History 1
Presented on: Saturday, July 3, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History 1, which means that we have come through six phases to reach this point. And this point, as you can understand now if you've been coming and following this, this point is not some place in a scheme of space, it's more like an occurrence within a duration of time. And it's fitting that History has to do with time. But not just time as it appears in nature, but with an added dimension to it of consciousness. History has to do with conscious time. And since time is related to space directly, so much so that we can talk in physics and math about time/space or space/time. Conscious time factors into space also. So that when we deal with History we're dealing with conscious space. That there is no longer any such thing as a neutral place. All space and all time that are brought into our reckoning have been infused with conscious valuation, conscious meaning. And we saw, about six months ago when we began the second year of our course, when we began to talk about Vision, we saw how Vision is the traditional English meaning of the word consciousness. That the term vision came into play about six hundred years ago in Chaucer's Middle English times and that vision for six hundred years has come to mean that transcendental realm of possibility, that one sees from the inside out, that the mind in some kind of deep, perhaps mystical, at least transcendent way, that the mind has a hidden faculty to be able to see further than the eyes, to see more than just this world, but to see possibilities of beyond. And so being able to envision something more than this world involves the appearance of consciousness.
And now that we're at History, we recognize that this consciousness has become woven into time and space, so that we have minimally a five dimensional continuum, conscious/time/space. But when we come to talking about talking about conscious/time/space, we already saw that in vision. We saw that vision already had that five dimensional quality. So when we come to History, we're coming to an even higher order, a higher complexity of process. And it's very difficult because we live at this moment, in our time at the close, the last six months of the twentieth century, the last six months of this millennium, we live at a blind spot where history is not understood nor seen at all. It is exactly there that the troubles that have haunted us for the last two hundred years and have become a crisis in our century, occur. Because, briefly, all of the solutions to historical problems that are tendered, are tendered from the wrong places, from the wrong angle of offering. You cannot solve historical problems by mythic solutions. There's no way at all. And as we go through this series of lectures in the phase on history hopefully you'll come to appreciate why this is so. And why history is such a sand trap for us (to use a golf simile here). We have no traction in history for these two good reasons: one, our solutions are irrelevant to the actual challenge, the nature of the challenge that is there. And two, that history is not objective at all. It isn't objective like the body, it isn't objective like the mind, it is not even objective like the person, but history is a process and in this, history is related to vision and history and vision as conscious processes are related to the natural processes; the process of experience and the process of nature itself. So that if you were to take a god's eye view of the way in which reality has its pizzazz, has its energy, has its quality of thusness, it's not thus because it's static, it's thus because it's in emergent waves of ongoing happening. And history (to use a sixties term), history is a happening. It's a happening. And so one cannot concretize it, though we try, and the attempts to make history concrete, actually trigger a regression that goes all the way back to the beginnings of objectivity, all the way back to the ritual level. And this is why, increasingly, the failure to deal with historical challenges, ends up with ritual failures as response.
The process of nature we saw when we began our education, because nature cannot be adequately objectified, every time we are able to characterize nature as a structure objectively, it disappears from our grasp. We once thought, earlier in this century, that when we got to the atomic level, that we would finally have the points upon which to peg the shapes of nature. And then the subatomic world opened up. And on top of that, the subatomic world has opened up to the extent that now several generations of further penetration have shown that nature becomes more and more mysterious the more that one becomes objective about it.
One of the qualities that we need to consider at the very beginning of History, is that life is a quality of nature and not something unique and special. That life occurs everywhere in the natural process of reality. Now our understanding of life is highly conditioned by mythological stories, by mythological narratives of feeling toned language, by cultural traditions that are thousands of years deep. And we need to have a little bit of an insight as to why life itself is not a unique special happening on one planet only. And I'll just briefly draw your attention to a book that came out two years ago from Germany, Springerverlog Publishers, Comets And The Origin And Evolution Of Life. That comets seed, not only water everywhere in the star systems, but seed also life. And the latest issue of Scientific American, July 1999, has its cover story, Molecules From Space, how life on earth is seeded from comets and meteors. Not only how life on earth, but that this phenomena of the molecules and the hydroxyl fragments of molecules occur, not only in our solar system, but they occur in interstellar space in between stars and they also occur in intergalactic space in between galaxies.
The point being that life is indigenous to nature and does not occur in the objectivity of existence but occurs before in the mystery of the process of nature. Because we saw that nature is a process. That the objectivity that we're familiar with, that we can deal with, that is practical to us, is the level of ritual, of ritual comportment. Because it's here that existence takes its root and becomes stuff, becomes the material, the materia of actuality that we would recognize as bodies, the bodies. And while our body has a lifetime of a hundred years, plus or minus, other elements have a much longer lifetime and if we go into the atomic structure of existence, we find that the longest lasting existential object is the proton. And in fact this Scientific American has Inside The Proton, an article in this very same issue, of how about twenty years ago, it was recognized increasingly, that the structure of the proton was made up of three little sparks called quarks. And two of these quarks had a certain kind of a spin and so they were called up, and one of these quarks had an opposite spin and it was called down. And that the proton is actually made up of a triad, like a trigram of quarks. How long to quarks last? No one knows. Now it's apparent that that structure was very naive. That instead of there being just three quarks there's a whole tapestry of quarks, not only up and down quarks, but a third kind that are very peculiar, in fact they are called strange. And that there are many more ups and down quarks than one thought but that they cancel each other out, so that the net result of what's apparent is only three quarks, two up one down. And all of these others are invisibly there but not apparent. And all of this means that appearance is deceiving, and I'm sure you've heard that before. So that apparency is not transparency. One has to learn to see into, not only what is there, what is phenomenally there, what is existentially there, but one has to learn to see into the articulate context that is not there existentially, is not there in a ritual way. And how do we see what is not there in a ritual existential phenomenal way? We see it with our mind.
So that the mind's objectivity dovetails and fits in with the objectivity of the body. And rather than there being a mind body problem, there's actually a mind body synergy. And the mind and body working together, symbol and ritual working together, form a very comprehensive integration. An integration that has its cycle, as we saw. In fact our first year in the education was the integral cycle that we divided into four parts, like the four seasons, because that integral cycle, at least on this planet, takes place in this kind of a four, this kind of a quaternary way. And it's very traditional wisdom to talk about it, not so much as a one-two-three-four, as a sequence of cardinal improvement, but to talk about it as a quaternary, which means that it has a structure like a square. So that the square is like an archetypal symbol of stability, on this planet, of the completeness of a cycle. And that the ancient wisdom way of understanding how to look at a square was not one-two-three-four, but that the basic structure, if you are working with ones, it's very difficult to get beyond the one one. Because if you're working in any kind of a depth, especially in terms of the mind, the oneness of unity becomes a barrier which it is very difficult to go beyond. The barrier of unity for the mind is much like the sound barrier for aeronautics. It's very difficult to go beyond, because the closer you come to penetrating through the liminality of unity, the more that one experiences that this is going to be a death. And while the body has learned, over billions of years, that it can go through a natural change, that death is not an end, the mind is not convinced of this, because of its abstract nature, and considers that this death, any death, is the only death and that is the end of it all.
So that minds have to compensate. Bodies don't compensate for death, minds do. And so the problem of exceeding unities is in the mind. And so ancient wisdom traditions of education about the completeness of nature, stressed for the mind, that it was a square made up of a pair of pairs. That the deepest level of actuality that you can deal with is not by ones but by pairs, pairedness. And so man is looked at as male/female, sides are looked at as left/right, pairedness occurs everywhere. And in a traditional wisdom teaching, say like the Tao Te Ching, from China of twenty-five hundred years ago, Lao Tsu says, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. But the Tao that can be talked about has a name and it is the mother of the Ten Thousand Things. And the deepest that one can say about it is that it occurs in pairs. It occurs in a Yin/Yang. That Yin never occurs without Yang, nor does Yang ever occur without Yin.
And so the pairedness in nature is a kind of a mutuality and that mutuality runs as deep as the atomic structure. Because if hydrogen and oxygen were not able to mutually be paired together, you wouldn't have a water molecule. In fact all molecular structure above the atomic, the next level of existence, the next level of practicality is the molecular, and on the molecular level mutuality is a characteristic of the mystery of nature that comes into existence and gives it a tone, gives it, the alchemical term for it would be a tincture. It gives it, not only a tone, but it gives it a color. And so the spectrum of life, its range, the range of physical actuality, as well as the range of life, has this particular tone, that mutuality, pairedness that shares together, is a characteristic and is so deep that it lends to the entire cycle of nature a term which we have come to use, and that is integration. The indelible mutuality of existence goes all the way through the entire cycle of nature, so that it can be characterized as an integral cycle. Its prime directive (to use the Star Trek simile) is to come together, is to integrate. So that nature tends, even though from time to time it will go out a little bit, it tends to want to come back. It tends to want to come to form. It tends to want to come to evermore complex forms.
And so nature as an integral cycle has this four parts: Nature, Ritual, Myth and Symbol. And we saw that in this natural cycle, the mind is a part of nature, yet the mind has a capacity that is nowhere experienced outside of the ineffable mystery of nature, it's nowhere experienced in existence. The mind has the ability to become centered to the point of stillness. This still point of the mind is a very telling kind of a quality. The standing point of the center, the still center of the mind finds itself at the axial core, at the pivot around which the entire cycle of nature, the entire cycle of ritual, the entire of the capacities of myth, of feeling toned languaged experience, even the entire cycle of the mind's integral procedures have this still pivot, and at that center of the mind, more than a still point, it's like an axial pivot. The mind there finds itself deeply akin to the mystery of nature. That the truth of the center of the mind, and whatever's true about the mystery of nature is one truth. Not one truth as a thing, but as a continuity, as a ribbon of actuality between them. And so someone who is able to presence this still point, this axial center of their mind, opens a threshold, opens a gate, opens a possibility that goes beyond the integral cycles of nature. The best simile that one can come with on the spur of the moment, is that it's like instead of the earth being limited to its little less than eight thousand mile rocky, watery, existentiality, plus its atmosphere, but beyond the earth there's also its gravitational field and its magnetic fields. And these gravitational fields and magnetic fields are woven into a fabric of gravitation and magnetic fields from the sun. And even from our moon and from other planets. And if we get really fine, our star system rotates with about fifty other star systems in a local group, and they have a gravitational magnetic web in which they belong. So that there is more reality beyond the cycle of nature in its integral and that cycle beyond, we've come to characterize, for educational purposes, as differential. And one of the qualities of differentiality is that it is conscious.
Again, just as we began with trying to understand that life is not a peculiarity. In the universe life is not a peculiarity. In fact, we learned no longer to call it a Uni-verse, we could have called it differentially an Omni-verse. Instead we used the ancient Greek term Cosmos because cosmic meant this differential conscious time/space without end. A world without limitation. A world that exists in reality beyond shape and because of the deep conviction of alignment of likes, things like each other, on all the orders of existence it came to be seen man as a microcosm has more to themselves than is physiologically here. That the physiological body, including the objective mind is but a small part of the true reality of this being, of your being, or our beingness. And all of this is not a metaphysical daydreaming. All of this emerges as our education has gone phase by phase, to show how universal it is. Or rather at this point, how cosmic it is.
And thus it is that history is very difficult to deal with realistically. Because history is the grown up version of vision. In an odd way, experience, the level of myth, the process of myth, is the child of nature. And just as nature is the parent for the process of experience, has very similar qualities to it, both are processes. And in between the process of nature and the process of myth, we saw the objectivity of ritual, which comes out of nature, the objectivity of existence. And just so the objectivity that comes out of myth is symbol, the objective mind, ideas which have shapes, applications, structure. And we saw how vision as a process has the person that objectifies that process. History as a process will be the context out of which the objectivity of the Cosmos occurs. So that history is deeply related to Cosmos, just as existence is related to nature. Which makes of history, an enormously fascinating, but almost not understandable process; a matrix which defies the ability of the mind to characterize it. And specifically because the mind operates naturally only within the integral cycle, in order for the mind to operate outside of the integral cycle, it has to transform itself. The natural mind cannot imagine the Cosmos. In fact the natural mind cannot even imagine the Spiritual Person. That takes something that goes beyond the limitations of ordinary experience. It takes something extraordinary. And so in every culture, in every people on the planet, in whatever age, whatever century, whatever millennium you choose to find, there's always a word for going beyond. Going beyond the body, going beyond the mind. Not into oblivion, but into another realm, a realm that is so much vaster than the realm of integral limitation, that the unlimited is what it was called.
And so twenty-five hundred years ago, men and women very much like ourselves, at a particular place on the planet, at a particular juncture of a crush of concomitant events and people and circumstance, so that it produced a flash point, a flash point in history, a development where those men and women for several generations had to deal with the crisis of consciousness called history. And they were the, one of the few places on the planet where men and women were forced to deal with this problem of history, of historical consciousness, in the actual time/space of their existential lives. Of especially in the time/space of their symbolic minds, because it was a problem that would not go away. You couldn't wish it away, you couldn't do rituals that would get rid of it, you couldn't do ordinary mental integrations that would get rid of it, the problems were still there. And so we're focusing in History One on one of those figures from that place. The place was the Athens of about twenty-five hundred years ago. And the individual that we're taking is the great historian Thucydides.
But this quality of understanding is not text book. It's not like taking a text book and studying the origins of Greek historiography. We're not in that kind of situations. We're in a radically different situation. We're in a differential conscious appreciation. And so we're pairing, because pairedness is really the deepest that we can go. If we try to go to unity we get caught in a particular bind. The mystery of nature showed us that one itself is a part of a pair and that the pair, the paired quality to one is zero. That one never occurs by itself, it always occurs with zero. It sounds like metaphysics, it sounds like maybe this is like religion. It's Math, it's Physics. All the great advances of the last twenty-five, thirty years, in technology are due to the fact that electrons are paired with their holes. Electrons have holes, they have shadows that are holes in time/space and without that there would be no possibility of the kinds of developments that we have seen. That this is not taught basically in schools, is because the teachers themselves are uneducated.
But we need to be educated. And we need to know that we can't just take books anymore, because books as texts have become ruins in a dissolved mentality that no longer has any applicability to life. That sounds very radical and it is. And yet we have to go back and save, go back and recapture that whole era where books were a workable idea, symbolically, in the integral cycle, because the mind was still viable as the controlling part of the scenario. The mind was still the cook in the kitchen and books were the stove upon which the meals of life were served for several thousand years. Before that there were no books. Before the book there was something called the scroll. And the scroll was there, and the tablet. And the scroll and tablet were there for several thousand years, and before they were there, there was something else there. Not something else for language, because there was no written literacy. More than five thousand years ago there was no written literacy, but there was a written numeracy. Number were written for at least three-thousand, four thousand years before letters were written. So that man had numeracy long before he had literacy. But long before numeracy was there, spoken language for tens of thousands of years was the current communication. And so the orally delivered language forms were the stove upon which man, men and women cooked the integral cycle for themselves, so it made sense, so their lives were there and they could live them.
The book is now gone, and with it, the entire integration of everything that went before it, and yet what's new is not there yet. It certainly isn't the computer or the internet. Those are very clumsy. To developed differential consciousness, those are just little building blocks. It's still sand blocks play. It has nothing to do with what's coming which is so radically different it's unimaginable. Arthur C. Clark is just a babe in the woods.
But we must use books still in 1999, and for the next ten or fifteen years. Still use books, but instead of using them as a book, as a text, we're pairing two books together so in this paired structure we get something which is not there in the book. We get a ratio of two books together. We get a ratio, a rationality. We get a temporary form which we can use that can still relate and go back to books, but has the differential conscious umph to take us forward into the unknown, into that realm yet to come. Where the stove will be something other than books, something even other than computers. We don't know yet.
And paired with Thucydides is Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin, especially his autobiography. Because in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography we have the instance of a differentially conscious person, even though born about three hundred yeas ago, who took it upon himself to be differentially conscious during his entire lifetime and to see where that would go. He was like a pioneer, an explorer in these realms beyond integration. And he kept an accurate record of it and wrote it down in his autobiography. And so we're pairing the individual Benjamin Franklin with the history of Thucydides, because Thucydides shows that history is a process. He lived at a time, twenty-five hundred years ago, where the crisis of consciousness in history was a poignancy that couldn't be ignored. Thucydides is a contemporary of Sophocles. He's a contemporary of Socrates. So that Greek tragedy and the Self inquiry of Socrates, the beginnings of philosophy and the beginnings of history all happened at the same time and the same place, they knew each other. They all lived in the same town at the same time.
And Thucydides was killed just the year before, actually about seven or eight months before Socrates was killed, for the same reason. He'd become a danger to the state. He'd become a revolutionary voice that all the young people were beginning to listen to because they were reading this history and listening to Socrates and listening to Sophocles in such a way that the crisis of historical consciousness was showing that it does not resolve in any kind of integration whatsoever. It's resolution is not to resolve down, but to resolve further out. That you win the challenge of history, not by reducing it to a solution, or even reducing it to a number of solutions, but that you open the possibilities beyond number. And so the problems of history dissolve in the further outflow of too much possibility to be corralled into a crisis.
So that the crisis of history is a problem of freedom, not an idea of freedom, nor a goal of freedom, but an exponentiality of freedom so that it is so free that crisis doesn't have any place to occur. The Diamond Cutter Sutra says awaken the mind by not letting it rest on anything. That's Freedom. Let's come back.
HISTORY ONE
PART TWO
Let's come back, let's come back to an issue that we have. And the issue, when we first began to be together a year and a half ago, to initiate this education, to set it into motion, the question that we asked was what are we doing here. Why are we here? And we learned patiently through an alignment of encounters, coming together every Saturday morning, and letting them string themselves along into a sequence, and that sequence not only had an alignment, but it had periodic modulations. Like every four weeks we would change our pair of text, we had different pair. And after a month we had a different pair. So we saw that there was a lunar cycle to the pairs of texts. And that after a year, we had come back, through a seasonal cycle, we had come back to a very similar point in terms of a seasonal cycle. We were back at spring again. And we learned that this periodicity and alignment together gave our distant ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, ways to structure their experience. So that they didn't just live but they lived in pattern. And that the pattern was maintained, not by some mental ideation, there were no powerful ideas in those times, powerful ideas are very very recent. To live by ideas is only about four thousand years old. Mostly men and women throughout millions of years of experience have lived by patterned existence. And patterned existence is experience. And that the alignment and periodicity needed to be maintained all the time, which was why the rituals were repeated, to maintain that alignment. But that the variance from person to person and year to year were important also and kept alive. So that the way in which ritual and myth work together, the way in which existence and experience really belong together. The one is the objective foundation for the other, and the other as the atmosphere for the former, but they really work together.
But the appearance of the mind as a player in the situation, both added a different quality to that pattern of life and also posed a problem. Because the mind's objectivity, while it still mimics the ritual way of being objective, the mind discovers that it has its own special way of being objective, and its special way of being objective is to abstract away from experience. So that one good term for symbols is essence. To take the juice of experience and then concentrate it. To further integrate it, so that it isn't just juice that's extracted and then put into a concentrate, but the concentrate is freeze dried into a pellet. The mind likes to do that and it feels familiar in its own way when it does that. And so the more that the mind came into play, the more that symbols and the process of abstraction became more and more powerful and eventually got to the point to where the mind began to say I'm no longer just a player in the game, I'm the game player. The honcho in this whole thing is me. And so the mind began to reach back in its abstract, highly integrated ordering way and say we will have these kinds of alignments, even though nature doesn't have them, we will have them this way, because it makes better sense to me.
And men and women who for thousand generations had followed the animals in their cycle, suddenly built corrals and said the animals will stay here, this is easier for us. And so the domestication of animals. Instead of foraging over twenty miles of landscape to get enough herbs and roots, the plants will grow here. The domestication of plants. And so a whole different quality of experience came into play in what we call the Neolithic. The Paleolithic was still wild because it was a way in which men and women, in order to be real to themselves and to each other, were natural. They participated in the way nature is. But in the Neolithic, men and women, on the strength of their minds, on the strength of symbolic integration, began to tame nature so it became domestic. So that it became a distinction a difference between domestic plants and wild plants, domestic animals and wild animals, domestic people and barbarians. And the domestic people banding together, viewed people undomesticized as being quite different and fodder for them to organize for their own good, plus their advantage.
And so the Neolithic, which came into play some ten thousand years ago, brought a whole different level of complication into, not only the experience and the ritual, but the way in which the mind now became increasingly a major player. And that whole evolvement, we saw, came into a super-concentrate. And that super-concentrate, about four, five thousand years ago, was the essence of the Neolithic abstracted even further and made into civilizations. Neolithic means new stone age, as opposed to the Paleolithic, the old stone age. But urban civilization had nothing to do with stone, new or old. It had to do with ideas, with ideation, with symbols. So that the symbol that controlled the idea, and that idea controlling other ideas and those ideas then shaping the way in which experience then reshaped existence. Instead of just having a domestic range, one had an empire. Like the Roman Empire is remarkably different from Neolithic villages.
But that process of development, that evolution, had its own wind. It's like a fire, when it gets big enough, generates its own wind. Civilization, when it got powerful enough, when its symbols became powerful enough, began to bring in a transcendental wind. Talk about a phantom menace. Episode one in differential consciousness is literally a shock. That there is such a thing as being super-natural. Not just supernatural because someone is a special person, is psychic, or is a shaman, or has a death experience, or survives an illness, or is accidentally some kind of a genius about this. When the supernatural qualities were for special occasions of rare individuals, it was worked into the folklore, it was worked into the mythology. And even up to a certain level was worked into the symbolism. But when civilizations got enough of their own wind, their own kind of energy, they began to incorporate supernatural vision as a part of what they were and changed themselves. They transformed. It was no longer cities, but became something, well the Roman Empire was not at all just an urban civilization. The name of the great history of Rome by Livi, translates into English, the title of that history was Towards The Urban Condition, meaning that the entire world is the province of this city. And colloquially became known as the city of man. The world now was the whole city of man. The entire world was the province for The City Of Man. And so deep became the hubris and the pride and the arrogance of that, that about sixteen hundred years ago, a man struggling with how to make a theological ideation capable of modifying the Roman Empire's religious ethos, the man's name was St. Augustine. Wrote a classic book called The City Of God. That the city of man had become so powerful, the only pair to it was heaven itself. And in between these two cities, man had to learn to make a balance, a peace. But Augustine's City Of God comes very late and is actually an early Medieval pastiche compared to the real crisis that happened some nine hundred years before St. Augustine. And that real crisis hit in just a few places on the planet, and the place it hit the hardest was in classical Athens, because it was the place with the most arrogance.
Classical Athens in its heyday, the ruler at that time, the head man, was a man named Pericles. And Periclean Athens is the bulls eye of the classical age, the classical realm. It had about two hundred thousand people in it. Only about thirty thousand of those people were, what they called, free. Free men, who owned property, who owned other people, who owned the events. And out of that came a ruling oligarchy of just four hundred people Which in the course of the was narrated by Thucydides was finally reduced to the tyranny of just thirty men. And they're the men who ordered the death of Socrates, who murdered Thucydides in exile. He'd come back to the city and he was too big for them. Like Socrates was too big for them.
And the problem of this condensation of power was leading to an inescapable conclusion which Thucydides is the first person in history to envision and see as the problem, because the condensation doesn't just stop at four hundred. It doesn't even stop at the tyranny of thirty. It stops when one man is ruler of the world, dictator for life. And Thucydides is the base of a pyramid of historical insight that comes to a pinnacle in Julius Caesar. Would have come to a pinnacle in Alexander The Great, but he never stopped his expansiveness. But Julius Caesar was the person who said the movement of history comes to a point with me. And it was exactly at that point, because of that trigger that his best friends killed him, altogether. They murdered him publicly, because it was not just a sacrilege, it was a frightening inevitable Frankenstein of historical development that they couldn't understand. And that position, at the point of dictator of the world, became radioactive.
Julius Caesar's closest ally, his right hand man, a valiant general named Mark Anthony, tried to occupy that place and was electrocuted by divine fire. He reached out to try to bring Cleopatra in so that he would have some kind of divine consort so that he could be there, and they were both fried in the prime of their life by the nephew of Julius Caesar, Octavian, who turned out to be Augustus Caesar, who finally founded the Roman Empire. Who ruled as master of the world for forty-five years, completely alone. Who ruled under the appearance of not being the dictator. He never referred to himself as the dictator. He said I am simply the first. And so he called his rule the Principate, the rule of the first. He was the principal human being on the planet. And so the colloquial term for the Roman Empire was the Augustan Principate. All roads lead to Rome and all the roads in Rome lead to the Forum, and all the yardage in the Forum concentrates in the temple that Augustus built for himself, the Arapaches Augustus which survives right to this day, you can go to Rome and see it. It's there, it's intact.
The difficulty for appreciating all of this is that that historical process, once put into motion doesn't go away naturally because it's not a part of nature. It's like a transcendental smog that cannot go away. There is no natural process that will process it. And so it's our problem. Not ours existentially, it was made thousands of years before we were even born. But the pollution has become so dense now that it produces, whenever nature rains, an acid rain. So that there is no structure of life on the planet that will exist unless it is dealt with historically. And so there is a creepy side to the thing. A creepy side to the education that a supernatural element entered into the play of the planet several thousand years ago and is not in the form of some kind of occult this or that, but is in the very stuff out of which civilization is made. Out of the very stuff with which the mind, in its conscious projection of possibility, is really, if one's looking for a villain, is the villain. But it's not a villain, it's the natural way in which the mind, when it reaches a capacity of concentration, it doesn't just stop there. Stillness occurs not in time/space, but in a non-time/non-space which of its own accord transforms.
So that it became a very very difficult issue about a hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago. The crisis of historical consciousness happened twenty-five hundred years ago, but the mathematical appreciation of the insidiousness of the mind's re-arranging, about a little over a hundred years ago, was finally seen in all of its scary depth. And out of it came a development in mathematics colloquially known as Set Theory. You can get an introduction; Naive Set Theory, great writer, Paul Holmos; undergraduate text in mathematics. It's no longer even graduate stuff. And a classic that you might run across; Set Theory, published in 1936, translated into English. Or books like this: Groups Of Finite Order, Representation Theory Of Finite Groups, Infinite Sequences And Series, (just reading the titles you begin to get the alignment) The Classical Groups - Their Invariance And Representations, the great Herbert Weyl, who also wrote The Theory Of Groups And Quantum Mechanics. All of these written before most of us were born. And Weyl finally came out with The Continuum, A Critical Examination Of The Foundation Of Analysis.
And not only are there sets and groups that come together in a flow which mathematically can be characterized as a continuum, but within that there is such a thing as a theory of continuous groups. That the continuum has in itself an odd grouping power, so that finally when we come to some little book that engineers used to get in the fifties, Theory Of Sets, a little Dover paperback, and right in the beginning the author says very simply that sets began by the symbolic investigations of one man, a man name Georg Cantor, who died in 1918. Contributions To The Founding Of The Theory Of Transfinite Numbers. Cantorian Set Theory And Limitation Of Size.
All of this has to do with the true problem of history. That the historical challenge, the flow of the process of history, is a differential conscious time/space raised to an nth degree and has a pivot which is unimaginable. Cantor was the first person to bring the mathematics into play. He found that there was a way to characterize what was happening, what was available. And in his theory, his set theory, his original work of about 110 years ago, he found that, not only does integration work for things, but that also the same kind of mathematical rules and structures apply to all, he didn't call them sets, he called them originally aggregates. The German word 'menge' means aggregate. Every aggregate, which we could algebraically refer to as M, Every M has a definite power which we will call its cardinal number. We will call by the name power or cardinal number of any M, the general concept which rises by means of our active faculty of thought. That thought does this structurally all by itself and that that working is hidden, because usually thought has some kind of a content which shields, some kind of an appearance, some kind of realm or range of appearance; it's the table setting which our attention looks at and not the table, not the structure, especially not the deeper structure, that beneath the table setting and the table is the invisible proportional relational idea, transformed into a conscious projection by the mind. It's this power, it's this capacity that adds to abstraction, a further abstraction. That not only can you abstract, not only does the mind abstract, but when it becomes transformed, when it becomes differentially conscious, it can abstract from abstraction itself. And a double abstraction produces something which never occurred in nature anywhere at all.
Cantor, he was a Jewish mystic in many ways. He went through a bout of insanity, he searched to try and find some mathematical symbolic delegation that would express this and he called it Aleph/Zero. He used the Hebrew symbol for Aleph, for One, beginning. Aleph is not just one, it's like an occurrence which is a threshold coming out of who knows what and has just now come into play and will go further. So Aleph/Zero was not one as a numerator over a denominator of zero, but it was an expression of Aleph and Zero together with Zero as the power of Aleph. And so modern Set Theory was born out of this kind of a deep deep transcendental differential conscious realization.
It came into play in such a way that the twentieth century has been increasingly exfoliated, not just intellectually, but that the conscious appreciation of complexity and process has a hidden key in this very observation. And as we go through History, I'll try to bring out more and more how the mathematical structure of zeros and infinities and continuous transformations is a part of the problem of history. Indeed it is the crucial crisis in history. Because a form is going to come out of the historical process. Just like existence came out of the process of nature, just as the mind came out of the process of myth, just as the artistic person came out of the process of vision, the artist emerges from the process of the magic of vision, the cosmos emerges out of the process of history. So that the cosmos has something to do with historical saturation which is truly apocalyptic, which is truly millennial and has been seen now for several thousand years, a couple of thousand years, two thousand years, has been seen as a possibility, but no one knew how to deal with it at all because there was no range of experience that was applicable. And we now have fumbled in the crisis long enough. We're now the third or fourth generation without end of a situation that ends only with our demise if we do not come up, not with solutions, but with further possibilities. The way out is not any where but to increase the limits to everywhere.
So history has something to do with freedom. Not freedom of choice. With infinite freedom. Its objective form, its differential form is related to that of the spiritual person, related to that of the work of art. So that person and cosmos vibrate together. Art and the totality of reality have something to do with each other. And we saw, when we looked at art that the work of art is rather like a prism. Rather than being an object which is integrally there, it's an object which allows for further experience and investigation. Rather than integrating experience it differentiates it. The more that you return to a great work of art, the more you can return to it with more possibilities. And the cosmos is the nth degree of that kind of prismatic openness. So that the cosmos is actually not there in any kind of integral way, but is increasingly both there and not there as one develops the freedom to be in it. And so the cosmos is actually super mysterious and mystics of the last two thousand years everywhere on the planet have had intuitions that this is so. Whatever continent on the planet, the visionary mystics have seen in the last especially thousand years everywhere, this is what's true. But we don't even know how to relate to that. It's not true in some kind of a principal way which we could understand as truth. It's not there cinched in some kind of ideation focused on a symbol which we can objectify in our minds. The only mind that can deal with it is an open mind as in completely Aleph/Zero open. And so the articulation of that kind of openness is essential to factor in to all of the developments in vision, art, history and science because the whole differential cycle of vision, art, history and science depends for its health, not on coming together, but on letting increasing possibility occur. And so it isn't a question of someone being tolerant of someone else. It's of toleration learning and infinite degree of toleration. And this kind of freedom is seen as nothingness by the mind. The mind has long since condensed that into an ideological certainty that that is nothingness and therefore is not even worth thinking about because it's nothing. It's less than, it's worse than nothing, it's nothingness.
And so in a way the problem of death in the integral cycle is compounded by the problem of nothingness in the differential conscious cycle because differential consciousness, when it's still new, carries over the habits of integration. It can't help it. It's the only basis upon which it can work and uses the abstract principal of identification. And because it cannot identify any problem, it doesn't see any need to do anything at all. There's nothing wrong, so there's nothing and there's nothing to do. And when it first starts to develop, of course the focus is on the prismatic infinity of the spiritual person. And built into that realization is that not only is there nothing to do about nothing, but that there is no one here to do it. And so one gets into a quandary where the challenges of history turn out to be a supernatural nightmare. They're not at all what schools now tell us. The colloquial use of the term history among the young is that it's something over and dead. When you're out of date completely, you're history. It's a deep genius intuition that history has something to do with death on a super cosmic level.
So history has this peculiarity and Thucydides and Benjamin Franklin are two, a pair of individuals, separated by two thousand years, who focus together, because of the way that we're holding them. We're holding them with a hand that spans two thousand years, as a caliper to show that if you rotate this instrument any way that you want, not just to make circles like in an integral thing, but if you go in some kind of a contour like a French curve that an architect might have, you begin to get the possibilities. But this is a French curve that has an infinite pivot, it can go anywhere in five dimensional conscious space/time.
Benjamin Franklin is a key because he is the first individual in history to tap into a cosmic energy source that man, before that, always considered supernatural. He's the first man to tap into electricity, into lightning. He's the first man for whom lightning is not some natural event or some mythic event, but it's a source of scientific energy which a man can tap and store and use. Franklin as the discoverer of electricity also at the very same time, with the very same prismatic quality of genius, looks at himself as a university of universe energy source. That his personality obviously is a universal source and he wishes to tap it to find its universal energy. And so he says, in the autobiography, he says "it was about this time that I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection". He doesn't mean moral perfection by prayer or meditation or whatever, he means (cell phone rings) moral perfection in the way in which the machines will never understand, of a scientific pattern. And so he took thirteen qualities of character: temperance, order, resolution, frugality, sincerity, justice. . . . . . . .He took thirteen of these qualities of character and put each one onto a graph by day of the week, by time during the day, and he kept track of himself on all thirteen counts at every hour of every day for months on end, to see what kind of scientific pattern there was to him, so that he could learn to tap his cosmic energy source and use it.
If you think that the United States begins with George Washington, that's a myth. It begins with the personality, the differential conscious personality of Benjamin Franklin, because he was successful. He found the energy source. He found a way to tap the differentially conscious prismatic person and bring that into play and when it's brought into play, it masters history. Then man makes history. History, instead of being a nightmare acid rain of incomprehensibility become a malleable medium within which that kind of a man or woman can make cosmic forms which are objective. More about that next week.
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