Vision 11
Presented on: Saturday, March 17, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Vision Eleven and we're pursuing, by a patient pacing, something which has been intuited and written about for quite some long while and had a rash of enquiry and intensity about 200, 250 years ago, that recut the way in which the mind was looked at in a very radical way, right in the middle between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The generation that came to maturity from that middle point lasted into roughly the first third of the nineteenth century and as they were dying out through natural attrition, their children found a completely different world challenging them. In-between the American and French Revolutions there was a period called the Enlightenment and those people, those men and women, who rose to that challenge, their children came into a world that was inundated by the Industrial Revolution, a completely different social reality from the Enlightenment. And the Industrial Revolution brought to the fore the conviction that only by changing the lives of many people at the bottom could a new world be envisioned. Whereas the Enlightenment felt and was convinced that if you change the minds of the elite, they will be able to recut the world in such a way that everyone will have a better life. Two completely different outlooks. Those two outlooks were both swept aside progressively through the nineteenth century, but it wasn't apparent until 100 years later, in the 1920's, 1930's of the twentieth century, that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were both irrelevant to a world that has a technological, scientific expansion. And as if to put an exclamation mark on that fact, the atomic bomb in 1945 sealed that argument permanently. It was not a matter of an elite understanding and recutting the world so it would be better for everyone, or of a population of people to be raised up with social justice, to reconstitute a better humanity, that both those positions, both those points, were political points. They were based on a confidence that there was a political arrangement of man which is the best way in which the mind then oversees a social realm. Following hard on the atomic bomb, within two years, the Roswell UFO incident, of which we're coming up to the sixtieth anniversary this year, blew out the expansion to a point to where it can never be put back into the box of an Enlightenment, or the box of a social justice politics. We know now that it isn't just a question of a technological element in a social realm, but that that is raised to levels of almost incomprehensible complexity and scope. And so we have found ourselves over the last 60 years going through a very serious withdrawal syndrome. We were used to a political arrangement based upon an economics and the Greek spelling of economics is with an, 'O,' o-e-c-o-n-o-m-i-c-s. Thus the stylization of both the Enlightenment and the socialist revolutions of the early nineteenth century, are both dealing with the confidence that the mind, understanding a political economy, is the widest strategy of human life. The seeds of which we are looking at today are that it is not a political form that man lives by in his fullness, but that he lives by an aesthetic form and the very prejudice of thinking that an aesthetic form is keeping your head in the clouds, is one of the tacks of discrediting it. Another is that it may be interesting for salons that have works of art, or museums that have works of art, but what does aesthetics have to do with human life? It has everything to do with it. And that just as a political economy is a mental constriction of the social realm, an aesthetic oikoumene is expandable into infinity. Not an economic, but an oikoumene and not just ecumenical in bringing everyone together in a certain way where there's toleration, but the original oikoumene, o-i-k-o-u-m-e-n-e. The original oikoumene was that there is an infinite variety of beings, an infinite variety of human beings, each one not an individual so much, to be protected by their political rights in a managed economy, but a prismatic person who has an array of possibilities within their own lifetime. They can be many people, many kinds of people, different emphases, different varieties of themselves. And so the aesthetic confidence is in the prismatic person, not in the individual, pragmatic actor. The simplest way to say it: 'You do not have to play a role. If you are a differentially conscious, expanded actor in the world, you may play many roles and none of them will exhaust your ability, your rights, to have even further.' And so the whole emphasis that comes out of a ritual stricture, based upon individual political economy arrangement of people, what comes out of their rituals is the laws, the codes, the strictures by which if they will live by, they will be successful. Successful in the sense they will blend in, they will be within that structure. The differential is a complete rejection of that as being myopic, of being erroneous, of being flawed to the nth degree, because the prismatic person, being capable of almost an infinite possibility of activities, has the ability to have human communities on a creative, imaginative basis. An aesthetic social realm is not limited to any political economy, no matter how it is stylized, no matter what mind, or minds think it up. An aesthetic oikoumene recognises that there is a full spectrum, not only for each prismatic person, but their interchanges between themselves are a higher order, a bigger power of that differentiation. And that the source of it is not in the mind, as a symbolic structure, but the source is in a transcendent consciousness that outclasses the mind in every conceivable way. The most conspicuous is, is that a mind with a symbolic structure cannot handle naturally more than four dimensions, whereas consciousness is already dealing very much at home with a five-dimensional field and that that quintessential fifth dimension is a transformational dimension that specifically expands or contracts time. And consequently that the space that emerges out of that expanded or that contracted time, that is a creative space. And so works of art, spiritual persons, matured, prismatic human beings, are able to engender a creative space that extends beyond the limitations of what the mind, both in its enlightenment, top-heavy sophistication, or its social, political, socialism, political economy, for the ground up works of social orders and relationalities.
So we're dealing here with something that was in a seed 200 years ago and that seed was lost because its original seed was between two revolutions, revolutions that were ostensibly about changing the nature of the political economy. The American and the French Revolutions both were out to change everything, to start from scratch, yes. The French Revolution junked the calendar and said, 'This is the Year One,' but it was the year one in a new political economy. We're looking at the way in which a buried seed maintained its fertility all the while surviving the so-called oblivion that it suffered because the Industrial Revolution had come in and had obviated, had consigned to oblivion, many of the seed insights, many of the seed intuitive and works of art, prismatic presentations. And what we're doing here in these four presentations at the end of Vision, is going back, revisiting, two individuals, two prismatic persons, Schiller and Shelley, who present between them one of the most insightful, deep qualities of understanding. Two other poets need to be considered as a pair along with those two and a third pair needs to be considered along with them. And if you take a set of six, world-class, prismatic, aesthetic, oikoumene artists, right about the same time, from roughly 1770's to about the early 1830's, late 1820's, you get a hexagram, you get a hexagon of a prismatic insight, almost as if now you not only have an exemplar in someone, or a pair of exemplars, but by having six of them together, you have the essential, hexagonal, crystalline structure of the prism that generates the spiritual realm of the creative person, who is able to live in more dimensions than the symbolic structure was able to envision, to understand. And literally, human beings who do this pass beyond understanding. The seed word for this, taken from antiquity, taken form the pinnacle of the Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian ethos of about 2,000 years ago, the word that translates into English that they used and was used again, is the, 'Sublime,' the, 'Sublime.' And the sublime is a complexity of spiritual dimensions of the universe that renders it as a cosmos. It is not a universe, a one thing, but it is a cosmos, it is every possibility. Not only every possibility of everything, every possibility of every possibility. The emphasis here, classically, 2,000 years ago, was that if we are not dealing just with the mind, what we're dealing with then obviously are powers of the mind. And so the initial reference to it in the seeds that we're taking a look at, was that there are powers of aesthetic judgement. The person who brought most of this to pass in a considered way, was named Kant, Immanuel Kant, who led one of the most externally boring lives you could possibly have. He was a professor in a city called Königsberg, which is on the Baltic Sea, midway between Lithuania and Poland and now is still a part of Russia, the old Soviet Union. It was said that you could tell the time of day by what Kant was doing, because he was in one of the deepest yogas that the planet has ever seen. And in fact in India, in the Indian philosophic tradition, they respect Kant as a Raja Yogi and is compared to Shankara, who is sort of in some comparisons, he's the Thomas Aquinas of the Vedas, he's the founder of the Vedanta. Kant is very much like Shankara in this respect: all of his concern was to hone and be sure to have a differentiation and a distinction of dimensions and aspects of reality that heretofore were consigned to mysticism, or consigned to secrets, or told that this is ineffable and no one can understand it. To transform the symbolic structure of thought so that it became, literally, a field of consciousness able to look back from its field upon the mind which had generated it in the first place. And so Kant is the developer of the transcendental philosophies put into three great critiques. Now, 'Critique' is an art term. If you're somebody who is an impresario, who's going to put on a production, you want to critique that production while it's being rehearsed and developed so that it's going to be the best possible. In a theatre, a director, the first thing a director does, while the actors are learning their lines, the director will block out the stage, where everybody is going to be as the scene progresses and as these scenes go to these acts, as these acts build to this play. The ritual, literally taking chalk and marking out on the floor of the stage where everybody at such and such a moment is going to be so that the delivery of the lines will have its line of expressiveness, giving amplitude to a quality and resonance of the experience of the play, which is not an experience that is not purely natural, but is an experience that is spiritual and aesthetic. For instance, in Greek tragedy the stage was about 90 feet across and one of the most dramatic qualities in a Greek tragedy is to have a single figure stage front, almost proscenium front and to have behind them, off on side, 12 figures in mask and costume, that mime together, that speak in a chorus and who have a conversation with the single figure and then to bring another single figure in. So that you have a contrast of the aloneness of the protagonist, with the massive form of the gestalt of the chorus, with the aloneness of another figure, you begin to get ratios of extraordinary feeling tones, that the mind in its own symbolic structure tends to want to abstract it out, to give it a geometric kind of a relationality and yet the delivery of the lines in a beautiful rhythmic poetic, keep drawing feeling into the imagery which is not allowed to sink into a ritual comportment, but is constantly being churned, so that it becomes an artistic event. And while the ritual actions are purely ritual because of the way in which they are choreographed by having been blocked out, now you have an audience that is suddenly aware of itself, that the audience is a part of the theatre. That the stage is not up there and the audience over here, there's no dichotomy. But the echo of the words, the resonance of the actions, makes the ratioing between the audience and the performers knit together in a larger whole. That theatre now becomes a transcendental sphere. It has a wholeness of stage and audience and if the actors in the production have been blocked out right, the choreography has been handled right, as the audience gains an aesthetic appreciation of what is happening on the stage, the actors on the stage, the performers, gain an aesthetic transcendence that the audience is a part of their performance. And everyone who has ever been in a production that has achieved this, understands this is theatre magic, this is a magic night. The songs of a famous Broadway hit from decades ago: 'It's a grand night for singing, the stars are shining above and I feel like, everyone feels like, falling in love.' That energy of love, that sharedness, what I call a, 'Shared presence,' is that the entire community of the performers and the audience together have been subsumed into a creative space that exceeds the ability of the mind to structure it and so the mind cannot structure it. What structures it? The work of art, the spirit person, they together structure that. Not structure it as an integral, but as a prismatic differential. And when it shines in this way, something super happens. The cosmos invites us to be at home in it and we recognise that we have gone through a threshold, we have left the world that could be manipulated by ritual, that could be conceived by the symbolic structure of thought and we've entered into the ineffable of the beautiful and the sublime. Kant, Of the Beautiful and Sublime, written when he was a young man in 1764, a generation before he wrote his three great critiques. The Critique of Pure Reason was 1781 and then the second edition, 1787. The Critique of Practical Reason, its Application was written after that. And then The Critique of Judgement as it's called, but the correct title is The Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgement, came out in 1790 and the second, refined edition in 1793. Of the Beautiful and Sublime a generation before, the blurb says, 'This is the first complete English translation since 1799.' We're living in a junkyard of contradictions and contentions that were diagnosed a couple of hundred years ago as being unworkable permanently. But the whole realm of solutions that came out a couple of hundred years ago, were swept aside several times and consigned to a non-acknowledgement:
This is intellectual stuff. This is old history, this is dead past. This is only for the few people that don't have anything to do and they have plenty of time to sit around and just look at these things. And look at them, they don't get along in this world, they're not successful. They don't know how to be masterful junk dealers. They refuse to participate and become rag salesmen. They keep daydreaming of the fact that they may be cosmic, spiritual beings who have many lives, in many star systems and are essentially free in reality. How stupid can they be?
One of the deepest qualities that's there is that Kant's material was drawn out, not just into the German language part of Europe, but in particular was drawn out into English at the time and in the English of the time it slipped into a mode of visionary poetic that challenged the entire political economy, the entire limited, symbolic structure of thought world. One of the most powerful figures in this of course is Schiller, who's On The Aesthetic Education of Man definitely goes back to his early naive and sentimental poetry and On the Sublime. He took the beautiful philosophic yoga of Kant and he put it into a poetic production, so that you had not just the yoga of the yoga master, that one could participate in and do but took a lot of difficult energy, but it was put into a kind of a language where the poetry would be able to open it up gorgeously. But because it was completely different from the expectations of a political economy, social realm, habituated by thousands of years and centuries and traditions....this is the opening quotation from a chapter called 'Beauty and Freedom: Schiller Struggles with Kant's Aesthetics.' 'In a letter dated August 15th, 1795, William Von Humboldt'...one of the great explorers and travellers, traveller philosophers of the time. His brother Alexander Von Humboldt was the most daring traveller in world history probably and ended up writing a five volume work called Cosmos towards the end of his life. He was the most exciting adventurer, he was like an exponential Lawrence of Arabia. He went everywhere in the world. He went places that most people would cringe from. He walked on rims of volcanoes in Peru and walked onto the calderas to get closer to the lava, to be able to get the sense of the world. He lived with all kinds of peoples all over the world and Alexander Von Humboldt's travels would make a hell of a film. His brother, William Von Humboldt, passed along to Schiller a comment from an anonymous reader of his Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, one of the books that we're working with here. It said:
Someone said to me, after the usual tribute of praise, that he did not understand your work and that its obscurity is of a worse sort than, for example, Kant's. For one reads Kant with great difficulty; it stops doubtfully at every sentence, but once one has struggled through he know distinctly what he has read. In the case of your work, the reader readily accepts each individual sentence and thinks he has understood everything equally well, but if he asked himself afterward what he has read, he does not know how to articulate it.
The indelible realisation is that you must mature a poetic in persons over a long time cooking time, so that when they do have the expanded consciousness of creative, imaginative visioning and achieve a prismatic person in the spirit of the beauty of possibility, that they will be able to survive the almost inevitable oblivion that comes from the hurricane of a universe transcendently transformed into an infinite cosmos. The storm front that comes is the kaleidoscope of historical consciousness. And in order to surf through the kaleidoscopic consciousness of historical thresholds, so that instead of it being a wall, or being a hurricane, or being a typhoon, that sinks us, we're able to use that energy and ride our, surf our way through, to a confidence now that we are at home in the oceans. We belong out here and all of these vicissitudes are part of the natural weather of an expanded universe into a cosmos. We are no longer frightened that there are supermassive black holes, that there are supernovas that blow hell out of whole galaxies. We are part of the beauty of the possibilities of having an infinite aesthetic oikoumene with creatures without end, with beings from star systems without end and to be at home on that level. Let's take a break and hope the Ferrari goes.
And being a kind of a stout fellow, they put him in charge of herds, a shepherd and it was odd because he began to intuit for the first time that there was something peculiar about his life because he began to have this expanded consciousness and he began to learn a little bit about the Bible - Schiller had never known anything - and he realised that many of the Patriarchs in the Old Testament were herdsmen just like him. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the 12 Tribes, largely herdsmen. So he had a very interesting life and when he died he was buried in Glastonbury Cathedral, before it became the big cathedral. In fact, before it became the big cathedral in the 1100's that was one of the most enormous cathedrals in the world on the level of Chartres, because it was much more important than Chartres. It was a very large cathedral in the 700's, about the time that Beowulf was written and that church enclosed a small circle of 12 huts that had a communal banquet, singing, choir hall in the centre and that was the original Glastonbury. Glastonbury means, 'The isle of apples' and it's in a part of Somerset that floods in the spring and there are hills there that become islands and the central island is called in Arthurian lore, 'Avalon.' Because not only was St. Patrick buried there and many other saints, but King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were buried there as well. They were buried on the south angle that comes in where the 12 huts were originally arranged round the central choir dining hall. Those 12 huts were built by the family of Jesus that went there to that part of the British Isles in 37 AD. And there were six pairs of men and women that went there. Jesus had four sisters and each of them had a husband and so those four, plus the four. His oldest sister was named Salome, who was born in the Egypt captivity and married Zebedee and had a pair of sons, James and John, St. James and St. John. The next oldest girl was Mary and she married a man named Cleophus and among their sons was John Mark, who became St. Mark. And the next oldest girl was named Joanna and she was married to Chusa, who was the royal steward for King Herod Antipas, who controlled all of the Transjordan and Galilee provinces. And the fourth sister, the youngest one, was Susanne and she married Joseph of Arimathea. So those four couples went and Lazarus and his sister Martha went and Nicodemus and his wife went and they arranged those huts in the same order that the huts had been arranged for the Therapeutae community outside of Alexandria, where Jesus taught for almost 30 years, where Mary Magdalene studied with him for almost 30 years. Joseph of Arimathea and Susanna, because they were younger, had a daughter whom they named Anna. And Anna had a daughter named Penrhyn and Penrhyn married the historical, real King Lear. So that the family of Jesus became linked with the royal family of England at the time of King Lear and if you take a look at some of the esotericness in Shakespeare's King Lear...spelled L-e-i-r...the i-r ending has a royal connotation, where mine is I'm not quite sure. But the constitution of Glastonbury is one of the most sacred sites in the world. In all the early conventions of Christianity it was always given the first place, not Jerusalem, but Glastonbury. And so it's an odd thing that St. Patrick should not only be the saint of the British Isles, but St. Patrick in his convolutions of...how can I say it? The resonances of the transcendent, symbolic qualities became associated with St. George, St. George and the dragon. Which is why King Arthur's father is named Uther Pendragon. He's the, 'Old dragon.' The Great Dragon was the Milky Way originally. And so literally there were kings that reigned in-between stones and stars, with a pedigree that goes back to ancient times. And not only is St. George a patron saint, like Patrick is of Ireland, St. George of England, St. George is the patron saint of Ethiopia as well. Because Ethiopia has a very long esoteric history, with the royal lineage of things going all the way back to Makeda and Solomon and their son Menelik, who was the first really great king that brought the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Axum in Ethiopia, about 950 BC. Many of these things...and if you get interested, the old leader, Lionel Smithett-Lewis, who was a victor of Glastonbury, has done Joseph of Arimathea and Glastonbury and it will just be of interest for you. And the son of King Leir and of Penrhyn, the grandson of Anna, the great grandson of Joseph of Arimathea, was named Bran the Blessed and when esoteric things were first being really understood, in the age of Yeats and Jessie L. Weston and so forth, in London, David Nutt, who was a great friend of Jessie L. Weston, published the two volumes in translation by the German Irish specialist, Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febail, to the Land of the Living. Because rebirth was a part of the family heritage. The Irish Version of the Happy Otherworld and the Celtic Doctrine of Rebirth. And the second volume is The Expanded Celtic Doctrine of Rebirth. So if you get interested you can find all this and of course one of the great figures at the time when this came out was James Joyce and you'll find in Finnegan's Wake, it is the esoteric epic of the rebirth theme that comes all the way through the ancient Irish, west English, historical kaleidoscope. And one of the later researchers who went into this was E.Y. Evans-Wentz, an American and he was researching The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, which he published and recognised that there were resonances from the ancient Irish to Tibet. And then he went to Tibet and was welcomed by the Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup and he did four big volumes for Oxford University Press: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Great Liberation, etc. So all of these things are brought together and they figure here in southern California, because Evans-Wentz owned a ranch on Mount Kuchumaa, just west of San Diego, near the Mexican border. And Mount Kuchumaa is a place of the ancient south-west Indians receiving some of the visitations on the rebirth teachings from Jesus. Many things, yet to be disclosed to a world that is currently a junkyard, but we're going to have a garden before this generation is out.
Let's come to the sublime, let's come to Schiller and Shelley and just have a few lines from Shelley, right at the time that he was writing Prometheus Unbound, that we're taking with Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, right at the same time his wife, Mary Shelley - and in the notes I've put a portrait of Mary Shelley - she was writing Frankenstein. And Shelley was persona non grata with his family and with the authorities and he died in July, early July, July eighth of 1822. He drowned off the coast of Livorno, Italy, Leghorn. And his body was washed ashore and it wasn't buried until January of 1823. And Mary in her journal writes:
On the 21st of January those rites were fulfilled. Shelley, my own beloved, you rest beneath the blue sky of Rome, in that at least I am satisfied. A storm has come across me as life's circumstances disturbed the deceitful calm of which I boasted. I thought I heard my Shelley call me, not my Shelley in heaven, but my Shelley, my companion in my daily tasks. I was reading, I heard a voice say, 'Mary, it is Shelley,' I thought. The revulsion was of agony, never more. But I have better hopes of other feelings. Your earthly shrine is shattered, but your spirit ever hovers over me, or awaits me when I shall be worthy to join in to that spirit which when imprisoned here, yet showed by its exultant, nature, its superior derivation.
Right in the midst of the torrential, poetic intensity, he wrote a series of three poems. The other two I'll talk about next week, but this one is 'To a Skylark' and just a few lines, just to let you hear a poetic, spiritual English, raised for the first time to a transcendental level above Shakespeare. 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert, that from Heaven or near it, pourest thy full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher from the earth thou springest, like a cloud of fire. The blue deep thou wingest and singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.' Like a spaceship taking off. 200 years ago, a visionary poetic in the intensity of those harbingers who had been infused with something. And in Jung's Psychological Types, in the section on Schiller as the originator of psychological types, for Jung, more than 100 years before, he writes that, 'Feeling in-to' - it's with a hyphen, when you feel in-to - 'Feeling in-to therefore is a kind of perception process, distinguished by the fact that it transveys through the agency of feeling, an essential psychic content into the object, whereby the object is introjected,' charged. This is why psychics can read from materia that's been introjected and psychically infused. Like a teabag that's steeped and now the water is infused, the object is infused, not only with feeling, but the introjection does not come from the natural process of feeling, it comes from the field of visionary consciousness. And so the visionary consciousness is the source that that feeling tone now is not a part of just the square of attention of the natural integral, but it is the first indication of a phase of the waves of an ecology of consciousness. And what receives, not only the infusion of the psychic energy, but receives the infinite array of possibilities, of conscious energy, is the spiritual person, the work of art. They now are able to tune resonantly and in an infinite harmonic, those higher energies. And Jung concludes in this little introduction for us:
This content, by virtue of its intimate relation with the subject, assimilates the object to the subject and so links it up with the subject, that the latter senses himself, so to speak, in the object. The subject however, does not feel himself in-to the object, but the object felt in-to, appears, rather, as if it was animated and expressing itself of its own accord. This peculiarity depends upon the fact that the projection transfers an unconscious content in-to the subject.
Jung is a Kantian and we must recalibrate this. They were close, but no cigar. It isn't that there's a subject versus an object. Objectiveness is a quality of existential things that comes emergent out of nature and not just once, but vibrantly, iteratively, millions of times per second. But when the existentiality has a very special form of existence, its emergence, its vibrational, iterative quality, it's no longer just a lump of something, but now it has a lattice structure that allows it to be crystal. Elizabeth Wood's little book on Crystals and Light, published by Dover, is a very good, little introduction to optical crystallography. So that crystals are able to receive and to tune. This is how radios work. The crystal tunes the radio waves, the electromagnetic energy of radio waves, into such precision that you can get a number of stations on a dial. Crystals tune, they tune because they are prismatic to an energy that is not limited to a ritual form, nor a symbolic structure. But these forms now are forms of vaster resonance of life, tunable and that resonance is tunable to sets, or to individual notes, or to individual calibrations, of any specificity whatsoever. However small or large you would like to go, you can. But not only are there crystals, there are molecular crystals, not just molecules, but molecules also are arrangeable into molecular crystals and there is such a thing as magnetism and optics of molecular crystals. Now we're getting into areas that are interesting and there is such a thing as liquid crystals. The possibilities are enormous. Now the spiritual person has a body of light able to tune vibrations, the music of the spheres if need be, on any scale whatsoever. We're trying to, not school ourselves, not trying to just educate ourselves. I suppose, essentially, if you're new at it, we're trying to sensitise ourselves to the range of possibilities that is almost unbelievable until one experiences it themselves. By the way, Schiller's theory of types, expanded to Jung's psychological types, appears in The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell, so you can find it there.
Shelley and Mary Shelley were together only eight years. It's an incredible condensation that in just eight years...when they were first together she was 16 years old, but instantly felt the mutual infusion of each other with the feeling tones of the differential, conscious spectrum. She'd been raised by two extraordinary people. Her father, William Godwin, was one of the great writers in England. He wrote novels, he wrote philosophy. His Political Economy in three volumes was the most read book on political economy for almost 100 years. His novels, like Caleb, were read everywhere and went through many editions. But no matter how distinguished William Godwin was, his wife, the mother of Mary Shelley, was Mary Wollstonecraft, who was the most beautiful revolutionary woman of her time. One of her classics is called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and it is still in print after 200 years. So she was raised from birth to be spectacularly open to the vibratory resonances of possibility, of spiritual tunability, of personal courage, to take the chance and go and live this way. And exactly, almost eight years to the day, when they eloped together to Europe, Shelley began a journal, a notebook and it became Mary Shelley's journal after a few days because she took off where he left off, but his first entries are very interesting:
Thursday July 28th 1814. The night preceding this morning, all being decided, I ordered a chaise to be ready by four o'clock in the morning. I watched until the lightning and the stars became pale. At length it was four. I believed it not possible that we should succeed. Still there appeared to lurk some danger, even uncertainty. I went, I saw her, she came to me. Yet one quarter of an hour remained, still some arrangement must be made and she left me for a short time. How dreadful did this time appear. It seemed that we trifled with life and hope. A few minutes passed, she was in my arms, we were safe, we were on our way to Dover.
But she was ill and when they got to Dover they had to find a way quickly to hire some kind of a boat to get across the English Channel. It was a very dangerous body of water at that time. Still very precarious currents and the bottom is uneven so you get a constant chop. It's very difficult. They hired a fishing boat to go across and instead of it taking just a couple of hours, it took almost 12 hours, all night. And everyone was convinced that they were going to drown, the boat was going to capsize. And it's interesting because Shelley died by drowning almost eight years to the day, exactly in those kind of circumstances and conditions. When they found his body washed up on the beach, he had in his pocket of his jacket a little volume of Keats. Keats was dying of tuberculosis, he was even younger than Shelley and Shelley had, because he was a grand spirit, had written to Keats to get out of England and come and live with them in Italy. And Keats got as far as Rome when he died. He was just in his early twenties.
It's amazing to realise how precarious the vibration of tuning spiritual energy is on this particular planet. We have a very special place in the cosmos, almost more than any other star system. We have come the closest to oblivion so many times, out of non-acknowledgement, inadvertence, ignorance, which are much more dangerous than fear and violence. Oblivion is not because you were killed, oblivion is because you were forgotten. Forgetfulness is the river that surrounds hell, Lethe. Once you drink of the waters of forgetfulness, the only shore that you can reach is hell. So in a way that is deeper than any kind of political, or religious structure, a poetic language is able to express the way in which feeling infuses and two or more human beings infuse each other, so that there is a glow of loveliness that occurs with them. That loveliness is a liquid crystal tunability of cosmic love and we're just about one calibration away from eternity. More next week.