Presentation 9
Presented on: Saturday, February 28, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
Transcript (PDF)
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 9 of 52
Presentation 1-9
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Transcript:
Let's come to the ninth presentation in 2015, this year of preparation. The seed of deception is self-deception. And the germ of that seed is identification. Which is why in the course of cognizing an identity there is an inevitable crisis. One of the great volumes in the set that make a Psychological History of a Life by Eric Erickson is The Crisis of Identity.
In Eric Hoffa's The True Believer, which originally appeared in 1951 in this mentor paperback 1958. My copy comes from buying it early in 1961 at the University of Wisconsin Bookstore. The True Believer is a difficulty that is endemic in the species of Homo sapien sapiens. Part. One of The True Believer is the appeal of mass movements. And the very first section of three is the desire for change. The second is the desire for substitutes. And the third is the interchangeability of mass movements. "The True Believer is a fanatic", Hoffer writes, "who is not only willing to die for his cause, he is willing that you should die for his cause as well".
We see it in 2015 rampant around the world. Mass movements whose plural is itself a cover for the deception and for the enmass self-deception that stems from a whole layered panoply of crises of identity leading back to a self-deception that enters into play in the very structure of the symbolic thought of Homo sapien sapiens. When in nature any species has the cyclic enfolding which allows for the natural dimensions of space, time and the universe and the world to continue within that cycle the conception of identity that exudes its resonances of the need for being sure of identification because of the uncertainty in self-deception is a snag producing an itch, producing a sore, producing a plague. Which comes to pass. Not when nature has its cyclic integral concourse. But when there is a snag that comes into play. Not in the field of vision. Vision occurs supernaturally natural in a living universe. But when vision, which naturally supernaturally brings into play a new dimension of person. It is so rare, initially, as to present a kind of challenge to eventually the whole natural cycling of the species. And that prismatic person is an artist who expresses in art the very first forms of a new dimension where culture transforms into the beginnings of civilization.
This is the moment where the self-deception has its moment of blinking into play. And out of this comes a crisis of identification because the buildup of further resonances then of that which constitute history. Which in the natural cycle is a cultural, traditional form of experience remembering because one has a ritual basis to confirm it. And a, an integral symbolic way in the mind to bring it all together so that the ritual is the basis of the whole horizon of experience. Its feelings, its images, especially coming into being able to be tied into a bow by the symbolic function of the structure of thought. When it detects through an improvement in identification. The very safety of one's identity reaches a snag, which becomes a crisis. Which engenders like an infestation that proliferates into a plague. The obsessive need to be sure about your identifications so that you can confirm your identity feeds the self-deception that eventually expresses itself as a mass movement, all mass movements. They're interchangeable of the true believer, the fanatic. And this is a peril of civilization.
We live in a time where the accumulated penetration of several very large cycles of civilization, which are time forms, actually their energy comes from time. Their extent comes from the dimensions of space. And so, they acquire for those ensconced and engrossed with it, a universal situation, which is that one's existential in terms of ritual, experiential, in terms of myths. And a crisis of cognition versus the ability to color outside the cognition lines into recognition.
And that challenge requires in civilizations a response. And the response must be adequate to the challenge. And that as civilization has developed and matured in this world, on this planet, in this star system, no less. The detection of the challenge response crisis reached an apex in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's in that 30 some year period. Having a genesis in the 1920's for sure. And the decade before that, the teens, absolutely. And the whole notion that somehow the turn of the 20th century was, uh. Epochal. E-p-o-c-h-a-l. An epoch was turned. And that it was high time to do something about all of these problems. All of this deception. And it was fueled by a 19th century, century long unraveling of the certainty in the veracity of nature.
I once did a 52 lecture, before presentations I used to lecture. 52 lectures on the development of the 19th century. And its beginning, for the most part, the solidity of human life, of civilization, had received a challenge seed that brought in the self-deceptive nature of time at the very root of the nature of man. And the two outstanding revolutions that expressed this was the American Revolution and the French Revolution. And very soon became this revolution of that revolution. And the 19th century saw the progressive unmistakable fraying of the certainty of the identity of things. And by the 1890's, the mid 1890's specifically. it became scientifically confirmed that all was not what was assumed. And that all that was trusted was an assumption that fed presuppositions, especially about ourselves.
In 1895, the almost accidental discovery of Rontgen rays, better known as X-rays. And in 1896, the recognition that there was such a subatomic particle as the electron. And to match 1895 with X-rays, H.G. Wells published The Time Machine. And in 1896, to match the discovery of the electron, he wrote The Island of Dr. Moreau. We can change our time referenced by referent, by immense scalers. The protagonist in The Time Machine goes some 900,000 years almost into the future. This is in a culture that in many aspects a civilization and many cultural aspects that thought man was created with Adam and Eve in 4000 B.C.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is about a human, Dr. Moreau, talented to be able to speed up the evolution, which was a fresh scientific idea at the time. Hardly two generations old. That man could interfere with the natural constitution of beasts and produce men out of them in a laboratory. That's what Dr. Moreau called it on his little secret island out in the Southern Pacific. Within several weeks Sailing of Apia, which was in the Solomon Islands. And Dr. Moreau had the confidence that he was able to use his kind of Frankenstein science not to reactivate portions of dead people, but to take living beasts and produce out of them in his laboratory new kinds of men, who referred to the laboratory as the house of pain. Who we're constantly available to be regressed back to beasts if they were not handled with all kinds of constraints. And the snag came when Dr. Moreau tried for the first time to make not a man out of beasts, but to make a woman out of a panther. And the panther woman became the subject of a scientific experiment where this chance castaway was brought to the island, a young man. And Moreau wanted to see how would she regard a man that she had never seen? A man who is not a beast, but a man. Would she fall in love with him? Could she? And what would happen?
All of this is replayed in the early 21st century. The issue of the energy, the dynamic of time and it's blossoming as to space. The nature of man and the ability to scientifically alter man quickly and hopefully irrevocably. All of this ensemble is a very complicated, not a bow, but a knot where we are going to hang ourselves for sure if we do not loosen the noose and climb down from the tree by which we will be strung up. So, we are faced with a very peculiar quality of space-time, of world culture, of so called now civilization. which is deeper and deeper into its second century after such a challenge. The unravelling of the certainty of things into x-rays, into time machines, into the modification of species by ourselves. All of this comes rather rapidly within one generation, from 1895-96.
By the time of the early 1920's the ultimate machine to modify us is the subject of a great play by Karel Čapek of Prague, genius author, and it was called in initials, R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots. Robot is a Czech word. It means an artificial being who is man like and can be tinkered with and perfected so that he becomes supra human. Human plus. Where have we heard that? Everywhere before. Constantly now. Self-deception is the seed of deception gaining an addiction to identification and a crisis of identity. And all of that is, in reality, a tempest in a teapot. It is so unreal on every conceivable level. But it takes dementiality of maturity to let it evaporate. To let it be dissolved in a solution. And to have that refinement through a recalibration.
And that's what the future in the new past is a 2015 series falls into the eighth year of an eight-year set that began with the first year long set paired phase transforms, which was a condensing and a making of a one-year delivery shortcut for a two-year education learning called eventually, in 2006-07 The Learning Civilization, which took about 42 years to develop on the university level, largely outside of universities.
We are by 2015 coming into a recognition that recognition has a self-deception snag forbidding it. Not only to mature and to flourish beyond that, but to even occur. And it is this closing off that characterizes every new time form improvement in civilizations development. So that our particular time form change has the qualities scientifically, mathematically of a carrier wave. And that carrier wave has a particular peculiar exact quality. It has the quality of a soliton where that energy wave of a soliton will continue unimpeded by space-time. Its dynamic has a pure time so that its energy carries through space in the way in which time initially occurs, and that is spontaneously. So that the instant blossoming of space is not at all a friction or an impedance to the steadiness of time in its spontaneous energy coming out of zero field.
This is a very difficult way to talk. To present. And one of the borrowings from Sanskrit helps. And that is that a natural cycle with its symbolic structure of the mind Integral is capable of resolving its focus to what in Sanskrit is called Dharma. The truth. The veracity. The Veritas. Which is transparent in the sense of a translucence enters into play that allows a freedom to the structure of the mind so that it begins to function in a fifth dimension, a quintessential freedom, that is a high dharma field. As nature is a field of dharma of truth, vision is a field of refining and recalibrating the truths, the dharmas indefinitely refundable. So that high dharma quality is that discovery, that the crisis of identity is a flaw in manufacture, not in nature.
The previous time form came to the conclusion by a few very clever people and communities that were very clever in saying, we know we are Gnostics. We are those who know. We are some of the few who know that man as he seems to be is flawed because the universe as it seems is flawed. Because it isn't a creator God, but some demiurge that has produced this phantasmagoria by jailing Miss Wisdom in its fantasy distorted realm and we are here too free her to return to where we are. Of seeing that the divine is not the real but flawed and man is not really finished, we must go human plus beyond. We must take our intelligence, our cognition raised to a technology where now we are able to be trans human in developing an interface with an artificial intelligence that is totally codable so we can run it through all of the filters and verifications and tests and come out with that exactness that we know now we can confirm. And that we will be that and that will be it.
This happened 2000 years ago as well. The Gnostics of the early second century after the carrier wave are speeded up so that they happened now just right almost on the tails, if not before the carrier wave that developed and is developing in our civilization on this planet, in this star system, in our species.
And the complications are so enormous that the knot has so many feeder threads and strains that it almost seems to those who would get rid of this knot that the best solution, if we can't have an ordering of the bind, of the structure, of the integral cycle itself, of commanding nature and ritual and myth and symbols, to be, as we understand with our cognition codified. Then we must take a sword and cut that knot out. Hence there are two tribes of true believers. Two tribes of mass movements that are interchangeable. Because of writing this in the late 40's, early 1950's, Eric Hoffer used what was fresh and world concern. At the time he used the Communists and the fascists. The Nazis and the Soviets. The Russians and the Germans. We have seen in the news the interchangeabilities where there's a dosey-doe where those who are struggling to have a democracy are accused of being the fascists by those who are the resurgence of a Soviet imperium, a Eurasian superpower, as we really should be. And the need to control a Europe that is economically, if not quite yet, politically, if not quite culturally united under a financial agreement, under a contract book of regulations that this Europe has to make deals so that we don't upset the possibilities with real social crises.
And in between one has akin contribution from China, from Islam, which are part of a three-pronged trident of the time forms of civilization that reach into all three in a special braid. Which all three have a special maturity that is excellent together braiding to a very trustworthy cable of a tethering that does not jail, does not control, does not make a lasso for those who do not believe. Who are not willing to die. Making those who don't believe die. That all of this requires a visioning airing out, a prismatic person art, a kaleidoscopic history dimension. So that a science of analytical exactness can participate as an eighth-dimension quality where a mature civilization, a mature species, becomes free. Free to leave one's cultural home, one's home planet. To be at home and one's entire star system, no matter how complex, how many stars, how many planets, moons. Et cetera. And be free on the interstellar frontier between all the stars systems. And a great spiral spirit swirling of a galaxy of billions of such systems. On that vastness the knots of culture and of cognition and of imposition are actually like tying one's shoes wrong. So that you stumble because they're tied together in the same knot.
Let's take a break.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back.
Those of us in the computer generation have come to understand that memory is limited. And memory can be defective. It can develop glitches. It codes the corruptions as well as the information and makes no distinguishment between them. Just so memory as a brain center function is limited until it crosses through a gate, a portal, into a visionary differential field of consciousness where cognition is no longer mnemonically limited. But a transform has occurred so that instead of memory as an integral structure, the dynamic of remembering is unlimited in an infinite field of possibilities. So that the classic understanding of refinement of our species as Homo sapien sapiens man, not just wise. Not just capable of art. But wise about being wise. Capable of a written language of remembering whereby one can mature and develop and change and transform memory out of its limits progressively into wider and wider limits until it has the ability to have a poetic access to the unlimited.
One of the favorite oppositions of Pythagoras 2500 years ago was pairs of opposites and at the very beginning was limited and unlimited. **inaudible two or three words**. It is a quality where remembering as recognition is able to transform not once but even twice over so that cognitive functioning based on the ability to have memory. You can't use a computer very much without it having memory. And yes, you can increase the memory. You can run it so that even 256 gigabytes is rather small. Nevertheless, it is coded to be limited and to function on a binary limitation. And that all codes and coding have this identifiable identification of computation. Until the memory is free to play as remembering. And when it does, because memory as a structure of the mind came in to play in the structure of thought by a dosey-doe exchange with another structure in thought, that is the imagination. And as remembering became the memory in the structure of thought, the imagination in the structure of thought became creative imagining in differential consciousness along with remembering. And so creative imagining ratioed with remembering when the denominator, common denominator, is creative imagining you have art with remembering as the numerator. Personal. And when the ratio is inverted the common denominator is remembering with the numerator as creative imagining. And that's history.
So that art and history are ratios of the real. Art, harkening to its spontaneous creativity and remembering in an infinite field of differential consciousness. And science, harkening in a harmonic to that resonant set of differential consciousness, become kaleidoscopic consciousness of history is able to have an analytic that is infinitely capable of exact analytics, regardless of whatever limitations there might be. There is no artificial intelligence and no brain coded intelligence that is anything more than a drop in the bucket that can be dipped into the endless ocean of the real called maturity.
When in the summer of 1961 I was first reading Eric Hoffer's The True Believer on The Fanatic in interchangeable mass movements. I was 20 years old. I was given the assignment in a Roman history course at the University of Wisconsin by the professor himself that I had signed up for four credits, not the three-credit course, and needed to submit a paper. And he gave me his copy of Tacitus' The Annals in Latin, to read during the summer, to write my paper on it, and to send it to him on vacation in Florence. And if he received it in time in Florence to read it, he would give me the four-credit grade, which had been suspended. And which I needed in my grade point very much. He gave me Tacitus. So, I read Tacitus' Annals and Hoffer's True Believer together. Braided together with a third that were the writings in several volumes by D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism. That's how I matured from age 20 to become 21 in October. And learned how to learn in a very, very big way.
There is a moment where recognition springs spontaneously into a creative imagining, remembering dynamic braid of energy and form where one is able quicker than instantly to spontaneously recognize, not only what is going on beyond the codifications, but what is occurring quite beyond the identifications.
One of the wonderful books on Sir Isaac Newton that was recently published is entitled The Newtonian Moment. And, uh, the author, uh, Mordechai Feingold. Nice Jewish **inaudible word**. Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture the Newtonian Moment. And Newton's creative imagining remembering moment came in the midst of the bubonic plague in 1665-1668. He was at Cambridge University as a very special, they call them sizars, somebody who is admitted, uh, uh, under, uh, finance help, um, but on a low-level sizars must at mealtimes. The dining hall is essential to maintaining the order of such institutions and traditions and cultures. And sizars do the waiting on tables. A little more wine? More food? Could I bust that for you? Oh, yes, sir.
When the plague broke out in 1665, it was not only in Cambridge and London, but all over England and in many parts of the continent. It had a lull, a false lull. Plagues always have a false lull. And then broke out more virulent than ever. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was followed by a false lull. And we see the virulence currently. This goes for Chinese history as well. It goes for Islamic history as well. It goes for Democratic impediments as well. So that we are awash in crises worldwide and history deep. But revolutions will not help. Reformations will not help. They add fuel to the conflagration. What helps is a recalibration. And that recalibration brings in the moment where in between the original virulence and then the secondary super virulence, in that calm, there are prismatic persons who gained a kaleidoscopic historical insight into the very nature of space because they have a spontaneous recognition about time.
Sir Isaac Newton between 1665 and 1666 he, in response to the original outbreak of the plague, went back to the rural countryside of Lincolnshire, to his home, uh, area. Uh, his home family estate. Quite small. And he returned after almost, uh, nine months, ten months to Cambridge for a period of about three, three- and one-half months. And then with the reoccurrence of the virulence, he went back out. So colloquially, it's always called well, he was gone for two years from Cambridge. Um, Feingold has been able to show that this is not the case at all. There was a creative outbreak in between the two bouts of the plague in Cambridge with the young Isaac Newton. He writes on page 13 of The Newtonian Moment, after then the plague struck Cambridge, "A common perception lingers that with the outbreak of the epidemic in 1665, Newton left Cambridge for two years. and that it was precisely during these amimoromolous miracle years, two wonder years, two wonder years of isolation that Newton made his great discoveries." An entire lifetime of genius took place not only in those two years, but specifically. Exactly historically, when momentarily he returned to Cambridge with the visionary theory to contemplation, beginnings of a theory, to Cambridge, and there was an ignition. His major patron protector tutor Isaac Barrow, was the holder of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. Barrow was the first Lucasian professor. And his successor, of course, was Sir Isaac Newton and the current Lucasian Professor of mathematics at Cambridge is, uh, Stephen Hawking, whose mentor is, uh, Roger Penrose. Both still alive. Both still working. Penrose's latest book is The Road to Reality in 1000 pages. The award-winning film on Stephen Hawking's life, uh, is, uh, currently showing in cinemas.
It was precisely during these any plural years, amimoromolous years, two wonder years of isolation that Newton made his great discoveries in actual fact. Newton was away for only two periods of eight or nine months each with a creative Cambridge interval in between. Having left for Lincolnshire in June 1665 Newton was back in residence by mid-March 1908th, um, 1666, remaining in Cambridge until mid-June.
Mid-March to mid-June from the ot of...the vernal equinox roughly to the summer solstice. That's why anciently we used to compute remembering and creative imagining.
He then left again, not to return until April 1667. Newton's subsequent chronology of his discoveries allows us to correlate the progress of his studies with his whereabouts. As the plague was devastating to Cambridge and other parts of England it was apocalyptically devastating to London. And the great book about it is by Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. And Defoe weathered the plague in London. And mysteriously gave it the presentation in this book. This is the latest Oxford World's classic edition of it. A modern version of Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year is Albert Camus The Plague published on France Gadamer, 1948. 1948 is when George Orwell published 1984.
So, Camus The Plague and Orwell's 1984 are a tuned pair. If you don't get the existential science fiction vision tandem, you're not tuned to history as it actually has occurred, is occurring. It's time to get your antenna out functioning. We are in an ultimate knotted crisis. Camus The Plague, La Peste, is set in Algeria, Northern Africa, Northern French Africa. In the city of Oran on the Mediterranean coast. Camus was born. He was a French Algerian. The Islamic term for that whole region of that Mediterranean coastal area is the Maghreb. The Maghreb is Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. In crisis as we speak because the resonances are analytically exact and aesthetically active as a prismatic form.
For Defoe, the novel that set him up before A Journal of a Plague Year was called The Storm, about the worst storm, the worst tornado, cyclone, hurricane. The storm that hit London in 1703. This was the Penguin Classic edition came out in 2003 as the, um, uh 300th anniversary of the storm. So that Defoe was artistically conscious. That the artistic expression in writing in a written work of art of these incredible moments of occurrence in nature coming into an implosive interchange with history, with the cities, with civilization, with persons who thought that they were well cared for, well protected, in possession of a real worldwide imperium suddenly come into not just confrontation, but collision with apocalyptic nature. And apocalyptic history coming into visa-vie, dosey-doe apocalyptic collision with nature. Both ways. Constantly. Tuned to apocalypse. Tuned to what in civilizations time forms given an analytic that holds and holds increasingly exactly the midpoint between carrier waves is a millennium. And there is a millennial fever that occurs as a midpoint crisis in the whole-time form dynamic energy of space-time in species refined civilization. And we are in the midst of it.
It is a problem that Newton came to understand because he had someone to bounce his ideas off by never meeting him in person, but by having a go between handled a correspondence between both where both were claiming that they were the creative originators and developers of the refined mathematics of calculus of a mathematic. That both men independently tuned to the same time form energy had come to understand from completely disparate origins that one can calculate infinitesimally unlimitedly with exactness either way, how you get from 0 to 1 and how you get from 1 to 0.
Leibnitz was the other man. And Leibnitz at 20 was in the Dutch Netherland area in Rotterdam. I came into contact with the great thinker who was Jewish but outlawed from the Jewish community because he was a non-conformist par excellence Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza. And Spinoza in contact with Christians because he was not limited to Judaism and its traditions and customs. And it was Spinoza, in talking with the Dutch Jesuits who had been in the Far East because the Dutch were very active in Indonesia and in China, along with the Portuguese and India and Japan, And the Dutch Jesuits had translated the Chinese I-Ching into Latin. And almost no one realized what it was, even Spinoza. But the 20-year-old Leibniz was a not just a universal genius, he was a cosmic recognizer. And he saw that the book of changes has exactly the dynamic analytic that one can employ. And it is his language that we use when we talk about how calculus operates, how it works. Newton's word functions replaced, uh, by Leibniz's term and many others.
Oddly enough, because history has these moments of peculiar, most peculiar, almost hyper peculiar events that perpetuated would produce a self-deception, a misidentification, a really torrential crisis of identity. Dissolvable almost instantly, even faster, spontaneously. If the right prismatic persons at that juncture are able to have their resonance to their harmonic. The German patrons of Leibniz became the new holders of royalty in England. And when George came over the house of Hanover to England to become King, he refused to have Leibnitz come along because Leibniz was the philosophic teacher counselor guide for his wife and his daughter, and both were becoming well, I think the colloquial term down south in the United States is very uppity. They were becoming difficult to manage. Their salon style was being broadened to a scientific analytic that exceeded anybody's ability to even criticize them. And all due to Leibnitz and so, he was left, along with almost all of his writings in a little German town.
And it's only now in the second decade of the 21st century that Yale University Press has the limited series translating for the first time in 300 plus years the rest is the writings of live notes. And it's only now that one begins to get the interesting development of volumes like this one. Its, uh, published date is, uh, um, 2007 in Penguin Books. And, uh, Judith Zinser, Emilie du Chatelet, and the title is Darling Daring Genius of the Enlightenment. And, uh, Madame de Chatelet was in her great creative years the translator of Newton into French in such a way that she understood the detailed filigree of complexity of Newton. And so, her French translation of Newton produced a revolution in mathematics that was somewhat truncated in England, did not really reach into Germany. But in France one had a generation of absolute geniuses in France and mathematics headed by Fourier, Lagrange. A whole sequence. Her Madame de Chatelet's friend for 20 years, they lived together in her, uh, villa not far from where CERN is set up on the French Swiss border at **inaudible word**. And while she translated Newton, Voltaire wrote Candide, which is a fictionalization, as they used to call it. Which was a short novel on a world where Leibniz is satirically presented in Voltairean style. And one gets Leibniz, well one gets Newton refined in French exactly at the time that the new world sends Benjamin Franklin to France.
More next week.
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