Art 12

We come to Art 12, which means that next week we have our interval, the sixth interval and the following week we begin our phase of History. This is the most difficult transition that there is in our whole programme and it is a rare transition to be successful in at any time in human history. The failure of our species was a failure in historical dynamic. One of the reasons that all civilisations on the planet have failed and crashed and died, is because they were unable to navigate the dynamic process of history. When you are unable to navigate history, vision atrophies and the only process that one can fall back to is myth. Now, in a tribal, cultural, natural world, myth is wonderful. It is the essential flow of experience, that generates images, generates feeling tones, generates language. And when myth is a participant in the natural dynamic, in the dynamic of nature, myth and nature can fit together in a very interesting way, not as an object in something, but the flow of experience is a river in the field of nature. And we and all the animals and all the plants, all the minerals, every thing that is existential, is able to generate experience, participate in experience, feels at home then. There is such a natural integral that still when we return to nature, without any preconceptions and are just there, just let it be, the flow of our experience returns back to a delightful homeyness. Even the astronauts, when they go into orbit, go into zero G's and are stepping on the end of one of those Canadarms, with 220 miles down to the next solid piece of land, human beings, men and women, have learned to be completely at home there, to do incredibly delicate tasks, for hours on end, no sweat whatsoever. We can have our flow of experience at home in the field of nature. And also, when they flow together in that way, when nature is a field, makes the flow of experience at home, all of the existentiality fits and is able to work together in integral ways. And that whole cycle of nature, existential, ritual, objects and actions, the flow of experience, all of that can be integralled together in what normally would be called 'The natural mind.' Natural symbols are delightful because they do not index to control, they index to integrate. And we can share this with other species. There have been other species of man, there have been at least five or six kinds of Homo. Homo Neanderthal, Homo habilis, the little three foot high human beings that were found recently, last year, in Indonesia, on the island of Flores, where they had little, miniature elephants and little people, only three feet high and they were complete species of Homo, Homo floresiensis, as they are called now. Homo sapiens fit in with other species and we are able to establish the flow of our experience with other species, chimpanzees, dolphins, dogs, cats, horses, even with plants. My own discipline in yoga was done with the giant sequoia trees and so I'm at home with plants, able to integral into symbols with you. And you will find again and again, like Chinese scrolls will have very sentient pines, or very sentient willows, that are a part of the way in which our symbolic ordering can share with plants, can share with animals, can share with minerals, can share with jewels, with crystals, can share with metals. There are moments when the subtle, rich sheen of something out of platinum speaks deeply and evokes out of one something that you had only the hint of with something like nickel, or only the beginnings of appreciation with something like silver, whereas something platinum in just the right affinity, draws out this enormous quality that metals are alive. As all the alchemists, East and West, said, 'Metals grow, minerals grow.' The elixir of health, of immortality, is a mineral that is introduced into one's diet, so that now your physicality participates in the complete field of nature, in the deepest flow of experience and that the existentiality extends to all things, great and small. And in this way there are natural symbols that hold this beautifully for us. Myth is important here, but once consciousness has engendered a fifth dimension of vision, differential consciousness moves as a differential field, not as an integral field. And nature accepts the counter quality of differential, conscious vision and forms a complementarity with it. And out of that differential field, comes a different quality of form, a prismatic form, instead of an existential form. Instead of something practical that is there, one now has something prismatic that is possible. And so art forms, spirit forms, personal forms are made as emergent out of the differential field of vision. Those prismatic forms generate a higher quality of the flow of experience and that is what history is. As mythic experience is the flow in the field of nature, historical experience is the flow in the field of consciousness and what distinguishes the flow of the river of history, is that it is kaleidoscopic. It is not narrative in a plot line. A myth, a methos, always has a beginning. It has an existential beginning, it has a complication and it has an end. Its beginning is in the ritual actions, the existential things and its end is in the meaning that's in the mind, carried by the symbols, even enlarged in ideas. So that a methos is the middle ground of the flow of experience between ritual existentiality and symbolic integral, but history does not share that narrative, sequential, integral line. History begins in a visionary field which is differential. It prisms a spectrum of possibilities that are scintillating and always available for transform, for an alchemy, into, not the end of some kind of form, like the symbolic mind, like the structure of thought, but instead it's the complement to it. The middle ground is not a process of myth, it is a prismatic form of art and its beginnings are not in some kind of existential, ritual form, ending in symbolic, mental form, but its beginnings are in a field of differential, conscious process and what would be its culmination, is an even farther flung flow of the process of kaleidoscopic, historical consciousness. What comes out of the integral in nature is the mind and its individuality and what comes out of the differential is the cosmos and its protean possibilities, infinitely. So that mind and cosmos can form a complementarity, but they cannot form a unity. And to try to stuff the cosmos into the mind's unity, is the ultimate tyranny. And to try to stuff history back into the mind, fades historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness, obviates visionary process and comes back to myth in a regressive way. Now mythic experience is radioactive, it will kill. Because it was meant to be the flow between existential, ritual actions, the real doing of things and the real putting of things together in the mind, but when you come back, regressively, to myth, experience now is a saboteur and the only way it can sustain itself is to corrupt the mind and to tyrannise the actions, to tyrannise the things. 'Our plan calls for no trees on this street, therefore we will cut all the trees down. We want only pavement, that's what our plan calls for.' This kind of a regressive, radioactive quality is what destroys civilisations, but not only does it destroy civilisations, but it is an enemy to cultures, natural cultures of experience. People who live au naturel, wherever it is that they are, are now in the way of the regressive tyranny of mental constructs and mental groups, doctrinaire groups of people. 'These are primitive people.' Whereas the fact is, is that they are primordial people. They are not primitive at all, but the regressive mind says:
No, they are primitive, they have to be changed, they have to grow up. The animals have to grow up, the plants have to grow up, to our plan. We don't need 1,000 miles of rainforest in Brazil, all we need is little preserves of ten miles of rainforests here and there, which we'll give to them because it's a nice thing to do and our plan, all the rest of it's gonna go. We don't wanna have a continent of rainforest. We'll provide oxygen for the planet in some other way. We'll figure that out later, but we want the land and all this.
This kind of radioactivity by 2007 has not only destroyed the previous civilisation completely, but it stops and obviates any new civilisation from being engendered. It also corrupts and sabotages all primordial cultures on the planet, no matter who or where. So that what is happening now are the death throes, the dry heaves of trying to vomit up a radioactivity that is inimicable to cultures and civilisations, to the primordiality of nature and to the possibilities of consciousness alike. So that all the plants and all the animals, all the minerals, all the metals, all of the human beings and our cognate friends everywhere are in jeopardy and are dying.
This is a learning to establish right away two qualities that are essential. One of them is the visionary capacity, to have a creative imagining, the other is a visionary capacity to have a remembering. Differential consciousness is a process of remembering and of remembering how to remember and of creative imagination and of creating possibilities of creative imagination. So that creativity and remembering are functions of visionary, differential consciousness. In the symbolic mind creative imagination is a structure called 'The imagination,' where it organises and orders images, in terms of their existential, ritual sequences, in terms of the higher integral of how they would fit into a pattern. And this is all well and good, the imagination is important. And in the structure of symbolic thought, there is a form known as 'The memory.' The memory does not happen in an integral, natural way. What happens is a record, which is like instinctual. The robin who builds a robin's nest is different from a hummingbird who builds a hummingbird's nest, but they don't remember how to build it, they just build it. It's in that integral quality. Where someone who has a memory, with an imagination in their symbolic structure, is able to employ in an integral way, to compose, to remember how you composed it and to change it if you want. To remember and to tie that in with the imagination now, that is able to bring not only the image base into an integral play, but all of the feeling tones of experience are now brought into a composing order. Now symbolic thought is a mind, but its source for the memory is conscious remembering as a process and the ability for the imagination to be creative comes from visionary consciousness as well. And we've talked about how there's a do-si-do between the symbolic form of thought in its order and the field of visionary consciousness. They have an exchange very much like the field of nature and the field of vision, but their exchange is one of like a synergy and makes a complementarity on that scale, but the form of the mind donates the form of the imagination into the field of visionary consciousness, where it becomes creative imagining. The form of the imagination now is dynamic, differential and it can ally itself with the process of remembering. And in the exchange gifting, as the mind contributes the imagination to the field of vision, the field of vision exchanges with it remembering and makes a form called 'The memory' in the mind. Now you can have a mind with a memory that is able to function on the level of an integral, indexing form. You can train the memory to remember almost any scale of complexity.
One of the great discoveries in the middle of the twentieth century, there was a huge argument for over 150 years: 'How could poets remember the Iliad and the Odyssey, when they're so huge and enormous?' And it was discovered by a man named Milman Parry. He was working in Yugoslavia and he found old Slavic storytellers that could remember epics five or six times the length and size of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. The memory, when it is trained in such a way that it has the full force of the field of visionary consciousness sourcing it, will not be limited by the integral mind's conception of what is possible. In India, the whole store of the entire civilisation was put into the Mahabharata, written originally by Vyasa, written down about 300 BC and of which the Bhagavad Gītā is a little chapter. But the additions to the Mahabharata now make it an enormous work. Many, many, many volumes can be, not memorised specifically, but specifically, differentially, remembered, so that one can get into the flow of this and the flow of that is an oral telling, out loud, of a meditation. And a lot of the presentation here is the same way. If you look at the enormity of what is presented over two years here, it is the entire heritage of our species and not just our species, but the entire heritage of the entire star system up until this very moment. We go back to the DNA beginnings of life, the RNA beginnings before the DNA. We go into the future as far as one could want to explore. Not because something is just remembered, but because remembering flows with creative imagining all the time and is raised to a very, very high kaleidoscopic level of historical consciousness, practised as a yoga for many decades now. This process, this programme, exercises your memory and your imagination to the extent that it can make a smooth, effortless transform into creative imagination, into dynamic remembering. So that your sense is no longer as an individual that could be cut off, or as an individual that is worried and anxious because it has to oversee its place, protect its security. Instead, the prismatic possibilities of your person are emerged and brought into play, literally into play. So that now your life is like a work of art which is prismatic not only of all possible worlds that you could imagine, but all possible worlds that remembering could bring back into play. It's not just remembering of a past life, or remembering of past lives, or a channelling of someone else, or...all of this is minuscule compared to the ability to free remembering in tandem flow with creative imagining. Now your person is so vast in its spectrum, that you exceed the limitations of space time. The four dimensions of space time are to you now a composing pen, out of which you can draw, you can write anything, that you wish to do. But the training ground for that, as we will see, is to develop a sense of the personal, prismatic, kaleidoscopic possibilities of your history. You do not have a history, you have a whole spectrum of possibilities so exceeding that I have for a long time used the phrase, 'The future and the new past.' That your present is not a point, but it's like a jewel that is able to reach back and redo the past. You can be different from what you thought you were, so much so, that what you thought you were is a minor footnote in the new, composing you. And at the same time, in a resonant way, your future possibilities open. And the word operatively is 'Open;' they open wider than wide, 'Whatever' is possible. Extraordinary. On this scale one makes a pair of friends. One consciously knows that the cosmos is home and that nature loves that cosmic home and she'll be there too. This is an extraordinary thing and in the past, for many thousands of years, in fact, tens of thousands of years, very few Homo sapiens were able to achieve this. If you were lucky enough to be around where a major sage was, if you were lucky enough to have somebody who remembered an ancient wisdom tradition and was able to revivify it for a while, groups of human beings, various persons, have always been able to access this. Our condition is unheard of now because always there were cultures that you could fall back to, that could live in nature. There are no cultures now that are not irradiated, that could live in nature. Because the nature that is viable now is many dimensions beyond what the conception of a four-dimensional nature was. And all the civilised raising up of higher forms are all dead, none of them have survived. There's not a single one on the planet and a new one cannot come unless there is a very huge population of people at home with each other and with the plants and animals and minerals and metals and with all the beings that are out in the interstellar reaches of every galaxy that there is. So this is a prelude to prepare a process which can be broadcast out and reach several hundreds of millions of people, several billions of people, each having their own starting point. And not mulching them together, but giving them a play where they begin to recognise no one is an enemy, everyone is a hidden accomplice in the same kind of freedom that we had hoped would be possible and now really is.
We've been taking pairs because it's like a tuning fork that we run through the different phases. And the Art phase of our learning, following Vision, is the differential form that comes out of the process of vision and they go together, they go together like Tao and Tê, they go together like nature and existence. Subatomic particles, which are also energy waves, emerge instantly out of seeming nothing and can go back into seeming nothing and emerge spontaneously again. They do not go into oblivion, they do not come from nothingness, they are a complementarity and we can see this. The plasma out of which all particles, all energy waves differentiate, that primordial plasma had no space time limitation. Its time was a constant extension of all the original now and only after some incredibly wondrous transformation, was there an instant where time began and as soon as it began, three-dimensional space began to blossom out of it. Now, men and women have for a long time on this planet had access, directly and personally, to this and described it in various languages. The difficulty is that none of those traditions are able to extend themselves to more than one or two, or a small group, or an esoteric few. None of them are able to expand quick enough to do any good for the situation in which we find ourselves. That's why this presentation has been worked on, for over 40 years now, to present something like we're talking about Max Ernst and we're talking about Henry Moore together in Art, Arts Nine, Ten, 11 and 12. And one of the qualities that's there...let's take Max Ernst for a moment. He was an artistic genius and by the time he was just a little boy he, at the age of five...he was born in 1891 in Germany, near Köln. And when he was five he put on his red nightshirt, with little animals on it and walked out of the house and had a little whip with him, a little toy whip and he walked down into the town, by the railroad station and there with the big railroad train, all of the people around there were charmed and said, 'This is the infant Jesus come to bless us.' And when he was taken home, the father was going to discipline him and little Max Ernst said, 'But I am the infant Jesus' and so his father painted him as the infant Jesus. By the time Max Ernst was 14 he was doing a painting like this. He had never been to art school, but he had a visionary consciousness beginning and by watching his father, who was not a professional artist, make art, out of himself, out of his life, in spare moments, little infant Jesus, Max Ernst, decided that he would paint. And by the time he was an adolescent, he was 17, he was able to paint something like this. This quality of his work extended and extended, till in 1957, he was able to make a painting called The Dark Gods, to really begin to hone a capacity to prismatically present. That one could see there is a huge resonance between a visionary, prismatic presence, in more dimensions than we have in the halo above our heads and it has a direct, resonant bearing on who it is that we're standing there with that halo of extra dimensions around them. The most formative person in his life was named Dorothea Tanning and when we come back from the break, we'll take a look at Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning together and the incredible realisation that when a personal prism finds itself in creative remembering tandem with another personal prism, all of a sudden you get a multiplication of facets of possibility that were not available to the single prism before. Now with two lenses you're able to do something that a prism couldn't do. The two lenses together can be a telescope, or they can be a microscope. The entire range of possibility is now within reach, because two have tuned together. What is the old phrase? 'Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, I will be there.' Let's take a break.
Let's come back from the break and let's look ahead visionarily to next week. Next week is an interval and we are characteristically using for the intervals, world classic, spiritual material, like the Tao Tê Ching, the Bhagavad Gītā. But for Art we're going to use Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. And you can get it from Dover Paperbacks, I paid $3.50 for this. The original printing of it is somewhat different because it has poems in it that are not put into the Dover reprinting. And the edition was published in New York Documents of Modern Art, in the 1940's. If on the Net you can get it, you will find that there are some exquisite Kandinsky poems. One of the qualities is very nice though, about the Dover edition, is that it reprints a version of the 1912 Concerning the Spiritual in Art, that has a beautiful quality of a preface in it for the Dover edition and also the translator's introduction, which is extremely useful. And that Dover has also published the sequel to Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which is Point to Line to Plane and this was one of the great formative books, one of the 12 texts that were founded to make the Bauhaus design centre in Germany. And it had two incarnations in Germany and then when the Nazis took over and banned it, because it was really inimicable to the National Socialist Party, it moved to the United States and split. One portion went to Black Mountain College, where there was an experimental group, one portion went to Harvard, where there was an experimental group and one portion went to Chicago. And so the Bauhaus came to the United States and split into three. Point and Line to Plane goes back to the origins of geometry in Euclid. A point, a line and the plane that it generates. But Kandinsky, as you will see, was a spiritual master. He understood that a point, technically, in the Pythagorean tradition of Euclid, is that a point is a locus of no dimensions, it has zero dimensions. So that a line which is one-dimensional is not what is meant by the Pythagorean Euclid. A line is a point of zero dimensions when it moves, so that it is a continuous, zero dimension vector. The plane that is generated out of it, is not a plane from a line, but is the plane of the mysterious field of nature, that is generated by the movement of a zero-dimensional locus. When someone uses a very advanced, powerful yoga to take the mind to its single-pointedness...in Sanskrit called 'Ekagrata,' that single-pointedness is able to wink out instantly and leave zero dimensions and immediately wink back in and recreate a five-dimensional newness instantly. One of the qualities of the five-dimensional instantaneity is that four-dimensional objects are transparent, including oneself, including the ego, including the individuality. And by being able to see that transparency, all of the symbols now function in a way that is different from what they functioned before. They functioned only up to the point of integration to one, now they function beyond one, approaching zeroness. So that now, not only do you have geometry, with a trigonometric development, but you have the ability to have a calculus, called the infinitesimal calculus, because you can work with the infinitesimal, infinite differences between zero and one and one and zero. You can have an integral calculus, or a differential calculus. You can have equations of them and figure out anything that you would like to figure out, to any exactitude that you desire, including working with infinite infinities. One of the great heroes in science, when we get to it, is Richard Feynman, one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived, was at Caltech. He figured out how to make a diagram - they're called Feynman diagrams - a diagrammatic language that is able to make transparent to the conscious mind, mathematical operations in their purity, without being limited by the designated diagrams and quantities of an outworn, old, limited mentality. And we'll see that.
We looked at, in Art, Georgia O'Keeffe, along with Ch'i Pai-Shih. And Georgia O'Keeffe's wonderful years of her art, to make cosmic flowers. Max Ernst's lady, Dorothea Tanning, has done among her late books, Another Language of Flowers and these are flowers that have never existed, yet. They are presented imaginatively, so that one can remember them in a future possibility. And her flowers are of a garden and of an ikebana type display of pure creativity. 'Imagine walking through a garden full of never before seen flowers, then open this book and you will find 12 of them waiting to charm you.' 12 poets contributed poems on these imaginary flowers, now presented as works of art and so the book itself is like a new zodiac of a constellation of 12 symbols, 12 signs, that are not the old zodiac, that's just the plane of the ecliptic of this sun, on this planet, in this star system. This is a zodiac of a garden of possibilities, good anywhere in the cosmos. Her wonderful tuning with Max Ernst, led them...they met in New York City. She was living on 58th Street, which just a block over from 57th Street, where all the art galleries of the time were aligned. And Ernst came to her place and found a painting there, of herself, a portrait, called Birthday. And in Birthday she realised that he had given a title to it. She was born in a little town called Galesburg, Illinois, which is not very far from the little town in southern Wisconsin, where Georgia O'Keeffe was born and where Frank Lloyd Wright was born. So the three of them were born within just a couple of hours' drive, in some of the smallest, Midwestern, out of the way towns. And she was born in 1910, Wright in 1869 and Georgia O'Keeffe in 1887. One of the qualities that came out when she met Ernst, is that they wanted to get back to primordiality. Ernst had found that in the United States, in his exile from the Nazis, from World War Two, that the most affined place that he experienced in the United States was the American Southwest, where the Kachina dolls were made, with the Pueblo tribes. So he took his lady fair and they went to Sedona, Arizona and over many years of living there, he made this sculpture, a version of the King and Queen that you see in Henry Moore. But this is a pair that tune and it's called Capricorn. One of the most interesting photos is Dorothea Tanning, cupped by the sculpture of Capricorn. It is a sign, a symbol, that what has emerged out of this is an extraordinary, new quality of visionary art and visionary spirit life. And together they found more and more the capacity to make beautiful discoveries. One of the first things that he showed her was a seahorse in a crystal ball, in 1942, that he used to carry around with him in New York City as his crystal ball. Of being able to see that there are horses in the sea, but they are little, tiny, but you can ride those horses if you're able to go through the looking glass and live in Wonderland. One of the most beautiful paintings that Ernst was able to do, in 1957, is this painting called For Alice and her Friends. For anyone who's able to go into Wonderland, this is a kaleidoscopic, prismatic presentation, which later served as the quality of prismatic presentation that he did the self-portrait of Dorothea Tanning. And his portrait of Dorothea, he kept in his salon. They lived together for 34 years and it was always there, always still on the easel, not on the wall, because it was a part of the tuning that he went through as well.
There is a marvellous quality to art and artists when they get together. And one of the most powerful of all the surrealists, along with Max Ernst, was Yves Tanguy. And there's a beautiful photograph of Ernst and Yves Tanguy smiling together in Sedona, against the red walls. And this quality of red is an extraordinary experience. The paintings that had shown Ernst to be a visionary, came back...this painting is called Colorado of the Medusa and begins to show a quality of not just surrealist art, but visionary, of yet another world, of almost another star system. And this painting, which is entitled The Pink Bird, again has the Sedona red. One of the qualities that came out for them as they lived in Arizona, was the proximity to the Grand Canyon and they got to know a lot of the Native guides and so they took a river rafting trip. Dorothea Tanning, who is now 97, says, 'You can no longer take the trip, there are too many dams' and so forth, but at that time you could go down the Colorado and these huge, skyscraper cliffs of the Grand Canyon showed them, dwarfed for them, the canyons of New York City. The tallest buildings in New York City are 1,000 feet high. The cliffs of the Colorado and the Grand Canyon are 3,000 or 4,000 feet high. They're three or four times the size of New York City at its peak. The scale of this quality, the sense of the River, stayed with them and when they finally returned to Europe, finally returned to live in France, were tempted to live in Paris because it was the New York of Europe. Instead, they decided to position themselves on the Loire River, the French version, not of the Colorado, not of the immense cliffs, but because the Loire Valley is known as the 'Garden of France.' And [57:25 Hueme], one of the most charming places and there they founded their house, but missed the American Southwest climate, so they moved their house to Provence in the south of France. And in Seillans they bought a big, old, three storey house and then Dorothea Tanning designed a house that was finished for them in 1970 and Ernst lived there until he died in 1976, he was 85. She lived there until 1980 and then returned back to New York City and began a whole new career there as a poetess. Ernst's painting, The Marriage of Heaven and Earth, not The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but The Marriage of Heaven and Earth, is very, very similar in tone and in thematic development, of these paintings that we saw in the first half. This one from 1909 and the other one from 1906. So after 55 years one can still see symbols and themes, motifs, colour palette, this time brought into a play which is rather extraordinary. One of the greatest photographs taken of an artist is this 1942 photograph of Max Ernst with all his Kachina dolls, on a balcony in the best section of New York. He was married to Peggy Guggenheim at the time. So when they moved to Sedona, Arizona, Dorothea said they would like to have a dog and they named the dog Kachina. And wherever they went at that time, Kachina was with them. He was like an animal familiar to the magic of their tunable art, visionary expressiveness. She said eight times they took this old model pickup truck, with a two-wheeled trailer, stuffed with paintings, in boxes, in crates, that all were handmade. Took them to New York City to see if they could sell a few things to get a few dollars and then drive all the way back. And that eight times they made this pilgrimage while they were living in the American Southwest.
This quality of recalibrating your life so that the energy, the frequency of your energy, is able to be tuned with someone else and from that energy, it is able to be brought into polarisations where the forms that are made are made out of their tunable energy. Instead of being a natural energy that makes existential forms in their polarity, the differential energy of vision will make prismatic forms that are able to lens together and to make a - as we said before the break - a telescopic focus, or a microscopic focus. Many times in the sophisticated development of our species, our forebears found that not only can two people have their lensing capacities brought together in tune, but that whole community of persons is able to do this. So that you get, instead of a telescope and a microscope, you get a number of lenses and you get the modern version, the contemporary version of, say a telescope, that has maybe dozens of lenses that are available for adaptive optics, to work together and make a focus which is now many times more capable than any previous focus. There are ground based telescopic observatories, like the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile, that the European Union has built. Four eight point two metre telescopes that have adaptive optics, but are computer linked together, so that you are able to have four giant telescopes, each one able to X out the atmospheric interference, so that you have as good a quality as the Hubble Space Telescope, above the atmosphere, but you have four that are linked together. And that the twenty first century edge of technology is now...one is able to have any number of telescopes around the planet, or off the planet, linked together to give an indefinite refinement. The James Webb Space Telescope will be about 1,000 times what the Hubble Telescope is, able to see a planet like the earth around star systems, several hundred light years away. We, in the twenty first century, by the time this century is over, will have the capacity to refine to an almost infinitesimal great or small degree, the transform of existentiality. What will be necessary is to have that same capacity to transform the mind. The mind cannot be transformed by any education that is working now. It's just simply inept, its liminals are not workable. And so this is presented to develop a community of people around the planet, who together will develop the expansion, the projection into larger, more refined scales. That two years of our programme, the eight phases, could be made into the first eight grades, so that grades one through eight are very easily given an integral and an differential at the same time and then doubled, so that the next cycle would be just four years, the high school, grades nine through 12. So that by the time someone would graduate from high school, you would already have two cycles that had been paced once a year for each phase, two phases per year and you would be ready for the full, two year, eight phase programme. And after that, you would have enough scalar to be able to devise for yourself any kind of future running of that kind of programme, on any kind of accelerated scale that you were capable of. There will people who will be able to do in one day all of this and make just a day of intense, creative meditation. About the time that we have working, not colonies, on the moon, but farms. We're going to the moon not for mining, but for growing pure food and for getting a perspective that we are at home everywhere. If we can live on the moon, we can live anywhere in the star system.
Be sure and try to get a copy of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, it's only a couple of dollars from Dover. And when we come next week for the interval, I'll try to present the interface that was the most difficult for Kandinsky to penetrate. The interface was that he, being born in the 1860's, in Moscow, had a big city outlook at a tsarist age of Russia and didn't have any traction whatsoever to go outside of that stylisation, till he went to the farther north part of Russia, to the ancient Komi people, who were related to the Finns. And there the folk art of the Komis opened for him a whole new mythic culture that he had never been exposed to. He was brilliant enough that he gave up his legal career and started to go into art at the same time that he became acquainted with the world theosophical movement of Madame Blavatsky and many other occult aspects. He was brilliant enough to realise he had to take himself completely out of the context of Russia, out of the context of the tsarist, out of the context of Moscow, so he moved himself to the south of Germany, to Munich. And in Munchen, within a couple of years, he discovered that the true opaqueness in his mind was the opaqueness of the civilisation everywhere and the opaqueness was due to an inability to be abstractly creative. And so abstract art was created by Kandinsky as an artistic penetration through that opaqueness. Usually, the abstract quality of the mind will stop vision from developing into its own ecology and curl it back so that it becomes a powerful tool of a closed mind, to lord it over existence and experience and other minds and supposedly, nature. It was the making of abstract art that was one of the greatest advances on this planet and Kandinsky is the genius who really found that to be the case. When we look at Concerning the Spiritual in Art, one of the qualities that I will bring out for you is this. It's section seven, called 'Theory.'
Because of the very nature of modern structure, there has never been a time when it was more difficult than it is today to formulate a complete theory, or to construct a pictorial foundation. All attempts to do so have the same result, that started in the case of Leonardo and his system of little spoons. However, it would be rash to say that there are no principles in painting comparable to a foundation, or that such principles would lead inevitably to academicism. Music has a grammar which, although modified from time to time, is of continual help and value and may be used as a kind of dictionary.
And one of the most miraculous qualities that came out for Kandinsky right at this time, is that his best friend was Arnold Schoenberg, who was penetrating the abstractness of music in serial music, in the 12 tone system. And I will bring a whole sheaf of letters between Kandinsky and Schoenberg, poised on the first orbital edge of leaving terrestrial limitations behind and getting a view of the cosmos through a new kind of recalibration scalar, that of a six-dimensional, artistic person prism, that was able to see for the first time that the kaleidoscopes of history have barely been begun and barely broached. And we will use Kandinsky as the gateway by which we will be able to take ourselves back to the original crisis at the beginnings of the civilisation that just died in our lifetime. Back to the fifth century Greeks and the extension into the first century Romans and in that 500 year period, the foundations of Western civilisation were certainly laid, but the foundations were laid with faults that caused it to be unstable and with traps that caused it to be vicious. The first historical work we will use, a great work of art, is Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. He was a General in the war and he wrote in that history: 'The reason I write this is that by now, knowing human nature as I do, all of these events will repeat themselves again and again and again. And so I write a warning sign to the future.' The Cold War which ended ostensibly in 1991, was a replay of the Peloponnesian War, almost act for act, stage by stage. The follow-up to the Peloponnesian War was a tyranny at the centre of the civilisation, in Athens and the casualty was Socrates, killed by the state, because he taught the young men not to believe in the old gods and to talk to each other openly, so that they could discover for themselves actualities and truths that were unknown to their superiors, their elders, to the authorities. And for freeing the young men of Athens, the Tyranny of the Thirty condemned him to death, 399 BC. We live exactly at the time where if there were a Socrates in the open, he would be condemned to death in the way that they do it now. Some agent, passing by, with a little radioactive polonium, will brush by you and flick a bit of dust onto your skin somewhere and you will eventually die of radioactive poisoning within a couple of months. We saw this last year. More next week.