History 3
Presented on: Saturday, July 17, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History Three. We try to take phases of our investigation and allow them to build up a sequence. So like we're now in a phase that's called History; it's a designated name. And there'll be twelve lectures. And so History One, Two, Three, next week four, develop into a sequence. But it's a very peculiar sequence in that the chronological order has a double property: one, it stays put so that in retrospect later on you can do all kinds of geometrical relationalities. For instance History is the third phase this year and our education has two years and this is the second year which means that a year ago we were in the third of four phases and the third of four phases a year ago was Myth. So that there is in fact a lecture whose title geometrically bears the designation Myth Three. So that in a geometrical structuring, one would be able to build a relationality between Myth Three and History Three; between that lecture and this lecture. And in similar fashion Myth One has some kind of a relationship to History One. So the fixed order, the fixed designation helps us to build a geometry.
But if we were to remain only in geometry, it's actually a very low level of civilization. So that the other capacity is for there to be a transform (or many transforms) which can be applied to these sequences and can transform these sequences out of their sequentiality into all kind of new possibilities. We can take the sophisticated permutations of Set Theory and look at History as a set and Myth as a set and make a very very interesting discoveries that mere geometricity would never disclose. But in all of this, and so far this is not new, it's been a hundred some years since men and women like ourselves have understood this possibility about learning. And when it was first mooted and occurred in the nineteenth century it was highly suspect, and in the beginnings of the twentieth century it was very esoteric, and for awhile from the 1920's to the 1950's it was all the rage, and in the 1960's it was simply set aside for other concerns and from the seventies on to the nineties it's been absolutely left fallow. And we've regressed and no longer understand why it would be important to read someone like Friedrich Nietzsche instead of listening to the latest albums.
But if you take Myth and History, as we could do today, you would see that they do not form a parallel. They don't run in the same direction. They run, in fact, in different directions. They have different kinds of currents and they are naturally not miscible. Miscible is a term, it means that they don't mix. It's not only like oil and water that don't mix, but different kinds of water don't mix. In South America where the Rio Negro River runs into the Amazon (the Rio Negro is named because of its dark waters), it flows for many many dozens of miles inside of the Amazon and they never mix because of the different kinds of sedimentation.
But there are very peculiar and subtle problems in the non-miscibility of Myth and History. And one of the subtlest of all problems is that elucidated by the first Historian Thucydides, whose book on the Peloponnesian War we're using now. He noticed that Myth and History are not miscible; that they can flow concurrently together and never really mix and that human beings trying to live in such a bifurcated current have a difficult time of it, especially if their feelings, their feeling toned experience of themselves and of each other and of their culture (a word for that is sentience); if one's feeling toned sentience in your culture, in your experience is comfortable with Myth, it's not going to be comfortable with History. Thucydides discovered this and it was a problem for the Classical Greeks, the Greeks of Pericles' time. It was the first time that History was powerful enough to be noticeable as not being miscible with Myth. But there was an insidious counter part to this, a corollary which was astounding, and that is for men and women who get used to, not computing by Myth but computing by History, the whole Mythic horizon of human experience is no longer miscible. Then you don't talk about the great Myths by which our truths live, but you talk about how cultures deceive themselves by sociological lies ("myths are lies", "those are myths").
So you have concurrently, in the Athens of Thucydides, one of the first instances in human experience where two great non-miscible currents, two great processes by which human beings can navigate their lives, flowed concurrently and did not blend. The Greek experience, the Classical Greek experience of this, though it was devastating to those people, didn't have much an effect. The effect was not very wide spread. Thucydides says the Peloponnesian War is the greatest war of all time, and when you look on a modern map of the globe, your thumb would more than cover the whole area that it involved. But the difficulty was that it was never resolved. Not only that there is a problem that was never resolved, but the entire non-miscible horizons of Myth and History were brought into play in a non-miscible concurrent polarity and they were swallowed whole by the Roman Empire, and now you've got something that takes the whole hand to cover the globe. And the Rome of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar is like holding a megaphone up to the problem that Thucydides points a finger at.
So the next book we're going to look at, and we're not reading this like academics, we're using this as nourishment, as food for thought. And we're going to just read it for four weeks. So next week is the last time we work with Thucydides. And we're going to follow it up by a Roman Historian named Tacitus. And Tacitus is the Roman Thucydides. Like Thucydides, Tacitus as a man was used to the highest echelons of power. Thucydides was a general for the Athenian military, very cultivated aristocrat. Tacitus was at one time not only a general, he was one of the two counsels who ran the Roman Empire. Every year they have a pair of counsels and he was one of those. He married the daughter of the man who was the governor of the province of Britain. So both Thucydides and Tacitus were at the highest levels of power. Both of them said from this vantage point, there is something crazy about man in the version in which we find him in our lifetimes. Only for Tacitus, he knew about Thucydides so he had a depth to his concern. He knew what Thucydides already had pointed out and knew, and then he knew his own stuff on top and you get a layering effect. And where Thucydides said one of the reasons of writing this History is not to make a chronology so that people will just remember the terrible odd amazing things that have happened, but having lived through this and having written a great deal of this History, I now understand something about human nature, that human nature given what it really is, all of these events will happen again. But they will happen again with like a deeper rut, a deeper scoring, reinforcing what was a fracture in Thucydides' time, into something that became a scar in Tacitus' time. And Tacitus says this. He says this is very serious because he concurred with Thucydides that all of this, the whole nightmare, is going to happen again and again and again, and there doesn't seem to be anything that man can do about this because it happens with increasing frequency and deeper scoring.
These problems were not talked about for about a thousand years. Men and women in the Indo-European theater entered what used to be called the Dark Ages; it was just a barbaric feast, no one cared, and there really wasn't much History. And Myth had become so politicized that people were comfortable with just living ideological fodder lives. But as soon as men and women began to be conscious enough to bring History into play again, all of these problems came back with a vengeance and so the third book that we're going to take is the great History of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt. And Burckhardt's book on the Renaissance notices, not only do the classical Greeks go through this stuff and the Augustan Romans but the Renaissance also went through all this stuff again and added something to it. Added a quickening of pace, added a depth so that instead of just some kind of a bruise, some kind of fracture, which had become a scar, now you had a festering open wound. And the problem that Burckhardt saw is that human beings, being what they are, like Thucydides said, like Tacitus reinforced, Burckhardt was fearful for the future. What kind of nightmare comes next because you go from a fracture to a scar to an open wound to some kind of catastrophic gash.
And that all of this takes place in this very peculiar horizon, this process energy which we call History and very few people know what it is, understand what it is. Except that it has something to do with us. That if you look at the Moon for four billion years, nothing Historical happens until thirty years ago, a couple of guys shuffle out and the first foot prints start to include the Moon into the Historical process indelibly. It's never going to go away. It adds an interplanetary complication that is there, and in fact has been festering for thirty years, and no one (except the science fiction writers and readers) have been trying to factor this in; what does this mean now? Not only does this species go off the planet but the problems of History, not being miscible with Myth, now become something, who knows where it can go. And if Voyager 2 is a part of that Historical extending process, then the whole star system is already involved in History. Voyager 2 is already beyond the current orbit of Pluto.
And so we're having a difficult time with History. Because the actual fact is that the Historical dimension now is a whole star system wide and we're trying to deal with it on national basis. You can see that it's not even adequate for the planet, much less the truth. The Truth, who knows. Not so much the truth, but the scale of actual possibility now is star system wide.
But if we were just taking that kind of a sequence, we would have a beautiful graduate course on History, and that's not what we're doing. Because we're cutting Thucydides by another book, a totally different book. This one is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Not the History of an event, of times, of a city state, of a nation but the History of a man, the History of an individual. And one of the problems that Thucydides brings up is the problem of individuals. You find in classical libraries dozens and dozens of studies, you must understand that this material has been talked about for twenty-four hundred years. This one is recent, Individuals In Thucydides, published in 1968. (Published about the time that Robert F. Kennedy was killed, it came out. I remember buying it a couple weeks after that.) That these kinds of problems that Thucydides and Tacitus and Burckhardt raise are also poignantly focused by human beings like Benjamin Franklin.
And so we're taking Franklin and Thucydides as a pair, not as a parallel pair, but as a generating kind of pairedness. Not as a polarity but as a pair which acts like a tuning fork, that when this pair is struck together in our conscious experience, a very distinct tone is heard which no one would have ever heard before; they were never paired before. Well not never. The first person to pair these two together was Thomas Jefferson. He's the first one to understand that the good Dr. Franklin, who was a mentor for him in many ways, and Thucydides, who elucidated the problems of government and History, that somehow the decisions of great human beings, the tenacity of their ability to make a conscious Symbol transform for events, so that History instead of being in a rut, changes. That it isn't the same old thing deeper, but it becomes something different. And that indeed there's a History of this kind of thing and none of the events in that History were very successful beyond revolts like Spartacus against the Roman Empire (budding empire). Whereas people like Jefferson and Franklin managed to make a great experiment in algorithmically changing the recycling recurrent nightmare of History into a new possibility. Jefferson in one of his letters said there have always been free men and women. And there have always been sympathetic groups of free men and women. What we want to do is free men and women on the scale of millions and just let them go and see what they will do. That was the great experiment. Millions. Let them go.
In one of his Visionary moment (which Jefferson let very few happen for himself in print), in one of his letters he talks about having ridden out on horse back with his daughter, one of his daughters, to the great natural bridge that was on property that he owned, and he was on top of that. And in this Vision he saw light, like populations of future men and women sweeping like angels of a future History, moving West. And he never forgot the mystical tone of that moment and when the chance was there to turn that Vision into the amplitude of History, he made the Louisiana Purchase that tripled the size of the United States. Pushed it all the way to the ocean. And he did it against a very formidable opponent named Napoleon. Napoleon who was going to fight and Jefferson sent over his protege James Monroe, who was very humorless, and Monroe informed Talleyrand who informed Napoleon that Jefferson had taken the trouble to make a survey for Napoleon of all of the Frenchmen in North America who could bear arms, and they totaled 18,000 men, total, and most of them were in New Orleans. He said "I am sending more than 20,000 men a month through the Cumberland Gap. I'm sure we can come to terms". That's how it happened.
Not only does Franklin come into a pair with Thucydides, but because we're going on with Tacitus, we're getting bigger from Greece to Rome. I want to do something, not somebody bigger than Franklin, but someone for whom the problems that Franklin's Autobiography pioneer, like Thucydides, in his History pioneered, and Tacitus went bigger, the problems that are pioneered in Franklin's Autobiography are writ very large in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Very profound lady. Written in 1958, about the time the apex of when these kinds of philosophic Historical issues were white hot. I remember being at the University of Wisconsin in 1958 and you could get into discussions about this when it first came out for days on end. No one would sleep. But just as we went, so Tacitus and Hannah Arendt, and just as we went from Franklin and Thucydides, we'll go to Tacitus and Hannah Arrant, spend a month with them, spend four weeks. Four weeks with this pair, four weeks with this pair, and then four weeks, a third group, a third set of four weeks, who can we put with Burckhardt? I thought of putting his errant younger friend Nietzsche with him but the actual Historical figure who cuts Burckhardt beautifully is Hegel. Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Absolutely devastating critique that goes not with Burckhardt so much but Hegel writes two generations before Burckhardt began to really become famous. But Burckhardt published almost nothing after 1860 because as Aldous Huxley quoting William Blake said, when you cleanse the eyes of the veils you begin to see with such clarity that you realize that you had never seen reality before. And Burckhardt is one of those individuals like Nietzsche who learned to see so poignantly that they got scared. They got frightened because there seemed to be such a daunting title wave of monstrous complication. How would men and women ever be able to deal with what is coming.
For someone like Friedrich Nietzsche, he found a way to temporize the situation so that instead of like Burckhardt being almost muffled by an overwhelming sense of intellectual fearfulness and trepidation, because he held high hopes that great art was a way in which the spirit of individuals capable of dealing with History, but how many great artists are there? And so there won't be enough. Or will there? For Nietzsche the problem was solved because he met Richard Wagner. He, in a letter said I'm willing to resign my philosophic chair and just become an apostle, an evangelist for Wagnerism. Wagnerianism, that's how he put it. Which he did. Which was a cause celebre at the time. Nietzsche was the youngest professor in European History. He was a full professor at twenty-four lecturing on the Classical Greeks. His book the book The Birth of Tragedy is all about this, it's a poignant tragedy occurs at the very same time as Thucydides. It's a part, the development of tragedy of Classical Greek Tragedy is a part of what the problem of what the crisis of History is all about. (cell phone rings) It's Nietzsche calling. Son of a gun. From the asylum.
It's a curious thing that when we think about these, we compartmentalize them. If we think about Sophocles we think about drama, If we think about Thucydides we think about History, if we think about Plato we think about Philosophy. (cell phone rings again) That's Plato for sure. We don't realize that they all lived in the same little place at the same time. Athens in its total population was never more than two hundred thousand people. That's about half the size of Fresno. And out of that, there were only about ten percent of the people that ever participated really in anything; that's twenty thousand people. So you get it that it was the size of the community of a modern high school in terms of population. Only the high school had people like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Thucydides, Herodotus, Pindar all living at the same time, with a baddy named Socrates thrown in from the other side of the tracks.
So that you had an odd situation where one of the great pioneering crises, the problem of History and its non-miscibility with Myth coming into play in a state but it wasn't like a state like The State has become, it was a City State. But it wasn't a City State like Rome had become, it was, Athens was still like a small place. And when they failed, when they failed to have a response to the challenge of the crisis of Historical consciousness, Athens became a university town; a little quiet school place and that was it. It was off the world stage; it never again was important at all. It's a curious situation.
What we're trying to do, is we're trying to put together a recipe. Not a recipe that you just mix into the bowl but this is a recipe for a whole meal. We're not just cooking (which is an integral form), adding the ingredients together to make the dish. But we're dealing with a differential presentation of it, which is setting the table, getting the right silverware, the right dishes, the right flowers, the linens, the chairs, the right guests. So the idea of a banquet (the Greek word for it was symposium); the idea of a symposium is not only the integral of cooking the meal, but the differential of setting the table and having the guests and having the conversations.
So that Plato's symposium is a whole conscious echelon beyond just the integral phase. The integral phase is like a part of the way in which Myth has its place. We saw that Myth fits together very nicely with Ritual and Symbol. And Ritual, Myth and Symbol are very integral within the natural order. They go together beautifully. In fact they form, what we would call post Feynman, they form a path integral. And everything from Nature through the Ritual comportment, the Mythic languaging of feeling and experience which interiorizes into the Symbols and ideas of the mind; and all of that is a fabric that goes together. But what does not go with that is consciousness. Consciousness doesn't fit into that. Consciousness is a distillation that's different, it's radical, it's different. It doesn't factor in. It takes the entire cycle of a path integral and changes it by introducing itself to it. Consciousness is not miscible with Myth either. Vision is different from Myth and in ancient times it used to be called magic. Magic is different from Myth. In Myth the important thing is to be a part of the story, to be folded into the language. In Magical consciousness, you have to be the speaker; you tell the story that other people are in. It's a whole different thing, and so they're not miscible.
But just as Vision is radical from Myth, History is differentially more radical than Vision. It's the grown up version. Just like Mythic language is as a process language, in its Mythic feeling toned experiential horizon, Myth is a grown up version of Nature. The processes of Nature are all there in the processes of language. And just as language is more integrally potent than Nature, language can index Nature it's so powerful; History is that to Vision. History is that to consciousness. So that History is a very daunting kind of a situation. In fact it's not a situation so much as it is a process of magnified possibility which was there nascently in Visionary consciousness. And it means also that the quintessential Nature, Ritual, Myth, Symbol, Visionary consciousness; the alchemical fifth, the fifth business, the magic part of it, the radical changing, the thumb added to the other four which makes a hand. The most you can do with four fingers like this is cling to branches to try and get the bananas. You add a thumb, you can make tools now. You have a whole planet of banana plantations if you want. It's a different thing. In 2001 it isn't with four fingers that the ape throws up the bone that becomes the space station, it's the full hand. Jacob Bronowski says in The Ascent of Man, "the hand is the cutting edge of the mind". And once we have that kind of a cutting edge, we cut into the unknown and we expand the capacity, and the mind is the flower that comes out of this. And integral though it is, it has a curious quality that once the flower is there it has a fragrance, and consciousness is the fragrance of the mind. And it turns out that the fragrance of the mind perfumes the entire cosmos; everything is tinctured by it including time and space.
And because consciousness can do that, History is an exponentially greater process of differentiation and no human population has learned to deal with it yet. No one. No one has successfully learned to deal with it as a people. Certain individuals have come to understand how to do it for themselves. Certain groups have pioneered way in which temporarily, with fingers crossed and eyes uncrossed, that you can get through a generation or two, but there's never been a human population yet who have been able to deal with History at all. Because those kinds of energies, when they come into play, they're there, they don't go away. And if you don't develop them, then they do just what muscles do (when you develop muscles and you don't use them), they atrophy and when they atrophy you go into a regression.
But it turns out that things as radical as consciousness and persons and History, when they regress they become radioactive. They don't complement Nature then, but they slip back into Nature regressively and contaminate the whole thing. And that's when you start to get human populations talking about the contamination of Nature; man is a polluter of the whole integral cycle. And you get that kind of talk. But it's not just introducing something that stinks, what regresses brings with it all kinds of seeds of possibilities, and those first of all hit the mind. And the first thing that comes into the mind is a cancer of integration known as ideology. And the first thing that an ideology seeks to do is to organize everything according to this kind of doctrine, this kind of program. And what eventually comes out of that is the integral desire to do it the best that anyone has ever done it and to make a Universal State. And in order to sustain that Universal State, to make a Universal Church, Universal Religion.
So that when he was writing his study of History, Toynbee, who had worked from the First World War on until the 1950's, and had done beautiful volumes on a study of History, all of a sudden in 1954 he publishes volume seven. And volume seven of is study of History is entitled Universal States, Universal Churches. And he says here in this volume that came out about the time that the Cold War really started taking off, 1954, he says "we're up against an incredible malaise that we must do something about because we have no other choice". And the blurb on this reads something like this "deals with phenomena apt to accompany a disintegrating civilization, a Universal State, a Universal Church and a heroic age of the barbarians" (you think we're not in a heroic age of the barbarians?) "who live beyond civilization's pale. These parts bring into operation a wider vision of human society as a whole. Furthermore, three of these topics, Universal Churches, Law and Freedom in History, and the Inspiration of Historians" (the Vision of Historians) "cannot be approached without looking beyond the bounds of life on the Earth". It's not science fiction. It's the greatest professional Historian of his time who was so acquainted with the problems of Historiography that a study of History is literally a Platonic banquet set for discussing, between the writer and all the readers, issues which have never been resolved that have been repeatedly brought together.
And one of the figures who is poignantly at the center of all of this is Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, who had two wonderful friends, who are two of the most poignant Historians who ever lived, one of them (I'm sure you've heard of him), his name is Voltaire. And Voltaire, this is a sample, one of his Histories, The Age of Louis XIV, have you ever heard of Louis XIV? And Voltaire says at the beginning, he says there are four great crisis stages to History. The first, of course we know, is Thucydides with the classical Greeks. The second, the age of Caesar and Augustus. The third is the taking of Constantinople by Mohamed The Second, and the fourth is, Voltaire says, the France of Louis XIV. Because some kind of radical Historical conscious crisis happened to the French mind at this time. But Franklin was equally at home in England as he was in France and the other Historian is David Hume, known as one of the great English philosophers of all time. But his pride was not his philosophy books but his History of Great Britain, that originally came out in eight volumes. This is the one volume precis of one of the volumes, usually reprinted in six volumes. And Hume's History was written backwards. He took the modern age first and worked his way back to the origins of civilization. So that when he got back there he had this retrospective context that illuminated the problems in such a way that Franklin and Hume in their correspondence with each other recognized that they were part of a very rarified few who have ever understood, contemporaneously, these problems, and were able to talk with each other. And that's why you find at that age, Hume died in 1776, Franklin was 70 years old then. And the young guy that they were talking to wrote his first document that year, the young Thomas Jefferson. Let's take a break and we'll come back.
HISTORY 3 - PART TWO
We started out this morning by doing a little bit of a recursion. That means going back through with intelligence about an order, in order to change the order. Something which is recursive can be modified by a layer of a transform being applied and you can amazingly do this infinitely. So that at the mature workings of consciousness, the possibilities of what is real outdistance the what-ises; there are more possibilities than is. That means existence becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of possible actuality. And we call something which is all of the existence as a Universe, but we call the full range of infinite possibilities a Cosmos. That was the ancient word, a Cosmos.
A Cosmos is a wonderland in the sense that every time you look at it it's different because your looking at it is factored into what it is doing. It's the famous paradox, the conundrum of physics that came up and led to quantum theory, Schrodinger's cat, the observer changes what is observed. And the smaller that one goes, the more that that change is evident. And likewise the larger one goes, the more that change is also evident. And it's peculiar that reality should be conscious of us individually, specifically and everything that we do. That kind of Vision leads to an ethic, not based upon doctrines, but upon the range of possibility being nourished, and it gives you a different outlook.
The previous outlook used to be, because of Aristotle's book, The Categories, when it was promulgated by Immanuel Kant, a couple of hundred years ago it was called the Categorical Imperative. Before you do anything you have to ask what if everyone did this. Which means that you weed out a lot of things on the basis, if everyone did this - pretty bad. Whereas on the other side, that realm of infinite recursive possibility was matured by a French thinker named Maurice Merlout Ponti into the existential imperative where you don't ask what if everyone does this, you ask what if no one did this. And quite frequently the answer is the Universe would be minus a value. But to modify Merlout Ponti just a tiny bit, it isn't that the Universe would be without a value, it's that the Cosmos would have a gap there where your participation would be a part of what's going on, a part of the real banquet.
So that in this kind of an outlook, this differential Historical conscious outlook, there are no problems in History at all. There are ranges and scales, there are landscapes of possibility to be explored, but there are no problems. The kind of mind that formulates crises in History is a constipated symbolic mind that never grew up to transform. There are no problems anywhere in the Cosmos. So that when you come across rare matured individuals, they use a different style of language from everybody else. Nineteen hundred years ago in Northwest India, this is in translation the kind of language that they talk about, it's someone who is a differentiated consciousness to the point of being a participant in the Cosmos. Here's what it translates as: "No wisdom can we get hold of. No highest perfection. No Bodhi Satva, no thought of enlightenment either. When told of this if not bewildered and in no way anxious, a Bodhi Satva courses in well gone wisdom. In form, in feeling, will perception, awareness, no where in them find a place to rest on. Without a home they wander. Dharmas never hold them nor do they grasp at them with a Bodhi eye. They are wandering in truth." This kind of language from nineteen hundred years ago, Northwest India, is the kind of language that you find where History is competently dealt with by consciousness that has come into focus prismatically in a spiritual person; some one who is not an individual as a cultural phenomena, but someone who is a prism of possibility endlessly. So that they're home, as one would say in the ancient Egyptian wisdom, someone like that lives in the fields of eternity.
That as long as you accomplish the joining of yourself to a successful cycle of return then you can be reborn again. In the Egyptian Mythos, when Ra rises tomorrow, we rise with him. And we will come forth by day, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says, we will come forth by day and be reborn again. But there's a snag in it. We will be reborn again and again and again and again and after several trillion times, that is really a nightmare. You thought Bill Murray's Groundhog Day was something. And as if it weren't complicated enough, it has a fractal quality to it that every billion details of every trillion aspects also reoccurs again and again and so one is caught in an infinite algorithmic kaleidoscope of no end and no real variation.
This was the thing that scared Nietzsche. The problem was literally too much for him and so when his idol Wagner, when his idol cast him out, said you ignorant idiot, this is about music not philosophy, this is about theater. This is about Parcival and look at you. So Nietzsche response of course to Wagner's Parcival was his Zarathustra, the superman who comes down out of the mountains laughing at the problems of nightmare History. The Ubermensch, the over man, who overcomes the problems of History by simply overcoming it massively, but in Nietzsche there's a snag. He overcomes the problems of History by a powerful ideology. By the mind becoming powerful, and the mind putting a parenthesis around. And what happens when a mind tries to put a parenthesis an infinite fractal kaleidoscope? It becomes inflated beyond belief.
When we get to Jacob Burckhardt we'll see that Burckhardt's take on this was not to go there. That this is tying a knot in the mind. Burckhardt didn't know what to do but he knew not to tie a knot. And that the string that ties the knot is something called force. And the not tying the knot in the mind is something called freedom and one of the collections of Burckhardt's writings, which we'll take a look at, I think I brought it, it's called Force and Freedom, Reflections on History, Force and Freedom.
And just to look ahead for a moment, Burckhardt was very very close to Nietzsche. He was an older man, he was like the mentor, in Basil, in Switzerland. He says in here that there seems to be a six sided form to the crisis of History. Whatever kind of crisis it is, it always has this kind of six sided form and the six sides are enumerated and in this paragraph I'll just give you what they are. The first side: Culture determined by the state. The second one: The state determined by culture. The third: Culture determined by religion. And of course the fourth: Religion determined by culture. The fifth: The state determined by religion. The sixth: Religion determined by the state. Now to someone who's familiar with planetary thought and planetary consciousness on really vast level, Cosmic level, this is remarkably similar to the Buddhist typology of ignorance, which the Mahayana was a solution to. It dissolved it. Solution in the sense of, not an answer, but just dissolved it.
When Aldous Huxley had a psychological problem, his Parisian psycho analyst who was also a Zen Buddhist, Hubert Benois, convinced Aldous Huxley that searching for the solution to a problem is the problem. When you let go (one of Benois' books is called Let Go), when you let go of the need to find a solution, the problems themselves seem to evaporate because they only have sustenance as long as there is a force in the mind to sustain them by matching question and problem. That's why when Benois' book Let Go, it was his second book, the first one was called The Supreme Doctrine. Benois' second book Let Go, that the solution is that there is no problem in the first place because there is also no solution in the first place. That that entire choreography is a dance pas de deus that always happens together and cannot happen with either of them individually suspended. And so in the sixties the phrase was, problems and their solutions are a dance which you can just watch and you don't have to get involved with it, on either side, you don't have to take sides. And finally you can get up and walk out of that theater because that theater takes place only in the stage that's in the mind. And if you choose to stay there, you can get into the most unbelievable dead end reductive, ridiculous skits. The best one ever done was Samuel Beckett's End Game. Bare stage, couple of garbage cans, a couple of guys in the garbage cans, forever arguing, even better than Waiting For Godot. They never, ever will leave those garbage cans. And those garbage cans will always be on the stage in that set, in that scenario, in that mind. And all of it is a fiction of belief (it's the correct language). It's a fiction of belief.
And in the Western tradition, curiously enough, one of the first philosophers, if you can call him a philosopher, I call him a philosopher, to recognize this was a man named Jeremy Bentham, who's famous as being one of the founders of the development of political economy. He was an economic genius. Also, his kind of philosophy was called Utilitarianism, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But if you look at Bentham's writings, the core of it is what he called his theory of fictions. That value is a delegation that is arbitrary unless one has a measured, a valued measured context. Otherwise, what is a dollar if there's no measured value context, it's (crumples a dollar) only that. Bentham's theory of fictions, the basis of the maturation of the industrial complex based on political economy, the modern driving force of the State, is all provisional as a mental fiction.
This was the whole point that David Hume brought out in his philosophy, his treatise on human nature. Perception is arbitrary and stylizes the infinitely protean real into little sets, little skits that are only ascribable as long as the cultural milieu continues to believe in it and when it doesn't, they have to be replaced, all the time. And the last person to take this kind of issue poignantly seriously was a man named Norman O'Brown in a book called Life Against Death. It was the coup de Gras to the sixties, Life Against Death. In his essay on Money and Feces in Life Against Death, you find the incredible genius of Norman O'Brown, who as a young man, his first book was on the Protean Conscious Transform of Hermes. And his book on Hermes, typical of young Norman O'Brown, Hermes the thief. That that Hermetic quality of wisdom is to steal your freedom back from your own imprisonment that you have made. You do not have to waste energy being a warden for yourself. And as soon as you withdraw energy from that, it atrophies amazingly quickly.
In fact, what they found out nineteen hundred years ago is that it atrophies instantly, except that you have a carry over cloud of belief that makes you doubt that you were free in that instant and you regress instantly back and you're still there. It's like the episode one trillion of The Prisoner. And as long as you're in that drama, you're going to remain there on that island. And you can see that after awhile, that it is totally fictitious, totally limited, but there's no way for you to escape that as long as you try to escape in terms of the imprisonment. You have to change the script, by tearing it up largely. It's a very short word, even in Texas it's the same word - No. You have to tell the mind No. You can add garnishes of phrases, you know we all know the profanity, but just simply No. What do you mean No? No. Do you remember in The Right Stuff, where John Glenn's wife has a stuttering problem and the guy who plays Lyndon Johnson wants to interview her and she says tell him no. He wants to come in and he says well what do you mean no? She means No.
You have to tell the mind no. That you, mind, are not the final arbiter of what is real. You are a fulcrum where integration learns of others and other possibility and other than that you're a pain. And of course the mind, in its regressive form wears a mask that says well I'm you, who are you to tell me? You must be some kind of insanity version of me telling me? We need some pills. Or scalpels. I mean, you know it gets ridiculous. You're crazy not to want to be me. That's exactly what the mind finally says. Until you put a hand over its mouth and muffle it. Shut up.
It's as if you went hiking in the Sierras and you took a virtual reality helmet with you and you never were there. You say oh yeah, I hiked it. Well what did you see? Well I saw Debbie Does Dallas. Oh you did, I didn't see that.
The mind is so peculiar. So that consciousness turns out to be a play form of Symbols. Consciousness is Symbols at play. One of the qualities that you will never find in an ideological universal state, universal church, finished product, you will never find the sense of being sublimely capable of that humor where one could brave the ridiculous. The old Zen master who formulated that best was Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote. He is not sallying forth by day in an eternal return, he is sallying forth in an ever changing array of possible adventures, as his readership, world wide for all time matures and changes and goes on. Don Quixote rides forth several hundred thousand times a year now, all on completely different adventures, because the readers are all different. This is a Cosmos. And in that Cosmos there is no appreciation for the serious problems that the mind cannot solve because it's incapable of solving.
The crisis of History is a crisis of believing that the eternal return is a nightmare that must be solved. The problem with enlightenment is for the mind to get over the fact that it needs to be enlightened so that its enlightenment will be non ignorant; and many parenthesis of that in the entire spaghetti of all that, all of that is irrelevant. It is not necessary to follow it and understand it in all the details. The complication itself is irrelevant. You don't have to untangle that confused skein at all, just let it go, set it aside. Not so easy to do, because it's not only a problem in someone's mind or in our minds, but that has been beautifully projected out so that it's a problem in the geography and the sociology and the History and the politics, the whole thing is a production that's been going on for many thousands of years and they're very good at putting on the production.
So that even an attempt to draw a radical line in society; even more radical than the American Revolution was the French Revolution, and those trying to get out of the imprisonment of mental ideological histories in the French Revolution, saw that the problem was really that the dimension of time has this traditional sequencing, therefore we have to erase all of the dates and we have to start over from year one, which they did. And I think they went up to fourteen or something before the whole thing crashed again and you had Napoleon's Empire. Very Roman.
The individual at the time who was most poignant in the world to see through that was Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin's Autobiography is one of the most poignant confessions of this process of learning to not fret over complications but to begin in a completely new way and develop freedom for oneself and for others. And yet it was his own delegated executor who kept the autobiography from being seen publicly. A copy of it was sent to France; a copy of just the first section was sent to France. And that was printed in France, and then there was an English translation of that printed in England, and then another French company did a French translation of that English translation of the French translation of Franklin. And for almost a generation, more than a generation, that's all that was allowed of Franklin's autobiography to come out. So that you have a forward here, this is 1806, by 1806 not only was Jefferson president but he was really in the driver's seat. Re-elected at the Louisiana Purchase. So behind the scenes, things were being done to get the stuff out.
The first collection of Franklin's writings is made by Mr. Peter Collinson, the year 1751. The collection was actually a series of letters. Collinson was a scientist in England and he and Franklin were corresponding. And he was saving Franklin's correspondence because it was all about his adventure in consciousness of discovering electricity. Franklin's the one who discovered electricity. He's the first one to characterize it. It consisted of letters communicated by the author to the editor on one subject, electricity, and formed a pamphlet. It was enlarged in 1752 by a second communication on the same subject. In 1754 they were published as a book. In 1769, by the addition of several other letters and papers on other subjects, it was a quarto of five hundred pages. Ten years after in 1779 (middle of the Revolutionary War), another collection was made by a different editor, in one volume, printed both in quarto and octavo of papers not contained in the preceding collection, under the title of Political Miscellaneous and Philosophic Papers. In 1787, a third collection appeared, a thin little volume entitled Philosophical and Miscellaneous Papers. Lastly in 1793, a fourth published, two volumes consisting of some memoirs of Dr. Franklin's life and essays and so forth.
It goes on to say that it was the executor who held back all of this material. That the holding back of it until 1806 was indeed a very contrived affair because people of that time, that generation, knew that Benjamin Franklin's autobiographical writings was like a key to consciousness dealing with History and there were many groups, factions, political parties, nation states, churches, all kinds of institutional groups who didn't want to have this out. But in fact, even in 1806, it was only still baldarized version. No one knew better. It wasn't until the middle of the eighteen hundreds that anyone came out with something halfway there and when the Huntington Library here in Los Angeles bought the original manuscript of Franklin's Autobiography, a man near the end of his life, right out here in San Marino, is poring through the different versions of Franklin's Autobiography and he found that they're all different. So Max Friend was planning to bring out a volume in 1949, it was the first parallel text of his autobiography. He died when the book was in editorial process and the staff of the Huntington Library finished it. And the University of California Press published parallel text column version of the autobiography, 1949. And only after that were there other individuals who painstakingly wanted to put it together so that someone would get a chance to read what Franklin wrote. Six years from now it will be three hundred years since the man was born.
So this edition, the Norton Critical Edition, has all the stuff in it. So that the reader (for ten bucks) can get something that was kept out of the public eye for a hundred and two hundred years after the man died. So a question to ask is what's going on? No one told us that censorship over Benjamin Franklin is like big news, but it is. Why is it so big news? Because Franklin's autobiography is the successful story of finding the kind of release transforms that you find like in Mahayana. The way to let go progressively, by realizing that you are clinging and not grasping or that you're grasping and not motioning or that your motioning is empty gesturing and doesn't really express. And Franklin is that kind of protean individual who patiently, event by event, layer by layer, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, that his language allows for a progressive nudity of disclosure to be apparent. Franklin learned to presence himself in print so that the reader reading this can participate in that unclothing of false ideation about oneself. Far enough along so that you get 'this is how you can do it' and then you can take it the rest of the way yourselves.
So that Franklin's Autobiography is very similar to (let's choose something from the classical Judeo-Christian), it's very close to The Book of Daniel. The Book of Daniel is the Hellenistic Jewish dream manual, written by the Teacher of Righteousness, down on the Dead Sea, at Qumran, about 160 BC. The Book of Daniel is about how to analyze a person's dreams, Then how to analyze someone else's dreams, then how to analyze those dreams which are not just individual dreams but are large archetypal dreams, as we would say, and then how to go from that, from dreams, into conscious Vision and to understand the unfolding of conscious Vision in terms of the History of God's Cosmos. So the Book of Daniel was a workbook of how to progressively free yourself from littleness of mean perspective into freedom of spiritual grandeur. And Franklin's Autobiography is that kind of a book. It's for that, that's what it does.
And when you slip this (shuffles two books together) into Thucydides, and with that kind of deck, now you deal. Any hand you deal is a mirror, no matter what cards there are, they turn up mirror like. So when you hear of a book called Force and Freedom, and the subtitle is Reflections on History, you begin to get that that's exactly what's going on here. But there's still a proviso, there's still a gaff because the only thing that mirrors is the mind. Consciousness never mirrors. What kind of backing would there be to allow a mirroring in consciousness. The whole point of Hui Neg the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism was that famous quatrain. The head monk said that when you polish mirror so that there's no dust on it, then it shows reality. And Hui Neg's quatrain is that the mind is no mirror, where could there ever be dust. And the old fifth patriarch Ma Tsu looking at Hui Neg who was only sixteen years old at the time, was the dishwasher in the monastery, he said you know the head monk is going to have guys ex you out. Here, here's the robe and the bowl, you're the sixth patriarch but you better high tale it before they kill you. And he did, and he was gone, he was like a Chinese truck driver for about thirty years. And finally came out and was the sixth patriarch. Delivered the platform sutra. There never was a seventh patriarch because Hui Neg new that you do not carry a sequence on beyond its transform into freedom. So he broadcast out so that anyone who ever heard him was the seventh patriarch. Anyone who ever understood, and they themselves went that-a-way. Then you're the seventh patriarch. So fractally there're infinite number of seventh patriarchs .
This kind of freedom is not possible to be disclosed in any kind of institutional setting because institutional settings, by their very nature are backings to the mind. They're the silver that goes on back of the reflection that gives it substance and that's why someone believes in it and why it's fiction. All of it is a fiction. But there's a fearfulness built into the addiction to fictions that if there are no fictions then what's true. What's real. What will happen to us. And all of these are false questions. What was the phrase somebody said one time, consider the lilies in the field, they don't take any aspirins. More next week.