about 160,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, that as soon as a new variant that is more capable to accept the challenge and make a response, life's energies, realities, guarantor of not just survival, but of flourishing, of nourishing, goes to the new exploring point of penetration and that species becomes eventually dominant. The new species is that Homo sapiens sapiens is willing to go off-world, to go off the earth, at least as far as we can practically see over the next 200 to 500 years, to go off this planet and inhabit the entire star system. And so a temporary designation that I have introduced is that the new subspecies, the new variant coming, which has already begun and is here, is Homo sapiens stellaris, 'Star wisdom Man.' That our home will be the entire star system and what will be the adventurous frontier for us will be the interstellar reaches that go...in this galaxy it's about 30,000 light years just to get to the centre of the Milky Way and we're about two thirds of the way out to the edges, make that 45,000 light years times two, is a diameter of 90,000 light years and perhaps another 50,000 light years as outlayers and halos and dark matter and so forth and you realise that we are now needing to recalibrate. And the recalibration is not one of adjustment, it's not one of transition, it's not one even that a revolution could help, or that a reformation could help, even a renaissance could help, it's a recalibration of going back and recapitulating the way in which an embryo goes through all the stages and comes out to the latest threshold of being born, now with all those capacities folded into it. And so our recalibration requires us at least on a minimum basis to understand how all of this occurred, how the universe occurred, how existential stars and galactic structures occurred, all the way up until the birth of our recalibration in our own time and in the succeeding decades and centuries to come. And more and more, what will atrophy is that the old ways will not work any longer, they will not have the efficacy that they once had and the energy, the nourishment, will go to the new.
The observation increase of interstellar spacecraft came immediately upon the development of the atomic bomb. The development of nuclear energy in its initial, primal blast in New Mexico was something that had repercussions. At the time the greatest visionary evolutionist of the time, Teilhard De Chardin, wrote an essay, Spiritual Repercussions of the Atomic Bomb, that's collected in his book The Future of Man. And increasingly it became apparent that that site, the Trinity Site in New Mexico, was some kind of a pinprick of a pivot of the signal that Homo sapiens stellaris was being born in a radically revved up way coming into play and the Roswell crash was midway between the Trinity test site and the Roswell air force base that at the time was the only atomic bomb carrying fleet, air force fleet, in the world. So that we have coming up this summer the sixtieth anniversary. A 60 year cycle as we saw in our education at the beginning is the old I Ching cycle, five times 12, a 60 year cycle, where everything in its stylisation possibilities has gone through a course and comes back around, not to repeat, but to go back through with the accumulated penetration of what has occurred before. Now operating not just in a recollection in the mind and not just in the documentation in the records, but it juices up the fifth dimension of consciousness so that its quintessentiality now has more transforming power than it had before. And that each time these cycles repeat, they repeat in such a sense that they acquire more amperage, they acquire more capacity to transform completely, so that everything becomes new again. We live, in 2007, where that particular 60 year cycle later this summer will come back into play in a huge way, a very big way. If you look at the state of capacity in 1945 and you compare it to 2007, it is extraordinary. If you rev that up exponentially you realise that the next 60 years are going to absolutely dwarf what has happened before. Already all of the old traditions, no matter what they were, are retrenching themselves back to a retreat into a fundamentalism to protect it, to keep it there, to not let anything further happen and this is the ostrich head in the sand response. The challenge is already there, already viable, the threshold is upon us. The right tack in such a storm is to head into it and use your mariner navigation savvy to ride it out and ride through it and acquire a capacity beyond it. Our kind has always done this and 45,000 years ago our forebears rode out the tremendous threshold of the discovery that visionary consciousness was powerful enough to be arranged into images that were taken from experience, from the world and arranged symbolically in such a sense that the arrangement of the images within the symbols and the symbols being arranged within a visionary expansion of the structure of thought, led to a transform where a new quality of person actually emerged, not born, not born so much existentially, but reborn spiritually. And the evidence is the appearance of Palaeolithic art and all of a sudden one finds the record that in many spots and many places for the first time you have sculptures, you have paintings, you have a kind of cave modified architecture and for the first time Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens. And it took a while for that to obtain, but one can see immediately that it came into play, it came enormously sophisticated very early on. Our accelerated pace is that in the next five years we will find ourselves midway into the threshold that has been upon us for the last 60 years in a completely new kind of an amperage. This learning is a recalibrating of the way in which learning acquires its wisdom through all the stages, from the beginnings of an organic life force coming into form, all the way through until today, the latest development. The technique though, is one that requires a patience of hunting, a patience of gathering. The wise old Palaeolithic hunters learned that it was better to hunt game together and so instead of the lone hunter, it was better to have a group of hunters that had the savvy of working together. The gatherers found that if you have the co-operation of gatherers you can take advantage more quickly of a time bound area crop that will go bad in X number of days and you can harvest the ripe fruit very quickly and gain all that nourishment. That the hunting group together can bring down any game that is out there. Even on level of a 13 foot tall mastodon, a handful of Palaeolithic hunters working together with just flint spears can bring that game down. So our whole new level of co-operation is a community that is arranged in a recalibrated way; we are no longer dependent on being a community of just a geography that is existentially immediate, the entire planet is a field for a possibility of community. A blog site can reach anywhere on the planet and can reach any number of tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of people. There is no limit now to the size and complexity and depth of what a hunting community might be, of what a gathering community might be, but fundamentally to transfer this on, to teach these techniques, the fundamental quality of our species will remain sharing learning. And so what we have here is a learning process recalibration that allows for us to participate in a hunting, gathering, learning community that is not only unlimited in terms of geography, but unlimited in terms of traditional wisdom access. We can include in our community those men and women who lived all the way back to the beginnings of Palaeolithic art 45,000 years ago and also to project into the future array of possibilities, the future possibilities of ourselves, like a vast science fiction rainbow and so the past becomes new and the future becomes viable in a complexity of the present that is shareable in an increasingly refined way of efficacy. Always at the beginning of such a moment, such a move as radical as this, the beginning is always very small. It's like the first spark, it's like the first neural impulse jumping the synapse and it's like the very beginnings of it are always small, but have a carrying power through resonance and through harmonics. This has been kept campfire confidential largely over the last 40 years on purpose. Several times it has been let out to see what it would expand to. As early as 1970 the Symbols phase, which was then Symbols course, the very first one that I designed was left to expand from 70 students to about 350 students in the second offering and it was apparent that it was going to be kaleidoscopic. And so it had to be, not curtailed, but it had to be kept into a viability of exploration because everything had to be done from scratch and new. And now by 2007 it is viable in recalibrating ways all the way through.
Vision is the fifth phase out of eight and it's kept into eight phases, four and four as a pair, because we are used to composing a music in an octave and so we take the eight phases as if they were the notes of a musical set, understanding that we can multiply the eight notes of a musical set and for instance, if we have 11 sets of the eight we now have a piano. Now instead of just having the elemental percussion, or the elemental flute, or the elemental tambourine, or cymbals, one now has an instrument where artists can come along, like someone named Mozart and compose fantastic new ranges of musical forms of feeling, shareable by hundreds and perhaps thousands of years of fellow beings in increasingly complex ways so that now there is not just a Mozart, but there are thousands of composers. Using the instruments, all of them refined in such a way that they can enlarge and refine the feelings, the images, the very sense of language that we use to talk about our experiences and increase the quality of the integral and release a larger amperage of the visionary. We're taking by the middle of Vision, the first four, we're on a pair, we're always pairing, we're always going into symmetricality, we're always going into tuning. We always take pairs of books, pairs of classical persons, because we're trying to wean ourselves away from a textbook education based on subjects, subject to exams, expected of degrees and all of that calibration, to take pairs so constantly now what were texts, what were the basis of instruction, what were the curving of learning just so that the mind was the final repository, symbolic thought was the end of the game. If we pair we now always have proportions, we have ratios, we have tunability and the more that we shift from pair to pair, to pair, the more that those tuning forks now themselves become a source for us, a resource, in that those tuning forks arranged into a set, allow for the tuning fork set to tune the instrument called the piano. Now the capacity to explore, to compose, to create, to use the new instrument, matches the capacity of the instrument. And we know from investigations into music even 100 years ago...Arnold Schoenberg, in his great book on the harmonics 100 years ago, already revealed the understanding that the octave music of the classical west is different from, but no way superior to, the five note scale, the penta scale of the Chinese, or the multiple scales of Indian raga music and that his 12 note scale from 100 years ago showed that there were an infinite number of musical scales that are available. We can not only tune and retune ourselves, but we can do this in an infinite array of possibilities. There are more musics to be enjoyed than have ever been heard in a billion times all the compositions thus far. So our threshold is not one of jeopardy, but it's one of promise. Its only jeopardy is that we do not go through it, in which case it becomes a devastating wall of extinction. Otherwise, we have the capacity through our consciousness to add the dimension of quintessential transformationality to it and it becomes permeable to us and instead of a wall it's a membrane. And instead of there being a recoil, there's an osmosis. And instead of there being an extinction, there's a raising of the refinement of our living this. The two examples that we took to begin the first four Vision presentations, we took the classic Zhongshu from the Taoist east and the classic first Hermetic treatise the Poimandres, the Mind Shepherd, from the classic west. And we paired east and west again, like we did a year before in Nature, we took Thoreau and the I Ching, the classic nature of the east, the classic man of nature of the west and used them in new proportional ratios. And with Zhongshu and the Poimandres we began and now we're expanding it in the second group of four Vision presentations to Shakespeare's greatest play, The Tempest and to the wonderful Odes of Solomon. And as we go into next week we will bring ourselves to an even stronger way of understanding how this transformation could happen. The third set of Vision, the pair will be two of the most remarkable young men at the threshold 200 years ago. Both of them died in their thirties, both of them left an indelible impress on the way in which the next 200 years unfolded. We're gonna take Shelley and Schiller. We're gonna take Shelley's Prometheus Unbound because he was able to reach back in his own poetic genius of language to the origins of Classical Greek tragic drama and tease it forward through the Renaissance, pictured by Shakespeare as an exemplar, into a third level of possibility. Aeschylus' Prometheus Unbound, from about 2400 years ago, Shakespeare's Tempest, of about 400 years ago and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, from about 200 years ago, give us this kind of alignment: 200 years back, 400 years back, 2400 years back, so that we now with those three points, those three alignments, can use this as a sight line to go back as far and as deep as we need to go. Back to understand now what kind of Palaeolithic dramatic events were choreographed 40,000 years ago, or 20,000 years ago. And if we go back 20,000 years, we see that in the great cave of Lascaux there was such a sophisticated understanding already that one is brought, not just through initiations, but brought through a set of resonant thresholds to find the courage to undergo what would normally be an experience of death and to survive it and to be reborn, not as an existential, but as a magical, spiritual being who is not limited by the limitations of existence. And we can go back 40,000 years to, again, southern France, near Marseille, to the great cave of Chauvet and we see there the origins of this kind of Palaeolithic cave art choreography. That the whole cave is a temple of transform, a whole temple of recalibration. 40,000, 20,000, 2400, 400, 200 and as a contemporary to Shelley, so that we don't get ourselves inadvertently into textville, we're using Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which was a revolutionary book that man is not a political animal, he's an aesthetic spirit and if you take that tack for yourself and for others, you get a readout that is completely different from the one in which the world is embroiled. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back and let's reposition ourselves just for a moment. We're not only taking pairs of books, because reading is the yoga of symbolic structures. A written language has a quality of being able to engender vision immediately. A spoken language will engender imagery that becomes creative immediately unless it is veiled by the symbolic structure of the mind, of thought. When children play and laugh and shout, sing, they do so because their experiences are participating in a visionary play. As they are put through the artificiality of the educational mill they lose this immediacy and one of the unfortunate accidental qualities that comes into play is that while kindergarten children, boys and girls, still play au naturel, first graders are begun to learn their alphabet and their counting, to organise and systematize and at first they play with it in a natural way. They sing their ABC's, 'A, B, C, D,' or they have fun with the counting of things and they'll go around counting everything. But progressively as the grades occur, as they become inculcated, the veil becomes likes a tablet that gets in the way of the natural experience engendering vision. One says, 'Their wings are clipped, they're no longer able to just fly.' And William Blake, couple of hundred years ago had a famous engraving of the bespeckled authorities clipping the wings of children so that they'll stay put where they are put and will not be able to fly on their own and away. What happens is that there's a shift to reading, so that by the time of the second grade they're encouraging the students, the readers, to make pictures in their mind of what they read the words are and so the pictures in their mind are not pictures in vision, but they're mental reproductions of what would normally be the creative visioning, now becomes a formulaic imagery and the best word for that is, 'Icon.' They become iconographic images that are reproductions and the clarity of those reproductions is encouraged to have a referential correlation to physical things in the world. Thereby one is told that, 'You're being practical. The icons you have in your symbolic thought match the things in the world and now you're being pragmatic and practical and now you're learning the way we want you to learn.' And so a whole inculcation happens and one of the curious qualities to this, children raised in the 1930's and 1940's, in those 20 years their exposure, largely outside of school, was to radio. And radio was an oral language medium, much like the old mythographers, the old mythic storytellers. And children who grew up in that era remember you do not just listen to a radio, but you watched it. The big old radios of the late thirties and early forties were huge and they would have a red dot light that would come on when it was working and you would sit in front of the big radio on a Saturday morning and you would watch the radio while listening to your radio programmes. Sky King, See If You Can Get a Magic Ring, The Shadow, a number of adventures. Everything was adventures, everything was immediately, creatively imaginative and the generation of Homo sapiens sapiens that grew up in the thirties and forties had a most supple quality of creative imagination. They did not mind so much just reading silently, but they liked it when somebody would read out loud and the children of that time loved to have stories read to them, so that with play, the theatre is very much the play. And one of the all-time great radiances was Shakespeare, but Shakespeare must be played. So that in the 1930's you had editions like this one from 1939, The Mercury Shakespeare, Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging by Orson Welles and Roger Hill. Roger Hill at the time was a teacher at the Todd School and they were experimenting with having Shakespeare put on the radio and also Shakespeare staged in such a way that these books, these versions of the plays could be used in schools everywhere that the English language was used and it would teach people how to play with the play.
Introduction
On studying Shakespeare's plays: don't. Read them, enjoy them, act them. Shakespeare might not be surprised to know that his plays are still bringing money to producers and fame to actors throughout the world. He would be greatly surprised however to know that they are studied by compulsion in the classroom. That they are conned by scholars, dissected by pedants, fed in synthetic and minute, quite distasteful doses to students, much in the same manner as are capsules of Cicero's Letters and pellets of Euclid's Geometry.
So that the artificiality and the superficiality of false boundaries was progressively inculcated in such a way that it produced a monumental back-up of creative capacity in the decades following this. Public education was never very big until the early 1830's, 1840's, about 100 years before this. Most boys and girls, men and women, were not formally educated at all, they were literally at the mother's knee, at the father's side, of how to live, or how to do things. But increasingly with the Industrial Revolution the superficiality became thinner and thinner, more and more a steel film and the artificiality became more and more of a mechanism of mechanical application. So that you had for instance, a vision from a great Czech writer at the end of the 1920's, seeing already, it was called R.U.R. The author was Karel ?apek. R.U.R. stood for, 'Rossum's Universal Robots' and in it the robots become more and more sophisticated, the people become more and more docile and dominated by dependence on the robots, till the robots become sophisticated to reproduce themselves, to make themselves, make their own improvements and they didn't need man anymore at all, he was in the way. It was a nightmare vision of what is happening through artificiality and superficiality being fed into a mechanical quality of extinction of life and of life forms.
Here's from Orson Welles in his beginning:
Well, one more biography [and it's headlined 'Biography of William Shakespeare, number 1,000,999.] While one more will not seriously disturb his ashes, it will however, seriously disturb the complacency of any biographer who aims at literary honesty. What to say? What not to say? Tennyson told us, 'The world should be thankful there are but five facts known about Shakespeare.' This sounds simple enough, it might easily be memorised verbatim by even an amateur examinee and thus on the student might supposedly face any college board test on Shakespeare with equanimity, but alas for the student, unfortunately for the student, if you get what I mean. This is not all studied from the start. The Mississippi River starts in a tiny spring in Minnesota, but by the time it reaches New Orleans is one of the vastest rivers in the world.
It's not only in the 1920's, 1930's, that you begin to find this, but becomes accelerated at that time because of the realisation by refined and cultivated men and women that we're beginning to face a saturation of artificiality, an ultimate thinness of superficiality and one of the greatest theatre directors of the past few decades is Peter Brook. Peter Brook who did the great nine hour dramatic production of the Indian national epic The Mahabharata, The Great Indian War and put it out on six hours of DVD now. Brook in his little lecture given in Berlin just a few years ago...this was printed in 1999 and imprinted by the Theatre Communications Group in New York, just a little seeming throwaway critic lecture, but Brook's one of the great directors of the world. And he said and the transcript reads:
Even if a concept is something necessary in speech, it is a tragically pathetic portion of the amazing whole that speech can offer. Concept is that little, thin, intellectual strain that the whole of western civilisation has bowed down to excessively for so many centuries. Concept is there, but beyond concept is the concept brought into life by image and beyond concept and image is music. The word, 'Music' is the expression of what cannot be taught in conceptual speech. Human experience that cannot be conceptualised is expressed through music. Poetry comes out of this, because in poetry you have an infinitely subtle relationship between rhythm, tone, vibration and energy, which give to each word as it is spoken, concept, image and at the same time an infinitely powerful further dimension, which comes from sound, from the verbal music. And yet I think how dangerous it is even to mention the word, 'Music.' This can lead to a terrifying misunderstanding. An actor can take this to mean, 'Ah, I have a musical voice, so I can speak musically.' Let's be clear, the word, 'Music' in the poetic sense is something very subtle. Word rhythm is something very subtle, but tragically, in theatre schools all over the world if this has been reduced to a set of rules, if actors are told that Shakespeare wrote in pentameters and pentameters have a certain beat and the actors try to use this in their speech, you get a dry, empty music, which is not the living music that is there in the words.
The ancient way to speak of this, when English went under its transform 600 years ago into the humane Middle English of Chaucer, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of all of the great, huge first transformation of English into a humane, living language, the phrase was, 'To lift the words off the page.' And one of the classic illustrations that survives from 600 years ago is Geoffrey Chaucer reading out loud his Canterbury Tales to a court audience of men and women who were absolutely creatively playing to the sound of reading off the page into a visionary, experiential flow together. That as experience is always a flow like a river, the process of vision is like a field and where experience usually flows through the field of nature and finds its comfort there, finds its home, finds its familiarity, it gets suddenly surprised in a beautiful way that it can flow in the field of vision just as well. And that where it flows in the field of nature the existence of things is wonderful and clear. When it flows in the field of vision, it realises that the mind is wondrous and capable of transformation. That the structure of thought is not an indelible structure, but is a relationality of proportions that can be remodulated in such a way that you're not destroying anything by redoing the structures of thought. You don't have to have a revolution to change the way people think. You don't have to have a reformation to put new content into those structures of thought. You don't have to have anything radical at all, because the mind's structure is supple and thrives on being creatively, not just rearranged, but reconstituted completely. Two things come out of the field of consciousness: it emerges a new kind of rainbow person for whom the spectrum of possibility is the very stuff of new ways to be. 'Who will I be today? Who might I be next year? In 50 years from now I want to surprise myself and have gone through many styles of possibility of my being.' The enriched life is infinitely variable. The other that comes through is a mind that becomes supple again in that it does not rely upon habituated actions to correlate referentially with doctrinaire structures and ideas. The other person's difference from you becomes a point of interest, rather than a point of contention. And so the variety of human beings becomes a wondrous possibility and there are many, as many ways of being as may be. To lift the language off the page is the very essence of a dramatic presentation and Shakespeare is one of the all-time great presenters. If we look at acting Shakespeare, when you are in a production of a play...this particular volume by Welles was Twelfth Night and I remember at 17 acting the part of Malvolio from Twelfth Night in a company in our city called Pit and Balcony Players. In Elizabethan theatre the pit was where the common people were down near at the stage and you had to look up at the stage and it was the cheapest seats. And the balcony, the gallery, were also common people, but a little better off that they could sit down and get a little distance. But all the wealthy people had their own boxes where they could have their food and their wine and they could jeer or cheer from comfort and from prized places. So pit and balcony meant the common persons' participation because the audience in all of its layers becomes, when the magic of theatre is happening, a part of the commune that's going on and what one has then is that the performers, the actors, in their doing of the presentation, of the performance, the audience energy becomes a part of their energy flow and it's like having the two poles and an electromagnetic field begins to occur and there is something like a really magic performance, a magic night, an incredibility. One of the most incredible exemplars of this was at the first Monterey Pop Festival in 1970. Ravi Shankar played a new creative Indian raga, based on American rock music and it was called 'Dhum,' d-h-u-m. And when he performed that you got a bluegrass American rock rhythm to the way in which a classic Indian Afternoon Raga had its energy and when it finished, in one of the most melodramatic flourishes of the tabla, the drum and of the sitar going, chording down and chording up and it ended with such an impact that the entire audience was absolutely stunned and the cheering was not out of cheering the performance, but like a gushing heart on a shock of emotion that you had participated in this. The audience was an indelible part of that performance. An incredible realisation came through that the ancient India music and the modern late sixties auditorium rock performance had flowed together in such a way that they were real together. There was no discrimination whatsoever of different centuries, different millennia, different musical types. The new music was heard there clearly for the first time, that this was an extraordinary event. One of the follow-ups to that was George Harrison taking a whole group of musicians to make a special concert for Bangladesh, the poorest part of India that had been taken out of India and put into its own country and left a language. And one hears in the concert for Bangladesh the response, the follow-up to Ravi Shankar's dhum at the Monterey Pop Festival, the first one. And you hear in the interplay of this a way in which this kind of learning brings out something never heard before, never seen before, but welcomes a completely new quality of our vitality and our possibility.
We're taking Shakespeare's Tempest because it crowns his entire career and we've been talking the last three...now this is the fourth presentation, that the figure of Prospero, the old magician who knows how to command the elements, who's in touch with spirits like Ariel, who has a structure of recognition and of capacities that are truly magical. That all of this came to a fore right at the beginning of the 1600's. The most devastating book published at that time was published in 1608, right at the time when Shakespeare went into high gear and produced the last four great plays of his life, The Tempest being the fourth. And what was published in 1608 was for the first time a completely New Astronomy by Johannes Kepler. And the New Astronomy was the first time that there was a new way of looking at the universe since Ptolemy's great Almagest. That's the Arabian Islamic translation of the Greek title The Ptolemaic Astronomy and Universe. It held sway for 1500 years unchallenged. Copernicus had challenged a little bit, but it didn't really reach many people. Kepler all of a sudden was in the New Astronomy...this is not a very good likeness of Kepler at all. One of the reactions to Kepler's New Astronomy was that his mother was charged with witchcraft. The authorities didn't know enough sophisticated math to be able to challenge Kepler on Kepler's terms, so they went for the jugular vein. His mother, if she's convicted of being a witch then her son was raised perhaps by witchcraft and even though we can't criticise and understand it, we know that witchcraft is forbidden and all this will have to be excised. 'You will not be allowed to publish, you will not be allowed to communicate. All of this is obviously necromancy. It's magic that goes against our authority.' And so Shakespeare's The Tempest, that was written just a couple of years, three years after this, is one of the great documents in the world. Of a man who was so equanimious that it is difficult in a previous place to find any way to position Shakespeare in terms of a doctrine, in terms of, 'Well, what were his beliefs?' He has hundreds of characters, every conceivable aspect of humanity. And he in his great cape of capacity has thousands of different ways of the human embroidery, he's just humanity himself and yet in The Tempest the figure that comes through is not any figure playing a part in this play, or any of the figures in any of the plays, but it is the playwright. It is Shakespeare the man who comes through and discloses in the play one of the curiosities of his time. And one of the curiosities of his time is that the focus of magic, the focus of theatre, the focus of religion, of science, had come very close to being a mishmash of mutual hatred and polarity. One of the figures who was there at the beginning was Giordano Bruno and this volume by Frances A. Yates...Frances Yates was about six feet tall, she had flaming blue white hair. I have heard her speak and she lived in the same house for 50 years and she was one of the great scholars in England of the time. And this volume was published in 1964, right at the beginning. Bruno had gone from Italy to London in 1583 and had made a contact there...and we talked last week, with some of the brightest, new poetic voices in England, chief among them Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Edmund Spenser, the author of The Fairie Queene and we talked about Sidney last week. The book that followed up on Giordano Bruno and Hermetic tradition was Frances Yates, two years later, 1966, doing The Art of Memory. The creative imagination that is projected out and the overwhelming great chapter in this is chapter six, called, 'Renaissance Memory: The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo.' And one finds in here the fold-out that the memory theatre of the Renaissance held a key to recalibrating the entire structure of symbolic thought in a visionary mode, rather than letting it remain in a doctrine mode. Rather than it being a doctrine mode, addicted to making sure that it is following the habitual connections that you were taught, that you must obey, that you ought to stick to and that anything else is dangerous, anything else, who knows where it will lead? That the memory theatre was a recalibration of the structures of symbolic thought. Many books followed. This one came out in 1969, three years later, called Theatre of the World. It has the Leonardo da Vinci Hermetic star man, famous. The man who is not crucified, but who is exalted. One of the great paintings of this watercolours is Glad Day by William Blake. The frontispiece, John Dee, Theatre of the World, the astrologer to Elizabeth I, the greatest mathematician of his day. It was Dee, mathematical genius, who first figured out and published in 1575, a long essay, many, many dozens of pages, on how to navigate the entire globe of the world. And this was the foundation of British sea power because one now could navigate the entire globe as a globe and have the math and the instruments to be able to be at home anywhere in the world, no matter where your ship was and to know exactly where you were and how to get back and how to get there again and how to do this concourse. The central figure of the Yates volumes...where she taught was at the Warburg Institute in London. But before the Warburg Institute was in London, it was in Berlin in the 1930's. Developed just after the Nazis took over in Germany, it was developed as a response to not let this go on further and the first journal of the Warburg Institute is in 1937, July. Now, Aby Warburg was the older son of two sons of the most wealthy bankers in Germany, in Berlin, but he made a deal as a very interesting younger man, that his younger brother would inherit running the family banking businesses if the younger brother would make funds available so that Aby Warburg could buy books and accumulate a library, because he was interested in many things, especially the Renaissance and how it affected everything in the world. So the younger brother agreed to it and didn't realise that his older brother was smarter than him and wanted millions of marks worth of books and had a library of 65,000 volumes. When the Nazis began to close them down he moved the entire library, the entire school of scholars that collected around him, to London. And it was there in London, in the 1940's and 1950's and 1960's, that all of this work is done. It was a recapitulation of the Renaissance, especially the Florentine Renaissance, sponsored by Cosimo de Medici and it was in the Renaissance of the Cosimo de Medici that Marsilio Ficino headed the Florentine Academy and brought back into play the recalibrating energy from the classical First Century and Second Century AD and central to that was Plato's Symposium. And here in a letter by Ficino, the dedication of his translation of Plato's Symposium:
As a gentle little thing which man does frequently and often, after long experience he does well and the longer he is accustomed to it, the better he does it. But in the case of love, this rule, because of our stupidity and much to our sorrow, does not hold. We all love continuously in some way, but almost all of us love wrongly and so the more we love, the worse it becomes. And if one in 100,000 loves rightly because he is not the common practice, no one follows his example. We fall into this great error, unfortunately for us, because we boldly start out upon this difficult journey of love before we know its destination, or how to travel the perilous path of the journey. The farther we go, the farther we stray, to our great undoing. And losing our way in the dark forest of love is more serious than on other journeys, because we travel there in large numbers, often. In order to lead us back to the straight path which we have missed, the supreme love and divine providence inspired a chaste love in Ancient Greece called Diotima, the priestess, who under divine inspiration finding the philosopher Socrates devoted above all else to love and explained to him what this ardent passion is and how by means of it we can fall into the greatest evil, or soar to the highest good. Socrates in turn revealed these holy mysteries to Plato in his Dialogues.
Next week we'll take up exactly where we stop here and see that there was an esoteric centre within a centre and the centre within the centre was a young, brilliant man named Pico della Mirandola, the Count of the little kingdom, the Duchy of Larenta. Pico della Mirandola, again, like Shelley, like Schiller, like Mozart, died in his early thirties, but before he died he challenged the entire structure of authority in the Europe of his day and the authority of the Church, in such a massive way. When he threw down the gauntlet, he threw it down with 900 argument theses, he was willing to argue with anybody in the world. He was 23 years old. Of course the Inquisitors came after him and he died a few years later, very much on the tenterhooks of one the biggest threshold crises, that's like a resonance of our own time. Shakespeare is a direct layer comparator of the outcome of these kinds of things. Next week when we bring in Shelley and Schiller, we'll see that both of them are resonances furthermore of Shakespeare. They both come about 200 years later and both of them are affected very much by, not just Shakespeare, but the way in which Shakespeare had been mishandled, manhandled, artificialised, superficialised, for 200 years and then it was brought back, full force, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When you have a tableful of revolutionaries - Goethe, Napoleon, Jefferson, Beethoven - all of a sudden, across the face of the earth, you had men and women who refused to not understand the creativity that they were the rightful heirs to and blew authority out the water for a little while. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Romantic revolution. When we look next week for the next four presentations at Shelley and Schiller, we'll see one of the most incandescent qualities that was brought back into play at the end of the nineteenth century, with the revolutions in art that almost dwarfed everything that had come before it. Be sure and watch the films, the four films that with go with the Vision. Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Frank Capra's The Lost Horizon, Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and the beautiful film that George Miller did in Australia, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Four great films, four great directors, to generate the kind of visionary quality that is going on in our own time. More next week.