Presentation 32

Transcript (PDF)

The Future and The New Past
Presentation 32 of 52

Presentation 3-6
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, August 8, 2015

Transcript:

We come to the 32nd presentation in this year long series, The Future and the New Past based on a continuity of time in civilization that is complex and has a triple braided time thread through sets and groups of forms. So that there are time forms in civilization and a triple mode of integral and differential.

One of the aspects that we are paying attention to is the development of modern physics. And science Cosmology. And we have come to understand that in the history of that development, there are nodes which are like spikes where certain decades of certain centuries become significant. In the 20th century that we just left handful of years ago, the 1920's were one of the most astounding decades. Followed by an even more astounding decade of the 1930's. So that the development of physics at that time in particular is of great interest, not only historically but symbolically.

Dover has been publishing paper editions of science books, not just classics, but of current important books in science since the early 1950's. Those of us who were engineering students at universities in the 1950's remember that Dover paperbacks were not in the university bookstore. They were in the engineering bookstore where you could buy your T-squares and your instruments. And there the Dover books were. One of…and they're still being published in Manila, New York.

This one is entitled Nuclear Shell Theory Amos de-Shalit and Igal Talmi. And their book traces the incredible history that happens in the 1920's and 1930's, leading up to our understanding of the structure of the atom. Which when it was first developed in the very early 1920's as the Rutherford Bohr. B-o-h-r, atom with electrons in an orbit around a sun like nucleus. To the development of the realization that one could split the atom. And in doing so would release unimaginable energy.

Their preface written in November of 1962.
This volume is intended to fulfill the need for a comprehensive textbook dealing with modern methods of nuclear shell model. Although these have been extensively used in the last few years, anyone who wants to learn these methods must resort to various articles scattered through the literature.

And a great deal of science is developed in articles or studies so that one has, if you're trying to follow the development of science now on a planetary scale, for some while. The international journals of Science, Nature and Science are published every week. Constantly. And the articles are almost never collected. So that when you look at the bibliography of science articles on anywhere on the planet, on a planetary scaler, one finds that they're referring to scattered articles all over very important journals. Some of them are called astrophysical letters, for instance. It's rare to have an author or in this case, a pair of authors, who are able to understand that above all, science has a confirmable pattern, which is expressible in a mathematics.

They go on in their preface. Just a few sentences. "In the present book, the methods of modern spectroscopy are developed in a form suitable, suitable for use in the nuclear shell model."

Spectroscopy is the ability to have a diffraction pattern from the registry of a spectrograph. Generally, one would think as the archetypal example, a spectrograph of light. Say the light from the sun. Or the light from any star which are also suns. Or the collective light from a galaxy, etc. So that there is an immediate understanding that what holds in the physics of the spectroscopy of light of our sun, Helios spectroscopy will hold throughout the entire universe. And this is true. Light can be in that spectroscopy seem to have atomic elements that show up as certain lines. But to the amazement of those first dealing with the spectroscopy of light from the sun.
And the first person to build an instrument like this, capable of this, was right at the turn of the 20th century. And his name was Hale. H-a-l-e. Who grew up in Chicago. As we have mentioned, George Ellery Hale. His family lived adjacent to the grounds of the University of Chicago. And so, he grew up literally being across the fence from one of the great universities in the world, especially for science. And he built the…hand built…the first Helio Spectrograph himself out of his own design. And no one in the United States could manufacture it. So, he sent the directions off to contacts in Germany, where the technology of milling and machining by 1900 was advanced enough to allow that to be built.

Later on, Hale became one of the great developers of telescopes in world history. He, for instance, was eventually able to bring the funding of Andrew Carnegie with the savvy of Mountaineering of John Muir, with his own ability to have the marshalling of all things to make a scientific instrument. And he built the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope. The largest in the world at the time. Just outside of Pasadena. Just outside of Los Angeles. About the time of the First World War.

But as a scientist, Hale understood that as you enlarge your capacity, your refinement, to be able to tease out the increasing understanding of what the information in these patterns amount to in terms of informing a theory that one has. And the mathematical theory at that time had come to a very huge understanding. That when you do a mathematics the workable notion is to expand trigonometry, which is the movement of a vector, to be able to pair at least vectors or sometimes make three or more. And that when you do so, the slight differential between the various vectors gives you a sense of infinitesimal accuracy as to what the real movement is. It's calibration. Its real direction. It's real significance. And the calculus for that is called tensor calculus. T-e-n-s-o-r. And a tensor calculus like that diagram on the cover is useful in dealing with the universe because it is calibrated to one. So that from that calibration, all the various calibrations infinitesimally can be made and extraordinarily accurate.

But the math also has another aspect to it that mathematicians begin to understand that they're not only dealing with a science through mathematics, but that they're dealing also with an art through science. Because the mathematics is a personal artistic language that is written as if it had a poetic of its own. And that, though a tensor field is always calibrated to one, a scalar field is calibrated to zero. This zero horizon is the primordial reality of the source, out of which all things emerge.

And what becomes more and more apparent as the 1920's mature and go into the 1930's. Is that the most significant scalar mystery problem is that of time. And the understanding is that time is the governing way in which the scalar field emerges the tensor field. And because that zero and this one are related in such a way that they naturally pair. They pair in an infinitesimal exactness of an infinite express ability. And so, the binary of zero and one becomes a bit that leads directly to the design of computers. That if you get your zeros and ones right, it's a lot more accurate than getting your P's and Q's right. And that it can be refined to any degree of application that the math is able to be developed anywhere in the universe.

But the problem, as the 20th century matured and came into possession of an enormous capacity. By the late 1940's, hedging on to 1950, it was apparent to artistically genius, scientifically precocious geniuses like a Richard Feynman again in Pasadena. At Caltech. Which not only had been associated early with the Mount Wilson Hale telescope but was associated when Hale decided that the 100-inch gave us such a jump in capacity that we needed to begin designing and learning how to build a 200-inch telescope.

And when I was a little boy, brought to the Los Angeles area in 1948 they opened the Mount Palomar 200-inch telescope that Hale had visioned and theorized and designed. And it took that while to actually build. And I have still the original program of the consecration opening of the 200-inch big eye Mount Palomar Telescope. And in it is a photograph of the panorama of the floor of the telescope with the enormity of the telescope apparatus. There are several hundreds of people seated in chairs around the floor.

And another photo shows that at the very top of the 200-inch, which is at that time was the largest imaginable telescope that could be built. At the very center of that telescope at the far lofty end, pointing out into the universe, into the cosmos, is where the astronomer sits. Sits in the pupil of the big eye. And that little space that he sits in is just big enough to hold a hand telescope. The first telescope that Isaac Newton built for himself back in the 1670's. And began doing his research on a book that eventually was called Optics. One of the great science books of all time. And the preparation for Principia Mathematica, which is maybe the greatest science book of all time. One could hold Newton's telescope in your chair in the pupil of the big eye, looking out and for the first time understanding it isn't just that there are what billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. But that there are thousands and thousands of other galaxies. And all of that had been seen. Not by Hale at Mount Wilson. He was busy designing and getting the funding and everything. But the astronomer who took control of using the Mount Wilson was Edwin Hubble. Who published the first catalog of galaxies. That there are thousands of them, and we can see that through the 100-inch. With the 200-inch for the first time, it became apparent that there are millions of galaxies.

Going back, notice going back in time, that the distance that those other galaxies are from us, from our galaxy by the spectroscopy of light. Which is no longer just light as one would see it, in our quote neck of the woods. But on that scalar of distance, the light spectroscope has shifted into the red. And this red shift is correlated to distance and time. Distance in space and time. And that early in the 20th century, the understanding that spacetime was a four-dimensional fabric led Einstein in 1905, sitting and burned in the patent office and understanding that if you deal with space time, you have to understand then that that fabric is not flat, it's curved. And it curves because of gravitation.

By the time the red shift had shown that, one can look back in time billions of years and in distance billions of whatever unit you want to call and count. That we live in a very vast universe that has a particular quality to it. Not only does space curve, but the phenomena within space that integrally come into play with space, with the energy of time, vectoring them, tensoring them, a scalar, bring them to a cosmos. They not only move in time, but they have a rotational energy called angular momentum. And that that angular momentum has a bit of a subtlety in it, just like the red shift has some subtlety in it. That as it any particle of phenomenology, like an electron, which became a cause celeb in the later 1920's when it was recognized that this electron orbiting this nucleus that we've been able to measure with three dimensions of space by three whole numbers. That the mathematics had become sophisticated to show that it was accurate. Not that it was wrong, it was incomplete.

And it took. A 20-year-old genius, Ralph Kronig, who was studying under Wolfgang Pauli, who had studied under Arnold Sommerfeld. So, that there's a whole lineage becoming available so that the history is passed on personally. Mano a mano. You got this kind of magnetic and electric transmission so that one could understand. And Kronig saw the electrons not only have this kind of a vector or this kind of tensor scalar of space, but they also they rotate. And it was Wolfgang Pauli who tried to make Bohr and Heisenberg, and others understand that what we're dealing here is that there is a force, not just three quantum numbers, to describe the tensor calculus of the universe, but there's a fourth, a fourth quantum number. And that fourth number is a universal property of all particles. In particular, in this case of the electron, it has spin. It has angular momentum, almost infinitely small, but we were infinitely capable already by then to do an analytic that spelled it out to any degree of specificity that was necessary.

And that that spin meant that there was not only a magnet atomics and electronics. But eventually in the late 20th century that there was a spintronics. One can have instruments that are calibrated to the spin of electrons and not just the electronic linearity. And wireless became almost a mystical term. Because the spin is chiral. It's chirality and it links directly to a responsiveness in the magneto electric spectrum. Now you're beginning to get a kind of music that is almost like jazz. Where there are creative riffs. There are mathematicians. There are people who begin to understand like a Richard Feynman, we don't need to look at a score to play our music. Yes, we can do that. And it plays. But somebody who is improvising, a la jazz, does a riff that isn't based on the score, but based on the creative imagining. And that the imagal world of his music awakens a quality of aesthetic appreciation. And can be analyzed later to an awakened science of acoustics that shows that sound is actually very mysterious. It isn't just what had been assumed seemingly forever. And that rhythm, cadence, in fact, has mysterious qualities that only surface when there are like spin being a fourth number starting with vision as a fifth dimension. And more dimensions after that.

And for Feynman, by his time, by the opening of the polymer telescope, he began to not only be able to do the math for quantum electrodynamics, but he was able to in his spare time. And his spare time was spent playing bongo drums, which was his version of being able to participate in a jazz creative situation. He began to do squiggles. And those squiggles matured in the early 1950's to become what they are today that we understand we call them Feynman diagrams. And those squiggles, those doodles, of a bongo player at Caltech, are able to be refined almost beyond comprehension. So that the mathematics. Of writing on the basis of equations in a tensor scalar of oneness, of integral, are complemented by the ability to explore a scalar that calibrates to zero, which logically allows the calibration to be in infinity as well.

Any good logician since the time of Pythagoras 2500 years ago understood that you can take any expression for zero and replace it by infinity. And it doesn't affect the logic at all of what you're dealing with. So that you can deal with the universe in oneness, and you can deal with the cosmos in zero-ness. Emptiness.

All of this came to a great fruition in the 20th century at great cost. Because the distancing of those few who could not follow what was being done, but who were creating what was actually being done, kept getting to be fewer and fewer. And so, it was a problem with communication that the veracity of the real deep wisdom and the real high dharma began to suffer from its own success of being pioneering. Of out distancing, even distancing, itself.

And so, in the 21st century, we face a monumental chaos of lack of perspective. Lack of conception. Lack of creativeness. Lack of, the term that I love was…the first time I ever heard. It was at a lecture on philosophy in San Francisco by Jacob Needleman. In the beginning of the middle of the 1960's. 66. Fresh from his, he had been magna cum laude at Yale and then went to the University of Heidelberg and became the great star. And he went from the slums of the ghetto in Philadelphia to becoming a star at the University of Heidelberg and came to San Francisco, still wearing the homburg hat, the trench coat, the briefcase, the tie, the polished black shoes and the whole thing. And one time he was writing on the blackboard some very interesting equations expressing something, and he said, and this is obvious. And then he stopped, and he stepped back and he looked at it for a long time and all of us waiting, waiting. And finally, he turned to us, and he said, yes, it's obvious. And it takes chutzpah to know that. And chutzpah is that quality of being able to step out, of just stepping forward into stepping beyond. So that you give up the calibration of stepping into that of pure motion. And that pure motion frees you from calibrations of time and allows you to be in the energy flow. That quality is what now can really be called with great immense accuracy, freedom.

Let's take a little break.

END OF SIDE ONE

Let's come back to our presentation. Not a lecture. Not instruction but a presentation. Live. Creative. Remembering. So that it is operative in the dimensions of consciousness. Which are very comfortable in the dimensions of space-time. A four-dimensional fabric that turns out to be a continuum. A continuum that curves.

This is typical of a very brilliant cull of symbols that are related relative to a discussion of time. This particular one is by Marie-Louise von Franz. Born about 100 years ago in Switzerland and became one of the most famous of all the women around Carl Jung. C.G. Jung. This subtitled Time Rhythm and Repose. Rhythm in the flow. Repose in the intervaling within that flow. So that the pattern is in the rhythm. But meaning of the pattern is in the flow. Just so the pattern phenomenally in the universe is in space, but the meaning is in time. So that one has to understand that when you shift your perspective to a scalar, which is zero based and not one based. You stop looking at the math and you stop computing by the math, and you begin to open your dimensionality to being calibrated to zero and or infinity easily brought into sync, into symmetry. So that the rhythm and the repose become capable of a very refined composition.

For Jung, one of the revelatory realizations came from a friend of his. Who was a German, but he was a German missionary family's son. And he was born in China. His name was Richard, Richard Wilhelm. Wilhelm. And because he grew up quite brilliant, he was able to think and dream in both German and Chinese equally interpersonally. And he became the first person in the West who was able to understand The I-Ching.
And Richard, Richard Wilhelm's, Richard Wilhelm's translation of The I-Ching into German became a cause célèbres right away towards the end of the 1920's in Europe. Most people were literate in French and German and perhaps English as well. And eventually in the 1940's, the Bollingen Foundation, set up by the genius of vision of Mary Mellon with the money of her husband, Andrew Mellon. The Mellon Foundations. The Carnegie Foundations. It's always the patronage of very savvy families that throughout history have made those spaces of creativity that are so new that they are not recognized yet as spaces of creativity or of remembering. And the Bollingen Foundation published the translation of Richard Wilhelm's The I-Ching in German in the English translation of H.G. Baines.

And H.G. Baines English version, published by the Bollingen Foundation, became a bestseller. In particular when it was recognized in the 1960's, the meaningfulness of it. And it was the first academic book that Princeton University Press had that sold more than a million copies. And that was many millions of copies ago.

But H.G. Baines had a family member, Kerry F. Baines. And Kerry F. Baines not wanting to really outdo H.G. translated into English another little slim book by Richard Wilhelm called The Secret of the Golden Flower. Published in German in 1928. Translated in the early thirties by Kerry F. Baines.

But the German edition was sent by Richard Wilhelm to his friend Carl Jung. Right at a time when Jung himself was in a desperate struggle. A life and death struggle with himself that had become exacerbated when he let the calibration to the ones of science. Dr. Professor Jung let, as they translate in William Blake's phrase and Herman Melville's phrase, the floodgates of the inner world opened up. And he had to learn to swim. And just at that time, The Secret of The Golden Flower in German still came into Jung's possession. And he understood for the first time that the process that he was exploring had been explored before, but not in terms of the calibration of an analytic that stressed integration. But in terms of an analytic that opened its calibration to zero and infinity. Not at just the same time. Not even one and the same time. But to time and timelessness alike.
And so, Jung had a revelation within the revolution. The revolution that began with a private little self-published booklet called Seven Sermons to The Dead. Which frankly, we would say now he channeled. And who did he channel? We talked a little bit about this last week. The Seven Sermons to The Dead written by facilities in Alexandria, the city where the east touches the west. And Seven Sermons to The Dead translated into English, finally from the German of privately published Carl Jung. It was put out into a small edition in 1925.

And if you've been following my work, you can see that there are certain dates that are extraordinary. 1922, as we've been pointing out, was extraordinary. 1825 was extraordinary. And so on. There are dates, there are years, there are times, there are persons for whom it is the first penetration of what will become spring. And the first penetration is not the flower. The first penetration is usually in plant lore, a small green shoot. When I was living in being a professor in Canada in Calgary, Alberta, spring came about the beginning of May. And everything had been brown since mid-September. And all of a sudden, the first popping of green shoots. If you had a garden, it was the peony plant. Or if you're out on the prairies, it's the wild crocus whose flower that comes out very early on in the windy spring, and its light lavender with flappy petals that flap in the early spring breeze against the winter landscape. But do not fray. Do not break. They're very fragile looking. They survive very well because they're at home in those conditions. The peony eventually, as a plant, will have this gorgeous red quality.

And the Chinese Daoist revere the peony. Like the rose is revered in some quarters in the West. Or the lotus in South Asia. The peony is a symbol of the flowering into a midsummer of what began in the spring, was hidden in the winter, but was prepared for in the fall previously to it. So that that cycle of the seasons can be seen in terms of the wholeness of a year. But it can also be understood in its meaning, not just of a cycle, but of a time dynamic spiral. And that time dynamic spiral has the energy that not only creates time with rhythm and repose, but it creates the ability to have a symbolic expression of the pairing symmetry of rhythm and repose. Like in The I-Ching, the rhythm is symbolized as a line. And the repose is symbolized as an opening in that line. Not a broken line, but a line that includes its space in it.

And so, you get the yang, and you get the yin. And that if you put them in triplets. Because of the triple time form of consciousness. Founded not on the universe of oneness, but emergent in the scalar of zero. That triple yang line, that triple yin line, can have a symmetry where it's all yang in a pair, six lines. And that then is the great creative masculine. And the six broken lines is the great receptive feminine. And that together the pattern of their rhythm and repose in the symmetry of a bright braided triple time of human beings like Homo sapiens sapiens in their natural completeness, with the triple time forms of Homo sapiens sapiens in their scalar openness to zeros and infinities without limits. Brought into a super symmetry, then it is possible to be able to understand, as Jung began to understand, that he was dealing with aspects. That were not just of himself. Or even of his background. Or even of anything that he was even acquainted with. And began to understand that what he really had been dealing with was a transformation which was expressed for several thousand years, both in China and in the West starting in Egypt, Having a correlate in India, of alchemy.

And his last great book was, as we talked about last week in the Bollingen series, 20 volumes of Collected Works. It's volume 14 and it's called Mysterium Coniunctionis. The marriage of the yin and the yang. Of the Tao and the Tae. Because the Tao is really zero scalar. The Tae, the power to be and to do is really the power of one able to be put into any number of numbers. And hold. And, and be accurate. Even as quantum numbers can be accurate. But that the phenomenal structure in its hidden dimensionality for understanding and appreciation and analytic for its meaning needs to have a fourth, which is that aspect that brings the three into not just a new frame of reference. Although it is that as well. But the carrier wave that is able to show that the flow of meaning is at the very source of what will become time. Of what will blossom out of that instantly as space since time occurs instantaneous-ness has occurred with it. But the emergence of time is spontaneous.

So that the dynamic of energy, though it is a source of the way in which the universe exists and occurs, its source does not have time has, if we like timelessness. But isn't a timelessness. It is a full timelessness. The Greek word for that was Pleroma.

Marie-Louise von Franz was able to understand that one of the qualities of Jung in his life that he was not paying due attention to was the fact that he was married. His wife's name was Emma. They had four sons. They were wonderful sons. He was busy exploring and analyzing himself. And all the while the sons were growing and maturing and often wondering about their father. And his wife Emma was understanding that there is something of great mystery within this life, within this marriage, with this man, which I can understand if I can explore it. And she began understanding through letting the vision narrate quality that her husband was using to try to find what is the universe of symbols for my psyche, including the unconscious energy that's coming forth for the first time fresh. She did that by letting the visionary quality of what she was surrounded by the events, the people, the books, the images.

And eventually, in 1925, she began to understand one of the key pivots for her was the Grail. And she spent about 30 years trying to understand the Grail in its mythos. She was not concerned about history. She was not concerned about science. She was concerned with the art of literature expressing something that had a deep symbolic pattern that was not yet understood. That went back to a flow of mythos, of myths, that had some kind of ritual basis that had to do with how they then and there had been then and currently and would be living their lives. She died in 1955.
It was unfinished. And Marie-Louise von Franz took up because she had been very close to Jung, very close to the family. As women will be, she was close to Emma. And she teased out of Emma's unedited, undigested notes and completed. And this was first published in a very limited edition in Zurich. And eventually became a translated. The first German edition was 1960, but the first English edition was 1971.

When Jung realized what was going on around the time of his wife's death in 1955. He himself was about 80 years old. And he understood that something huge had had a threshold that he had passed through. He had passed through with his wife, had passed through with the many wonderful men and women who were associated with him and his analytical psychology for decades and decades. And the population around the world who were not only interested critically and in utilizing it. That all of this had passed into a new through a threshold. Into literally a new realm.

And indeed, by 1955, anyone who was following it could understand that even in retrospect, one can come to understand. We'd pass through some kind of membrane. Not particularly just 1955 but having its roots. This was the peony of 1955, but the roots were there in 1954. And it takes a lot of sophistication and probing to understand the esoteric history that leads to 1954.

And the visit of Dwight David Eisenhower as president of the United States to a secret session at Andrews. Not Andrews, but from Andrews Air Force Base to Edwards Air Force Base. From Washington, D.C., to not to Los Angeles, but to Edwards Air Force Base out in the Mojave. To have a meeting with aliens.

That threshold became so challenging for Jung. All during the buildup through the 19, early 1950's in himself, to an extent to where he could hardly keep himself balanced. He had again and again been victorious in recasting his balance, his symmetries in more and more complexity. But this time was violent to him psychologically. He was forced to write Answer to Job.

He wrote in a letter to one of his famous female analysts, coworkers, Aniela Jaffé. July 18, 1951. "If there is anything like the spirit seizing one by the scruff of the neck, it is the way this book came into being. I've known a couple of writers, visionary writers, who testified privately to similar event."

Ray Bradbury towards the end of the Second World War, said that he kept getting experience, the experience of being manhandled by the neck to write a story. And those stories eventually were collected as The Martian Chronicles. As The Illustrated Man. As Fahrenheit 451. Spirits are a lot, Olof, as they say.

The other was another great science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon could not write his science fiction stories unless he was absolutely nude and had his Danish pipe in his mouth and a gambler's green visor. At his typewriter, but not sitting in the chair, but sitting on the back rim of the chair with his feet on the chair. See? Then he could write his stories. And he could not finish his stories until they were done being created.
When one of Sturgeon's first collections of books of stories into a book was published in 1948. Its title was Without Sorcery with an introduction by Ray Bradbury. And Bradbury said, "If some dark night you're off on a stroll in the seeming urban countryside and you cross over a little mysterious, stone arched footbridge, you might notice a greenish glow under the arch next to the stream. That's theatre Sturgeon's spirit writing a story. And I'm jealous of him."

More next week.

END OF RECORDING