Presentation 42

Let's come to the 42nd presentation in this year of preparation for 2016, which certainly is shaping up to be an ethical threshold, which it will be. When I first began. Seriously designing a an educational program. It was about 45 years ago. I was hired out of San Francisco to go up to western Canada, to Calgary. Alberta and design a interdisciplinary program. I had spent nine years at universities, University of Wisconsin, San Francisco State, and was fairly capable by that time had offered courses for credit in San Francisco. And I was given free rein. So I decided to have a pivot. Course. That would at least begin to introduce a disparate audience. Calgary was the oil centre of Canada. And thus it was international on a very high powered. There are 400 oil companies that had their head office there in Calgary. But it also was the home of the stampede. So it's western Canadian farmers and farm children and so forth. So the student population was polarized. So I thought, I will start with a. Something based on the classic later Greek understanding by Plutarch that in order to understand the complexity of a life, you have to use a parallel life as a context. And so they contextualize each other rather than it being indexed by just one person's capacities. You had a pair which required you to have a tuned ability to your understanding. So I offered parallel lives I used because I was in Canada, which is Commonwealth, British Commonwealth I use at the time. This is 1970. I use Bertrand Russell, but for the appeal outside of this empire formality, I use Carl Jung and Jung psychology at the time with archetypes and individuation and the whole. Shebang for him. And in order to give a parentheses for that parallel lives course, I concomitantly offered two courses that I knew were universally related, and one of them was on world mythology, which indexed into the Jung, and the other was symbols which indexed into Bertrand Russell. Russell was famous as a mathematician, as a logician, and later on as a social rebel and finally as a international leader of peace movements. All based on an understanding increasingly in depth of symbols and Jung on myth that mythology is related to dreams, and that our experience of myths and mythology is an experience of life in a pattern, and that those patterns are universal. Just as Russell's symbol integrals are universal. Mathematics is the same anywhere, not only on this planet, but in any star system. Mathematics will hold up. It can be expressed in some interesting ways, but it's always recognizable. When I began the symbols course, the enrollment became complicated because there were so many people wanting to take it who are not students at this particular college. And in fact, the college was completely redone. It had been in business since the early 1900s. But with all the oil money, they decided to build a supersonic new campus, which was in one enormous 15 acre building shaped like a flying saucer. Immense. And there was so much curiosity for coming into this spectacular dome of education. Plus, they had heard through the grapevine that I was really a little bit of an oddball special case. And so many people wanted to enroll in it who were not students. And so I decided to offer it parallel as well in the daytime for the students and in the evening for the city, people who were really international and quite extraordinary on that scale at that time. Oil was not so much the big business that it is now commanding things, but it was the big exploration of the earth, of geology, of industry, of the energy and power, and also that it took an immense cooperation of different kinds of people to make it work. My first pair, I again carrying Plutarch's parallel lives the parallel lives course into pairing. And so I began for the first time to use not books but pairs of books, And one of the first pairs of books eventually became the Dao of Physics by Fritz Capra. It was rather used to come to some of my talks when I had my own house in the Los Feliz Silver Lake District of Los Angeles. And. But Fridtjof. Was a different sort of thing from his brother. His interest was in Zen Buddhism, and he actually meditated here in Los Angeles at Zen Center, which is over near where Vermont and Olympic come together. And that area, it's now Korean and Zen Center was set up by a Zen master named Izumi Roshi, who was an extraordinary, talented Japanese Zen master, Monk, who later on became appreciative of the great resonant corollary of beautiful women and wonderful cocktails. So there were some very interesting developments. The same thing happened in San Francisco to Zen Center Chandru Suzuki Roshi, who I was acquainted with very heavily his Zen Center when he passed on early too early, went to Richard Baker, who turned out to be more interested in being a famous playboy than in being a teacher. At any rate, the quality of footage of Capra and his understanding because he had a physics background is that the revolution in physics that was leading at that time? This is the beginning of the mid 1970s to some kind of an expected combination that where we're broaching something that is extraordinary to a realization that is seminal, pivotal. So he wrote a little article for the Zen Center, Le Journal, and the cover of it was used by Shambhala when they reprinted it many years later. And I couldn't find my copy. Right now I have a lot of books. More than a lot. It's an avalanche of books, and I couldn't find the copy. I'll find that issue again. When this finally. Was put together late in 1974. It came out as a publication in June of 1975, and it was epical. By that time I had decided to. Do something that was unheard of. I'd become a tenured professor at 34, which is a little unusual, and I resigned from that position as I was approaching 35 and caused quite a furor. It was the first time in Canada that any tenured professor had just resigned. But paired with the Dao of physics and the symbols course to begin it the pair to it. I chose a book which was being prepared by the Sierra Club in San Francisco, and I knew those people pretty well. And it was by Timothy Ferris, and it was a big picture book of photographs, and it was simply called Galaxies. And it was going to be and it was when it came out also in 1975, when these things came out, they had this devastating ringing that some great huge truths about ourselves. And the universe has been struck and we're having trouble continuing to to hear it because we're fantasizing around it rather than hearing it and understanding What have we heard? And that the deep conviction was that somehow there is a tunable resonance called a harmonic in this kind of pair of cosmology and of not psychology, but of deeper, higher meditation, all realization. And so the symbols cause in 1970, because I was creatively in on the route and the soil of out of which the physics and galaxies came, that that course went on to become quite famous and was really the pivot rather than the parallel lives and the world mythology and the symbols. Today is some 45 years later. The fourth of four phases of a program called the Learning Civilization, which takes the four seasons of a year and makes a transform of them by treating them as Phases four, phases four quarters of an annual pattern, a cyclic pattern, and that a paired year to that parallel to that, but having different dimensions from that, the four phases, the four seasons, the four dimensions of space time. That the fifth phase beginning the second year is a quintessential. Phase, which does the second transform that the phases become dimensions. So one moves from seasons as phases to phases as dimensions. And yes, it is parallel. There are four phases of the learning civilization, second year that complement. They form a complementarity to the first years, four phases. And so there's a ninth phase of individual study where you do it on your own in whatever way you're doing it. You will surprise yourself by your capacities and capabilities. And it is always a surprise because the. It's one thing to come to truth. Which is a maturity. Of that integral cycle where the symbols. As a written language expressing the ultimate pivotal ideas ourselves, the universe, truth itself. Goes from those essentials into a quintessential of fifth. Like the opposable thumb, so that you begin to understand that you have grasp truths. But now that grasp is capable of a dynamic series of creative imagining. Transforms. And out of that vision, fifth phase, that fifth dimension. In show business, there used to be a saying saying that there is a fifth business, which is the magic of the performance. If you're an actor or a musician or an artist, that the magic of that is a. Astonishing. I had a. 75th birthday dinner last night with a friend of mine of many decades, architect. And he had taken his. Two children there in their twenties to the new Albert C Barnes Art Museum. Barnes was a very wealthy philanthropist, and he built a huge art collection at the beginning of the 20th century. Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Renoir. All of this originals. Scores of them. So at the new Barnes Museum was spectacular. I mean, it had more great paintings than almost any place in the world in one spot. Every single one of them. And he said, when you entered the main large room with Matisse's and Cezanne's, et cetera hanging, what leapt out were the Picasso's. And that you have astonishment because you thought all of these are fantastic. Why does why do the Picassos leap out? Because Picasso, like a toreador of his own stubborn mind, was adept at coming to near being gored by his mind and able to move the Cape and survive to the chairs of those who understand bullfighting. It goes back. It's not just Spanish. It goes all the way back to in Minoan civilization some 4000 years ago. To prove the courage young men would face. A oncoming bull and acrobatically through training and so forth, seized the horns of the bull and flipped themselves over the bull whose momentum would carry it on, and they would survive as a toreador without a cape. 4000 years ago. When you go to the earliest cities in Anatolia. Catalhöyük was a city 6500 years ago in the private room of the houses. There's an area with benches built into the wall, and on the wall are little sculptural friezes of bulls heads with the horns. But the central figure is like the maitre d for this entire entourage is always feminine. It's always a woman. And in the ancient one, she always has flounced long skirts, bare breasted, able to hold in both hands. Poisonous snakes. And she has the. Steady gaze. A fearlessness. This deep feminine wisdom. With the adventurous high dharma of the masculine. Courage is the essence of a deep wisdom and a high drama coming together. And in that. Parenthetical pairing, not a tuning fork so much as a composition. Context. We. Experience, presence rather than a present moment. And now we experience presence as a higher, deeper than universal beingness. In ancient Judaism, the closest angel to the throne of God is the angel of the presence. The Book of Joe begins that there is such a day when all of the creatures and all the different types present themselves, present themselves before the beholding of the presence. And of course, the arrogant one, the Satan and Hebrew. You always use the neutered argue article the because it's not. Evil has no gender. In fact, it gender evaporates it and gender complementarity. Produces a radiance that clears it permanently. So. Learning is the approach to that presence, which is shareable to the nth degree rather than education, which can so many ways so often be sabotaged by side tracks, by inversions, even by irrelevancies. Projections. It's almost endless with what can and does happen. The mythology course was all about world mythology that because I was before they finished the big campus UFO structure, the first couple of months had to be in downtown Calgary at the old brick buildings and fortunately for me was right across the street from the city planetarium. And so I. I offered my initial courses there at the planetarium and of course with world mythology and symbols and so forth. I am being a San Franciscan of the sixties and. I began with the Bhagavad Gita, and because I realized I had the planetarium to work with. I decided to do a star show along with the presentation, and also because they had all of this facility to put some music in and bring some narration voices. I found an old Canadian baritone and I found a couple of Blackfoot Indians because just down the street was the Indian Friendship Center and brought them in. And it was quite interesting because they had a sixth sense about myself and that what I was doing was recognizable to them on deep tribal ways. And the centerpiece of those ways is the. Summer solstice, Sundance. In Algonquin. The. And the ocean is always guaranteed by a holy woman in the midst of the coldest of winter. Early February can be 40 below and she makes a vow to host a Sundance. That year. And so everything begins with her lonely midnight vow in the coldest night of the year, which she maintains in a continuity until the summer solstice. And when they set up the circle of the TPP's. And because the Blackfoot nation was the center of the whole Algonquian language group that went from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, there were Algonquin speaking tribes in Delaware, no less. All the way for thousands of miles. Their invitation for a special token. It's only offered every so often. Is that they're invited to come and pitch their TVs to. But hers. The sacred. The Holy Woman is outside of the circle. She's the quintessential vision holder. And. Her quality. Involves keeping the feminine quality of that wisdom, ordering alive in that special way in which the essentials gather together in such a way that they just gesture to the quintessential to the vision. And in order to symbolically show this. Her ritual task comes to a culmination in that she is brought dried buffalo tongues to cut into the proportions like communion. For everyone who is participating so that they are a part of a spirit community, so that the residents will go out. And assure nature and the constellations of the heavens that we are worthy of having our lives. That having our wisdom lived and having our Dharma recognized. All of this is a particular quality. That by the 1970s had begun to come and by the mid 1970s came to a recognition in many parts of the world on the highest, deepest levels. Not so much levels, but of persons participating. In that parenthetical way that this was some watershed. The quality that was. Foremost was that time has shape. It has shaped not only in cycles, but when there's a quintessential quality to the. Dynamic of time. It doesn't go in straight lines very much outside of certain kinds of architecture and irrigation. It begins to follow spacetime in a curvature. And with the dynamic, the curvature, instead of making a circle, will make a spiral. But the spiral of dynamic time will have because it's a curling, it will have a rotation, and that that rotation will be both clockwise and counterclockwise. It will have a paired chirality to it. And that paired chirality is not. So much about the straight lines of electricity, of electrons, of that sort of thing, but of the double chiral curling. And so you will have a very interesting kind of a dynamic which is recognizable in the field of magnetics of magnetism, so that the electro magnetic energy of the universe has a very understandable deep wisdom and high dharma as well. And that paradox symmetry. Is at the root. From the soil. Of how. Material matter. Life occurs. So what we're looking at here is some of the. Brilliance. That not only came together by 1975, but within about seven years, eight years, there began to be the sense of time that it was time to have another get together on the creme de la creme level of trying to understand ourselves and the cosmology at the same time tuned. And it became apparent that. The last note of this was 1947 that it had happened. Then for those people. Many of them were still alive. And one of the outstanding events of 1947, aside from the Roswell UFOs, etc., founding of the United Nations, etc., was a meeting on Shelter Island. And in 1983 was Shelter Island two and on Shelter Island in 1947. All of the really great scientists, especially astronomers, physicists and so forth. Met together. If you don't know, Shelter Island, New York City and Long Island juts out into the Atlantic and in between Connecticut and Long Island is Long Island Sound. But at the very end, north end of Long Island, it pairs like a tuning fork in two very long peninsulas. The lower one ends at Montauk Point, famous in some alcohol setters, but on the other it comes out to where the ferries go to various parts of Connecticut, New Haven, where Yale is, New London, where the center of US submarine forces are not only the Center for Naval Submarine warfare, but the first atomic submarine, the Nautilus is there on exhibit. And parts of Rhode Island, which go up the sound from where Newport Beaches, the Jazz Festival into Providence and so forth. But in between those two peninsulas, there are two islands. The first one is called Governors Island, so that waterways in Mariner talk referred to as Governors Bay. But the larger island is Shelter Island and there are no roads that go out to Shelter Island. You have to take ferries either from the north or the south peninsula to get there. And it's famous for being a quiet, contemplative center for those who have the background, the money, the connections, etc., etc., to to have really quiet time. Together. On the Atlantic Ocean side, you have Fire Island and all kinds of very interesting resort adventures. And on the north you have all of the New York City scale of developments like Cold Spring Harbor and so forth. But it's interesting that if you go down the center. Of Long Island from Shelter Island and you draw a line towards. Coming into New York City about Midway is the birthplace of Walt Whitman. Right in the midst like a center pull. That there is such a thing as a visionary voice that is heard everywhere when hearing has a shared presence. I have several books in my library from India where they call Whitman a Maha Yogi. That means somebody who is really huge. And for those of us who think Whitman is just something that. Is an English courses. One needs to read Whitman out loud. There are some times where it is a. Revelatory. And so a great deal of post Whitman American Poetry of the Deep Wisdom High Dharma are like resonance as of that quality. One of the when quantum physics was first being developed in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the greatest poets in world history an American was Wallace Stevens. And he was in social life, the vice president of Hartford Accident and Insurance Company in Connecticut. But he lived out of town, out of Hartford and commuted in. And as he would commute to work each day, he would compose in his vision. And when he would get in, his executive secretary would take down the poem for the day. And he was Whitman asking a 20th century style. We're going to take a short break and we're going to come together and realize that by the early 1940s, as World War Two was becoming an avalanche of complications, where it was apparent to many people that something really evil comes this way. And evoked a fearfulness that was almost reckless to find some way to deal with it. The Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb in secret in Los Alamos, on a plateau out in the New Mexico desert. But at the same time, a refugee from Nazis taking over his native Vienna was Erwin Schrödinger, and he went to Dublin. And he was in 1943 and February early, like the holy woman giving this. Vow to hold a Sundance. He did a series of lectures that were eventually published as What is Life? And we'll come back from the break and the foreword to this reprint. Additions to what is life near the 50th anniversary 1992, published by Cambridge University Press. The foreword is the second. Foreword is by Roger Penrose. Who was the. One of the great physicists always paired with Stephen Hawking. That pair had a masterful figure teaching them. This is a. Hawking's first grade book, The Large Scale Structure of Space Time. And it's dedicated to that teacher who is also a teacher of Penrose, D.W. Sciamma. Won't find it on WikiLeaks. They don't know enough to have someone of that scale. But at the same time. Where Hawking's was at Cambridge. Was Glanville and Keith College that had been completely transformed in setting up not only the heritage from people like Newton and so forth into eventually Hawkings and Penrose. But. The master of that college at Cambridge had been. The author of Science and Civilization in China. And Joseph Needham was one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He was a biologist. Who began to have a recognition in the late 1930s that all of his really prized students were Chinese. Because they were able to understand the deeper and higher resonances of life on the level that they were able to begin to deal with. Why was this so and so Needham went to China. Which was just being embroiled in the Japanese version invasion version of World War Two and decided that he would learn Chinese as a language and that he would try to understand, well, why is there no history of science in China? And I began to realize that there was no one who was in a position like he was to do that. And so he spent the rest of his life. And there now about 20 volumes from Cambridge University Press Science and Civilization in China of close to 10,000 pages. Let's take a little break. Let's come back to. Not just a focus, but the continuum of a scalar. One of the puzzling mysteries. Is that? As you learn to expand the scalar of. Yourself your outlook. The more it becomes apparent that the focus shrinks. And in very high meditations where you understand that the scalar is infinite. The focal pivot is zero. Sometimes it's colloquially called emptiness, or occasionally with a little bit of temerity. Void. Or supposedly educated vacuum. Everyone becomes glib, even about zero points. There is no zero point. That's the point. And let's come back to for a moment, Schrödinger. In February of 1943. It was published the following year. In 1944, in the midst of World War Two. What is life? And when it was published in early 1944, it was not apparent at all that this was going to be over any time soon. In fact. On the level of sophistication that Schrödinger was capable of working. He understood that a. Evil had come to. Almost a possession of the attention of everything on the scalar and only the really deeper wisdom and only the higher dharma. Was free. There's a real crisis. So in his preface, a scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge at first hand. Of some subjects and therefore is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master. This is regarded as a matter of noblesse oblige. For the present purpose. I beg to renounce the. Oh, bless. There's no nobility. In not sharing spontaneously deep wisdom and high drama whenever, however, wherever they occur. We are really free to share that. We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified all embracing knowledge. We want a universe. We want a world order. We want an identity. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us that from antiquity and throughout many centuries. The universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread both in width and depth of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last 100 years or so. Has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together. The sum total of all that is known into a whole. But on the other hand. To command more than a small, specialized portion of it. The more our understanding of control is, the less control we have. Actually. This is a quality of poignancy that was. Devastatingly apparent in the Dublin of 1943 44. One of the young writers at the time was of great, great capacity, was a playwright, Samuel Beckett. Who later would win the Nobel Prize for Literature and refused to show up for it. It would have none of the ceremonies of importance. Put it on. My place is most famous place Waiting for Godot. And the most poignant. Theatrical. Realization that you've been expecting all the time during the play. Godot never comes. He will never come. And the two major characters that speak out of trash cans, large trash cans. Participate in that absurdity. It was the Dublin that eventually, right after the war, Beckett left to become an expatriate and went to Paris and began to use French as a language. Like James Joyce fled Dublin and went to Trieste and wanted to be around the Italians and so forth. George Bernard Shaw's plays had become almost a. A body of work that was comparable at the time, it seemed, to Shakespeare. Yeah, it's. It's poetry. Uh. Began to be understood as being more mystical than mythological, etc.. For the 50th anniversary of what is Life. Roger Penrose wrote his foreword When I was a young mathematician student in the early 1950s. I did not need to read a great deal. But what I did read, at least if I completed a book, was usually by Erwin Schrödinger. By the early 1950s, it was apparent that. Schrodinger's, despite all of the aspersions of womanizing and carousing and so forth, that his mathematical genius was really seminal and Schrodinger's equation. Was one of the fundamental quantum mechanic equations. With its puzzling to the point of recognizing mystery. And of realizing impossibility in terms of an integral order. Concomitant with this was the great revelatory mathematical work of Kurt Gödel, who eventually was able like Schrödinger's equation to prove the. Absurdity of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. Goodell evaporated it. And showed that. It never has been possible. To even approach comprehension. As long as you stick with equations. That fundamental prejudice. For integral identification and identity. Is, in essence, core and in quintessence. Absurd. It's ridiculous. In the underground in France at that time, 1943 and to 1944, the editor of the underground French underground newspaper Combat was Albert Camus. And he showed that. The existential philosophy refined to the point of understanding that there is an absurdity of such a man in life, in such a human being in life, that it really was absurd to insist that somehow, existentially, the now is primordial when it is an epic phenomenon at the very best. So he wrote a short novel translated into English as The Stranger. It begins with my mother died yesterday. Or was it the day before? And the pair to it was the. Combat, taking on the social resonance of such absurdity. And that novel was called The Rebel. And just as the Strangers theme is about absurdity. Of the existential reality. The rubble is about the suicide. Built into society. By not only clinging but trying to enforce that absurdity upon life person self. Penrose. I always found his writing to be compelling and there was an excitement of discovery with the prospect of gaining some genuinely new understanding about this mysterious world in which we live. None of his writings. Possess more of this quality than his short classic What is life? Very short 100 pages, which, as I now realize, must surely rank among the most influential of scientific writings in this century. And it goes on from there. And Penrose. Indeed, by 1991 was one of the really great figures in the history of. The world in science terms especially. The Isaac Newton Foundation in Cambridge. Cambridge University held a series of six debate presentations by Penrose and Stephen Hawking, and they filmed it at Princeton University. Now they published their book on. The essence of nature. But made available on video the six presentations I have not seen them on. Dvd, but I have the sex. And they were struggling with this pair. The dollar. Physics and galaxies. Cosmology and the mystery of. Transformed being that it isn't self. It isn't ego. Ego is ritual based mythology and self is a psychological projection of completeness. Wholeness. Wholeness and its implicate order, as David used for the conundrum in his conversations with Krishnamurti about. That absurdity. At the very small minute coming to its focus and of the scalar expanding, becoming infinite without recognizing that a scalar in infinity is no longer a scalar. That a zero in a continuum is no longer in the continuum. So that a zero field. An infinite field. Are perishable. They're tunable. This is of a great moment. In a volume that we're taking a look at for the last couple and going on, we're trying to understand. How equations. Mathematics was not just simply transcended, but was transformed. By taking symbols out of the cycle of assumed enforceable cyclic completeness and letting it free in the quintessential dimensions of. Infinite field consciousness. And it's not its full ecology, but it's unfolding into further openness. Ecology. And that those two fields have a complementarity. Not just of this and of that. But a towel and a tray with a gen and an E. Yes, it is true that the Tao Te Ching is. An insight, an angle of insight, of vast subtlety into town day. But that energy cycle has its completion in two other the Chinese words for them. The third is gen human heartedness relationality exemplified by a dialogue and E which is the symbols so that the book of Tao K Gen E uses its term Chinese term for book is ching, ching ching. And it is the book of symbols. The book of completeness. Completed. They don't stop at completeness. They then are capable. Of Discovery, a fifth, which the Chinese word is chea used to be spelled c h. I now is filled with a q. Q i Qi. And that the principle of organization that can be most applied to this whole cycle, integral cycle of completeness of the Tao te. Assuming that is what you're talking about are capable of talking about. And t. And. The gen E does not complete it, but rather if the symbols are transparent. What you end up with is not room for square room, but you end up with a frame. That is not a frame. It's a window through which one can see. And what one is able to see. If your participant in seeing ness is you see that the real soil of all of this is energy key. So the quintessential is the circulation of energy. Not only in the universe, but especially in life as a refinement. Of matter in the universe, but consistent all the way through as a common denominator is energy. And that energy is time. This becomes apparent. By 1947. Two years after the atomic bomb and very quickly after the atomic bomb at Trinity site is. And the crash of UFOs. One crashed right at the Trinity site. Two years later. The Shelter Island conference hidden at the end of Long Island in Gardiner Bay. There's a famous photograph of. Six young men gathered around a table, and in the photograph one could see that the speaker is a very young Richard Feynman. And in behind him is his teacher from Princeton, John a Wheeler. And on one side is a pair, a man paying attention to the choreography of the event. His name was Abraham Pius Pais, and he wrote great historical biographies of Niels Bohr and so forth, showing that when one has the phase, the dimension of history, that's how an analytic becomes actual. Just like if you have vision, art becomes actual. And that the vision as a field and history as a complex of rivers and ocean. So that the arts and sciences are tuned. That's why they stopped teaching at what were called monasteries they started having in the Renaissance, what are called universities. If schools, they have buildings of the arts and sciences. They got together. They tune. If you have a continuity with the vision as a field and history in its complexity, no doubt. Flowing. Then the whole cycle, the whole frame of reference of nature in its four square season phases become dimensions of space time. What becomes accessible is that the quintessential. Operative. Transforming. Is in fact in mathematics called an operator. Really? This almost 1000 page. Discussion and length of Oxford Science Publications, the Feynman Integral and Feynman's Operational Calculus. Which became available in the discussions at Shelter Island for the first time in 1947. Not that he had a resolution or a solution, but that he was able to show that this mysteriousness was accessible to his relentless commitment to figuring it out. And the book has become a classic. This is the latest reprint from Princeton University Press, Princeton Science Library Classics, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Richard Feynman. We use it in the learning civilization. And this is this is the scientific academic printing of it. Allison Wesley Classic of science textbooks. What's important about. Fineman And by the way, the person next to Abraham Paez is Julian Schwinger, and it is Schwinger who really heard Feynman in a participatory way. And the two of them, along with a Japanese genius terminal. The three of them developed quantum electrodynamics and won the Nobel Prize for physics. This is Feynman has a reputation as being like Schrödinger, even more so a character. This is the Folio Society Classics edition of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. And the subtitle of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is Adventures of a Curious Character, as told to his friend Ralph Leighton. And this came out in 2012 in this super expensive edition. He says right away in this esoteric, playful, it's the comic version of. Beckett's tragedy. Feynman says that he was precocious as a youngster, and that got even worse as he went on. And by the time he became an adolescent, it became aggravated worse. He became really intense and he turned his attention on himself. How do I know what I know? How do I do this? How do I figure things out? How do I know somebody gives me a problem and a few minutes? I know the answer. What gives with me? So he got serious. We're going to I'm going to take a look at this. Nothing is going to stop me. I got interested. Now I had to answer this question. How does the stream of consciousness end when you go to sleep? So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme. I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights and go to sleep. And I'd watch what happened when I went to sleep. Then at night I'd go to sleep again. So I had two times each day a pair to make observations. When you pair observations, you get to be sensitive not only to symmetries but to what is called in science and mathematics perturbations where they're not the same. Well, how are they not the same? To what extent, what's the measurement and so forth. At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually. Then when I got was getting tired, I noticed I could think of two things at once. I discovered this while when I was talking internally to myself about something. And while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected. And then he said they became word that they would get entangled and that they would be cranked up and he would become skewed instead of balanced. I said internally, Oh, the tension on the pair of ropes. We'll take care of that. And this interrupted the first thought I was having and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once. And he goes on. Suddenly and briefly to understand. That the operator is a deeper than himself presence. That was really him being able to interrogate his own dreams while he was having them and would never have known that if he was counting on an analyst to tell him what the meaning of these dreams are. And some genius to say that this is a structure of the psyche that's key to the mind, that that is what consciousness is when consciousness has no business at all. More next week.