Presentation 29
Presented on: Saturday, July 18, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
Transcript (PDF)
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 29 of 52
Presentation 3-3
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Transcript:
Let's come to the 29th presentation of this year of preparation 2015. Preparation for 2016. We're looking at learning. And we live in an era, a time, where the most amazing discoveries and creativities are quite active.
This is a CD made in 2011. It's available on the web. It's labeled as a Pilgrimage to Santiago Vocal Music for Saint James. And it is a choir of 21 men and women, the Bamberg Choir. And they sing a millennium of song selections by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest of Spain. Which received St James very early, actually about 41 A.D. Bringing the Gospel and the message of Jesus to Spain. The CD of Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by having these 21 men and women in this choir sing a medley of songs by the Pilgrims over that long millennium, go back to the beginnings of how Santiago de Compostela was founded. And if you don't know your Spanish, it means Saint James, Santiago de Compostela of the starry fields.
And so, on this great celebration of new horizons, going to a star like Pluto and making it into a planet, in fact a binary planet, and of Dawn reaching Ceres and the asteroid belt and circling it for an orbit for a couple of years. We want to recognize that Santiago del Campo de Compostela, Saint James of the Starry Fields is au current. Just like this CD recorded in 2011. The commemoration is on the reason for founding Santiago de Compostela, and it reads this way, "In the spring of 711 A.D., the sunlight in Gibraltar glinted with the weapons of 7000 warriors." Gibraltar, as you know, is just across the straits from Muslim North Africa. It was called the Maghreb.
The Moorish military commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad, headed an invasion which had quelled the Christian resistance within only a few months. Roderick King of the West Goths lay dead on the battlefield. Tariq and his vice regent, Musa ibn Najjar Sir, who had brought up their troops, pushed all the way as far as the Pyrenees, between Spain and France and on into France. And began the conquest of Europe. About 711 seven, 12 A.D. It was not until October of 732, 20 years later, that the Frankish majordomo Charles Martel, succeeded in halting the invasion between Tours and Poitiers.
And Charles Martel in history is known as The Hammer. He stopped the Moorish Islamic Invasion of Europe 1300 years ago. 600 years later, the invasion of Genghis Khan moved into Europe and was finally stopped then.
To understand our times purely as some kind of Western colonial invasion is a historical nightmare grotesquerie. What is interesting about our learning is to be able to understand increasingly the waves and resonances of a recalibration of civilization.
And one of the poignant beginning places is a quotation from The Gospel According to Thomas. If you remember, Thomas was a very close associate, Apostle, of Saint James. In fact, it was quite interesting the connection, because Thomas was an architect. He was an architect from what is today, Damascus. And his relationship as an architect was with the grandfather of Saint James, who was Joseph. And the reason for this relationship was that the oldest daughter of Joseph and his wife, Mary, their oldest daughter, their oldest child, their oldest son was Jesus. Their oldest daughter was born in Alexandria and her name was Salome. And Salome was the mother not only of James, Saint James, but of Saint John. They were brothers.
And the way in which Joseph is remembered as a carpenter is a misnomer because he was a builder of many things. He was what we would call today a complete architect like Frank Lloyd Wright. He could build anything, including up to very large complexes.
And Thomas was a part of a inter kingdom combine of builders. And the center of that combine of builders was the port of Tyre on the Phoenician coast. And it was Tyre that always had the far-flung shipping connections from the time of the ancient Phoenicians going back to 2000 B.C. The Phoenicians from Tyre founded Carthage in North Africa. That was the large city trading port in the very center of the Maghreb of Moorish North Africa. And they founded Carthage in 800 B.C. They also founded Marseilles on the French coast across the Mediterranean in 600 B.C., where the Rhone River emptied into the Mediterranean. So that one could go up the Rhone River hundreds and hundreds of miles into the very center of France, of Europe, of Gaul at the time.
So that Tyre had this incredible array. But in more recent historical times, like after the founding of Alexandria in about 323 B.C., when Alexander died, the satrap that was appointed by the then king of Macedonia, Philip Aureus, was Ptolemy, one of his Alexander's generals. And Alexandria was built to be a world city in terms of its trade routes, its shipping by water, its trade routes by land. And the shipping was fed because they went inland on the Nile all the way down to Ethiopia. And so, they were used to having very strong trade routes all the way out to Carthage and Marseilles. Especially Marseille, because Carthage had been devastated by the Romans in the Carthaginian wars. But Marseilles had become a huge port. So that going on the Rhone into France was very much like going down the Nile into Egypt. Like the trade routes on the land going across from where Damascus was all the way to the great river of the Euphrates. The Euphrates, Tigris, but especially the Euphrates. Going down to the Persian Gulf and all the way along the coast of that Middle East, that near East, all the way to another great river, the Indus River, coming down and going into what was northern India for very ancient time. And so, we have enormous connections.
What is important about Thomas is as an architect, he was meticulous at keeping the recording of how all this is going to be built not only as an architect, but what the architecture was for. Its landscape. Its construction. The what is needed to build it. How you train your groups of construction people. How you marshal them together. And Thomas was chosen by Jesus specifically to be one of a triad, three, because it's very stable. Triads are very stable in this universe. In the cosmos that holds the universe in palms of its hands. Thomas, was one chosen to keep track of what Jesus was saying. The other Apostles chosen for that were Matthew and Philip.
Thomas as the architect Apostle was chosen to make sure that the core seeds would be curable because they would be written down. And the subtitle of his gospel is the in fact, the title, these are The Living words of the Living Jesus [The Gospel of Thomas]. So, he was there for the seeds. Matthew was there for how these seeds develop into not just sermons, but a whole pattern of five sermons. And so, The Gospel of Matthew is that hand that holds the grasp of understanding what The Gospel of Thomas sayings. In Greek they're called logos. These are the logos of the Living Jesus.
The third apostle with Philip, who was to write about the mystery of the bridal chamber. About the way in which to plant those seeds, because you know what they are saying. To develop those seeds into a pattern of sermons woven together so that one begins to have a literature. And Philip, that the sharing of that literature together is an expansion resonance of the harmonic of a spiritual marriage.
This is the 24th out of 114 logos from The Words of the Living Jesus, recorded by Thomas.
His disciples said, show us the place where thou art. It is necessary for us to seek it. He said to them, whoever has ears let him hear. Within a man of light, there is light, and he lights the whole world. When he does not shine, there is darkness.
We're looking at the way in which the harmonic of light, whether it's in songs of pilgrims over more than a millennia. Still current. Still doable. The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela this year had several hundred thousand pilgrims walking several hundred miles to get there. And when they get there and complete that journey, they are like they have been for more than a millennium, given a symbol which is this shell. This seashell. Not a conch shell, but a seashell.
Oddly enough, in the late 20th, early 21st century, we recognize that this also is a corporate logo. This seashell is the corporate logo, interestingly enough, for Royal Dutch Shell Oil. One of the themes of world corporations and busy now just for the first time of drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
We live in a most interesting time. And we're learning that an ongoing recalibration is in process. And process with such a, an energy almost one can call it a ferocious lunge into a mystery that cannot be characterized. Or planned for. Or trained for. Or manufactured for. And it is the patience of our learning that helps us to recalibrate. It's not about an education for a degree so you can get a job at a corporation. It's not about passing tests to get grades so that you have the necessary recommendations for entree into all of this. Learning is different from all such patterns. Learning is not only lifelong learning, it is learning over the whole course of a civilization which acts as a prism for understanding the way in which the universe itself is phenomenally actual in a cosmos as a context that is supra phenomenally real.
And for this we have an ability to do a reconnoiter that the prism civilization has within it a geometric city. It has a geometric. Its metric is geometric. One of the sayings, one of the logos of a 500-year forerunner of Thomas was Pythagoras. The sayings of Pythagoras. The, the Golden Verses of Pythagoras is The Gospel of Thomas about Pythagoras' sayings 500 years before. One of the logos of Pythagoras is geometry is history. And for many forever seemingly it has been one of the mysterious ones. Like one of his other sayings is don't eat beans. Don't eat legumes. They give you gas. They bloat you. It's a metaphor for don't get bloated by the taste of your taking nourishment.
But geometry is history is understandable now in our learning, because time in civilization is triple. Like those three apostles chosen to be able to position the right time geometry that was occurring then accurately. When we go to the development of Thomas in Matthew, we find The Gospel According to Matthew, has an incredible geometry. It has 28 chapters. It has four, a quatre, a quartet of sevens. Each seven chapters of Matthew is like a direction. Is like an angle. And that the entire square the frame of the four sevens gives us a very interesting quality, as you can tell. The words are penetrative. They have efficacy.
The 28 chapters begin with the very first of the chapters. And the very first words translated out of the original Greek is, "These are the generations of the living Jesus. Son of Abraham. Son of David." So that there's a recursive recursion going back that these generations of Jesus have in this particular calibration, a starting point. And the starting point is Abraham. They have a midpoint, and the midpoint is King David. And they have a current…au current revelation point, which is Jesus. The living Jesus. Not the crucified Jesus, the resurrected Jesus. And these are the generations.
And when they're totaled and Matthew, who was an ancient Levite, was extremely accurate. The Levites were set aside. They were set aside in the time of another Joseph, whose father was Jacob. Whose grandfather was Isaac, Isaac, whose great grandfather was Abraham. And that Joseph in Egypt had a pair of sons. And those sons, Manasa and Ephraim, were welcomed into the structure of the 12 sons, the 12 tribes then, of the sons of Jacob. And Manasa replaced Joseph as a single person. And Ephrem was the blessedness of the ability of Joseph to save what would have been the end of the patriarchy. The end of that whole lineage from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, so that it could continue in history.
And so, Ephraim replaced the tribe that would have belonged to the son Levi. And they were set aside as a special blessing tribe. Their concern was to maintain the history of the generations and their complications complete up until their own day. And to record this and to pass this on within that Levite tradition. And one finds that almost all of the masculine figures surrounding Jesus were Levites, except for Peter and for Judas Iscariot. They were not.
Matthew being an exquisite Levite. He is characterized in the Bible as a customs inspector, a tax person for goods coming in and out. And of course, it means somebody who is keeping track of this immense pattern of the shipping and caravan routes and their commerce as far as it spreads.
And so, Matthew, his real name was Levi. He was called Matthew by Jesus. Trustworthy blessedness. In The Gospel According to Mark, he's characterized not as Matthew but as Levi, because that's what Mark understood from his family heritage. Well, that's it's actually this is your uncle Levi. Uncle because his parents were one of Jesus's sisters, Mary and her husband, Cleophas, whose branch of the Hebrew shipping route families worked out of Pathos, Cyprus. Cleophas' brother was Barnabas, their father was Nabbous. And so, the brother was called Barnabas, the son of Nabbous. And Cleophas married, one of the sisters of Jesus and their son was the boy who grew up to be Saint Mark. Who was only ten years old at the Last Supper, where he served the water to mix with the unmixed concentrate wine. And that unmixed concentrate wine was held in a big chalice. It held, actually enough quarts to provide a glass of wine for 13 at the Last Supper.
We know because that particular chalice was found in 1909 outside of the ruins of Antioch in what is today, Syria, where battles are being raged to this moment against a split in Muslim invaders. One of them being in ancient Iran and the other being from the ancient Arabs. And they are now fighting over the spoils of having definitely driven out the European colonialists. And now we want to see who is going to have the most of these oil rich lands. Oil rich Iran or oil rich Saudi Arabia or whatever. It's oil, isn't it? And its power and it's here as corporate future, isn't it?
We have to recalibrate, and our learning must be not only continuous. It must have a continuity. And that continuity must be paired by a tensegrity of geometry. Of structure. Which can be understood to whatever degree of specificity is needed to do an architecture of whatever it is that we're endeavoring to do.
And so that tensegrity of the Universe, that continuity of the cosmos are a pair. It's a symmetry as eternal as symmetry and paired ness itself. And we are putting our learning into a pair of four square one as a frame of referentiality. The other as a double rotation of that second frame to become a diamond shape. And that, though it seems that the diamond on top of the square makes an eight-fold, it's actually that the diamond is paired. It's not just four. It is paired so that its four times paired is 16. And that 16 and that four make 20. And the complementary of them together is a 21st.
We're getting apparently a little deep. So why don't we take an early break and then we'll come back for something longer.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back to time forms. Civilization has a triple time form that is the energy of its being. Its ability to be there. Like the universes energy to be in space phenomenally is due to the energy of time as the first dimension. So that civilization, all civilizations, no matter where they are, whatever star system, whatever galaxy. They have a triple time form that gives them a geometric that allows for structure to have an equal distribution of tension. Like a geodesic dome distributes whatever tension has come into the structure equally throughout the structure. So that the structure itself has, as Buckminster Fuller who invented and designed geometric geodesic domes, they have tensegrity. They not only hold together, but they hold together because they are together. They're designed in the architecture to work. And that workability of that tensegrity structure, if it has as well a continuity.
Frank Lloyd Wright About the same time, a little bit before Bucky Fuller, began to work with the tensegrity of geodesics, began to run his architecture school at Taliesin in the early 1930's. 1932. And training, running a school to train architects to learn how to live so that their lives had a continuity with their architectural profession. So that they were architects in lives that had an architecture. And that that continuity would come out and whatever it is that they were building. Whatever they were designing to be built would be built with a continuity that would hold and that this was the nature of materials to do this. But the nature of materials with that kind of continuity and the freedom to develop the expressive extension of your architecture cannot only work with natural materials.
One time Frank Lloyd Wright, in an interview in the early 1950's with Hugh Downs as a young man at the time on television. It's on CD. I think, DVD somewhere. 1952, I think it was. He said, look, if the Greeks had had steel and cement, we wouldn't have to do any worrying about building or design. But they didn't. So, we have new materials.
The aspect of this is extendable beyond 1950's into the understanding recognition, the learning that materials now can be so sophisticated that it makes cement and steel look like some kind of ancient missing medieval wondering out of datedness in terms of what really is required for an architecture for the 21st century, etc. And beyond. It has to have not only a continuity with nature, it has to have a tensegrity with the architecture of conscious dimensions. And they have to be together. There has to be a way to put your hands of nature into the arrangement of ancient beyond belief future into all possibilities together to now make a tensegrity within the continuity that has a complementarity that works. And this is the challenge. It is the challenge. And this challenge resurfaces in civilization at periodic nodes.
Such a node happened 2000 years ago. What can be classically styled as 0 B.C., 1 A.D. Everything before has arrived at zero in its countdown and everything since begins with maneuverability since. And so, 2000 A.D. is 2000 years. Midway is a millennium. So that in the time forms of civilization, there are carrier waves as major nodes of developing from not from scratch, but from zero. And generally, up until now, it's been all right to count from zero again, but to count numerically, arithmetically, linearly.
This carrier way, we can no longer do that. We have to move beyond that, which classically, anciently always has been trustworthy in the shaping of civilization. We have to be able to start from zero yet again. But we have to be able to go to infinity. We can't put an arithmetic numeracy. Because there's no count up. You can count down and that's true and valid, but you can't count up. How far are you going to count? You will run out of the patience of enumerating.
So, it is now opened to such an extent that whatever integral cycle of trustworthiness was there is still the heritage but is not the future. Which means then that the future is in a continuity with a new past. Which means that the median pivot point is not some millennium. But is actually a part of time form that one has to be able to begin to recognize has been operative, is no longer operative and thus, and so. We have to be able to be on guard, not only to move into the future with continuity, but with tensegrity. Because the structure has to be new in terms that are not able to be comfortably lodged back into an integral, only four-dimensional space-time. However universal that is. It is a universe. It is not the cosmos and it's not reality. So that we are not only faced with, we are faced into a need for a tensegrity and continuity to work together in a complementarity.
So that what we're doing here is understanding that the time forms of civilization have accumulated, their meaningfulness, their development, to exactly our time. And that to go future forward at all we cannot regress and live and work and pray and idealize with what went in the past. As long as it stays past, it will come alive demonically. So that a regression of forcing a past time form on not just the current present. Because in the future and the new past is the continuity there is no present. It is precisely exactly zero.
However, a new past is concomitant and compatible and in complementarity with the continuity of an open future. All possible worlds. Because a new past can be investigated and refined again and again until it becomes literally kaleidoscopic. And history that is kaleidoscopic is a continuity of the new future and the new past. Based not on a present but based within presence. Presence as a quality, a quality of complementarity in dimensions. And by having a presence within a continuity tensegrity becomes something that is consciously natural. You can have a natural continuity that develops between the future and the new past in presence. But to have a tensegrity you have to have an architecture. And that architecture has to have a science of materials, of techniques, of the way in which you organize. To build an architecture on that scaler with those dimensions requires long preparation in learning how to work together, to form groups, to form the various tasks that you have to do in order, for instance, for New Horizons to put its probe into the Pluto system 3 billion miles away. It is an incredibly difficult tensegrity that was only possible because of the continuity.
Just say that it took 26 years from its beginning. Well, no, it took, it took visioning that went all the way back to 1930 when a farm boy become a young astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, was looking in a new way through a telescopic file of views of the stars from the Earth in a new kind of observatory. Not that the telescope was so new, but the reason and way that that telescope got there in Flagstaff was completely new.
Percival Lowell, who used his money and genius to make Clyde Tombaugh's telescope that discovered Pluto through an incredible blinking process of what moves in these star fields. And being observant farm boy, American farm boy, he saw this dot moves ever so minutely but had the math to be able to understand this is a new planet. Way out there moving.
And for Clyde Tombaugh's diligence and excellence as a Hermetic American really in the way in which I portray it. A large structure on Pluto that New Horizons was able to photograph incredibly and send that photograph 3 billion miles in a complex coding compression that was able to come and be decompressed enough so that one could read the zeros and ones back into its zeros and ones. Back into its image. Back into seeing that this large heart shaped heart of Pluto was named after Clyde Tombaugh.
Percival Lowell, who built the Flagstaff Observatory, which is still there. Still operating because it's been updated in terms of technique. It isn't that the telescope is like super-sized. It is that the techniques that are being refined in the 21st century already are, um, they're cosmic. We can do it. We're doing it. It's just that learning has not kept up with the understanding that goes into this of why it works and stays tensegrity. And how it's developed in continuity and why that complementarity is our maturity. Or there is no future. There is no past. The challenges are not only daunting, they are endgame.
Percival Lowell's family was from the East Coast. One of his sisters, Amy Lowell, became one of the great American poets who developed the Imagism School of Poetry and Poetics, which was cannibalized by Ezra Pound and a few other poets. But Amy Lowell, if you will look into her, her poets. The family house was called Seven Oaks. One of the great estate villas on the East Coast. New England.
Percival Lowell, originally as a young man, was a linguistics genius. He learned Japanese and he went to Japan as a business liaison person and became quite accomplished as a Hermetic American understanding of how to understand Japan.
About the same time that Frank Lloyd Wright was building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Because he had learned about Japanese prints and realized that the Japanese artistic continuity had an art of being able to show us something incredibly timeless in the beauty of understanding the immense relatedness of images taken out of their linearity and put into a matrix.
And the archetypal printmaker that Frank Lloyd Wright learned to appreciate about the time he was developing his architecture of continuity was Hiroshige. Who already in 1832 was as a young man, an artist, traveling on the major throwaway. There were no vehicles other than horses, but the horses couldn't negotiate the couple of hundred miles between Tokyo and Kyoto. That way, that trail highway, was called the Tokaido. And so, Hiroshige went, and he found that there were 53 stations along the Tokaido that were spaced so that the porters, the men carrying their loads or whatever it was, walking were able to walk from station to station. And that was a full day. And then there's no electricity so when night came, it was night.
There were 53 stations, including the beginning in Tokyo, and the concluding ending in Kyoto makes 55, and he made 55 prints. A set of 55 prints called The 53 Stations of the Tokaido. And the symbol that made this was that the very first of the 55 was leaving Tokyo, the Shogunate capital of Japan, over a bridge, Nihonbashi. And entering in on the other side from Tokyo proper. The Shogunate Central Power City. It was the Moscow. It was the Paris. It was the London. It was the Washington, D.C. of its time. But Kyoto, far to the south, was the ancient cultural capital. It was like a Philadelphia or a Boston. And this ending of where the Nihonbashi went over beginning on The 53 Stations of the Tokaido. The 55th print was of the bridge going into Kyoto. Two bridges and poignantly in the middle, not in a dead center, but in a midway, there was a famous bridge. And that bridge in Hiroshige print is a bridge where he chose walking in this not all the porters carrying the industrial business goods is almost every other print just has. But this time coming over the bridge were two Japanese figures coming from Kyoto to Tokyo. And one of them was the arch poetic traveler in Japanese literary history Basho. And his companion, Sora, younger companion who, who went with him on his Zen travels.
And the greatest of all of the Zen travels recorded by Basho is the Okinawa Somchai, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about how if you leave Tokyo going not South to Kyoto, but North one goes into the ends of Kyushu almost to where there's beyond that just the island of Hokkaido. Where the Ainu, the Ain…Ainu have been there for well, they've been there for more than 10,000 years. They're not Japanese at all. They're burly Caucasians with huge beards and they predate the kind of European refined strains. But nevertheless, that's what they are.
And so, Basho is famous for being able to take these other travelling's. But on the Tokaido, Hiroshige puts him on a bridge. And on that bridge, as Basho is crossing on his way on the Tokaido to Tokyo and Sora, behind him, there's a huge wind that is blowing from him, from his time continuity harmonic. And it is blowing so strong that everyone coming the other way is bent over and they look like a worshipers worshipping something holy. So that off in the distance in the print, those in the rice fields who are planting the rice, it's obviously a springtime. And rice planting songs are interspersed with all of them singing together and planting together. And all of the figures are bent over like the travelers bent over on the bridge as if they are all caught in the presence of something holy. And behind them flying in the sky are two kites showing that the wind is blowing such that these kites can be blown the way that Basho is going. And one of the kites is middle high. And the second kite has been blown so hard its cord broke and it's now free dancing into the windy air, into the light.
In Hiroshige's print that was cherished by Frank Lloyd Wright. That was understood by Percival Lowell in Japan firsthand. Not just there to build something like Frank Lloyd Wright, a la Frank Lloyd Wright, but he was there to appreciate there is a way to recalibrate into a continuity that can be expressed into the tensegrity of instruments. And he got the cosmic idea, vision, like a good Hermetic American of his era and throughout our histories from Benjamin Franklin on have understood. We can build that. Let's do it.
And that's where Clyde Tombaugh as a young boy, no longer on the farm and just beginning in astronomy, discovered Pluto that just a day or so ago that body, Pluto was seen for the first time ever. Not just in human history, but who knows? It's been there since the Earth was created 4.5, 8 billion years ago. We can see the heart of Pluto named for Tombaugh just now, in a new past. In a future that is open. It takes an open mind.
One of the great mathematicians whose work is on the internet now after 85 years a conundrum of Wiles mathematics has been solved, finally, by a group of young mathematicians. One of Wiles short little books is called The Open Mind. I'll bring a copy next week.
We're looking at the way in which a carrier wave has a millennial beginning, middle. And that millennial middle, like the carrier wave has a reference wave. And when you have a reference wave for a carrier wave, you have a new scalar of the power of written language.
Our reference wave goes back to the development of calculus, starting its creators, a pair no less. Starting about 1650 in their maturation process, Isaac Newton and G.W. Leibnitz. And it was the mathematical ring of written language to the scalar of being able to deal with ones and zeroes infinitely. That in between zero and one, one can now calculate an infinitesimal exactness indefinitely. And one can calculate the other way because it's a complementarity. It's a chirality to that matrix. One can go from one back to zero infinitesimally infinitely and know precisely where one is in between together and ratio, the two proportionately together. So that one can hear actually little whistles that were made in Pasadena at the JPL, giving the sound of planets in their orbits around the sun. And you could hear the little whistle that was made there, for instance, the sound of the Earth in its orbit around its sun.
More next week.
END OF RECORDING