John Amos Comenius

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We're substituting tonight instead of Duke Augustus of Brunswick we're talking about John Amos Comenius. His name in Czech is Komensky but he was always known by the Latin name of Comenius. And if you get interested, and I can't see how you can stand not to get interested in a man like this. If you go to UCLA's library they have over 2 or 3 inches of cards in their card catalog and it's under Comenius. He is almost unknown in the mid and late 20th century because his ideas highlight the absolute poverty of our educational structure today. We are worse off in 1983 than any time since about 983 in terms of education. And what is worse is that we know better. Whereas in 983 they were not so well off as we are with examples. Comenius is extremely important because it is through him that the Hermetic tradition focused itself on the education of the individual. We're used to thinking of Hermetic philosophers as the alchemists or the astrologers and we can conceive of John Dee very easily being a hermetic scientist. We think of Paracelsus very easily in that mode but it's almost superhuman for us to think of an educator as a hermetic magus. And this is because we have a blind spot and a flat intellectual development exactly in the position that education occupies in human life. And this is not due to accident but due to concerted design for the powers that maintain themselves in their monopolistic hegemony over human beings count on the fact that there will be no effective mass education.

Comenius was born in 1592 which sounds like a long time ago but Descartes was born just four years after him. And the Cartesian coordinates of the natural physical philosophy are still used at most universities in Europe and in the United States. And it's odd because Comenius, among his many publications, demolished the Cartesian worldview point by point in a publication over 300 years ago. And yet for someone like myself who had more than 70 credits of university philosophy and nine university years I never once heard the name Comenius mentioned. Now Comenius is a superb example of the way in which huge enormous complicated traditions come together in a most profound and capable individual and who become invisible by the machinations of power structures and traditions that seek to eclipse the effect of such great men and their traditions. So I want to give you just a paragraph or so of background of Comenius because among other things he became the presiding bishop of the Moravian Church. Now the Moravian Christians who were very prominent in southern Poland in what is today Czechoslovakia, in what was Hungary, what became Austria in various times in history. The Moravian Church owes its inception to a most remarkable human being, a man named John Hus - H-U-S. Now Hus was born a century before Martin Luther and he founded the notion of a brethren, a brotherhood, a brethren whose total population formed a unity. And in Latin the Moravian Brethren are called the Unitatis Fraternum. That is, all together form a completed shape of human manifestation. So that the individual in joining the church participates to the extent of the individual in creating a larger entity, the Unitatis Fraternum. And this outfit was responsible for enormous social reforms which hit at the quick of social structure and political power so that very quickly the Moravian Brotherhood was isolated in its effect and kept localized for over 200 years.

It's with Comenius that the Moravian tradition, joining with the Hermetic tradition, becomes an effective platform which had a worldwide appeal during the last years of Comenius’s life, the last 30 years of his life. Now he was born in 1592 and by some quirk he was not given a proper education as a child and he was discovered to be quite capable intellectually. And so at the rather advanced age of 15 he was put into a grammar school. And this condition gave him a firsthand glimpse of how idiotic elementary education was. It was enough to buffalo and baffle the five and six year olds who properly belonged there, but for someone who was already a young man - 15 - it was absurd. And Comenius maintained throughout his long 80 years that one of the arch travesties of human history was the waste of childhood in the individual and the accumulated waste of human energy by the millions and hundreds of millions of childhoods thus thrown on the scrap heap.

Comenius as a rather brilliant teenager realized that his inexpertise in education was due to lack of training and not to lack of intelligence because he quickly within three years closed the gap and found facility with language he was able to express himself quite adequately. And he realized that the problem is not to place intelligence in a human being, that is there. But it is the responsibility of education to encourage that intelligence to blossom forth and to give it the appropriate techniques and tools by which it can express itself. And that this is the, as Krishnamurti would say, the only revolution that man needs. If we would have but one generation massively, properly educated they would see what is needed to be done, and they would do it. So with Comenius the whole idea of writing political manifestos, or of seeking some esoteric transformation in natural science became secondary issues to him. The primary issue became, how may we teach the young? How may we bring them into manifestation in a way commensurate with what we would know of their inner spiritual capacities?

One of the prime arguments of Comenius, and he was the founder of the idea of the mother school, the kindergarten. The taking of children in infancy and bringing them into a learning process is that we come into manifestation with a spirit that has a unity. And this unity needs but the proper techniques to unfold its capacities. By the time he was 19 years old, Comenius found himself able to go to the University of Heidelberg and in one year there got an advanced degree. And he came back to the very school that he had started at at age 15, six years later, and became the head instructor of that school. So as a case in point Comenius would always show his career as an indication of what capacity human beings might have were they given a proper chance to unfold. Now Comenius was an outstanding individual because of his absolute honesty. He never compromised. He was almost like a fairytale prince in terms of his ethical character and his honesty. And very quickly he was recognized by the superiors in the Moravian Church as being the sort of individual they wanted in their priesthood. So he became a priest in the Moravian Church a couple of years later. He would become a bishop of that church in about another ten years, and towards middle life he would become the head of the Moravian Church. Incidentally if you read some of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper has the American Indians talk kindly of only one religious group of the Europeans and that is the Moravians. And you will see that with Comenius one of the basic notions of the Moravian Church at this time was that the American Indian population should be educated in a way that they could teach us their natural theology and we could teach them our revealed philosophy. This preoccupation with the American Indians I'll go into in just a little while. Comenius and the Moravians because of that were very influential in the education of Indian Americans.

By the time that Comenius had achieved a position teaching and being a priest in the Moravian Brethren he conceived of the idea of writing a book on how to learn a basic language. And the basic language of his time was Latin. And about this time someone sent him a copy of a book by an Irish Jesuit which was called Janua Linguarum, which in Latin a Janua is a door, but in particular it's a door that is covered. So in English the concept of what in Latin is a Janua would be an arch, an arched covered doorway, and in the sense of a gate of a portal, an arched portal through which one would move. And linguarum, of course, language. The arched entrance to language. And with trembling hands Comenius opened the volume and then put it down in disappointment. He had had a premonition, a conception, a preconception of what a gate of languages would be and when he opened the book he realized that the man had not executed the vision which he had had, and the words had reverberated. And Comenius’s spirit, not his mind, but in his spirit had produced a sense of a unified project. And for the next 30 or 40 years Comenius would seek to translate the gist, the spiritual sense, of what that wholeness might be into an actuality, into a reality. And this of course is one of the basic concomitants of Comenius’s theory of education: that human beings have a spirit that it resonates in terms of wholeness and therefore education needs by various stages to cover the same ground in increased perspectives so that one gets a chance to open this wholeness. That is to say, we are not rational animals that are built up fragment by fragment, but we are spiritual manifestations that increase in profound wholeness as we manifest. And therefore education is a primordial process of unfoldment. And in fact because it is done in a social situation, in a classroom with many students, there is an effect of spiritual development for the individual and social maturity for society in one basic movement. And in fact, Comenius laid stress on the fact that there should be movement in education. Movement not only in terms of the subject matter, but in terms of the students themselves. And at one point in his mature life where he was trying to get across the idea he wrote a book called Scholia Ludicum which is the idea that we learn in a school by play by playing with the elements that we have for consideration and that an increasing interpenetration of play produces the self-unfoldment possibilities. He was the innovator who stressed that there must be light, there must be play, there must be openness, there must be leisure in education for it to proceed.

One of his great carping criticisms was that schools were dark habitual jails where individuals were simply put aside and their natural spirit wrenched into ungodly shapes. And he said perhaps the only thing to be thankful for is that the training doesn't really take hold. And we have the sense that we know something and we can't even thankfully use our crippled perspectives to great effect in society. Otherwise man would come to an end very very quickly. Comenius, by the time he was in his 20s, began then to write a book and he took the title The Janua Linguarum and he added a couple of other Latin words so that he could distinguish his book from the Irish Jesuits. The basic theme of the book was that teaching a language was the core of the self-unfoldment process. And therefore even though it was a pedagogical method, it was also a hermetic unfoldment all at the same time. And in the Janua he decided that words must be related to things they must have a reality and that just juggling words in terms of an abstract linguistic capacity is absolutely deadening to the life of the student. And his statements over and over again: we must educate for life and not for the subject matter. The student has a goal but the goal is not one which is fulfilled simply in his living condition, in his job as it were, in his employment. We are spirits who are here to grow and our purposes are beyond the physical and therefore whatever we do in this living process must lead us by gentle and natural transformations towards the wholeness which we will experience beyond this life. Therefore education was a very important transition and the process began in infancy because we were still fresh in our wholeness from our real condition.

The children learning these languages then through the Janua would be given a series of one thousand sentences. But these sentences were arranged so that they covered primordial material all the way through. That is to say, they were not disembodied sentences meant to just teach grammatical rules but they were specifically chosen to illuminate the unified perception of the spirit of the child. Now this development by Comenius was without precedent at the time. He had… In 1631 with the first edition of the Janua he had this kind of arrangement. This is from a book called Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform. All the American translations and commentaries on Comenius came in the 1890s because we had a great outflowing of genius at that time in American education. It was only with the First World War that all of that was scrapped and the inculcation of business practices into education introduced what was known in educational history - arcanely I might add - as the cult of efficiency. There's a book by Robert Callahan written in 1922 published by the University of Chicago Press called The Cult of Efficiency, about how big business from the First World War took over American universities and progressively ousted the educators. And we still have that condition today.

I am able to say that because I am experienced personally in this field. In the first edition 1631 - this is 350 years ago - of Comenius’s Janua, the subjects by the sentences covered this kind of a range. The first chapter was an introduction in which the reader is saluted, respected told that they are valuable, that the teachers are glad to be cooperating with them, and they are informed that learning consists in stages and in processes which have an order that they make sense and that the order is not from someone's speculation but that the order is from nature. And this is the way all learning takes place. And the student then is assured that he will find explained in this little book the whole world and in consequence also the Latin language. He will learn a language but he will learn it in a way of spiritual self-unfoldment to his wholeness. And as his wholeness and his ability with the language increases the examples will have illuminated the entire world for him. How is this done? It's done because the subject sentences are arranged in an architectonic order. Just because it's 350 years ago doesn't mean that human beings were not extraordinarily intelligent. So the second chapter after this introductory chapter of establishing the rationale for the student, the sense of companionship, the sense that this is an order based on nature, the sense that there is a fullness to the process. The second chapter then treats of the creation of the world. The third chapter, the creation of elements. The fourth chapter, of the creation of the firmament. And in chapters 5 to 13, inclusive, they take up fire, meteors, water, earth, stones, metals, trees, fruits, herbs, and shrubs. The animals occupy the next five chapters. And man his body, external members, internal members, qualities of the body. Pathologies of the body like ulcers and wounds. External and internal senses. The intellect. Affections. The will. Then 19 chapters are given to the mechanical arts. 21 chapters deal with the house and its parts with marriage, the family civic and state economy. 12 chapters are assigned to grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and other branches of knowledge. Then ethics gets 12 chapters so it has a full development. A chapter is devoted to each of the 12 basic virtues. Incidentally the archetypal development of these 12 virtues comes from an old second century AD gloss in Greek on the Hebrew tradition of the Twelve Patriarchs. And the notion in Alexandria at that time was that by taking the Twelve Patriarchs - the sons of Jacob - one could make a full view of human capacity within one archetypal family. And this incidentally was brought back into Western civilization by the genius educator that I'll talk about Thursday night, Robert Grosseteste who lived 800 years ago. Time doesn't make any difference in terms of quality friends. We can still learn from someone whether it's 350 or 800 years ago, or 2000.

So there were 12 chapters on ethics grouped around this archetype of the Twelve Patriarchs, the sons of Jacob. Then there were chapters on games, on death, on burial, on the providence of God, on angels, and chapter 99 treats of eschatology, the end of the world. And in the 100th chapter Comenius gives some farewell advice and then takes leave of his reader. This was the program of the textbook for teaching Latin. Now the Janua for 250 years went through dozens and dozens of editions. And Comenius, ever the educator, ever the responsible man at the helm of the real ship of state, even added pictures to it later on in the 1650s. And he published it and called it the Orbis Pictus. And each of the sections were given beautiful illustrations and it was the first illustrated textbook in the world, and it was a marvelous success. And you can imagine at the time when it first came out in 1631 it was simply breathtaking. This also was the period of the Thirty Years War. Europe was busy, for psychological reasons that I've tried to elucidate for you, Europe was busy tearing itself apart. The Thirty Years War is an exact psychological analogue of the Thirty Years War we had in the 20th century. Because the war, the First and the Second World Wars were one war. From 1914 to 1945 was one war. Incidentally the best mythic treatment of this was William Faulkner's great book, A Fable, for which he won the Nobel Prize for literature. And in the Nobel Prize for literature speech he said, in 1950, that the world had been at war since he was a little boy and had become such an ordinary condition of life that we no longer recognized it as a state of war.

The Thirty Years War, in the 17th century, was an analog experience of this. And in the midst of this Comenius found himself a target and had to leave with his wife and little child. Where would you go? Well he went where a great number of refugees in Central Europe always went to. He went to the Carpathian Mountains. He went south from Poland into the Tatra range. And there he found some indications that there were many other individuals like himself and that in fact there were whole communities of refugees that had been collecting in these mountains for centuries. The first of the communities in those Carpathian Mountains were at the time of the great Frederick the Second - in the 12th century, late 12th century - and these communities had organized themselves into little towns. And to protect themselves from acculturation they used the technique that Jewish communities had used throughout the world. They kept a language distinct from the language of the country. And the language that they kept was German so that in the midst of the Hungarian Empire, Hungarian at that time, were in these mountains high up little towns that were independent and were German speaking. And they were called the Zips Republics. Likes Zips. Zips Republics. In Hungarian, Stefan tells me, it's called Zips. And there were about a dozen of these towns and they were loosely confederated together. And this loose confederation of the Zips Republics, in business for four almost five hundred years at this time, laid the archetypal vision of a confederation which later on was mirrored by hermetic projection and became the colonies of the United States of America. Comenius went there and he discovered that there was a tremendous current behind history. That it was not simply a tradition from John Hus, however great that had been for him, nor was it just a tradition of individuals which had gathered for four or five hundred years. But he came into recognition of the fact that there was a tremendous universal plan to human history and that by a paralleling of events, man had reached some plateau of maturity in his time and that it was up to those conscientious people who felt this, who understood this, who would accept the ethical responsibility to manifest this, that Comenius began to write books other than educational books. And the first book that he wrote was an assessment of physics in terms of spiritual light. And this book, which is normally ignored in histories of science, is extraordinarily important because some great universal mind that didn't overlook this book realized that Comenius had put his insightful finger on the crux of the matter for physics. And that genius of course we’ll get to, I think next week, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Because physics revolves in its full expression and effectiveness on two entirely different coordinates. One is that chosen by Descartes and Isaac Newton which revolves around a dead universe, and the other is that chosen by Comenius and Leibniz which sees the universe as a unified light structure of organic wholeness. And if we are ever to have a humane physics we have got to go back to the 17th century. We have to go back to Comenius and Leibniz and understand again where we took a wrong road. Now this publication of Comenius on physics in terms of light also owes its genesis to an idea expressed by Robert Grosseteste who I will lecture on this coming Thursday at PRS. And Grosseteste had, of course, brought in many ideas in terms of spiritual light and the only person that received those ideas was Roger Bacon the first great scientist and alchemist in the 13th century. Then of course authorities at that time put the clamps and the lids on this kind of information and most of those manuscripts were locked up, or conveniently lost, or just not translated, except for the fact that Comenius came into contact with people like Johann Valentin Andrea and Francis Bacon by correspondence and by courier. And these ideas were being refurbished again at that time. And of course any time you let loose living ideas among persons of integrity you're going to have a renaissance. It's going to happen just like ABC's. It's a chemical formula. It's always happened and that's why man may plan with joyful confidence his future because we know what the ingredients are and we know what the critical point is. All we need to do is to have the courage to go ahead and do it.

Comenius then with this experience, in this context, went to Poland and there he became the bishop of the Moravian Church and under his responsibility, under his aegis, he began to set up schools and educational programs, and at this time Comenius instituted the four part schooling system which has come down in education to our own day even though it's come down in a somewhat crippled form. That is to say there are four levels of education. There's an infant school, a kindergarten; there is an elementary school; there is a secondary school; and then there's a university. But what we missed today is the point that Comenius made because he made it in terms of spiritual realization that those four levels should cover the same subject, the same cycle of information, only at an ever increasing depth and at an ever increasing extension that there's no use in making a dead line of development chopped up and compartmentalized and sterilized from each other by fear of ridicule and by all kinds of other psychological impediments so that somebody in the 10th grade would not even consider today studying something he had in the third grade. He knows all about it and he's much older.

But of course all it takes is a moment's reflection to realize that this is simply one more ploy of the egotistical abyss. Of course we should go back over the material again. Of course we should have that sense of recognition because in increasing recognition we realize our affinity with the whole range of the material at an ever increasing depth at an ever increasing extension. Comenius was very fond of saying that man has certain limits with his hands. He can reach out just so far but with his ears he can reach out much farther and with his eyes much farther and with his mind. There isn't a shell in the universe that could stop man. And just think where his spirit might lead him if it were allowed to manifest. So for Comenius man was a particularly glorious summation of the unity of the universe and it was part of education to see that each individual had a chance to recognize this increasingly. So that the four schools were based upon increasing complexities of language. The mother school, the kindergarten, the infancy school, would use whatever language the child used in his home. And in fact Comenius wanted to have in the communities the kindergarten as we would call it today, he called it an infancy school. That the infancy schools would be conducted in the homes, by the mothers, in a rotating fashion so that the child would begin to see that other children were welcome in his home, could learn from his mother, and he could learn from other mothers in other homes and the whole sense of an interpenetration of social fabric occurred very naturally to the child. He didn't have to be taught boring lessons at age 15 about how to get along with one another. He would have recognized this fully before he was even able to propound for himself a possible problem with the information. The second level of school, the elementary school, was to be done in whatever colloquial language was used in the state or in the community at that time. So that the child would have a little bit better grammar. He would realize that what he had spoke as a child in the home now had to be honed a little bit more, and that it had to be spoken in terms of the community. And just as this progression in the elementary levels, in the secondary level, it was to be totally in Latin so that the child would see that there was a centuries long, if not millennia long, tradition in which that state manifested that community manifested. And he would have a chance then to grow in his perspective by learning the language of the ages. And then at the university level he would learn many languages - Latin, Greek, Hebrew - so that he would recognize that there were many lineages many traditions.

So that in this way the learning of language, the method of education, the development of the individual, the manifestation of the spirit worked for Comenius. A single harmonic of one spectrum that should not be interrupted now in this development there is a progression of seven parts and I think Mr. Hall's little article on Comenius in volume two of the Collected Writings has the best explanation in one paragraph, so I'll give you that. This is in Collected Writings, Volume two. This is in paperback under the title Sages and Seers, and by this time of course you can recognize the statement that Comenius would make when he labeled his education ‘pansophy’ - all wisdom. He says we can teach man everything, all of it together. So he called it ‘pansophy’. And it was not a collection of arcane fragments glued together by speculation as external critics would have it. But you are in a position now to understand that it was an integral formulation because Comenius said nature always grows from within out it always grows from the universal to the particular. It always manifests itself with ever greater clarity.

And the seven parts, the seven stages of this Pansophic University - and by this way the school would become like the temple of learning. The first stage was discovering that there was a possibility of total knowledge and the general outline of the entire enterprise of acquiring it. Just introducing the notion to someone that there is a unity to knowledge. One would not have to know every detail but that one could know the unified structure that goes into all the manifestations and that this is achievable, well within the limits of a human being. And it still is. And then the general outline of how this would be acquired. Second, a notion of the general apparatus of wisdom and the concept of a total approach to knowing all things knowable were to be examined. In other words, the student brought into a critical interchange with this notion, with this concept, give a chance to really chew it up and chew it over and and examine it think about it. Then on the third stage the resources of all visible nature and all the lessons which could be derived therefrom should be explored. That the idea of what was natural to man was much larger in the mid 17th century than it had been at almost any time since the days of Alexandria.

All of this information increased the scope of what there was to know. And in fact one of the basic preoccupations of Comenius with America was the recognition that European man who had suffered from in-grown habitual mental toenails, could best be opened up by placing him in a tradition like the Americas where everything would be new, and he would have to rethink everything that he knew from scratch. So the resources in the third stage of visible nature were to be examined in total. Fourth and a complement to this wider external nature the inner life the inner life of man himself and the reasoning power within himself should be revealed. That our capacities for understanding are truly phenomenal, almost noumenal. And when we recognize that it's a matter of being taught, a matter of methodology of opening up, that the inner universe and the outer universe have this harmony then we really have something. And so the fifth stage is the essential relationship between free will and responsibility and the restoration of man's will as the beginning of a spiritualized existence. Because if he recognizes that he can awaken his internal, his interior capacities - I like the word interior over internal. Interior has an architectural connotation which is truer. If we have an interior capacity and an external, natural unfoldment ever larger both, and we see that there's a relationship between them then man becomes actually in himself a portal, an interchange point, between the two and he begins finally to conceive of himself in a spiritual way. That he is in fact a moving part of divinity as he sits or as he stands as he goes about his business. He is a part, a manifest part, on the circle of unity and that divinity cooperates with him. That man is not separate from God, but that man and God together form a partnership and that men and women who are thus in a spiritualized position may cooperate with each other in a very complete way. They may cooperate on this plane seemingly as a social combine but because they have recognized themselves as the moving points of divinity, each and every one, there is a greater manifestation of the divine the spiritual in life because of it. So the fifth stage was the essential relationship between free will and responsibility. The recognizing that what in oneself in one's existential motion has the capacity to manifest and therefore the responsibility to join with others and to effect these growths and changes. Sixth, this is from Mr. Hall, under the concept of theology, man's complete acceptance of God as the eternal center of eternal life should be realized. That is to say, this spiritual center operates like a real center of a circle. It operates by a structural sense of presence. That it's not simply some geometric point at which one would put the other end of a caliper. One point being on oneself but that there is a quality of presence that is available in manifestation which includes oneself in one's motion of unfolding. And that this realization is the sixth stage in this education, in this pansophia. And the seventh is a building of the very machinery for the dissemination of wisdom and it should be methodically perfected so that the whole world might be filled with divine knowledge.

Now the idea here with Comenius emphasized by Mr. Hall and I think correctly so is that there is increasingly an exactness about how to do this. That we do not have to speculate. We do not have to guess. We do not have to use a trial and error methodology, but that there is a geometry of meaning. There is an exactness of what was called later by Leibniz a differential and integral calculus of man's capacity. And we can know exactly what to do and when and why. And because of this man may plan. He may look within himself and with each other look out onto the world and see exactly what is to be done and like nature, move step by step. Comenius always said nature never jumps at manifestation. She always prepares and when a maturity is achieved the next step is taken. So it's a qualitative maturity at each stage. And this qualitative maturity has to be promoted, therefore one should never rush education. That the students when they are ready, they will take the next step. When they are matured at that phase they will go on, they will go on with joy. So that this whole notion of education, in Comenius, received a kind of a quantification in terms of nine rules. But the rules, rather than being disembodied rules to be applied in a cookie cutter technique, are rather expressively descriptive of what actually happens in the transformative process of growing. And these rules were, the first one, nature observes a suitable time. There's always a suitable moment for a movement in nature. Two, she prepares the material before she attempts to give it form. We always have a lot of preparation before some forming happens. Third, she chooses a fit subject to act upon or first submits her subject to a suitable treatment in order to make it fit. Four, nature is never confused in her operations but in her onward march advances with precision from one point to another. And you shouldn't think of a point as just a mechanical disembodied point, but it's a transformational phasing, that as soon as one phase has its fullness the transformation is implicit, imminent, in that fullness and already moves on. And we'll see that the recognition of this growth process is what gave the clue to both Leibniz and Newton for higher mathematics and that the unfolding of modern science is all upon grasping this particular movement, that fullness at a certain phase of an event includes already its transformation to another further phase. And the description of this, the language of this, became higher mathematics. The fifth rule, I have to put quotation marks around this, the fifth rule from Comenius in all the operations of nature development is from within. So we nurture the child, the person, the human being within because that's where growth has to initiate. And so there's a sense of caring. There's a sense of wholeness and nurturing always in the operation. And the sixth point, in her formative processes nature begins with the universal and ends with the particular. So that a sense of the gist of what is happening should always be made clear for the student and by now you can see that the student would include any human being learning anything. The seventh, nature makes no leaps but proceeds step by step and because she proceeds step by step we may plan. And corollary to that, we may recognize in retrospect what was the plan thus far. And so we may look back with comprehension and see that in its fullness the career of man on earth has exemplified a very specific plan of growth. And we can tell where we are in that plan and what is yet to be done so that the mystery in the universe is not what man doesn't understand, but the mystery is that man finally does understand, he knows. The eighth point that Comenius made, when nature begins a thing she does not leave off until the operation is completed. And this of course when translated into social or educational realms means that if we get stuck in some phase that isn't completed, the energy keeps going over and over again and like a dead circle to try and get this finished like a broken record. And it's nothing wrong with man. It's nothing wrong with nature, nothing wrong with growth. It's just that that phase hasn't been completed yet. And so instead of punishing the child for not learning this particular thing, instead of going to war because such and such an issue hasn't been resolved, this is all ignoring this basic process of nature and the reason why it gets stuck is that it hasn't been completed, and therefore the educator, the doctor of civilization doesn't criticize the moment the incapacity but goes into an analysis, an educational transformative process to identify where the growth is hung up and to correct that nurture that at exactly that point. And to this end there are as in the Hermetic tradition doctors of civilization who come to cure the patient in the largest sense. The ninth, and the final rule, nature avoids all obstacles that are likely to interfere with her operations so that she very often goes around some situation.

So we find that if we follow a natural pattern, if we have in our experience better information about what nature can yield for us we have a better chance to educate. And later on of course someone like Leibniz will write, we should be able to teach revealed religion to the Chinese but we should learn natural philosophy from the Chinese because they have a better sense of nature than we do. That was 200 years ago, 250 years ago. Comenius in looking over this material and in publishing these kinds of works drew the attention of that powerful group in England which were trying to further Bacon's idea of an Advancement of Learning under the aegis of some great school or some great society. And so they began corresponding with Comenius. And in fact Johann Valentin Andrea in 1629 already wrote to Comenius saying I pass the baton on to you. Your work is unbelievably great and it is your leadership that will carry the day.

One of the most powerful individuals in England at that time was a merchant who was born in Poland but who spoke German and eventually spoke and wrote and lived in England wrote in English. His name was Samuel Hartlib. Samuel Hartlib. And Hartlib was one of these great self-doer individuals. He wrote books on beekeeping, and on animal husbandry, on agriculture, and he wrote books on education, and he was one of the inner hermetic circle of England of the 1630s and 1640s. He's also one of the founders of the Royal Society in London. Hartlib was also in contact with most of the Esotericists in the Western Hemisphere. Now it's difficult for us to believe that at this time there were hermetic alchemists in the Americas, but that is the case. One of the really powerful alchemists at the time in fact, John Winthrop Junior, became governor, first governor of Connecticut. And Winthrop had the largest alchemical library in the New World. And in that library he had at least a dozen volumes that were signed by John Dee. They'd been in his library and there were alchemists who, like Francis Starkey, who were born in the Somers Islands the Bermudas and who eventually went back to England. But someone like John Winthrop who was born in 1606 and died in 1676 stayed in the New World and in fact Winthrop through Hartlib was in communication with Comenius and was constantly trying to get him to make a visit to the New World and maybe set up shop in America. And just about this time in the 1630s Harvard was founded, Harvard College. And because of the work of Winthrop and Hartlib and Comenius, Harvard College had in its curriculum, right in its organizational report for 1650, they noticed that a portion of Harvard is to be set aside for the education of Indian Americans. And of course this was taken very seriously by these Hermetic scholars because they were looking at a reformation of the entire world and they wanted to bring all the capacities for experience into play. And one of the great proponents of this was the great English chemist Robert Boyle, also one of the founders of the Royal Society. And when Boyle died he left his fortune to endow these colleges at William and Mary and at Harvard for the American Indian. And of course the machinations soon took these funds away and made off with them. This has happened so often in the past that we can no longer even get incensed about it, we simply have to recognize it as one of those stuck records and not to fall prey to the same mistake again. It's happened many times.

This group centered around Samuel Hartlib were interested in bringing together the best minds of their day and actually making a world university. Now they had the backing of Charles in England. But just as Comenius was invited to England in 1641 and they were all set to get this set up, Parliament was going to actually fund this, the English civil war broke out. And Comenius, realizing that the situation was broken, went back to the continent. He went first to Amsterdam where he had been as a young man. Then he got a commission from the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, and spent the next six years writing superior textbooks for the Swedish school system. He didn't like Sweden so he didn't live there. He lived on the Baltic coast in Prussia. But he spent all this time waiting for the Thirty Years War to run its course, waiting for the English Civil War to run its course. Trying to keep in contact with various individuals Hartlib had published one of Comenius’s letters called the Prodromus Pansophia and it was, in its day, in the late 1630s, what the Fama Fraternitatis had been in the 1614 era. It was a declaration of man's capacity to change himself to mature himself so that he could reform the world and that the core of this of course was a Methodology of education which was to be put into practice.

Now Comenius’s favored idea at this time and this version of the Pansophic University was that all seven levels of man's experience should be placed into separate but related buildings and that this seven stage development was actually to be the cornerstone of the secondary education so that from years 12 through 19 in the secondary level of school after he'd had the infancy school after he'd had the elementary the secondary would be this seven years where the students would be taken through these seven levels of maturation that I read from Mr. Hall's book leading up to an interior realization of the divine center behind the universal plan and the seventh step of how to assess the world to see what was needed to be done so that individuals could work together and create plans of action and carry them out.

Comenius’s favorite phrase, remember, was that the student should be educated for life to live. To be effective in the world. Not effective in his job. That was the thing that came in time and time again in history. Training man to be a clerk instead of a free spirit. It was one of Gandhi's favorite criticisms that the British trained Indians to be clerks in the civil service. And he once said derisively the only tradition that will probably survive will be the British civil service because that's all we've been educated for. I guess he was right. But this emphasis then on the secondary school in the learning of the Latin language where individuals would see the background historically one would learn the responsibility spiritually for oneself as an individual, for oneself as a cooperative member. You can think of this as hermetic guerrillas if you need some catchy phrase. Commandos of the spirit. Seeing that the world was incomplete and that there were stages and steps that needed to be taken and you could form intelligent groups to go about affecting the steps and the stages as you saw them. And that there need not be any authoritarian leader over the whole development because God's spiritual presence, and that larger universal circle of recognition, was plenty of center for everyone. So that no matter where they were, good men and women working assiduously by this methodology would know that others were also working with this methodology. So it transformed the Hermetic tradition from something that was passed on from magus to magus to something that was democratic and worldwide. So that Comenius really is one of the great titanic minds in human history. And we have a nice painting by one of Rembrandt's favorite students of Comenius in here and you can look at him later. He was really somebody, a very great individual.

After he had left England in 1642 had worked for six years seven years on the Swedish school system rewriting again and again his Janua and adding on to it two other appendages, an introductory book called The Vestibule and a furthering book called The Atrium - keeping the architectural theme you see. One has a vestibule then one has the arched gateway then one has the inner atrium so that increasingly Comenius extended the analogy of the learning process, the completeness of it, and all the time emphasizing that if students are left to move naturally by these self-revelatory stages of growth throughout this similar architecture of understanding we will eventually, like a moving stream, purify the errors that man has been beleaguered with. There is nothing that we may not cure and redress as long as we have the integrity to stick to this wholesomeness and to share openly the possibilities.

At this time the Thirty Years War finally, seemingly played itself out and one of the great spirits of Europe at that time, a man named Sigmund Rakoczi, was holding the reins of power and decision in Transylvania, in Hungary, and Rakoczi was bringing back into the mountains, into those republics, the Zips Republics, the best minds that he could find in Europe. There are many individuals that he brought at this time. And one of them was Comenius who had already had a glimpse of this already, had understood what was going on there. So he willingly went and for four years joined in with that brain trust, if I can use that FDR capsulization, that brain trust under the Rakoczi family in the Transylvania of that time the 1650s to begin to actually write the advanced work, the advanced books. And at this time Comenius had been saving material. He called this huge manuscript that he was saving his Sylva, his forest, his forest of universal examples, which he had culled from all history and all places and all time. And he was going to write a massive work which would have been like a universal matrix to show that in fact their understanding of man's nature was true because you could see it play itself out in all civilizations and all cultures again and again thus confirming the universality of what they had come to understand about themselves and about man's capacity.

As usual the man in charge died, prematurely in this case, and the family members at that time were hard pressed to carry on, even though Rakoczi's wonderful mother was still alive. The Rakoczi family at that time was unable to hold back some of the encroachments of the competition at the time. While Rakoczi was alive the Emperor Ferdinand the Third even gave family titles and family crests to Protestants. He was a Catholic emperor. So powerful was the Rakoczi whole. They were centered around Tokay where the wines come from in northern Hungary. It laid the foundation for the later Rakoczi family members to make sure that their power base was kept intact and that the family was able to pass on its internal grasp and continuity by sacred means rather than by external means. And of course the two generations down the line, the Rakoczi who came in and started the tradition again, was Ferenc Rakoczi who was the father of the Comte de Saint-Germain. So all of these families and these traditions linked together.

Another example of how this happens. Johann Valentin Andrea in 1628 had drawn up a Societas Christianus. And one of the members of that society of Christians was the grandfather of the great mathematician Leibniz. So that again and again we find the family traditions linking again and again. And if you take family history and you trace through European annals with family histories you begin to see these families linking up. The true plasma of historical reality flows by family and by lineage traditions. And it's only by following them that you get the real story. You cannot follow it on an external pattern no matter how critically cute and clever one is. You can have any kind of meta history you want but if it's an external view you're just going to get increasingly complicated cleverness and not the situation itself.

With the death of Prince Rakoczi, Comenius went back to Poland, back to city Leszno where he had been. But the temper of war was still in the air and the city was sacked by none other than the Swedes. And all of Comenius’s library, his entire Sylva, his life work was burned and destroyed by troops of the very king whom he had spent six years of his life writing educational programs for. The ironies of history sometimes are almost more than one can bear. The waste of human intelligence and hard work is unbelievable. Undaunted, Comenius decided that he would move himself to safer quarters somewhere. He received invitations from Winthrop to come to New England. He received invitations from the London group. By now Elias Ashmole and Robert Boyle had gotten into maturity in London. But Comenius chose to go to Amsterdam. He liked the Dutch. He liked the honesty of the flavor. And of course if you remember that the Amsterdam of the late 1650s and the 1660s is the Amsterdam of our dear beloved Rembrandt - probably the greatest spiritual artist of all time. So Comenius went there and many of Descartes's early works, the Discourse on Method had been published there in Amsterdam in 1637, the Meditations in 1640. So that Amsterdam was really an intellectual and cultural center of its time. And Comenius of course was welcomed there and he began again to try to piece together some of his work. And in Amsterdam, in 1657, they brought together all of his known works and published a huge four volume Collected Works of Comenius, which is really a great edition of Comenius work. And in preparing this Comenius went through all of his works made all the corrections corrected all the errors that had crept in from printing and so forth and his only regret, when they published it, is that he wrote I am sorry to see how much of my life has been forced to be wasted on redoing the same material again and again. I hope that future generations will not have to be squandered in this way. I can see now what needs to be done and it's so close and yet very little actual work is being done towards achieving the goals that we need.

Comenius lived for the last 14 years of his life in Amsterdam. He died in November - November 15th, 1670, and he was buried there. Universally mourned the passing of one of the great minds. But before he passed, young man of even more universal intelligence, if you could believe, made a contact with Comenius, understood what had happened and decided to devote his life to developing the language of the universe because Latin proved to be actually in a universal sense a very parochial language. They had learned to think in very large terms and even Western history was no longer large enough to contain the notion of what man was capable of. That man who contacted him finally achieved in creating a universal language. That man is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. And next week we'll take a look at this incredible genius.

Well I think we'll stop there.