Yeah, a continuing dialogue regarding the theme which is the reconciling
of aesthetics and theology that we were trying each in his own way to
address yesterday that perhaps it would be well for us today to begin with
some of your uh responses and questions two,
the panel and then perhaps at the near the close, we would take some time
for our panel to make a summarizing short of her short summarizing
statement on this general subject. So we would like to begin and pleased
with the panelists repeat the question for the micro for the recording so
that we have the question as well as the, your response to it. So if you
could keep your question somewhat inbounds but raise them for things you
heard yesterday that you wanted to either clarify or or raise questions
about the probe.
We want to give you an opportunity.
How many of you were here. You extruded that my view. Uh huh mhm I think
we lost our audience. They're listening to the piano music. Yes, that's uh
well that makes it bit of a problem.
Mhm Maybe we just, I mean we should start out with the summarizing
statements uh, to give the flavor.
Oh no, no, I couldn't possibly do that. So that we could give some uh
impetus for it.
Mm I think there are five of us. If each of us gives one sentence summary
, we may have a flavor of what was going on. I think what was going on was
a recognition that our civilization and our culture has a very high
standard of living, but the very low ceiling of spiritual aspiration and
spiritual attainment. And we then considered what is the nature
of our ultimate beliefs
has expressed through theology and religion. At one point, we're asking,
what is the nature of God? And I think we have had more
agreement on what is it that response in human beings to the notion of
godliness of divinity, of striving beyond our grasp. Then we could agree
on what is the origin and ultimate destiny of the divine.
Yeah, I'm supposed to speak at 1:00. So I think I'm gonna be the most laid
back of the panelists because I'm going to have more time than anybody. Uh
, you can't possibly repeat what went on yesterday. But basically I
disagreed with the theology of Paulo salary in said it did not represent
an understanding of the great esoteric traditions of the great universal
religions and that it was Atheism in camouflage and was in a four block
incense wherein, which one's theology is a projection under the sky of
what one is. It was a projection of Apollo's own personality and as such,
uh, it could become a magnification of the ego. Specifically, I uh, denied
pollos conception and philosophy of time as being the very first thing
that disintegrates in the mystical and ecstatic experience and the
specialization of time, in which you have a notion of God behind you as
alpha and God ahead of you as omega is a complete uh delusion that is
something that's overcome very early on in the path of meditation, whether
it's yoga or Sufi ism or tibetan buddhism or Yockey shamanism or whatever.
So yesterday was devoted to what we can say is a polarization of a
friendly disagreement between paul and me, where I'm a great supporter of
his aesthetics and a great uh uh detractor of his of his theology, to put
my position in a statement, I would say art and theology cannot be
reconciled except through the process of initiation. The only artist who
can reconcile aesthetics and theology has to be an initiative. He has to
be an artist of the level of a Hieronymus brochure WB Yates, uh, the kind
of great artist who creates civilizations so that if you look at the great
architecture that express cosmological visions in Teotihuacan, in Mexico,
in Luxor, in Egypt, in Polonnaruwa, in salon in Anyang and ancient china,
you see an incredibly developed cosmic consciousness of astronomy, sacred
geometry and mystical canons of proportion that affect the subtle bodies,
not the physical bodies. You have to have a knowledge of the physical body
, the etheric body, the astral body, the causal body and the such and
under beyond all of those otherwise, you can't design cities or buildings.
So we got a really polarized situation going yesterday.
My purpose yesterday was primarily to raise some questions. First of all
with regard to the relationship between the past and the future with a
view toward clarifying also whether the timeline was a completely linear
one that made past and future mutually exclusive of each other, or whether
we were dealing with the reality that in some sense transcends the realms
of time is usually defined and therefore raising that question, but also
raising within a sense of history, the question of whether, whether it's
ever possible to put into operation in one's thought, any kind of
effective storyline that does not pay as much attention to memory and
therefore the past as it does to hope and the future. I also simply raised
some kinds of, or what probably are primarily linguistic questions about
ah about the relationship between religion and theology, seeing religion
as primarily what we mean by a religious tradition, and usually that means
the norms set by the great religious traditions of the past that are to
some extent at any rate worldwide and scope most of them. Uh and that
theology is an intellectual enterprise dealing with the clarification of
one's religious ideas and therefore they are not identical in any sense.
Ah I think I also raised the question as to whether
uh whether because what Apollo seems to be suggesting to me in his uh
religious thought, what what he seems to be suggesting to me is the
advocacy of what becomes in effect a new or perhaps not so much new as
another, or a religious tradition of sorts, at least the religious thought
, that I I infer from, from paolo's work uh seems to me to be the advocacy
of a position, the advocacy of a religion, the advocacy of a particular
religious tradition. And to the extent that that is true and I'm not
convinced it's true. And I'm simply raising the question on the basis of
the uh contact that I've had up until this point and my understanding of
the thought up until this point to the extent that is true. I wonder
whether it is,
I wonder whether it's important to his enterprise and adequate as a system
of religious thought. Uh and I'll leave it at that.
Yeah.
Um yesterday I spoke uh huh initially and really didn't address salaries
uh theology and and so forth. That spoke to more to the question of how I
understood uh the relationship between art and religion um aesthetics and
theology and fundamentally it is that I believe that but that faith
without art is dumb. That as a matter of fact art authentic art or depart
not. Uh huh Bill kept talking about shock and kitchens, things like that,
which obviously maybe we wouldn't consider it was authentic art, but
authentic art has a revelatory function in culture that is at its best, is
terribly important to awaken in us, make us see certain things that we
would never see. It has a celebratory function which enables us to
celebrate. Uh huh The occasions and human existence, the epiphanies, the
ecstatic moments in time that we envision joy and uh the power of the
universe, the one is of it. Uh and that it also is art is a fantasize er
and uh it opens up the invisible, makes visible invisible and makes uh uh
those who have imaginations dream dreams and see visions and that insofar
as art, authentic art does that it is indeed in relationship to authentic
religion? Uh huh. For that is a lot of the role of religion that they are
brothers and sisters, but that in our culture they have been a culture
which d ritual iseS and d spiritual eyes is everything. Uh they both
become ghetto ized uh in museums and churches and all that sort of thing.
And they've been also uh incommunicado unable to communicate with because
there's no universal themes, no reconciling images that we that we have
together in the culture in which we live. So they impoverished by that
that general picture of what I was trying to say yesterday.
Well, for a moment we thought that the gap would be would be decreasing
yesterday. But the gap is as wide as ever. I um
I see two ways of becoming conscious of something. One is a revelation,
the is uh which refers to pre existence and then there is another way of
of existing or feeling alive and of uh stating something which is the
creation away And I cannot reconciliate the two because revelation is my
ignorance
uh in uh in front of an overpowering an all knowing reality. And uh if I
believe that this reality has existed, I'll be telling them forever and I
I am somehow an offspring of this reality of offshoot spinoff, then
evidently my task, my existence, my reason for living, is to try to find
out what the reality is. So that's I'm trying to be revealed by behaving
in one way instead of another, where I'm attempting to open myself to this
pouring of that, which is there. Well, I don't happen to believe in this,
not, not in in the sense that it doesn't mean anything, but it in the
sense that it's only part of reality because there is something more to it
, which is that no matter how great reality is all inclusive or whatever
might be reality, I believe that there is something which is as yet to
become to be created and this as yet is the future. So while I can accept
regulation all or informational or learning experiences, I also, I also
have to believe that I am creating as you are creating us, anything that
moves around is creating. So I have to see the past is a reality which is
somehow moving
into new reality by creating and transcending itself and it does this in
that, which doesn't exist, which is the future that's why time for me it's
a very fundamental and in many ways linear thing. Uh so on one side I have
a universe which is a revelation a where perfection has been there from
the very beginning. On your side, you have a universe that might have been
very ah cheap at the beginning in terms of just being some kind of
unconscious and
very powerful, but very dim reality. And since I believe in evolution,
since I am an evolutionist, I believe I cannot accept the notion that
evolution is, it's just a figment of the imagination and that we are
really here only to reenact or to be revealed something which is beyond
our grasp. I know that most of what exists is beyond our grasp is
certainly beyond my grasp at the same time. I believe that I am one of the
little particles which is attempting attempting not just to understand
what that past is, but also to create a future which doesn't exist. So, I
believe in life as a creation process.
Those of you who were not here yesterday may may or may not have some
flavor of the direction of the conversation. The dialogue between the
panel yesterday, but hopefully uh and there may be some of you who were
here yesterday who would like to raise some questions and we'd like to
give you an opportunity at this time since you didn't have it yesterday
before we go on and say anymore individually. Yes, please see you think
could you speak up
since? Yeah,
yes,
clear. Yes. Mhm.
Yes.
Mhm. Yes.
So
it's useful.
Yes, yes, yes, yes
ST
yes,
but she Yeah.
Yes.
Okay. Could I put that question very succinctly and let Bill respond. No,
I I think what all you said is important, what you're really saying to
Bill Thompson is uh what I heard yesterday was not such a basic
disagreement, but I heard fundamentally an agreement between yourself and
Paula salary because and then you gave the reasons for, I'd like to for
Bill to kind of say to that either yes, you heard right or no, you didn't
hear right. And would you speak to that bill please? And so he could
clarify that blake has a uh an expression he says in opposition is true
friendship. Um I think you can understand that is my relationship to
follow over the last seven years or so. He also says without contrary,
there is no progress now, human beings do not like in a sense change. And
therefore when confronted with two positions, their immediate response,
whether it's at the dinner table or at a conference is to try to
synthesize them and thereby blur the integrity of each position. Symbiosis
in nature, co evolution. The relationship of symbian is in an environment
is not a fusion where they all become sludge together. It's an incredibly
diversified ecology where the sun comes down and makes miracles and
cactuses and roses and mountains and all kinds of things so that um I
don't think one should jump to try and put Pollo and I in the same place.
Now, the next thing is one of the difficulties we have as human beings,
is learning how to listen to one another because we tend to only half
listen and to try to hear enough that can trigger what we're going to say
next. And therefore it's very necessary for us rather than being very
feminine and yin and receptive to the holy Other. That that thing that is
not us to try somehow rather to characterize it, to put it into an
interpretation so that that that interpretation can then energize us so
that this is the dynamic of the ego which is not wholly evil. I'm not
saying that the ego has no role to play at all, but it means that in order
to energize a position based on creativity, say Pollos is the artist, one
has to caricature the mystic as the quietest or the escapist and
caricature. His position is based on revelation. And immediately the
caricature is a misinterpretation because part of what the, the, shall we
say, the mystic mystical attunement is, is becoming quiet moving to the
still point in the center, inhaling experiences and values that are
outside of time and then returning in the next heartbeat to embody to
incarnate and to create. So there is no opposition whatsoever between
Creation and revelation. I see those two points as a caricature of the
great mystical traditions now in the way that I look at time as a
historian is every great civilization begins as a mystical vision, you
start with the initiate capsule Kotal and out of his vision and his
initiated experience comes the entire civilization of Mexico. You start
with the vision of Mohammed in a cave and outcomes islam. You start with a
vision of jesus and outcomes christendom. The great civilizations of the
planet have gone through a period where their first announced as mystical
visions outside of time. Then you come down a step and the artist as the
interpreter tries to put that into specific form and to move it into a
process of institutionalization. But that's the kind of stepping down. Now
, what we're talking about really is the experience of education,
basically, I disagree with you where you say both, all of us tend to feel
we're in time. Therefore why don't we accept the illusion as enabling us
to grow this would be to go back to plato's cave to say all of us are in
the cave and the reality we have with the shadows on the wall. So why
don't we try to create a science that is the most meticulous analysis and
weighing and measuring and drafting of the shadows on the wall.
And so my sense of education is that literally x do career one must be led
out. Now I see paolo very much as a man like James Joyce or Michelangelo,
the great artist, the heroic ego and that is has a place in culture. But
when paolo says, I am going to become a theologian, I am going to
reconcile art and theology. I am going to create the future city. I am
going to resolve all human culture into my vision. Then I say stop, you've
gone too far your inflated, which which never did naturally. But and
remember I'm I have the advantage over many people here. I'm surprised
that I've actually read those articles and theology. I've read religion of
stimulation, I've read the two sons psychology, I've read the collective
papers, I've read the bridge matter and spirit and our ecology. So if I'm
critiquing this, I'm critiquing this from, you know, a specific analysis
of reading all his collected works or most of it, the stuff that he sends
me, which is quite a lot. It just happens that I have read all those
papers too and it just happens that I have another vision of the whole
matter to for what we are really confronted here Our two visions, 2
paradigms to alternative realities. If Bill starts with the essential
integrity and reduce ability of the mystics as the core of our religious
experience. Therefore starting this with this as the point of departure in
the artistic not only paolo's ideas, but they had to shut down is queer.
However, if we acknowledge the plurality of paradigms and particularly if
we start with basic assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of
evolution, and most importantly, the nature of godliness. Then if our
question becomes not to explicate what has been given, what has been
ordered accumulated in cultural religious traditions and instead of
eulogizing their greatness, we try to ask ourselves what was the role of
religions religious experience, including mystical experience in the
evolution of human kind and evolution of matter becoming spirit than this
, evolutionary genetic experience gives a different reading of all the
mystics for they may represent one stage in the development of our
consciousness. What I'm suggesting is that if you start with a different
set of basic assumptions about the nature of evolution, the nature of
consciousness and the nature of godliness. So there is a paradigm becomes
tenable. I do not accept it for another reason for all the basic concepts
which we use to grapple with our existence, including spiritual experience
, are so far removed from our experience and his scatology that I see no
meaning. I cannot somehow envisage of the process of perfection that is
not related to perfection as we have known it, as we have experienced it,
as we have used it to raise ourselves by our bootstraps. I really have two
questions to both of them, but supposing that I accept the greatness of
past the religious traditions and particularly Mysticism, What follows for
me for you for next generation from next idioms is the distilled wisdom to
still experience the spirituality of all evolution and mankind as thought
in mystical experience, all there is to it, to religious experience and to
the development of the spirit or if not what comes. And the question is,
if I accept your
ultimate in their logical logical extensions,
what do I have to live for perfection? Beauty and all the all the grace is
so far removed from it that I am nothing but speck of dust. Yeah, I don't.
Oh right, right. I feel that I I have for the individual, I have a much
more humble position,
but for reality, I have a far more ambitious
design model. I'm saying that because I feel that no matter how good we
are individually, we are, we are not going to do very much in terms of the
incredible
nature or what eventually reality is going to be.
But I I very firmly believe in in the the incredibility of this reality.
Because if I didn't, then I would not have very much reasons to exist so
within my very, very small capacity, I had to try to contribute to that
kind of notion that might suggest the possibility of total perfection.
Truth, justice, Beauty, harmony, Grace or whatever, not partial, but total.
Now my contention is that no matter how good we are, no matter how
saintly we are, no matter how mystically taken we are, we are still very
tiny fragments not of something which exists so much, but of something
which doesn't exist. So again, time comes as a very powerful parameter,
most of reality doesn't exist yet,
in a sense that time hasn't been stopped. Time keeps ticking. And time is
going to take to the end. We're not going to be short on time, We are
going to be short in change in the sense that the moment will come when
change is not going to be any more possible, why is not going to be any
more possible? Because at that point, truth justice
Beauty will be not partial, but total. And I'm very much sold on this idea
that we might be fooling ourselves in pursuing equity and justice and
believing that this is something that is in our grasp. I mean, we can get
it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I find that a very skimpy notion of
justice and truth. So in order for me to believe that I have a reason to
be. And uh in my very tiny position I had to project, I had to transfer
participate. I had to see in a scatological and where not just uh
something it's good, but the whole universe is good and it's good not
because there is only that kind of universe, but because it at that point
is total knowledge, total understanding, Total love, total compassion,
total justice and so on.
Yeah, okay, now I want to be understood to say that I think there is value
in what Pollo is doing and I don't want what I'm saying to be interpreted
as in any way uh negation of it. What I'm talking about is the bridge
between architecture and theology and I'm arguing that there is an
expansion here that cannot occur in a linear way without a tremendous
transformation in which the heroic artist like a James Joyce has to go
through a kind of death experience of the heroic creative ego and move
into the dark night of the soul and understand the experiences of Saint
john of the cross or a Jalaluddin rumi or in the garden or whomever. So
I'm talking basically about The linear concept of time, which I totally
reject and the linear sense of the expansion of our ecology into theology.
Now, when I was quoting and saying that in the 19th Century Firebox said
that religion which pretends to be about the Gods is really a projection
onto the sky of the social structure and you can tell what's going on in
the social structure of ancient Egypt or any other society by looking at
their mythology. Well, if we take what firebox was trying to teach us and
we apply it to Pollos theology, it makes very good sense as something
that's powerful and motivating and energizing for paolo and my as I've
said to him in the past, I said this if it's important to you go ahead
with it. If it helps you keeps you buoyant and joyous and alive and helps
you build the city fine. But don't over extend it and try and sell it to
the U. S. Of A. As the theology, visionary theology of the future have a
sense of limits. This theology is not that interesting as a literary
document, it's a personal document. Keep it in your diary, but don't try
to publish it as paolo Soleri takes on the theologians of of all history
in the world. Now, paolo has a very linear as he said, vision of time and
his vision is something like a fisherman, fly casting and spending out a
lure and sending that lure way out into the reaches, lodging it on some
pillows, some ideals, some future, some omega point and then reeling
himself into the ideal. Now look around you, The city that you're sitting
in is going to take 250 years to complete. How can paolo possibly go at it
, day after day, footstep by footstep, bucket of sand and cement by bucket
of sand, unless he threw out to the furthest reaches of his ego and his
imagination, an image of the perfect ideal city of human evolution. And
then began to reel himself into it. The city and the theology is the
autobiography of policy. Hillary, what you have written large in his
theology is the artistic description of Apollo salary, his imagination,
his personality, that's not theology. But naturally that happens to unless
you are sold on again on enemies and Mysticism, there is no way out of
that. We can only do what we are. So, I mean, it's quite it's quite
evident that unless again, I believe in this being filled in with
something which which which is not me, what I'm going to project out is me.
The question is to see how valid to me is not not the question of being
me or not me. And I think the crux of the matter is there because anybody
can come up with a model. The question is to see how desirable the model
is, how fruitful the model is, how helpful the model is. And I would
challenge anybody to find to come up with a better model. Very simple. I
think it's a bit presumptuous on the part of Bill to say that's not
theology, that's theology. If you are so personal as to say that what
power does is merely a footnote to his autobiography, then I'll be
personally ask you, who are you to tell us? What is theology? I think in
the age when God was declared dead in the 19th and 20th century, and when
we really want new spiritual ideals to sustain us, obviously, God must be
of our own making or we are remaining king God and obviously God making
becomes a new departure in theology, whether what paul does, and many
others is going to survive. Historical test, the time will show. But times
show that old pattern of thinking about relations to God somehow withered
away. And therefore, traditional theology is in a sense, dead and
therefore in a sense, we don't know what is theology and therefore we have
no business of saying. That's theology, that's not. It will be only shown
by the test of time. I think that there are five of us and 15 the audience
, perhaps we might entertain other ideas. I since everybody has given his
idea, I want to suggest that for me, theology is realizing our
transcendental project
that helps us to live with the anguish of our imminent existence. That is
to say, all religious ideals have always been a production have been
projection into something that we could not attain. And after we have
really made this ideal, we have revealed ourselves in this sense that
parlor in Bill's opinion is doing and this is what perfectibility of men
means for me in history, for unless we have an ideal larger than we are,
we never become more than we are And religious ideals and all religions
have challenged us to become greater by our own production or by
envisaging of gods that are much greater than ourselves. And in a sense,
new theology, remaking of old gods is in the old tradition of constructing
ideals that are so much larger than ourselves that we have to challenge
are the ultimate in order to attain them. And in order to make something
of ourselves of ourselves, God making has always been making something of
ourselves in a transcendental sense. Could we uh go back to the uh the
audience again now the dialogue has been sharpened. Uh people have come in
who perhaps were here yesterday also and would like to raise some more
questions hopefully to further that dial. And the first question is here,
second ones here and the third one is there, could we
mm
say, is it? Mhm.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well yeah, the president has
Yeah. And all the best people say so.
Yeah. And
that's it. Yeah.
That is part of this new Just right. Yeah.
Mhm way. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Therefore
indian people love it society
and yeah, please allow us to keep feeding into it with their consciousness.
They were into Yeah,
no work. And what what
what happened? Right?
And find ice cream because this will be out. Where is she global
involvement in the Mhm.
Uh Yes. Yes.
You've been you've been saying that anticipation is somehow what I'm
trying to suggest. And I would tend to agree,
I don't have any qualms in being called another is since I don't believe
in the existence of God, full fledged, totally flourished in that sense of
another. Is since I believe in a I have a reverence for life I think then
I believe in Godliness, but I believe that he is so tiny at this point. So
embryonic so primitive. So if a gentile that way to work at it.
Mhm
Or no, I'm not setting up anything. I'm trying to say what I believe, what
I tend to work with.
Mm. Okay. Uh I think that that if we go on with that, we're not gonna
we're not going to clarify more by that we don't have time to do that
clarified.
Uh huh. It's all right. If you were it doesn't matter. I mean, it's a I
know, but I want to give other people a chance to to put in the ore and
maybe some of them will be other question to be speaking along these lines
, please.
Yeah.
Right. All right.
The game. Mhm. Again you back
where did Okay lot. Mhm.
Here.
Okay. And
these two differences.
Yeah. Played all right.
And from that. Yes, I what? Okay,
I'm thinking mhm. Some right. Uh Mr Singer was saying that from his
reading of uh my books and most specifically the last one. Darkness and
scattered light where I talked about the reconstruction of the
relationship between the country and the city and the future. It would
seem that my emphasis of non urban life and its role in the future is part
of the dynamic of polarization
with Paulo's intense focusing on the city as the primary evolutionary
vehicle for uh the human future. Um I think when we come down from the
disagreement between, let's say Mysticism versus theology and we come down
to the role of the country, the dialectic between country and city within
civilization. There is not a disagreement or polarization between
parliament me because I can't, we're getting too much overload here. Uhh I
can't imagine a culture which would not a firm and lift up and embrace its
history of cities and the history of this brief interval of civilization
from 3000 Bc to 2000. D. Has been a history of world cities, from Iraq to
nine nova to Athens to Rome, to London to new york and on into Paula's
militarization of the city as appropriate for planetary culture. I don't
in any way deny refute uh, that thesis at all, what I'm saying is much
more um lower down the level of saying that the relationship in post
industrial society in which 2% are involved in agriculture and 98% are
involved in goods and services supported by a glut of fossil fuels in the
next 30 years is not going to be a tenable relationship between country
and city and the relationship in which large world cities like new york
have colonized the periphery. Like the oil wells pipeline in Alaska, that
dominance where the elites are at the center and the hicks are at the
periphery, that is going to change. What is going to enable that to change
as a new global consciousness, which will allow us to d structure are
megalithic monolithic unities like nation states and we can go back into
more emotional identities like Quebec instead of Canada, like maybe
Manhattan instead of new york city or new york state. And whale devolution
of Scotland Wales, Northern Ireland ulster um Southern Ireland as well,
that we're going to be in smaller unity's at the same time that we're
going to be in larger economic biosphere planetary unities. The
relationship, therefore of consciousness, which has been dominated by
elites and civilizations, is going to undergo a change in which now the
consciousness on a biological planetary level is going to be one in which
the center is nowhere and the circumference is is um you know, the the
circumference is now in the center is everywhere. Which is a phrase of
Nicholas of ouzo is a mystic. So that when that happens if you take new
york before I came to this conference, I saw a film at linda's barn by a
man named Hillary Harris on new york is organism, which Paula would really
like because it showed in lapse time photography, the pulse of the
arteries of the highways, juxtaposing it with the pulse of blood in the
human body and through lapse time in the sun and the clouds and everything.
He showed how new york is an organism. Well now in the esoteric tradition
uh which is beautifully described. It can be experienced personally, but
it's beautifully described in army Corbin's book on uh celestial body and
spiritual earth. He talks about landscape angels, that there is a
collective consciousness that over lights, constellations of people, the
way a fire over lights a log and that there is a kind of collective
consciousness of new york city that is David or angelic. So that when you
say the angel of new york over lighting the empire state building in this
tradition, you are not speaking metaphorically and that this is an
experience to be had and certainly out of the body states and meditation
now When New York reaches its crisis in the 80s and 90s and it loses its
power as the economic center of the world, the informational center of the
world, the kind of force that brought it together like a sort of
Portuguese man of war. That's a colony of minds or what paul calls the
organism of 1000 minds. A certain compression and intensity was necessary
to create that world city when we've gone through an initiation, which is
what we're beginning to experience now on a racial level and go up to the
next level of consciousness, we won't have to constellation in that
intense level to have eight million people necessary to create one nucleus
of civilization. That when you go up to the next level, you reach a
different dispersal when consciousness can be suffused through the
biosphere and highly initiated, highly intellectually, highly developed
individuals Can exist at what used to be considered a periphery. So what
I'm talking about is that the structure of the last 5000 years has been a
relationship with the center and dialectic with the periphery that is
breaking down in planet Ization. I think two things happen from that one
is policy larry Chardon vision of implosion. So paolo is designing the
cities for the landscape of the moon, for space colonies, for the first
colonization of mars and all of that's valid, but that's only half of it.
Reality in any biosphere always moves in two equal and opposite
strategies. The opposite is the more mystical, decentralized, agrarian mal
is whatever you wanna call it vision. And that's what I'm trying to make
more conscious because I don't think it's being understood and I think
we're rushing too much into a yang and not understanding the yin and
that's why I'm trying to energize this to make another kind of
consciousness um perceivable. Let me, since we've been arguing about time
, let me give you an image that may help. Time is real, as you were saying
, and we are saying at the bottom of an ocean and there's a very dense
kind of medium in which we experience time behind us and in front of us
and trying to make it real now as you move up to different levels and you
go out of the ocean, then you find another level of vibration and energy
that's the air, then time has a different flow. The relative relativistic
nature of time. Space changes as you move from the physical to the author.
Erich. Then you keep going and you go out of the sky and you go into the
outer atmosphere and you move from the author eric into the astral or the
causal and then you see the whole solar system and you see time in a
different way to the galaxy and then the relativistic qualities change. So
when you try to define time only with what's happening at the densest part
of the Eagles location at the bottom of the ocean, you're dehumanizing me
, you're taking away 90% of my experience. I don't recognize my experience
in that model and I don't think part of the great flood of visions of
cosmic cities. Thinking of Teotihuacan here has been to define the city
only as that dense part of matter. That's why these cosmic cities have
astronomy as part of their city planning and that's where I think the real
step of our Cassani should be too imitate the chinese city planners who
threw Fang shui would look at the dragon flow of energy through the crust
of the earth and locate through clairvoyance buildings according to the
geomagnetic properties of the constellations of rock and water in certain
places in the subtle mental of the earth. Then the next thing was to bring
in the astronomers and say the energies as they aligned so that this city
can make love to the stars requires that everything be aligned to the
position of the sun, the moon and the planets. So you have to bring in an
astronomer when you live with the solar system as your neighborhood, Your
consciousness is no longer just being Bill Thompson step at a time. Good.
Good.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yes. Yes. But you see that was the interesting thing about this
gentleman's comment in the cat half. You actually changed Pollos concept
of time and you made a very interesting theological application to him in
terms of work, the real process of this place. Much as say, paul ST paul
made a change of jesus. But in that change, you, there was a big
difference in your consciousness of time because you were talking about
the eternal now in which the future in the past are impregnating and
giving meaning to this moment of time. And that's a much more cyclical
conscious of time and not so linear. So, you know, you're agreeing with
Paulo, you're making very fascinating changes. Please your question.
Yeah.
Well, that's that's what I get stuck with the notion of grace and justice.
Um, mm The two weeks ago we were talking about that with a group and said
, well, we had, we had about 70 millions of murders in the last two
generations toward wars. Plus. So that was a massacre of gigantic
proportion. And I cannot see it anyway, by which I can find grace unless
that disgrace has been somehow redeemed. And there's only one way already
in that disgrace is to take the past and make it into the present. But
that's not the time was that Bill is talking about? That's something very
different. That's the going at the end of the line. And at that station at
the end of the line, you can pull all the past within it and then within
it you can find the justification and the justice and the equity.
Yeah,
well, we, yeah, again, I'm much more humble than that. I believe that you
can pull a little but we cannot pull the whole thing. It's a you know,
it's about 3.5 billions of years of struggle just on this little tiny
thing we call the earth. Now, that's a massive process. And that massive
profits process is pervaded with violence. That's life. Well, I I feel
that we need to come up with an idea with the notion that that violence is
going to be not only made uh comprehensible, but in a way made to be the
reasons for for becoming what we are going to be at the end. So all those
means the small eating the big the big eating being eaten by the bigger
and so on. Uh, all those things have to become ends at the end, how you
get those things to become ends at the end. Well, through utter knowledge
, through utter utter uh, understanding through utter compassion and all
those things. But we don't have that those things now, no matter how much
we, we say. Well, I, I was illuminated by a divine voice. I heard the
beautiful thing to come to me from. I don't know where Those are very
beautiful phenomenons, but those uh 60 or 70 millions of people destroys
are still 70 millions of people destroyed. And that's a very tiny drop in
the ocean of evolution. In terms of strife, sufferings, pain, injustice,
and so on. So I cannot buy that that kind of model. I can't, there will
never be justice in it.
Well, I'm suggesting a very simple thing that the universe as we, as we
begin to know it as to transform itself totally into something that we
cannot imagine what it is. But there's something will be pure intelligence
or pure knowledge or whatever at that point will be all be their
understanding what happened to us, how and why we behave in certain ways
so that we be resurrected into it.
All right. Uh, Jack.
Yeah.
Part
no, that's the nature of an intelligent. You're absolutely right. I'm not
in any way saying that one has to be conscious of these things as a matter
of fact consciousness sometimes like a juggler trying to keep conscious of
every ball can get in the way. And that when you really master typing or
playing the piano, there's a certain element of hyper consciousness that
comes into and that consciousness can be an impediment meaning
consciousness meaning ego, focused attention. Uh, no, these streams of
consciousness or these gasses of Galaxies that constellation around
individual human beings uh, do not require that the individuals have to be
conscious any more. That each cell that's doing his job in your body has
to be conscious of your identity. It still goes and serves as nerve tissue
, is bone tissue, as specialized tissue. So the, the relationship between
angelic orders of intelligence or the higher levels of forms in plato's
cosmology is more a question of education. What what we're talking about
basically. Uh, when we're talking about the relationship with aesthetics,
activity like building a city and um art and theology is we're talking
about what are the appropriate vehicles of, of leading out of education
for the planet Ization of humanity. And so this is very much where the
balance of these things has to be attuned. There's a difference between
what I would say is the role of the artist has initiate the cancel
colossal, the civilization founder, the creator of a whole new quantum
leap in human culture and the role of the artist as heroic creator. And
I'm just saying is trying to make a very minor point in a way that I see
Pollo in the company of Michelangelo and James Joyce. That's not a put
down, I don't think. Uh, and that is the traditional heroic role of the
artist as heroic ego is heroic creator. I'm only arguing about when we say
we're going to move to the next step Now, let me just finish this and give
it back to you Now, Henrik said, how could I dare to presume to criticize
pollos theology? But that's precisely the way in which we're all in
communication with one another, the act of publication of writing an
article and sending it forth and saying, I am now thinking about theology
and I want to make a contribution to theology and I want some feedback.
Well, that's what you get in the same way that when I write a book, I
don't assume that Mr Sager is presuming that criticize the book I write.
So that part of this whole thing is to be really clear about what the
vision of civilization or planet Ization is and what is the role of art,
education, Mysticism and these other realms in this whole new thing that
we're going to experience on the other side of the coming crisis of the
world system. A personal note and a large gripe.
1st, I would never dare to say to Bill, How would you do to criticize
power theology for? Indeed, he has been hired and brought here to
criticize Soleri theology. But there is another question whether there is
any human being, who can say this is theology, this is not theology and
because of the importance of this question. I am a bit unhappy about this
whole discussion which for me has too much a flavor of scholastic
discussions of medieval times, all those abstract terms floating around
with no relation to me as a concrete human being, I may be very naive, but
I think theology, religion has always been very concrete and tangible
propositions. They had an immense impact on human lives and also abstract
, were guiding and incorporated into the structure of human lives. They
were indeed a part of the flow of life. And I think what we are trying to
do is to ask ourselves what we are at present, what are our gods? What
kind of gods we can and must believe in? What is the source of our
godliness for? We have found that without it we are without an anchor. And
what makes me unhappy about this whole discussion is that the esoteric
plane, at least of language has been so far removed from from us as human
beings, that we do not contribute to
coherence, our connecting ourselves under the guidance of some new
transcendental ideas, but indeed we contribute more to universal confusion.
I should like to hope that during the last few minutes, the illustrious
members of this panel will help us to get to grips again with religion as
a concrete tangible phenomenon which has always exerted an enormous
influence on our lives, both connecting well, connecting us with stars and
heavens and at the same time giving us guidance in our practical tangible
day to day life and in regulating our relationship with other human beings
on moral and social grounds
going to the station.
Well, those things, if I thought maybe, uh, let's uh, let's take one more
question and then we'll try to make some other people that some other fuel
in the panels feet.
You want to take that first pole since I've been talking a little bit
before. It depends on the size of the future. Oh, the question is, what,
what, what is the future of some change as you see it in uh, in the life
of, of the future? And I mean in the future, life in a, in mankind's life
,
our theologians and architects.
Well, I would like to eliminate the television and the architect, I'm just
a person trying to understand something and then suggesting things, I
don't know if that's theology or architecture or whatever. But again, what
do you, what do you mean by the future? We know that the earth is going to
go, well, he's going to become, unless we do something about is going to
become a frozen or burned out chunk of matter. So that's, that's the
future. And the scientists tells us that it's unavoidable. I turned around
and said, no, it's not avoidable. B is not unavoidable because the spirit
is going to do something about it. That's why I believe in evolution. So
if you say, what's what Stonehenge is going to do within the next few
generations, I would say that even though I haven't visited stone Age, I
think that it's it's a very impressive
uh
hopeless of mankind there. And I don't I'm not trying to understand what
they have been trying to do. Evidently there is an astronomical
relationship connecting those stones and so on. And I should be there in
order to receive the impact of that construction. Uh not having been there
, I don't know, but just by looking by listening, I think it's it's an
impressive thing. But as any other kind of thing which is in part physical
is going to go is going to disappear. You can there's no two ways about it.
That's why conservation, the true conservation is only can only be a
resurrection. There's no way by which we can be true conservationists.
Unless we believe that everything, everything that has ever existed is
going to be present somehow and kicking some somehow and somewhere in the
future. Any kind. Any other kind of conservation is fantasy.
Yes. I think that
part of the process of historical change of revolution is that you go back
to the past and you re you? Re vision with an emphasis on vision history
because your consciousness of the past energizes what you do in the
present. So that when the irish revolutionaries were trying to break free
of England, the history, the english told him was that you were ignorant
savages and you had no culture until we brought it in when we conquered
you in the norman invasion in the 12th century then then the irish went
back and found that there was a tradition of the great saints and scholars
who had actually kept learning alive in the dark ages and that they had
run the reverse that they had colonized England and then discovered there
were even more ancient civilization there in New grange and all the tummy
, Lion, Karen's and megalithic ruins of ancient Ireland. Then that began
to have revolutionary implications that what you see is your image of the
past is your identity. It changes who you think you are in the present and
therefore gives new implications for what you're about to become in in the
future. So the prelude to every revolution is a re visioning and re
conceptualization of history, whether it's marks or or standish O'Grady or
whomever, what we're going through now is precisely that re visioning of
history as a change of our industrial concept of progress. And we're
learning from things like alexander Tom's work on Stonehenge that there is
an incredibly sophisticated and indeed, probably matrilineal culture that
is older and preceded Egypt, that's much more sophisticated and that it's
possible to have high mathematics, high art, high astrological
astronomical temples and not have cities and that one of the reasons we've
overlooked megalithic Western europe is because we tended to be city
oriented and had a very imperialistic notion of history. So the, the
implications whether or not Stonehenge is an artifact, you know, is
bulldozed and turned into a parking lot or whatever. It doesn't matter.
The implications of all of that are enormous and we'll have an aar have
already had revolutionary implications. We are in one of those ages That
are expressed, I think in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch where in the
year, he showed the sky cracking open and things in the air dropping fire
on the burning cities. And as medieval christendom ended and the new
modern world system of 1500 to 2000 began. He had a vision of the
beginning of the world system and also a vision of World War two and the
end of the world of the world system that we're experiencing now so that I
think the visions that seem to be past oriented are in many ways the
opening, the breaking of our false sense of the past to create a new
revolutionary future. And my last comment, because I've got to supposedly
say more stuff in a few minutes, Heinrich, I agree with you about the
academic thing, but that's really the phenomenology of a conference. One
of the things that always impresses me when baker roshi comes to speak at
linda's foreign, he's the abbot of his monastery, he says I can't speak
before inish it's I'm not supposed, my teacher told me never to give
lectures in the public so that his answer to your question would be the
coal community of Zen center at Tassajara. My answer to your question is
the community uh living experience of linda's barn. Now, what we have here
is the answer to everything we're talking about is the process of creating
arcosanti. But as all you people who will live here in our building it,
you know that from day to day, just slashing the cement around that
sometimes it's possible for your focus to become just as cement and to
lose a whole sense of the horizon. So what I assume paolo is trying to do
and having these festivals and bringing artists and poets and musicians
and thinkers and and gathers and bullshitter is all in is to present a
horizon again so that you can have a figure ground relationship between
this bucket of sent cement and this kind of horizon. Now, if we were going
to really make these esoteric things real, um this is not the way your
place or space or time or form to do it in,
I'm gonna ask Richard when, because he hasn't spoken if he would make some
statement at this point, whatever he wants to comment on the conversation
, our product for me.
Mhm
Well the first thing I'd like to say is that I don't I don't really see
how anybody can talk about theology
and refer only to some kind of vague ideology about a transcendent reality
, that to me isn't theology and if you're going to define what theology is
, it has to be the manner in which a particular community of faith has
established an intellectual tradition that must be carried on, clarified,
continued in some sense, into the future. That's what theology is, that's
what it's always been. And to simply speak of some something that somebody
believes about the manner in which the universe operates as being a
theology is is meaningless to me. So I'm very interested in the turn that
the conversation uh, took with your question because I've asked myself
since coming here yesterday and observing what was going on, I've asked
myself well, now what is it, what is it that energizes a situation like
this? Why are people here, Why are they here as work shoppers? And why are
they here as uh participants in the festival atmosphere? And it seems to
me that if I try to answer that question for myself, the answer that comes
to me is they're not here to get a metaphysics
uh, least of all, a very, very, very probable or in fact improbable
physics based upon something called evolution because it seems to me that
more and more the kinds of conversations and the kinds of belief
structures that we set up over the past 100 years and more about something
called evolution. And it is a belief structure are are seriously
questioned,
nobody needs to be told that in order to do what we need to do in this
particular time in which we exist, that we have to have a metaphysics,
least of all an evolutionary metaphysics. I think what people want is a
story. And as I see what is going on here, I think that paolo Soleri has
given people a story, a story about people and of the giving of themselves
to others and into an environment in relationship to each other. That's
what they want. Now, there may be some intellectuals who are concerned
with metaphysics, but that is virtually an incidental thing about which
you're going to get absolutely no consensus and no agreement because we
can be engaged in the same story, doing the same thing together and
metaphysically, b at opposite sides or ends rather of a spectrum. The
second thing I want to say is that the people are not here because they
want a religion, not only do they not want to metaphysics, they're not
here because they want a religion. As far as I'm concerned, there are
plenty of those and they're all, there are many of them that are quite
good and all of the good ones are capable of creating everything that uh
that has been spoken of here. There isn't there, it is possible to turn to
the christian tradition. It is possible to turn to the jewish tradition
and any any tradition of the great religious traditions of humankind and
find in it, if you really penetrate it and go to it instead of make some
kind of Presumptions about it on a superficial level. There isn't anything
, any one of those traditions that isn't capable of doing all that you
need to do so far as what religion is meant to do. And the third thing I
think is that nor are we here entirely too, because we want another kind
of narcissistic exploration of the inner self. A story does not
necessitate that kind of thing. Uh as the sort of thing that we talk about
when we talk about the necessity for some kind of exalted states of
consciousness and so forth. That's an elite operation which people living
in the circumstances of history. Uh some have it, some want it, some don't.
And I don't think there is any necessity for putting some kind of a
premium on those who do and those who don't. So I guess the essence of
what I'm saying is that it's something similar at this point at any rate
to what what Bill has been saying. And that is if you venture into
metaphysics and you venture into religion, you must be prepared for the
consequences. You must be prepared to be the profit, the cult leader or
the high priest, or else you must be prepared simply to be a member of a
community of faith that has some kind of relationship to one of the great
traditions. Uh I think what in other words is happening here, that is
necessary is that people are looking for a vision. And that policy larry
has in a sense, provided that kind of vision and what is required at this
stage of the things is the extension of that vision into the kind of
believable story that all of us can say we are participants in. Thank you.
Um,
I do not agree it,
say the least. It is to uh Carlos resounding credit and ecumenical spirit
that he's invited all these diverse people here uh, to speak to him, to
criticize and to tear it down, build it up. So we we already understand
something of o Paulo's a community. I want to just say a couple of random
thoughts, reflections upon yesterday's conversations that we had here and
to try to say finally, uh worried about my own work experience at
arcosanti and some things about the future. Uh First of all theological
language is a way of giving form to those wondering moments when we find
ourselves possessed by a power which makes life holy and whole theological
language is the means, an instrument abandoned when it doesn't function
creatively.
A living theology demands a constant process of iconoclasm
and renaming of the holy. There is no holy word, not even God.
Then a quote from Van Gogh.
I can do very well without God, both in my life and my painting,
but I cannot you always, I am do without something that is greater than I
, which is my life, the power to create and in a picture. I want to say
something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women
with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize and
which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrations of our
coloring.
Quote from Nietzsche.
I would believe only in a god who could dance and when I saw my devil I
found him serious, thorough, profound and solemn. It was the spirit of
gravity through him all things fall
not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter? Come, let us kill the spirit
of gravity. I've learned to walk ever since. I let myself run. I've
learned to fly ever since. I do not want to be pushed before moving along.
Now I am light now I fly now. I see myself beneath myself now. A God
dances through me. Arcosanti and salary
must keep their grip firmly on fantasy.
Our reality,
our Western reality about world about cities is too narrow. Someone has
said that the real advances in science comes when some one leaps out of
the existing paradigms and creates a new way of envisioning things. I
believe one of the dangers
of the work being done here. And perhaps it's a temptation of Poland is
the intellectual ization or theology. Ization of this archaeology,
there is an imbalanced abalone in emphasis. What else with two sons are
ecology and neglect of the dynasty in way in the very construction of the
place, there is room for conceptualization, dialogue theorizing, but
there's not enough place or the creation of new rituals in which the art
of labor and architecture and construction or celebrated a place for the
spirit to find sustenance and power that infuses the work
in a city without churches to create a new vision of holy space
norman Brown
In his love body said one point, Diane ISIS calls us outdoors
out of the temple, made with hands out of the ark of the book, Out of the
cave of the Law, Out of the belly of the letter. 1st Tabernacle in
Jerusalem,
the second Tabernacle, The Universal Church.
Third Tabernacle. The open sky.
I submit to you that this panel
has not solved any of your problems. It has not reconciled art and
theology, but it I hope has been an exercise in concern for every one of
the panelists. And I hope for you about those ways in which policy larry
and this movement is trying to articulate what they believe about what
they're doing and the dialogue and the dialectic must and will go on thank
you.
Okay,
someone's mantra.
So we'll give you a chance to leave and those who one mistake and come
back in a second.
Well, you better do it. Is this working. We have a request if there is a
David Greenberg here to come up and receive a message
doors because there's going to be a concert and I think we'll need the
doors closed.
Uh huh. Yeah.
For those who may have come in and wonder what section are part of the
festival. This is my name is William Thompson. I'm the founding director
of the linda's Foreign Association in new york city and a writer. And I
thought since this is a festival rather than a conference and especially
since I was listening yesterday to a talk about improvisation in music in
jazz and classical music, I thought rather than giving a talk or lecture
on cultural history,
which I was going to try to go from the harmonization of the primates to
the planet. Ization of humanity uh is in the view of cultural change and
changing relationships of art and the sacred that I would perhaps rather
than do that, just ask from you to find out more where you are and have
more of a sense at this time and space in arcosanti as a process and as a
festival. So maybe asked three or four questions, which I would right down
and then improvise and give a talk upon those questions. So it's more like
I'm asking you like the musical offering a bach to be the aristocrat, the
leader of the court and to give me a musical theme, a statement of theme.
And then upon that I will try to work theme and variation and
intellectual development because it seems to me that if we're talking
about the relationship of religious experience art, environment. thinking
one of the things that is, I think happening in contemporary art is that
we live in a culture of information. Not nature anymore. Just and with so
many millions of people in universities and so many hundreds of thousands
of papers and books written a year that the storyteller now has to be a
brick allure and a storyteller with information and therefore writers like
myself tom wolf, Lewis thomas are really creating a new genre of art. The
epic was appropriate for a classical civilization focusing upon warrior
society.
The novel was appropriate for a middle class, expanding industrial society
, exploring matter in the external world. And basically concerned with my
missus, the imitation of reality now that we're in a cybernetic society of
consciousness of electronics and mysticism.
The artists can't play out the same role and just write a day in the life
of a person living in new york city and what happens to him, we've done
that for several centuries and that's enough. Now it's time to do
something else. And so what people like myself and Lewis thomas are doing
in books like the lives of a cell or my own works at the edge of history
or the one I'm working on. Now, the time falling bodies take delight is
really creating a genre that, that I use the german word for this in Const
this in shaft means science in german and so lobbing off the shaft and
adding const, I think we're seeing a new art form that's really very
appropriate. As a matter of fact, it's so kind of new in a way that people
sometimes mistake it and don't understand that what people like myself or
lewis, thomas or Castaneda are doing is presenting forms that have the
structure of art, but the content of scholarship and so a lot of people
mistake the surface for the structure and can't quite understand. Well,
this is an academic university history and this isn't a novel. So what the
hell is it? Um, and so I think that, that kind of perception fails to
understand that the genres of art have to change with our culture. And if
we're in a new culture, you just can't write the same way that you would
before. And so I thought, well, if this inquest is what I try to do when
I'm alone in my, with my typewriter,
much as a composer would try to compose and put the notes down in place.
What if I were trying to do something scary scary for me boring for you,
uh, and try to open myself up in a more yin way unless yang too, this
place is time these people and rather than laying on something on you and
just telling a story which I can do and I've done before, uh, to try
something more like theme and variation. So, this requires you uh, to give
the statement of theme. I think probably four questions at the most would
be handled. All the theme has to be just a small collection of notes. So
let's have a moment of silence of attunement to whatever sources of
intuition or inspiration we have. And just try to, in a very yin feminine
way become conscious of everything going on at all the levels around here
and then those of you who feel so moved in the Quaker sense of the meeting
too, proposed statement questions or whatever. Then I'll take those and
write them down and then give my talk. Okay, is that acceptable? Or would
you rather have me just tell you a story about history from beginning to
end
acceptable? You said Okay. All right, let's just take a minute then.
All right,
those who feel so moved. Yes, sir.
What is my personal goal in life? Nothing like getting down to basics.
Nice light question. Nothing like starting off with a heavy
he must be a what? What? And in what way does it contribute
of humanity, Paulo uses the word Whoa man, I've shifted from mankind to
humanity the same thing. Yes. Now we'll have from a woman. Yes, you please.
Mhm.
Because let me translate that into a smaller question and see if I'm
keeping the spirit of your question, what role does the quote dark night
of the soul
which is individual
have for
people
in general. Since it seems to me you were moving from the solitary
individual to the collective to the social, what role does it have for
people in general? And
Okay,
okay. And what implications does it have
for you all, you said something before? More about where we're going in
arcosanti? What implications does it have for like the present and the
future? Which I think is interesting too.
Yeah,
I mean,
right. I think what one way one could compress that into a few words to
say, what is the role of it of the initiate IQ experience for a city or
for humanity in general and where contemporary society is going?
Well, that's a good question.
Role of elites.
Is it for a few or for the many?
Since these questions are getting so long ambitious and heavy, I might
only be able to deal with three instead of four. Okay. You sir
yourself
the primates? Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Right.
Call.
Okay. What are the most
important
points
I've learned about cultural history
that can help us
for the present and future or the relevant, what is the relevance of
cultural history? Is it another way of saying it?
And the last and fourth question, I think I'll have two men and two women
to keep a sense of balance. Yes.
What
what do I think about dance? Since the last panel here ended on the two
dancing God, what do I think about dance and human culture?
Okay, now I'll take a moment
to begin at the beginning with the first question,
what is my personal goal in life? And in what way does it contribute to
the welfare of humanity? To begin with the latter part, the ego can never
know its effect in time or space and to attempt to describe its impact or
its effect or to write its history or epitaph before it was dead is an
exercise in self glorification. There's no way that I could say that what
I do alters
the history of humanity or is important for the following reasons.
Nevertheless, I think that each of us does work with a sense of how
our work should be attuned to the larger welfare of humanity. So my
personal goal in life mm is too
work toward the connecting of the sacred and the profane and to try to
bring together what has been broken and make it whole once again. And in
working upon that those broken fragments in our culture, work upon the
broken pieces of myself to achieve some sense of unity and the battle
between the artist and the yogi. Uh the battle between the profane that
requires liberation by going out into the six secular and breaking out of
ecclesiastical controls
and the necessity of the and humility of the of the shall we say, the yogi
to realize that the sacred is larger and that one has to work for the sake
realization of art, of the humanities, of culture, so that everything that
I'm doing is to try to move from religion, which I grew up in in in the
catholic church to spirituality and defined in spirituality,
a dancing balance between the energies of the liberation of the secular
and the liberation of the profane and all the energy that comes from
profane nation and liberation, and which is a creative expensing form and
its opposite, a consolidation into a new sacred vision of culture, a new
concentric vision, a new Dante's vision when I was very young and had
those heroic dreams that everyone has at 14, 17, interestingly PJ and
talking about adolescents who said, they all write their life plans and
their life scenarios and they already have their statue up in the streets
of paris uh awarding them for their nobel work, my fantasy uh came to me
while I was reading when I was sick, recovering from a long operation for
cancer of the thyroid, and I dropped out of high school and I was alone by
myself and I was reading Whitehead science in the modern world. And I
thought if it was not only thought a voice in my head said, If the 20th
century has ever to put itself back together again, it will be with this
man's vision, this work. And so I felt a kind of intellectual conversion
to the philosophy of organism of wholeness of Whitehead. And then I
thought because in those days I saw myself as a poet that I wanted to take
Whitehead's philosophy of process and time and space and the movement from
object and matter to process and dynamism and use it for poetry. The way
Dante had used a coin is as the kind of uh metaphysical backdrop for his
work. And to try to synthesize and create a larger synthetic vision to
approach the kind of architecture of thought that that was available at
Dante before the modern world began its adventure into disintegration and
fragmentation and energizing itself. And so I had a sense that the
philosopher gives the poet the furniture of existence. But it's up to the
poet to make it into a home and the way in which the just the crude
objects are made uh made lovable and made in some form. That is not just
mere order but is uh
is a loving relationship of form that enhances one's life and becomes a
home. That I was looking to somehow put together a use of language in
poetry where it would no longer be subject predicate object but would be
almost english as if I were writing chinese and that everything would be
processed and transformation. And I failed to do that partly because I I
went to Cornell and I was appalled at the artist, the vanity of the poets
, their narcissism, their self indulgence. They're egotistical desire for
publication. They're posturing their peacock quality. There's they're
fashionable sterility there, writing only of their own neurosis and I
thought that the contemporary poets are like the prophets of baal and I
had a kind of aesthetic revulsion to everything that they stood for. And I
was complete disgust and the poet in our society. And so I said, if this
is poetry, I will not be a poet. And so I went in the opposite direction
off to Ireland to do a study of the role of the great poets in changing
the world, the role of Yates and E. And creating the irish revolution and
dismembering the british empire and trying to check the materialism of
industrial society with the mystical vision of the irish. And so I was
attracted said, I'll go into history, I'll follow the muse of Cleo and I
found by abandoning poetry and going into the brute resistant matter of
historical fact, that there was a way that brute resistant fact could be
made to sing, and that there was a way that history could provide the
elements of story and narrative that could satisfy one's hunger for the
beautiful ones, hunger for the aesthetic. And I found that that
relationship of opposites was myth and that history have seen sensitively
that history was the performance of myth. And so I wrote my first book in
a kind of study of the relationships of imagination in history, poetry and
revolution, trying to find the answer myself because as I wrote the book,
my own city was going up in flames in the insurrection in watts. And I
found a huge revolution of consciousness with the 60s and and the new
music and the psychedelic drugs. And I could see that as I was in my study
in Cambridge massachusetts, writing a book about the transformation of
history, that history was being transformed all around me. So at that
point I decided that it wasn't enough just to be a historian of cultural
change. That one had to take one's vision seriously and find a way where
the university could become a place in which myth, history could become
the performance of myth. It was clear to me that the modern university was
not such a place. The modern university was not a place for the
sexualization of the humanities. It was not a place for the sense of the
holiness of the intellect. It was not a sacramental space. It was a place
of pride of ambition, of power, of a Tower of Babel. So that that sent me
on a search all over the world looking for the right kind of place where
education could literally become a place where one could move out of the
tiny ego to the larger sense of the soul, the admin, whatever you want to
call it, and to find a place where people could come together in a
community and communion of scholarship to see how the intellect itself
could become a dance and how the dance of the mind in form could take on a
poetic nature of its own and at that time I didn't know anything about
this in constant, I didn't know what I was doing and deciding not to write
another book on the irish revolution, but to go west and follow the voice
, saying go to California and out of that wandering and unconscious
wandering, I wrote out the edge of history and at the end of it realized
what I had done. But basically the goal was to try and find a sacred
school, to try and find the contemporary equivalent of the ancient linda's
foreign or the ancient academy of Pythagoras, that Crotona or the ancient
frappucino or whatever kind of schools they had in Stonehenge to find or
the schools of Persia to find a way in which knowledge was not just simply
facts, but knowledge lead to initiation and led to a transformation. And
so I felt that the trouble with the catholic church, which I knew as a
child was that sister mary immaculate and father Murphy did not really
know in the way that a yogi new or no new in the way that Hiroshi new and
I was trying to find catholic roches and couldn't find any, trying to find
catholic saints and couldn't find any, I found nice good people, but I
didn't find what I was looking for. So that took me into the journey to
the east and into yoga and into a into whitehead as a way of trying to
find ways in which white head and yoga could come together. And that's why
Yates interested me so much because he's a marvelous intellectual and
mystical synthesis. So the wandering brought me to all kinds of places to
Arcosanti in 1971. This is the end of a seven year cycle for me. And
things tend to run in mystical seven year cycles to the Hopi reservation,
uh to ashrams in India, to Oroville, to the max Planck Institute in
Germany, uh to the fin horn community. And in all of these places, I was
looking I guess for the grail, the way in which you could find the vessel
for the incarnation of this higher consciousness in the culture. And I was
interested in those places where the vision had set down and created a
larger civilization. So I became interested in Saint columba and the way
in which Iona created Western european civilization in the dark ages. I
was interested in cattle co waddle in the creation of mexican civilization
, interested in the role of the buddhist monks and moving through indian
tibetan into china. And I was searching in a sense with the way in which
personal vision can move into larger civilization and felt that all
civilizations really begin in a vision and that the vision of progress and
power and the domination of nature had reached its end in MIT and that I
didn't want to continue in that in that dimension at all. And so I became
as a as unhappy with M I. T. As I had been unhappy with the poets of
Cornell,
but in looking at say the way in which mitt or the catholic church had
failed to connect the experience of initiation to education. And they had
ended up only becoming what I called yesterday, the interior decorators of
Plato's cave. I began to invoke something and energy I guess that I wasn't
prepared for. Because in in looking to put initiation back into education
,
I think one comes to a place where it's no longer a question of just
getting a PhD, we're writing a book, but it comes to a point where you've
invoked in your search something things so large that your prayers are
going to be answered, but you won't survive it and you have to be very
careful for what you pray for because you'll get it. Uh and sometimes we
pray for things that we really aren't ready for. And so I was invoking a
lot of heavy imagery of monastic schools like the ancient linda's farm,
pythagoras academy, uh yoga and started In the period of revolution of 68
with the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the riots in
the streets decided that there was nothing in the collective in history
that I could see that was going to be either sacred or B. Whitehead or the
Yates. It was a choice between the domination of power of the liberal
technocrats and those who ran the military, defense university
establishment mitt or the Marxist radicals who were trying to gain wrest
power away from them who were materialists. And so I quit and went off to
Canada and started practicing crea yoga.
But the practice of crea yoga is raises an energy
that forces you to confront your unconscious and forces you to become
aware that you're you're not as good as you think you are and that there's
a whole shadow side and that the more energy it raises and the more power
that comes, the more distortion your personality goes through. The only
way I can describe initiation. And here I'm coming to the next question of
the dark night of the soul is by um
a lesson that was dictated to me in In meditation as I was ending a period
of about seven years of Korea yoga. And it was saying that tantra yoga and
I don't mean it necessarily in the explicitly sexual sense. I mean it in
the awakening of kundalini
tantra yoga is like making g when you boil butter, you subjected to a
violent process, which breaks it down. Now, if you look at normal butter,
it's yellow and clear and homogeneous and this is like the normal
personality before initiation, the normal well adjusted wholesome
personality is very functional because it's not dealing with its shadow
because it's repressing a lot of the negative stuff. and it's decided that
in order to have this social role, this ego to make it through society,
it's necessary to stay on track. And so the normal personality is quite
functional and it looks to be consistent and healthy. But if you look at
butter almost microscopically you can see that it's sort of like globules
of white and yellow and that it's a contradiction of unresolved elements
of golden elixir and ugly white globules of fat. The way in which you
become aware of that is to subject the butter to a violent agitation by
putting it on the stove and cooking it and boiling it. Which is the
process of the awakening of kundalini which is the process of the practice
of things like crea yoga, there are many different ways to do this. But
what happens then is your opposites become energized and visible and you
break down into a golden clear elixir and ugly globules of fat. All that
is most negative uh and disgusting uh and unconscious and instinctive and
unsa pollinated. It's almost like an alchemy. Now if you were to stop the
process there, you would be in a very dangerous position which is one of
the troubles of working with acid in drugs and things of this sort at this
particular point. The energy that comes to you tends to inflate your ego
and you say I am a yogi, I am on the path. There are those on the path and
those are those off the path. I am a sadhu, I am an initiative of secret
mysteries of the Himalayas. And you go through all these inflations of the
ego where the energy that's supposed to break down your ego ends up
energizing it. And at this point, many people called themselves gurus and
set up a sign and put on a turban and take in disciples and that when you
go to the Ashram you find that the guru is an incredibly contradictory
being who is interested in money and laying every woman in the Ashram and
coming on with the wisdom of the east and you have a being with these
incredible contradiction, there's a lot of power and there's this
incredible golden elixir and the guy is not all fraud, but there are these
incredibly unresolved globules of ugly fat. And this is the point midway
where the guy sets himself up as a guru and says, I'm ready now to take on
disciples. I'm really hot stuff. It's a very difficult period and one
reason why it's useful to work with a guru who can help you sift through
with the strainer and take out the ugly globules of fat and throw it away
because the process of clarification of butter, which is like a latin form
of, of illumination, is to try to gain uh something that at the end is
basically still human. It's G and G is very much just butter, but it's
clarified butter. And so it's at a different stage than than the ordinary
personality. But the funny, dangerous thing about trying to build in
initiation into the experience of education and say, now that I've had my
PhD, it's time to go to the Ashram, is that if you stop in the middle, you
can't stay at a plateau, you'll get worse, not better. Once you awaken the
energies, once you get on the shamanistic path, you cannot go back to
stage one, you cannot go back to being a normal householder and being a
good dutiful suburban husband professor, etcetera, you will get worse, not
better. So that it's at that point, that the thing is very dangerous,
because this is the point where you can have psychosis. This is the point
in which you have no frame of reference for what's happening to you. And
in trying to end, boy, if you take drugs, and I thank God, I had enough
intuitive guidance not to do that. You really multiply a hundredfold the
danger of self deception and psychosis, and I've lost a few friends in
that path. So I'm speaking from my own experience, so that at that
particular point, you begin to be in a very dangerous condition. You're
sort of like a a jet going through the sound barrier and you're rattling
and things have come flying off and and your personality is uh is really
contradictory and really in a state of turbulence because you've shattered
the old steady state and before the new consolidation can emerge, you're
just all over the place up and down. So that the strange thing is by
invoking initiation, I was really playing with fire and invoking stuff
That is would be pretty hard to build into sort of initiation one a in the
humanities classroom and think it was going to work. So I was very naive.
I was the professor aware that the university didn't make any sense and it
had to be re visioned and fixed up and naively thought that all you had to
do was to add yoga and that you would go through graduate school and you
get your PhD and then you would go and spend seven years or so in intense
practice of of yoga and then, you know, you would be ready to be a college
teacher and that everybody should go through them. But what happened was
the sense that
that I discovered what I was talking about yesterday, the three stages at
the first stage is the of illumination is not
gaining
a lot of transcendental experiences. You are given ecstatic bliss states
to energize you. It's it's very one, it's part of the grace of, of yoga
that at the very beginning, you're given really beautiful experiences that
convince you that this is the path and that this is genuine and that
you're you have a glimpse of a higher consciousness and then the rest, it
closes down and the rest of your life is you keep getting up every morning
saying, why am I meditating? I'm just sitting here thinking about the rent.
This is a complete waste of time. I'm still a dumb, ignorant ship. When
the hell am I going to get really illuminated? And your mind just runs on
and on and on, and you think, God, I'm doing 3.5, 4 hours of yoga day,
surely I should be making some progress. Uh, and you approach it the way
any graduate student does, you know, you're gonna take your final exams,
you're gonna get a and the rest of it and you start and say, illumination
is at the end of the track and I'm an ignorant. So I'll just run and work
hard and get myself illuminated. If it takes six hours a day, I'll do six
hours. So when approaches yoga with all the fantasies of the old
personality of being an academic, um involved in upward mobility,
but the stages that comes out of that is the illumination of your darkness
, the confrontation with the shadow, the awareness of you ain't so good
after all. And as that moves and continues,
you reach the point of Stage two. And I mean, it's not so clear, These are
just metaphors that don't concretize these stages to be absolute things,
They're more uh loose indications, it flows into Stage two, which is
coming to the edge of your sanity. You come to the edge of the formation
of the ego and all that is not ego. And you realize in a sense that you've
created the ego in the way that you would almost a tune to a radio channel
and fix on it and create a projected being in time and space and that
that's you and you realize how illusory it is and how full of illusion and
how arbitrary and how limited and you also realize how close to psychosis
the disintegration of the ego is. This is one reason why a lot of Yogi
teachers say, don't get into yoga unless you have a good healthy strong
ego. Because if you have a weak unformed adolescent ego, you'll you'll
definitely go psychotic and schizophrenic is this is not for a person
without an ego, it's for a person with a healthy stable ego then to go
into it at that particular point where you're at the edge of the Yugo,
seeing the border of psychosis and sanity and seeing how sanity is defined
by society, Your sensibility changes and you can smell auras and uh you
have sort of weird experiences where the senses come together in different
combinations and you're aware that things are getting all unraveled. If
you persist in that uh and continue with your practice,
then you it reaches the point
where
that's lovely.
Yes, it reaches that point and
you eventually have to completely accept your defeat and have to accept
the fact that the construction of a project to be a good yogi and to get a
yogi PhD and to get illuminated uh is an exercise in fantasy and vanity
and that the ultimate end of all your wandering is the complete uh
collapse and defeat and the surrender of your whole idea of being a yogi.
So you have to reach the almost Krishnamurti point Where you've spent
seven or 8 years in four hours a day getting up and meditating and holding
onto your technique and saying, crea yoga is a divine technique and it's
gonna carry me to higher consciousness where you let go of all techniques
whatsoever and throw yours ah fu your meditation pillow out the window and
sit completely open, vacant void and surrendering even your yoga. And that
comes at a point when I think when one accepts his absolute
inability to deal with it, that's where you reach this kind of dark night
of the soul aspect, where you say welsh it, I mean, crea yoga was supposed
to be it and here I am just the same, you know, nerd I was when I began uh
I know how to meditate and I know how to have certain kind of psychic
experiences, but the psychic is just sideways. It's just a you know, the
mirror image of the physical, so you can, you know, do nice fancy things.
So what and it's uh you know, it's new seminar games, not simply not very
different from the kind of things you do in graduate school. So you reach
a certain point where ST john talks about aridity and that you don't feel
all your bliss states were in the early years of your practice, those
ecstatic transcendent uh out of the body experiences
and all you experience toward the end of your practice is just aridity,
nothingness, void, uh complete sterility, complete ordinary nous, complete
uh absence of God, void. Uh blackness. And one feels the whole thing is a
complete mortification of the ego to use the um the christian phrase. And
at that particular point, then one realizes that the awakening of
kundalini is not a ultimately enlightenment or wisdom, it's a psychic
energy that's just part of life. And the elevation of kundalini is
important. But the descent of kundalini is equally sacred and that one is
the materialization of spirit and the other is the spiritual ization of
matter. And that one being ordinary is as paolo would say, uh where it's
at and that being who you are and accepting your ego is an important thing.
And so one comes to the point of with a virtuoso with a Stradivarius, the
attempt to destroy the ego is not the point, the virtual doesn't shatter
the Stradivarius, but plays with it, note by note and it note by note, the
music is able to express the fullness of time because when the music is
ended, then the then the music is complete and the party to now fully
exists because it's finished. And so that the whole linear thing of time
is escaped by accepting the linear step by step, Note by note. So that the
ultimate aspect is a kind of return to the the ordinary and realizing that
initiation can't be put back in education. And my attempts to do it at
linda's foreign were failures. So I gave people a lot of power and
independence at linda's foreign and very little training. And five or six
years later after linda's farm, they weren't terribly different from when
they went in. So it's very clear that I could go on a personal journey,
but that couldn't generalize and become a school. So that the whole
project of building intellectual itty and meditation together in a sacred
school that would be linda's farm was itself a failure too. And so one had
to accept in a sense the failure of all those goals. But in the failure,
there's a peculiar thing that happens. I the words that came to me in
meditation is that when you give up God can give down and that only by
being wounded are you opened and only at the point of complete wounding
and surrender. Are you really able to be open to what had been trying to
get into you all the time and that if you try to meditate, you know, and
really work at it hard, you're getting in your way and that the even
though one has a lot of psychic experiences, the deception is that you
think because of the psychic experiences that you're moving toward wisdom
, that's not true. The psychic is not is not wisdom. And at that point, I
was talking to trump foreign pressure and he was saying, we were comparing
notes with the christian and the buddhist and he was saying that the
difference between buddhism and yoga is that in yoga, you try to use
physiological exercises of the subtle bodies and meditation practices to
change the personality and to change the body in buddhism, you work upon
the character to achieve wisdom. So that when the physiological and other
changes come, they're irrelevant. So they've just turned it the other way
around, which is exactly like the christians, where they say you can speak
with tongues. But if you don't have love, then you've missed the whole
boat. So that the Buddhist emphasis and the Christian emphasis on Caritas
are very, very similar. And again, as with ancient Judaism, they say you
shouldn't get into these practices until you're well adjusted, normal,
healthy and over 40. So, And we can see the wisdom of that because the 60s
was about the adolescent religious experience. And what happens, you know
, when you try to have the universe infusing the stage of adolescence, you
get, you know, some highs, but you get a lot of deception
both politically and religiously. So that out of that than I could more
readily accept the fact that linda's barn would have to be ordinary and
that I would have to accept the fact that what had been set up to be a
monastic school of retreat was becoming
a center for the political inquiry into a new culture and a new
civilization. And that the people who were paying attention to in this
foreign weren't necessarily yogis or buddhist, but were people like
Governor Brown in California. And so it brought me back to society and
that the paradox that what seeks to be escapist ends up becoming politics.
And that taught me the wisdom of what the french poet said when he said,
Sharp Peggy to commands a mystique, a fenian politique. Everything begins
in mysticism but ends in politics the sixties, We're, in a sense,
mysticism, the 80s are going to be politics
now. What this has to do for society in general is that I think humanity
at large is experiencing the dark night of the soul and the initiation
and the destruction of all its self images. It's having its confidence
shattered, that science or technology can control and manage reality. It's
having its confidence in religion in the old fashioned sense shattered,
that it can deliver the good, It's having its emphasis on the
counterculture religions of the gurus shattered because we're clearly
seeing all that sixties and seventies stuff isn't really getting very far
and people are getting locked into reverend moon kind of stuff and that
the ashrams are limited to. And so all our strategies of maintaining
control Are being shattered. And I think that what we'll see in the 80s is
the de structuring of the world system. It's relationship between culture
and nature and ecology, the industrial system, the process of urbanization
and the process of nationalism and all of these will generate their
shadows, nationalism will generate terrorism, urbanization will generate
the breakdown of all civic systems like new york and Calcutta. And that
ecology will generate uh industry will generate ecological disruption and
and certain kind of cataclysms. So we're coming to the crisis of the
industrial nation state system and its world cities like new york and
London, So this is going to be a period of initiation and dark night of
the soul if we try to resist it. Uh then I think the impedance in the and
the wire is going to generate even more and more heat and it's going to be
really apocalyptic if we can understand that we're going through an
initiation experience and completely let go and surrender in the profound
ist deepest sense of having a planetary religious spiritual awakening of
the order of the sixth century Bc, which was pythagoras allowed to mama,
vera buddha, the hebrew prophet all at the same time, If we can allow
ourselves to be open to that, then I think we're the possibility of moving
through this week to passage this crisis. This initiation is open. If we
don't understand the religious maps we've been given and we attempt to
continue in a linear way, industrialization, urbanization, and nationalism.
I think we'll have an apocalyptic Third World War and will experience a
real literal concrete material destruction and have very large dark ages.
So it's a question of how large the destruction is going to be and how how
humanity is going to make it through. As for the role of the elites in
this, someone said here before me that elites should not have any special
significance given to them. And I think that's true that we need elites.
All culture is based on elites, Paulo is an elite are, if you want to
study guitar, you go to the best guitar teacher, you can find. The trouble
with our universities is they're not elitist enough. And what has
destroyed them is mediocrity, not elitism, Harvard no longer knows what
it's doing. And this has hurt America greatly. I mean, Harvard was a great
institution in the age of Whitehead and William James and when it lost its
vision of the humanities and was taken over by behavioral science and
political ambition. And we got the Harvard be of skinner and e o Wilson
America was wounded. You know, it's one of our great institutions and it
it really hurts to have it fall into the wrong hands of just the Mcx
George Bundy's and the marriage of Harvard in Washington that gave us
Vietnam so that if we if we see that we need elites, but they mustn't be
given power that they have to be point.