Art 8

We come to Symbols 8, which means that we're two thirds of the way through a twelve occurrence presentation. To call them parts is to fall into a characterisation of something as exclusively a form. What we're developing in the Symbols phase is the idea that the structure of symbolic thought is not particularly a form. Our body, existentially, is a form and forms are characterised by unity. Every part of a unity is itself, has unity, so that there is an accumulation of additionals, or a subtraction. And so the body and all ritual phase actions have their objectivity because they embody unity, or as we have used consistently through the first year, the Chinese term Tê: they have the power to exist. In the ancient Greek the term was monad, which meant oneness and that characterisation of oneness carries all the way through, from the earliest Pre-Socratics to the time of Leibniz in the early 1700s. One of Leibniz's great books is called The Monadology - the study of onenesses.
But while the body, while all existentials, have unity and are thus forms, the mind does not have a form which embodies unity. It has, instead, a structure which is capable of modulation and it is extremely important to understand the distinction and the difference. If we present for ourselves a simple outline of formality and hope to then correlate the body and the mind together, we do so by reducing the mind, by reducing thought to something that can be existentially handled and will require of it, then, that it have some unity, a oneness. This predisposition was always countered by men and women who were masterful at understanding that life is an expansion beyond the simple actions that go to correlate and establish the unity of existence. Life is certainly founded in its traction on ritual comportments, of our sequences of actions, of the developments in the linearities of how sequential doing will establish, in the mode of action, the unity of existence and the participation of our unity as beings with beingness itself.
We are learning here something which first emerged in the time of Leibniz and Newton and that was that there was an infinite array of determinables between zero and one. Out of this comes something that is so universal that it is taught all over the world to high school students, it's called calculus. Calculus has two modes: it has an integral and it has a differential. These two work together and thus form a set within which there is exactness, there is determinability, which is precise and yet is in an infinite array within the set. We use Leibniz's notation rather than Newton's. Newton called them fluxions, but it's Newton's Principia Mathematica, 1687, that is the magisterial tome presenting why it is that symbolic thought is capable of more precision than simple monads would seem to have, than simple existentials would seem to have. For Newton, his concern led him all of his life to be interested in and to try and understand alchemy. For him it was the simplest aspect of the universe and of ourselves that we undergo changes, transforms. We do not have a stuck existentiality in things which are just simply unities but we can go into the proportions indefinitely, discover more and more unities, but also discover relationalities between them which are proportions, which are rations. And that that expandable set between zero and one is capable of an analytic both ways, from one to the integral of one and from one down to the differential of zero.
The great challenge to this was Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason, saying from his background - his background that included a tremendous development that came just before Newton and Leibniz and crested about the time that Kant's generation was coming into its maturity - in The Critique of Pure Reason, written about a century after Principia Mathematica by Newton, one fund that there was a transcendental space which the mind is able to play in, and that this transcendence was not limited to the set of zero and one. That is one were going to characterise a set, which had a transcendental space within which the mind could discover ratios and proportions, that set now, instead of being zero and one was zero and infinity.
When you have, instead of a binary of zero and one, which is able to write complex computer programmes, but there is no programmer alive that can even imagine how to write programmes in zero and infinity. It will take another hundred years to be able to have what one would call true cubits. The pair of the binaries of zero and one and zero infinity paired and brought together so that one now has a quaternary that includes two modes of zero and one and infinity in such a way that one would be able to characterise, to any specificity of accuracy, something as convoluted as non-existence or as the encompassing cosmos, which elude the ability for computation at the present time. The flow between that pre-zero and that expanded infinity, that flow is consciousness and so consciousness has a dimensionality that exceeds the ability for space time to even characterise it.
One of the odd things in the hundred years since the development of Kant's material and Newton's material, in the early 20th century, both those genius high water marks were eclipsed and exceeded - by a factor that exceeds their eclipsing of the old medieval order - with the development of quantum mechanics, of Einstein's relativity, of the tremendous development in mathematics since then. It is apparent to anyone who is even within the neighbourhood of current early 21t century thresholds: we have more to learn in this next generation than man has learned ever since the Palaeolithic days of about 40,000 years ago. What happens is that the carrier of the amperage for consciousness to emerge, as we have been seeing in our Symbols presentations, the last three presentations and today, the carrier is language. Any of us who have raised children have firsthand experience of how children accumulate and acquire language: they all jabber gibberish beforehand. It is only after a while that the facility for speaking comes into play.
As it comes into play a curious development begins to happen; when language becomes speakable, when a child is capable, now, of at least the rudiments, the beginnings, of speech, what also occurs is the beginnings of a sense of temporality, of time. So that time as a dimension, now, emerges in a very curious way. As their sense of events, making something now past or something present, perhaps looking forward to something future - when we used Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying at the beginning of Symbols, little James Ramsey is sitting at his mother's feet cutting out little things and he is looking forward to a trip to the lighthouse, he has never been there - little children have this sense of coming, the sense of having been, the sense of here, now.
As the sense of time begins to have a dimension to it, a universal emergence occurs all over again. It's like a replay of the whole ecology of how existence came into being in the first place. When time now is a first dimension fresh again, a new space blossoms out of time, the three dimensions of space blossom out of a first dimension, time. That space that blossoms, now, in the child as they acquire language and thus temporality, that space is an interior space, not the space of the world but the space of themselves. It's the beginning of the space wherein the mind will have a structure of thought, a transcendence of resonance and a harmonic of a whole ecology of consciousness in many phases.
Now for our learning we have brought everything down to an octave because one of the traditional understandings was not only that there are pairs, not only this and that or hot and cold, positive and negative, Tao and Tê but pairedness is one of the deepest qualities of realisation and that there is a symmetry operating. When one has something asymmetrical that occurs, it's of great interest: perhaps there's something hidden that goes with it. That tuneability of pairedness is so deep that a pair of pairs as a four, as a quaternary, as a structure, as the four corners, as the frame of reference, of the frame of the picture, all of this, then, indicates that there is not only pairs and pairs of pairs, but there is a pairedness of those pairs of pairs, leading us to an eight-part set. The ogdoad of the ancient Egyptians, the octave of classical music, the Noble Eightfold Path of the classic Theravada, even in our times somebody like Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech trying to understand quarks finally came up with the eightfold structure that works all over again.
And so our learning has phases that not only occur in themselves but that they pair together and then another pair of them make a square, a quaternary, and that has its complementarity in a further four but if you write it out in terms of an algorithmic progression, it writes out in two different ways. The classic discoverer of this was Pythagoras and the place that you find it written most accurately is in Plato's last great dialogue, the Timaeus. It's an inverted V and so they call it the Greek letter lambda. In fact in quantum physics there is a lambda particle that was discovered using these ancient techniques of wisdom. The progression runs, not only by squares: 1, 2, 4, 8, but it also runs by cubes: 1, 9, 27. And so eight is not only a pair of fours, it is a cube of pairs. If you cube two, you also get eight.
So it's remarkably useful as an encompassing set that allows for development and expansion of proportions and ratios that are not immediately evident yet can be, not only discovered, but when discovered it gives us a cue of how to disclose it to others who have not discovered this on their own and thus teaching a further maturity from simply getting along in a tribe, in a culture, in a social world, in a globalisation. To mature any further from that one needs to learn this wisdom, this being not only wise, about the world, about the culture, about the social realm about the globe, but being wise about the wisdom of that and thus our species is called Homo sapiens sapiens: being wise about wisdom.
And so we are learning something new here, a new form of learning and we're using several of the greatest discoverers and disclosurers about language in the 20th century. We are using C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, whose book The Meaning of Meaning we are using as one of our pairs of texts, because we are always keeping consistent so that once you get used to the balance of our procedure it will be commutative, that you can carry it over, to any of the applications, any of the disclosures, any of the discoveries and become useful for yourself as a calibration, not just as a tool but an entire calibration. We're using the third edition of The Meaning of Meaning, not only by Ogden and Richards but is has an appendix by one of the great social anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski.
Malinowski, as we've talked about, had enormous experience in the First World War he was in New Guinea, he was trapped by the First World War, he had to live with the natives. As he lived with the Kula people, and realised their connections, not only in Papua New Guinea but out into the Trobriand Islands, especially that very rugged volcanic island Dobu, where everyone on Dobu prides themselves on being magisterially suspicious of everything else. One of our earlier works that we used was Ruth Benedict's great Patterns of Culture where she used three ways of being human in the primordial sense, the Zuni of New Mexico, the Kwakiutl of British Columbia and the Dobu of the Trobriand Islands, where Malinowski was and his great volume was called Argonauts of the Western Pacific. The New Guinea Trobriand islanders are Melanesians, the Polynesians have an Asian origin, the Melanesians have an origin that goes back to the Australian aborigines and to Africa, it's black Southern Pacific populations.
Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea and the preface here for the 1922 first edition is by the great Sir James George Frazer, the author of The Golden Bough and many, many other works. One of the qualities that comes out of Malinowski, in his supplement to The Meaning of Meaning in the third edition is that he points out that something extraordinary has happened now, that when this was published January 1st 1923, it struck a great many people that they had touched a live wire here. And the reverberations were that many people in diverse fields found correlations and Malinowski points out that he is going to tender himself as one of three who found correlations and completely different approaches to language that fit in with what Ogden and Richards came up, with the understanding of symbolism and the symbolic mind.
He says of himself, 'My investigations were with the Papua Melanesians.' The second figure, a doctor, Henry Head, dealt with neurologically damaged people who were suffering from aphasia, the inability to speak. The Greek aphasia means speechless but there were two kinds of aphasia and they are assigned to physiological areas of the brain, neurological locuses. One of them is Broca's aphasia, which is in the frontal cortex. The other is Wernicke's aphasia which goes deeper into the cerebral cortex, especially by the temporal lobes. If you have a Wernicke's aphasia, you have a complete confabulation, the lack of being ordinated, of knowing where you are and what you're doing. It is a sensory aphasia, whereas Broca's is semantic, you are unable to connect your language together that one can speak. The connectors do not occur because there has been disease or damage to the neuronal cells, to their networking, to their networking not just as some kind of linking the dots together but the complexity of that linking of the cells together which is characterised as like a neuronal cloud, has a shimmering quality, not only to its structure but that that structure has an ability to generate dimensionality interior space, an inner spatiality that is not limited to the form but is able to go outside of the form.
And so the space of consciousness, well, when a child is beginning to learn to speak and their sense of time is beginning to acquire enough of a flow so that the blossoming of interior space making the mind, it proceeds and goes through a transform. A transform beyond being in the form of the body, which includes the brain, to having that space exceed and colour outside the boundaries, not so much just colour but to exceed and one gets a very classic portrayal of human beings who do this, who have a bubble of clarity around their head. They have a nimbus of holiness, they have a blessedness, they have a golden section of like a halo, they have the radiance of the qualities of something traditionally called enlightenment, realisation. [Pause] The leaving of a hiatus, just as I did, to accommodate something new, is a quality of not just factoring something in, unexpected, but of allowing your disclosure, discovery, opportunity of space to exceed that of your individual thought, of your individual symbolic structure of thought, to exceed the form, existentially of your body, brain, and to allow the coherence of that expanded space and resonance to acquire a sense of advanced kinaesthetic familiarity.
One of I. A. Richard's collections of essays, he lied to be about 87, and the uncollected essays published in Manchester, England, was called Complementarities, based on the great developments of complementarity, headed by Niels Bohr and developed in quantum mechanics, quantum physics, astrophysics as we should call it by the 21st century. He writes, 'It is reasonable, is it not, to expect that a deep influence may take years - even decades - before producing its full effect. The effect produced may often be very unlike what might be thought likely.' Now, he was speaking of a time where he had through great physical health problems - tuberculosis - had managed to be placed in the greatest university in the world at the time, at the apex and peak of its greatness, Cambridge in England, 1911.
One of - we've talked about this - one of the great flourishes of that time was the publishing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 11th edition, 1911, which has been famous ever since by the hundreds, if not thousands, of articles written by the crème de la crème of around the world on every possible subject. The original assay to make an encyclopaedia - from the French philosophes coming at the time of Immanuel Kant - that there should be an encyclopaedia, then, of all knowledge, which will then give us the ability to have a Principia Mathematica of what there is to know in the world about everything. But the early French encyclopaedias, in the early editions of the British encyclopaedia were really dwarfed by the eleventh edition that came out in 1911.
Cambridge was like the epicentre. It was the place where, in the ceremony of discovery and disclosure, it seemed that the centre pole of the planet had been placed exactly there so that one could have not only a structure of a centre but could have an axis of a pivot. One find, like I. A. Richards found, going in fresh, that he was surrounded not only by students like himself or students maybe a couple of years advanced than himself so that he was now not just a brilliant person but he was one of dozens of brilliant persons. And they were all learning from super-brilliant professors, who, in a social realm, a pecking order, referred to themselves as Dons, like the old grandees of the Spanish imperium. A Cambridge Don was not only the top professor at Cambridge; he was the top authority in the world on what he knew.
The centre pin prick of that hierarchy was in the development of mathematical philosophy and there were three figures who occupied that pivotal axis in Cambridge at this time. We talked about two of them who got together, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, who took the philosophic mathematical qualities of Newton's great work and opened it up into a new set of relationalities. Instead of the zero and one calculus of Newton's fluxions, one now had the zero-infinity possibilities of Principia Mathematica; that not only is there a language which we learn in our culture, in our homes, in our families, in our nations, a family of languages around the globe, but there is a universal language of mathematics that is a common second language for anyone on the planet to use and of course by the 21st century we realise that one can use this language anywhere in the cosmos.
It not only holds but it expresses, to any degree of accuracy, to any ratioing of possibility. The imagination is staggered by a indefinite expandable and discloseable, thus learnable, and why this particular learning is called, I have called it for many decades the yoga of civilisation. Not the yoga of some other civilisation or of something existing but of the future civilisation that belongs, not to this or that continent or this or that quality of the globe, but to a star system humanity, who are at home, their culture is the entire planet, they are at home anywhere on the planet with any kinds of people, past, present or future. But a civilisation is a doubly transformed expanded; from the culture one can get a social realm and transform that into a world, a global quality, so that a planetary culture is really a transform. It's a transform of the entire heritage of man, as if one were transforming water, as the natural medium, into wine, which is an expansion and a transform.
But the second transform is a distillation of that wine into a cognac: of making, now - in alchemy it was always called a liqueur - something which has, not only the transformation of form but has the distillation of the transform into what is classically called spirits. The liqueur, the spirits, has a particularly quality; it is able to enter into any natural forms and transform them and bring them out through the double transforms. To introduce, now, that anywhere, that you are using the natural flow, there is now a deeper, transcendent quality of that natural flow and a doubly, triple level of refinement which is like a cosmic flow which is spiritual. So that the spirit, instead of being a third part of something - body, mind and spirit - the spirit is a completely different dimensionality, and when it enters into the world, into the realm, into that picture of things, it enters in to change it and the first thing that it changes is the ability for language to express and to disclose.
When primordial men and women, even 100,000 years ago, went on a vision quest to transform their bodies, to transform their minds, which is really, as we are going to see today, is a restructuring, and the restructuring is not changing the structure - changing the calibration of the structure. So it's about a recalibration, not technically a transform, but to even go further from that, and that is to allow for the possibilities to exceed the ability to put a limit on it. Thus the better way to speak is that while our sense of the whole is encompassing, it is in no way delimited. It is not only that is unbounded, it is unboundable. When Malinowski was working with Papuan New Guineas, he discovered that they already know all this; they have never been to Cambridge, they never even heard of England. They never heard of Russell and Whitehead but they used all of the sophistication of these activities and Malinowski had to learn all over again what symbolic thought language might be. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back and tune our consideration. Part of the challenge of our continuing to live is that the acquaintance of our species with not only levels of order, qualities of power, and expansion of facility and capability, have catapulted us into a situation where we cannot fall back to a previous comfortability. It's not only that you can't go home again, but as we acquired, as we generated, as we emerged, not only once, but iteratively, many times, throughout a very long development, the past that was became new. It became freshened, it became transformed in terms of its existence, it became recalibrated in terms of its structure so that by now we are able not only to return to any particular past but to see it in terms of a kaleidoscopic historical consciousness.
We were talking earlier about Malinowski's great appendix to The Meaning of Meaning, to the third edition that came out, and he was disclosing and showing that there are a great many of correlations among people of disparate kinds. This third edition, which includes that particular preface, Malinowski showed that not only his work in social anthropology in Melanesia, and Dr Henry Head's work with aphasia patients - speechless, loss of orientation - but that a third figure, the great A.H. Gardiner, Sir Alan Gardiner of the Griffith Institute at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University in England, who is one of the world's great Egyptologists. Malinowski said, 'All three of us, in our separate fields and disciplines find deep correlations, parallels and sympathy with the work of Ogden and Richards on the meaning of meaning, on the structure of symbolic thought.'
Now Gardiner's great work is the great Egyptian Grammar: an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs and Gardiner's work, now in the third edition, is the world standard for this. Part of what he displays and discloses in here, is that the ability to read hieroglyphs, to be able to symbolically think along with the thought of written Egyptian language was lost for about 1,700 years. Towards the Roman era, in Egypt, Egypt became not just a kingdom in itself, having gone through 3,000 years of vicissitude but it became the personal property of Augustus Caesar so that he could keep a leverage in terms of worldwide marketing and economy on the control of a disparate empire, of an imperium that had spread farther than their capacity to keep things in order. And one of the reasons was the great wealth of Egypt but also its ability to produce food in a basic - what was called at the time, the grain dole, it was just called corn, it's actually Emmer wheat out of which one can make bread.
In the time of the early first century of the Common Era, of Augustus Caesar and his successors, Rome had a population of about two million people. Only Alexandria was of comparable size, at the time, in the world. Half of Rome was on the food dole so that they owed allegiance, not only to the power of the Caesar but you would not get your daily dole of food if you misbehaved. So Egypt was extremely important and it lost its ability, progressively, to remember to maintain its own historical development, so much so that the last person to make a history of Egypt, so that one could understand what the language was and what it did, was by Manetho. Translated here in the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard, done by W.G. Waddell, this edition was originally 1940 and has been reprinted many times.
Manetho wrote around 250BC, under the invitation and command of the second Ptolemy, Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria, who was building the great library at the time. The Musaeum, as it was called, in Alexandria, was the world's first global university, was the first university. It was the first place where all of the languages of the known world were being studied together, all of the literatures and the library, the Musaeum, had more than a million scrolls 2,300 years ago. It was the last time that anyone was able to read hieroglyphics with a comprehension of going all the way back and one finds, at that time, of about the middle of the third century before the Common Era, there was still a deep understanding of the incredible stages by which we had emerged to that kind of world scope humanity.
The key to it was understanding what language does, what it is, what it can be.
The next figure to begin to show himself hieroglyphics, to try and understand, 'How do we read this, how do we understand ancient wisdom through Egyptian hieroglyphics?' was a British savant named Thomas Young, who was the discoverer of the frequency of light, that light was a frequency, and he also was the first to divide hieroglyphs into a set of 86 different kinds and categories. And from that the great young French savant Champollion was able, for the first time, to show us how to read and all during the 19th century the discovery of how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs grew. The great savant towards the end was E.A. Wallis Budge who was the Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum.
Alan Gardiner took the baton from Budge, who had taken it from several others going back to Champollion and showed that the key, simply, to understand how to read hieroglyphics out of which comes now an enormous tome that one can use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to the extent that one could use the English language or Spanish or any cultivated civilised language to understand, to the nth degree, how to say something, how to read something, how to think symbolically with that language structure in operation. One can sense the early edition of this, one can think Egyptian.
The key to it was the discovery that a Pharaoh will have five names that will make a set. The first name of the five that's in that set was the Horus name. The second is called the Nebty name and it literally translates as the name whose origin goes back to the two ladies, to pre-Dynastic Egypt where there were two kingdoms, an upper and a lower Egypt, each one having a special goddess. The goddess of the lower Egypt was a goddess of vulture and the goddess of upper Egypt was the goddess of cobras. And so the vulture and the cobra together, the hieroglyphs for them written together as a tuned, paired set, stand for the unity of Egypt, complete, of the two kingdoms brought together to a dynastic focus and that Nebty name was the name of the Pharaoh in that lineage, in that unity.
The Horus name is the unity of the gods, the second name is the unity of the earth, vibrantly in harmony with the unity of the gods, and the third name is called the golden Horus name which has the hieroglyph for Horus repeated twice over the glyph that means gold. It means that that god level of the universe, now tuned and paired with man's world unity, has a third unity of the two together that has a special kind of power. It has the power, not only to be, in a unity of the world, participant in the unity of the gods, but with the golden Horus name one has the power to reoccur eternally in that set unity.
The fourth and fifth names belong together as a special set. They are always presented in a cartouche, like a horizontal oval. Here, out of Sir Alan's Egypt of the Pharaohs, published in 1961 - this is actually signed by him - the original cartouche is described as two ropes curled and tied in such a way that where the knot would be is actually a straight line of the two ropes together. Now, those of you who have been following our learning can appreciate and understand that the origin of this goes back to the earliest presentations of the symbol for eternity, in early Dynastic Egypt, 5,000 years ago. When the body of the deceased is lying supine with the candles at both ends, the Horus figure, carrying in one claw, will have this eternity symbol - which would be the cartouche not elongated but made into a hoop that is more circular - and recalibrates the dead so that the dead, with the right language, will be able to pass through the twelve gates of the netherworld and re-emerge.
The word was triumphant, and that that triumphant re-emergence would be the coming forth by day, so that the Egyptian Book of the Dead, colloquially called, is actually the book of coming forth by day, each day, every day, forever. The Egyptian eternity was that it is made day by day for millions of years, unlimited and so the lord of the horizon is the lord of the horizon where language occurs and this is, in our learning - the best way to characterise it still - is the mythic horizon of experience that is sayable.
But in the sayability of it, there are many paces in intonations which silences or spaces are as important as the sounds that are made. There are not only phonemes, phonograms, but they are brought together into a gestalt that includes the spaces in between the sounds of what is said. And united together, not so much just brought together - the ancient Greek word sumballō meant thrown together - it is a kinetically, dynamic linking. The sound elements and the invisible spacing elements come together and they make an ideogram, they make a higher hieroglyph: it's a glyph but it's a hieroglyph that can be read in such a way that the meaning of that hieroglyph is expansive, not only in the space of the mind, but in a transcendent space extending that space of the mind which is unbounded, unlimited.
Now, one has - one of the best phrases for it, Sri Aurobindo made a phrase for it in the 1940s, he called it - the mind of light. Wherever the mind of light looks to see, one sees exactly and one sees penetratively so that one can see through something. So that one's understanding is not just what it is, and what it is based on what it does, and what it is based on what it does, integrated to what it means. But one can look through that as if the symbols were now transparent and one can generate visionary consciousness. One can see through the existentials of the world with a great transcendent transform of the mythic horizon of experience that is sayable: that its images are brought integrally into the imagination, in the structure of symbolic thought; that its feeling tones are expressible in the filigree of the intonation that expresses those images and brought together in a quality of self in the symbolic structure of the thinking, now thinking, individual, that that individual can go through the gatedness of the cycle of limitations, that are necessary for boundaries of existence, that are necessary for the sense of experience having its ordination in such a realm of existence and its integral in a symbolic structure of thought.
All of that can be carried with it, like an entourage of capabilities and facilities, through the transparency of the symbols into visionary consciousness. Here is indeed a triumph because it opens an entire ecology of what we are calling phases: that each one of those four has a direct weavable, expandable quality of coming into the four dimensions of space time, with a special trigger-realisation that when you go through a symbol - when you penetrate the meaning of its integral to emerge through it - there is a do-si-do of time and space and instead of it being space time, it is a time space. Now time is like a first dimension that provides the frequency of energy for space to expand and not just expand so that there is more space, but that there are more spaces. Now instead of there being one kind of space, there are many possibilities of spaces and the same occurs with time, there are many kinds of time, now. In mathematics there are hundreds of different spaces. There is a Riemann space, a Banach space etc and one can deal with great precision and consciously using these different qualities of calibration.
The cartouche originally was not just Egyptian but the original of the cartouche form is ancient Sumerian, while the Egyptian cartouche goes back to early dynastic times, about the time of the great pyramids. The first Pharaoh to comprehensively use this would have been Zoser because his architect doctor Imhotep was also the architect for the first pyramid, understood very much structure and how to do things about 2700 Before the Common Era. But more than a thousand years before that, in Sumeria, was the development that we saw when we looked at the Inanna epic by Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad. For Inanna, almost 6,000 years ago, her transform of the date palm - called the Huluppu tree in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian - that the roots of the date palm are able to be woven into a wreath. The fronds of the date palm, one can take out the centre of the frond, which then links to a kind of organic chord filament ,and one now has the ability to take a wand with its linkage that is able to be woven into the wreath made out of its roots. Now, one has the symbol of ancient Inanna who is able to guarantee life, permanently.
That symbol became the basic set, as we saw, of how ancient architecture developed itself out of just mud huts finally into being able to build the great Ziggurats, the great temples and a whole architecture comes out because one has the ability to ratio and proportion and tie it to completeness and tie that into whatever degrees of unity, of parts, of particles, of procedures and to bring all of it, expressively, so that one can refine one's ability to build, not only an architecture in the world but an architecture of the mind: that symbolic thought now acquires the dimensions of an art.
All of this is here and Gardiner in his Egyptian Grammar cautions new learners of the Egyptian language, of the hieroglyphs, not to translate all five names. You can translate the first three names but the two names in the cartouche should be left as they are. Even though you would know what the meaning of it is - the prenomen, which is like the basic name that this Pharaoh would go by in his lifetime, and the nomen, which would be what we would call today the family name - that those should be left untranslated, left in ancient Egyptian, so that we refer to the Pharaoh, for instance, as Tuthmosis, and not that Thoth is Graciousness. That those names in the cartouche are sealed, they are protected in such a way that that is no longer just an individual who is in a line of the gods, in a line of the Pharaohs on the earth, in a lineage of their unity together, but this was this particular, specific individual raised to the personal level of an eternal spirit: that once one's name is recorded in this structure, that person as a spirit, does not die, lives in eternity and this was the great knowledge.
If you look at the Horus name, the first one, there is an early form of the cartouche with the Horus bird on top and then a square for hieroglyphs, for the name, and underneath it a design which is the doors. The doors to the funerary chamber, whether it's in the mastaba, or later on, in the pyramids. In the mastaba it was actually a door that once was sealed - a mastaba is like a very large elongated hut - once those doors were sealed no one was to go through them. The reborn re-emerged, re-emerged as spirits, and they can go back and forth through those doors, they don't need to open them. Those doors are symbols that are open to them. They are concourses in eternity, they are not stopped by anything in space time.
In the pyramids, of course, instead of there being doors, they were painted on the walls so that they were second remove, not only the doors that are sealed, now, and are symbolically open only to the spirit, but when they are painted onto the walls, they never were doors, they were originally symbolic doors now raised to a third level of greatness: they are eternal doors so that the spirit that goes back and forth through those kinds of advanced symbols participates in the creativity of eternity. We are looking in such a way as to recalibrate our entire learning. We are faced with challenges that are like a storm front, if we do not learn. It doesn't take long to learn but one of the qualities that's there in language, we are taking not only Ogden and Richard's and Malinowski's The Meaning of Meaning, but we are pairing with it because we are always tuning, we are always ratioing, we are always proportioning, we don't deal with texts. We don't deal with books as texts.
We deal with pairs of books that are like gates through which we can learn to learn, have a concourse, a maturity, and maturation. The other pair to The Meaning of Meaning is the book by the great linguist Roman Jakobson who was perhaps the Einstein of linguistics in the 20th century. He lived to be in his mid 80s and his last book was published by MIT Press, his last university stint for many years was at MIT, he was at Harvard before that, he was at the Special Free French School in New York City, under the New School for Social Research, having been driven out by the Nazis in Europe, out of his professorship in Prague where he was for 20 years and before that he was a professor, founder of the Moscow circle of linguists. So he was always one of the great figures in the world for language, for linguistics.
This is a series of dialogues with his wife, Kristina Pomorska. She asks him about time in language, the time factor and he replies, and in the reply to her, he was at the end of his life here, about 82 years old,
The child's experience takes form in close contact with the development of language. Students of language acquisition by children have only recently noticed that the child often remembers an earlier stage in his progressive mastery of language. The child likes to talk about language. Meta-linguistic operations are an essential instrument in his linguistic development. He recalls the past in this way: "When I was small I talked like that, now I talk differently, like this." He also sometimes begins to speak in the manner of a baby or either as a game or in order to solicit more tenderness or affection from adults.
The phenomena that the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, 1860 -1943, one of the great pioneers of understanding the new symbolic depths of a kind of poetic, raised to a cosmic, comprehensiveness. In his penetrating analysis of language, Jespersen called them shifters and they play a tremendous role in the acquisition of language by the child. One of the great volumes on the development of this was by the great Jean Piaget and it's called The Development of Language in the Child [ 1.13.12 The Language and Thought of the Child ? ].Jakobson, right at the end of his life, 1982,
The concept of the shifter has seemed to me for some time to be one of the cornerstones of linguistics, although it has not been officially appreciated in the past, and therefore demands more attentive elaboration. The general meaning of the grammatical form called shifter is characterised by a reference back to the given speech act. The speech act that uses this form, thus the past tense, is a shifter because it literally designates an event that precedes the given act of speech. The first person form of a verb or the first person pronoun is a shifter because the basic meaning of the first person involves a reference back to the author of the given act of speech.
And it goes on from there. Malinowski, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published 1922, talks about how there are specific uses of language for spells by the Papuans and that some of them apply directly to the things, others involve a transference of energy. It isn't just for these things but this is for this instrument that we are going to use to do something else and we want it to carry this special transform energised quality to participate in that. He uses the example of a canoe and the carving out of the log to make the canoe will have a direct application to that physical canoe. The shells that are used to scrape, the adze qualities, but there will be a different language used, a different symbolic thing, for making the boat not physically a canoe but to making it lighter so that it carries itself over the water easier.
And for this one would use, he calls them streamers, they are the long feathers of certain birds in New Guinea, that allow you the sense of the streamingness of the existence of this thing, that has been brought into a symbolic shape, that is now given a spiritual energy to carry it easily in this world and to carry us with it. And so the symbol of a spirit boat is one of the most primordial qualities of Homo sapiens sapiens. In front of the great pyramid of Cheops, a couple of decades ago, was discovered the great boat of the sun that was used by Cheops to make sure that his concourse in the rebirth forever would have its symbolic boat. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in the coming forth by day, chapter 23 is called The Chapter of the Opening of the Mouth, so that one can speak. The Chapter of the Opening of the Mouth of the Osiris Ani, this is from the great papyrus of Ani in the British Museum, Budge was the first translator of it:
To be said:- The god Ptah shall open my mouth and the God of my town shall unfasten the swathings, the swathing which are over my mouth. Thereupon shall come Thoth, who is equipped with words of power and great abundance, and shall untie the fetters, even the fetters of the god Set that are over my mouth. The god Tem shall cast them back at those that would fetter me with them, and cast them at him. Then shall the god Shu open my mouth, and make an opening into my mouth with the same iron implement wherewith he opened the mouth of the gods.
And then comes a great prayer of emergence of being able now to speak a divine resonant spirit language that is a particular distillation of a poetic of the personal spirit. Now twice refined and brought to the classic third level, there is Thoth, there is a good spirit, then there is a thrice greatest Hermes - Hermes Trismegistus, who conveys the distillation of the personal spirit into the kaleidoscope of the cosmos. We have a recalibration here, in what we are learning and how we are learning. The carrier of it is a special language, there is not enough time in a lifetime to teach it by the grammar and the vocabulary and the syntax. It would take centuries to learn that way. Instead the technique is just to participate in it, like a child participates in the milieu of the family and the life and one day begins to speak, doesn't know the rules of grammar but says, 'Mommy, I would like something to eat.' More next week.