History 2

Transcript (PDF)

This is History 2. So this is the second presentation in what, if you take it naively, is a row. But we have come to see that it's very difficult to keep an alignment where human beings are involved, especially a lot of conscious critically accurate human beings like ourselves. So that a row turns out to not be a ruler line in some direction like a geometrical marker of consecutive continuity. But when we have several presentations like this, the row tends to be a kind of a scattered, somewhat zig-zaggy motion in some general direction. But after awhile, if you were to accurately, with mathematical digital accuracy, plot it the presentations do not make an alignment at all; they don't make a row at all. In fact if they're untended, they tend to become random. I've been teaching long enough and have had thousands of students and watched the responses, and if untended, these kinds of presentations tend more and more to become random because of the lack of discipline for integration, and because of the lack of a transform which would allow consciousness to re-pattern the material. So it neither integrates nor does it re-pattern. This is not unusual because life in our times is very random. It seems like it has some kind of inherited consecutiveness, some kind of form to it, but the fact is that these forms are just appearance and the consecutiveness is highly problematic. And the actual detail examination would show that our lives are largely random. Not only are our lives random, but our personalities are random collections. And that what is even more disturbing, that the countries that we live in, the histories that we supposedly populate, the societies which we inhabit, are also random fictitious made up scenes, scenarios. And so we are actually scattered individuals, whose life motions are more like the random scurrying of water bugs on the surface of a very muddy pond. And this is the true condition of life as we find it. It's difficult to accept such a characterization and yet the most poignant of the dramatic presentations of life in the second half of the twentieth century all disclose this. Whether it's the dramas of Samuel Beckett, or it's the mathematical characterization of fractal geometries, it's apparent now that we live in a random nightmare, which only has the appearance of some kind of consecutiveness, some kind of pattern, because we have delegated trust and confidence to these appearances, to these forms.

One of the most poignant poems from the 1960's, a poem by Jack Kerouac about the golden mystery of the Universe. The first phrase is "It was Friday afternoon in the Universe". This is supposed to be Saturday morning. It's not even only Saturday morning on the other side of the planet, it's already a different day, different time. Is it Saturday morning on the Moon? Is it Saturday morning on Jupiter's moons? And we haven't even exceeded our own Solar System. What about other stars systems, what about other galactic qualities. And so the deep penetration of reality does not get to us because we life in a fuzz; we live in a layered haze of ignorance. And so, of course, when anyone tries to still themselves down, through meditation or prayer or discipline or application, it becomes more and more apparent that there is a chaos everywhere, a randomness everywhere. And that the truthful beginning for us is to recognize and accept that randomness.

Which is why, when this course began (for those who began with the beginning of the course), in January of 1998, a two year cycle, and we began January a year and a half ago; our first assignment, our first invitation to the dance, to the process of learning that this is, was to engage ourselves in a random walk. That from wherever you live, to simply step out your door and just walk anywhere that you want to, in any way that you want to, and come back home. And to record that, and that was the beginning of your realistic participation in this adventure in learning, this excursion in possibility. And then we learned that the second assignment was exactly like the first but it differed in only one particular. That again, you were invited to take another random walk, but this time changing the randomness by a factor of simply one detail. The detail was as primordial as I could think of, that out of the four classic basic elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water, choose one of those four and then keep that element in mind as you took the walk.

Now the changing of a random matrix by a single simple factor of one turns out to be one of the great mathematical analytical techniques that were introduced about three hundred years ago by a man named Gause, for which an electric energy gravitational quality is named. And the Gausian analytic was: by taking a single factor differential and comparing it to the previous matrix, you will be able to patiently unravel all of the details that are there, even if the details were infinite, even if there were no details whatsoever. And the two individuals who took this cue from Gause and from the Astronomy of Kepler and Galileo, and figured out that there was a way to come to understand exact precise truthfulness no matter how confused reality was. Those two individuals were Sir Isaac Newton and a man named Leibnitz. And the two of them almost at the same time, one in Germany, one in England, came to understand that there was a Universal language that could describe reality in its truthfulness to any amount of detail specified. And that language turned out to be the language of the mathematical discipline of calculus; the integral and differential realms of calculus. That one could come to understand this, and that that entire mathematical leap into a completely different world, happened about three hundred years ago.

That leap was a play on the old Gausian analytic of taking only one single factor as a difference, isolating that single factor, and then applying your analysis with that in mind. And calculus, by Newton or by Leibnitz, it turns out we used Leibnitz's notation, because the German notation of Leibnitz was better informed than that of Newton. Though the philosophical impact was that of Newton's work rather than Leibnitz. Leibnitz never published whole, his works. In fact three hundred years later, almost half of Leibnitz's writings have never been published. They're still on the shelves of a library in Germany where he was left, he was left behind. He was the teacher of the family that became the Hanoveran Kings of England, the House Of Hanover went to England and all the Georges became Kings. And Leibnitz, in terms of historical development should have been the wise man who went with that, and who met face to face, Newton, who was the wise man resident there at the time. And they never physically met. In fact they argued through middle men for many years, and the Leibnitz - Newton arguments were as famous as if Einstein was arguing with Niels Bohr in our time. The arguments were over a way to use a universal language, a characteristic universal language like calculus.

Newton, in his English occult prejudice assumed that there was an overall mysterious everything to the Universe; that God had a plan for the Universe and it was up to man to use this language to figure out what that plan was. So that the seventeenth century English mind, by the time of Newton, had refined the sense of a Divine plan, to the point to where, if one could only use the universal language of higher mathematics, one could figure out the Divine plan. Newton, when he finished his great work on the Principia Mathematica, 1687, it so shifted the foundations of logical thought, that in the English language tradition of the 1700's there was never again any confidence by anyone that they really knew the truth unless they could find the Divine plan. And Newton sought, for thirty years, to provide that by taking his magnificent analytical mathematical mind and trying to read the esoteric works of God. One book from the Old Testament and one book from the New Testament. He tried to read the esoteric Book Of Daniel and the esoteric book of the Apocalypse, the Revelation of St. John, and tried to put those two books together. And put his mathematical analytic into the combination of those two, and he tried for thirty years and never could do it.

Leibnitz, on the other hand, had not the confidence in some great master plan. He inherited a slightly different version. He inherited the German language version of searching for the subtle. And the German language version had for some time become disenchanted with looking for something very large, instead they were looking for something very very small, very subtle. And Leibnitz thought that he found a clue when, as a young man (he was about twenty years of age), he was in what is today Holland in the Netherlands, and he was visiting a very wise man named Spinoza who was an esoteric Jew who thought that there was a mysterious geometry in the universe, because God's mind was extremely subtle and that it was not evident so much in a plan, but as in the spaces between the lines of what might be a plan. It was in the mystery, not in the geometry. And just about the time that the young Leibnitz was talking with Newton, some Jesuits from China brought back with them a translation into Latin, of the I Ching. And Leibnitz was the first European to read and understand what the I Ching was all about. And saw that it was not about a Yin and a Yang, a positive and a negative so much, but that it was about the mysteries of one and zero brought into an interplay together. That in between one and zero was the entire template of the possibilities of reality, and that God worked with that. He didn't work with super large numbers. He didn't work with infinities, but he worked with the difference between zero (nothing) and one (unity).

And of course the analytic of Leibnitz, also taking a cue from Gause, that all you need is to understand how one interplays with zero, and then you have the key to it all. And so the esoteric German tradition was that the problem was understanding what is One. What is One? You don't have to worry about the other numbers, you don't have to worry about a Divine plan because all of it is right there in that if you could understand. And so his genius, Leibnitz's genius was to apply (for fifty years) his genius to try and understand what is the range in reality between one and zero? How does reality move back and forth.

And these two individuals had their melding together, not in either of them; Newton and Leibnitz never found an understanding. Newton hated Leibnitz because he was, not because he was competition on the mathematical level, but that he was a constant reminder that he might metaphysically be wrong. It's much deeper. And so he was fearful rather than jealous. And Leibnitz, because he was really a good soul, wanted to, expected that someone like Newton with that genius, could be his closest dearest friend in investigating these very mysteries.

The traditions of Leibnitz and Newton met in one individual who embodied both of them to perfection; that man was Benjamin Franklin. He came into a world which had already been fractured by Newton's great Principia Mathematica, he came into a world where the generations after Leibnitz's great little monograph on the esoteric reality of the Chinese I Ching; the natural theology of God's mystery in zero and one, Tao and Te. That the I Ching is not about Yin/Yang. It's not about positive and minus, it's not about yes and no. It's about nothing and oneness. Tao is 0. It's neither Yin nor Yang. Te is 1. But it's neither Yin nor Yang. Te can be Yin or Yang. So that the pair Yin/Yang is an appearance, it's a faux pair, it's a false pair. And most of the books on the I Ching that deal with Yin and Yang, and all of the permutations of what they might be are just so much metaphysical fluff.

It's like not counting right and therefore you always make mistakes in your calculation because if you start counting from 1, you're always going to be off. You're always going to be off to the extent of the mystery of how 1 gets to be itself, you have to start counting from 0. And a great lesson in reality, if you can meditate deep enough, pray continuous enough, discipline yourself in learning long enough, you come to appreciate that counting starts with 0. And we have seen, we've shown how really refined works in the late twentieth century, generally start their chapter numbering with 0. The great Dutch computer programmer, Dijkstra, began his book twenty-two years ago on programming, the discipline of how to write accurate programs, with a chapter 0. And most great mathematical treatises now, that seriously take the entire realm of the Real for their investigative subject matter, they begin with a chapter 0.

And so our education also began with a 0. It began with we ourselves, in complete randomness, just taking a walk, but that we were able to leave our home, where we live, and come back to it. And then again leave our home and go out with a difference of just one element, one constituent and come back. And then their was a third assignment, not to establish a sequence so much, though a sequence is established, it happens to be an artifice of the assignments. And that was to take a different element, just one element again, but a different element, and again take a random walk with that. So that instead of just having a sequence of three random walks different from each other by a single element, a different kind of a process was set up; a process known in Western Wisdom traditions as a Hermetic process. In the East Asia traditions, it's known as a Taoist process. And it doesn't go back to the beginnings of civilization, it doesn't go back to the One of sociological, of cultural, of tribal, or even the One of existential objective reality, it goes back to the Zero base of nature's mystery. And that no matter how confused we might be, even if we were crazy people in a crazy world, in a crazy universe, the method of the Hermetic or Taoist pattern will establish truthfulness to any degree of specificity because the method focuses, no matter what is happening, even if it's madness, even if it's appearance within appearance within appearance. Even if it's a complete lie, or as they used to say in the seventeenth century: suppose God were an evil genie and wanted to deceive us and so made us just the way that we are so that we would doubt everything except doubt itself. Even then one would be able to find the truth.

In a human sense it goes back deeper than our species. It goes back to the old Paleolithic forms of forerunners to us several million years ago. They lived by hunting and they, two or three millions years ago, those pre-homo sapien forms of ourselves. Homo erectus two million years ago was already a six foot wonderful hunter on the plains of the Serengeti in Africa. The skeletal remains of one of the Homo erectus fossils found, showed a seventeen year old who was almost six feet tall and who obviously was athletic and able to sustain himself hunting. His kind were able to do that. And the old ancient pre-Homo sapien hunter's way is to know the world where your animals live. And there were no maps available, there were no demographic satellite positioning ways of finding out so you had to learn the reality of the world, and the old hunting technique still holds. In fact was given, the most recently it was given was in the late 1930's.

One of the worlds great writers was still raised as a hunter. His name was William Faulkner. And Faulkner was still raised in the deep American South to go out and hunt in wildernesses. And he says, and he writes in a section called The Bear, one of the world's great literary productions. The Bear is also a part of a larger novel whose title is Go Down Moses. Go Down Moses is an old Black spiritual from the South. The lyrics are "go down Moses, tell old Pharaoh, let my people go". It is the hymn of freedom. That man becomes free when he can establish reality for himself even though he was crazy in a crazy world in a random universe, he still found truth and was freed from that. What's the phrase in St. John "Ye shall know the truth and the truth makes you free". Exact unrelentingly precise truth instantly, whenever, wherever, for whatever, makes man free. Not just free to have a choice and more than being free in his life, that person is free forever, in whatever Cosmos comes to stage front. It's an eternal freedom. And that's why the wisdom traditions, East and West, talk about learning on a deep level is to discover your threshold to enter into eternity. It's not about getting a job, not about getting grades, passing tests, having a successful life even. All of those are wonderful and can be done. But underneath it all, underneath all the dozens and dozens of layers of what can be achieved is an open foundation that there is an eternal freedom available for us, for our kind. We can do that. And that's what this kind of learning is all about

But to penetrate through the moving veils of obscurity and appearance and false possibility, takes a patience like an old hunter. As Faulkner wrote in The Bear. The youngster learned from Sam Fathers, the old half Indian half Black guide who taught him how to move in the big woods without knowing where you are because wherever you are you start from there and you circle off to the right and come back. And then you circle off to the left and come back and you keep enlarging this pair of circles and this pair of circles as they enlarge, not only establish a There based on exactly where you are, on your presence. Your presence which is finer than a point, as you establish it you also become acquainted with the entirety of the terrain. Not in terms of a map grid but in terms of relationality to that presence focus. And as you do this the land itself gains a spiritual topography. Its contours of actuality are touched on the deepest level of reality. Not on the level of surface land, not even on the level of the rocks of a planet, but on the deep vibrations of resonance of presence that are there in the cosmos, whether there's a planet at that time space or not. Even in a perfect vacuum void, one would find one's way. And by having that relationality, every living life form in that resonance is like a squiggle part of those wave forms and so they form a realistic relationship to you who are participating with that presence, that presence focus.

And having extended out in this double butterfly effect, one establishes an accurate symbolic configuration, even if there were a fractal infinity of wrong possibilities. In chaos theory it's known as the double attractor and you get the butterfly effect. And what you get is that infinity sign, that infinity sign which is the old Hermetic sign in the Western esoteric tradition of the way in which truth is established. Even if everything is crazy, you the world and the Gods. It doesn't make any difference. This method establishes the true.

For someone like Leibnitz, he saw that that mysterious presence focus was the Tao in China. Not the Yang and not the Yin, but the Tao. And saw that in the I Ching, the Tao showed that Te, the force the umph of 1 comes out of 0 whole. It doesn't get born in a fractioned way but it comes, it emerges whole. And while there are analytical fractions between 1 and 0 in the mind, the mind's objectivity is capable of a fractioned spectrum of possibility for sure, in fact it loves that. It gets bored with things that emerge whole. Whereas in existence, the emergence of wholes is exactly, paradoxically what reality likes. It likes for something to come out of 0 into oneness. From out of Tao into Te. And so Lao Tsu's great commentary on the I Ching, written about five hundred years after the I Ching was re-configured at the beginning of the Cho Dynasty. The Cho Dynasty re-configuration of the I Ching is about the time of Moses. About twelve, eleven hundred BC And about five, six hundred years later comes Lao Tsu writing, not a commentary but a Tao angle of Vision into the presence focus, which is the fulcrum of the I Ching. The fulcrum not between Yin and Yang but the way in which Tao and Te share what we today in astronomy would call a barycenter.

A barycenter is the focus of all the gravitational forces. The presence focus of all the gravitational bodies in their mutual patterned revolving. So that it turns out not only is the Earth not the center of the star system, but the Sun is not the center either. The center is a barycenter, it is very close to the sun, but all the other planets, moons and asteroids and comets all have their realistic effect and move the center of the star system out of the sun into space, very near by it, but never the less it's that barycenter which is the pivot, the reality of the pivot of the whole star system. And if you know that then you can compute, then you can send a rocket ship from the earth to the moon and it will get to the moon. Whereas if your calculations are off by thinking that the star system is centered in the Sun, your calculations will be off just enough, it will make the difference of about three or four hundred feet and you will always crash your spaceship into the moon. You will never be able to land there, you'll always crash into it because your calculations will be off several hundred feet. And so the Apollo mathematicians, thirty years ago, had to understand realistically what they were measuring from. They were measuring from the barycenter of the star system. And so the Earth's orbit and the Moon's orbit and its motions become realistic so that they were able to set the Columbia, the Eagle and all of the other Lunar Modules as gently as I set this book down here, because it was accurate.

The same with our personalities, with our spiritual selves. We are anxious, we are crazy, we are angry because it's not right. No only is it not right or they're not right or we're not right, nothing is right. And the source of the anxiety is not in them or in us or in a relationality between them and us, it's in a very involved pattern of two mysterious paired qualities, Tao and Te, 0 and 1 and the way in which they have in between them, in the mind, in a symbolic way, an infinite fractioned fractal possibility range.

Now for Leibnitz and Newton, Newton trying to go for the big One, and Leibnitz going for the very subtle Zero, they never really got together. The correspondence between Leibnitz and Newton is collected and it is very famous. The go-between, a man named Clark. His letters, he's a mouthpiece for both of them. But the person who brought those two perspectives together, in a living genius was Benjamin Franklin. And there is a wonderful study, a great historians of science, I.B. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, published in Philadelphia, the American philosophical Society. There isn't a book on Franklin and Leibnitz written yet, but if you look at a volume thick like this, also published by the American Philosophic Society: this is Benjamin Franklin's printing. This is simply a catalogue of all the things he printed.

Before Franklin was anything else, he was a printer. He was a printer in a time where you set type by hand. I'm old enough to have learned to set type by hand, where you would hold a little metal cup, a bracket, and you would have the letters in front of you. And you would have to select the letters individually one at a time, to set the type. And the E's were the largest box of letters but it wasn't the largest box of type. The largest box of type in a type font for setting are the blanks. The blanks that go in between each word. And so you're always using more blanks than any letter including E. So that someone who was raised setting type, he knew that Tao is a constituent part of everything you wish to say. Actually. Type font physically. And so as a young man, how old was he? When he was independent he was seventeen, seventeen years old. He set all these books by hand, letter by letter and in between every word he put a blank piece of lead. So that he fingered Tao millions of times in his life for actuality. And so he was practical about that kind of thing. He wasn't metaphysical about it, he was practical. He was a practical mystic, which are the most devastating kinds of mystics, like Ghandi. Practical mystics blow you out. Because the only response is to learn from them, even if you argue against them, you get caught in a ping pong game where they keep serving aces all the time. Because as you gain in critical acumen to destroy their arguments and their positions, you learn more and more that they don't have a position which is theirs that you can argue against. That they're always presenced precisely and accurately in the real.

So when Ghandi learned his great Satya Graha. His political technique of warfare without violence. It's called Satya Graha. Sat comes from the ancient Indian root from which we get Upanishads, Sat, Sad, it means to, in the form Sad like in Upanishad, it means to sit, to position yourself down there. Sat means to come to truthful focus. To sit truthfully, to sit in truth, to place yourself into the presence focus and not leave. So that the Yoga for doing that is extraordinary. His secretary Morev De Cy called it Ani Sata Yoga, it's actually a form of Karma Yoga. Actually it's a form of A-karma Yoga. Karma means action, A-karma would mean non action. Non action yoga. That you enter into presence focus and you don't leave, you don't shift it, you don't modify it. And as long as you maintain that, no matter what happens, its happening will gain a pattern of organized infinity around your presence point. So that Ghandi would say it only takes one Satya Grahi to organize the entire world into truth. That's all it takes, just one. It never took muscles, it never took swords that you could swirl around, it never took armies of thousand, it just took one spirit who could presence and not move. That still point was held by Benjamin Franklin for about nearly seventy years. And because of it something new was born, something called a revolution in history. One form of it was the American Revolution, another form was the French Revolution and a deeper form of that, in literary history it's called the Romantic Revolution. That is that there was born the confidence that some One can make a difference in the Cosmos. The Romantic Hero and be man or woman but it's usually one. A person who presences the real can challenge the entirety of time/space so that it becomes organized, especially if its fighting with you. The harder it fights the more quickly it becomes organized. Let's take a break and we'll come back.


HISTORY 2
SECOND HALF


When we began, our assignments were to take walks from wherever we lived and these actually turned out to be random walks which there's a whole literature on in mathematics and biological applications and it's rather very sophisticated. And we've had many kinds of projects and assignments. For instance the follow up to the three walks in nature, in ritual it was making a pair of masks. One was a mask of food and the other was a mask of feeling. Food being something which comes from without and goes in, feeling something from within that goes out. And that these two masks (we talked about at the time, you may not remember but if you go back to the tapes it will be there), that the mask of food; of the external becoming internal and the mask of feeling; something internal going out, that when those two masks are brought together, the closer that they are brought together the more there is a vibrational focus between them and that that point that is established between those two masks is the first location (in geometry it's called a locus or a loci, a point of location), it's the first point on the true face of ourselves. Whatever the contour of that true face is, that point is real and you can generate out of that point your true face. That masks are very sophisticated, but pairs of masks are differentially consciously sophisticated. And while the mask is a ritual implement, the pairs of masks is a learning excursion angle of vision.

Now in History what we're to do is to write our own history of the last two years. The reason why it's the last two years is that the History section is the seventh out of the eight sections of our education. So that if you do the history of the last two years (assuming that you've been in this situation), your history will be able to be covered all the way back leaving just a one three month segment before you came into the course. And the whole purpose of this is to disclose a very particular kind of a pattern; one that's not only integral, one that not only comes into form but one which is also differential. Which means that the form plays itself out in possibilities of resonance. Not just resonance but possibilities of resonance, which play themselves out into the context of formlessness. So that this assignment, do your own history, and no one's ever done it. I'm getting tired of writing F's. So I made a model and there's a ten page model which you can look at. If you follow that model you're guaranteed a D. Better than failing.

We also have three sets of pairs of texts. We're not using books as books, we're doing an end run around the form 'book'. But if we try to use non-book as a form we will end up immediately in skepticism and evolve into nihilism. You cannot use non-form as a form. It turns out to be a self defeating paradox because all that it produces is disjunctiveness. So we use pairs, pairs of books. And the pairs are books that would not be related to each other except in the context which we're making by use them. And the first pair is Franklin's Autobiography and Thucydides' History Of The Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides is an example of the way in which the crisis of consciousness in Classical Athens disclosed itself to the breaking point. When Thucydides died, probably of a violent non-self inflicted causes in 404, he was one of the most conspicuous casualties of an emerging tyranny, the Tyranny of the Thirty, who just four years later were the ones who were responsible for killing Socrates, for the very same reason. Because Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War in this History is raising issues that they didn't want talked about. The man who lived just a generation before Thucydides, Herodotus, also wrote histories. He wrote a book called The Histories and is usually called the father of History. But Herodotus' histories are different. He, at the beginning, Herodotus says "in this book, the results of my inquiries into history, I hope to do two things: to preserve the memory of the past by putting it on record; the astonishing achievements of both our own and the Asiatic peoples, namely the Persians, and secondly, more particularly, to show how the two races came into conflict" (how the Persians and Greeks came into conflict). The fine print way to read this is that this is an inquiry into history, it isn't quite history yet. It's a record, it's a recording, but it is the use of memory as if memory were simply a recording. And out of this comes a classic misconception. The Greeks misconceived it and they passed it on to the Romans who misconceived it and they passed it on to the Christian Church, they misconceived it. It was swallowed whole by the Muslims, they misconceived it. The middle ages are just filled with shards of this misconception and it wasn't until the Renaissance that anyone noticed that all of this is bogus. That there is something, there is an energy that really happens which is history. We would today, using kind of physics tainted language, we would say that physics tells us that transforms, when they operate, make any media that they operate in capable of dissolving forms and capable of delivering new forms out of that solution. So that a transform changes a medium from just being a context into having a double action. It dissolves old forms and is the saturated field out of which new form come.

So that History is a super-saturated conscious medium of transformation. And that apparently beings like ourselves are born into, always are in and die in and are reborn in this kind of mysterious acid that once it's introduced onto a planet, in a star system, it becomes like a dimension of the real. And that before there is a history that dimension is not there. It's like, if you have a primordial comet that has no life forms on it whatsoever, it's subject to the dimensions of time/space. But if you have a planet that generates life forms that are capable of consciousness, then those life forms and that whole planet exists not just in time/space anymore but in conscious/time/space. And that evidently, what history is, as a transformational fluidity, is a step, a stage beyond conscious/time/space. And that as far as we know on this planet, no one knows how to deal with it. No one has ever successfully dealt with it. It isn't that just no students in this learning cycle, for thirty five years, have ever been able to write a history, it's that no one in any culture has ever been able to write a truthful history. There are great histories. They're all examples of magnificent failures. And Thucydides is distinct from Herodotus. He's a magnificent failure, his history is broken off mid-sentence when he gets to the eighth book, when he gets very close to home. And it's not the Herodotus chronological placed stories, even in Herodotus the chronology is not based upon a conscious/time/space differential wave form, it turns out more and more it's based on geography. He gets distracted associatively by geography. He mentions something about Egypt, then he goes into Egyptians. He mentions something about the Syrians, he goes into that. He mentions something about the Greeks, goes into that, Italy, goes into that. It's like he gets distracted by geo-politics, which happens a lot in pseudo histories.

Whereas Thucydides is relentless, absolutely relentless. Herodotus says he wants to write this down so people will preserve it in memory, but memory is not a passive record of what's put there as if it were stone. It turns out that memory is the transform in the super saturated acid fluidity of history. And as powerful as imagination is in Myth, memory is even more powerful in History. So to consider that memory is a static repository like Herodotus has, is a gross misunderstanding, it's a fatal flaw. And the Classical Greeks were broken into little bits because they thought like Herodotus. And those few who struggled with the issue that Thucydides brings up have become some of the mainstays of the Western Tradition. Contemporaries of Thucydides are Socrates, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, you get it.

So the first pair of texts that we're going to use, that we're using now, Franklin's Autobiography and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. The next pair takes a permutation of this pair. The Greek Thucydides line had a Roman resonance to it. There were some Romans who got it that what Thucydides was getting at was something that really effected them. And so the great historian in Rome, Thucydidean style, is Tacitus. And like Thucydides, Tacitus was one of the top experienced men in that world; Thucydides was a general for the Athenians, Tacitus was one of the two counsels for the Roman Empire in a very formative time. His father-in-law, Agricula was the man who ran the British Island first, after Julius Caesar's conquest. So Tacitus was very high up and the Annals of Imperial Rome is all about the acid decay of the Roman Empire from the inside out during the first century. Of how, no matter what anyone did, it always turned out worse and that what followed it was even worse and that this happened on every level all the time. What is going on, is what Tacitus asked. Why is this. And he tries to put a form on it and as he does he realizes that the annals structure is the only key that he has. Annals are like a chronology, like trying to make a time sequence, and when you make a time sequence, you can see that the actuality (he shows it in his history), the actuality keeps overflowing the order of the time sequence, so that obviously time is not the string upon which all the beads are going. What is it then? It turns out to be something which Tacitus calls the force of History, which is what Thucydides called it, the force of History.

That there's something there. There's a dynamic umph invisible to us and doesn't even enter into nature at all, doesn't happen in nature at all. Every cycle in nature does not disclose this. It is a phantom menace that only comes into play when consciousness achieves its form as a spiritual person. Then the dynamic of History comes into play hauntingly as if to say, "oh so now you understand do you, completely? How's this?! There's something demonic about history. It's like a super acid rain meant to dissolve spiritual persons exactly where their consciousness plays. And as you can see it is a very formidable problem then. It means the stronger you get as a spiritual person, the more you're exposed to this demonic acid rain. And more are you called upon to find some way to deal with this challenge. And what's terrible about it, insidious (as both Thucydides and Tacitus show), what is insidious about it is that the more developed a person becomes, the worse the conditions are that confront them. It goes from worse to horrible to nightmare. Which seems in terms of natural justice to be a bastardization. How can the better you become at being yourself, invite more stuff from this kind of dimension? How can that be? There's something crazy in this.

But the key to it that both Thucydides and Tacitus is that there's something in understanding that the person is not an integral form. If you keep depending upon the person being an integral form, the integral person is exactly what's dissolved by History. What History doesn't dissolve is a differential person, a person whose focus is the jewel like facets of differential infinitude. A person who is a prism of eternity is exempt from the dissolution of History.

And so in the rediscover of Thucydides and Tacitus, in the rediscovery of what all this was about, it produced the Renaissance in Northern Italy, especially in Florence. And places like Venice too, and Rome too, but especially in Florence. But the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt is someone discovering that this is what they rediscovered then.

Now Burckhardt, not just some kind of professor, Burckhardt was at the same time as Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. They're very similar, Burckhardt and Nietzsche are very similar. They discover that the classic forms of integral personality always invite the tragedy of dissolution and do so the more successful they are. So that the Nietzschean person has to be a completely different type of person from the classical integral person. So Nietzsche's psychology laughs, laughs at, as if it were a joke (it's a terrible joke), at the integral personality. You want to find yourself by integrating? How many millions of support groups do you think there are on this planet who try to help people integrate themselves? It's like lining up ten pins for the master bowler, History, to knock over. It's just a growing sucker list. And you pay money? You should sue.

What Nietzsche says and Burckhardt in his way says is that there is a way of making a prismatic artistic person who thrives on challenge and indefinite possibility. Who when given hard times says, this is an opportunity. When given a situation that would crush someone with the old type of personality, the new type of person exalts in this. But in order to be capable of this one has to go over and above; one has to go beyond the limitations of the integral form. The Ubermensch, the superman, the over-man, is that human being who goes beyond his limitations; goes beyond his defining identifiable self. But Burckhardt says yes that's right, but going beyond does not just involve a Zarathustrian laughing challenge to the entire order, it can be on a very subtle kind of a quality. And so Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is about the artist. Because the artist goes beyond the identifiable person by showing that the artist plays with Vision; plays in a Visionary process, a visionary field, and that when History occurs the artist knows that there is some art form which can deal with History. Just as works of art deal with the differential process of Vision; works of art are very successful. The dissolution qualities that are there in Vision also, works of art hold up. Works of art not only hold up but they thrive with Visionary challenges. So Burckhardt says in the Renaissance, they made the connection that if it's the work of art that survives the Visionary pressures, it must be that it is the artist herself, the artist himself, who can survive the pressures of History. So that there must be some way in which there is an artist of life, of one's own life. Your life, not just as an integral form, but your life also as a differential formlessness which carries a portable transform wherever she or he may go, in whatever condition. And that this was the search they had in the Renaissance.

And that the key to it for them, in the Renaissance, the key was that such an artistic person with such a transform has another kind of form, has another form that's related to them, and that is the form of the Cosmos itself. So that that viable spiritual person who can swim in the acid oceans of History is the kind of a person who is related to the Cosmos. That woman as a microcosm, that man as a microcosm is viable in History. And so one of the great documents in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, one of the great documents is a writer who is always compared to Thucydides, his name is Machiavelli. And everyone always remembers The Prince because The Prince is Machiavelli's Renaissance formulation of a being who becomes a conscious relationality with the Cosmos. And he takes as his guide initially, that first being who matched himself to the Cosmos in terms of being The Prince of History, and that First Prince of History, at the time, self declared, was Augustus Caesar. He said, were my uncle Julius Caesar failed I succeeded. I established the Roman Empire, its official name is the Augustan Principate.
But Machiavelli, like Thucydides is much deeper and much wiser than Augustus Caesar was. He saw that this is only a temporary interim phony solution. That there is something that's wrong about this because the Augustan Principate is based on starting to count from one, not from counting from zero. And that the true spiritual person is someone who is founded on the presence, the focus of their zeroness. And Augustus Caesar never understood that. The Roman Empire never understood that and so Machiavelli's The Prince is a fierce satire about that kind of historical understanding. It's not a manual of what to do; it's a very subtle manual of what to look out for in yourself and don't get trapped into believing it. And Machiavelli's other works, like his History of Florence, trying to do what Thucydides and Tacitus did in their time; trying to figure out how did we get to where we are and where is it that we are. And it cannot be determined by just saying well what happened in some kind of linear sequence, in some kind of chronology. Yes you can begin there, but you begin there, not to establish the evidence, as a truth of a case, but by establishing the evidence so that it becomes more and more transparent to showing how it lies. The alignment of evidence, while legally the basis of winning a case, that whole process is questionable. That whole process is in fact not law so much but politics.

That the misunderstanding of History produces an integral form in the mind called political theory. And even when it's joined with economics, the political economic theory is a creation of the integral cycle, it's an object in the mind and it holds up never to Vision and is completely useless in dealing with History in any kind of realistic way. When one introduces that kind of a political theory, it's at home only in the integral mode. It's at home essentially in the mind. And so it doesn't play itself out in History actuality. Historical actuality, being a differential process, a differential energy, it doesn't recognize it at all. So someone who is using that, unknowingly slips back into the complement of History. And what is the integral complement to differential History is Myth. And so one slides into the Myth of the State without even knowing that you did it, because your ideas keep telling you that you're dealing with History powerfully because you have this political ideology.

So about the time that Nietzsche and Burckhardt's work was coming to a real fruition, you had writers like the genius of an Ernst Cassirer, who spent decades of going into symbolic forms, finally getting it, and wrote a devastatingly penetrating book called The Myth of the State; absolutely devastating. And out of that came a couple of Historians trying to find a way to deal with the challenge of History without making Historical forms that imitated political ideology mythological wraps. And the two most distinguished students of Ernst Cassirer's insight were Susanne Langer and Hannah Arendt. And Hanna Arendt's The Human Condition is what we're going to use to pair with Tacitus. So while we move from Thucydides to Tacitus, on the other hand we move from Benjamin Franklin to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. And as we move from Thucydides to Tacitus to Burckhardt's Renaissance, we move from Hannah Arendt to Hegel; Hegel's The Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.

Because Hegel puts, not his finger on where the problem is, but be holds in the space of open hands a sense of the blind trying to learn by touch how to read a language that never was in print. And was getting very close to being able to do it when he died. He died of an illness. So that Hegel's ideas of History were so sophisticated that they went through a transform and went beyond being ideas of History into being personal artistic essays into playing with History as History. And says in one of his pages that there seems to be an invisible form, perhaps it's god himself who's striding through the reality of the conscious universe and in the wake of that rush we are trying to join that flow. And had Hegel had known about surfing a big pipeline wave he probably would have had exactly the right metaphor for himself. Except that if you use metaphors you slip back into myth without even knowing it. So that it is a treacherous thing, dealing with consciousness on the level of History is very very treacherous; very very very difficult.

So that the culmination of these three sets of books: Thucydides and Franklin, Tacitus and Arendt, Hegel and Burckhardt, the culmination is the seventh book which we will use for the interval. And the seventh book we're going to use this time is a classic from the early Mahayana literature from India. It's called the Ratna Guna Paramita Sutra. It's the Sutra, Sutra means a thread, but it doesn't mean a physiological thread. When the monks misinterpret it they hold a gold thread when they chant together. Buddhist monks do that traditionally. The Sutra thread is not a physiological thing. It's a relationality that doesn't align itself in lines, it's a relationality that allows for randomness to come into eternity, which is quite a different logic. Paramita means perfection. Para is beyond, mita is like measure. That perfection is not a thing, it's a quality of being beyond measure; no one can measure you. I wrote a poem in Canada once, the title was Walt Whitman was never measured. Ask his barber, there was no end to Whitman.

The Ratna Guna is from ancient Indian, it means the night queen. The night queen's beyond measure thread. And so the Ratna Guna Paramita Sutra in its English title is Accumulation of Precious Qualities and there was a rare translation by Edward Consi done in 1962 and I'll make a reprint for you, because I think it's always been unavailable.

In that vehicle is the training manual for the Bodhi Satva, the Enlightenment Being. And the Enlightenment Being, the Sutra says, courses without being anywhere at all. And occurs not in any kind of a sequence of causality, but occurs freshly from zero at each instant that achieves oneness. So that the Bodhi Satva in this early form is an Enlightenment Being meaning that they occur because they walk on zero and one all the time and that every other step just simply doesn't ever exist, and every other step from that just simply exists.

So our excursion into History is not at all what you would think if you read a catalogue description in any university in the world. Yet it's exactly the realistic hard nosed tough logic underpinning of what History has been about for at least twenty-five hundred years.

When the New World was founded, founded about three hundred years ago, not by people from Europe coming here but by someone who was from here coming into themselves. Then you had a phenomenon, a differential conscious phenomenon which Socrates said was the examined life. So here's a book published by Princeton called the Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James. The Examined Self, the sense that as you examine yourself, as you differentially learn new possibilities and relationalities about yourself, then yourself changes to that extent. The more that you do this, like a jeweler cutting new facets, the more of a gem you are. And that there's no upper limit on how many facets of gemness you can have. That the artistic person is of infinite capacity to grow to change to learn and the continuance of that capacity to operate is what is the transform. There's no ideology that is the transform, there's no metaphysics that is the transform, there's no magic or mathematical formula that is the transform. Though one can generate fracticality out of even chaos with an algorithmic equation, the deep zero truth of that, the perfection of truth of that is that it is the maker of all of these algorithms that is the real operator. And their continuance in freedom is the transform.

So as Hegel comes to the conclusion, several time he broaches it, he says we live in a very strange universe where the more free we are the more freedom exists. It's a double entendre. It means the more that we practice freedom, the more freedom there is and the more freedom there is, the more our practice of freedom itself is free. So that there's a relationship between the artistic individual, not an individual as an identification but the individual as a jewel like prism of possibility that we become more and more related to a cosmos which also at the same time becomes more jewel like. So that the phrase in the Ratna Guna is that by Bodhi Satvas becoming jewels the cosmos itself becomes more jewel like. And so the term for it nineteen hundred years ago was that it is a mysterious jewel matrix. It's a matrix that hold the crown jewels of reality, us in our best form. More next week.

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