Presentation 30

Transcript (PDF)

The Future and The New Past
Presentation 30 of 52

Presentation 3-4
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, July 25, 2015

Transcript:

We come to the 30th presentation in a continuity of presentations that has tensegrity as well. It has a complex structure which is needed to evenly distribute all of the tensions that are inherently exerted on this structure. And this structure that we are talking about for a long time is civilization. Civilization singular. On this planet. Plural in the cosmos beyond count. But for us, our endeavor is to learn. Not to pass a judgment. Or to indulge in broadcast fantasy.

Our grandparent generation largely entered into a 20th century that was, to say the least, catastrophic. And has left a ruin of what was the past. As long as one inhabits that ruin, there is no cure. It is an end game. To discover that that is not the case, not the condition at all is a joy.

We have with us two profound publications that are worldwide in English. One of them is Nature and the other is called Science. Nature and Science. And for those of us who are learning, and we understand that the learning civilization now exists as a program that can be learned. We begin there with Nature, and we come not to a conclusion, but we come to a rallying of Science after two years. And discover that the cycle of nature and the ecology of consciousness have a complementarity. And that this complementarity is appreciable and true.

The latest issue of Nature features building the 21st century scientist. Now 15 years out of the 20th century. Out of the frying pan into the fire. But fire is ever a transformational element. And that is what we are doing.

The teaching of science, of scientists, has a familiar quality to it. It is an infinity sign that has the beginnings, and the ends open. So yes, they can be brought together to make an infinity sign, but they exist in this way because it's a dynamic. The most consistent conspicuous dimension of the universe is that it is dynamic. It just isn't is, it's constantly continuously acquiring tensegrity. And we also recognize that this, quote split unquote, infinity sign, mobius strip, when presented in this way scientifically, it is the double helix giving us life.

And we have a whole issue of Nature and its companion, Scientific American, examines what is needed to grow the next generation of scientists.

The other magazine is Science. Nature. Science. And this cover is a computer simulation. And the description. This is a special issue of Science, just like a special issue of Nature at the same time, on the preparing of new scientists out of the 21st century people. This is a special article on artificial intelligence. In fact, it's many, many articles together. It is a whole special issue. The cover is,
Intelligence is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or do you? Artificial intelligence researchers can now design algorithms with almost humanlike abilities to perceive images, communicate with language, and learn from experience. Can we learn anything about how our neuron-based minds work from these machines? What are they teaching us that we need to learn?
And if there's ever a cart before the horse, that's it. Do we need to worry about what these algorithmic minds might be learning about us?

On the cover is a visualization of human brain connectivity from an MRI diffusion imaging with superimposed computer connectors. It's courtesy of Beth Rakouskas, who is at the USC that's here in Los Angeles Laboratory of Neuroimaging Computer Connectors. And when you do an MRI imaging on that global scale of the neural net brain with all of the algorithms put into connection, currently this is what you get. This is what shows up.

So, we have before us a very challenging not just a situation, but a challenging condition. And not just those two, but a challenge singular with a capital C.
There was a great history in multiple volumes. Eventually 13 volumes called A Study of History about, by Arnold Toynbee to understand what is the most fundamental nib of civilization. And he came up with challenge and response. And that if a civilization is unable to respond to a challenge, it grows old, senile and dies. And A Study of History took him a whole lifetime to research and write.

He came, Toynbee came out of a distinguished family. And even as a child, as a boy, first learning to draw. He was trying to draw caricature figures of history, historians, historical events and so forth.

A Study of History comes up with 28 civilizations, 27 of which have died because they had no response to the challenge that faced them. And Toynbee came up with the 28th civilization, which is current that faces a challenge for which there has been no response so far. And that is beginning to atrophy the dynamic of this civilization, rapidly. In fact, we are now into about the fifth generation where it has become a crisis. It won't continue this way for another generation at all. So that a response is forthcoming.

One of the most courageous of the attempts to understand what that challenge really is, was a great psychologist for the 20th century Carl Jung. C.G Jung. Who, as a young man, as a child, faced an odd home situation in which he found himself increasingly having the emergence in his psyche, not only images but symbols, that haunted that young male child. He overheard his parents talking that young Carl is never going to fit in and in fact, he is not able to mature. And we're going to have to seriously consider putting him away. Which frightened the boy into mustering himself to come up with one of those symbols that would help him. And what emerged was a urge to make a small totemic figure. And when he made it, drawn out, carved, painted in order to shield himself and protect himself. He hid that totem in the attic of his grandparents. The Jungs were very frequently preachers, ministers. And he placed it on one of the rafters in the attic at the top of the structure where no one would ever be able to even see it, much less look for something. And he left it there and decided to apply himself. And right away in that transformation, he did very well in school finally. In fact, he did extremely well. And he became not only like a PhD, but he became an MD, a doctor as well. Doctor Professor.

He was born in 1875, so that in 1902 he would have been 27 years old. And at 27 he wrote up something that he had been investigating for a couple of years. And he called it some Observations on The So-Called Occult Phenomena [On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena], published in 1902.

Published in the same year that a masterful psychologist, William James, published one of his incredibly world-famous books. It's always been in print, still is many editions, The Varieties of Religious Experience. James at the time was not only a distinguished professor at Harvard, but he was also the president of the Society for Psychical Research. Which at that time was still relegated to occult phenomena. Ouija boards, mind reading, telekinesis and many, many other things.

Jung's publication made it possible for him to begin to associate himself with Sigmund Freud into a continental, a European, not just a German. Freud was a Viennese from Vienna. Jung was Swiss from Zurich. But their common literary language, scientific language, inherited from the 19th century was German. And Freud's work with the psychology of dream interpretation, leading the way, was extremely powerful. And Jung understanding, both rationally and also because of his personal deep background, hidden away. Occulted but occulted because it was a survival technique which had worked.

So, when he got involved with Freud and with starting the psychoanalysis, which is a characteristic of Freud. Going back to your childhood, especially sexually, to find out what are those hidden triggers, those hidden snags, those hidden hooks, that are interrupting, interfering with your life. And that only by disclosing them do they dissipate enough to become manageable, which means that they have become conscious. Which means that the occulted place where they had been is unconscious. Which late in the 19th century was a burgeoning idea in the German language field that there is an unconscious.

And for Jung, it became one of the two hands by which he formulated his own revision of psychotherapy. And it would eventually be called Analytical Psychology. And one of those centers, two centers of it, was the collective unconscious. That there is a collective unconscious hidden occult field of unknown extent that records everything exactly. And so, it is all there but is not ordered. The other was the archetype. That somehow there are archetypes that control the way in which one can handle, one can respond to the challenge of erupting collective unconscious and and begin to deal with it. And that's the way in which our kind has dealt with it obviously, for who knows how long, as long as we've been around. Or longer. Yes, one of the realms of investigation is our dreams. One of the realms is therapy. But the interface is in a composable large way, composed by archetypes.

So that in The Collected Works of Carl Jung runs through about 20 volumes in the Bollingen series. The Bollingen series was made available to the world by Mary Mellon, wife of Andrew Mellon. And she had, through tremendous intelligence and insight talent had come to understand that what was troubling her a complexity of symptoms, situations, fears, premonitions, intuitions.
She read one of Jung's early great books, which was The Psychology of Types [Psychological Types]. Because the archetypes are sets of types that form a pattern. And those types in order to form a, an integral pattern, the archetype in its action to modulate, to make livable, to make sense out of this eruption from the collective unconscious, has to have a way to make a preliminary structure out of all of the types so that there is something which is preparatory to the way in which one is going to deal with the archetype. One has to be able to deal with what is the structure of the types. And Jung's psychology of the types, 1921, went back in the German language to one of the greatest of all of the German language poets. His name was Friedrich Schiller.

And what influenced Jung in part was Beethoven. Beethoven, who was this volcanic eruption from the so-called collective unconscious archetypally coming to being able to express himself into a new scalar of musical composition that had had the types of music given a structure by Bach. Some of Bach's compositions like The Well-Tempered Clavier, run through the entire catalog, the entire alphabet of possibilities of musical arrangement, and are put into a master composition.

Schiller had done that with types. Types of people. Types of human beings. And come up with four master types that together, as Jung saw it, would make it possible to understand the archetype. The master symbol, the self that would be able to utilize the integral patterning of the four types brought together like the four directions. And in this quartiere, this four sided, four cornered, there would be a center, a quintessential fifth center, which would be the self that would be able to marshal the energies of the archetype in order to balance out the four different types. Because as Jung saw it, as Schiller had seen it, as Beethoven had understood musically.

One of the central poetic genius poems of Schiller was an ode to freedom, a sense translated into English as Ode to Joy. And it was the thematic origin of the Ninth Symphony. It was the way in which the symphonic Beethoven came to a ninth that the eight symphonies previous to it had led him to have a master symphony.

It was Jung at this time who understood that the deep feminine wisdom that had helped Schiller to understand that had also helped Jung in the stability of his wife, Emma Jung. Who all during his work during the decades of the early 20th century, came to understand for herself that if there is an archetype that has been working historically in the West especially but would have cognates in the East was the grail. And her magnum opus that was published was called The Grail that she did with the number one person who understood Jung's work, also, a woman, Marie-Louise von Franz. And so, Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz together authored this incredibly complex, revelatory book on the Grail, the Holy Grail, as being the archetype, the archetype of a fractured civilization. Not of someone or of some condition. Not of just types brought together that need to be balanced, but there is a fracture that needs to be healed. And that the recovery of the Grail through a quest is a quest to have a healing, not just a balance.

Marie-Louise von Franz is quite famous and well known for her work with children's fairy tales. She is specialized, you can use that term, in the therapeutic understanding of the difficulties of, of children maturing yes into adolescence where the sexuality becomes a primary issue. But of maturing out of the fracture of the childhood through the haunting-ness of the adolescence, into the challenge of the maturation, not just into wholeness, which would be a balance of the four types, but into the health, which is the living version of the cure psychologically.
In Jung's work, all of this came to a head in 1928. Jung at the time was 53 years old. And a German friend of his who was raised in China, Richard Wilhelm, introduced Jung for the first time to The I-Ching. Because he had made a translation out of the Chinese. Richard Wilhelm was born in China. The son of missionaries who were there. So, he grew up being not only bilingual, German and Chinese, but understanding English in French as well. Multilingual.

But so complicated is The I-Ching to begin to address oneself to that Wilhelm's shorter little book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, was presented to Jung as being like a nib precis of the entirety of the transformational consciousness of the Chinese language humanity.

And Jung in order to honor his friend and the gift did a letter, it's now called an introduction to a German edition of The Secret of the Golden Flower. And that was in 1929, in the autumn. And Wilhelm died the following March in 1930. And The Secret of the Golden Flower with Jung's now introduction was translated into English in 1931 by Carrie F. Baines. Who also translated into English Richard Wilhelm's German translation of The I-Ching, which is published in the Bollington series, funded by Mary Mellen.

We're going to take a little break, but we're going to come back to the way in which the archetypes and the collective unconscious was published as a pair. And the pair published as Volume Nine in The Collected Works and the pair two it is the Greek word Aeon, for a time age. And here is where Jung got very close but could not, as they say, utilize the merry go round to get that gold ring.

Let's take a little break and come back.

END OF SIDE ONE

Let's come back to a major miscalibration. There is an idea of the collective unconsciousness doesn't exist. There is an idea of the archetypal symbol it cannot sustain. The misunderstanding of an archetype is yes, it can be symbolized. It can be integralled. It can bring experience and phenomena and even so-called occult phenomena all together into a shape, into a geometry. That is deceptive because it's not alive. It's not real. It cannot be real. It becomes a completed artificial intelligence. The algorithms prove out the neural nets coalesce into that kind of indexical finality. And the finality is that in the poetic words of one of E.E. Cummings great poems, short poems, "It comes out like a ribbon and lies flat on the brush"

Time is the energy that is archetypal but is not a type or archetype at all. So, it's peculiar that Jung got so close. The Collected Works prides itself justly on the whole Bollingen series. This is just volume 20 out of the 100 sets of the Bollingen series. All financed due to Mary Mellon. The money from her husband Andrew Mellon, of course, but she was the one that helped design the reach and the extent, the complexity, the excellence of that particular series that she put her life energies into. Not just having a therapy for herself but going through that self and recognizing that all those corridors that had come together integrally and led to a curing of what ails her. Disclosed to her that civilization was in this kind of a crisis, and it couldn't go down all those corridors psychologically. Because it doesn't do it for one who doesn't come to an individuation integrally that sustains. It's a combination and when it is a actual culmination it results in zero. It results in emptiness.

After three centuries of genius in India, taking the wisdom kernel of the archetypal themes in the Rigveda and its couple of versions, The Samaveda, The Yajurveda and so forth. Out of The Vedas, those kernels were the wisdom that is taught to someone live with whom one sits, Sanskrit for set in that way is sôt. And sôt in Sanskrit is the syllable that also means that it is true. It's the truth. It is truth. Sôt learned is Dharma. It's mispronounced as shard in the term Upanishad. To sit with the teaching long enough to understand the very center of it. So that for 300 years there were Upanishads that were the gems of The Vedas wisdom.

And the historical Buddha after incredible travail trying to follow the Upanishad way of various kinds of ascetic and rigorous discipline, rituals and so forth. Ended up after 7 years of being absolutely emaciated, weakened to the death, and fell on his face into the monsoon mud outside of a hut at 35. He would have died except for an old woman that came out of that hot into the torrential rains and pulled him inside. And nursed him back to health. Fed him. Cooked for him. Tended him quietly, continuously, until he came back to his senses that none of those ascetic masculine tones had done anything except put him a step away from death. He had been sustained by an old woman's assiduous care. She wished him well, going out again. And this time he understood, the historical Buddha before Buddha Siddhartha. of Gautama, of the Shakya clan. A prince. He was a prince. Prince of the Shakya clan. He left Broad Palace. Left his wife. Left his young son, seven years before. And this time he understood he cannot do it in any version of this way. There must be a different way.

And he came upon a complex grove that was a garden. Very large grounds of royal palace. You recognize the thing, but it was so huge. It was a section of the garden where there were rare specimens. Very large specimens of trees. And he sat at the foot on the roots of one of those trees for a whole week, seven days. And moved to a second tree another week, another seven days. These are all huge trees of very special varieties. And a third tree. And finally, a fourth tree. And at the end of four sevens, four Sabbath weeks, he came to the four square 28-day lunar cycle where the moon goes through all of its cycles and then goes dark. The darker the moon. And they're under that huge species of fig tree, the so-called bodhi tree, he finally realized that it wasn't doable in those terms. It just wasn't doable.

So, he ceased doing. He ceased doing at a point where he had been able to discipline his mind to be able to have the quickness of grasping. In Sanskrit it's graha but Satyāgraha, grasping truth. He could grasp a single atom of thought. Ekāgratā in Sanskrit. And when you let go of that single atom of thought truth with an empty mind. There was no residual. There was no unconscious. No eruptions. There was perfectly nothing. Not an absolute zero, just simply zero. Nothing absolute at all.

And in that emptiness two merchants traveling found this radiant young man, his mid-thirties, seeing seemingly beatifically. And so, they sat at his feet. They were experienced and learned it enough to know that you sit at the feet of someone to learn their wisdom. To hear it from them, personally. And they sat there. And it became apparent to Siddhartha, now the Buddha, that they were here for that purpose, to her teaching. He recognized it. And spontaneously the situation became one of, how will I ever realize this? I don't know what to teach. I don't know how it could possibly be taught. I don't know how they could possibly hear.

So, he began by saying to them that it is not possible for me to teach you. I don't know any way to express it. You don't have any way to receive it. There will be no communication. And those two traveling caravan men nodded silently and just kept listening. And that began 45 years of teaching.

There is no way. There's nothing to say. Not absolutely, just zero. Except for the energy of time. And the energy of time emerges spontaneously out of pure zero field. There's no cause. There's no reason. No design. Nada is a made up, fictitious level of negation. It has nothing to do with any of that at all. Ever. Never.

And yet that deep wisdom can be refined. It can be refined in the sense that that zero horizon, with the energy of time going through its energy dynamic cycling has a quality that is remarkably realizable in refinement, and that is not only can it be taught and heard, it can be shared. And that refinement came 500 years later. And was astounding, to say the least.

The king of northern India at the time was named Gondophares. Gondophares understood that he had a very special life in a very special palace, a very special kingdom. He was a descendant of ancient Greek, Indo Greek kings. His initial lineage went back some 350-75, almost 400 years to Alexander the Great, who had conquered that whole terrain. And left Greek kings who blended in with the populace. And to slowly over those hundreds of years introduced structures that were recognizable as Hellenistic Greek, post Alexander the Great. And still recognize that Alexandria is the is the old center of this vision of civilization. And that it has the ultimate refinement of something deeper than truth. And that refinement is not just a dharma, but as a high dharma.

And that there was a teacher in Alexandria, in Gondophares' time, who was the teacher. He was the carrier of that wave of time that had come to full maturity. And Gondophares wanted to have him come to India to teach. To teach the refinement of sharing.

And so, a very special architect was sent about 41 A.D. to India, to Gondophares. And used the well-known ancient route that went from Ethiopia to India. Had been there for a couple of thousand years. The Ethiopians do not look fully African because they're Afro, Afro India. The Queen of Sheba was Afro India Queen 3000 years ago. "I am dark, but comely," she writes in The Song of Songs, which is by her. Because they were civilized.

So, Thomas landed in the very south of India on the Malabar Coast, and as we've talked about many times, made his way up to the northern northwestern area that today is Pakistan, Afghanistan. The center of it is the link between Kabul and Peshawar through the Khyber Pass. And that the center where Gondophares Palace was to be built is north of that, where the Khyber River, not the Khyber Pass, but the river comes through those mountains. And there was Gandhara. That was the kingdom, the Indo Greek kingdom of Gondophares.

And the story is, is that Thomas brought with him the high Dharma Great Way. In Sanskrit it's called The Mahayana. The great way is a high dharma. Its beginning is coming to realize the zero that worldly techniques can deliver. You can't deliver what is real, but it can deliver that none of that, nutty, nutty. None of that works. And in fact, there is nothing to work because it doesn't have any base. There's no traction whatsoever of workability in the universe.

Spontaneity occurs in spite of that. Extraneous to that. Other than that. And thus, is permanently a mystery. That time occurs at all is a mystery. That space blossoms out of time is not only a mystery, it's mysterious. That I can get up and not only walk around, but dance. Finds its expressiveness become recognition in shareability. The communal dance is not only primordial, it is primordiality.

The ancient Blackfoot sage named in Algonquin **inaudible word or two**walking Buffalo, said something that was typical. That the Plains Indians of North America had understood. And it was reiterated decades and decades later by Black Elk, a Sioux wiseman. As the Tonga Mahoney Black Elk said, it is in the dark of Europeans eyes that they get lost. It's in the pupil that images that they think if they find the master index to structuring images, they will then be able to control feelings. And that this then which is the nourishment of experience it will all be understandable according to this kind of indexing. And that it can be improved upon from the natural organic human saying to a human plus something super, supra natural. That works better because the math pans out. There it is the algorithms, they arrange. I can arrange language, etc., etc., etc. Yes.

Knocks, a little nib off the speaker. When you speak the truth on this level. The interferences are recognizable.

In Jungs's appreciation of The Secret of the Golden Flower 1928, his writing of the Letter of Thank You to Richard Wilhelm, 1929. The sudden death of his good friend in 1930. And the publication in English by Carrie F. Baines in 1931, reached into the wisdom heart of Los Angeles. And one of the very powerful sages chose the illustrations of The Secret of the Golden Flower, a series of illustrations of Daoist yoga whereby a self is able to take not phenomenology but numinality. And that it is able to split itself into a fivefold numinous sequence. And these were illustrations in a book published in 1940 called The Self Knowledge by Manly Hall.

My first lecture series in 1980, coming after five years of having resigned. Not only resigned as a professor but resigned as a tenured professor. And was brought to realize that talents like those that were operating in me can only be shared. They don't do you individually any good at all, because what good is there for them to do? For whom do they, do it? Etc., ad infinitum. But by sharing it, it occurs in that kind of reality that is a multi-dimensional. It's not limited to what can be indexed. Or given algorithmic shape.

About the same time that it was beginning to seed in people like Manly Hall. It was seeding in Jung. And Jung from 1930 when he got news that his friend Richard Wilhelm had died prematurely. Suddenly. He did a series of vision seminars that lasted until 1934. Reprinted. It's very hard to find these. It's reprinted by the Jung Foundation. And its provenance, this is 1976 Spring Publications Post block 190, Zurich. That's the only time that they've ever been published. I was able to get these in the early 1980's to understand all of this is con-competent. In fact, from the late 1920's to 1934 is an epochal time sequence.

One of the great recent books is called The Physicist and the Philosopher, and she is just marvelous. Jimena Canales, published by Princeton 2015. The Physicist and The Philosopher Einstein, Bergson, André Bergson, and the Debate That Changed our Understanding of Time.

As they say, it's about time that we began to understand that learning is different from any organization that instruction or telling or education or planning can not only possibly do, but ever, possibly do. It leads as it becomes better and better at its organization. If really pushed magnificently forceful to its conclusion, it ends up at zero.

More next week.

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