Vision 12
Presented on: Saturday, March 24, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to Vision 12, which is the twelfth presentation in an arc, not so much a line, but an arc of presentations. We have four of these kinds of arcs that make a whole circle, not so much a circle but an ambit around, not so much a centre but, a volume of innerness which is inner because if the way in which we make the ambit around the cycle. Though it appears to the mind, that closes that circle, that there is an inner part and an outer part, the ambit of the circle is suspended within a field without end. The inner and the outer are the same field. That field is the field of nature. That field of nature has an ability to generate dimensions. The beginning of generation of dimension is movement, not so much movement in space, though that occurs almost instantly; the first seed of movement down, below the nanoseconds, below the femtoseconds, below the attoseconds, in instantaneity, the first seed of movement that creates space is change. Change.
And so change is an interface invisible between what is visible and its source in indefinite invisibility. The same holds for time; time gets interfaced instantly that there is change and that change is thus movement, generating the three dimensions of space out of the first dimension of time. As soon as you have a four dimensional time space it inverts itself into space time. The space of movement becomes dominant to the temporality of change, though change is the source of it. So when we began our education, when we began our process of learning, when we began the yoga of this, which is the yoga of bringing the entire planet's heritage together in such a way that it can expand into a new quality of humanity. A planetary culture is the nourishment, the home base out of which a civilisation that is emerging now which is beyond just this planet. While it's a planetary culture, the new civilisation will be the entire star system. And so a planetary culture is the nourishing home turf out of which a new enormous structure of a stellar civilisation is rising.
It will take about 200 years for this to really accomplish itself and in doing so the expansion of our kind of being will slowly undergo a metamorphosis, not of becoming weird, but becoming more real, in a larger expanded version of ourselves. Instead of being geographically located in some place on a continent, on a planet, our sense of geography will be the entire star system: about six billion miles in its planetary diameter and about twice that in terms of its real structure. The star system in terms of its full extent is about one light year across, so it's enormous. Our sense of being at home will be that enormity. Our grandchildren will never consider themselves earthlings. They will consider themselves human beings who are full of star wisdom and for them the frontier will be interstellar reaches. To them visitors from other star systems will not be aliens but they'll e friends and competitors and occasionally there will be challenges but mostly it will be about companionship on a very large scale.
This is a learning meant to take us back through the entire heritage that we have coming to us and developing it in such a complex interfaced way that by the time we have gone the entire ambit of it we will have done it twice; once to bring it around in a natural way and once pivoting so that it doesn't quite close and going back through it in a transformative way. So that we will have a beginning out of mysteriousness, a turn out of magicalness and an in out of eternity. In this way, we will understand the field, its forms, the processes by which those forms emerge and the double paired symmetry of the fact that when you put two cycles together you get a touch at a point that vanishes and makes an infinity sign. One of the earliest images of wisdom on the planet was two very big eyes, like owl eyes, and at the very origins of literate civilisation, some 6-7,000 years ago, archaeology has shown that there are all sizes of these little figures that have these large eyes.
These are eyes that are able to see, not just within but penetratively within to the without and through the without to the within. So that these are very large eyes, owl eyes of wisdom, that allow for one to see the complementarity, the interchange of it all. At every maturation juncture, this primordial Palaeolithic wisdom has come back into play in a new expanded way. In our time this is the new expanded way for the stellar civilisation, for the new quality of humaneness which we are now rapidly achieving. Our Vision presentation are the first arc, the first curving phase of the second of those cycles and it will be followed by twelve presentations on art. Not studying art like art history or art like some school way but going deeper and deeper into the visionary consciousness that brings art forms into an emergent, prismatic jewel-like form. Instead of being forms, like the forms of an integral nature, they are forms like the forms of a differential consciousness.
Those forms of a differential consciousness are not static or pragmatic, they are prismatic. They reflect an entire rainbow and that entire rainbow itself is able to extend its rainbowness into the invisible, both into the infrared and into the ultra violet and finally into the invisibility beyond the electromagnetic spectrum which is where one finds the deeper mysteries of our time: dark matter; dark energy; the sources of gravity; the beginnings of the way in which vacuum nothingness, if condensed in some mysterious magical way, produces, for the first time, a sense of polarity between what isn't and what is. A condensed vacuum emerges the very first change that happens out of eternity and that is now you have not only a Tao but you have a Tê that pairs with it and tunes it, so that the Tê will carry the tuning of that in itself and the tuning of the Tê will be yin and yang. Yin and yang are not there in Tao, it's just an endless flow, eternal, but in Tê it's polarised, momentarily, in appearance so that you have a 'This and a that.'
So at the end of each of our phases, each of the curves of twelve presentations, we have an interval and that interval presentation allows us to separate the phases from one another without making a slash. The interval is like there is an interval in music. If you have sound without end you do not hear a note. If you have intervals, not only do you have notes but you have the ability then to have scales and to produce some music. A sound without end is indistinguishable from silence. As soon as you have intervalling, now, you have sound and silence and the spacing of them together gives you a realistic sense of pacing. So the intervals are not just a punctuation to separate the phases, but they give us the ability to finally get the pace of how our maturation occurs. The interval for the Vision presentations is the greatest classic in Zen, and it comes from China from about 1,400 years ago. The best translation is by a man named Philip Yampolsky and it's called The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. His name was Huineng and next week the presentation will be on Huineng.
This is a photograph taken in the 1930s of Huineng. This is not a statue of Huineng, it's not a sculpture of Huineng, it is Huineng, who was such a powerful yogi that he petrified his body into the consistency of anthracite coal and is still there in the temple where he did this 1,400 years ago. This photo was taken by Joseph Campbell. His greatest rival, Joseph Needham - now Campbell went into mythology but Joseph Needham went into science and his great huge work in about 20 volumes, Science and Civilisation in China, published by Cambridge University Press, because he was the head of Keys College in Cambridge. He was one of the world's greatest engineers, historians of science, marvellous man. He took this photograph himself in the 1930s in China. So you want to get yourself a copy of The Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, there are many editions of it this is available from Columbia paperbacks, Columbia University Press paperbacks.
When we come to art, right away we're going to begin as we do in each of the phases. We start with tuneable pairs, pairs of people, pairs of books, because we like to keep ourselves in the flow of tuneability. Our entire maturation and learning is that tuneability is capable of a very complex kind of a structuring. If you bring a pair of pairs together, they have the ability to form a square, they have the ability to form a cross, you can get coordinates or you can get frame, but if you bring three pairs together now you have an expanded structure, not a square, but a hexagon or a hexagram. You begin, now, to have the kind of structure which is characteristic not of inorganic form but of organic form. The honeycomb of bees is made out of hexagons, again and again. With triple pairs, together in form, you can gather the honey. In triple pairs together you can transform the way, beginning, a middle and an end, a mythic line, a storyline, a plot line, is transformed now, not to a line but to the free movement of the line. Instead of having a geometric straight line beginning, middle and the end, now you could have a line like Matisse line, a beautiful curve.
Or you could have a line - one of the first pairs that we're going to use in the Art is Frank Lloyd Wright and the great Japanese print master Hiroshige, both of them are extremely interesting for the interfaces. All of these pairs are carefully chosen to allow for indefinite expansions; you may learn as much as you wish to learn at any given time, all the time. We'll see that one of the great interfaces between Hiroshige is not just that he influenced Frank Lloyd Wright but that all of the artists who transformed art, from the beginning of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, all were aficionados of Hiroshige. If you look at old photos of Monet you will see Hiroshige prints. If you look at old photos of the drawings and paintings of Van Gogh you will see that Van Gogh copied two Hiroshige prints in his own Van Gogh way and used the quality of Hiroshige's line and colour again and again. There is a famous photo of Claude Debussy and a number of Parisian artists gathered together and in the background of Debussy is a Hiroshige print. Frank Lloyd Wright collected so many Hiroshige prints, more than 5,000, he had at the time the greatest collection, including Japan, of the artist's work.
So, we're going to begin with that but, look here, we're ending today, four presentations of a pair, who 200 years ago tuned a special tone of revolutionary challenge to the entire heritage of the world: Schiller and Shelley. Friedrich Schiller in Germany, great friend of Goethe, the great interpreter of Kant into artistic poetic terms, and Shelley who was the greatest poet in terms of the use of the English language, whose use of the English language refined something that was almost impossible to consider it could be refined further. If you look at the English language in its origins, its origins go back about 1,500 years and the very first time that there is any kind of work in English, Old English, is the venerable Bede, writing in the late 600s a history of the ecclesiastical church in England for some 600 years. Immediately following that, near his death in 735, is Beowulf, the national epic of England. That old English maintained itself unchanged, largely, for 600 years and the person who changed that language from old English to what is called now Middle English, the genius of that was Geoffrey Chaucer. That Middle English was changed to Renaissance English by William Shakespeare, more than anyone else.
Though Chaucer was surrounded by other writers, though Shakespeare was surrounded by other writers, it was their genius that lifted the English language out of a ritual based mythos to Chaucer's symbol-based art, to Shakespeare's art-based cosmic language. How do you go further from that? Shelley, genius among a number of geniuses like William Wordsworth - this study is called The Borders of Vision - Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, but it was Shelley among all of those that took Shakespeare's Renaissance English and gave it a better inflection, that instead of being poetical based on a rhetorical basis it was now cosmic based on a poetic basis. Shelley weaned English poetry away from its ritual rhetorical foundation and raised the foundation to a Shakespearian level and then carried it to a refinement beyond that. English as a language, ever after Shelley, was challenged constantly to try to reinvent itself in a kaleidoscopic array of possibilities, and so you have, following on Shelley, you have English poetic that become the most experimental language on the planet, from Whitman to Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot to Wallace Stevens, to e.e. cummings, on and on.
English poetry, more than any other language, since ancient times - since Ancient Greek, since Ancient Sanskrit - became the experimental language of presenting not only a differential conscious process of expression, prismatically through the artistic spirit of the person, the artist, but that that would engender again a further expansion: the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. And so the English poetic, for the last 150-200 years, has specialised in trying to explore the kaleidoscopic consciousness of an ever expanding sense of history: that history is not a record that is dead, it is a frontier of the array threshold of possibility that is expandable out into infinity. We have here a special kind of use of English that goes to an even deeper refinement than that of Beowulf or of Chaucer or of Shakespeare or of Shelley. I use an advanced poetic that is experimental even as you hear it, that takes the jewelled matrix of the poetic art and takes it through the kaleidoscopic historical consciousness and lets it play iridescently in the mysterious, even beyond the capacity of electromagnetic forms and processes, to be the whole cycle. It also takes in the invisible ecology of most of what is real, the visible universe is about 4% of what is real.
We have a challenge that was engendered, almost like a sorcerer's apprentice, about 60 years ago, that has haunted us, haunted our parents, haunted our grandparents and is unresolved as to now. The book that was published at the time was published by Princeton University Press in 1945, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government 1940-1945, written at the request of Major General Leslie R. Groves who was in charge of the Manhattan Project from a military standpoint. The scientific leader, the director of it, was J. Robert Oppenheimer. The first edition of this was a special report, on government paper, written before the atomic bomb was detonated. The public edition, published by Princeton, was published two weeks after the first test, successful, of an atomic bomb, July 16th 1945. This is a very serious paragraph which needs to be reiterated at this particular time,
A weapon has been developed that is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination; a weapon so ideally suited to sudden unannounced attack that a country's major cities might be destroyed overnight by an ostensibly friendly power.
It wasn't just about a 'them' and an 'us', it was about the insidiousness of friends being betrayers, of being traitors. And what was even more insidious, at the time, was the realisation that we might ourselves be the traitor and betray ourselves. And so an infinite suspiciousness, like a radioactive dust, has contaminated the world since this day. We live now in a suspicious junkyard. Where is there a resolution? The resolution is not in boiling it down, the resolution is continuous expansion so that the challenge is continuously challenged. So we have here a structure and a process which is refined to the nth degree, a presentation which has its roots back to the origins of Homo sapiens emerging with a capacity for art some 45,000 years ago. When we come to art, and we pair Wright and Hiroshige, we will follow that up by another pair that tunes that first tuning into a new quality of frame where it isn't square but it's like a diamond: instead of having a frame of reference we have a diamond of reflective possibility.
The next pair that we use, we use the greatest woman artist of the 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe, and we pair with her the greatest Chinese artist of the 20th century, his name was Qi Baishi. Now for Qi Baishi you may have to go on the internet. The only really good book on him is my mentor Kai-Yu Hsu, Qi Baishi's Paintings and you may be able to find copies on the net. If you don't, his book Magic of the Brush, with his friend Catherine Woo, is available, I'm sure, in paperback and you'll be able to find it on the net. With Georgia O'Keeffe, when we get to her, we're going to use the paper edition of her last great book, that she oversaw herself. Copies now go for more than 4,000 dollars, for an original, if you can find it but the paper edition by Viking Press, now Viking Penguin, you'll be able to find used copies on the net for nominal sums.
We will be able to see, with that pair of pairs, how when you bring a third pair in to play with them. And the third pair will be the greatest sculptor since the Renaissance, Henry Moore, and one of the most transformative artists of the 20th century, Max Ernst. Usually people think of Surrealism, they think of Magritte or Dali; it is Max Ernst who is really the genius of that. We will punctuate those pairs of pairs of pairs with Kandinsky's, Wassily Kandinsky's great little classic Concerning the Spiritual in Art - Dover Paperbacks has it - less than 90 pages, extraordinarily insightful, a real classic. So what we have ahead of us is the way in which the pairs of vision intervalled by the original classic of Chan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, lead us into the new array of art punctuated, intervalled, by Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual and Art.
We will then move into the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history, not as a history subject, not as a history lesson but again following our way, our method, of being able to tutor ourselves in a yoga of attentiveness, in a continuity of perspective that is so vibrant that it suffuses from perspective to conception to ideas and carries on outside of it, beyond it. The classic way of illustrating a human being who is able to do this was the portrayal of a human being whose head was surrounded by an open space. That open space, like a thought bubble, or if you did a cross section of that sphere of openness it would be a halo. The very first time that that quality of spatiality around someone, around the head of someone, showing that they were beyond their mind, beyond the limitations of mentality, operating in a super-essential space that they carried with them and was expandable, the first time that we find figures like this is in 868 AD: the very first printed page in world history.
A page illustrating the diamond sutra in China, printing originated in china and the very first thing they printed - and I'll bring in a copy of it for you so you can see it - it's very large, it's not a little thing, it's huge. All of the figures in this print have haloes, have thought bubbles, have consciousness spaces around them and they are all facing the viewer except for one. The only person facing away from the viewer is in a deep yogic posture of manifestation, also with a thought bubble. But when you step back and you get the gestalt of all these figures together you see that they all make a gestalt outline of a very large cosmic face and right where the cosmic face would have its mouth open to speak is where sits the figure who is looking away from the viewer. So that the viewer, now, is able to empathetically enter into he who sits where the sound comes through the mouth of the words of the language. And the text of the diamond sutra then would be what you would say, and saying here, 'You're the speaker as well as the hearer at that moment.' This is a quality not of truth, of dharma, but what was called in ancient wisdom high dharma, eternal truth.
We are learning in such a way that we can bring ourselves from anywhere that we are through any labyrinth of complications imaginable and bring ourselves not to some integral focus alone but to the dynamic quality of letting the sparkle of that focus open into the cosmic array of any kind of necklace of realisation we would wish. Tall tasks, this presentation is called All Possible Worlds. It's a takeoff of a science fiction collection called Possible Worlds of Science Fiction done in the very earliest of the 1950s published in 1951, the English edition of it did not include all 40 stories but only about half of them and the paperback versions of it only included ten out of the 40 stories. The whole emphasis of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction was a follow up, after a couple of years, of the success of the first great anthology of science fiction stories called The Best of Science Fiction that was made in 1945 right at the time of the atomic bomb and published in January of 1946, to present to the world 'Do not be afraid, all of this has been visioned over and over and over again by men and women who are still alive, still writing, still visioning and you can vision with them. We don't have it under control so much as we have it under creative expansion. Join in.' Let's take a little break.
Let's come back from our break and resume. Beware that this is a yoga. A yoga is a science of attention. We've looked at the way in which the sourcing of a form will come out of a process and that there are a pair of processes that characterise the integral cycle. The first process is actually a field - nature is a field - and the forms that emerge from that field will have polarised traction in form because of the way in which an electrical charge, an electromagnetic spin and several other characteristics give existential form its thusness, its quality of being there, which is not at all static but is always vibrational. It's always iterative, though so many times per time unit that it occurs cursorially to just be there. But its thereness is always spiced by a punctuating continuous intervalling of the field non-differentiated, not the field itself for the field has no itself. So that the punctuation occurs in a pair of expressables, one is that it's zero and the other that it's infinite.
So that for any existentiality of something or of a process or of a relationality between them, one can express that in terms of zero and one as a binary and thus you have a computer language. But there is another expressibility and that is to punctuate not with zero but to punctuate with infinity, in which case what is punctuated is not the oneness of existentiality but that the field of zeroness itself is punctuated by infinity. Thus you get consciousness rather than the field of nature and the field of visionary consciousness, though it can be contiguous with the field of nature, its interplay with it is such that it literally can play interally with it. So that, now, whatever is existential that emerges from it has a transformation character all the time, every time, in every iteration and the zeroness instead of being zero as empty is zero as full. So that any aspect form or process added to the fullness will precipitate out a form and thus subatomic particles literally emerge out of the fullness a vacuum, vacuum energy.
This quality is difficult to appreciate in terms of traditional learning, by subject, by prejudice, by assumptiveness, by presumptiveness, etc. One of the ways in which a psychology emerged in the third decade of the 20th century was the way in which a psychotherapy was matured, not only by Freud but by Jung and several cognates like Adler and so forth. But in The Interpretation of Dreams of Freud and especially in the Psychological Types of Carl Jung, one finds an interesting way in which the resourcing goes back to a classic matrix: for Freud Sophoclean, for Jung a Schillerian, from Schiller. In Psychological Types, subentitled The Psychology of Individuation - how one becomes one, individuation. That the integral yields one, one's self. This is a flat surface shape that is only made viable by fictiveness.
A really powerful yoga, like that of the historical Buddha, can resolve shape into its emptiness and form coextensively at the same time. There is no trace of one's self yet the no trace is recognisable and so one has a very interesting triple entendre in reality. Schiller and the Type Problem,
The limitation over conceptions and cognition ]writes Jung, 1923] the limitation of our conceptions and cognition becomes nowhere so apparent as in psychological presentations, where it is almost impossible for us to trace any other picture than that whose main outlines are already marked out in our own psyche.
To the extent that your psyche has pre-marked out in a disposition is all that you will be able to find. At long last having found it, you will referent it as being true. This itself is an illusion, doubly, because not only is it an illusion, the illusion is an illusion as well. It's easy to get into Alice in Wonderland. It's easy to go through the looking glass but the looker who goes through the looking glass is not at all mirrorable, so that we have a very interesting situation. We've taken a look at one of the sources of Jung's Psychological Types, Schiller, and seen more than 100 pages of Psychological Types, 1923 is the first edition. Over 100 pages concern Schiller's theory of types. Here's a classic typology from Schiller, brought forth by Jung and reiterated so that it is a preconception psychologically almost everywhere that psychology is practiced, determined, charged for, learned for, taught by - all erroneously. Introvert and extrovert, four types: sensation; thinking; feeling; intuition. Two moieties combined together, two times four, eight types that now can be refined even further.
But that mandala of those eight times, of that two moieties, if taken out of typology, which is an enlightenment prejudice of the 1700s, of the 18th century, if taken out of that, instead of being types, one now has a phase form syncopation of emergence and form. The four types can easily be expressed as four phases like in our learning: ritual sensation, feeling-toned mythos, thinking-structured symbols and intuitive conscious vision. Now instead of having four types, one has four phases. Instead of having a moiety of introvert and extrovert, by recalibrating that to integral and differential, now, one has a new quality of expressability, a recalibration. What was not included before assumed, and the assumption was magisterial, nature was issued and worked with, intelligently, without counting it. Intelligently because nature cannot be counted as a phase, it is a Tao zero. But as a Tao zero it is as full as it is empty, not just paradoxically or coextensively, which would be a spatial assumption, or co-creatively which is a process assumption. The assumer here is always the mentality, considering itself to be the sine qua non of the actuality of the realisability of all of this. One's oneness, 'I think this, I know this,' this quality of identification and referentiality is particularly famous in its limitation.
The sourcing of Jung's psychological types to Schiller goes to, as we have been looking at, one of the great geniuses of the world who dissolved the limitations of mentality enough to get an expansiveness of consideration that he called instead of just reason, he called it pure reason, his name was Kant. We talked about Kant the last three weeks as a being a source of Schiller and that Kant because of being a real European yogi - the saying was you could tell what time of day it was by what Kant was doing all his life. He hardly ever left the city where he was raised and taught and died. He hardly ever changed any aspect of his daily routine but kept a double discipline familiar to all high dharma yogis; he kept spiralling in and he kept spiralling out at the same time. The spiralling out became a sense, increasingly, that there is a dimension of transcendence to time space that occurs in a very much real actuality and that that transcendence of dimension without is, at the very same time in the very same space of poignancy and immanence, at the centre within.
If one spirals to the immanence one comes upon a present point so precise that it vanishes from existentiality and occurs as something real beyond our ability to existentialise it. At the very same time the transcendent, instead of just being a further dimension of who knows what, becomes in fact the dimension of transformation of mind and of participation, mystically, as nature itself. So that the field of transcendence now becomes a mysterious natural field and whatever occurs, whatever emerges, vibrantly, iteratively, out of that, will have that quality, will have that tone. This mountain, now, is a mysterious mountain, this thunderstorm is not just a thunderstorm, it is a romantically mysterious thunderstorm. The qualities, there, is that what occurs out of a mysterious nature appeals in such a way that our experience becomes more dimensional than four: it becomes the old saying quintessential minimally, a five dimensional continuum, now. It has a quintessential transformative dimension to it all the time, every time, in between times. And space now becomes generative of not just an experience, which is the flow process through the field of nature, but when experience is able to flow through the field of differential consciousness, experience now has a profundity in addition to the mysteriousness.
One of the great savants at the beginning of the 20th century, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, who was a very good friend and encourager of Jung, wrote a book How Natives Think , still in print from Princeton paperbacks. The statement in Levy-Bruhl was that primitives do not think with their head, they think with their heart but not the heart as a heart, but they think with the heart tuned to nature in a very special way: in an empathetic way. And he used the term, Jung using it all the time in his work, participation mystique; that the primordial men and women of the pre-civilised world, when they were participating mystically with the field of nature, the flow of their experience, confirmed the reality on the actions that they did, that they linked and kept pure the mystical participation. So that their lives actually occurred, the relationalities actually happened. And then the great discovery: that when their shared participation in the field of nature was shared in the flow of their participation mystique, the flow of the stream of experience in the field of consciousness, it became a stream of consciousness, so to speak.
It made of experience the ability to be scintillatingly profound and that it was not only mysteriously true in nature, it was now equally, in a complementary way, actual in a spiritual dimension: a five dimensional spiritual continuity. The classic civilised word for that is theory. The doing of actions is the practice, the ritual sequencing of actions is the practical. But when experience becomes profound and flows as a field of consciousness with the field of nature, the field of consciousness has a special exchange with the form of the symbolic structure of thought. The lattice of the structure of symbolic thought is due to the imagination and within the net lattice of the imagination the relationalities that are possible through that structure are given the quality, in thought, of images arranged into a symbolic structure called an idea. So that the lattice of the imagination produces a form for the idea to have its traction, as a form, and to be able to integrate the flow of experience, through the field of nature, into its imagery arranged in its ideas. And that that is augmented in a huge way when the flow of experience now includes the flow through the field of consciousness.
One now has the ability to have symbolic structures of thought where the ideas are not only integral in a natural way but they are differential in a visionary way. The ideas achieve a dimension they did not have before: they acquire the dimension of memory. Now the imagery in its structure can be made memorable in a mnemonic structure of symbolic thought. What was in the field of visionary consciousness, remembering - the gerund -becomes a feature of the structure of thought, the memory. So that the imagination and the memory cinch together and symbols and symbolic ideas are able to access both and to give a further quality, instead of there just being a shape of understanding to being a living form of understanding. This way, the auger comes into play so that now we have the imagination, the memory, we have symbols symbolic structure, we have what is now called the mind. But just as remembering becomes the memory in symbols, the imagination in symbolic structure goes as creative imagining into the field of consciousness. So that differential consciousness now in addition to being remembering becomes creative imagining as well and when they synergise together as a pair of processes, the forms of art are able to emerge, the forms of the person are able to emerge, the forms of spirit forms are able to emerge as six dimensional forms.
The easiest analogue, we talked about last week, is to think of a crystal. The crystal, unlike the lump of something, has a lattice structure able to tune and if you can tune it you can pull radio stations out of the aether. You can pull calibrations of frequency that are carrier waves of information, of expressions, of messages, and tune them in and that there are an indefinite number of tuneable stations. Now, they are the crystals, crystal growing, as we talked about last week, but now there is a whole science of crystallography, of stepping up a creative aesthetic form to an even higher, wider expanse: an analytic form of science. Not only crystallography but there are properties and qualities, now, that are quite interesting. Helen McGaw's classic ferroelectricity in crystals, she was Assistant Director of Research in Crystallography at the University of Cambridge, under the great Braggs. There are magnetic ions in crystals, there are all kinds of interesting ways in which this is now able to develop, and we talked about molecular crystals, liquid crystals, Dislocations and Plastic Flows in Crystals from the University of Birmingham, the English have always been at the foreground. And even here, a primer from Oxford: Monographs on the Physics and Chemistry of Materials, Quasicrystals from Jannot at Grenoble University in France.
The analytic and the aesthetic are two forms that emerge very large in the ecology of consciousness and that consciousness not just being a fifth dimension to that of time space, space time, but engenders further dimensions. The six dimensions of art, of the artistic person, engender a seven dimensional kaleidoscopic consciousness of history, quite an enormous flow that raises the flow of experience, even of mysterious experience to an expanded infinite level. Out of the kaleidoscopic consciousness of a seven dimensional history, one now has an eight dimensional analytic form which itself is of actuality but not limit. This is the cosmos, not the uni-verse, which is an idea that is a four dimensional shape, but the cosmos as an eight dimensional differential conscious prism raised to infinity and generates another kind of a space, another three dimensional space. So that the eight dimensions now generate a complementarity that actually has eleven dimensions of string theory.
Now we're beginning to enter into the late 20th century, not yet quite to the 21st century. We are unable to appreciate this unless we recapitulate attentively, not the steps but the phases by which this occurs and infinity spreads its wings. One of the most interesting and beautiful of all of the works that was presented in this comes from the ability of someone like a Shelley to use language in such a way that his poetic, even 200 years ago, 180 years ago, is able to cue us to some of the origins of the language that's being used here. These just a few lines to his Ode to Liberty,
A glorious people vibrated again / The lightning of the nations: Liberty, / From heart to heart, from tower to tower, over Spain, / Scattering contagious fire into the sky, / Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay. /And in rapid plumes of song / Clothed itself sublime and strong.
We've been taking Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, written exactly at the same time that his wife was writing Frankenstein, for just as Kant was an interesting sourcing for Schiller, the sourcing for Shelley, both Percy and Mary, was Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin's letters on experiments with electricity that were written from Benjamin Franklin for about ten years to a confrere of his in London named Peter Collinson, who in 1757 published the letters on electricity. And, for the first time, the world had a prismatic understanding of the universal energy of electricity and all of its preceding experiments to develop both the analytic and also the artistic aesthetic of the new kind of person who is able to do this.
Within a very short time, within about a year, one of the most perspicacious thinkers on politics in England of the day, Edmond Burke, wrote his beautiful little book on the aesthetics of beauty and the sublime in 1759. It was a poignant realisation that the political social realm and the scientific cosmic realm had come together in such a way that the old politics was a politics of a universe idea of a limited mind and that the new men and women would be able to exceed that politics with an experimental social adventure. If they could be raised in the population from just a few savants and a few brilliant women, to a place ... Jefferson in one of his letters said,
We are following Franklin and we now have a place where more than four million men and women altogether will be able to go into this grand experiment to see what they will find when they are free together without limitations of the old, without assumptions of a universe, with the openness of the array of possibilities.
This quality occurs, wonderfully, at the end of the Prometheus Unbound, the final lines are this,
This is the day which down the void abysm, / At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism, / And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep; / Love, from its awful throne of patient power / In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour / Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, / And narrow verge crag-like agony, springs / And folds over the world its healing wings. / Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance-- / These are the seals of that most firm assurance / Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; / And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, / Mother of many acts and hours, should free / The serpent that would clasp her with his length, / These are the spells by which to reassume / An empire over the disentangled doom. / To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; / To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; / To defy power which seems omnipotent; / To love, and bear; to hope till hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; / Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; / This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be / Good, great and joyous, beautiful, and free; / This alone is life; Joy, Empire and Victory.
Within a year Shelley was dead, drowned in a boating accident. His work was not allowed to be collected and published until almost a generation after his death. His wife, finally, in 1839, was able to put together his works for the first time and publish them to the world. Most of the world didn't know who Shelley was until almost 18 years after he died. Immediately, the impress was phenomenal and reached an apex in the 1840s and one finds in the 1840s, for the first time since the American and French revolutions, a tremendous build up of men and women wanting, demanding, that everything be reconsidered. And in 1848 there were revolutions everywhere in Europe, in every single country, the revolutions of 1848. It was a gong that rang a bell that had a reverberation in the science and the technology of the day. Because a man who was very little - he was hardly over 5'4' - whose first job was the sweep out the laboratory of Sir Humphrey Davy, little Michael Faraday, who so loved sharing with ordinary common people the discoveries of the sciences and experiments in electricity, finally put together, on Friday night lectures, The Chemical History of the Candle. In which for the first time electricity and magnetism were put together as electromagnetism, a single frequency vibration of the way in which power occurs via the mysterious quality of light in the universe.
At exactly that moment one finds the revelation, all over the world, that there is more yet to be done that has been done in all of the millennia previously by human beings. Next week we'll take a look, in the interval, at Huineng, who brought together the ability of the historical Buddha to vanish the point of the ego into its openness and the ability, influenced by the Hellenistic Jewish realisations that came through the Apostle Thomas into India, that the interpenetration of them by 90AD produced the first great classic in the Mahayana, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana by Asvaghosa. Nowhere in classical Buddhism does anyone talk about faith of the Mahayana but Asvaghosa did and was considered such a rare jewel that the greatest emperor-conqueror of the day, Kanishka, surrounded the city of Benares with his huge armies demanding one thing; that they realised the monk Asvaghosa to him, not as a prisoner, so that he could take him back into Central Asia, into his great, vast, Scythian Central Asia empire, which he did.
It spread the seed of the Mahayana, from one person in India, to become the predominant Buddhism of all of central Asia, all the way to China and Japan, Korea, Indonesia, into Scythian ancient Asian Persia, Parthia, into Afghanistan, the Bamiyan Valley. The refinement of Asvaghosa became fixed in a vanishing point called Huineng. There were 28 patriarchs of the Mahayana in India and, in China, the first of those patriarchs was Bodhidharma, the sixth patriarch was Huineng. There was never a seventh patriarch because Huineng broadcast the high dharma in such a way that anyone who ever got it would be the seventh patriarch, billions and billions of them. Next week.