Art 11
Presented on: Saturday, June 16, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Art 11 and we're going in, in a special, spiral way. In Classical mathematics it was called an Archimedean screw, that as it bores in, it pulls out and the deeper that it bores in, the deeper the substrate that is brought out to the surface. This is an ancient principle and it is developed not out of mechanics, but it's developed out of a very deep, Pythagorean, philosophical understanding. I'm updating the Henry Moore text from Sir Herbert Read's classic work. This work first came out in the Praeger Art Profiles series in 1966, but was a culmination at this time of 30 years of writing about Henry Moore. He wrote the first really good monographs on Moore in the '30's. And Sir Herbert was an extraordinary poet, novelist, art critic. He was one of the principal editors of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, in 20 volumes, for the Bollingen Series, quite an extraordinary man. I'm replacing it though with this volume and this is by...edited by a Canadian, Alan Wilkinson. It is published in 2002 and was commissioned by the Henry Moore Foundation. The great selection of the writings of Henry Moore, was issued in 1966 and Philip James did this in London and many of the great documents and writings of Henry Moore were published for the first time here, but he lived for another 20 years after that, he died in 1986 at aged almost 88. And so the Henry Moore Foundation wanted to have somebody go back and do all of the early work that was not included and the later work that was not included and many other things and the editor found that there was just an enormous amount of material that was available. So we're going to use that. And we're pairing of course, Henry Moore with Max Ernst, just as with the other pairs in Art, Frank Lloyd Wright and Hiroshige, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih and now Henry Moore and Max Ernst. And our pairs are lining up, not like wickets in a croquet game, but as tunable forks that make a resonance, able to be included in a set. If you've ever seen a piano tuned, the piano tuner will have a case with a series of tuning forks. Each phase, we have three tuning forks that are graduated so that the increase is in a special proportion, so that four phases of three tuning forks each, will make over a year's concourse, a set of 12. And that this set of 12 tunings, in four phases, will give us a range of two kinds of operation. The first year is the integral cycle, the second year is the differential ecology. The first year is the way in which nature works, the second year is the way in which consciousness works and they are able to be complementarities, but only if the integral cycle is not closed, is not shut off from further transforms, from further developments. Another way to express this is that the first year, those four phases are about the completion of what, psychologically we would say now, deals with cognition. The second year deals with recognition, which is a totally different thing. A cognition can be aligned so that the index, the indexing order, references the base of existentiality, out of which the cognition begins and has its summation in the symbols. So that our symbolic structure of thought indexes the actions, the practical things we do, the physical things in the world, which generate experience, which generate feeling, which generate images, which generates for us language. And that all of this can be summed up in the structure of what we colloquially call, 'The mind.' But symbolic thought is not the mind, symbolic thought is the brain indexing a cognitive integral. For the mind to occur, there needs to be an extra space, so that it can now look back reflectively on itself. And in a self-recognising mode, begin to work with a transformational envisioning, which includes itself. This capacity to be able to literally step outside of the structure of your symbolic order, means that you must close the book with the index at the end and set it down. You now are not just the writer, or reader, or holder of that cycle of integral, which is held together, bound, printed by your mentality, but you have the capacity to step outside of that and explore further. This is a classic problem and problematic. The problem is that what comes into play is a question then of authority and the fear of losing control and of the trepidation of losing that authority. And so what happens is, is that mentality portions out what it figures out are convenient moments, are acceptable snippets of visioning, which are quickly brought back into the security of the identity, to the control of the authority and in this way it prides itself on having done wonderful things and continues with its custom, continues with its tradition, continues to enjoy its authority, continues to have the certainty of its identity, which if roughed up too much, now what becomes questionable is not the identity, not the authority, not the control, but the excursions which have gone too far, they are now called irrational.
And we talked last week in the presentation about one of the formative, wonderful books that came out from the Sather Classical Lectures at UC Berkeley years ago, in the late '50's, E.R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational. And what a crisis it broached at the time in the 400's BC, the Fifth Century BC. It was the first time that there was a concerted effort by an entire society, the Classical Greek society, to try to come to struggling terms with this crisis: crisis of identity, crisis of authority, crisis of control. And all of the classic, by now classic, missed solutions, happened then and there. And so it is a heritage that was always held to be a warning sign and the warning sign was heeded especially by the authority kingdoms that came after the Classical Greeks to make sure that their control extended out to any of the extra spaces that the mind might think that it could explore and the successful kingdom that became the Roman Empire, was based on the fact that it held all of the keys to the kingdom. One of the first acts of Augustus Caesar was to make it punishable by death for anyone to have prophetic literature, even a single scrap or fragment of prophetic literature. It was not only illegal to have possession of it, you were killed if you were found to have it. And all of the prophetic writings were collected together in Rome and edited and a standard collection of the Oracles was put out, the Sibylline Oracles and this was permitted. And anything else was not permitted; the material was destroyed, or in some cases was secreted away and kept under lock and key, under authority and control. This was repeated again and again throughout history and in our time, what is used to weed out the visionary field that goes too far beyond the identifications, beyond the authority, beyond the control, is confiscated by a modern technique and that is of non-acknowledgement. 'It's not important,' 'That person doesn't count,' 'This can't possibly be of value.' And so as Stravinsky once observed, 'The sin of our time is non-acknowledgement.' And thus you see something as strikingly radical as this presentation, you can see for yourself what has become of its presentation over a period of now more than 40 years. There is nothing wrong with the presentation, there is nothing that is not refined in all of it and this is why it is non-acknowledged. It has been approached many, many times, by many individuals, by many groups seeking to commandeer it, to fold it into their act, into their control, into their identifications and referentialities. There is a proliferation especially, by 2007, of hundreds of groups, of thousands of teachers, of millions of questers and all of it has a kind of water bug activity chaoticness to it, which suits authority just well, because it's very easy then to say, 'It's irrational.' It's very easy to say, 'It's not important.' But if you will endeavour to do this yoga of civilisation, it will progressively refine you unto freedom and you will be able, in your own recognition, in your recognisance, in your own renaissancing, to emerge as far as you would like to go in freedom, in actuality, in capacity.
One of the peculiar qualities that was stressed by a Harvard professor, German origin, Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. Jaeger did a big, three volume study called Paideia, which was the presentation in Classical Greece of what you're receiving, a very refined, much expanded form in what is given to you here. Paideia was not an education, it was the transform of the entire society of the whole nature of man through a programme of pursuing the excellences of a lover of wisdom, a 'Philosophia,' a philosopher. Someone who lived that and eventually some 500 years after Pythagoras, who was the first to call himself a philosopher, the first to develop a community of people, men and women, who learned together and in learning together, passed through two enormous modes of attentiveness. The first mode of attentiveness was always learning how to hear. The Greeks, like our time, because we're an inheritor of it, always depended first on sight, the visuality. 'Make a picture.' 'What's it look like?' And so Pythagoras did an end run and emphasised hearing and so that group...and it was a five year, patient yoga, learned how to hear and they were called 'Akousmatikoi.' The Greek word is the 'Acousmatic,' the acoustics. The akousmatikoi learned to patiently sit into the language that was not the normal language. It was not the business language, it was not the sophists' traditional, convincing, good argument, rhetoric teaching style. It was not the religious, scriptural inculcation, but it was a new form of a poetic, of a language that was especially generated to deliver, not little points that amount to a mental structure of order, so that your cognition reached a point where you 'got it', in the sense that it was now installed in you. What they had planned and arranged, was now transferred to you, like a decal and you were able to repeat what they expected you to repeat and therefore you now know. You know what you were inculcated to know. You have the method which has been inculcated, the content and the authority and you accept it to the point of identification. And anyone who does not have this is on the outside and needs to be re-educated. All dictatorships work in this way. And so the heritage of the world is largely a dictatorship for the last several thousand years, having different groups take over and now we're in control. All of this is through, none of it will ever work again, because that particular mode is based upon a closed mentality that has reached a suicide and murder totality. What happens at that point is that two people realise that they are the only ones who really can trust each other and they're not sure about the other person, which is like a penultimate. The ultimate comes when you realise that between the two of you, not only can you not trust the other person, but you cannot trust yourself either. That's called the dead end. That old, traditional, customary, failed civilisation, death culture, is at the point of suicide, murder, dead end. There's no way that that is not here and not operating. What has always been characteristic of us, of our species, is that we have always been able to transform. Always been able to get out of the encoded, inculcated, authority identity and in exceeding it, in going native, in exploring the wild, in venturing the wilderness, we find refreshment that was unexpected and we are encouraged by the freshening that there is a possibility. In Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, Jaeger, who is enormously learned, said, 'The form of martyrology'...of becoming...the study of martyrs.
The form of martyrology was used by pagans in Egypt, where it developed during the religious struggles between Egyptians and Jews at the time of the Apostles, before the Christian Martyrologica literature came into existence. We have to reckon with the existence in Hellenistic times of religious tracts as a mean of propaganda fidelis of many sects.
Just like today, just like at any time in history. 'Fidelis' is like the bona fide, 'This is the true stuff brother. You better get it.' 'Although these ephemeral productions did not survive.' They hardly ever survive. 'Plato mentions Orphic tracts in his time.' This would have been somewhere around the 380's BC. 'Plato mentions Orphic tracts that were distributed by members of that sect, who went from house to house, distributing the pamphlets.' There were whole groups that decided that Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, was a development of the original Orpheus and Orphism and one should go back to the beginning, to the originals. So they were the fundamentalists in the time of the great development of the new ways. It is interesting because one of the ways in which one can detect if you have been victimised in this way, comes out in a little discussion on Max Ernst, in his book Beyond Painting, published in New York, in the Documents of Modern Art series. Right after World War Two was a great effort at the time in the world, to make sure that we never do this again. That the First World War had been horrific, the Second World War had been a nightmare deepening of the horrificness. Remember that the Second World War ended, not only with atomic bombs, but ended with firebombing of cities like Dresden, Germany, where more were killed by saturation firebombing than by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The power of carpet bombing by the late 1940's, was capable of obliterating, literally, an entire sea coast.
The psychological question corresponding to the self-portrait, 'Who am I?' When we see a figure covered by a mask, we instinctively ask, 'Who is it?' In the age of individualism the mask does not symbolise an archetype, as was the case in the dances of the primitives, or in the Greek or Japanese theatre, but it hides an individual. The two forms given by Max Ernst to the sphinx are highly individualised, in contrast to the anonymous characters who ask in De Chirico's pictures.
And he goes on in this way. 'The mask, if used in a theatre, always involves a recognition. The mask used in a ritual always involves an identification.' If you put on a mask, if you contort yourself in a role which absorbs you, your conditioning has reached a saturation point to where you are being handled, by whoever the puppeteers are, on whatever levels. If you cannot take that mask off, if you cannot set that role aside, then you are not involved in a theatre, you are involved in a ritualization that is being run according to script.
One of the projects that we have in our Art phase...because in each phase there are projects that are portioned out, so that eventually as you go through each phase, the maturation of it is literally a saturation of that phase, leading to the next, in the sense that it occurs in nature, naturally and it occurs in consciousness, ecologically. Ritual as a phase follows Nature and Myth, Mythic Experience, follows Ritual and Symbols follow the Myth. And that whole integral cycle naturally has that kind of an increment. You could style it using different words, different ideas, different concepts, but you would always eventually come very close to that kind of an approximation. Even if you started with pure randomness, you would come to it. One of the great examples of chaos theory was to find that if you run a random process, fast enough, long enough, it will always develop what is called the butterfly effect, the double attractor. The infinity sign will always occur eventually within any kind of a randomness and in fact, our whole learning in the first year begins with three random walks. Because it's a logical form of presenting that even random walks, if performed often enough, quick enough, they will exhibit a characteristic shape and that that shape will be the field out of which the taproot of existentiality will emerge, which will generate the primordial experience flow, which will be integrated by your symbolic thought structure. We are in a supersaturated, accelerated presentation here, so that three random walks, beginning in the first year, are all you need within a three month period. That's fast enough, long enough, because we are already carrying an enormous heritage of recognition, out of a consciousness field that is already a deep heritage for us. And it only takes a very small repetition, a very short duration of time, to evoke, to bring that out. By the time we get to Art, we have gone through not only the ecology of the four phases that make the integral cycle of nature, but we're coming towards the close of the second phase of the ecology of consciousness. The projects in Art are three. The first is a pair, a tandem: one is to make a painting which is a self-portrait, the other is to make a painting which is a landscape. And the self-portraiture and the landscape, the ultimate contexting and the prismatic artist presenting themselves, have a very special middle ground and that middle ground is classically held by what is called in art, as one would call 'Portrait,' or 'Landscape,' the middle ground is what is called the 'Nude.' The nude is the way in which portraiture can prismatically be projected out into landscape. Someone like a sculpturer, like Henry Moore, does a reclining nude and the reclining nude is expanded to become a landscape of rock shapes, of mountain shapes, of wood contourings. And it is no longer just a reclining nude, it's not yet quite achieved a landscape, it is no longer in the classic, assumed portraiture, but has a special kind of a focus, where it is the appreciator of this, of this work of art, of this reclining nude, in this particular instance, a Henry Moore reclining nude. It is now your portraiture that is in play by a transform of your experience, called an aesthetic experience. Now this reclining nude is involving you in your portraiture, in your person, with the landscape of the world, or worlds, in which you have your being, in which you move. The classic phrase was, 'In which you live and have your being.' So you're doing a portrait, a self-portrait and then doing a landscape and by the time that those two are done, you will have come to the third of the pairs in Art, Henry Moore and Max Ernst. But as a juncture meeting the Henry Moore aspect of it, the third task besides those two paintings, was to make a work of sculpture. And then to take that work of sculpture and exchange it with someone else, so that they revise your work of sculpture and someone who revises your work of sculpture in a large enough group, it can get extremely interesting. And you revise someone's and then the process is repeated a third time, like the third random walk in the projects for Nature. You have had your sculpture exchanged and it was revised and you revised someone else's, now the exchange happens again and a second party, a second time, the sculpture is revised. The revision is revised and that second, revised vision of your sculpture is returned to you, for you to keep. Now you have an evidence, you have a self-portrait, you have a landscape and you have a sculpture that has been revised and re-revised, which was originally from your intuition, from your creative imagination, from your art, from you as an artist and now it's returned to you in a doubly expanded, a triple, aesthetic spatiality, which you can place in the middle between your self-portrait and your landscape. Now you have been unclothed to a nudity that is very rarely encountered in life. You have not only found what one of your most creative moments in form has been reformed, transformed, but even that reform, that transform, has been further transformed and now is brought back to you. So now your middle ground has a triple, aesthetic complexity of conscious space, which is the new arbiter, is the new nudity and you realise that you are not just nude when you are naked in your body, nor are you nude when you come to a full cognitive attention in your mind, but that you are really nude in the cosmos when your triple, aesthetic spatiality is revealed through, not only an active creative imagination, but...and transformed by a critique of aesthetic transform, but is further changed into an object now that is capable of being analysed. And it's on the level of an analytic that the complex spirit person recognises that the only landscape complex enough to hold such a triple nudity, is the cosmos itself. No mentality is ever going to be other than just a mask, forever again. You will never have to be a captive again. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to...notice that each presentation has a pair and we do a break, we do an interval in-between them. The phases also have pairs and we have an interval between them and those pairs of phases with an interval, have an interval between another pair of phases that have an interval and that those four phases will have an interval between another four phases, that will also have pairs and intervals. And so we have a syncopation. The syncopation, in order to get away from all of the expected, Western inculcated terminology, I use the Chinese designation, the syncopation is between Tao and Tê. And initially, Tao is a field. It's a field of zero dimension, it has no boundaries, it has no liminalities. And Tê is the power to be, the power to exist. The power of Tê emerges unified, it emerges whole, out of the field of Tao, instantly. It doesn't creep into its Tê, it is suddenly emerged and the suddenness has a reverberation and the reverberation will be the vibration, the frequency of the emergence of that energy form. That energy form will have emerged from a zero dimension field, which is really nature, it's the nature of nature. But Tê immediately, because it has emerged, initiates time as a dimension, immediately, spontaneously and that spontaneously, immediately blossoms the three dimensions of space. Yet, when we're dealing with aesthetic space, it blossoms not out of the field of nature, but out of the field of consciousness. So that an aesthetic form is not existential per se. It has extra dimensionality to it, it has a conscious, recognition capacity and so one of the qualities of the field of consciousness, of visionary consciousness, is that it is...and you have to use the gerund form for this, it is 'Remembering,' 'Remembering.' And has at the same time, braided into the field of it, part of the fabric of the field of consciousness, remembering has creative imagining also. That creative imagining came from the symbolic structure of our thought. The creativity, in its purest form, does not have to have imagery. But when you have creativeness as a dynamic, that has imagery, so that it is now imagination, creative imagining, now the possibility is to have that dimension of creative imagining, which is also the dimension of remembering, which is the quintessential fifth dimension of the field of consciousness, that emerges a form which is not just existentially there, but is iteratively, prismatically there. It has the ability to lens the superlight of conscious time space into a new array. And that new array is the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. And when we get to History, in just three more weeks, we'll come to understand it has nothing to do with dead end mentality. The current phrase, 'You're history,' means, 'You're over, you're through,' is the worst sort of stupid gibberish, it's nothing to do with history whatsoever. It has to do with somebody's pseudo-cool, false idea of themselves. It's a sign of being almost terminally ill with ego.
What we're looking at is the way in which symbols which hold the structure of symbolic thought...symbols will hold ideas in an integral shape, that integral shape will be its meaning. But as symbols become more and more translucent, rather than existentially opaque, the more they become translucent, the more the glow, the light that shines through them, is colloquially called an inner light. The inner will now begin to cast its glow and those symbols being now more or less translucent, will begin to have very interesting capacities and capabilities and one can increase this translucence all the way to transparency. Now the inner light comes through in a very, very powerful way, it's like a laser. It comes through and the prism of the person, depending how refined one is, is able to show that through that refined, prismatic of themselves, of the works that they create, is able to show a spectrum that has more variations that the mind has ability to calibrate. It isn't just that the rainbow has seven colours, or that one can have a colour wheel with 64 colours of the box of crayons, or one can have a computer with 2,000,000 colours. Now there is an infinite array that is possible to explore. And so the discovery of the capacity of the artist to be able to see in this way, is truly a visionary capacity, it's a visionary dynamic and the Vision phase goes with the Art phase, they go together.
It used to be said that it was Palaeolithic magic that gave rise to Palaeolithic art. That already 30,000 years ago, our species was able not only to vision very transparently and bring out exquisite works of art, but that there were exquisite artists, who were not just self-conscious, not just identifying themselves, but who were prismatically capable of a spiritual presence. We used the example earlier last year of the great cave temple of Lascaux, dating about 20,000 years ago. And it didn't take thousands of years to paint Lascaux, it didn't take hundreds of years to paint Lascaux. There was a great Palaeolithic master artist who began Lascaux and carried out its essential plan, all within his lifetime. We don't know names, but we know the symbol that he used to be the transparent prism of his artistic spirit and person. And we talked about as how you would go into Lascaux...it's closed now to the public because the breath of tens of thousands of visitors has begun to flake off the colour. And so an alternative Lascaux has been made, an exact copy, which tourists now can go through. But as you go into the entrance of Lascaux on the left, on the left, on the hard side, the very first image that is there, is the head of a black stallion, a wild, black stallion. Very strong. If you've never seen a wild horse, believe me, a wild horse is something and a mature, black stallion is really something. Shimmering, velvet, energy, night, in the day. One of the great Buddhist masters, name was Ashvaghosha and it translates as, 'The horse neighing.' Boris Pasternak, because of his courage in Russia, was sometimes called, 'The eye of the horse,' 'cause he could look through the Stalinist era and see exactly what things were and write something like a Doctor Zhivago. 'Here's not only who you are, this is the whole set of all the things that you think you are and you are not. And I'm here to show you that beyond those blinders, is the gorgeousness of human lives, of art beyond belief and of a poetry that is a medicine.' That's the way I used to talk in the '60's.
The tandemness of Tao, Tê, gets hidden, it gets covered, not because of deviousness, but all by itself. Because the Tê has emerged from the field of Tao, the objectivity of Tê, carries the tuning pairedness of its origin. It's the signature of the structure of its origin, which is also vibrational. A frequency actually, an iterative frequency. But the signature, ostensibly, at its deepest, most primordial signature, it is that it is paired, but in order to be paired in an energy form, the pairedness in its dynamic now is turned 90 degrees and it becomes polarised. And so Tê is always polarised, a polarised pair and the polarised pair of the Tê is yin yang, yin and yang. Positive and negative, day and night, male and female, pairs of opposites. And in the Pythagorean tradition, the beginning of being a philosopher, while you're doing your listening stayingness for five years, being an akousmatikoi, was to be able to slowly develop your theoria, your contemplative, your quieting of the mind, so that it becomes translucent and eventually transparent, so that one can now vision openly, vision freely. And this is always a moment of great recognition and paradox shows that it's the song that wakes us up. We've been contacted, we've been called, to wake up. As Tê polarises into yin yang, the only way that it can unpolarise, is for that 90 degree tilt to be reinstated in its flow, which means to tilt it either forward or backward 90 degrees. Tilt it forward to 180 degrees, or tilt it back to zero degrees. If it tilts back to zero degrees, you get an equanimity, which is oceanic. If you tilt it forward 180 degrees, it shoots you into insight. Instantly. You don't have to put a down payment, you don't have to check the time, you don't have to check your identification. The Chambers Brothers once had a song called Time and 'Time is here to stay, until it's here today and when it's here today, then you're ready.' Now, their first record, they followed it up, Time was followed up by People Get Ready. 'Train's a-leavin'. You don't need no ticket, you just climb on board. People get ready.'
This quality of tilting the polarity has a pair of modes. You can go into an equilibrium, which is a rest that refreshes and that rest that refreshes is a return back to the field of nature. Or if you go forward, you go forward into the field of conscious vision. And because the field of nature and the field of conscious vision are not only malleable, but nature accepts the fifth dimension of conscious visioning, naturally, takes it in as itself. And so the expansion is not different, like existence is different because it's polarised into a yin yang and it must be because the Tê is that way. But before there can be a return back to nature, by tilting the polarity back, or a flow into the field of consciousness, by tilting it forward, there's a way to have the polarity of yin yang balanced in its polarisation and this is the third phase in the Chinese five stage energy cycle. That's the stage of Jen, human-heartedness. One can learn to be human-hearted, even though one is a yin or a yang, a positive or a negative and maybe two together will make that Jen. And so Jen is never egotistical because you can't go it alone, you always have to do it with someone. You have to pair up and there are an infinite number of ways to pair up, but it takes two to tango. And 'Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, I'll be there.' That's the way the wisdom was said, straight out. 'You pair up, I'll be there.' The Jen is always a median where it is the flow of experience now that has the Jen, it has the human-heartedness. And so the mythic phase is always the flow, it's the river, it's the stream of experience and the more that it is distributed from two to more, indefinitely, to the family, to the tribe, to the community, to the country, to the planet, to the federation of star systems, to the galactic council, we're all gonna sing together, no matter what time it is in the universe. In our cosmos, we're all on time brothers and sisters. It's not just glib, it is that the Jen, because it has this capacity to bring the Tê back into a harmony, that the Jen and the Tao have a participation. The Jen now flows in the Tao. It isn't flowing, our Jen, our human experience is not flowing in the culture, it's not flowing in the tradition, it's not flowing in the society, it's flowing in nature, in the field of nature. And we experience togetherness as a participation that this is all real, this is all true. It is a quality where what is achieved by the right rituals, is the participation of our experience in the field of nature. And if we do our rituals right together, it's not right because they follow the laws, not because they exemplify the codes, not because they fit into the doctrines, it's because they flow in the field of nature and we all feel it. All our images tell us this is so. Our language flows so now that the stories we tell have this mythic quality that they really begin, they really get told and there's really an end. Now we can tell fantastic, interesting stories to each other, because the flow of our experience is in the field of nature. When our field of nature has the field of consciousness with it, woven with it, now the stories we tell will be poetic, they'll be great stories. They'll no longer just be myths, they'll be fantastic stories. Now you will have a short story, like by a Tolstoy, now you will have a play by a Tennessee Williams, now you will have poetry by a Pablo Neruda. You will have now a work of art that comes into play, because the mythic experience has been pulled through the symbolic, indexing order, because of its transparency and at the same time pulled through nature and vision together, into the prisms of art, the prisms of the artist. And so an easy mnemonic by which to distinguish is this: it's the difference between telling and teaching. Telling is mythic experience, it's full of custom, of culture, of ego, tradition, leading to a mental order, an index. 'This is what it means, this is what our experience amounts to. This is what we get out of it, this is what we grasp.' But teaching is different, it's historic. Teaching is a transform of myth into history and for that, real teaching is always an art. A real teacher is an artist, not just a storyteller, uses a poetic, not a mythic or a rhetoric and that poetic develops into an historic. And that historic, because it's kaleidoscopic, opens up a very, very interesting actuality that comes into play, as we will see. What comes into play is that the cosmos becomes real. It's not just your idea of the universe, or our ideas that are agreed upon as the universe. It is the actuality of the reality of the cosmos which is an infinite prism form and that infinite prism form, when it energises, either to equilibrium or advance, the equilibrium will be the spirit artist person, or it will move on into the existential, emerging out of nature originally. So you get the creative artist who's able to make a creation, or you get the created being who's the best product of that. This has a very powerful presentation. One of the keys to this is composition. This is a book on Cezanne's Composition, Erle Lauren. The first edition came out in the midst of the Second World War, one of the worst years in human history, 1943, absolute desperate year. It looked like the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese war machine, not the Japanese people, the Imperial war machine and the Nazi war machine were going to have a victory. They were taking over everything, such that they were called the Axis, the axis of a new tyranny. Cezanne's Composition came out at the time to show the core, the trigger artist who began the recalibration of art in that crucial period of the 1880's and '90's and right at the beginning of the twentieth century. And Cezanne is enormously powerful. Henry Moore said of Cezanne that he was the most important person. He said, 'Sometimes the impression of seeing something for the first time is immense.' It's the recognition, it's the moment of recognition that...the 'Aha,' the eureka moment. 'A great work, for instance, Cezanne's Bathers.' The portrait of Cezanne's Bathers are maybe a dozen nude women arranged around a little bathing area and the landscape opening behind them. And the composition of it is that there is definitely a triangular, symbolic composition, with the women as the base of the triangle and the point of the triangle going up, goes into not just the above of the frame of the painting, but goes into the way in which the light directs itself deeper and further out. And Henry Moore says:
A great work, for instance, Cezanne's Bathers, the big triangular bathers will always stand out clearly in my memory. I went to Paris several times when I was a student, but the Cezanne was the big event. He brought painting back from straightforward copying of nature, to picture making, into using the mind as well as just taste. I think photography was playing an important role at this time, in that its ability to copy with accuracy freed the painter to explore other ideas.
We talked about the development of photography, with Alfred Stieglitz, in connection with Georgia O'Keeffe. How Stieglitz was the first photographic artist of being able to use a photograph, not just to reproduce something, but to be able to see penetratively and accumulatively to the right moment. And then to be able to develop your own negative in a variety of ways, to tease out and bring out the refinement of the right moment, to the exact, penetrating, immense, first time, work of art moment. You remember how Stieglitz got up and suffering from pneumonia and a cold and he got up in the middle of a New York winter night, because he intuited that there was a photograph he had to get. And went out and in the barren boulevard of a Manhattan snowstorm, he captured a timeless instant, of one of the most immense...the immense city, with all of its vigour and everything, was quiet. That he was the only person on the street, for as far as you could see, down Fifth Avenue. And he took that midnight calm, equilibrium photograph of the major thoroughfare of New York at one of its most powerful...by 1900 New York was really a powerful place. And it brought that artistic moment of immensity home to everyone, that this was not just a photograph, but it was the right moment, refined in the right way, to show that even at the heart of New York City, there's an aesthetic space of incredible, universal, timeless recognition. 'Indeed,' he said, 'Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.' The artist who took Cezanne's way of composing most powerfully was Picasso and he and Brock and Juan Gris, developed cubism out of that. But it is Cezanne who is really the father in the sense, the founder in a sense, he is the penetrating moment. It's like the presentation of this education for you is an accumulated penetration to poke through all of the deceptions that were ever engendered on the planet, permanently.
This quality of paired...each presentation has a pair and then has a break, has an interval. And all of those presentations together begin to have a mounting of pairedness, of tunability, with pauses, so that at any time when you get to a moment of recognition, the lightning of insight will distribute itself all the way through the lightning tree, into all of the spaces, all of the intervals, spontaneously, at the same time. The entire shape and form, though it takes two years to deliver ostensibly in a four-dimensional, existential, social world, can illuminate its entirety in one instant. That's why it's called a yoga. It's an expansion of a Raja yoga to almost indefinite capacities of expansion. We're ready for interstellar adventures and we need to come out of the sandbox and play in larger realms, but not sandbox games, life adventures. More next week.