Art 5

Let's come to Art 5, and we're deepening our considerations here. There is a four star prison that we would like to stay out of. The four star prison is that, without vision, symbols assume the mythic mysteriousness into metaphysical systems which are an artificial mirror of ritual which falsifies art into artifice. So this is a handcuffing lock that is endemic with civilisation. In traditional cultures the mythic horizon is a flow of experience that is participated into the field of nature so that experience flows in the sourcing context of nature and, if the flow of experience is participating, a quality of mysteriousness in nature is the natural outcome. And its natural outcome is that our emotions, from our body, become fluid as feelings in the cultural life. And the cultural life is a flow within nature.
And, because of its participation, not only is there a sense of mysteriousness to nature, which we have and are taking part in. But the rituals by which we bridge this, bridge the flow of our experience with the field of nature, those rituals are very serviceable and easily correctible because, first of all, if they're done wrong there'll be a disturbance in the sense of the mysteriousness. If they're done not just wrong but with a flaw or a fault they won't have the right feeling. And the right feeling will show itself not just in the feeling in our experience but in the images that come out. You'll get bad dreams; you'll start seeing things in a kind of macabre light. There are fearful things hiding at night, there are bogeymen now whereas before the night was also a beautiful part of the concourse of night and day.
For a healthy culture there are no demons, there are no bogeymen. And the whole attentiveness to ritual is to make sure that it works right by bridging the mysteriousness of experience with its beautiful flow of feeling and its appropriate decorative whorl of images. And that all of this is kept in its participatory flow by the development of oral language, not to communicate but to tell stories, to tell narratives, to tell myths and to link those myths into a necklace of a mythology. And so the mythic horizon, naturally, has a wonderful quality of conveying to us the mysteriousness of our lives in nature. And the purposeful usefulness of the ritual actions and sequences that we do and the weaving of those actions and sequences into a fabric of the way we live and all of this eventually becomes integral in the structures of symbolic thought. And, if kept natural, the integralling of symbols is very simply excellent.
The difficulty comes, though, that as symbolic thought strengthens and strengthens, it begins to pull away from the traditions of the mythic experience and begins to abstract out a kind of a criticality that endorses no longer just participating with nature but of changing the way things are. We are going to, now, not just live among the trees, we're going to cut a lot of these trees down and we're going to plant food, we're going to slash and burn and we're going to have a better handling of nature by our ideas of what we want to do with it. Now when slash and burn was just an initial quality in the Neolithic period, starting about 12,000 years ago, everybody that you knew might slash and burn enough land to work with. That would maybe take several modern urban city blocks. In the 21st century, slash and burn in Brazil alone is x-ing out enormous square mileage tracks that are as large as some states every year.
The quality here is that symbols do not just stay integralled in their natural way but they have their own nature. And that is to tighten and tighten the structures of thought and more and more abstractly and so they become on one hand logical but one of the logicalities that comes out of it is their need to be metaphysical systems, to describe, to organise. And these metaphysical systems are the beginnings of a projection into experience of an individuality that is a product of the metaphysics into the experience and that projection becomes an ego. But because mythic experience is a process phase, it's not a form, it doesn't have existentiality, it only has tenacity as long as the projection is strong enough to cast that protagonist appearance in experience. And so one now has to make images that will sustain that ego projection. One must stylise feelings that have to be elicited from rituals and cemented by thought in its systems, especially in its metaphysical overseeing of these integrals.
And out of this, more and more, the culture no longer is mysterious but is a by-product of the plans, of the systems. And of course they become more and more artificial and abstracted so that nature, more and more, recedes as something that is just there for the convenience of the very strong social forms. And the social world at that point is no longer a culture but now has become a social world; the natural world now is displaced by the social world. Were it not for vision, that would be the dead end and species like ourselves would die out as soon as the power of symbolic thought began to make systems strong enough to permanently seem to displace the natural integral. For most people, who have fallen into this kind of artificial sequence, their visionary quality is limited to flashes of insight, to occasional moments, or if they have some kind of natural affinity of wanting to return to nature and keep the mysteriousness of experience alive it begins to extend itself a little bit.
More and more, the need to enlarge the duree, not just the duration but using Henry Bergson's creative evolution language form the 1920s First World War period, he said that time is a duree. It's not a thing it's a duration and that this duree can be expanded and when it does, he used the term from William James, stream of consciousness. It's not really a stream of consciousness it's really the stream of experience with a conscious scintillation to it. It's like adding a carbonation to the water, the flow of mythic experience now is carbonated, it has a different quality. Or to use a better simile: the water now becomes fermented and you can tell by the crisis of the moment that the fermentation process is very iffy, it's perilous. Not perilous, really, for those who are extending vision but perilous for those who have authority based on the social world, for those who have commandeered experience according to the rituals that they have stylised and endorsed and according to the beliefs that their egos are safe in that kind of experience. And anything added to it from without, especially uncontrollable by structures of thought, is going to be inviting trouble.
And so social worlds that have become closed, become more and more closed, especially to vision, especially to the extension of vision: those who proceed, then, must take themselves out of the social world, at least temporarily. And when they do so they follow the age old pattern of going back to nature but as they go back to nature, with an extended visionary quality, vision as a field of differential consciousness begins to participate not only mysteriously within nature, like the flow of experience, but the field of consciousness now becomes a magical nature. Now you not only fit in mysteriously with your flow, safe in the source field, but the very source field itself becomes alchemically alive to the magic of transformations. Now you have completely outdistanced the call of authority of structures of thought in the symbols of the social world. And instead of projecting a false persona into experience and onto ritual as a mask, as a role in experience, as a mask in ritual, now the process is turned inside out in the sense that the flat backing of symbolic structures, which produced like a mirror quality, not able to mirror experience because it's a flow mirroring the structure of images and feeling s rooted in the rituals.
So that a symbolic mind that is closed will always look for its referentiality in terms of the ritual codifications that must be followed: we have codes we have laws, we have principles, we have procedures and you must follow them otherwise the mirror mind of the social order is going to be disrupted. And when it is the ego projection becomes untenable, cannot sustain itself at all, becomes wobbly, becomes faded, becomes weak, becomes fractionated and one then says that you have to go and get your mind straightened out according to the structures of thought. But visionary consciousness is differential and it turns that mirror mind by taking away the artificial closed quality of it: it opens the mind so that it is now open, it is an open frame of reference. It doesn't look to ritual to make a codification referentiality but it looks forward now to a differential expansion from the possibility of a magical field of conscious nature.
And out of this, just as existence emerges out of the source field of nature, now a differential conscious existence emerges out of the fructified nature field. And out of this will come a person, a spirit, a spiritual person who is creative and produces art and produces not some kind of belief in the ego artificiality but a real form: the artist who is able to make not only their own lives but to make creative works out of their own lives as well. So that art becomes an enormous benefactor, it not only saves the individual from an imprisonment into a false metaphysical artificiality but spares them the tyranny of an imprisoned ritual basis of their existence and takes away the artificial projection of the ego and replaces it by an openness of the sense of an interpersonal quality of resonances. Now one belongs to a great network of relationalities whose order is not so much the egg crate pigeon holes of a metaphysical pseudo logical system but now it is the sets of resonances in a harmonic in an ability to emerge together and so shareability is a quality of the artistic person. An artist will make works of art to share those not just moments but those extended durees now brought into a prismatic form.
And the prismatic form, though it is still rooted in experience, experience flows not just in the field of nature as a mysterious participation with it, but now flows ambidextrously in the field of differential vision. And in that flow through the field of differential vision, when it flows through the prism of the person the prism of the art forms, a new quality is revealed and that quality is the kaleidoscopic flow of history and it has a very interesting thing. In vision the natural light becomes a rainbow, one sees the complete rainbow of possibilities but in a higher historical kaleidoscopic consciousness one now sees the source of science. Science forms not only see the rainbow but they see the spectrum within the rainbow. Now, instead of having a metaphysics, one has the transformation into a rainbow of differential possibilities of art and, further, the analytic of the spectrum within the rainbow, now you have the ability to have an astrophysics of light. Not only is light prismed into a rainbow but all of the natural elements hold a specific vibration registry within the rainbow as a spectrum: every one of the 92 elements, naturally, and, in fact, all of the transuranium elements also will have a spectrum place.
Their registry, though, will not be able to be seen by the natural eye, which only sees rainbows in extraordinary natural conditions: after a rain storm, in the midst of a waterfall, perhaps even under moonlight one will see rainbows, occasionally under those conditions. An artists will have the ability to compose rainbow vision all the time, be able to see, but somebody who develops the further spectrum analytic capacity in sciences will be able to assemble extensions and magnifications of capacity and be able to see every possibility. The first person to build a successful astrophysical spectrograph was an American, named George Ellery Hale, and he did it because his backyard in Chicago backed up to the astronomy little observatory oat the university of Chicago. And he got interested as a boy looking over the backyard fence in astronomy and by the time he was a young man he had built for himself, machining it in the basement, the world's first astrophysical spectrograph.
And he went on to build a series of ever larger astronomical observatories, the Yerkes observatory in southern Wisconsin, Lake Geneva that was associated with the University of Chicago. Then, moving to better viewing conditions, built Mount Wilson the 100 inch telescope here above Pasadena and then, right at the end of his life, built the 200 inch mount Palomar telescope which, when it was dedicated in 1948, was the first time that one could now begin to have a complete atlas of galactic structures by the hundreds of thousands. All in the lifetime of one person, one little Chicago boy, who learned that if Maxwell and Faraday were right about electromagnetic theory and about light in terms of Planck and Einstein and all of these developments coming out, it must be possible to see the registry of natural elements in the carrier of electromagnetic energy which is light. It was a while before they identified the particle as the photon, this was done in 1923 by Einstein. And we know now that there is a super symmetric augment that pairs with the photon, called the photino, that carries a very high dharma order of super symmetry in existential actuality and that the universe is really a cosmos of enormous complexity and play and delight. Metaphysical systems are tired, old yellowing pages of sketches by people who have no idea of the enormous play of reality.
Our learning is to come out of the set tracks that lead into the dead end, closed mind that is no longer able to function in the world. One of the figures that we're looking at is Ch'i Pai-Shih, who is the greatest Chinese painter for many centuries in China. And we're pairing with Ch'i Pai-Shih the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. We're taking a Chinese man and an American woman. And we're taking two human beings who were almost contemporaneous, who lived into their 90s. Georgia O'Keeffe lived to be almost 99 and Ch'i Pai-Shih, when he died, was almost 94. So they lived for an enormous length of time and one of the qualities, just for a moment, about Georgia O'Keeffe - here she is on the cover feature, the cover 1968, March 1st, on Life Magazine - she became an enormously interesting character. One of the qualities that is of interest to us is that she was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, not too far from where Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, not too far from Lake Geneva where the Yerkes observatory was built about that time.
It's as if there was like a fruitful little quality of the Wisconsin farmland as a creative resonance of the tremendous energy of Chicago of the time. And you still find it: you find resonances around places like Boston or Philadelphia or Chicago or San Francisco, Los Angeles. That, as you go out into the landscape, into the land, there are resonances that carry the true differential conscious field, visionary field, that is actually obtaining. Yes, it's pivoted there in the cities, in those great cities, but the pivot, in its spin, makes resonant ridges around that that really are not existential so much but that they are harmonically detectable. The quality of our learning is to be able to sensitise ourselves to see that we too carry resonances around us and the more that we are able to have a creative imagining recognising remembering pivotal quality to our visionary natural persona, emerging into spirit, the more that those resonances now will begin to register for us.
We begin to understand that we focus a prismatic harmonic all the time around us, not just Kirlian photography of auras but that beyond the physical extension of auras in a kind of a light, one can see around one's life, build these resonances, more and more, that interpenetrate with other creative resonances, other creative recongnitioning remembering qualities and begin to form, now, an interlace that is not just some kind of network but becomes now a creative quality because the interpenetration of very strong resonances will produce a densification along the interpenetration. And one will get out of this very powerful creative events that happen because the right people got together in the right time, place, but in the right way and their events began now to register as historical. History is not about dead files of chronology but about the largest flow of experience now that includes within itself the ability to carry the theory of vision, not theory in the mind, theory doesn't come from symbolic structures, theory comes from the field of field of conscious differential conscious visioning.
And one is able to carry theory, the field of theory, into a flow of experience that is a 'what if': and experiment. And by being able to have this quality of a theory that is still able to found itself on existentials, existence in ritual, by the time it gets to history the existentiality of it becomes differential existentiality: it becomes what happens if you do this experiment, what will come out of this. And what comes out of it now is a distillation of the initial transform of vision. Vision will turn the water into wine but history will turn the wine into cognac. And so in alchemical terms you talk about especially in terms of the visionary transform, now, one says that you have made an alchemical fermentation but when it is distilled, that alchemical fermentation becomes an elixir, it becomes a liqueur of the original magical fluid. Now it becomes distilled into something enormously powerful.
The first liqueur ever made in the world was made by French monks about 1,000 years ago and it was called Chartreuse because of the monastic community. And Chartreuse is still made today and in fact the original green Chartreuse was the first and there is a little bit of a yellowish Chartreuse that is available, more like a lime quality to it, and it has a little bit less potency, the original chartreuse was very, very potent. The Italian liqueur Galliano in long tall bottles, alchemical bottles, is an Italian version of that kind of liqueur. It isn't wine, it's distilled spirits. The distillation happens because of the forms of art, there is an art of making wine but there is a really refined art of making a great liqueur.
The difference between somebody who is able to make a homemade beer and someone who is able to make a really fine scotch is an enormous refinement. I remember my beer making companion at the University of Wisconsin's father was the classics professor at the University of Wisconsin and he had this name, Hieronymus, he hated it but it was given to him by his dad. We used to brew beer, Wisconsin, in the basement and green beer will make you sick and so you have to have patience to make sure that the beer will get refined enough that it becomes potable. But even with all of our expertise at making very potable beer, we knew that the distillation process was way beyond us yet.
Georgia O'Keeffe is someone who distilled at a place that was extraordinary: after she had already learned to distil at the most powerful place on the planet at the time, and that was New York City. She was in the New York of just at the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War when New York City was the most powerful place on the planet. But her second distillation place was a place called Ghost Ranch. When we come back from the break we'll see that at the time that she arrived at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, Ghost Ranch had been put off limits to anybody but classified people because it was the resort location for all the Los Alamos engineers and scientists making the atomic bomb, that's where they had their dude ranch. And the only person who was allowed in to live and work there, was Georgia O'Keeffe. So we're going to look at somebody who is really extraordinary and pair her up with Ch'i Pai-Shih, the most extraordinary Chinese artist since the 16 maybe 1300s. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to our Art 5 presentation. And we're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih as our second pair. And, by pairing, we're constantly maintaining a symmetry, not a symmetricality but a symmetry, of process which has not a meandering but it has something even more analytically fruitful than a trajectory: it has a vectoring. It's very important for us, here in the 21st century, to be able to take our understanding out of a regressive mythic process that is characterized by bottled up feelings, by scrambled imagery, by deceiving language which is misshapen so that it has its integration in an artificial mental structure which then confirms that, 'Yes, you should be having those images. You should be having those feelings. You should be using this kind of talk and this makes sense and what we have to do to ensure that everything is alright is to make sure that everybody does the right actions.' And this is the abstract simplicity source of tyrannies: tyrannies of minds over lives, tyrannies of individuals over families, tyrannies of committees over cultural units which are then prorated into structures of authoritarian power in the social world.
All of this has been diagnosed for thousands of years but the correctives were always limited to just a few. We live in a time where we need to have hundreds of millions if not billions of mature men and women to handle the landslide that has occurred. We ended the first half of talking about the Ghost Ranch, almost appropriately named, with a skull of a cattle animal posted at the gate and the fact that in the early 1940s it was chosen because of its proximity to Los Alamos to be the dude ranch recreation site for the scientists working on the development of the atomic bomb. In this volume on Ghost Ranch, it reads,
The thing was done and tested July 16th1945 at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Northern New Mexico residents who were standing outside, tending to their morning chores, at 5:29 that dawn saw the light from the Trinity flash in the sky over the mountains. Many in their beds were awakened by the shockwave that passed through their homes like an earthquake. Windows were blown from their frames in buildings in Gallant New Mexico 235 miles from Trinity and people on the Arizona New Mexico state line 150 mile from ground zero saw the sun come up and go down again.
This quality of something that, in the space of just a couple of decades, went from a dude ranch for Easterners and Midwesterners, wealthy usually, to go and have a place to play cowboy for a little while, ride horses, not have to work with the social world that was excerpted, the American west as a mythic icon and of a place to get away for a while from the social world. And it is exactly here at this place that the supernatural demonic of a social world, gone critical, occurred just at the time that Georgia O'Keeffe was permanently moving there from her New York City home and era. She had married Alfred Stieglitz, one of the great original founders of the art of photography, who was considerably older than her, born in fact while the American civil war was still in progress. And his gallery at 291 in New York City was one of the places, one of the few places, where the new art could be seen in the United States. He was one of the first to exhibit Picasso and Cezanne and of course the early photography of which he was one of the great pioneers.
His first exhibition included some of these early 1917 paintings. This is of an evening star, the morning star and evening star of Venus and it's an exemplar of how the beauty of Georgia O'Keeffe as a visionary artist was able to almost foresee the way in which future resonances were going to come out. This is a painting done of the East River in New York and this was a visionary painting, it's almost as if there's an atomic bomb over the city. This painting from 1927 was done ten years after and one of the paintings that she made in 1958 is of her ladder to the moon, above the northern New Mexico skyline. This was before President Eisenhower established the Mercury Programme for the astronauts that would eventually send Americans to the moon. One of the last paintings that she was able to do before her eyesight went bad in 1965, looking out from a plane over the planet she did this amazing skyscape.
This is the landscape of the planet from its first visionary encounter, of being able to go far enough out, high enough up, to be able to now see that this is not just the world but it is a world, one of many worlds. And that by seeing this as a planet, the Earth as a planet, the first book to ever use that title, the Earth as a planet, was in a University of Chicago press series edited by Gerard Kuiper, of the star system around our sun, the solar system, and one of the first books in it was The Earth as a Planet. When we are able to see the entire extent of all the social worlds that have ever existed for our kind as a dwindling, shrinking location on a planet in a vastness that becomes so huge so quickly that even by the time we get to the first nearest planet to us, Mars, the earth from Mars is but a blue star, it is one star among many, many thousands that can be seen. At any one time on our planet the naked eye can see about 6,000 stars on a very clear desert night or ocean voyage night.
Our learning, our eight phases, have resonances all the way back to the eight trigrams of the I Ching and all the way forward to something like this written and published in 1964, The Eightfold Way, by Murray Gell-Man and Yell Niemann. And this is about global symmetry.
We attempt once more as in the global symmetry scheme to treat the eight known baryons as a supermultiplet. And not only the eight known baryons as a supermultiplet but the symmetry is called unitary symmetry and corresponds to the unitary group in three dimensions in the same way that charge independence corresponds to the unitary group in two dimensions. The eight infinitesimal generators of the group form a single Lie algebra [Lie algebra a name for a mathematician from Sweden, Sophus Lie] Just like the three components of isotropic spin, in this important sense unitary symmetry is the simplest generalisation of charge independence.
One of the qualities that emerged out of this is expressed in just a few short paragraphs later, it's only a one line sentence, 'A ninth vector mason coupled to the baryon current can be accommodated naturally in the scheme.' So that you're not limited to something that has just eight dots connected together but that these are vector facets of a prismatic relationship that has, within itself, a number of symmetries. One of them is, in mathematics, called coefficients: they change together, they maintain a proportion, they maintain a ratioing. And her on page 120 of The Eightfold Way, a little review, The Octet Model and its Coefficients, from the CERN Geneva installation in Switzerland,
In trying to understand the structure of the strong interaction, several higher symmetry schemes have been proposed. These higher symmetries should conserve the isospin I and the hypercharge Y. [So that as transformations occur there are carriers that continue to function through the transforms that carry with them, in this case hypercharge and isospin] especially interesting in this respect is the octet model of unitary symmetry proposed independently by Gell-Man and by Niemann. In this model one assumes the strongest models to be invariant under transformations [of a very high kind]
We don't need to go into all of this immediately. When we get to science we'll take a deeper dip into this. We're trying to understand, now, how art emerges as a prismatic form out of visionary consciousness. And we're taking Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih. You've seen Georgia O'Keeffe, this is what Ch'i Pai-Shih looked like when he was 93. Both of them lived long enough and lived in extraordinary times, survived almost everything. For someone like Ch'i Pai-Shih he lived through a period where China, in 1863 when he was born, was still reeling from the incursion of European powers, having trade incursion centres all the way along the Chinese coast. Places like Hong Kong, places like Canton, Tientsin outside of Beijing in northern China, shanghai. These treaty ports, as they were called, were slowly draining the wealth and the capacity from China which was frozen, at the time, in a Qing dynasty, the old Manchu dynastic northern Chinese from Manchuria, that had been in place since the 1600s. And there had not been a great artist in China in all that time. The last really important artist in Chinese painting at the time was famous for his expertise at making copies of great previous dynastic masters, Dong Qichang, lived about 1555 to 1636. And in all that time from then on, painting in China, especially portraits and landscape painting, which as we're seeing are very important and interspersed together, we're all derivative: academic schools, styles. Someone once wrote, 'It's as if someone took great pride in being able to make an artificial Goya and saying this is a really good artificial Goya.'
Ch'i Pai-Shih is an original visioning artist. For the first time, if one looks at the traditions of Chinese, especially Chinese landscape painting, the last time that there was an original visioning great landscape artist in China was in the 1300s, his name was Ni Zan. And in fact, one of his distant descendants is master Ni, Ni Hua-Ching who lived here in Los Angeles for many years and whose sons run medical practice in Santa Monica, in Yo San University in Santa Monica. Master Ni is 76th generation Ni and his distant ancestor Ni Zan was one of the great original artists. Ch'i Pai-Shih is the greatest artist since Ni Zan in over 500 years of painting. His extraordinary capacity led him to survive almost every catastrophe that life could offer. And one of the earliest achievements of his visionary insights was the need to expand his landscaping, journeying contexts so that he was able to take himself out of the village cultural life that he had been born into, out of the social commandeered society that he was forced into to begin to explore as the traditional Chinese way of travelling.
And using the journeying of travelling through a landscape to be able to refine the self portrait of one's person, not the ego that you're supposed to have by obeying the plans of authority and doing what is prescribed as their actions that will support not only their actions but you behaving in the way in which you should. And it is travelling through landscapes that became extremely important in China, especially when the great power of the Han dynasty - the Han dynasty are the Chinese Romans - began to falter in the 200s AD, about that time you began to get the seeds of several developments that would balloon and resonate together. One of the developments was from south China and that was the introduction of Buddhism from India via Ceylon via Burma via Thailand. The south Indian Buddhism that came in was very much the traditional Theravada Buddhism.
And it came in through the south of China and one of the first southern Buddhist monasteries that was established was in Nanjing, China, which is pretty far north from the ports like Hong Kong and Canton. Nanjing is inland from Shanghai about 100 some miles. 247 AD is the first time that there was a Buddhist monastic community and construct of buildings. The other was a movement of the northern Buddhism which was a Mahayana, not a Theravada, and the Mahayana underwent a huge transform distillation as it moved through central Asia into northern China. The port by which it came into northern China, the large city, was Chang'an, the ancient capital of China in the Zhou dynasty, again in the Han, again in the T'ang dynasty. That northern Buddhism that came in carried with it a different quality. The southern Buddhist quality had a Sri Lankan Ceylonese southern India tone but the northern tone carried with it a sense of art that had a very strong Hellenistic quality to it. The Hellenistic quality showed itself in human figures that were recognisable as portraits of people who were not Buddhists but Buddhists to be, they were bodhisattvas.
And so the northern Chinese received this kind of Hellenised Indian Mahayana that, by the way, had a very very strong Hellenistic Jewish tone to it, one finds for instance, the earliest Mahayana classic by Asvaghosa about 98AD, it's called the awakening of faith in the Mahayana. Classical Buddhism does not talk about faith at all, it talks about the method. But the faith of the Mahayana is the faith in the Great Way, that the Great Way is an expansive resonance that is possible because the spirit person has crossed over from the limitations of the false world, from the limitations of the social authority with its false ego, with its artificial rituals, with its disrespect of nature and mysterious nature and transformational magical nature. The method quality of the Theravada, from the south, introduced, specifically, an informational form: 'If you follow these procedures, these methods, these yogas, these forms will occur.' This information will be developed and will be able to be handled by you and you will become able to control the informational structures of these forms whereas the Mahayana, its emphasis was on operational, not informational.
Processes of relationality and how they operate, how they work, like the advanced physics of The Eightfold Way. It is keeping track of the way in which the vectors of analytic are able to be gastalted and proportioned together so that one can understand that all of these processes, together, form a set, not a set of qualities of something which is just physical but a set of cosmic proportions and relationalities. And that all of the solid things in the universe will distribute themselves according to the nonsolid vectors facets of a set that is able to be not only theorised and prismatically brought into an art by using a special quality of language, not just a symbol written language of an oral mythic language but using a visionary differential conscious transform of written language so that it becomes now prismatic. And such a language, such a prismatic differential symbolic language, is mathematics. Any great mathematician will tell you that mathematics is art and an art related, harmonically, with the scientific way in which the cosmos can be talked about through this art language.
This is very much in the keeping with documents like The Eightfold Way and when we get to science we'll expand this and you'll be able to see that it's in every field, all the time, everywhere. The respect for someone like Ch'i Pai-Shih grew out of the fact that as a young man in trying to break his way out of the various onion rings of limitations he took five related journeys travelling around China specifically not only to go and see things but to learn how to see, to expose his limited personae to the refining of linked resonant journeys, in this case the Chinese pentatonic scale - a music scale of five notes: pentatonic. The five trips, the five journeys, were related together and out of this came a series of paintings and a stylisation for himself of the man who borrowed mountains and Borrowed Mountains was one of his earliest works.
One of the qualities that began to come out is that Ch'i Pai-Shi, instead of having just one kind of a seal - semi soft stone with the carved bottom stamped with red ink and then put onto your documents, your paintings - he had dozens of seals, he was many facets of people. Some of these seals read this way: 'Old man Pai-Shih already 85 years of age, the old dweller of the apricot grove. The old man who borrows mountains.' One seal reads, 'I owe much to those who really understand and appreciate me. No such heaven endowed thing in my town. Floating name in excess of reality. The hall of regretful grow. Poetry excels only after much privation.' And so the multiple seals of Ch'i Pai-Shih were able to exemplify something important: as he unfurled the possibilities of different facets of his spiritual person, his art began to find a way to penetrate through the limitations that were constantly enforced and involved around him.
One of the most difficult things was in 1950, after the People's Republic of China was founded, Mao Zedong and his group, Communist China wanted to make sure that it was going to have authoritarian control over everyone, all the time, in the country. Eventually it led in 1966 to the Red Guard Revolution where everyone dressed in army uniforms or blue ant uniforms and had a little red Mao book and that was all you know and all you need to know. In 1950 one of the most interesting paintings by him was just peaches and I have brought in and we showed on the DVD a later refined presentation of peaches.
It is a quality where the most simple everyday things are brought out in the simplest way of presentation so that it penetrates through the layers of propaganda, inculcation, the artificial critical limits of being able to seep through as if it were like a spiritual [myth 1.13.30], through all the cracks of the lattices of the work that was supposed to hold everything together. One of the qualities of peach blossoms was done in the 1940s in the midst of the travail not only of the Second World War, the Chinese call it the war against Japan which lasted from 1933 to 1945. Here are peaches in a basket above peach blossoms. Now, peach blossoms and peaches do not happen together so that one is looking here at the blossoming origin and the fruiting, already picked, and put as a pair in a basket.
The more that one begins to look at the way in which a prismatic form will emerge out of a field of vision, one does like a reverse engineering from the art work, from the artist, back to the visionary field. And that the visionary field has already done its scintillating interpenetration with the field of nature so that one learns to see with this particular penetration and its pivotal spin, generating, more and more, for you the resonances of your own pivoting. You learn to relate yourself to that visionary field, that visionary sourcing and your own creative imagination becomes freed, your own remembering quality becomes available and the discernment is able to take one back through because your experience flow has flowed through nature, naturally, and now it is flowing through vision, consciously. Eventually you'll be able to refine so that you'll be able to rediscover yourself in the field of nature, originally and recognise yourself in the field of differential consciousness, visionally, indefinitely.
So it's like having a moment of insight that continues and as you carry your dynamic comportment of vision experience and nature, together, that synergy of them together is not only an integral weaving but it has a differential, flowering, blossoming quality out of it. And just as art is the fruit of that visioning field, a historical kaleidoscopic multi river network will be able to disclose for you a new landscape: the landscape of the cosmos. So that the spirit person is a traveller in eternity, as Basho wrote in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Once we are able to be journeyers, to be travellers in eternity, together, all tyrannies are over, permanently. You not only cannot put the genie back in the bottle, you cannot put the spiritual being back into the authority bottle, you cannot imprison someone who is radically freed from permanently.
One of the qualities that comes out, here are two chickens with some taro plant leaves. Black chicken and Yellow chicken and they're very happy being different, they're very happy pecking together, exchanging and interchanging together. All of this was in a painting from 1948, right at the most crucial part of the battle to regain China for the Chinese. Not only had China not been Chinese since the Manchu dynasty took over in the 1600s but it had been taken over by European colonialism and then taken over by power groups. So that when the final moment came for China to come back to the Chinese, for the first time in about 300 years, one of the great moments was when the People 's Republic army marched to lay siege to the great huge city of Canton in 1949. The army totalled five million men under arms, they covered the landscape as far as the eye could see and the city of Canton surrendered without a fight. It was the last place in China to be incorporated and one of the most famous phrases of the time, Mao Zedong said, 'The Chinese people have stood up,' we will never sit at someone else's beck and call again. Yet, the quality of the infection was not European, it wasn't Mongolian and Manchu, it is a flawed infection that is there in civilisation, since its beginning faltering ways. The Chinese have been ultimate authoritarian and imprisoners of social worlds, professionally, for 5,000 years. They make the Egyptian Pharaohs look like democrats.
It is a quality that seeped in, even within less than a generation of that kind of melodramatic almost grandstanding, to where teenagers were ripping people out of their homes and accusing them of being anti-populist and sentencing professors to pick peppers in the fields, in some cases 1,000 miles or 2,000 miles away. Ch'i Pai-Shi endured through all of that and maintained himself as an artist. He used to put signs on his door saying 'This man is not at home and even if he were at home he's likely to be dangerous. He thinks that he is the man who borrows mountains.' How about that? And he was left alone, largely, except for the fact that slowly his ability to penetrate through began to be recognised, more and more, even by the social strengthening of the People 's Republic of China into a tyranny. And when he was in 1957 when he was 94 he was acclaimed as an all-time cultural global figure and honourised. The very next fortnight from his death in late September of 1957 was sputnik going up signalling the space age. And almost on the anniversary of this death, the next year, 1958, was the Great Leap Forward: we're going to jump over centuries in just a generation.
And of course, the China of 2007 has jumped over many generations of development but only for a small percentage of its population; more than a billion people still in a realm which is untouched except for the inculcation and the compression of something which they have not been prepared by a new learning, like this, to be able to explore. This is not only true of China it is true of every country of the world; it is true of the United States. The United States by 2007 is more medieval than it has ever been in its history. Medieval America is a reality. If you go out in the countryside it is very difficult to find the resonances of spirit, what you find is the mulching mayonnaise of a schmeer sometimes called pop culture, sometimes just simply called fashion. The pizzazz, that pizzazz is the bubbles in a glass of Coke. And if you let it sit overnight you're going to lose those bubbles and if you put your false teeth in a glass of Coke overnight they'll be discoloured by morning. And besides that, Coke isn't Coke anymore because the original Coke was named for cocaine which is what made its selling point as. Not to disparage American culture but it is the nourishing enrichment of American culture in a planetary way that was its original vision.
This education, this eight phase learning, opens up the resonances so that they exceed even the planet: go out into the star system. We're using Ch'i Pai-Shi and Georgia O'Keeffe to initially give us a tuning fork for some of these deeper issues. Next week, when we come back, we're going to take a look at the way in which, especially, the Chinese landscape and the Georgia O'Keeffe portrait ,of herself as flowers in a landscape, increasingly reveal to us a set of resonances that we need to be creatively in touch with. And, remembering to the point of recognising, we will be able t to step on the gas of our own development. There is an acceleration that is both natural and conscious, able to be brought into play.
Phrase translated as 'The literary mind and the carving of dragons,' in Chinese, in Chinese is 'Wen xīn diāo long.' 'Wen xīn' is the literary mind, it means a mind that is made jewel-like through many experiences and layerings, many cuttings, many facets of being acquainted with an enormous, expansive realm of art, not only the literary mind of reading and of writing but Chinese art comes out of calligraphy, it comes out of the written language. And the term 'diāo long' actually means carving dragons. And we'll talk about this next week. It is the freeing of the dragon energy by being able to carve it out in a very special way that is paired with and in tune with the way in which the mind, as it becomes literate to the point of exceeding any social world to which it was inculcated, becomes universally literate. And one of the keys to this is understanding. Not one or two or three or four but dozens of civilisations, all in the same learning scheme. If you look at our programme, you'll see towards the end of it that there is a three page listing of all the major civilised nexes that we use together. More next week.