WEBVTT

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 Yeah, a continuing dialogue regarding the theme which is the reconciling

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of aesthetics and theology that we
were trying each in his own way to

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address yesterday that perhaps it
would be well for us today to begin with

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some of your uh responses and
questions two,

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the panel and then perhaps at the near
the close, we would take some time

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for our panel to make a summarizing
short of her short summarizing

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statement on this general subject. So
we would like to begin and pleased

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with the panelists repeat the question
for the micro for the recording so

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that we have the question as well as
the, your response to it. So if you

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could keep your question somewhat
inbounds but raise them for things you

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heard yesterday that you wanted to
either clarify or or raise questions

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about the probe.

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We want to give you an opportunity.

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How many of you were here. You
extruded that my view. Uh huh mhm I think

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we lost our audience. They're
listening to the piano music. Yes, that's uh

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well that makes it bit of a problem.

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Mhm Maybe we just, I mean we should
start out with the summarizing

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statements uh, to give the flavor.

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Oh no, no, I couldn't possibly do
that. So that we could give some uh

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impetus for it.

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Mm I think there are five of us. If
each of us gives one sentence summary

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, we may have a flavor of what was
going on. I think what was going on was

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a recognition that our civilization
and our culture has a very high

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standard of living, but the very low
ceiling of spiritual aspiration and

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spiritual attainment. And we then
considered what is the nature

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of our ultimate beliefs

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has expressed through theology and
religion. At one point, we're asking,

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what is the nature of God? And I think
we have had more

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agreement on what is it that response
in human beings to the notion of

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godliness of divinity, of striving
beyond our grasp. Then we could agree

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on what is the origin and ultimate
destiny of the divine.

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Yeah, I'm supposed to speak at 1:00.
So I think I'm gonna be the most laid

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back of the panelists because I'm
going to have more time than anybody. Uh

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, you can't possibly repeat what went
on yesterday. But basically I

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disagreed with the theology of Paulo
salary in said it did not represent

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an understanding of the great esoteric
traditions of the great universal

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religions and that it was Atheism in
camouflage and was in a four block

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incense wherein, which one's theology
is a projection under the sky of

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what one is. It was a projection of
Apollo's own personality and as such,

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uh, it could become a magnification of
the ego. Specifically, I uh, denied

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pollos conception and philosophy of
time as being the very first thing

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that disintegrates in the mystical and
ecstatic experience and the

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specialization of time, in which you
have a notion of God behind you as

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alpha and God ahead of you as omega is
a complete uh delusion that is

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something that's overcome very early
on in the path of meditation, whether

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it's yoga or Sufi ism or tibetan
buddhism or Yockey shamanism or whatever.

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So yesterday was devoted to what we
can say is a polarization of a

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friendly disagreement between paul and
me, where I'm a great supporter of

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his aesthetics and a great uh uh
detractor of his of his theology, to put

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my position in a statement, I would
say art and theology cannot be

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reconciled except through the process
of initiation. The only artist who

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can reconcile aesthetics and theology
has to be an initiative. He has to

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be an artist of the level of a
Hieronymus brochure WB Yates, uh, the kind

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of great artist who creates
civilizations so that if you look at the great

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architecture that express cosmological
visions in Teotihuacan, in Mexico,

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in Luxor, in Egypt, in Polonnaruwa, in
salon in Anyang and ancient china,

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you see an incredibly developed cosmic
consciousness of astronomy, sacred

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geometry and mystical canons of
proportion that affect the subtle bodies,

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not the physical bodies. You have to
have a knowledge of the physical body

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, the etheric body, the astral body,
the causal body and the such and

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under beyond all of those otherwise,
you can't design cities or buildings.

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So we got a really polarized situation
going yesterday.

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My purpose yesterday was primarily to
raise some questions. First of all

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with regard to the relationship
between the past and the future with a

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view toward clarifying also whether
the timeline was a completely linear

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one that made past and future mutually
exclusive of each other, or whether

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we were dealing with the reality that
in some sense transcends the realms

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of time is usually defined and
therefore raising that question, but also

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raising within a sense of history, the
question of whether, whether it's

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ever possible to put into operation in
one's thought, any kind of

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effective storyline that does not pay
as much attention to memory and

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therefore the past as it does to hope
and the future. I also simply raised

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some kinds of, or what probably are
primarily linguistic questions about

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ah about the relationship between
religion and theology, seeing religion

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as primarily what we mean by a
religious tradition, and usually that means

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the norms set by the great religious
traditions of the past that are to

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some extent at any rate worldwide and
scope most of them. Uh and that

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theology is an intellectual enterprise
dealing with the clarification of

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one's religious ideas and therefore
they are not identical in any sense.

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Ah I think I also raised the question
as to whether

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uh whether because what Apollo seems
to be suggesting to me in his uh

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religious thought, what what he seems
to be suggesting to me is the

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advocacy of what becomes in effect a
new or perhaps not so much new as

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another, or a religious tradition of
sorts, at least the religious thought

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, that I I infer from, from paolo's
work uh seems to me to be the advocacy

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of a position, the advocacy of a
religion, the advocacy of a particular

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religious tradition. And to the extent
that that is true and I'm not

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convinced it's true. And I'm simply
raising the question on the basis of

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the uh contact that I've had up until
this point and my understanding of

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the thought up until this point to the
extent that is true. I wonder

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whether it is,

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I wonder whether it's important to his
enterprise and adequate as a system

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of religious thought. Uh and I'll
leave it at that.

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Yeah.

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Um yesterday I spoke uh huh initially
and really didn't address salaries

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uh theology and and so forth. That
spoke to more to the question of how I

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understood uh the relationship between
art and religion um aesthetics and

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theology and fundamentally it is that
I believe that but that faith

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without art is dumb. That as a matter
of fact art authentic art or depart

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not. Uh huh Bill kept talking about
shock and kitchens, things like that,

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which obviously maybe we wouldn't
consider it was authentic art, but

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authentic art has a revelatory
function in culture that is at its best, is

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terribly important to awaken in us,
make us see certain things that we

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would never see. It has a celebratory
function which enables us to

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celebrate. Uh huh The occasions and
human existence, the epiphanies, the

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ecstatic moments in time that we
envision joy and uh the power of the

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universe, the one is of it. Uh and
that it also is art is a fantasize er

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and uh it opens up the invisible,
makes visible invisible and makes uh uh

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those who have imaginations dream
dreams and see visions and that insofar

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as art, authentic art does that it is
indeed in relationship to authentic

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religion? Uh huh. For that is a lot of
the role of religion that they are

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brothers and sisters, but that in our
culture they have been a culture

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which d ritual iseS and d spiritual
eyes is everything. Uh they both

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become ghetto ized uh in museums and
churches and all that sort of thing.

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And they've been also uh incommunicado
unable to communicate with because

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there's no universal themes, no
reconciling images that we that we have

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together in the culture in which we
live. So they impoverished by that

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that general picture of what I was
trying to say yesterday.

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Well, for a moment we thought that the
gap would be would be decreasing

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yesterday. But the gap is as wide as
ever. I um

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I see two ways of becoming conscious
of something. One is a revelation,

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the is uh which refers to pre
existence and then there is another way of

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of existing or feeling alive and of uh
stating something which is the

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creation away And I cannot
reconciliate the two because revelation is my

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ignorance

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uh in uh in front of an overpowering
an all knowing reality. And uh if I

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believe that this reality has existed,
I'll be telling them forever and I

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I am somehow an offspring of this
reality of offshoot spinoff, then

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evidently my task, my existence, my
reason for living, is to try to find

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out what the reality is. So that's I'm
trying to be revealed by behaving

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in one way instead of another, where
I'm attempting to open myself to this

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pouring of that, which is there. Well,
I don't happen to believe in this,

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not, not in in the sense that it
doesn't mean anything, but it in the

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sense that it's only part of reality
because there is something more to it

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, which is that no matter how great
reality is all inclusive or whatever

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might be reality, I believe that there
is something which is as yet to

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become to be created and this as yet
is the future. So while I can accept

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regulation all or informational or
learning experiences, I also, I also

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have to believe that I am creating as
you are creating us, anything that

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moves around is creating. So I have to
see the past is a reality which is

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somehow moving

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into new reality by creating and
transcending itself and it does this in

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that, which doesn't exist, which is
the future that's why time for me it's

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a very fundamental and in many ways
linear thing. Uh so on one side I have

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a universe which is a revelation a
where perfection has been there from

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the very beginning. On your side, you
have a universe that might have been

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very ah cheap at the beginning in
terms of just being some kind of

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unconscious and

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very powerful, but very dim reality.
And since I believe in evolution,

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since I am an evolutionist, I believe
I cannot accept the notion that

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evolution is, it's just a figment of
the imagination and that we are

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really here only to reenact or to be
revealed something which is beyond

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our grasp. I know that most of what
exists is beyond our grasp is

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certainly beyond my grasp at the same
time. I believe that I am one of the

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little particles which is attempting
attempting not just to understand

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what that past is, but also to create
a future which doesn't exist. So, I

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believe in life as a creation process.

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Those of you who were not here
yesterday may may or may not have some

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flavor of the direction of the
conversation. The dialogue between the

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panel yesterday, but hopefully uh and
there may be some of you who were

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here yesterday who would like to raise
some questions and we'd like to

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give you an opportunity at this time
since you didn't have it yesterday

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before we go on and say anymore
individually. Yes, please see you think

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could you speak up

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since? Yeah,

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yes,

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clear. Yes. Mhm.

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Yes.

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Mhm. Yes.

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So

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it's useful.

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Yes, yes, yes, yes

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ST

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yes,

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but she Yeah.

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Yes.

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Okay. Could I put that question very
succinctly and let Bill respond. No,

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I I think what all you said is
important, what you're really saying to

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Bill Thompson is uh what I heard
yesterday was not such a basic

00:17:51.039 --> 00:17:55.347
disagreement, but I heard
fundamentally an agreement between yourself and

00:17:55.380 --> 00:17:59.847
Paula salary because and then you gave
the reasons for, I'd like to for

00:17:59.880 --> 00:18:04.266
Bill to kind of say to that either
yes, you heard right or no, you didn't

00:18:04.299 --> 00:18:07.427
hear right. And would you speak to
that bill please? And so he could

00:18:07.460 --> 00:18:13.177
clarify that blake has a uh an
expression he says in opposition is true

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friendship. Um I think you can
understand that is my relationship to

00:18:18.079 --> 00:18:22.586
follow over the last seven years or
so. He also says without contrary,

00:18:22.619 --> 00:18:27.976
there is no progress now, human beings
do not like in a sense change. And

00:18:28.009 --> 00:18:31.776
therefore when confronted with two
positions, their immediate response,

00:18:31.809 --> 00:18:34.937
whether it's at the dinner table or at
a conference is to try to

00:18:34.970 --> 00:18:40.177
synthesize them and thereby blur the
integrity of each position. Symbiosis

00:18:40.210 --> 00:18:44.917
in nature, co evolution. The
relationship of symbian is in an environment

00:18:44.950 --> 00:18:49.746
is not a fusion where they all become
sludge together. It's an incredibly

00:18:49.779 --> 00:18:54.907
diversified ecology where the sun
comes down and makes miracles and

00:18:54.940 --> 00:18:59.627
cactuses and roses and mountains and
all kinds of things so that um I

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don't think one should jump to try and
put Pollo and I in the same place.

00:19:05.740 --> 00:19:11.756
Now, the next thing is one of the
difficulties we have as human beings,

00:19:11.789 --> 00:19:16.687
is learning how to listen to one
another because we tend to only half

00:19:16.720 --> 00:19:20.677
listen and to try to hear enough that
can trigger what we're going to say

00:19:20.710 --> 00:19:24.836
next. And therefore it's very
necessary for us rather than being very

00:19:24.869 --> 00:19:29.476
feminine and yin and receptive to the
holy Other. That that thing that is

00:19:29.509 --> 00:19:35.586
not us to try somehow rather to
characterize it, to put it into an

00:19:35.619 --> 00:19:41.387
interpretation so that that that
interpretation can then energize us so

00:19:41.420 --> 00:19:44.976
that this is the dynamic of the ego
which is not wholly evil. I'm not

00:19:45.009 --> 00:19:49.046
saying that the ego has no role to
play at all, but it means that in order

00:19:49.079 --> 00:19:54.506
to energize a position based on
creativity, say Pollos is the artist, one

00:19:54.539 --> 00:19:59.776
has to caricature the mystic as the
quietest or the escapist and

00:19:59.809 --> 00:20:04.407
caricature. His position is based on
revelation. And immediately the

00:20:04.440 --> 00:20:10.036
caricature is a misinterpretation
because part of what the, the, shall we

00:20:10.069 --> 00:20:14.657
say, the mystic mystical attunement
is, is becoming quiet moving to the

00:20:14.690 --> 00:20:19.816
still point in the center, inhaling
experiences and values that are

00:20:19.849 --> 00:20:25.617
outside of time and then returning in
the next heartbeat to embody to

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incarnate and to create. So there is
no opposition whatsoever between

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Creation and revelation. I see those
two points as a caricature of the

00:20:35.529 --> 00:20:38.647
great mystical traditions now in the
way that I look at time as a

00:20:38.680 --> 00:20:44.137
historian is every great civilization
begins as a mystical vision, you

00:20:44.170 --> 00:20:48.256
start with the initiate capsule Kotal
and out of his vision and his

00:20:48.289 --> 00:20:53.717
initiated experience comes the entire
civilization of Mexico. You start

00:20:53.750 --> 00:20:57.506
with the vision of Mohammed in a cave
and outcomes islam. You start with a

00:20:57.539 --> 00:21:01.607
vision of jesus and outcomes
christendom. The great civilizations of the

00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:05.726
planet have gone through a period
where their first announced as mystical

00:21:05.759 --> 00:21:10.766
visions outside of time. Then you come
down a step and the artist as the

00:21:10.799 --> 00:21:15.546
interpreter tries to put that into
specific form and to move it into a

00:21:15.579 --> 00:21:20.107
process of institutionalization. But
that's the kind of stepping down. Now

00:21:20.140 --> 00:21:23.756
, what we're talking about really is
the experience of education,

00:21:23.789 --> 00:21:31.387
basically, I disagree with you where
you say both, all of us tend to feel

00:21:31.420 --> 00:21:34.986
we're in time. Therefore why don't we
accept the illusion as enabling us

00:21:35.019 --> 00:21:40.006
to grow this would be to go back to
plato's cave to say all of us are in

00:21:40.039 --> 00:21:43.117
the cave and the reality we have with
the shadows on the wall. So why

00:21:43.150 --> 00:21:47.326
don't we try to create a science that
is the most meticulous analysis and

00:21:47.359 --> 00:21:52.607
weighing and measuring and drafting of
the shadows on the wall.

00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:57.927
And so my sense of education is that
literally x do career one must be led

00:21:57.960 --> 00:22:04.746
out. Now I see paolo very much as a
man like James Joyce or Michelangelo,

00:22:04.779 --> 00:22:10.266
the great artist, the heroic ego and
that is has a place in culture. But

00:22:10.299 --> 00:22:13.986
when paolo says, I am going to become
a theologian, I am going to

00:22:14.019 --> 00:22:18.726
reconcile art and theology. I am going
to create the future city. I am

00:22:18.759 --> 00:22:22.506
going to resolve all human culture
into my vision. Then I say stop, you've

00:22:22.539 --> 00:22:27.316
gone too far your inflated, which
which never did naturally. But and

00:22:27.349 --> 00:22:31.566
remember I'm I have the advantage over
many people here. I'm surprised

00:22:31.599 --> 00:22:34.917
that I've actually read those articles
and theology. I've read religion of

00:22:34.950 --> 00:22:38.076
stimulation, I've read the two sons
psychology, I've read the collective

00:22:38.109 --> 00:22:42.097
papers, I've read the bridge matter
and spirit and our ecology. So if I'm

00:22:42.130 --> 00:22:45.857
critiquing this, I'm critiquing this
from, you know, a specific analysis

00:22:45.890 --> 00:22:48.657
of reading all his collected works or
most of it, the stuff that he sends

00:22:48.690 --> 00:22:52.996
me, which is quite a lot. It just
happens that I have read all those

00:22:53.029 --> 00:22:57.637
papers too and it just happens that I
have another vision of the whole

00:22:57.670 --> 00:23:03.367
matter to for what we are really
confronted here Our two visions, 2

00:23:03.400 --> 00:23:08.897
paradigms to alternative realities. If
Bill starts with the essential

00:23:08.930 --> 00:23:15.016
integrity and reduce ability of the
mystics as the core of our religious

00:23:15.049 --> 00:23:20.387
experience. Therefore starting this
with this as the point of departure in

00:23:20.420 --> 00:23:28.107
the artistic not only paolo's ideas,
but they had to shut down is queer.

00:23:28.140 --> 00:23:33.367
However, if we acknowledge the
plurality of paradigms and particularly if

00:23:33.400 --> 00:23:38.907
we start with basic assumptions about
the nature of reality, the nature of

00:23:38.940 --> 00:23:44.826
evolution, and most importantly, the
nature of godliness. Then if our

00:23:44.859 --> 00:23:49.137
question becomes not to explicate what
has been given, what has been

00:23:49.170 --> 00:23:54.217
ordered accumulated in cultural
religious traditions and instead of

00:23:54.250 --> 00:23:58.986
eulogizing their greatness, we try to
ask ourselves what was the role of

00:23:59.019 --> 00:24:03.717
religions religious experience,
including mystical experience in the

00:24:03.750 --> 00:24:10.347
evolution of human kind and evolution
of matter becoming spirit than this

00:24:10.380 --> 00:24:16.986
, evolutionary genetic experience
gives a different reading of all the

00:24:17.019 --> 00:24:21.147
mystics for they may represent one
stage in the development of our

00:24:21.180 --> 00:24:25.107
consciousness. What I'm suggesting is
that if you start with a different

00:24:25.140 --> 00:24:28.016
set of basic assumptions about the
nature of evolution, the nature of

00:24:28.049 --> 00:24:32.887
consciousness and the nature of
godliness. So there is a paradigm becomes

00:24:32.920 --> 00:24:38.967
tenable. I do not accept it for
another reason for all the basic concepts

00:24:39.000 --> 00:24:43.647
which we use to grapple with our
existence, including spiritual experience

00:24:43.680 --> 00:24:50.157
, are so far removed from our
experience and his scatology that I see no

00:24:50.190 --> 00:24:55.127
meaning. I cannot somehow envisage of
the process of perfection that is

00:24:55.160 --> 00:24:59.607
not related to perfection as we have
known it, as we have experienced it,

00:24:59.640 --> 00:25:06.776
as we have used it to raise ourselves
by our bootstraps. I really have two

00:25:06.809 --> 00:25:11.607
questions to both of them, but
supposing that I accept the greatness of

00:25:11.640 --> 00:25:15.407
past the religious traditions and
particularly Mysticism, What follows for

00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:23.440
me for you for next generation from
next idioms is the distilled wisdom to

00:25:23.519 --> 00:25:29.236
still experience the spirituality of
all evolution and mankind as thought

00:25:29.269 --> 00:25:34.167
in mystical experience, all there is
to it, to religious experience and to

00:25:34.200 --> 00:25:39.387
the development of the spirit or if
not what comes. And the question is,

00:25:39.420 --> 00:25:42.306
if I accept your

00:25:42.339 --> 00:25:47.306
ultimate in their logical logical
extensions,

00:25:47.339 --> 00:25:52.887
what do I have to live for perfection?
Beauty and all the all the grace is

00:25:52.920 --> 00:25:59.207
so far removed from it that I am
nothing but speck of dust. Yeah, I don't.

00:25:59.240 --> 00:26:06.066
Oh right, right. I feel that I I have
for the individual, I have a much

00:26:06.099 --> 00:26:09.907
more humble position,

00:26:09.940 --> 00:26:16.107
but for reality, I have a far more
ambitious

00:26:16.140 --> 00:26:23.177
design model. I'm saying that because
I feel that no matter how good we

00:26:23.210 --> 00:26:30.187
are individually, we are, we are not
going to do very much in terms of the

00:26:30.220 --> 00:26:32.506
incredible

00:26:32.539 --> 00:26:38.107
nature or what eventually reality is
going to be.

00:26:38.140 --> 00:26:44.677
But I I very firmly believe in in the
the incredibility of this reality.

00:26:44.710 --> 00:26:51.736
Because if I didn't, then I would not
have very much reasons to exist so

00:26:51.769 --> 00:26:59.769
within my very, very small capacity, I
had to try to contribute to that

00:27:00.039 --> 00:27:06.226
kind of notion that might suggest the
possibility of total perfection.

00:27:06.259 --> 00:27:14.259
Truth, justice, Beauty, harmony, Grace
or whatever, not partial, but total.

00:27:15.309 --> 00:27:19.107
Now my contention is that no matter
how good we are, no matter how

00:27:19.140 --> 00:27:25.286
saintly we are, no matter how
mystically taken we are, we are still very

00:27:25.319 --> 00:27:29.836
tiny fragments not of something which
exists so much, but of something

00:27:29.869 --> 00:27:36.506
which doesn't exist. So again, time
comes as a very powerful parameter,

00:27:36.539 --> 00:27:41.107
most of reality doesn't exist yet,

00:27:41.140 --> 00:27:47.006
in a sense that time hasn't been
stopped. Time keeps ticking. And time is

00:27:47.039 --> 00:27:51.006
going to take to the end. We're not
going to be short on time, We are

00:27:51.039 --> 00:27:56.437
going to be short in change in the
sense that the moment will come when

00:27:56.470 --> 00:28:00.026
change is not going to be any more
possible, why is not going to be any

00:28:00.059 --> 00:28:06.107
more possible? Because at that point,
truth justice

00:28:06.140 --> 00:28:14.140
Beauty will be not partial, but total.
And I'm very much sold on this idea

00:28:14.900 --> 00:28:22.900
that we might be fooling ourselves in
pursuing equity and justice and

00:28:23.289 --> 00:28:28.046
believing that this is something that
is in our grasp. I mean, we can get

00:28:28.079 --> 00:28:35.286
it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
I find that a very skimpy notion of

00:28:35.319 --> 00:28:43.319
justice and truth. So in order for me
to believe that I have a reason to

00:28:43.410 --> 00:28:50.927
be. And uh in my very tiny position I
had to project, I had to transfer

00:28:50.960 --> 00:28:57.597
participate. I had to see in a
scatological and where not just uh

00:28:57.630 --> 00:29:03.407
something it's good, but the whole
universe is good and it's good not

00:29:03.440 --> 00:29:08.167
because there is only that kind of
universe, but because it at that point

00:29:08.200 --> 00:29:14.736
is total knowledge, total
understanding, Total love, total compassion,

00:29:14.769 --> 00:29:18.207
total justice and so on.

00:29:18.240 --> 00:29:26.240
Yeah, okay, now I want to be
understood to say that I think there is value

00:29:26.279 --> 00:29:31.127
in what Pollo is doing and I don't
want what I'm saying to be interpreted

00:29:31.160 --> 00:29:37.026
as in any way uh negation of it. What
I'm talking about is the bridge

00:29:37.059 --> 00:29:42.486
between architecture and theology and
I'm arguing that there is an

00:29:42.519 --> 00:29:48.887
expansion here that cannot occur in a
linear way without a tremendous

00:29:48.920 --> 00:29:54.336
transformation in which the heroic
artist like a James Joyce has to go

00:29:54.369 --> 00:29:59.967
through a kind of death experience of
the heroic creative ego and move

00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:04.347
into the dark night of the soul and
understand the experiences of Saint

00:30:04.380 --> 00:30:08.246
john of the cross or a Jalaluddin rumi
or in the garden or whomever. So

00:30:08.279 --> 00:30:15.586
I'm talking basically about The linear
concept of time, which I totally

00:30:15.619 --> 00:30:21.417
reject and the linear sense of the
expansion of our ecology into theology.

00:30:21.450 --> 00:30:26.397
Now, when I was quoting and saying
that in the 19th Century Firebox said

00:30:26.430 --> 00:30:30.847
that religion which pretends to be
about the Gods is really a projection

00:30:30.880 --> 00:30:35.476
onto the sky of the social structure
and you can tell what's going on in

00:30:35.509 --> 00:30:39.326
the social structure of ancient Egypt
or any other society by looking at

00:30:39.359 --> 00:30:44.066
their mythology. Well, if we take what
firebox was trying to teach us and

00:30:44.099 --> 00:30:50.776
we apply it to Pollos theology, it
makes very good sense as something

00:30:50.809 --> 00:30:54.947
that's powerful and motivating and
energizing for paolo and my as I've

00:30:54.980 --> 00:30:58.316
said to him in the past, I said this
if it's important to you go ahead

00:30:58.349 --> 00:31:01.847
with it. If it helps you keeps you
buoyant and joyous and alive and helps

00:31:01.880 --> 00:31:06.576
you build the city fine. But don't
over extend it and try and sell it to

00:31:06.609 --> 00:31:11.397
the U. S. Of A. As the theology,
visionary theology of the future have a

00:31:11.430 --> 00:31:15.296
sense of limits. This theology is not
that interesting as a literary

00:31:15.329 --> 00:31:19.467
document, it's a personal document.
Keep it in your diary, but don't try

00:31:19.500 --> 00:31:24.127
to publish it as paolo Soleri takes on
the theologians of of all history

00:31:24.160 --> 00:31:30.236
in the world. Now, paolo has a very
linear as he said, vision of time and

00:31:30.269 --> 00:31:34.937
his vision is something like a
fisherman, fly casting and spending out a

00:31:34.970 --> 00:31:40.397
lure and sending that lure way out
into the reaches, lodging it on some

00:31:40.430 --> 00:31:44.726
pillows, some ideals, some future,
some omega point and then reeling

00:31:44.759 --> 00:31:50.296
himself into the ideal. Now look
around you, The city that you're sitting

00:31:50.329 --> 00:31:55.836
in is going to take 250 years to
complete. How can paolo possibly go at it

00:31:55.869 --> 00:32:00.766
, day after day, footstep by footstep,
bucket of sand and cement by bucket

00:32:00.799 --> 00:32:04.897
of sand, unless he threw out to the
furthest reaches of his ego and his

00:32:04.930 --> 00:32:10.957
imagination, an image of the perfect
ideal city of human evolution. And

00:32:10.990 --> 00:32:15.597
then began to reel himself into it.
The city and the theology is the

00:32:15.630 --> 00:32:19.467
autobiography of policy. Hillary, what
you have written large in his

00:32:19.500 --> 00:32:24.516
theology is the artistic description
of Apollo salary, his imagination,

00:32:24.549 --> 00:32:30.776
his personality, that's not theology.
But naturally that happens to unless

00:32:30.809 --> 00:32:36.887
you are sold on again on enemies and
Mysticism, there is no way out of

00:32:36.920 --> 00:32:41.256
that. We can only do what we are. So,
I mean, it's quite it's quite

00:32:41.289 --> 00:32:46.177
evident that unless again, I believe
in this being filled in with

00:32:46.210 --> 00:32:51.526
something which which which is not me,
what I'm going to project out is me.

00:32:51.559 --> 00:32:56.407
The question is to see how valid to me
is not not the question of being

00:32:56.440 --> 00:33:02.486
me or not me. And I think the crux of
the matter is there because anybody

00:33:02.519 --> 00:33:05.847
can come up with a model. The question
is to see how desirable the model

00:33:05.880 --> 00:33:11.276
is, how fruitful the model is, how
helpful the model is. And I would

00:33:11.309 --> 00:33:17.367
challenge anybody to find to come up
with a better model. Very simple. I

00:33:17.400 --> 00:33:21.117
think it's a bit presumptuous on the
part of Bill to say that's not

00:33:21.150 --> 00:33:26.496
theology, that's theology. If you are
so personal as to say that what

00:33:26.529 --> 00:33:30.887
power does is merely a footnote to his
autobiography, then I'll be

00:33:30.920 --> 00:33:36.246
personally ask you, who are you to
tell us? What is theology? I think in

00:33:36.279 --> 00:33:42.786
the age when God was declared dead in
the 19th and 20th century, and when

00:33:42.819 --> 00:33:48.726
we really want new spiritual ideals to
sustain us, obviously, God must be

00:33:48.759 --> 00:33:53.467
of our own making or we are remaining
king God and obviously God making

00:33:53.500 --> 00:33:58.657
becomes a new departure in theology,
whether what paul does, and many

00:33:58.690 --> 00:34:03.097
others is going to survive. Historical
test, the time will show. But times

00:34:03.130 --> 00:34:09.497
show that old pattern of thinking
about relations to God somehow withered

00:34:09.530 --> 00:34:12.706
away. And therefore, traditional
theology is in a sense, dead and

00:34:12.739 --> 00:34:15.947
therefore in a sense, we don't know
what is theology and therefore we have

00:34:15.980 --> 00:34:20.706
no business of saying. That's
theology, that's not. It will be only shown

00:34:20.739 --> 00:34:25.407
by the test of time. I think that
there are five of us and 15 the audience

00:34:25.440 --> 00:34:32.497
, perhaps we might entertain other
ideas. I since everybody has given his

00:34:32.530 --> 00:34:39.227
idea, I want to suggest that for me,
theology is realizing our

00:34:39.260 --> 00:34:43.206
transcendental project

00:34:43.239 --> 00:34:48.137
that helps us to live with the anguish
of our imminent existence. That is

00:34:48.170 --> 00:34:54.606
to say, all religious ideals have
always been a production have been

00:34:54.639 --> 00:34:59.526
projection into something that we
could not attain. And after we have

00:34:59.559 --> 00:35:05.177
really made this ideal, we have
revealed ourselves in this sense that

00:35:05.210 --> 00:35:10.206
parlor in Bill's opinion is doing and
this is what perfectibility of men

00:35:10.239 --> 00:35:16.686
means for me in history, for unless we
have an ideal larger than we are,

00:35:16.719 --> 00:35:21.967
we never become more than we are And
religious ideals and all religions

00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:26.486
have challenged us to become greater
by our own production or by

00:35:26.519 --> 00:35:30.247
envisaging of gods that are much
greater than ourselves. And in a sense,

00:35:30.280 --> 00:35:36.327
new theology, remaking of old gods is
in the old tradition of constructing

00:35:36.360 --> 00:35:40.486
ideals that are so much larger than
ourselves that we have to challenge

00:35:40.519 --> 00:35:44.657
are the ultimate in order to attain
them. And in order to make something

00:35:44.690 --> 00:35:48.657
of ourselves of ourselves, God making
has always been making something of

00:35:48.690 --> 00:35:55.206
ourselves in a transcendental sense.
Could we uh go back to the uh the

00:35:55.239 --> 00:36:01.657
audience again now the dialogue has
been sharpened. Uh people have come in

00:36:01.690 --> 00:36:05.956
who perhaps were here yesterday also
and would like to raise some more

00:36:05.989 --> 00:36:09.666
questions hopefully to further that
dial. And the first question is here,

00:36:09.699 --> 00:36:17.699
second ones here and the third one is
there, could we

00:36:19.130 --> 00:36:22.197
mm

00:36:22.230 --> 00:36:27.396
say, is it? Mhm.

00:36:27.429 --> 00:36:29.597
Yes.

00:36:29.630 --> 00:36:34.197
Yeah.

00:36:34.230 --> 00:36:38.497
Well yeah, the president has

00:36:38.530 --> 00:36:46.530
Yeah. And all the best people say so.

00:36:47.030 --> 00:36:50.796
Yeah. And

00:36:50.829 --> 00:36:53.796
that's it. Yeah.

00:36:53.829 --> 00:37:01.829
That is part of this new Just right.
Yeah.

00:37:02.630 --> 00:37:08.697
Mhm way. Yeah. Yeah.

00:37:08.730 --> 00:37:14.997
Yeah, yeah. Therefore

00:37:15.030 --> 00:37:20.697
indian people love it society

00:37:20.730 --> 00:37:28.467
and yeah, please allow us to keep
feeding into it with their consciousness.

00:37:28.500 --> 00:37:32.197
 They were into Yeah,

00:37:32.230 --> 00:37:36.697
no work. And what what

00:37:36.730 --> 00:37:40.296
what happened? Right?

00:37:40.329 --> 00:37:46.577
And find ice cream because this will
be out. Where is she global

00:37:46.610 --> 00:37:50.896
involvement in the Mhm.

00:37:50.929 --> 00:37:55.816
Uh Yes. Yes.

00:37:55.849 --> 00:38:00.956
You've been you've been saying that
anticipation is somehow what I'm

00:38:00.989 --> 00:38:07.787
trying to suggest. And I would tend to
agree,

00:38:07.820 --> 00:38:12.137
I don't have any qualms in being
called another is since I don't believe

00:38:12.170 --> 00:38:17.456
in the existence of God, full fledged,
totally flourished in that sense of

00:38:17.489 --> 00:38:23.316
another. Is since I believe in a I
have a reverence for life I think then

00:38:23.349 --> 00:38:29.396
I believe in Godliness, but I believe
that he is so tiny at this point. So

00:38:29.429 --> 00:38:37.429
embryonic so primitive. So if a
gentile that way to work at it.

00:38:38.820 --> 00:38:45.586
Mhm

00:38:45.619 --> 00:38:51.247
Or no, I'm not setting up anything.
I'm trying to say what I believe, what

00:38:51.280 --> 00:38:54.787
I tend to work with.

00:38:54.820 --> 00:39:02.566
Mm. Okay. Uh I think that that if we
go on with that, we're not gonna

00:39:02.599 --> 00:39:08.336
we're not going to clarify more by
that we don't have time to do that

00:39:08.369 --> 00:39:10.686
clarified.

00:39:10.719 --> 00:39:16.017
Uh huh. It's all right. If you were it
doesn't matter. I mean, it's a I

00:39:16.050 --> 00:39:20.526
know, but I want to give other people
a chance to to put in the ore and

00:39:20.559 --> 00:39:23.847
maybe some of them will be other
question to be speaking along these lines

00:39:23.880 --> 00:39:31.880
, please.

00:39:46.719 --> 00:39:52.486
Yeah.

00:39:52.519 --> 00:39:57.486
Right. All right.

00:39:57.519 --> 00:40:05.519
The game. Mhm. Again you back

00:40:09.210 --> 00:40:16.276
where did Okay lot. Mhm.

00:40:16.309 --> 00:40:19.376
Here.

00:40:19.409 --> 00:40:27.409
Okay. And

00:40:28.809 --> 00:40:31.677
these two differences.

00:40:31.710 --> 00:40:37.177
Yeah. Played all right.

00:40:37.210 --> 00:40:44.977
And from that. Yes, I what? Okay,

00:40:45.010 --> 00:40:53.010
I'm thinking mhm. Some right. Uh Mr
Singer was saying that from his

00:40:53.440 --> 00:40:58.006
reading of uh my books and most
specifically the last one. Darkness and

00:40:58.039 --> 00:41:00.727
scattered light where I talked about
the reconstruction of the

00:41:00.760 --> 00:41:04.586
relationship between the country and
the city and the future. It would

00:41:04.619 --> 00:41:12.619
seem that my emphasis of non urban
life and its role in the future is part

00:41:12.869 --> 00:41:16.276
of the dynamic of polarization

00:41:16.309 --> 00:41:22.206
with Paulo's intense focusing on the
city as the primary evolutionary

00:41:22.239 --> 00:41:28.907
vehicle for uh the human future. Um I
think when we come down from the

00:41:28.940 --> 00:41:34.427
disagreement between, let's say
Mysticism versus theology and we come down

00:41:34.460 --> 00:41:41.267
to the role of the country, the
dialectic between country and city within

00:41:41.300 --> 00:41:47.197
civilization. There is not a
disagreement or polarization between

00:41:47.230 --> 00:41:52.046
parliament me because I can't, we're
getting too much overload here. Uhh I

00:41:52.079 --> 00:41:58.217
can't imagine a culture which would
not a firm and lift up and embrace its

00:41:58.250 --> 00:42:03.416
history of cities and the history of
this brief interval of civilization

00:42:03.449 --> 00:42:08.967
from 3000 Bc to 2000. D. Has been a
history of world cities, from Iraq to

00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:13.967
nine nova to Athens to Rome, to London
to new york and on into Paula's

00:42:14.000 --> 00:42:18.706
militarization of the city as
appropriate for planetary culture. I don't

00:42:18.739 --> 00:42:24.727
in any way deny refute uh, that thesis
at all, what I'm saying is much

00:42:24.760 --> 00:42:29.867
more um lower down the level of saying
that the relationship in post

00:42:29.900 --> 00:42:34.586
industrial society in which 2% are
involved in agriculture and 98% are

00:42:34.619 --> 00:42:39.376
involved in goods and services
supported by a glut of fossil fuels in the

00:42:39.409 --> 00:42:42.967
next 30 years is not going to be a
tenable relationship between country

00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:46.727
and city and the relationship in which
large world cities like new york

00:42:46.760 --> 00:42:52.486
have colonized the periphery. Like the
oil wells pipeline in Alaska, that

00:42:52.519 --> 00:42:55.847
dominance where the elites are at the
center and the hicks are at the

00:42:55.880 --> 00:43:00.456
periphery, that is going to change.
What is going to enable that to change

00:43:00.489 --> 00:43:04.206
as a new global consciousness, which
will allow us to d structure are

00:43:04.239 --> 00:43:09.066
megalithic monolithic unities like
nation states and we can go back into

00:43:09.099 --> 00:43:12.566
more emotional identities like Quebec
instead of Canada, like maybe

00:43:12.599 --> 00:43:17.416
Manhattan instead of new york city or
new york state. And whale devolution

00:43:17.449 --> 00:43:22.316
of Scotland Wales, Northern Ireland
ulster um Southern Ireland as well,

00:43:22.349 --> 00:43:25.347
that we're going to be in smaller
unity's at the same time that we're

00:43:25.380 --> 00:43:30.477
going to be in larger economic
biosphere planetary unities. The

00:43:30.510 --> 00:43:34.436
relationship, therefore of
consciousness, which has been dominated by

00:43:34.469 --> 00:43:39.106
elites and civilizations, is going to
undergo a change in which now the

00:43:39.139 --> 00:43:42.947
consciousness on a biological
planetary level is going to be one in which

00:43:42.980 --> 00:43:47.916
the center is nowhere and the
circumference is is um you know, the the

00:43:47.949 --> 00:43:51.146
circumference is now in the center is
everywhere. Which is a phrase of

00:43:51.179 --> 00:43:56.146
Nicholas of ouzo is a mystic. So that
when that happens if you take new

00:43:56.179 --> 00:44:01.626
york before I came to this conference,
I saw a film at linda's barn by a

00:44:01.659 --> 00:44:05.697
man named Hillary Harris on new york
is organism, which Paula would really

00:44:05.730 --> 00:44:09.566
like because it showed in lapse time
photography, the pulse of the

00:44:09.599 --> 00:44:13.247
arteries of the highways, juxtaposing
it with the pulse of blood in the

00:44:13.280 --> 00:44:17.506
human body and through lapse time in
the sun and the clouds and everything.

00:44:17.539 --> 00:44:22.256
He showed how new york is an organism.
Well now in the esoteric tradition

00:44:22.289 --> 00:44:25.537
uh which is beautifully described. It
can be experienced personally, but

00:44:25.570 --> 00:44:29.577
it's beautifully described in army
Corbin's book on uh celestial body and

00:44:29.610 --> 00:44:33.546
spiritual earth. He talks about
landscape angels, that there is a

00:44:33.579 --> 00:44:37.267
collective consciousness that over
lights, constellations of people, the

00:44:37.300 --> 00:44:41.617
way a fire over lights a log and that
there is a kind of collective

00:44:41.650 --> 00:44:46.557
consciousness of new york city that is
David or angelic. So that when you

00:44:46.590 --> 00:44:50.666
say the angel of new york over
lighting the empire state building in this

00:44:50.699 --> 00:44:53.447
tradition, you are not speaking
metaphorically and that this is an

00:44:53.480 --> 00:44:56.637
experience to be had and certainly out
of the body states and meditation

00:44:56.670 --> 00:45:01.396
now When New York reaches its crisis
in the 80s and 90s and it loses its

00:45:01.429 --> 00:45:05.017
power as the economic center of the
world, the informational center of the

00:45:05.050 --> 00:45:08.526
world, the kind of force that brought
it together like a sort of

00:45:08.559 --> 00:45:11.947
Portuguese man of war. That's a colony
of minds or what paul calls the

00:45:11.980 --> 00:45:16.657
organism of 1000 minds. A certain
compression and intensity was necessary

00:45:16.690 --> 00:45:20.807
to create that world city when we've
gone through an initiation, which is

00:45:20.840 --> 00:45:24.736
what we're beginning to experience now
on a racial level and go up to the

00:45:24.769 --> 00:45:28.856
next level of consciousness, we won't
have to constellation in that

00:45:28.889 --> 00:45:34.276
intense level to have eight million
people necessary to create one nucleus

00:45:34.309 --> 00:45:38.157
of civilization. That when you go up
to the next level, you reach a

00:45:38.190 --> 00:45:41.997
different dispersal when consciousness
can be suffused through the

00:45:42.030 --> 00:45:46.236
biosphere and highly initiated, highly
intellectually, highly developed

00:45:46.269 --> 00:45:50.566
individuals Can exist at what used to
be considered a periphery. So what

00:45:50.599 --> 00:45:54.657
I'm talking about is that the
structure of the last 5000 years has been a

00:45:54.690 --> 00:45:58.617
relationship with the center and
dialectic with the periphery that is

00:45:58.650 --> 00:46:03.666
breaking down in planet Ization. I
think two things happen from that one

00:46:03.699 --> 00:46:08.057
is policy larry Chardon vision of
implosion. So paolo is designing the

00:46:08.090 --> 00:46:12.717
cities for the landscape of the moon,
for space colonies, for the first

00:46:12.750 --> 00:46:17.577
colonization of mars and all of that's
valid, but that's only half of it.

00:46:17.610 --> 00:46:21.606
Reality in any biosphere always moves
in two equal and opposite

00:46:21.639 --> 00:46:26.706
strategies. The opposite is the more
mystical, decentralized, agrarian mal

00:46:26.739 --> 00:46:30.097
is whatever you wanna call it vision.
And that's what I'm trying to make

00:46:30.130 --> 00:46:33.327
more conscious because I don't think
it's being understood and I think

00:46:33.360 --> 00:46:37.247
we're rushing too much into a yang and
not understanding the yin and

00:46:37.280 --> 00:46:40.677
that's why I'm trying to energize this
to make another kind of

00:46:40.710 --> 00:46:45.137
consciousness um perceivable. Let me,
since we've been arguing about time

00:46:45.170 --> 00:46:50.787
, let me give you an image that may
help. Time is real, as you were saying

00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:55.017
, and we are saying at the bottom of
an ocean and there's a very dense

00:46:55.050 --> 00:46:59.307
kind of medium in which we experience
time behind us and in front of us

00:46:59.340 --> 00:47:04.767
and trying to make it real now as you
move up to different levels and you

00:47:04.800 --> 00:47:08.267
go out of the ocean, then you find
another level of vibration and energy

00:47:08.300 --> 00:47:13.106
that's the air, then time has a
different flow. The relative relativistic

00:47:13.139 --> 00:47:16.727
nature of time. Space changes as you
move from the physical to the author.

00:47:16.760 --> 00:47:20.497
Erich. Then you keep going and you go
out of the sky and you go into the

00:47:20.530 --> 00:47:23.827
outer atmosphere and you move from the
author eric into the astral or the

00:47:23.860 --> 00:47:27.296
causal and then you see the whole
solar system and you see time in a

00:47:27.329 --> 00:47:30.706
different way to the galaxy and then
the relativistic qualities change. So

00:47:30.739 --> 00:47:34.686
when you try to define time only with
what's happening at the densest part

00:47:34.719 --> 00:47:38.767
of the Eagles location at the bottom
of the ocean, you're dehumanizing me

00:47:38.800 --> 00:47:43.217
, you're taking away 90% of my
experience. I don't recognize my experience

00:47:43.250 --> 00:47:49.506
in that model and I don't think part
of the great flood of visions of

00:47:49.539 --> 00:47:55.066
cosmic cities. Thinking of Teotihuacan
here has been to define the city

00:47:55.099 --> 00:47:59.546
only as that dense part of matter.
That's why these cosmic cities have

00:47:59.579 --> 00:48:03.986
astronomy as part of their city
planning and that's where I think the real

00:48:04.019 --> 00:48:11.597
step of our Cassani should be too
imitate the chinese city planners who

00:48:11.630 --> 00:48:16.756
threw Fang shui would look at the
dragon flow of energy through the crust

00:48:16.789 --> 00:48:21.677
of the earth and locate through
clairvoyance buildings according to the

00:48:21.710 --> 00:48:25.677
geomagnetic properties of the
constellations of rock and water in certain

00:48:25.710 --> 00:48:29.236
places in the subtle mental of the
earth. Then the next thing was to bring

00:48:29.269 --> 00:48:32.896
in the astronomers and say the
energies as they aligned so that this city

00:48:32.929 --> 00:48:36.827
can make love to the stars requires
that everything be aligned to the

00:48:36.860 --> 00:48:40.177
position of the sun, the moon and the
planets. So you have to bring in an

00:48:40.210 --> 00:48:45.157
astronomer when you live with the
solar system as your neighborhood, Your

00:48:45.190 --> 00:48:52.206
consciousness is no longer just being
Bill Thompson step at a time. Good.

00:48:52.239 --> 00:48:54.736
 Good.

00:48:54.769 --> 00:49:00.836
Right.

00:49:00.869 --> 00:49:03.336
Absolutely.

00:49:03.369 --> 00:49:05.577
Yes. Yes. But you see that was the
interesting thing about this

00:49:05.610 --> 00:49:11.597
gentleman's comment in the cat half.
You actually changed Pollos concept

00:49:11.630 --> 00:49:15.307
of time and you made a very
interesting theological application to him in

00:49:15.340 --> 00:49:19.717
terms of work, the real process of
this place. Much as say, paul ST paul

00:49:19.750 --> 00:49:24.037
made a change of jesus. But in that
change, you, there was a big

00:49:24.070 --> 00:49:27.177
difference in your consciousness of
time because you were talking about

00:49:27.210 --> 00:49:30.787
the eternal now in which the future in
the past are impregnating and

00:49:30.820 --> 00:49:34.097
giving meaning to this moment of time.
And that's a much more cyclical

00:49:34.130 --> 00:49:38.367
conscious of time and not so linear.
So, you know, you're agreeing with

00:49:38.400 --> 00:49:46.137
Paulo, you're making very fascinating
changes. Please your question.

00:49:46.170 --> 00:49:54.170
Yeah.

00:50:13.960 --> 00:50:19.327
Well, that's that's what I get stuck
with the notion of grace and justice.

00:50:19.360 --> 00:50:24.166
Um, mm The two weeks ago we were
talking about that with a group and said

00:50:24.199 --> 00:50:29.267
, well, we had, we had about 70
millions of murders in the last two

00:50:29.300 --> 00:50:35.626
generations toward wars. Plus. So that
was a massacre of gigantic

00:50:35.659 --> 00:50:42.236
proportion. And I cannot see it
anyway, by which I can find grace unless

00:50:42.269 --> 00:50:46.776
that disgrace has been somehow
redeemed. And there's only one way already

00:50:46.809 --> 00:50:52.787
in that disgrace is to take the past
and make it into the present. But

00:50:52.820 --> 00:50:56.486
that's not the time was that Bill is
talking about? That's something very

00:50:56.519 --> 00:51:01.836
different. That's the going at the end
of the line. And at that station at

00:51:01.869 --> 00:51:06.646
the end of the line, you can pull all
the past within it and then within

00:51:06.679 --> 00:51:14.679
it you can find the justification and
the justice and the equity.

00:51:15.659 --> 00:51:21.126
Yeah,

00:51:21.159 --> 00:51:25.827
well, we, yeah, again, I'm much more
humble than that. I believe that you

00:51:25.860 --> 00:51:30.597
can pull a little but we cannot pull
the whole thing. It's a you know,

00:51:30.630 --> 00:51:36.747
it's about 3.5 billions of years of
struggle just on this little tiny

00:51:36.780 --> 00:51:41.157
thing we call the earth. Now, that's a
massive process. And that massive

00:51:41.190 --> 00:51:49.190
profits process is pervaded with
violence. That's life. Well, I I feel

00:51:49.610 --> 00:51:55.307
that we need to come up with an idea
with the notion that that violence is

00:51:55.340 --> 00:52:03.017
going to be not only made uh
comprehensible, but in a way made to be the

00:52:03.050 --> 00:52:08.776
reasons for for becoming what we are
going to be at the end. So all those

00:52:08.809 --> 00:52:14.767
means the small eating the big the big
eating being eaten by the bigger

00:52:14.800 --> 00:52:20.077
and so on. Uh, all those things have
to become ends at the end, how you

00:52:20.110 --> 00:52:23.546
get those things to become ends at the
end. Well, through utter knowledge

00:52:23.579 --> 00:52:29.577
, through utter utter uh,
understanding through utter compassion and all

00:52:29.610 --> 00:52:33.486
those things. But we don't have that
those things now, no matter how much

00:52:33.519 --> 00:52:39.927
we, we say. Well, I, I was illuminated
by a divine voice. I heard the

00:52:39.960 --> 00:52:43.807
beautiful thing to come to me from. I
don't know where Those are very

00:52:43.840 --> 00:52:50.356
beautiful phenomenons, but those uh 60
or 70 millions of people destroys

00:52:50.389 --> 00:52:55.287
are still 70 millions of people
destroyed. And that's a very tiny drop in

00:52:55.320 --> 00:53:02.347
the ocean of evolution. In terms of
strife, sufferings, pain, injustice,

00:53:02.380 --> 00:53:09.606
and so on. So I cannot buy that that
kind of model. I can't, there will

00:53:09.639 --> 00:53:17.639
never be justice in it.

00:53:31.849 --> 00:53:35.867
Well, I'm suggesting a very simple
thing that the universe as we, as we

00:53:35.900 --> 00:53:40.776
begin to know it as to transform
itself totally into something that we

00:53:40.809 --> 00:53:45.316
cannot imagine what it is. But there's
something will be pure intelligence

00:53:45.349 --> 00:53:49.336
or pure knowledge or whatever at that
point will be all be their

00:53:49.369 --> 00:53:54.217
understanding what happened to us, how
and why we behave in certain ways

00:53:54.250 --> 00:54:00.606
so that we be resurrected into it.

00:54:00.639 --> 00:54:08.639
All right. Uh, Jack.

00:54:29.039 --> 00:54:37.039
Yeah.

00:54:37.039 --> 00:54:45.039
Part

00:54:54.340 --> 00:54:57.336
no, that's the nature of an
intelligent. You're absolutely right. I'm not

00:54:57.369 --> 00:55:01.486
in any way saying that one has to be
conscious of these things as a matter

00:55:01.519 --> 00:55:04.606
of fact consciousness sometimes like a
juggler trying to keep conscious of

00:55:04.639 --> 00:55:08.566
every ball can get in the way. And
that when you really master typing or

00:55:08.599 --> 00:55:12.137
playing the piano, there's a certain
element of hyper consciousness that

00:55:12.170 --> 00:55:15.057
comes into and that consciousness can
be an impediment meaning

00:55:15.090 --> 00:55:21.657
consciousness meaning ego, focused
attention. Uh, no, these streams of

00:55:21.690 --> 00:55:26.666
consciousness or these gasses of
Galaxies that constellation around

00:55:26.699 --> 00:55:31.146
individual human beings uh, do not
require that the individuals have to be

00:55:31.179 --> 00:55:34.546
conscious any more. That each cell
that's doing his job in your body has

00:55:34.579 --> 00:55:38.316
to be conscious of your identity. It
still goes and serves as nerve tissue

00:55:38.349 --> 00:55:45.146
, is bone tissue, as specialized
tissue. So the, the relationship between

00:55:45.179 --> 00:55:49.677
angelic orders of intelligence or the
higher levels of forms in plato's

00:55:49.710 --> 00:55:54.276
cosmology is more a question of
education. What what we're talking about

00:55:54.309 --> 00:55:59.006
basically. Uh, when we're talking
about the relationship with aesthetics,

00:55:59.039 --> 00:56:05.197
activity like building a city and um
art and theology is we're talking

00:56:05.230 --> 00:56:10.197
about what are the appropriate
vehicles of, of leading out of education

00:56:10.230 --> 00:56:15.506
for the planet Ization of humanity.
And so this is very much where the

00:56:15.539 --> 00:56:19.447
balance of these things has to be
attuned. There's a difference between

00:56:19.480 --> 00:56:24.497
what I would say is the role of the
artist has initiate the cancel

00:56:24.530 --> 00:56:29.697
colossal, the civilization founder,
the creator of a whole new quantum

00:56:29.730 --> 00:56:36.037
leap in human culture and the role of
the artist as heroic creator. And

00:56:36.070 --> 00:56:41.537
I'm just saying is trying to make a
very minor point in a way that I see

00:56:41.570 --> 00:56:45.927
Pollo in the company of Michelangelo
and James Joyce. That's not a put

00:56:45.960 --> 00:56:51.427
down, I don't think. Uh, and that is
the traditional heroic role of the

00:56:51.460 --> 00:56:56.436
artist as heroic ego is heroic
creator. I'm only arguing about when we say

00:56:56.469 --> 00:56:59.816
we're going to move to the next step
Now, let me just finish this and give

00:56:59.849 --> 00:57:05.347
it back to you Now, Henrik said, how
could I dare to presume to criticize

00:57:05.380 --> 00:57:10.767
pollos theology? But that's precisely
the way in which we're all in

00:57:10.800 --> 00:57:15.646
communication with one another, the
act of publication of writing an

00:57:15.679 --> 00:57:19.387
article and sending it forth and
saying, I am now thinking about theology

00:57:19.420 --> 00:57:22.747
and I want to make a contribution to
theology and I want some feedback.

00:57:22.780 --> 00:57:27.267
Well, that's what you get in the same
way that when I write a book, I

00:57:27.300 --> 00:57:31.296
don't assume that Mr Sager is
presuming that criticize the book I write.

00:57:31.329 --> 00:57:35.497
So that part of this whole thing is to
be really clear about what the

00:57:35.530 --> 00:57:41.356
vision of civilization or planet
Ization is and what is the role of art,

00:57:41.389 --> 00:57:45.467
education, Mysticism and these other
realms in this whole new thing that

00:57:45.500 --> 00:57:48.717
we're going to experience on the other
side of the coming crisis of the

00:57:48.750 --> 00:57:55.396
world system. A personal note and a
large gripe.

00:57:55.429 --> 00:58:01.077
1st, I would never dare to say to
Bill, How would you do to criticize

00:58:01.110 --> 00:58:04.407
power theology for? Indeed, he has
been hired and brought here to

00:58:04.440 --> 00:58:09.046
criticize Soleri theology. But there
is another question whether there is

00:58:09.079 --> 00:58:14.217
any human being, who can say this is
theology, this is not theology and

00:58:14.250 --> 00:58:17.756
because of the importance of this
question. I am a bit unhappy about this

00:58:17.789 --> 00:58:21.997
whole discussion which for me has too
much a flavor of scholastic

00:58:22.030 --> 00:58:28.057
discussions of medieval times, all
those abstract terms floating around

00:58:28.090 --> 00:58:33.396
with no relation to me as a concrete
human being, I may be very naive, but

00:58:33.429 --> 00:58:37.347
I think theology, religion has always
been very concrete and tangible

00:58:37.380 --> 00:58:42.856
propositions. They had an immense
impact on human lives and also abstract

00:58:42.889 --> 00:58:49.086
, were guiding and incorporated into
the structure of human lives. They

00:58:49.119 --> 00:58:56.026
were indeed a part of the flow of
life. And I think what we are trying to

00:58:56.059 --> 00:59:01.526
do is to ask ourselves what we are at
present, what are our gods? What

00:59:01.559 --> 00:59:04.787
kind of gods we can and must believe
in? What is the source of our

00:59:04.820 --> 00:59:10.756
godliness for? We have found that
without it we are without an anchor. And

00:59:10.789 --> 00:59:14.706
what makes me unhappy about this whole
discussion is that the esoteric

00:59:14.739 --> 00:59:21.077
plane, at least of language has been
so far removed from from us as human

00:59:21.110 --> 00:59:27.287
beings, that we do not contribute to

00:59:27.320 --> 00:59:31.296
coherence, our connecting ourselves
under the guidance of some new

00:59:31.329 --> 00:59:35.756
transcendental ideas, but indeed we
contribute more to universal confusion.

00:59:35.789 --> 00:59:40.816
I should like to hope that during the
last few minutes, the illustrious

00:59:40.849 --> 00:59:47.367
members of this panel will help us to
get to grips again with religion as

00:59:47.400 --> 00:59:51.166
a concrete tangible phenomenon which
has always exerted an enormous

00:59:51.199 --> 00:59:56.657
influence on our lives, both
connecting well, connecting us with stars and

00:59:56.690 --> 01:00:01.137
heavens and at the same time giving us
guidance in our practical tangible

01:00:01.170 --> 01:00:06.106
day to day life and in regulating our
relationship with other human beings

01:00:06.139 --> 01:00:11.876
on moral and social grounds

01:00:11.909 --> 01:00:14.717
going to the station.

01:00:14.750 --> 01:00:22.750
Well, those things, if I thought
maybe, uh, let's uh, let's take one more

01:00:23.369 --> 01:00:27.106
question and then we'll try to make
some other people that some other fuel

01:00:27.139 --> 01:00:35.139
in the panels feet.

01:00:42.110 --> 01:00:44.977
You want to take that first pole since
I've been talking a little bit

01:00:45.010 --> 01:00:52.367
before. It depends on the size of the
future. Oh, the question is, what,

01:00:52.400 --> 01:00:57.376
what, what is the future of some
change as you see it in uh, in the life

01:00:57.409 --> 01:01:02.586
of, of the future? And I mean in the
future, life in a, in mankind's life

01:01:02.619 --> 01:01:04.876
,

01:01:04.909 --> 01:01:09.376
our theologians and architects.

01:01:09.409 --> 01:01:14.177
Well, I would like to eliminate the
television and the architect, I'm just

01:01:14.210 --> 01:01:18.177
a person trying to understand
something and then suggesting things, I

01:01:18.210 --> 01:01:22.787
don't know if that's theology or
architecture or whatever. But again, what

01:01:22.820 --> 01:01:25.796
do you, what do you mean by the
future? We know that the earth is going to

01:01:25.829 --> 01:01:29.967
go, well, he's going to become, unless
we do something about is going to

01:01:30.000 --> 01:01:36.227
become a frozen or burned out chunk of
matter. So that's, that's the

01:01:36.260 --> 01:01:42.646
future. And the scientists tells us
that it's unavoidable. I turned around

01:01:42.679 --> 01:01:45.836
and said, no, it's not avoidable. B is
not unavoidable because the spirit

01:01:45.869 --> 01:01:50.316
is going to do something about it.
That's why I believe in evolution. So

01:01:50.349 --> 01:01:54.256
if you say, what's what Stonehenge is
going to do within the next few

01:01:54.289 --> 01:01:58.727
generations, I would say that even
though I haven't visited stone Age, I

01:01:58.760 --> 01:02:04.967
think that it's it's a very impressive

01:02:05.000 --> 01:02:07.666
uh

01:02:07.699 --> 01:02:12.916
hopeless of mankind there. And I don't
I'm not trying to understand what

01:02:12.949 --> 01:02:16.316
they have been trying to do. Evidently
there is an astronomical

01:02:16.349 --> 01:02:21.467
relationship connecting those stones
and so on. And I should be there in

01:02:21.500 --> 01:02:26.376
order to receive the impact of that
construction. Uh not having been there

01:02:26.409 --> 01:02:30.267
, I don't know, but just by looking by
listening, I think it's it's an

01:02:30.300 --> 01:02:36.916
impressive thing. But as any other
kind of thing which is in part physical

01:02:36.949 --> 01:02:42.106
is going to go is going to disappear.
You can there's no two ways about it.

01:02:42.139 --> 01:02:46.526
That's why conservation, the true
conservation is only can only be a

01:02:46.559 --> 01:02:51.117
resurrection. There's no way by which
we can be true conservationists.

01:02:51.150 --> 01:02:54.887
Unless we believe that everything,
everything that has ever existed is

01:02:54.920 --> 01:03:00.816
going to be present somehow and
kicking some somehow and somewhere in the

01:03:00.849 --> 01:03:07.666
future. Any kind. Any other kind of
conservation is fantasy.

01:03:07.699 --> 01:03:11.566
Yes. I think that

01:03:11.599 --> 01:03:15.697
part of the process of historical
change of revolution is that you go back

01:03:15.730 --> 01:03:21.117
to the past and you re you? Re vision
with an emphasis on vision history

01:03:21.150 --> 01:03:25.666
because your consciousness of the past
energizes what you do in the

01:03:25.699 --> 01:03:30.947
present. So that when the irish
revolutionaries were trying to break free

01:03:30.980 --> 01:03:34.427
of England, the history, the english
told him was that you were ignorant

01:03:34.460 --> 01:03:37.896
savages and you had no culture until
we brought it in when we conquered

01:03:37.929 --> 01:03:41.477
you in the norman invasion in the 12th
century then then the irish went

01:03:41.510 --> 01:03:46.497
back and found that there was a
tradition of the great saints and scholars

01:03:46.530 --> 01:03:50.177
who had actually kept learning alive
in the dark ages and that they had

01:03:50.210 --> 01:03:53.717
run the reverse that they had
colonized England and then discovered there

01:03:53.750 --> 01:03:56.756
were even more ancient civilization
there in New grange and all the tummy

01:03:56.789 --> 01:04:01.876
, Lion, Karen's and megalithic ruins
of ancient Ireland. Then that began

01:04:01.909 --> 01:04:06.026
to have revolutionary implications
that what you see is your image of the

01:04:06.059 --> 01:04:11.597
past is your identity. It changes who
you think you are in the present and

01:04:11.630 --> 01:04:15.296
therefore gives new implications for
what you're about to become in in the

01:04:15.329 --> 01:04:21.186
future. So the prelude to every
revolution is a re visioning and re

01:04:21.219 --> 01:04:26.367
conceptualization of history, whether
it's marks or or standish O'Grady or

01:04:26.400 --> 01:04:30.956
whomever, what we're going through now
is precisely that re visioning of

01:04:30.989 --> 01:04:35.617
history as a change of our industrial
concept of progress. And we're

01:04:35.650 --> 01:04:41.686
learning from things like alexander
Tom's work on Stonehenge that there is

01:04:41.719 --> 01:04:47.626
an incredibly sophisticated and
indeed, probably matrilineal culture that

01:04:47.659 --> 01:04:51.776
is older and preceded Egypt, that's
much more sophisticated and that it's

01:04:51.809 --> 01:04:56.037
possible to have high mathematics,
high art, high astrological

01:04:56.070 --> 01:04:59.706
astronomical temples and not have
cities and that one of the reasons we've

01:04:59.739 --> 01:05:03.597
overlooked megalithic Western europe
is because we tended to be city

01:05:03.630 --> 01:05:08.126
oriented and had a very imperialistic
notion of history. So the, the

01:05:08.159 --> 01:05:11.816
implications whether or not Stonehenge
is an artifact, you know, is

01:05:11.849 --> 01:05:14.747
bulldozed and turned into a parking
lot or whatever. It doesn't matter.

01:05:14.780 --> 01:05:19.887
The implications of all of that are
enormous and we'll have an aar have

01:05:19.920 --> 01:05:25.646
already had revolutionary
implications. We are in one of those ages That

01:05:25.679 --> 01:05:29.037
are expressed, I think in the
paintings of Hieronymus Bosch where in the

01:05:29.070 --> 01:05:35.126
year, he showed the sky cracking open
and things in the air dropping fire

01:05:35.159 --> 01:05:39.327
on the burning cities. And as medieval
christendom ended and the new

01:05:39.360 --> 01:05:44.197
modern world system of 1500 to 2000
began. He had a vision of the

01:05:44.230 --> 01:05:49.126
beginning of the world system and also
a vision of World War two and the

01:05:49.159 --> 01:05:52.887
end of the world of the world system
that we're experiencing now so that I

01:05:52.920 --> 01:05:58.907
think the visions that seem to be past
oriented are in many ways the

01:05:58.940 --> 01:06:02.887
opening, the breaking of our false
sense of the past to create a new

01:06:02.920 --> 01:06:07.236
revolutionary future. And my last
comment, because I've got to supposedly

01:06:07.269 --> 01:06:11.776
say more stuff in a few minutes,
Heinrich, I agree with you about the

01:06:11.809 --> 01:06:18.836
academic thing, but that's really the
phenomenology of a conference. One

01:06:18.869 --> 01:06:21.947
of the things that always impresses me
when baker roshi comes to speak at

01:06:21.980 --> 01:06:25.557
linda's foreign, he's the abbot of his
monastery, he says I can't speak

01:06:25.590 --> 01:06:29.617
before inish it's I'm not supposed, my
teacher told me never to give

01:06:29.650 --> 01:06:33.856
lectures in the public so that his
answer to your question would be the

01:06:33.889 --> 01:06:38.807
coal community of Zen center at
Tassajara. My answer to your question is

01:06:38.840 --> 01:06:44.606
the community uh living experience of
linda's barn. Now, what we have here

01:06:44.639 --> 01:06:47.736
is the answer to everything we're
talking about is the process of creating

01:06:47.769 --> 01:06:52.336
arcosanti. But as all you people who
will live here in our building it,

01:06:52.369 --> 01:06:56.666
you know that from day to day, just
slashing the cement around that

01:06:56.699 --> 01:07:00.827
sometimes it's possible for your focus
to become just as cement and to

01:07:00.860 --> 01:07:04.756
lose a whole sense of the horizon. So
what I assume paolo is trying to do

01:07:04.789 --> 01:07:07.557
and having these festivals and
bringing artists and poets and musicians

01:07:07.590 --> 01:07:11.727
and thinkers and and gathers and
bullshitter is all in is to present a

01:07:11.760 --> 01:07:15.956
horizon again so that you can have a
figure ground relationship between

01:07:15.989 --> 01:07:20.017
this bucket of sent cement and this
kind of horizon. Now, if we were going

01:07:20.050 --> 01:07:24.316
to really make these esoteric things
real, um this is not the way your

01:07:24.349 --> 01:07:28.247
place or space or time or form to do
it in,

01:07:28.280 --> 01:07:35.347
I'm gonna ask Richard when, because he
hasn't spoken if he would make some

01:07:35.380 --> 01:07:38.367
statement at this point, whatever he
wants to comment on the conversation

01:07:38.400 --> 01:07:45.347
, our product for me.

01:07:45.380 --> 01:07:48.847
Mhm

01:07:48.880 --> 01:07:53.486
Well the first thing I'd like to say
is that I don't I don't really see

01:07:53.519 --> 01:07:57.247
how anybody can talk about theology

01:07:57.280 --> 01:08:02.557
and refer only to some kind of vague
ideology about a transcendent reality

01:08:02.590 --> 01:08:08.006
, that to me isn't theology and if
you're going to define what theology is

01:08:08.039 --> 01:08:14.477
, it has to be the manner in which a
particular community of faith has

01:08:14.510 --> 01:08:20.076
established an intellectual tradition
that must be carried on, clarified,

01:08:20.109 --> 01:08:23.887
continued in some sense, into the
future. That's what theology is, that's

01:08:23.920 --> 01:08:29.647
what it's always been. And to simply
speak of some something that somebody

01:08:29.680 --> 01:08:34.597
believes about the manner in which the
universe operates as being a

01:08:34.630 --> 01:08:41.897
theology is is meaningless to me. So
I'm very interested in the turn that

01:08:41.930 --> 01:08:48.586
the conversation uh, took with your
question because I've asked myself

01:08:48.619 --> 01:08:52.296
since coming here yesterday and
observing what was going on, I've asked

01:08:52.329 --> 01:08:58.576
myself well, now what is it, what is
it that energizes a situation like

01:08:58.609 --> 01:09:03.746
this? Why are people here, Why are
they here as work shoppers? And why are

01:09:03.779 --> 01:09:11.006
they here as uh participants in the
festival atmosphere? And it seems to

01:09:11.039 --> 01:09:15.067
me that if I try to answer that
question for myself, the answer that comes

01:09:15.100 --> 01:09:20.237
to me is they're not here to get a
metaphysics

01:09:20.270 --> 01:09:28.270
uh, least of all, a very, very, very
probable or in fact improbable

01:09:28.720 --> 01:09:35.166
physics based upon something called
evolution because it seems to me that

01:09:35.199 --> 01:09:39.246
more and more the kinds of
conversations and the kinds of belief

01:09:39.279 --> 01:09:44.187
structures that we set up over the
past 100 years and more about something

01:09:44.220 --> 01:09:49.057
called evolution. And it is a belief
structure are are seriously

01:09:49.090 --> 01:09:51.836
questioned,

01:09:51.869 --> 01:09:56.767
nobody needs to be told that in order
to do what we need to do in this

01:09:56.800 --> 01:10:02.626
particular time in which we exist,
that we have to have a metaphysics,

01:10:02.659 --> 01:10:06.826
least of all an evolutionary
metaphysics. I think what people want is a

01:10:06.859 --> 01:10:11.496
story. And as I see what is going on
here, I think that paolo Soleri has

01:10:11.529 --> 01:10:17.416
given people a story, a story about
people and of the giving of themselves

01:10:17.449 --> 01:10:21.937
to others and into an environment in
relationship to each other. That's

01:10:21.970 --> 01:10:25.987
what they want. Now, there may be some
intellectuals who are concerned

01:10:26.020 --> 01:10:31.467
with metaphysics, but that is
virtually an incidental thing about which

01:10:31.500 --> 01:10:35.467
you're going to get absolutely no
consensus and no agreement because we

01:10:35.500 --> 01:10:40.987
can be engaged in the same story,
doing the same thing together and

01:10:41.020 --> 01:10:48.456
metaphysically, b at opposite sides or
ends rather of a spectrum. The

01:10:48.489 --> 01:10:51.987
second thing I want to say is that the
people are not here because they

01:10:52.020 --> 01:10:55.786
want a religion, not only do they not
want to metaphysics, they're not

01:10:55.819 --> 01:10:58.746
here because they want a religion. As
far as I'm concerned, there are

01:10:58.779 --> 01:11:02.586
plenty of those and they're all, there
are many of them that are quite

01:11:02.619 --> 01:11:10.619
good and all of the good ones are
capable of creating everything that uh

01:11:13.140 --> 01:11:17.977
that has been spoken of here. There
isn't there, it is possible to turn to

01:11:18.010 --> 01:11:22.487
the christian tradition. It is
possible to turn to the jewish tradition

01:11:22.520 --> 01:11:27.677
and any any tradition of the great
religious traditions of humankind and

01:11:27.710 --> 01:11:34.477
find in it, if you really penetrate it
and go to it instead of make some

01:11:34.510 --> 01:11:38.166
kind of Presumptions about it on a
superficial level. There isn't anything

01:11:38.199 --> 01:11:42.147
, any one of those traditions that
isn't capable of doing all that you

01:11:42.180 --> 01:11:47.687
need to do so far as what religion is
meant to do. And the third thing I

01:11:47.720 --> 01:11:54.557
think is that nor are we here entirely
too, because we want another kind

01:11:54.590 --> 01:12:00.727
of narcissistic exploration of the
inner self. A story does not

01:12:00.760 --> 01:12:07.967
necessitate that kind of thing. Uh as
the sort of thing that we talk about

01:12:08.000 --> 01:12:12.046
when we talk about the necessity for
some kind of exalted states of

01:12:12.079 --> 01:12:17.557
consciousness and so forth. That's an
elite operation which people living

01:12:17.590 --> 01:12:24.027
in the circumstances of history. Uh
some have it, some want it, some don't.

01:12:24.060 --> 01:12:28.256
And I don't think there is any
necessity for putting some kind of a

01:12:28.289 --> 01:12:33.017
premium on those who do and those who
don't. So I guess the essence of

01:12:33.050 --> 01:12:38.156
what I'm saying is that it's something
similar at this point at any rate

01:12:38.189 --> 01:12:41.876
to what what Bill has been saying. And
that is if you venture into

01:12:41.909 --> 01:12:45.967
metaphysics and you venture into
religion, you must be prepared for the

01:12:46.000 --> 01:12:51.746
consequences. You must be prepared to
be the profit, the cult leader or

01:12:51.779 --> 01:12:58.206
the high priest, or else you must be
prepared simply to be a member of a

01:12:58.239 --> 01:13:02.237
community of faith that has some kind
of relationship to one of the great

01:13:02.270 --> 01:13:08.967
traditions. Uh I think what in other
words is happening here, that is

01:13:09.000 --> 01:13:17.000
necessary is that people are looking
for a vision. And that policy larry

01:13:17.289 --> 01:13:22.826
has in a sense, provided that kind of
vision and what is required at this

01:13:22.859 --> 01:13:27.206
stage of the things is the extension
of that vision into the kind of

01:13:27.239 --> 01:13:33.619
believable story that all of us can
say we are participants in. Thank you.

01:13:35.250 --> 01:13:37.250
Um,

01:13:38.350 --> 01:13:42.857
I do not agree it,

01:13:42.890 --> 01:13:48.506
say the least. It is to uh Carlos
resounding credit and ecumenical spirit

01:13:48.539 --> 01:13:52.267
that he's invited all these diverse
people here uh, to speak to him, to

01:13:52.300 --> 01:13:57.177
criticize and to tear it down, build
it up. So we we already understand

01:13:57.210 --> 01:14:05.210
something of o Paulo's a community. I
want to just say a couple of random

01:14:06.149 --> 01:14:13.506
thoughts, reflections upon yesterday's
conversations that we had here and

01:14:13.539 --> 01:14:19.567
to try to say finally, uh worried
about my own work experience at

01:14:19.600 --> 01:14:27.116
arcosanti and some things about the
future. Uh First of all theological

01:14:27.149 --> 01:14:35.097
language is a way of giving form to
those wondering moments when we find

01:14:35.130 --> 01:14:42.996
ourselves possessed by a power which
makes life holy and whole theological

01:14:43.029 --> 01:14:49.767
language is the means, an instrument
abandoned when it doesn't function

01:14:49.800 --> 01:14:51.807
creatively.

01:14:51.840 --> 01:14:58.406
A living theology demands a constant
process of iconoclasm

01:14:58.439 --> 01:15:06.439
and renaming of the holy. There is no
holy word, not even God.

01:15:09.739 --> 01:15:14.006
Then a quote from Van Gogh.

01:15:14.039 --> 01:15:21.107
I can do very well without God, both
in my life and my painting,

01:15:21.140 --> 01:15:26.807
but I cannot you always, I am do
without something that is greater than I

01:15:26.840 --> 01:15:34.840
, which is my life, the power to
create and in a picture. I want to say

01:15:34.880 --> 01:15:42.387
something comforting as music is
comforting. I want to paint men and women

01:15:42.420 --> 01:15:49.267
with that something of the eternal
which the halo used to symbolize and

01:15:49.300 --> 01:15:55.557
which we seek to give by the actual
radiance and vibrations of our

01:15:55.590 --> 01:15:58.406
coloring.

01:15:58.439 --> 01:16:01.866
Quote from Nietzsche.

01:16:01.899 --> 01:16:09.899
I would believe only in a god who
could dance and when I saw my devil I

01:16:10.210 --> 01:16:18.210
found him serious, thorough, profound
and solemn. It was the spirit of

01:16:19.130 --> 01:16:24.826
gravity through him all things fall

01:16:24.859 --> 01:16:31.006
not by wrath does one kill, but by
laughter? Come, let us kill the spirit

01:16:31.039 --> 01:16:37.137
of gravity. I've learned to walk ever
since. I let myself run. I've

01:16:37.170 --> 01:16:43.296
learned to fly ever since. I do not
want to be pushed before moving along.

01:16:43.329 --> 01:16:51.246
Now I am light now I fly now. I see
myself beneath myself now. A God

01:16:51.279 --> 01:16:58.597
dances through me. Arcosanti and
salary

01:16:58.630 --> 01:17:04.897
must keep their grip firmly on
fantasy.

01:17:04.930 --> 01:17:07.496
Our reality,

01:17:07.529 --> 01:17:15.217
our Western reality about world about
cities is too narrow. Someone has

01:17:15.250 --> 01:17:20.756
said that the real advances in science
comes when some one leaps out of

01:17:20.789 --> 01:17:28.789
the existing paradigms and creates a
new way of envisioning things. I

01:17:29.109 --> 01:17:32.196
believe one of the dangers

01:17:32.229 --> 01:17:40.229
of the work being done here. And
perhaps it's a temptation of Poland is

01:17:40.869 --> 01:17:48.097
the intellectual ization or theology.
Ization of this archaeology,

01:17:48.130 --> 01:17:54.977
there is an imbalanced abalone in
emphasis. What else with two sons are

01:17:55.010 --> 01:18:03.010
ecology and neglect of the dynasty in
way in the very construction of the

01:18:03.180 --> 01:18:09.876
place, there is room for
conceptualization, dialogue theorizing, but

01:18:09.909 --> 01:18:17.909
there's not enough place or the
creation of new rituals in which the art

01:18:18.319 --> 01:18:25.376
of labor and architecture and
construction or celebrated a place for the

01:18:25.409 --> 01:18:31.586
spirit to find sustenance and power
that infuses the work

01:18:31.619 --> 01:18:38.586
in a city without churches to create a
new vision of holy space

01:18:38.619 --> 01:18:40.987
norman Brown

01:18:41.020 --> 01:18:48.786
In his love body said one point, Diane
ISIS calls us outdoors

01:18:48.819 --> 01:18:54.666
out of the temple, made with hands out
of the ark of the book, Out of the

01:18:54.699 --> 01:19:00.796
cave of the Law, Out of the belly of
the letter. 1st Tabernacle in

01:19:00.829 --> 01:19:02.887
Jerusalem,

01:19:02.920 --> 01:19:06.987
the second Tabernacle, The Universal
Church.

01:19:07.020 --> 01:19:13.187
Third Tabernacle. The open sky.

01:19:13.220 --> 01:19:17.786
I submit to you that this panel

01:19:17.819 --> 01:19:23.866
has not solved any of your problems.
It has not reconciled art and

01:19:23.899 --> 01:19:31.899
theology, but it I hope has been an
exercise in concern for every one of

01:19:34.020 --> 01:19:39.536
the panelists. And I hope for you
about those ways in which policy larry

01:19:39.569 --> 01:19:46.807
and this movement is trying to
articulate what they believe about what

01:19:46.840 --> 01:19:54.840
they're doing and the dialogue and the
dialectic must and will go on thank

01:19:55.000 --> 01:19:57.887
you.

01:19:57.920 --> 01:20:05.920
Okay,

01:20:22.210 --> 01:20:30.210
someone's mantra.

01:20:35.109 --> 01:20:40.307
So we'll give you a chance to leave
and those who one mistake and come

01:20:40.340 --> 01:20:45.076
back in a second.

01:20:45.109 --> 01:20:52.607
Well, you better do it. Is this
working. We have a request if there is a

01:20:52.640 --> 01:21:00.640
David Greenberg here to come up and
receive a message

01:21:02.479 --> 01:21:05.666
doors because there's going to be a
concert and I think we'll need the

01:21:05.699 --> 01:21:12.376
doors closed.

01:21:12.409 --> 01:21:20.409
Uh huh. Yeah.

01:21:41.609 --> 01:21:45.836
For those who may have come in and
wonder what section are part of the

01:21:45.869 --> 01:21:50.586
festival. This is my name is William
Thompson. I'm the founding director

01:21:50.619 --> 01:21:56.256
of the linda's Foreign Association in
new york city and a writer. And I

01:21:56.289 --> 01:22:02.446
thought since this is a festival
rather than a conference and especially

01:22:02.479 --> 01:22:07.937
since I was listening yesterday to a
talk about improvisation in music in

01:22:07.970 --> 01:22:14.967
jazz and classical music, I thought
rather than giving a talk or lecture

01:22:15.000 --> 01:22:18.267
on cultural history,

01:22:18.300 --> 01:22:22.946
which I was going to try to go from
the harmonization of the primates to

01:22:22.979 --> 01:22:27.866
the planet. Ization of humanity uh is
in the view of cultural change and

01:22:27.899 --> 01:22:33.177
changing relationships of art and the
sacred that I would perhaps rather

01:22:33.210 --> 01:22:41.210
than do that, just ask from you to
find out more where you are and have

01:22:41.989 --> 01:22:46.786
more of a sense at this time and space
in arcosanti as a process and as a

01:22:46.819 --> 01:22:52.506
festival. So maybe asked three or four
questions, which I would right down

01:22:52.539 --> 01:22:58.217
and then improvise and give a talk
upon those questions. So it's more like

01:22:58.250 --> 01:23:04.767
I'm asking you like the musical
offering a bach to be the aristocrat, the

01:23:04.800 --> 01:23:09.927
leader of the court and to give me a
musical theme, a statement of theme.

01:23:09.960 --> 01:23:13.597
And then upon that I will try to work
theme and variation and

01:23:13.630 --> 01:23:18.666
intellectual development because it
seems to me that if we're talking

01:23:18.699 --> 01:23:25.567
about the relationship of religious
experience art, environment. thinking

01:23:25.600 --> 01:23:32.586
one of the things that is, I think
happening in contemporary art is that

01:23:32.619 --> 01:23:40.057
we live in a culture of information.
Not nature anymore. Just and with so

01:23:40.090 --> 01:23:45.357
many millions of people in
universities and so many hundreds of thousands

01:23:45.390 --> 01:23:51.647
of papers and books written a year
that the storyteller now has to be a

01:23:51.680 --> 01:23:57.796
brick allure and a storyteller with
information and therefore writers like

01:23:57.829 --> 01:24:05.829
myself tom wolf, Lewis thomas are
really creating a new genre of art. The

01:24:06.920 --> 01:24:12.256
epic was appropriate for a classical
civilization focusing upon warrior

01:24:12.289 --> 01:24:14.456
society.

01:24:14.489 --> 01:24:18.156
The novel was appropriate for a middle
class, expanding industrial society

01:24:18.189 --> 01:24:23.597
, exploring matter in the external
world. And basically concerned with my

01:24:23.630 --> 01:24:30.267
missus, the imitation of reality now
that we're in a cybernetic society of

01:24:30.300 --> 01:24:34.956
consciousness of electronics and
mysticism.

01:24:34.989 --> 01:24:40.927
The artists can't play out the same
role and just write a day in the life

01:24:40.960 --> 01:24:44.336
of a person living in new york city
and what happens to him, we've done

01:24:44.369 --> 01:24:46.737
that for several centuries and that's
enough. Now it's time to do

01:24:46.770 --> 01:24:52.777
something else. And so what people
like myself and Lewis thomas are doing

01:24:52.810 --> 01:24:56.777
in books like the lives of a cell or
my own works at the edge of history

01:24:56.810 --> 01:25:01.927
or the one I'm working on. Now, the
time falling bodies take delight is

01:25:01.960 --> 01:25:07.027
really creating a genre that, that I
use the german word for this in Const

01:25:07.060 --> 01:25:12.017
this in shaft means science in german
and so lobbing off the shaft and

01:25:12.050 --> 01:25:18.147
adding const, I think we're seeing a
new art form that's really very

01:25:18.180 --> 01:25:22.017
appropriate. As a matter of fact, it's
so kind of new in a way that people

01:25:22.050 --> 01:25:27.807
sometimes mistake it and don't
understand that what people like myself or

01:25:27.840 --> 01:25:33.027
lewis, thomas or Castaneda are doing
is presenting forms that have the

01:25:33.060 --> 01:25:36.387
structure of art, but the content of
scholarship and so a lot of people

01:25:36.420 --> 01:25:40.536
mistake the surface for the structure
and can't quite understand. Well,

01:25:40.569 --> 01:25:44.956
this is an academic university history
and this isn't a novel. So what the

01:25:44.989 --> 01:25:50.647
hell is it? Um, and so I think that,
that kind of perception fails to

01:25:50.680 --> 01:25:53.727
understand that the genres of art have
to change with our culture. And if

01:25:53.760 --> 01:25:56.317
we're in a new culture, you just can't
write the same way that you would

01:25:56.350 --> 01:26:00.927
before. And so I thought, well, if
this inquest is what I try to do when

01:26:00.960 --> 01:26:05.246
I'm alone in my, with my typewriter,

01:26:05.279 --> 01:26:10.446
much as a composer would try to
compose and put the notes down in place.

01:26:10.479 --> 01:26:15.506
What if I were trying to do something
scary scary for me boring for you,

01:26:15.539 --> 01:26:22.317
uh, and try to open myself up in a
more yin way unless yang too, this

01:26:22.350 --> 01:26:26.967
place is time these people and rather
than laying on something on you and

01:26:27.000 --> 01:26:31.567
just telling a story which I can do
and I've done before, uh, to try

01:26:31.600 --> 01:26:37.357
something more like theme and
variation. So, this requires you uh, to give

01:26:37.390 --> 01:26:43.446
the statement of theme. I think
probably four questions at the most would

01:26:43.479 --> 01:26:47.187
be handled. All the theme has to be
just a small collection of notes. So

01:26:47.220 --> 01:26:53.626
let's have a moment of silence of
attunement to whatever sources of

01:26:53.659 --> 01:26:58.987
intuition or inspiration we have. And
just try to, in a very yin feminine

01:26:59.020 --> 01:27:03.336
way become conscious of everything
going on at all the levels around here

01:27:03.369 --> 01:27:07.666
and then those of you who feel so
moved in the Quaker sense of the meeting

01:27:07.699 --> 01:27:12.857
too, proposed statement questions or
whatever. Then I'll take those and

01:27:12.890 --> 01:27:16.647
write them down and then give my talk.
Okay, is that acceptable? Or would

01:27:16.680 --> 01:27:19.187
you rather have me just tell you a
story about history from beginning to

01:27:19.220 --> 01:27:23.347
end

01:27:23.380 --> 01:27:31.380
acceptable? You said Okay. All right,
let's just take a minute then.

01:28:05.369 --> 01:28:07.637
All right,

01:28:07.670 --> 01:28:12.737
those who feel so moved. Yes, sir.

01:28:12.770 --> 01:28:20.770
What is my personal goal in life?
Nothing like getting down to basics.

01:28:27.970 --> 01:28:35.137
Nice light question. Nothing like
starting off with a heavy

01:28:35.170 --> 01:28:43.170
he must be a what? What? And in what
way does it contribute

01:28:53.069 --> 01:28:58.317
of humanity, Paulo uses the word Whoa
man, I've shifted from mankind to

01:28:58.350 --> 01:29:05.619
humanity the same thing. Yes. Now
we'll have from a woman. Yes, you please.

01:29:17.470 --> 01:29:19.470
Mhm.

01:29:45.970 --> 01:29:49.116
Because let me translate that into a
smaller question and see if I'm

01:29:49.149 --> 01:29:57.149
keeping the spirit of your question,
what role does the quote dark night

01:29:57.279 --> 01:30:02.727
of the soul

01:30:02.760 --> 01:30:08.126
which is individual

01:30:08.159 --> 01:30:12.326
have for

01:30:12.359 --> 01:30:14.517
people

01:30:14.550 --> 01:30:18.687
in general. Since it seems to me you
were moving from the solitary

01:30:18.720 --> 01:30:22.527
individual to the collective to the
social, what role does it have for

01:30:22.560 --> 01:30:25.927
people in general? And

01:30:25.960 --> 01:30:33.960
Okay,

01:30:37.760 --> 01:30:42.227
okay. And what implications does it
have

01:30:42.260 --> 01:30:46.836
for you all, you said something
before? More about where we're going in

01:30:46.869 --> 01:30:49.647
arcosanti? What implications does it
have for like the present and the

01:30:49.680 --> 01:30:57.680
future? Which I think is interesting
too.

01:31:07.960 --> 01:31:10.927
Yeah,

01:31:10.960 --> 01:31:13.527
I mean,

01:31:13.560 --> 01:31:17.927
right. I think what one way one could
compress that into a few words to

01:31:17.960 --> 01:31:23.557
say, what is the role of it of the
initiate IQ experience for a city or

01:31:23.590 --> 01:31:31.590
for humanity in general and where
contemporary society is going?

01:31:34.359 --> 01:31:39.826
Well, that's a good question.

01:31:39.859 --> 01:31:44.927
Role of elites.

01:31:44.960 --> 01:31:49.027
Is it for a few or for the many?

01:31:49.060 --> 01:31:52.616
Since these questions are getting so
long ambitious and heavy, I might

01:31:52.649 --> 01:31:58.727
only be able to deal with three
instead of four. Okay. You sir

01:31:58.760 --> 01:32:06.760
yourself

01:32:12.050 --> 01:32:20.050
the primates? Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

01:32:24.750 --> 01:32:28.517
Right.

01:32:28.550 --> 01:32:36.550
Call.

01:32:41.649 --> 01:32:45.717
Okay. What are the most

01:32:45.750 --> 01:32:49.916
important

01:32:49.949 --> 01:32:52.097
points

01:32:52.130 --> 01:32:58.717
I've learned about cultural history

01:32:58.750 --> 01:33:03.116
that can help us

01:33:03.149 --> 01:33:07.286
for the present and future or the
relevant, what is the relevance of

01:33:07.319 --> 01:33:13.416
cultural history? Is it another way of
saying it?

01:33:13.449 --> 01:33:19.446
And the last and fourth question, I
think I'll have two men and two women

01:33:19.479 --> 01:33:27.479
to keep a sense of balance. Yes.

01:33:31.149 --> 01:33:35.116
What

01:33:35.149 --> 01:33:40.616
what do I think about dance? Since the
last panel here ended on the two

01:33:40.649 --> 01:33:48.649
dancing God, what do I think about
dance and human culture?

01:33:52.949 --> 01:34:00.949
Okay, now I'll take a moment

01:34:09.039 --> 01:34:13.506
to begin at the beginning with the
first question,

01:34:13.539 --> 01:34:19.616
what is my personal goal in life? And
in what way does it contribute to

01:34:19.649 --> 01:34:26.097
the welfare of humanity? To begin with
the latter part, the ego can never

01:34:26.130 --> 01:34:33.437
know its effect in time or space and
to attempt to describe its impact or

01:34:33.470 --> 01:34:39.296
its effect or to write its history or
epitaph before it was dead is an

01:34:39.329 --> 01:34:47.256
exercise in self glorification.
There's no way that I could say that what

01:34:47.289 --> 01:34:51.166
I do alters

01:34:51.199 --> 01:34:56.810
the history of humanity or is
important for the following reasons.

01:34:56.840 --> 01:34:58.840
Nevertheless, I think that each of us does work with a sense of how

01:35:05.840 --> 01:35:10.277
our work should be attuned to the
larger welfare of humanity. So my

01:35:10.310 --> 01:35:16.607
personal goal in life mm is too

01:35:16.640 --> 01:35:22.366
work toward the connecting of the
sacred and the profane and to try to

01:35:22.399 --> 01:35:29.006
bring together what has been broken
and make it whole once again. And in

01:35:29.039 --> 01:35:33.836
working upon that those broken
fragments in our culture, work upon the

01:35:33.869 --> 01:35:38.506
broken pieces of myself to achieve
some sense of unity and the battle

01:35:38.539 --> 01:35:46.539
between the artist and the yogi. Uh
the battle between the profane that

01:35:47.420 --> 01:35:53.086
requires liberation by going out into
the six secular and breaking out of

01:35:53.119 --> 01:35:56.107
ecclesiastical controls

01:35:56.140 --> 01:36:04.140
and the necessity of the and humility
of the of the shall we say, the yogi

01:36:05.899 --> 01:36:11.357
to realize that the sacred is larger
and that one has to work for the sake

01:36:11.390 --> 01:36:18.366
realization of art, of the humanities,
of culture, so that everything that

01:36:18.399 --> 01:36:22.967
I'm doing is to try to move from
religion, which I grew up in in in the

01:36:23.000 --> 01:36:29.996
catholic church to spirituality and
defined in spirituality,

01:36:30.029 --> 01:36:35.906
a dancing balance between the energies
of the liberation of the secular

01:36:35.939 --> 01:36:39.807
and the liberation of the profane and
all the energy that comes from

01:36:39.840 --> 01:36:45.067
profane nation and liberation, and
which is a creative expensing form and

01:36:45.100 --> 01:36:50.307
its opposite, a consolidation into a
new sacred vision of culture, a new

01:36:50.340 --> 01:36:57.687
concentric vision, a new Dante's
vision when I was very young and had

01:36:57.720 --> 01:37:04.876
those heroic dreams that everyone has
at 14, 17, interestingly PJ and

01:37:04.909 --> 01:37:08.347
talking about adolescents who said,
they all write their life plans and

01:37:08.380 --> 01:37:11.567
their life scenarios and they already
have their statue up in the streets

01:37:11.600 --> 01:37:18.876
of paris uh awarding them for their
nobel work, my fantasy uh came to me

01:37:18.909 --> 01:37:23.567
while I was reading when I was sick,
recovering from a long operation for

01:37:23.600 --> 01:37:28.887
cancer of the thyroid, and I dropped
out of high school and I was alone by

01:37:28.920 --> 01:37:32.807
myself and I was reading Whitehead
science in the modern world. And I

01:37:32.840 --> 01:37:37.347
thought if it was not only thought a
voice in my head said, If the 20th

01:37:37.380 --> 01:37:40.046
century has ever to put itself back
together again, it will be with this

01:37:40.079 --> 01:37:44.756
man's vision, this work. And so I felt
a kind of intellectual conversion

01:37:44.789 --> 01:37:49.217
to the philosophy of organism of
wholeness of Whitehead. And then I

01:37:49.250 --> 01:37:55.347
thought because in those days I saw
myself as a poet that I wanted to take

01:37:55.380 --> 01:37:59.607
Whitehead's philosophy of process and
time and space and the movement from

01:37:59.640 --> 01:38:05.887
object and matter to process and
dynamism and use it for poetry. The way

01:38:05.920 --> 01:38:11.777
Dante had used a coin is as the kind
of uh metaphysical backdrop for his

01:38:11.810 --> 01:38:18.057
work. And to try to synthesize and
create a larger synthetic vision to

01:38:18.090 --> 01:38:23.347
approach the kind of architecture of
thought that that was available at

01:38:23.380 --> 01:38:28.347
Dante before the modern world began
its adventure into disintegration and

01:38:28.380 --> 01:38:32.217
fragmentation and energizing itself.
And so I had a sense that the

01:38:32.250 --> 01:38:38.206
philosopher gives the poet the
furniture of existence. But it's up to the

01:38:38.239 --> 01:38:42.187
poet to make it into a home and the
way in which the just the crude

01:38:42.220 --> 01:38:47.046
objects are made uh made lovable and
made in some form. That is not just

01:38:47.079 --> 01:38:51.086
mere order but is uh

01:38:51.119 --> 01:38:55.246
is a loving relationship of form that
enhances one's life and becomes a

01:38:55.279 --> 01:39:02.597
home. That I was looking to somehow
put together a use of language in

01:39:02.630 --> 01:39:07.796
poetry where it would no longer be
subject predicate object but would be

01:39:07.829 --> 01:39:11.347
almost english as if I were writing
chinese and that everything would be

01:39:11.380 --> 01:39:18.607
processed and transformation. And I
failed to do that partly because I I

01:39:18.640 --> 01:39:23.777
went to Cornell and I was appalled at
the artist, the vanity of the poets

01:39:23.810 --> 01:39:28.246
, their narcissism, their self
indulgence. They're egotistical desire for

01:39:28.279 --> 01:39:32.246
publication. They're posturing their
peacock quality. There's they're

01:39:32.279 --> 01:39:36.616
fashionable sterility there, writing
only of their own neurosis and I

01:39:36.649 --> 01:39:40.647
thought that the contemporary poets
are like the prophets of baal and I

01:39:40.680 --> 01:39:46.336
had a kind of aesthetic revulsion to
everything that they stood for. And I

01:39:46.369 --> 01:39:52.376
was complete disgust and the poet in
our society. And so I said, if this

01:39:52.409 --> 01:39:56.826
is poetry, I will not be a poet. And
so I went in the opposite direction

01:39:56.859 --> 01:40:01.366
off to Ireland to do a study of the
role of the great poets in changing

01:40:01.399 --> 01:40:05.286
the world, the role of Yates and E.
And creating the irish revolution and

01:40:05.319 --> 01:40:08.847
dismembering the british empire and
trying to check the materialism of

01:40:08.880 --> 01:40:13.137
industrial society with the mystical
vision of the irish. And so I was

01:40:13.170 --> 01:40:17.847
attracted said, I'll go into history,
I'll follow the muse of Cleo and I

01:40:17.880 --> 01:40:22.296
found by abandoning poetry and going
into the brute resistant matter of

01:40:22.329 --> 01:40:26.756
historical fact, that there was a way
that brute resistant fact could be

01:40:26.789 --> 01:40:31.967
made to sing, and that there was a way
that history could provide the

01:40:32.000 --> 01:40:37.446
elements of story and narrative that
could satisfy one's hunger for the

01:40:37.479 --> 01:40:40.767
beautiful ones, hunger for the
aesthetic. And I found that that

01:40:40.800 --> 01:40:47.576
relationship of opposites was myth and
that history have seen sensitively

01:40:47.609 --> 01:40:51.916
that history was the performance of
myth. And so I wrote my first book in

01:40:51.949 --> 01:40:56.536
a kind of study of the relationships
of imagination in history, poetry and

01:40:56.569 --> 01:41:01.456
revolution, trying to find the answer
myself because as I wrote the book,

01:41:01.489 --> 01:41:05.706
my own city was going up in flames in
the insurrection in watts. And I

01:41:05.739 --> 01:41:09.756
found a huge revolution of
consciousness with the 60s and and the new

01:41:09.789 --> 01:41:14.477
music and the psychedelic drugs. And I
could see that as I was in my study

01:41:14.510 --> 01:41:19.006
in Cambridge massachusetts, writing a
book about the transformation of

01:41:19.039 --> 01:41:23.406
history, that history was being
transformed all around me. So at that

01:41:23.439 --> 01:41:28.446
point I decided that it wasn't enough
just to be a historian of cultural

01:41:28.479 --> 01:41:34.326
change. That one had to take one's
vision seriously and find a way where

01:41:34.359 --> 01:41:39.737
the university could become a place in
which myth, history could become

01:41:39.770 --> 01:41:42.887
the performance of myth. It was clear
to me that the modern university was

01:41:42.920 --> 01:41:46.256
not such a place. The modern
university was not a place for the

01:41:46.289 --> 01:41:49.996
sexualization of the humanities. It
was not a place for the sense of the

01:41:50.029 --> 01:41:54.097
holiness of the intellect. It was not
a sacramental space. It was a place

01:41:54.130 --> 01:42:00.937
of pride of ambition, of power, of a
Tower of Babel. So that that sent me

01:42:00.970 --> 01:42:06.387
on a search all over the world looking
for the right kind of place where

01:42:06.420 --> 01:42:11.836
education could literally become a
place where one could move out of the

01:42:11.869 --> 01:42:17.967
tiny ego to the larger sense of the
soul, the admin, whatever you want to

01:42:18.000 --> 01:42:21.956
call it, and to find a place where
people could come together in a

01:42:21.989 --> 01:42:27.866
community and communion of scholarship
to see how the intellect itself

01:42:27.899 --> 01:42:35.326
could become a dance and how the dance
of the mind in form could take on a

01:42:35.359 --> 01:42:38.517
poetic nature of its own and at that
time I didn't know anything about

01:42:38.550 --> 01:42:42.866
this in constant, I didn't know what I
was doing and deciding not to write

01:42:42.899 --> 01:42:46.746
another book on the irish revolution,
but to go west and follow the voice

01:42:46.779 --> 01:42:51.147
, saying go to California and out of
that wandering and unconscious

01:42:51.180 --> 01:42:55.477
wandering, I wrote out the edge of
history and at the end of it realized

01:42:55.510 --> 01:42:59.666
what I had done. But basically the
goal was to try and find a sacred

01:42:59.699 --> 01:43:04.237
school, to try and find the
contemporary equivalent of the ancient linda's

01:43:04.270 --> 01:43:08.756
foreign or the ancient academy of
Pythagoras, that Crotona or the ancient

01:43:08.789 --> 01:43:13.796
frappucino or whatever kind of schools
they had in Stonehenge to find or

01:43:13.829 --> 01:43:18.887
the schools of Persia to find a way in
which knowledge was not just simply

01:43:18.920 --> 01:43:24.557
facts, but knowledge lead to
initiation and led to a transformation. And

01:43:24.590 --> 01:43:28.046
so I felt that the trouble with the
catholic church, which I knew as a

01:43:28.079 --> 01:43:32.027
child was that sister mary immaculate
and father Murphy did not really

01:43:32.060 --> 01:43:38.416
know in the way that a yogi new or no
new in the way that Hiroshi new and

01:43:38.449 --> 01:43:42.027
I was trying to find catholic roches
and couldn't find any, trying to find

01:43:42.060 --> 01:43:45.916
catholic saints and couldn't find any,
I found nice good people, but I

01:43:45.949 --> 01:43:49.696
didn't find what I was looking for. So
that took me into the journey to

01:43:49.729 --> 01:43:55.456
the east and into yoga and into a into
whitehead as a way of trying to

01:43:55.489 --> 01:43:59.017
find ways in which white head and yoga
could come together. And that's why

01:43:59.050 --> 01:44:02.027
Yates interested me so much because
he's a marvelous intellectual and

01:44:02.060 --> 01:44:07.427
mystical synthesis. So the wandering
brought me to all kinds of places to

01:44:07.460 --> 01:44:12.107
Arcosanti in 1971. This is the end of
a seven year cycle for me. And

01:44:12.140 --> 01:44:16.557
things tend to run in mystical seven
year cycles to the Hopi reservation,

01:44:16.590 --> 01:44:23.097
uh to ashrams in India, to Oroville,
to the max Planck Institute in

01:44:23.130 --> 01:44:27.866
Germany, uh to the fin horn community.
And in all of these places, I was

01:44:27.899 --> 01:44:31.527
looking I guess for the grail, the way
in which you could find the vessel

01:44:31.560 --> 01:44:36.326
for the incarnation of this higher
consciousness in the culture. And I was

01:44:36.359 --> 01:44:41.847
interested in those places where the
vision had set down and created a

01:44:41.880 --> 01:44:46.506
larger civilization. So I became
interested in Saint columba and the way

01:44:46.539 --> 01:44:51.536
in which Iona created Western european
civilization in the dark ages. I

01:44:51.569 --> 01:44:54.277
was interested in cattle co waddle in
the creation of mexican civilization

01:44:54.310 --> 01:44:58.446
, interested in the role of the
buddhist monks and moving through indian

01:44:58.479 --> 01:45:02.116
tibetan into china. And I was
searching in a sense with the way in which

01:45:02.149 --> 01:45:08.687
personal vision can move into larger
civilization and felt that all

01:45:08.720 --> 01:45:13.416
civilizations really begin in a vision
and that the vision of progress and

01:45:13.449 --> 01:45:18.576
power and the domination of nature had
reached its end in MIT and that I

01:45:18.609 --> 01:45:22.637
didn't want to continue in that in
that dimension at all. And so I became

01:45:22.670 --> 01:45:26.256
as a as unhappy with M I. T. As I had
been unhappy with the poets of

01:45:26.289 --> 01:45:29.256
Cornell,

01:45:29.289 --> 01:45:33.677
but in looking at say the way in which
mitt or the catholic church had

01:45:33.710 --> 01:45:39.357
failed to connect the experience of
initiation to education. And they had

01:45:39.390 --> 01:45:44.046
ended up only becoming what I called
yesterday, the interior decorators of

01:45:44.079 --> 01:45:52.079
Plato's cave. I began to invoke
something and energy I guess that I wasn't

01:45:52.390 --> 01:45:59.217
prepared for. Because in in looking to
put initiation back into education

01:45:59.250 --> 01:46:01.546
,

01:46:01.579 --> 01:46:06.477
I think one comes to a place where
it's no longer a question of just

01:46:06.510 --> 01:46:11.347
getting a PhD, we're writing a book,
but it comes to a point where you've

01:46:11.380 --> 01:46:16.286
invoked in your search something
things so large that your prayers are

01:46:16.319 --> 01:46:20.446
going to be answered, but you won't
survive it and you have to be very

01:46:20.479 --> 01:46:25.086
careful for what you pray for because
you'll get it. Uh and sometimes we

01:46:25.119 --> 01:46:30.467
pray for things that we really aren't
ready for. And so I was invoking a

01:46:30.500 --> 01:46:34.916
lot of heavy imagery of monastic
schools like the ancient linda's farm,

01:46:34.949 --> 01:46:42.949
pythagoras academy, uh yoga and
started In the period of revolution of 68

01:46:43.430 --> 01:46:47.597
with the assassinations of Kennedy and
Martin Luther King and the riots in

01:46:47.630 --> 01:46:52.677
the streets decided that there was
nothing in the collective in history

01:46:52.710 --> 01:46:56.916
that I could see that was going to be
either sacred or B. Whitehead or the

01:46:56.949 --> 01:47:00.496
Yates. It was a choice between the
domination of power of the liberal

01:47:00.529 --> 01:47:04.477
technocrats and those who ran the
military, defense university

01:47:04.510 --> 01:47:08.576
establishment mitt or the Marxist
radicals who were trying to gain wrest

01:47:08.609 --> 01:47:13.557
power away from them who were
materialists. And so I quit and went off to

01:47:13.590 --> 01:47:17.647
Canada and started practicing crea
yoga.

01:47:17.680 --> 01:47:24.746
But the practice of crea yoga is
raises an energy

01:47:24.779 --> 01:47:28.336
that forces you to confront your
unconscious and forces you to become

01:47:28.369 --> 01:47:34.967
aware that you're you're not as good
as you think you are and that there's

01:47:35.000 --> 01:47:39.647
a whole shadow side and that the more
energy it raises and the more power

01:47:39.680 --> 01:47:46.866
that comes, the more distortion your
personality goes through. The only

01:47:46.899 --> 01:47:51.196
way I can describe initiation. And
here I'm coming to the next question of

01:47:51.229 --> 01:47:57.046
the dark night of the soul is by um

01:47:57.079 --> 01:48:03.097
a lesson that was dictated to me in In
meditation as I was ending a period

01:48:03.130 --> 01:48:07.727
of about seven years of Korea yoga.
And it was saying that tantra yoga and

01:48:07.760 --> 01:48:10.866
I don't mean it necessarily in the
explicitly sexual sense. I mean it in

01:48:10.899 --> 01:48:13.536
the awakening of kundalini

01:48:13.569 --> 01:48:20.196
tantra yoga is like making g when you
boil butter, you subjected to a

01:48:20.229 --> 01:48:25.866
violent process, which breaks it down.
Now, if you look at normal butter,

01:48:25.899 --> 01:48:30.536
it's yellow and clear and homogeneous
and this is like the normal

01:48:30.569 --> 01:48:35.126
personality before initiation, the
normal well adjusted wholesome

01:48:35.159 --> 01:48:39.536
personality is very functional because
it's not dealing with its shadow

01:48:39.569 --> 01:48:43.317
because it's repressing a lot of the
negative stuff. and it's decided that

01:48:43.350 --> 01:48:47.626
in order to have this social role,
this ego to make it through society,

01:48:47.659 --> 01:48:53.246
it's necessary to stay on track. And
so the normal personality is quite

01:48:53.279 --> 01:48:58.796
functional and it looks to be
consistent and healthy. But if you look at

01:48:58.829 --> 01:49:02.046
butter almost microscopically you can
see that it's sort of like globules

01:49:02.079 --> 01:49:06.046
of white and yellow and that it's a
contradiction of unresolved elements

01:49:06.079 --> 01:49:11.906
of golden elixir and ugly white
globules of fat. The way in which you

01:49:11.939 --> 01:49:17.336
become aware of that is to subject the
butter to a violent agitation by

01:49:17.369 --> 01:49:21.006
putting it on the stove and cooking it
and boiling it. Which is the

01:49:21.039 --> 01:49:24.456
process of the awakening of kundalini
which is the process of the practice

01:49:24.489 --> 01:49:27.727
of things like crea yoga, there are
many different ways to do this. But

01:49:27.760 --> 01:49:33.137
what happens then is your opposites
become energized and visible and you

01:49:33.170 --> 01:49:41.170
break down into a golden clear elixir
and ugly globules of fat. All that

01:49:41.250 --> 01:49:47.996
is most negative uh and disgusting uh
and unconscious and instinctive and

01:49:48.029 --> 01:49:53.387
unsa pollinated. It's almost like an
alchemy. Now if you were to stop the

01:49:53.420 --> 01:49:58.336
process there, you would be in a very
dangerous position which is one of

01:49:58.369 --> 01:50:02.666
the troubles of working with acid in
drugs and things of this sort at this

01:50:02.699 --> 01:50:06.467
particular point. The energy that
comes to you tends to inflate your ego

01:50:06.500 --> 01:50:10.027
and you say I am a yogi, I am on the
path. There are those on the path and

01:50:10.060 --> 01:50:15.027
those are those off the path. I am a
sadhu, I am an initiative of secret

01:50:15.060 --> 01:50:18.586
mysteries of the Himalayas. And you go
through all these inflations of the

01:50:18.619 --> 01:50:22.387
ego where the energy that's supposed
to break down your ego ends up

01:50:22.420 --> 01:50:26.277
energizing it. And at this point, many
people called themselves gurus and

01:50:26.310 --> 01:50:30.796
set up a sign and put on a turban and
take in disciples and that when you

01:50:30.829 --> 01:50:34.496
go to the Ashram you find that the
guru is an incredibly contradictory

01:50:34.529 --> 01:50:39.446
being who is interested in money and
laying every woman in the Ashram and

01:50:39.479 --> 01:50:42.677
coming on with the wisdom of the east
and you have a being with these

01:50:42.710 --> 01:50:46.097
incredible contradiction, there's a
lot of power and there's this

01:50:46.130 --> 01:50:50.217
incredible golden elixir and the guy
is not all fraud, but there are these

01:50:50.250 --> 01:50:55.527
incredibly unresolved globules of ugly
fat. And this is the point midway

01:50:55.560 --> 01:50:58.746
where the guy sets himself up as a
guru and says, I'm ready now to take on

01:50:58.779 --> 01:51:03.586
disciples. I'm really hot stuff. It's
a very difficult period and one

01:51:03.619 --> 01:51:07.027
reason why it's useful to work with a
guru who can help you sift through

01:51:07.060 --> 01:51:10.987
with the strainer and take out the
ugly globules of fat and throw it away

01:51:11.020 --> 01:51:15.527
because the process of clarification
of butter, which is like a latin form

01:51:15.560 --> 01:51:21.277
of, of illumination, is to try to gain
uh something that at the end is

01:51:21.310 --> 01:51:25.567
basically still human. It's G and G is
very much just butter, but it's

01:51:25.600 --> 01:51:29.916
clarified butter. And so it's at a
different stage than than the ordinary

01:51:29.949 --> 01:51:36.027
personality. But the funny, dangerous
thing about trying to build in

01:51:36.060 --> 01:51:39.307
initiation into the experience of
education and say, now that I've had my

01:51:39.340 --> 01:51:45.727
PhD, it's time to go to the Ashram, is
that if you stop in the middle, you

01:51:45.760 --> 01:51:52.477
can't stay at a plateau, you'll get
worse, not better. Once you awaken the

01:51:52.510 --> 01:51:57.187
energies, once you get on the
shamanistic path, you cannot go back to

01:51:57.220 --> 01:52:00.967
stage one, you cannot go back to being
a normal householder and being a

01:52:01.000 --> 01:52:05.706
good dutiful suburban husband
professor, etcetera, you will get worse, not

01:52:05.739 --> 01:52:09.897
better. So that it's at that point,
that the thing is very dangerous,

01:52:09.930 --> 01:52:14.767
because this is the point where you
can have psychosis. This is the point

01:52:14.800 --> 01:52:18.756
in which you have no frame of
reference for what's happening to you. And

01:52:18.789 --> 01:52:22.317
in trying to end, boy, if you take
drugs, and I thank God, I had enough

01:52:22.350 --> 01:52:26.376
intuitive guidance not to do that. You
really multiply a hundredfold the

01:52:26.409 --> 01:52:30.857
danger of self deception and
psychosis, and I've lost a few friends in

01:52:30.890 --> 01:52:35.477
that path. So I'm speaking from my own
experience, so that at that

01:52:35.510 --> 01:52:40.267
particular point, you begin to be in a
very dangerous condition. You're

01:52:40.300 --> 01:52:44.286
sort of like a a jet going through the
sound barrier and you're rattling

01:52:44.319 --> 01:52:48.946
and things have come flying off and
and your personality is uh is really

01:52:48.979 --> 01:52:53.256
contradictory and really in a state of
turbulence because you've shattered

01:52:53.289 --> 01:52:57.836
the old steady state and before the
new consolidation can emerge, you're

01:52:57.869 --> 01:53:02.477
just all over the place up and down.
So that the strange thing is by

01:53:02.510 --> 01:53:08.717
invoking initiation, I was really
playing with fire and invoking stuff

01:53:08.750 --> 01:53:13.637
That is would be pretty hard to build
into sort of initiation one a in the

01:53:13.670 --> 01:53:18.187
humanities classroom and think it was
going to work. So I was very naive.

01:53:18.220 --> 01:53:22.357
I was the professor aware that the
university didn't make any sense and it

01:53:22.390 --> 01:53:27.206
had to be re visioned and fixed up and
naively thought that all you had to

01:53:27.239 --> 01:53:30.267
do was to add yoga and that you would
go through graduate school and you

01:53:30.300 --> 01:53:33.817
get your PhD and then you would go and
spend seven years or so in intense

01:53:33.850 --> 01:53:38.166
practice of of yoga and then, you
know, you would be ready to be a college

01:53:38.199 --> 01:53:43.046
teacher and that everybody should go
through them. But what happened was

01:53:43.079 --> 01:53:46.517
the sense that

01:53:46.550 --> 01:53:50.737
that I discovered what I was talking
about yesterday, the three stages at

01:53:50.770 --> 01:53:56.817
the first stage is the of illumination
is not

01:53:56.850 --> 01:53:59.017
gaining

01:53:59.050 --> 01:54:03.717
a lot of transcendental experiences.
You are given ecstatic bliss states

01:54:03.750 --> 01:54:07.057
to energize you. It's it's very one,
it's part of the grace of, of yoga

01:54:07.090 --> 01:54:11.147
that at the very beginning, you're
given really beautiful experiences that

01:54:11.180 --> 01:54:14.336
convince you that this is the path and
that this is genuine and that

01:54:14.369 --> 01:54:17.477
you're you have a glimpse of a higher
consciousness and then the rest, it

01:54:17.510 --> 01:54:20.967
closes down and the rest of your life
is you keep getting up every morning

01:54:21.000 --> 01:54:24.107
saying, why am I meditating? I'm just
sitting here thinking about the rent.

01:54:24.140 --> 01:54:27.756
This is a complete waste of time. I'm
still a dumb, ignorant ship. When

01:54:27.789 --> 01:54:30.887
the hell am I going to get really
illuminated? And your mind just runs on

01:54:30.920 --> 01:54:34.586
and on and on, and you think, God, I'm
doing 3.5, 4 hours of yoga day,

01:54:34.619 --> 01:54:38.666
surely I should be making some
progress. Uh, and you approach it the way

01:54:38.699 --> 01:54:42.166
any graduate student does, you know,
you're gonna take your final exams,

01:54:42.199 --> 01:54:45.357
you're gonna get a and the rest of it
and you start and say, illumination

01:54:45.390 --> 01:54:47.887
is at the end of the track and I'm an
ignorant. So I'll just run and work

01:54:47.920 --> 01:54:51.546
hard and get myself illuminated. If it
takes six hours a day, I'll do six

01:54:51.579 --> 01:54:56.437
hours. So when approaches yoga with
all the fantasies of the old

01:54:56.470 --> 01:55:03.206
personality of being an academic, um
involved in upward mobility,

01:55:03.239 --> 01:55:07.086
but the stages that comes out of that
is the illumination of your darkness

01:55:07.119 --> 01:55:12.586
, the confrontation with the shadow,
the awareness of you ain't so good

01:55:12.619 --> 01:55:17.406
after all. And as that moves and
continues,

01:55:17.439 --> 01:55:21.767
you reach the point of Stage two. And
I mean, it's not so clear, These are

01:55:21.800 --> 01:55:25.246
just metaphors that don't concretize
these stages to be absolute things,

01:55:25.279 --> 01:55:31.456
They're more uh loose indications, it
flows into Stage two, which is

01:55:31.489 --> 01:55:35.746
coming to the edge of your sanity. You
come to the edge of the formation

01:55:35.779 --> 01:55:41.286
of the ego and all that is not ego.
And you realize in a sense that you've

01:55:41.319 --> 01:55:45.696
created the ego in the way that you
would almost a tune to a radio channel

01:55:45.729 --> 01:55:50.347
and fix on it and create a projected
being in time and space and that

01:55:50.380 --> 01:55:56.456
that's you and you realize how
illusory it is and how full of illusion and

01:55:56.489 --> 01:56:03.097
how arbitrary and how limited and you
also realize how close to psychosis

01:56:03.130 --> 01:56:08.046
the disintegration of the ego is. This
is one reason why a lot of Yogi

01:56:08.079 --> 01:56:11.506
teachers say, don't get into yoga
unless you have a good healthy strong

01:56:11.539 --> 01:56:15.406
ego. Because if you have a weak
unformed adolescent ego, you'll you'll

01:56:15.439 --> 01:56:18.996
definitely go psychotic and
schizophrenic is this is not for a person

01:56:19.029 --> 01:56:22.857
without an ego, it's for a person with
a healthy stable ego then to go

01:56:22.890 --> 01:56:26.616
into it at that particular point where
you're at the edge of the Yugo,

01:56:26.649 --> 01:56:30.187
seeing the border of psychosis and
sanity and seeing how sanity is defined

01:56:30.220 --> 01:56:35.796
by society, Your sensibility changes
and you can smell auras and uh you

01:56:35.829 --> 01:56:39.086
have sort of weird experiences where
the senses come together in different

01:56:39.119 --> 01:56:45.357
combinations and you're aware that
things are getting all unraveled. If

01:56:45.390 --> 01:56:50.796
you persist in that uh and continue
with your practice,

01:56:50.829 --> 01:56:54.796
then you it reaches the point

01:56:54.829 --> 01:56:57.796
where

01:56:57.829 --> 01:57:00.496
that's lovely.

01:57:00.529 --> 01:57:07.097
Yes, it reaches that point and

01:57:07.130 --> 01:57:14.557
you eventually have to completely
accept your defeat and have to accept

01:57:14.590 --> 01:57:21.506
the fact that the construction of a
project to be a good yogi and to get a

01:57:21.539 --> 01:57:29.539
yogi PhD and to get illuminated uh is
an exercise in fantasy and vanity

01:57:29.930 --> 01:57:37.067
and that the ultimate end of all your
wandering is the complete uh

01:57:37.100 --> 01:57:42.786
collapse and defeat and the surrender
of your whole idea of being a yogi.

01:57:42.819 --> 01:57:46.217
So you have to reach the almost
Krishnamurti point Where you've spent

01:57:46.250 --> 01:57:51.727
seven or 8 years in four hours a day
getting up and meditating and holding

01:57:51.760 --> 01:57:55.366
onto your technique and saying, crea
yoga is a divine technique and it's

01:57:55.399 --> 01:57:59.107
gonna carry me to higher consciousness
where you let go of all techniques

01:57:59.140 --> 01:58:04.126
whatsoever and throw yours ah fu your
meditation pillow out the window and

01:58:04.159 --> 01:58:12.086
sit completely open, vacant void and
surrendering even your yoga. And that

01:58:12.119 --> 01:58:17.786
comes at a point when I think when one
accepts his absolute

01:58:17.819 --> 01:58:20.656
inability to deal with it, that's
where you reach this kind of dark night

01:58:20.689 --> 01:58:25.536
of the soul aspect, where you say
welsh it, I mean, crea yoga was supposed

01:58:25.569 --> 01:58:31.496
to be it and here I am just the same,
you know, nerd I was when I began uh

01:58:31.529 --> 01:58:34.786
I know how to meditate and I know how
to have certain kind of psychic

01:58:34.819 --> 01:58:38.376
experiences, but the psychic is just
sideways. It's just a you know, the

01:58:38.409 --> 01:58:42.166
mirror image of the physical, so you
can, you know, do nice fancy things.

01:58:42.199 --> 01:58:48.267
So what and it's uh you know, it's new
seminar games, not simply not very

01:58:48.300 --> 01:58:51.987
different from the kind of things you
do in graduate school. So you reach

01:58:52.020 --> 01:58:58.126
a certain point where ST john talks
about aridity and that you don't feel

01:58:58.159 --> 01:59:01.017
all your bliss states were in the
early years of your practice, those

01:59:01.050 --> 01:59:06.086
ecstatic transcendent uh out of the
body experiences

01:59:06.119 --> 01:59:09.317
and all you experience toward the end
of your practice is just aridity,

01:59:09.350 --> 01:59:15.357
nothingness, void, uh complete
sterility, complete ordinary nous, complete

01:59:15.390 --> 01:59:23.390
uh absence of God, void. Uh blackness.
And one feels the whole thing is a

01:59:23.770 --> 01:59:30.906
complete mortification of the ego to
use the um the christian phrase. And

01:59:30.939 --> 01:59:35.597
at that particular point, then one
realizes that the awakening of

01:59:35.630 --> 01:59:43.557
kundalini is not a ultimately
enlightenment or wisdom, it's a psychic

01:59:43.590 --> 01:59:48.006
energy that's just part of life. And
the elevation of kundalini is

01:59:48.039 --> 01:59:52.437
important. But the descent of
kundalini is equally sacred and that one is

01:59:52.470 --> 01:59:55.996
the materialization of spirit and the
other is the spiritual ization of

01:59:56.029 --> 02:00:02.237
matter. And that one being ordinary is
as paolo would say, uh where it's

02:00:02.270 --> 02:00:08.656
at and that being who you are and
accepting your ego is an important thing.

02:00:08.689 --> 02:00:14.807
And so one comes to the point of with
a virtuoso with a Stradivarius, the

02:00:14.840 --> 02:00:19.067
attempt to destroy the ego is not the
point, the virtual doesn't shatter

02:00:19.100 --> 02:00:24.906
the Stradivarius, but plays with it,
note by note and it note by note, the

02:00:24.939 --> 02:00:28.916
music is able to express the fullness
of time because when the music is

02:00:28.949 --> 02:00:33.177
ended, then the then the music is
complete and the party to now fully

02:00:33.210 --> 02:00:37.097
exists because it's finished. And so
that the whole linear thing of time

02:00:37.130 --> 02:00:44.217
is escaped by accepting the linear
step by step, Note by note. So that the

02:00:44.250 --> 02:00:52.250
ultimate aspect is a kind of return to
the the ordinary and realizing that

02:00:52.510 --> 02:00:55.857
initiation can't be put back in
education. And my attempts to do it at

02:00:55.890 --> 02:00:59.857
linda's foreign were failures. So I
gave people a lot of power and

02:00:59.890 --> 02:01:03.987
independence at linda's foreign and
very little training. And five or six

02:01:04.020 --> 02:01:06.637
years later after linda's farm, they
weren't terribly different from when

02:01:06.670 --> 02:01:11.956
they went in. So it's very clear that
I could go on a personal journey,

02:01:11.989 --> 02:01:15.546
but that couldn't generalize and
become a school. So that the whole

02:01:15.579 --> 02:01:20.187
project of building intellectual itty
and meditation together in a sacred

02:01:20.220 --> 02:01:24.847
school that would be linda's farm was
itself a failure too. And so one had

02:01:24.880 --> 02:01:31.876
to accept in a sense the failure of
all those goals. But in the failure,

02:01:31.909 --> 02:01:36.336
there's a peculiar thing that happens.
I the words that came to me in

02:01:36.369 --> 02:01:42.656
meditation is that when you give up
God can give down and that only by

02:01:42.689 --> 02:01:48.097
being wounded are you opened and only
at the point of complete wounding

02:01:48.130 --> 02:01:53.107
and surrender. Are you really able to
be open to what had been trying to

02:01:53.140 --> 02:01:57.647
get into you all the time and that if
you try to meditate, you know, and

02:01:57.680 --> 02:02:04.246
really work at it hard, you're getting
in your way and that the even

02:02:04.279 --> 02:02:07.557
though one has a lot of psychic
experiences, the deception is that you

02:02:07.590 --> 02:02:10.506
think because of the psychic
experiences that you're moving toward wisdom

02:02:10.539 --> 02:02:15.126
, that's not true. The psychic is not
is not wisdom. And at that point, I

02:02:15.159 --> 02:02:20.586
was talking to trump foreign pressure
and he was saying, we were comparing

02:02:20.619 --> 02:02:24.777
notes with the christian and the
buddhist and he was saying that the

02:02:24.810 --> 02:02:30.057
difference between buddhism and yoga
is that in yoga, you try to use

02:02:30.090 --> 02:02:34.746
physiological exercises of the subtle
bodies and meditation practices to

02:02:34.779 --> 02:02:40.326
change the personality and to change
the body in buddhism, you work upon

02:02:40.359 --> 02:02:45.567
the character to achieve wisdom. So
that when the physiological and other

02:02:45.600 --> 02:02:49.086
changes come, they're irrelevant. So
they've just turned it the other way

02:02:49.119 --> 02:02:51.916
around, which is exactly like the
christians, where they say you can speak

02:02:51.949 --> 02:02:55.536
with tongues. But if you don't have
love, then you've missed the whole

02:02:55.569 --> 02:03:00.227
boat. So that the Buddhist emphasis
and the Christian emphasis on Caritas

02:03:00.260 --> 02:03:03.987
are very, very similar. And again, as
with ancient Judaism, they say you

02:03:04.020 --> 02:03:07.246
shouldn't get into these practices
until you're well adjusted, normal,

02:03:07.279 --> 02:03:12.557
healthy and over 40. So, And we can
see the wisdom of that because the 60s

02:03:12.590 --> 02:03:15.817
was about the adolescent religious
experience. And what happens, you know

02:03:15.850 --> 02:03:19.857
, when you try to have the universe
infusing the stage of adolescence, you

02:03:19.890 --> 02:03:24.467
get, you know, some highs, but you get
a lot of deception

02:03:24.500 --> 02:03:30.746
both politically and religiously. So
that out of that than I could more

02:03:30.779 --> 02:03:36.487
readily accept the fact that linda's
barn would have to be ordinary and

02:03:36.520 --> 02:03:40.227
that I would have to accept the fact
that what had been set up to be a

02:03:40.260 --> 02:03:43.967
monastic school of retreat was
becoming

02:03:44.000 --> 02:03:47.906
a center for the political inquiry
into a new culture and a new

02:03:47.939 --> 02:03:51.246
civilization. And that the people who
were paying attention to in this

02:03:51.279 --> 02:03:54.217
foreign weren't necessarily yogis or
buddhist, but were people like

02:03:54.250 --> 02:03:58.996
Governor Brown in California. And so
it brought me back to society and

02:03:59.029 --> 02:04:04.357
that the paradox that what seeks to be
escapist ends up becoming politics.

02:04:04.390 --> 02:04:08.406
And that taught me the wisdom of what
the french poet said when he said,

02:04:08.439 --> 02:04:15.086
Sharp Peggy to commands a mystique, a
fenian politique. Everything begins

02:04:15.119 --> 02:04:19.076
in mysticism but ends in politics the
sixties, We're, in a sense,

02:04:19.109 --> 02:04:23.557
mysticism, the 80s are going to be
politics

02:04:23.590 --> 02:04:30.326
now. What this has to do for society
in general is that I think humanity

02:04:30.359 --> 02:04:35.857
at large is experiencing the dark
night of the soul and the initiation

02:04:35.890 --> 02:04:40.517
and the destruction of all its self
images. It's having its confidence

02:04:40.550 --> 02:04:45.156
shattered, that science or technology
can control and manage reality. It's

02:04:45.189 --> 02:04:48.876
having its confidence in religion in
the old fashioned sense shattered,

02:04:48.909 --> 02:04:52.847
that it can deliver the good, It's
having its emphasis on the

02:04:52.880 --> 02:04:56.597
counterculture religions of the gurus
shattered because we're clearly

02:04:56.630 --> 02:05:01.487
seeing all that sixties and seventies
stuff isn't really getting very far

02:05:01.520 --> 02:05:05.857
and people are getting locked into
reverend moon kind of stuff and that

02:05:05.890 --> 02:05:13.890
the ashrams are limited to. And so all
our strategies of maintaining

02:05:14.109 --> 02:05:18.817
control Are being shattered. And I
think that what we'll see in the 80s is

02:05:18.850 --> 02:05:25.067
the de structuring of the world
system. It's relationship between culture

02:05:25.100 --> 02:05:30.546
and nature and ecology, the industrial
system, the process of urbanization

02:05:30.579 --> 02:05:33.937
and the process of nationalism and all
of these will generate their

02:05:33.970 --> 02:05:37.616
shadows, nationalism will generate
terrorism, urbanization will generate

02:05:37.649 --> 02:05:42.246
the breakdown of all civic systems
like new york and Calcutta. And that

02:05:42.279 --> 02:05:46.927
ecology will generate uh industry will
generate ecological disruption and

02:05:46.960 --> 02:05:50.046
and certain kind of cataclysms. So
we're coming to the crisis of the

02:05:50.079 --> 02:05:53.536
industrial nation state system and its
world cities like new york and

02:05:53.569 --> 02:05:57.317
London, So this is going to be a
period of initiation and dark night of

02:05:57.350 --> 02:06:04.887
the soul if we try to resist it. Uh
then I think the impedance in the and

02:06:04.920 --> 02:06:07.677
the wire is going to generate even
more and more heat and it's going to be

02:06:07.710 --> 02:06:11.336
really apocalyptic if we can
understand that we're going through an

02:06:11.369 --> 02:06:17.147
initiation experience and completely
let go and surrender in the profound

02:06:17.180 --> 02:06:23.286
ist deepest sense of having a
planetary religious spiritual awakening of

02:06:23.319 --> 02:06:27.196
the order of the sixth century Bc,
which was pythagoras allowed to mama,

02:06:27.229 --> 02:06:33.086
vera buddha, the hebrew prophet all at
the same time, If we can allow

02:06:33.119 --> 02:06:40.017
ourselves to be open to that, then I
think we're the possibility of moving

02:06:40.050 --> 02:06:45.027
through this week to passage this
crisis. This initiation is open. If we

02:06:45.060 --> 02:06:50.246
don't understand the religious maps
we've been given and we attempt to

02:06:50.279 --> 02:06:55.217
continue in a linear way,
industrialization, urbanization, and nationalism.

02:06:55.250 --> 02:06:58.357
I think we'll have an apocalyptic
Third World War and will experience a

02:06:58.390 --> 02:07:03.927
real literal concrete material
destruction and have very large dark ages.

02:07:03.960 --> 02:07:10.126
So it's a question of how large the
destruction is going to be and how how

02:07:10.159 --> 02:07:13.927
humanity is going to make it through.
As for the role of the elites in

02:07:13.960 --> 02:07:20.446
this, someone said here before me that
elites should not have any special

02:07:20.479 --> 02:07:24.567
significance given to them. And I
think that's true that we need elites.

02:07:24.600 --> 02:07:29.057
All culture is based on elites, Paulo
is an elite are, if you want to

02:07:29.090 --> 02:07:32.456
study guitar, you go to the best
guitar teacher, you can find. The trouble

02:07:32.489 --> 02:07:35.116
with our universities is they're not
elitist enough. And what has

02:07:35.149 --> 02:07:38.916
destroyed them is mediocrity, not
elitism, Harvard no longer knows what

02:07:38.949 --> 02:07:41.807
it's doing. And this has hurt America
greatly. I mean, Harvard was a great

02:07:41.840 --> 02:07:45.487
institution in the age of Whitehead
and William James and when it lost its

02:07:45.520 --> 02:07:49.227
vision of the humanities and was taken
over by behavioral science and

02:07:49.260 --> 02:07:52.626
political ambition. And we got the
Harvard be of skinner and e o Wilson

02:07:52.659 --> 02:07:55.977
America was wounded. You know, it's
one of our great institutions and it

02:07:56.010 --> 02:07:59.557
it really hurts to have it fall into
the wrong hands of just the Mcx

02:07:59.590 --> 02:08:02.746
George Bundy's and the marriage of
Harvard in Washington that gave us

02:08:02.779 --> 02:08:10.187
Vietnam so that if we if we see that
we need elites, but they mustn't be

02:08:10.220 --> 02:08:15.229
given power that they have to be
point.