…open to attack. But it's an incredibly modern anticipation of ourselves going into a kind of quasi union with our technology. What is it Yeats says in sailing to Byzantium? The part about how I would be a thing of gold and golden once out of nature I…

…going to make it happen. It has become the guiding image of what we want to be. And I'm reminded of the poem by Yeats. It's sailing to Byzantium, where he speaks of how, after death, he would like to be an enameled golden object singing to the lords…

…in the same way that they did when I first read them, but then ive changed a lot since then. Well, changed utterly, as Yeats would say. Nonetheless, at the time I read each of these books, they made an indelible imprint on me, and without them I doubt…

…scientifically and religiously, because then we have what you said, when I'm saying symbolical consciousness or symbolic systems, or as Yeats said, metaphors for poetry, or as even Joseph Campbell said, myth. As metaphor. As metaphor, as myth and as religion.…

…do with the notion of boundary dissolution. That to be digested by something is to actually become it. It becomes you. You know, Yeats said, we become what we behold. And, yeah, I mean, it's fairly profound when you think about it. I didn't really lean…

…my problem lies. So you don't just place the word lust in the memory keeping spot, you place some vivid and shocking image. Yeats suggests the image of a nun lifting her skirts. I think this was a classically suggested one that people were taught to…

…Terrence says that we need a new myth. And I completely agree. As you know, things seem to be coming unstuck. Sort of like Yeats once said, the center cannot hold. Now, when Terrence gave this talk in early 1993, it seemed to many of us like the world…

…of you have followed Julian Jane's work, you know that he thinks the eagle arose in homeric times that recently, 1500 BC. Yeats, in sailing to Byzantium, has this wonderful line, something about, if ever out of nature, I should be turned. It's all about…

…my goodness, this is the stuff of prophecy. Something marvelous must be going to happen there. And, you know, you must know Yeats poem, what's it called, the second coming. The one about what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. And it is…

…Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come. And this is the idea of becoming, you know, a golden object after death. Yeats, this is sailing to Byzantium. Once out of nature, I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing but such a form…

…by this faint spookiness which can't be gotten rid of. So to start off this continuation of the discussion of flying saucers I'll have Yeats again. O sages standing in God's holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall. Come from the holy fire. Purn in a…

…going to make it happen. It has become the guiding image of what we want to be. And I'm reminded of the poem by Yeats. It's sailing to Byzantium, where he speaks of how, after death, he would like to be an enameled golden object singing to the lords…

…and take off our rosy blinders and Face Up to what's actually going on in the world today. The Great Irish poet w b Yeats Foretold this era many years ago in his famous poem the second coming, which reads: turning and turning in the widening jar, the…

…of final time and things. What I thought of doing tonight, if it was a small group, possibly was discussing two poems by Yeats which deal with final things. And then the thing which broke down our effort to talk about Bosch was that we didn't have…

…crisis and transition. So I thought to begin by reading a very short, well known and simple, actually, poem of Yeats, because almost every schoolchild knows this poem. And yet exactly what it's talking about is fairly ambiguous, although I think…

…feeling. But where? What we get out of Shelley is an archaeological site, a shattered wreck. What we get out of Yeats is something much darker and more menacing, something lovecraftian, something old, something alive and something on the move. This rough…

…in the widening gyre. The best lack all conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity. This is a fairly dark vision out of Yeats, and he hooks it up to. I mean, obviously the image that is invoked is that of the sphinx, that is this lion…

…and fin de siecle decadence, and it's almost a narcotic sensuality that comes out of these images. Then the next section is typical. Yeats. An aged man is but a paltry thing. It's invoking the transience of the body and all that. But then the last two…

…Zealand with the world grid system. There's the whole Jose Argueles cosmology. Ospensky was an early one in search of the miraculous. Yeats Book of Vision is a complex mathematical thing explaining the cosmos. And there seems to be something in us that we…