Leibniz

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New programs are out and you can see that the next offering for three months will be on The Mystic Century, the 14th century. And in a way I'm glad to have this coming on the heels of the Hermetic Lecture Series. This lecture series, The Mystic Century, will follow up the series at the Philosophic Research Society which has been going and will have gone up to Marco Polo. All of this is consonant with reestablishing the Chronologica Mystica which is different from a history which is the linking up of individuals of all cultures and all backgrounds into a vision of the religious unity of man. And in a way the man that we're talking about tonight figures very prominently in this endeavor. One of Leibniz’s favorite projects and one that he devoted 24 years of his life to was writing a Historia Sacrae, Sacred History, which he did not complete, and the function of historiographer was one of several dozen that Leibniz carried off very well. I've been establishing this Chronologica Mystica in a complex move that's taken three years and will take another year and a half to complete. And then this whole series, this whole movement, I'll repeat in the first decade of the next century and try and go into it in greater depth at that time to establish some sort of a matrix out of which trustworthy inquiries can be initiated. It's interesting too - and all this is germane to Leibniz because there have been only two individuals in our time who understood Leibniz, who went into Leibniz enough to write in English critical books on Leibniz. And those two individuals are the masters of modern logic. One of them is Bertrand Russell who wrote a book published in the 1930s, early 1930s, on the philosophy of Leibniz. And if you recall it was Russell and Alfred North Whitehead who teamed up together at Cambridge University early in this century and wrote the monumental three volume Principia Mathematica. And that three volume Principia Mathematica shifted the foundations of logic in the Western tradition. It didn't just revise but it shifted the foundations and proved conclusively beyond any shadow of a doubt or question that mathematical expression and logical form are synonymous, that they are not separate lines of development in philosophy but are identical. That is, the laws of one operate exactly in the same way in the discipline of the other. The first Principia was that of Isaac Newton some 300 years ago, 1687. So that in our time the two individuals that we're talking about tonight and next week have occupied again and again the thoughts of the greatest minds of our age. The second individual to write on Leibniz wrote at the close of the 19th century when he was a young philosopher. He was at that time, I think, still at the University of Chicago. I don't think he even went over to the University of Michigan yet. Maybe he was at Michigan and then went to Chicago. Later on he would go to Columbia. His name was John Dewey who was the greatest philosopher in the United States history. And out of his study of Leibniz came an understanding of logic as a theory of inquiry, that rather than following point by point an argument to a conclusion, a logic was a generative process of inquiry that lets you see the relational connections more and more. So that the purpose of a logic was to establish a view of unity rather than reduce down to a conclusion of a line of argument. Both Russell and Dewey, major minds of our time, and both of them learned a great deal from what materials they could garner from Leibniz. Unfortunately, Leibniz more than any other major philosopher in history, has suffered from the lack of exposure of his works. Someone once estimated that there are over 100,000 pages of Leibniz that have never been published. He wrote in Latin, he wrote in French, he wrote in German. He was fairly good in English, although not so critically exact as he was in the previous languages. And in his lifetime only two books were published by him, and those rather late in his lifetime. He in the tradition that I've been developing for you, generating for you in this lecture series, is one of a pair of culminating figures. He is a twin of Sir Isaac Newton. Both of them emerge out of the Hermetic tradition. Both of them in a simultaneous motion of genius developed the calculus the higher mathematics of the differential and the integral calculus. For several hundred years the debate raged as to which had developed it first, who had copied from whom. Dewey and Russell came to the conclusion that it was a simultaneous development and I think from our inquiry here we're in a position to understand why. Because both figures came out of the same matrix, out of the same tradition. The tandem interpenetration of the English and the German traditions was almost a single tradition up until the time of Comenius. And if you recall, Comenius lived until 1671, and Leibniz of course and Newton were well on their way by 1671. So in an odd way it was left to the 20th century to be able to begin to understand the extraordinary twinned process of development of modern science which includes higher mathematics. But the general academic population, still being bottle-fed on cribbed textbooks of history and tradition, have not sufficient scope of background or depth of perceptual quality to recognize the traditions which we've been generating here. That is to say, that the very techniques which went into the transformation of matter in alchemy were now transferred to the realm of ideation and the old technique of maintaining an inner equilibrium, in order to effect the transmutation of form, was now to be applied to the world of ideas. This is a very difficult move to follow, and the proof of the pudding, as it were, entails actually learning the calculus which we don't have time tonight to teach. So I'm let off the hook by the good graces of sheer bulk of circumstance. But I will make this sort of a mention that the differential calculus was called by Leibniz a Scientia Infinity. That is to say, that it was concerned with the maximum and the minimum of curvatures in geometry, but the clue for us is that curvatures, curved lines, are characteristics of sine wave motions, life-wave motions. So that the very nature of life and energy, as it propagates itself throughout the universe, and comes to focus in the very extant phenomena which we conveniently mis-call things. The properties of the maximum and the minimum of these wave-form curves are able to be described and talked about and transformed by use of this language, this Scientia Infinity of Leibniz. Probably the most peculiar circumstance of his life is that he was left alone as a child. His father died when he was very young. His mother was also gone very young and ostensibly, in all the biographies it is recorded that Leibniz educated himself among his father's books. Now if you recall, Leibniz's grandfather Christoph Leibniz had been one of those individuals who had been listed on Johann Valentin Andrea's Societas Christianae. That is that Rosicrucian order in the 1620s included, from Nuremberg, the home base of esoteric giants like Albrecht Dürer and so forth Maximilian. Leibniz's family came directly and distinctly from the Hermetic Rosicrucian tradition. The books of the grandfather were saved by the father who had been a professor of moral philosophy and had added materials so that the young Leibniz had free rein to this enormous, penetrating collection of material. And it was to bear fruit as it were later in his life because the last 40 years of his life he was patronized by the Duke of Brunswick, the then Duke of Brunswick. And Andrea had been patronized by the Duke of Brunswick in his time. And John Dee had been a friend of the Duke of Brunswick in his time. So that there is a continuity of family lineages and a similarity of patterns of population moving in this transformative way. Remember they move in the Hermetic tradition rather than point by point. They move matrix by matrix so that there's a transformation. And this whole idea of a transformation of one set of conditions to a new set of conditions as soon as enough elements have changed was characteristic of one of the fundamental principles of Leibniz's thought, the principle of sufficient reason. That a condition will obtain, in reality, when there is sufficient reason accrued for it to obtain. And further that the condition of reality which does obtain, is in Leibniz's famous term, the best of all possible worlds. It is best primarily because it is real, indubitably real. Leibniz was a wonderful intellect and in many selections of his writings, which I'll give you some later on, he demonstrates that there are many possible universes. There are almost an infinite number of possible universes and they have a potentiality in the matrix of being but that only the real has sufficient cause to obtain and it obtains because it is in fact the best of all possible worlds. This of course to us, given our backgrounds and our inclinations, our quest purposes as individuals, the background of this course, we recognize that Leibniz was a religious thinker but also that he was a mystic of the highest order. And one is reminded when later on he states, in his famous theory of substances, that the core of reality resides in a dispersion of monads of which we are examples and that every primary basic substance in the universe records in its ever-presentness all of the relational changes that it will go through in the career of the entire universe. All of its pasts, its present, and all of its futures. And that that religious condition, that mystical perception of a universal quality - often mistaken by philosophers of the academic persuasion as rationalism - that contention links squarely with his notion of a logic that moves by transformative reality whenever sufficient conditions have occurred for a movement to happen. So that we have in our time in the 20th century not too long before I was born one of the great works complex tight almost misunderstood to the very present day, one of the greatest works of the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality describes a universe where Leibniz thought would be recognizably at home. Also John Dewey's Experience in Nature has a great deal to offer in that. Now Leibniz as a youngster, left pretty much to himself, manifested those qualities of a child prodigy very soon. I suppose by the time he was 15 or 16 that he was already noticeable as a peculiar boy, odd individual, did not fit in with the crowd. He was given a pretty good education and found himself ready to receive a degree when he was just 16 years old. He passed all the tests, he had passed all the courses. The university refused to give him a degree simply on the basis of his youth. This was in Leipzig at the University of Leipzig. And so Leibniz understandably left town and never returned. He took himself to another city where they immediately gave him a degree and they immediately offered him a chair of philosophy which he turned down saying that he had investigations to pursue and he found himself shortly thereafter in Paris. Now in Paris Leibniz drew the attention right away of some of the most remarkable individuals of the time. One individual I think worth noting for yourself was named Huygens, and he was one of the earliest inventors and mathematicians to operate in Europe. He and his relations had built some wonderful telescopes. They improved upon Galileo. They had developed the first real complex clocks. They were fine individuals, great mathematicians, and they introduced Leibniz to the best intellectual circles in Paris. And very soon Leibniz began to apply, on the basis of a couple of articles, to the Royal Society in London for admission and within a couple of years Leibniz was admitted. I think it was 1673. So that in his 20s he was already a fellow of the Royal Society of London. He went to England. He met a great number of individuals there. He went back to the continent. He spent time in Amsterdam. Now he had met Comenius, in Comenius’s old age. When he went to Amsterdam this time coming back from London he had a couple of weeks conversation with one of the oddest characters in Western history. This man was a natural urban recluse who exempted himself from all associations, all institutions maintaining that only as a free and independent person could he pursue the quality of thought and experience which he found himself capable of. This individual's name was Spinoza, and Baruch Spinoza is one of the great massive intellects of all time. So that the conversations between Leibniz and Spinoza would have been miraculous. I rather think that the focus of their conversation was the approach to dismantling a hair trigger on the intellect which had been poised by the French philosopher René Descartes. Now Descartes had lived from 1596 to 1650 - so he had been dead for some time - but his meditations, his discourse on method, his very notion about mechanical processes of logic, about the basis of his sense of horizons of logic. All of the influence of Descartes work was beginning to bloom and blossom. And we find today because of the lack of attention to Spinoza and Leibniz that Cartesian philosophy is still king of the hill in most English-speaking and French-speaking universities - not so much in the French but certainly in the English and American. Spinoza, very soon after this meeting with Leibniz, published a most interesting work on explication of the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and a very fine critique of why it did not work. That is to say when one took into consideration the spiritual nature of the universe the Cartesian cardboard theories simply fell down as insufficient on all grounds. But Descartes was not the major figure in transforming this mechanical worldview into a political philosophy of reality which obtained in history. The individual who did that was named John Locke. And Locke did this by writing a massive work on human understanding. It would be Leibniz who would take John Locke to task. And it's interesting as a case in point as to why this was almost unknown up until our own time. The volume, Locke's work came out in 1690 and by this time Leibniz was under the protection of the patron of the Duke of Brunswick. But I want to digress and jump ahead for a moment because this is the case in point. Locke's essay on Human Understanding came out in 1690, and Leibniz found a copy very early on and began collecting some notes and through a mutual friend passed these notes on to John Locke. They were in the nature of a criticism about the naivete of his viewpoint, and I rather suspect that there were religious principles involved. Locke dismissed the comments by Leibniz. He later on, in a friend, to give you a quote, wrote a letter to a friend in which he said of Leibniz, “his comments even great parts will not master any subject without great thinking. Even the largest minds have but narrow swallows.” In other words Leibniz was recognized as one of the geniuses of his time but Locke dismissed him as not knowing what he was talking about. But the fact is that Leibniz knew very well what he was talking about and knew very well what Locke was talking about. He collected his notes and expanded them. And this will give you some idea of the career of what happened to Leibniz's philosophy. All of his notes were brought together in the summer of 1704 and were to be published as a book which was to be entitled New Essays on Human Understanding. Locke died in November of that year and Leibniz, gracious individual that he was, refused to publish a work which was criticizing a man recently dead when he had no chance to reply to the arguments given. And in 1708, in a letter to a friend, being reminded that Locke had dismissed him as having irrelevant comments, Leibniz wrote, “I am not surprised by it. We differed rather too much in principles.” So that Locke's work went on to obtain enormous influence in the Western world especially in the development of political theories and much of the foundation of the nation-state system under which we labor today comes directly out of that volume and its tandem interpenetration with the Newtonian worldview backed up by David Hume. What happened to Leibniz's work? His work lay on a shelf until a German edition was put out in 1765. One of his first readers was a professor at that time, young about my age now, named Immanuel Kant and out of reading the New Essays on Human Understanding Kant began working on his life's work The Critique of Pure Reason one of the most penetrating volumes ever written. But the work remained unpublished in an accurate edition until 1962. It remained untranslated into English until 1981 and finally last year about December it was published in a revised corrected edition - 300 years after it was written. And it's a bombshell. It absolutely takes apart the entire structure upon which the modern fallacies of science and state are based. This particular work focuses upon the way in which a faulty dichotomy of thought is engendered. Most of the philosophic tradition - basing itself on Locke, and as we will see, on Newton - shoved aside the kinds of thought that Leibniz seemed to offer into the category of rationalistic thought. And on the other side of the polarity thus constituted was empirical thought. The empiricists based themselves upon what they called common sense observation. Whereas the rationalists, devils that they are, are basing themselves upon systematic ideation which obviously can be picked apart on innumerable, if not infinite grounds. And until they come up with some picture-perfect system, we can't bother with them because common sense will tell you that they are wrong. This in fact engendered a situation which runs something like this. Leibniz was concerned with showing how what we call an image, a picture in our minds is not the same as an idea. The empiricists skirt around this dichotomy by saying that well we have an idea of X, of something, and this idea of something is our picture in our minds. The comic book version of this is the light bulb that goes on in the thought bubble - that's an idea. Well this is an absurdity. It's a logical absurdity. It's a spiritual travesty. It's absolutely one of the worst flaws ever perpetrated upon the human spirit. In fact, Leibniz makes the case that just - in the volume - that just as images come out of a sensation field and have a feeling explication to them ideas come out of an intuitional field and have a thinking quality to them. The thinking and the feeling are personal-focused unity oriented. That if the empiricists would like to say that they are working on an image base out of common sense the ideational aspect is working out of a sense of unity and working on a conceptual base and that the two bases work into a relational complementarity we would say today. And they produce the following condition: That images and ideas come together and form symbolic thinking and that whereas images work on data, ideas work on understanding, and that data and understanding together form that symbolic matrix, and out of that symbolic matrix we get truth and reality. And that perception and conception come together in an overall penetration of view. We would call it, in ordinary language, a mystic penetration to reality. So that common sense seems to offer, empirically, a way by which perception can be trained to yield an objective worldview. But this is actually a fallacious flat-sided motion. It forces on the other hand conception to develop a subjective view. And given this kind of a dichotomy the subjective-objective split which became famous in Western thought from the time that it was promulgated right up to our present day. Actually Leibniz's criticism here was extraordinarily profound - and I think we can use this kind of language. An image is always the focus of a feeling tone and an idea is always a focus of a thinking relationality. And that the tone and the relation cross and form the coordinates of what we would call religious experience. So that symbolically the basis of mythology and the basis of philosophy form a fabric of religion, and that religious thought has for its purpose the discovery of divinity, the discovery of God. This means, in Leibniz's term, that at any given level in the universe where there is an accurate understanding of the image one finds the condensed history and career of the entire universe in that experience, that event, that object. This yields a very interesting view of man. And Leibniz, in his work, whenever he would come to a developed position and was ready to deliver the punchline as it were, very much like Plato, he resorted to what we would call in Plato myth, but in Leibniz I think we have to go into the idea of an understanding image. This is Leibniz's philosophical dream and it gives us some notion of what he was developing. And the New Essays on Human Understanding is sort of the final result of this line of thought. Here's his philosophic dream. He writes, “I was happy to be among men but not happy about human nature. Often I thought with sorrow of the evils to which we are subjected. Of the short duration of our life to which we are subjected. The vanity of glory. The inconveniences which spring from pleasure. The illnesses which crush our very spirit. Finally the annihilation of all our glories and all our perfections in the moment of death which seems to reduce to nothing the fruits of our labors. These meditations made me melancholy. I had a natural love of doing good and knowing the truth, yet it looked as though I were taking pains to no purpose. And as though a fortunate crime were better than an oppressed virtue. And the folly which satisfies, preferable to the reason which gives pain.” But he says he resists these things and he persevered. Then one day he falls asleep and while he's asleep the following dream occurs to him. “I found myself in a dark place which was like a subterranean cave - very large and very deep and swarming with men who with strange haste pursued in this darkness wandering fires which they called honors or tiny shining flies under the name of riches. Many there were who searched on the ground to find shining pieces of rotten wood which were called pleasures. These unlovely lights had each its followers. There were some who changed their course and some who abandoned the pursuit altogether through tiredness or through despair. Many of those who were running blindly about and who often thought they had attained their goal fell over precipices whence nought was heard but their groans. Some were stung by scorpions and other venomous creatures which made them wretched or often mad with rage.” So one gets an idea of the almost like a condensed inferno. Then he says, in the vault of this great cave he happened to notice that there was a light very very small that seemed to be stable and as it caught his attention he would try to force himself in the dream to meditate upon this and to focus upon it. And as he did so he found that he had increased capacity to do this. Then he began to move himself purposely around the cave to get different angles on this. And as he did so, he noticed that the light seemed to grow stronger and that the aperture which it presented seemed to enlarge. So he began to set himself in a discipline to coordinate his inner meditation with his angle of vision. And of course this is the tried and true yoga by which man finally disciplines himself into spiritual perception. We finally hone ourselves into being able to see through. Finally he says, “I was led by my good star to a place which was the sole and most advantageous spot in the entire grotto destined for those whom the divinity wished to withdraw altogether from these dark regions. Barely had I begun to look up when I was surrounded, I was surrounded, by a great light.” It has transposed itself from out there to here. It has become imminent. He was, “surrounded by a great light which gathered from all sides and the whole grotto and its horrors were fully revealed to my eyes.” So that concomitant with the gathering of the light is the revulsion of seeing the true nature of the illusion. The horror of having been baited all this time by not just inconsistency and fallacy but by real nightmare. But this revulsion and this light come concomitant. “But a moment afterwards a dazzling brightness took me by surprise. Presently it took shape and I saw before me the appearance of a young man whose beauty charmed my senses so that the light around him now was projected out and transposed in a motion which included himself and the transcendent and manifested itself in an event which was a man-like light. His bearing had a majesty which inspired me with veneration mingled with awe. But the gentleness of his glances reassured me. I began to feel a weakness overcoming me and was about to faint when I felt myself touched by a branch imbued with a marvelous liquid which I cannot compare with anything I have ever felt which gave me the strength necessary to bear the presence of the celestial messenger.” Now this is directly from the old archetypal Eleusinian Mysteries where at the moment of personal transformation the wheat was brought in and touched. The person was blessed with the reality of the focus of life itself in the wheat. Or in the mysteries of the Dodonian Zeus that aspirant at that transformative stage was touched by the royal priest by a sprig of olive or laurel which is why the poetic envisioner was crowned with laurel in ancient times. It was a sign of being by the magic wand of living life symbolized in the branch, by being brought into a grounded contact with reality. And in Leibniz's dream, just as he is about to faint, this branch with its miraculous liquid comes to connect him with that shining man image. He says, “he called me then by my name.” First time he spoke. And what did he speak? His name. “And said in gracious tones. Give thanks to the divine goodness which withdraws you from this mob.” In other words, calls by the name and then instructs him to give a hymn of praise and a call connecting him by his language to the divine. When man praises he uses his language like the divine priest would use the olive branch to connect with the reality. Thus the word links us to the divine in the presence of the mystery of ultimate transformation. Thus we must speak praise. “At the same time he touched me a second time and at that moment I felt myself raised up. I was no longer in the cave. I no longer saw a vault above me. I found myself instead.” He writes, “on a high mountain which revealed to me the entire face of the earth.” Now when he's on this mountain looking over the entire earth he has the same mystical capacities that individuals say like Black Elk when he had in Black Elk Speaks his vision where he was a bird flying over the earth. That is to say, wherever his eye looked, that aspect of the world would zoom into focus and he could see in living detail what it was. And the longer he looked the more intent, the more magnified became the scene and the more detail. So that man's integrity at this transformative point includes a cosmic universal vision. His eye has become a divine eye, that wherever it will look with intensity it will see. And the more duration, the more detail. He needed no telescope for this. And he says that here. Then this guide, this light shaped man who knows his name who has officiated as the priest at these mysteries in this dream says to Leibniz, “since you desire wisdom rather than the pleasures of the vain spectacles which the world offers to your gaze you are now to have your desires granted but you will lose nothing of what in solid in these same spectacles you will see them with eyes quite differently enlightened. Your understanding being fortified from on high will discover everywhere the brilliant enlightenments of the divine author of things.” Single, divine author of things. “You will observe only wisdom and happiness where men customarily find nothing but vanity and bitterness.” Now this philosophic dream comes very early in Leibniz's life and the superficial criticism that he was a diehard optimist from critics is totally misplaced. It's like saying that one can't be sure that the ocean is wet. I mean to call this an optimist is to miss the entire boat you see. It's to be ignorant. He says - so the light figure is telling him now that you are different, you are transformed. You have gone through a ceremony and you are now different. And whereas among men secrets are despised when they are discovered though they were previously regarded with astonishment. You will find that when you are admitted into the heart of nature when you are admitted into the heart of nature the anahata chakra of the natural continuum the feeling, the image. When you are admitted into the heart of nature the further you go the greater will be your delights because you will be only at the beginning of a chain which goes on to infinity. A chain which goes on to infinity. And Leibniz always stressed that in a logical progression that all the predicates that could be had of a statement, of a thing, of a proposition are already bound up into the thing itself. So that any given thing, any given phenomenon, any given substance had within it the infinite chain of all of its possible manifestations. The man of vision, of religious capacity, of Hermetic penetration who can enter into the heart of nature would increasingly, as his rationality would manifest itself, be able to see into the entire scope of nature. So that everywhere he looked would be the possibility of unity. So that every idea coupled with any such image would have its final expression in the unity of the universe. Not by speculative hope, but by intrinsic logic and structural design. He finishes up his dream. The figure of light tells him, “the pleasures which charm your senses and that fabled Circe which changes men into beasts will have no power over you. If you bind yourself to the beauties of souls which never perish and never cause displeasure. You will be of our company and will go with us from world to world, from discovery to discovery, from perfection to perfection.” So that the movement is not from a given beginning whatever its nature to a perfection, but is a continuous motion from perfection to perfection, that there never is a condition other than illusion and ignorance, other than the unity of perfection, obtainable through a funnel where time-space comes together in an hourglass of understanding in the sense of the presence of the heart of nature being accessible to spiritual vision. This is absolutely necessary to understand Leibniz and absolutely necessary to understand how he culminates the Hermetic tradition because most of the activities from Ficino through Trithemius and Trismosin through Paracelsus and John Dee all the way up through Comenius become transformed in Leibniz. And further ending this, he hears from the light vision in his dream, “You will pay court with us to the supreme substance which is beyond all worlds and which fills them without dividing itself in doing so. You will be at one in the same time before his throne and among those who are distant from it at one and the same time.” So that the disparate polarities of an ignorant empirical time-space do not obtain fully. They obtain only in an illusory dream and that Leibniz's philosophic dream is almost like a black hole in the dream fabric of illusion leading back into the reality behind it. And it's interesting to note that he was then told to make good use of his time, that while he was available he would have to make very good use of this time. Now it's interesting that in the Cartesian worldview the idea of force, of what we would call energy today, is a mechanical multiplication of mass times its speed will give you its force and that thus motion in the universe is a mechanically calculable multiplication of these basic axiomatic elements of based common sense. But with Leibniz you can see that this was a puerile view of reality. And so, his idea of energy was that it was a transformative phase of the all which we find in motion in a particular because of our perspective, and that we have the capacity at any particular perspective to go into its contact with the unity which really is presented by its symbolic presence. So that every phenomenon in the universe in this view has a symbolic capacity to display the all. Any man, thereby, could have a possibility of developing a vision to the divine. Now I have something in this volume, which I've finished, that I'd like to read you about the early Leibniz because I think that this says it about as good as I can make it. I've tried in The Hermetic Roots of America to really go into this and I think I should give this to you. Leibniz incidentally was quite a cheerful individual. Even though he spent a great deal of his life traveling, he was always a great companion. I think I'll just give you a couple of paragraphs here. “In 1663 he began serious study of law along with his mathematics. He received a doctor of law in 1666 but a part was refused because of his youth. At Altdorf near Nuremberg he was offered a professor's chair but declined ‘having very different things in view.’ De Principio Individuali in 1663, which was his doctoral thesis, had explicated the notion that individuality is constituted by the whole entity or essence.” Individuality is the whole unity. “And that the notion of a reformed symbolism needed a method of thought in tune with the real cosmos.” So that Leibniz was concerned not so much with the results but with getting down pat a method of inquiry which would lead, by its correct nature of process, to a disclosure of the real. Here we have the two points which focus in the Hermetic tradition of a language of wholeness by which the Paradise may be instituted completing the work of creation. Man needs to have a language by which he can formulate the transformative phases into focus so that he may teach this so that we may learn as a species to apply this and thus generate, increasingly, the reality of the unity of the universe. In 1671 Leibniz aged 25 wrote the Hypothesis Physica Novae, The New Physics, the Hypothesis of the New Physics, explaining how corporeal phenomenon might be derived from forces and motion. He dedicated the first part of his great essay to the Royal Society of London and the second part On Abstract Notion to the Paris Academy. This was the Paris of his friends Huygens, Arnauld, and Malebranche. In a letter then to John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick he listed the discoveries and plans for discoveries to be revealed by application of his new art and he used the term art just as the alchemists in the previous generations had used the term art. In other words he had found a method by which to transform nature. Included in the list was a calculating machine, a distant forerunner of computers. This calculating machine of Leibniz was one of the hits of the time, and it made friends between Leibniz and the family of Blaise Pascal. And in fact one of the errors of Pascal gave all of the family papers of Pascal to Leibniz to be edited because Pascal had also been interested in mathematics and in calculating machines and remember that this is the Pascal of the pensees of the thoughts which is a religious classic and one of the phrases that constantly is quoted out of Pascal is, “those infinite spaces terrify me.” In other words Pascal had begun to verge upon the discovery in himself of this infinite relationality which has no physical formulation, has no objective structure, is rather the totality of the relationality that can obtain, but not having had some grounding by which to appreciate this experienced it as terror. Whereas for Leibniz his experience of it was the obverse of terror - the man of light, the initiator of the mysteries who knows your name - the personable connection. Now Leibniz had gone to London about this time as an attache on a Political Mission for the Elector of Mainz. This Elector of Mainz his name was Johann Philipp von Schönborn and this was in January of 1673. He spent two months in England at the time. This political mission established Leibniz's great legal capacity to handle professional matters and later on when he became under the patronage of the Duke of Brunswick, John Frederick passed on, and the next Duke in that family to come up was based at Hanover. He was in the Brunswick-Lunenburg family, and that man's name was George Lewis. And George Lewis put Leibniz to work inspecting his family background. Sent him off on a three year mission which included going to Vienna and going to Italy to make sure that his family genealogy and pedigree were solidified and of such a notion that he could take over certain estates in Europe. And because of Leibniz's work in these legal family genealogical and historical matters it made George in line for the crown of England. And when Queen Anne died, this George, this patron of Leibniz, became George the First King of England. So that the Dukes of Brunswick became the kings of England. And this happened at the time that Leibniz was in charge of the overall intellectual strategy of the development. Because Leibniz knew so much because he knew the basic story, which was the dynamite bombshell of the political intrigues of his era, Leibniz felt himself in jeopardy from his own final patron. George Lewis was a bore. He was an ignorant, uneducated bore. But his mother loved the integrity of Leibniz and his sister Sophie Charlotte loved the integrity of Leibniz and as long as those two women were alive and able to have some say in the family, Leibniz was okay. He tried to keep out of the way of George - like a man who knew too much. There was an awful lot at stake. England in 1710, 1712 was starting to become the world power. The War of Spanish Succession had been concluded and it looked like Spain was no longer going to be able to hold itself as a unity. France was making its run but it looked more and more at that time, as it did turn out, that Great Britain was going to establish a world empire. Leibniz had all of the information in his own mind that would have upset the apple cart if he had chosen to use it unwisely. When he came back hoping that George would see his way kindly to maybe taking Leibniz with him to London giving him some sort of a larger position. George put him under house arrest and kept him like that until his death. George went on to England and in his boorish way began to throw power around the world. Leibniz died in 1716 alone and forgotten under house arrest. Having seen it all but before he passed on Leibniz was able to bring together two really great works. One of them is this New Essays on Human Understanding which I'll give you a couple of statements from, maybe just one statement in here on the nature of truth in general. Remember he worked on this through 1704, 1705 so that this was in manuscript in first draft, just a few years before George took over the crown. The two individuals in this book who are having a running dialogue, the man who represents John Locke and the empiricist is called Philalethes - Philalethes. And where have we heard that before? One of the last British alchemists styled himself Philalethes. In fact, it was the British alchemist who had come over from the New World, the one who had become the Governor of Connecticut John Winthrop Junior who had all those books in his library from John Dee. He was the Philalethes, the anonymous Philalethes. And this Philalethes, in this dialogue, is talking to another man whose name is Theophilus, Theophilus. Where have we run across Theophilus? The anonymous symbolic pen name of one of the great Rosicrucian writers was Theophilus Schweighardt. We'll see some slides of some of his work next week. He's the one that had in the manuscript the Invisible College coming down from the hand from the cloud with the structure on the wheels and all of the new age things being announced. But in the names themselves Philalethes - Lethe in Greek is forget, forgetting love. Whereas Theophilus is love of God. So there's a dialogue here between one who forgets love. Accurate as you may be about your observation if you forget love you've lost it. Whereas the other, the interlocutor, is the lover of God - the Theophilus. Philalethes says, what is truth? That famous question, what is truth was an enquiry many ages since. My friends believe that it is the joining or separating of signs as the things signified by them do agree or disagree with one another. The joining or separating of signs here it meant is what by another name we call proposition, the terms of an argument, the language of logic, the language of mechanical polarization as in electricity plus and minus. The manipulation of objective signs is truth. The bringing together of them, the separating of them so that one has truth trees and this kind of a logic. True or false? It's one or the other Theophilus replies to him but a phrase the wise man does not make a proposition yet it involves a joining of two terms. Nor is negation the same as separation for saying the man and then after a pause uttering wise is not making a denial. Further what is expressed by a proposition is not strictly agreement or disagreement - it's not strictly one or the other. Agreement obtains between two eggs; disagreement between two enemies. What we are dealing with here is a quite special way of agreeing or disagreeing. And I do not think that your definition explains it. But what is least to my liking is your definition of truth, in your definition of truth is that it looks for truth among words so that if the same sense is expressed in Latin, German, English, and French it will not be the same truth. And we shall have to say with Mr. Hobbes [Thomas Hobbes] that truth depends upon the good pleasure of men. This is a very strange way of speaking. “Truth is attributed even to God. And I think you will agree that he has no need for signs. In short this is not the first time that I have been surprised by the attitude of these friends of yours who are pleased to make essences species and truths nominal.” So that the reliance upon language as a mechanical manipulator of signed reality is disclosed to be inadequate and not only is it inadequate but it moves out of the center focus the spiritual function of language which is to be a connector and a grounder of man to the divine. In fact when Leibniz was working on the second great volume, almost the only large book that he published during his lifetime, it was called the Theodicy - Theodicy. Theo from God, decay is justice in Greek. So divine justice - divine justice. It was an enormous work and it was published in 1710. Leibniz was 65, 66 years old. And in this he takes up the three great issues which he says are troubling his time and have troubled man at any time that his consciousness has gone up to a level to where confusion on a massive order is possible. And he writes this in the preface. He writes, “it is clear that Jesus Christ completing what Moses had begun wished that the divinity should be the object not only of our fear and veneration but also of our love and devotion.” Moses laid a basis of Veneration and fearfulness - Fear thy God - and Christ laid a basis of devotion - and love thy God - which was a completion which was in Leibniz's way of saying all wrapped up in the first that the expression grew in disclosure through history. “Thus he made men happy by anticipation and gave them here on earth a foretaste of future felicity. And also incidentally showed them how to look at reality. That reality unfolds itself to spiritual vision and that if you look with love and devotion consistently, you unfold the purposes increasingly of inequality in time-space including oneself. Love in that mental state,” writes Leibniz, “which makes us take pleasure in the perfections of the object of our love. And there is nothing more perfect than God nor any greater delight than in Him. To love Him it suffices to contemplate His perfections a thing easy indeed because we find the ideas of these within ourselves. The perfections of God are those of our souls but he possesses them in boundless measure, whereas we are but a phase-form manifestation, He is the unity of the boundless matrix within which this manifests. God is thus order and always keeps this truth of propositions. The truth is not that it shall be known by an argument developing point by point, but that the method of unfoldment by wholeness to wholeness always obtains.” And Leibniz calls this a universal harmony. That the phases of reality are like tones which as they reveal are a harmony, a harmonia, a music of the spheres. “All beauty is an effusion of these rays. It follows manifestly that true piety and even true felicity consist in the love of God but a love so enlightened that its fervor is attended by insight.” Very important in Leibniz that the fervor the bhakti must have insight consonant with it to give it a focus. And he will say later on, “one cannot love God without knowing his perfections and this knowledge contains the principles of true piety.” And remember at this time the Pietists were coming into play in Germany - the 1670s, the 1680s, the 1690s, 1700s - and it was those Pietists under Spener mainly that the little groups of Perfecti were coming into process. They would take 40 members, because 40 was the perfect number for tens, and that these groups of perfecti were called Collegium Pietas, Colleges of Perfection, and one of those Colleges of Perfection, as an experiment and the process of discovery of the purposes of history was sent from Germany to Philadelphia in 1694 under Johann Kelpius, just at the same time that Leibniz was developing all this work. Leibniz is the grand strategic hermetic mastermind who produced behind the scenes and encouraged in front of the scenes during his entire life the intellectual fuel, the flame of insight, so that this hermetic experiment in transforming the world could proceed. One cannot love God without knowing his perfections. We have to know. Insight must be tutored. It must be learned. And this knowledge contains the principles of true piety. “The purpose of religion should be to imprint these principles upon our souls. But in some strange way it has happened all too often that men that teachers of religion have strayed far from this purpose. Contrary to the intention of our Divine Master devotion has been reduced to ceremonies and doctrine has been cumbered with formulae.” So that it was in fact the condition at his time which we still find today that he was criticizing. The reduction to meaningless ceremony and the larding up of vacuous formulae of those very processes which we should be using to imprint upon our souls the images of nature as it really is and the ideas of divinity as it manifests. He writes, and this always had a political repercussion - it still does today. Somebody who pulls the plug on these faults pulls the plug on the whole historical structure that tyrannies have been based upon. And when it was seen through the late 18th and early 19th century by a number of individuals, among them Kant or Hegel or Goethe or Shelley or Blake or Beethoven or Napoleon, Jefferson. They were the ones who said we've got to pull the plug on the entire historic process because it has gone so far astray. We need a revolution to bring us back to a natural evolution of self-unfoldment and we'll have to have a course on that. “All too often these ceremonies have not been well fitted to maintain the exercise of virtue and the formulae sometimes have not been lucid so that man becomes educated and conditioned to using a faulty logic.” And through this fuzziness his mind atrophies and through the use of phony ceremony which has no reality his spiritual sense becomes lulled into habitual limbo and he becomes more and more the automaton of the Haitian zombie and more and more amenable by the kind of puppet strings of incantational manipulation that politicians so often in any time have become masters of. “Some Christians have imagined that they could be devout without loving their neighbors and pious without loving God or else people have thought that they could love their neighbor without serving him and could love God without knowing him. Many centuries have passed without recognition of this defect by the people at large and there are still great traces of the reign of darkness.” He wrote this in 1710. So he says, I am going to take in this work the three focuses which yield directly in the process of the logic of self-unfoldment to a vision of the unity. The goodness of God, the origin of evil, and the freedom of man. Now those are setting up the canon. Those are are the three issues that make or break a civilization. You have to know about evil. You have to have some way to bring it into focus. You have to know about the nature of God and you have to know about the freedom of man. Now all three of those issues were dealt with soundly at one time or another in human history, various phases. The greatest case that comes to my mind is the case that William Blake pointed to at the end of his life the Book of Job and the old Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament takes exactly those three points. In this work, at the end of part three, the third part where Leibniz is beginning to try to sum up how those three focus together, he again goes back to the method that he used in his early youth in his philosophic dream and he gives us the kind of platonic myth that the Grand Master of Athens would have given us. He says, that there is a time in the universe where he invites the reader to observe and man who is about to be offered the position of Emperor of Rome goes to the groves of Dodona where Zeus, Olympian Zeus, has his oracle. And of course Zeus in Rome was Jupiter so he calls him Jupiter here. Jupiter was the great god of Rome the Roman religion Jupiter Terra Maximus. And Leibniz has the reader look at the situation. And that's much in Krishnamurti's way of looking at this situation and being with it. And the emperor to be is named Sextus and he is told by the priest of Dodona that he has two ways that can manifest: He can go back to Rome and become an emperor and have all the luxuries; or he can stay and lead a good life. He says, Sextus says, “Why must I renounce the hope of a crown? Can't I become a good king? Can I live a good life and be a king at the same time? Jupiter says, no Sextus I know better what is needful for you. If you go to Rome you are lost.” Leibniz says, “Sextus not being able to resolve upon so great a sacrifice went forth from the temple and abandoned himself to his fate. Theodorus the high priest who had been present at the dialogue between God and Sextus addressed these words to Jupiter: Your wisdom is to be revered, O great ruler of the gods. You have convinced this man of his error. He must henceforth impute his unhappiness to his evil will. He has not a word to say. But your faithful worshippers are astonished they would wonder at your goodness as well as at your greatness. It rested with you to give him a different will.” So he raises the fundamental question. Why if you have this infinite capacity did you not create the conditions which would allow him to be an emperor and a good man at the same time? Why give him this dichotomy? Why give him this split between good and evil forcing him to choose. And once he’s chosen then he's gone off, he's condemned. Jupiter replies to the high priest to the master of the mystic ceremonies, he says, “Go to my daughter Pallas, she will inform you what I was bound to do.” Now Pallas. Pallas. Athena. So the priest goes there and in the time honored archaic way of worshiping after he goes through a purification ceremony. Leibniz doesn't describe it here but this is generally what happened. You would go in and you would purify yourself through diet for a fasting period. You would cleanse yourself usually with something like steam, fire, water. The food intake, the meditation, the circumambulation and so forth. When you had finished the purification you would then lay down in the temple and go to sleep and have a dream. The ancient Greeks and the American Indians, exactly the same. The way to gather the light of the spirit was to have a dream. This is how in the Serapeum in Alexandria people were healed. They went in and after purification they would have a dream. And the God would speak to them in the dream. So Jupiter tells the head priest Theodorus, go to the palace of Athena and there you will have a dream and she will instruct you. So the goddess Pallas appears in this dream at the gate surrounded by rays of dazzling majesty. She touched the face of Theodorus with an olive branch which she was holding in her hand. And lo he had become able to confront the divine radiancy of the daughter of Jupiter and of all that she could show him. Jupiter who loves you she said to him he loves you, God loves you, commended you to me to be instructed. You see here the Palace of the fates where I keep watch and ward. And in this palace of the fates. She goes on to describe that not only reality as it exists occurs but that all possible realities also are there. Every possibility also is there so that the infinite variety of the universe is in this holy dream of Pallas Athena in the temple for the aspirant who is able to see differentially into her radiant light after having been contacted blessed with the olive branch and being able then to speak to converse. She shows him all of the Sextus's that exist. There are many Sextus's, almost an infinite number, and Leibniz goes on to describe some of them. In one universe Sextus goes on instead of being an emperor he goes to Corinth and he becomes a good man. He lives a good life, he has wonderful children. And in another he goes to Athens and he becomes a great philosopher, somebody really wise. Leibniz writes, “because amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is finally one that is the best.” Because the possibilities of the universe are like a pyramid which has an apex and there is one but its base fades into infinity and the possibilities proliferate geometrically into infinity. But that there is an apex and there is a one and that Theodorus entering this highest hall became entranced in ecstasy. He had to receive succour from the goddess. “A drop of divine liquid was placed on his tongue restored him. He was beside himself for joy when he beheld the pyramid of Life and saw the parentheses between unity and infinity.” He again felt faint just like in the philosophic dream had to be touched again with the liquid of life and brought in so that he could entertain in presence, unity, and infinity, in one experience. And Pallas then says, “but here is Sextus as he is as he will be in reality. He issues from the temple in rage. He scorns the counsel of the gods. You see him? He's going to Rome bringing confusion everywhere, violating the friend of a wife, becoming powerful, driven out with his father beaten. Unhappy.” Why? Why? “The crime of Sextus serves for great things. It finally down the line renders Rome capable of freedom. Thence will arise a great empire which will show noble examples to mankind. But that is nothing in comparison with the worth of this whole world at whose beauty you marvel at the world of reality. When after a happy passage from this mortal state to another in a better one the God shall have fitted you to know it.” And even Sextus will move on and transform. A mystery has been given. “At this moment Theodorus wakes up,” writes Leibniz, “And he gives thanks to the goddess. He owns the justice of Jupiter. Divine justice is understandable to him. His spirit pervaded by what he has seen and heard. He carries on the office of high priest with the dedication of a true servant of God with all the joy whereof a mortal is capable.” And Leibniz ends here and he says, “this is the source of things that must be sought.” And with that Leibniz ended his great volume on the Theodicy 1710. All through his life he had entered into correspondence with dozens of people, every famous person of his age. But the man who refused to have a correspondence with him, had several individuals write letters for him refused to see Leibniz, refused to have any direct contact with him, that one man was Sir Isaac Newton who was absolutely appalled by the specter of an intelligence like Leibniz who was keeping his eye on a focus that Newton somehow was not sure that he could ever see. And I think next week when we describe the career of this man you'll get a glimpse at the conundrum in which modern science and modern civilization based on it has fallen into. A tremendous fear expressed by Pascal that there might be an infinite space capable of engendering an indefinite terror which man could not sustain. Well we'll look at that next week.