History 4

Transcript (PDF)

We come to History 4 and we're pairing Benjamin Franklin and Thucydides together. We're taking a pair of books and we're using them like two hands to reach out; to reach out with our comprehension to try to understand something about History. And when we're trying to understand something about History, we're immediately aware that we cannot depend upon cognition for intelligence and accuracy in History. We must depend upon re-cognition, recognition. So that History is not a matter of experience, it's not a matter of imagination, it's not even a matter of integration. History is a matter of memory; of re-membering, remembering.

Now the archaic wisdom teaching on remembering literally goes back to the archetypal origins of the way in which memory was stylized about five thousand years ago in Egypt. The art of memory which we have today, which is still current, is Hermetic and it means it comes down through the Egyptian lineage. And five thousand years ago the understanding of remembering was literally re-membering. Members being parts of the body. And the figure who was dismembered was Osiris.

In the Osirian Myth, Osiris was cut into fourteen pieces and each of the pieces scattered throughout what became Egypt. His enemy, in fact in the early Hebrew tradition, the demonic is always referred to in a neuter way. A demonic being is neither male nor female but neuter and so in the ancient Hebrew, it's never Satan it's always The Satan; it's never Devil, it's The Devil. So that the nemesis is always referred to in this kind of neutered quality and the nemesis of Osiris was Set. That neutered article 'The' that goes in front of the noun cuts the noun out of the personal and puts it into the purely abstract. So that the enemy of our kind; the enemy of human kind is an abstracted individual that has no gender whatsoever. That is to say it's not that the enemy is neither male nor female, it's that the enemy is an abstracted individuality that has no gender whatsoever. And that enemy, Set, who cut Osiris into fourteen pieces dismembering him evoked a wisdom response from the Cosmos because Osiris was a part of a pair. And the other half of that pair was Isis. And Isis went around and found all of the members of Osiris and brought them back together and put him back together. And that's the origins of re-membering.

So that the ancient Hermetic wisdom tradition for five thousand years (that's fifty centuries), has been that remembering has nothing to do with cognition, it has nothing to do with experience, it in fact has nothing to do with the mind as a symbolic facility. Remembering has to do with consciousness which is differential and History is the highest energy of consciousness. The beginning, the lower energy of conscious (what used to be call magic at one time, which is really Vision) gets raised to a high pitch in History. So that the Historical process is a process of remembering, and it's quite distinct from the process of cognition. Which means that perception is always suspect in conscious History.

So that whatever someone would see or hear or touch or smell or feel or say or image or think, make an idea, that entire integral range of items to high consciousness is always suspect. Not simply because of inaccuracy of perception (which is notorious), but because the very process of putting together involves a gestalting and that gestalting logically includes all of the actions as well as the items. If you say 2 + 2 = 4, you not only have to pay attention to the 2's and the 4 but the + sign and the = sign. They're all logically involved in the whole thing. And so the making of any kind of a form larger than an atom of instance involves a process of gestalting and that eventually becomes the neuronal cloud referentiality of consciousness raised to a high level of remembering which is History. And so men and women who've been wise for a very long time have understood that you cannot go immediately from sense perception to Historical understanding. There's no straight line, there's no connection actually. They are related by a transform which is so powerful that the transform can only be located in one kind, one type of venue. And that venue is the Spiritual Person.

So that in God's realm the Spiritual Person is the only place where the bow of comprehension for Historical understanding is tied. And if there's no one there then there's no Historical understanding possible at all. It just simply doesn't occur. Which means that a great deal of the Universe is what Teilhard de Chardin used to call rocks. He used to say of them, they're not dead they're just pre-life. They haven't come in to life yet. They haven't come into the conscious time/space full dimensiality of reality.

But whenever, in any star system, whenever there are wisdom beings like ourselves, who come to maturity enough in the History of their planet, whether it's a planet or a moon of a planet or whatever forms, there're many forms, then those beings come to understand the indelible necessity and (I'm tempted to say fragility, but it isn't fragility) I think the better term is the ancient term which is preciousness, the rare preciousness. That beings like ourselves are rare in the universe. It's true, if one could look galactically, inter-galactically that there are many many many intelligent species and beings. But in terms of any kind of time/space it's very rare. Our particular star system has been here for five billion years and we're the only conscious space/time life form here. In the family of stars, in the immediate vicinity there are about forty or fifty stars and probably somewhere around half of them have some kind of planetary system. And out of that there's probably four or five that have beings. We may well be the only intelligent conscious space/times beings in this immediate locale. So it's rare, it's very rare.

The rarity means that whenever beings like ourselves come into recognition and incorporate consciousness with time/space, it's noticeable anywhere that there are other beings who are working on that complex level. So that the saying (for instance, let's shift to India for a second) the saying in the India tradition of about twenty-five hundred years, about half as far back as the beginnings of memory in Egypt, about twenty-five hundred years ago the saying were that when the Historical Buddha would teach, there would be all kinds of beings that would come from all over the Cosmos to hear him because it was rare to have anyone who would be able to speak spontaneous wisdom immediately out of nowhere, out of nothing, and bring it in so that it was resonantly real, and that it was extraordinarily rare. And that the entire Cosmos, this was the only figure speaking at that time on that level out of billions of galaxies. So it's rare, it's rare to find. So the wasting and squandering of the opportunity is tragic indeed, when there is an opportunity to recognize on that poignancy because it save aeons of hit and miss and you're able to penetrate much much faster.

When it comes to this quality of wisdom language, wisdom speaking, it means that the language cannot have words that are representational. A language who's words represent things is on such a low level that it doesn't even come up to the mind, doesn't even come up to the level of Symbols for comprehension. Much less go through a major transformation into Visionary language, into an artistic Spiritual Personage, and from there into Historical differentiation. So that a language that is limited to making sense to someone who's counting on fingers and pointing to objects is a language actually closer to animals than it is to human beings. You can teach animals to have association word commands. We have to rise above the animal. We have to rise several orders of excellence above the animal. So that the language is always overlapped to prevent an association of one to one representation from happening. So a wisdom language is never hearable, never understandable initially at all to someone who comes out of the world. So you have to learn. And you learn by hearing, by hearing. Not by thinking, but by hearing. Thought likes to tie knots so it can measure and count. That's what thinking likes to do and it's limited. And curiously untransformed mind always regresses, never progresses, always regresses. So that the very act of naive thinking is a regressive action which is why primordial peoples used to hold thought in great suspect. Wise tribal level men and women, all over the world were always suspect of someone who thought. They think, they think too much. We can't trust them. Thinking is a suspect action. And it is indeed until it is refined. But its refining involves a transforming so that you break the habit of having words that stand for things. It's called being spiritual rather than material. If your language is materialistic, if your words must connect to things, then that's the animal command level and Pavlov is very right about that level. If you're trained to salivate when the bell rings, any time a bell rings you will salivate. But it's a stupid level in that they can train you to salivate to any cue, any command. You can train dogs to salivate when someone is shot. So at executions they will simply feel hungry.

This is the kind of massive tyranny which has faced us for the entire century and it's time not only to break it, but to shred it and to vaporize every trace of it. There's no place, not only in the twenty-first century, but in the third millennium. There's no place for it in this star system any longer. It's a radioactivity no one wants and no one can afford.

So two-thousand years ago, Two-Thousand years ago, this kind of language was used about the mind which still uses a language that's associative, and how inappropriate it is for consciousness, much less the higher energies of consciousness which is the Historical recognition that leads to the Cosmos. Here's a quotation from the Prajna-Paramita-Ratna- Guna-Samcaya-Gatha. Prajna is wisdom. Paramita is perfection, so it's wisdom-perfection. Ratna-Guna means, Guna is like a quality, the three Gunas, and Ratna means precious and it has a feminine tone. Ratna Rani in Sanskrit means the Night Queen. She's the gorgeousness of Eros who comes to gift us with love. So Ratna-Guna means that kind of feminine midnight preciousness of quality that comes through the perfection of wisdom. And that all of this is a Gatha, Gatha means a hymn. It means not only a poem but a poem which is sung with deep spirituality. Samcaya means the collection of these hymns that are brought together so that they form a larger pattern.

Another word for hymn is psalm. The most familiar collection of hymns in the Western tradition are the Psalms of David. And the Psalms of David make a necklace of songs from spiritual man to a Cosmic God. And so the Psalms of David were always the archetypal pattern by which conscious space/time, being sung, went into Historical play to confirm the Cosmos. That's what they were for. And someone who would be raised in that way, to be a king on that level is a Solomon for sure.

Here's the way the language in Sanskrit, a translation in English made in 1962, in New Delhi: "When in one who thinks there proceeds the perception of a thought or if thinking about the perception of enlightenment involves a perception of being, a being, then the perception is established in a triple attachment." It's established in a habitual attachment which is an addiction. Perception itself becomes addictive. The false view based on it becomes addictive and thought itself becomes addictive. So that one is really in a super prison, because the very action of thought is an addiction and the very action of perception which is the essence of the Ritual level. So if all of your Ritual and all of you Symbol objectifying capacities are addictive, (anytime you use any of them you're involved in reinforcing an addiction) and the link between them is the false view, the belief, which is the Mythic level. So that Ritual, Myth and Symbol are all co-opted, all three of those which are three fourths of the entire cycle of integration are all co-opted. So that thought itself, every time you think it's like taking a drug. Perception itself, every time you perceive, every time you sense, it's like taking a drug. So that the entire process of experience is like shooting up. Well what do you do?

It says here: "none of this happens to those who apprehend it". One drop, one conscious/time/space instance of recognition vanishes that entire complication. It doesn't take any time at all, it doesn't take any space at all. But if you can't remember that then the entire imprisonment rushes back instantly and is there again in the very next instant. So that one has to train memory in order to keep the flow of that recognition vital. And as long as it's vital, there's no way that that habitual imprisonment can come back into play. It has to wait until you stop recognizing before it can come back and take you over again. So that as long as the continuity of memory is operative, you are free. So that, for instance, in all of the Judeo Christian, even Islamic traditions in the Western History, the highest form of prayer was prayer without end. In fact the phrase that was used at council after council after council is the phrase world without end; referring to the fact that God's realm is unassailable as long as spiritual men and women continue prayer without end. As long as they are praying none of the false perception, none of the habitual drug quality of thought, none of the false belief has anywhere to have a hold. Because Ritual, Myth and Symbol, powerful as they are, indelible as they are, structural as they are in the integral realm, they don't have any power in the differential realm at all. So that Vision insures freedom. What is the saying in St. John, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. What is truth? Truth is meaning accepted.

But the acceptance of meaning is not the same as the acceptance of perception. Not even that of thought. There's a transform involved there and it frees language from its associative dumbness so that you loose (this will date me) you loose the tinker toy quality. You know what tinker toys were? In the Second World War they used to give little kids, cause we never had any spare metal or anything, so they used to give you wooden toys and they were sticks, rounded sticks, and little round things like biscuits with holes punched. And you were supposed to, as little boys, build things out of these. And it turns out that you can build only a certain limited set of things which every little boy got bored with the first afternoon, that you realized that that's only as far as it went. So before things were Mickey Mouse, they were Tinker Toy.

So memory, re-membering, goes back to Isis. The Symbol of Isis, the Ankh, is not only the Symbol for life, actually it's a Symbol for the gift of life. Each ray from Ra, each light ray from Ra, has at the moving end of it an Ankh. So every time a photon of sunlight comes, the end of the light ray has an Ankh on it. And because deep wisdom showed that there was no end to the light rays, it meant that the Ankh was always occurring everywhere along every light ray. So that any time you held your hand up to the sun you were bagging the Ankhs. Any time anything like that happened. But the deeper quality was that, it was not that you were perceiving the light but you were re-cognizing the light and that brought together with remembering was the way in which wisdom then wove consciousness into time/space. Wove Vision and the art of memory and the Historical consciousness, what was the saying, Ra is the lord of the horizon. What horizon? The horizon of the Cosmos; the horizon of Historical reality. In some of the ancient texts in Hieroglyphics it reads that Ra is the lord of millions of years. Which was about as much as they could count five thousand years ago, millions of years would do. It meant more than anyone could think of.

When it comes to understanding the Historical process on this kind of refinement, about a hundred years ago, men and women just like us were beginning on the Visionary level, on the artistry of their Spiritual Persons, they were beginning to recognize that the Historical movement, the Historical dynamos was reaching a peculiar threshold of massive transformation. Not just because of the date but because of all the signs of the times. But not just the signs of the times, that's on the associative Ritual Mythic level. Because the very nature of mind which had been firm for a very long time was noticeably dissolving. Not that mind was being erased, but that the forms, the old static forms of the mind were dissolving. First the structures of beliefs dissolved and then the forms in the mind dissolved and then the perceptual actualities of the world dissolved.

And that process was much hastened along by two individuals, both of them English, one who lived just before Benjamin Franklin, in fact Franklin was about twenty-one years old when he died. The other was one of his closest friends. The older Englishman was Sir Isaac Newton and the younger one was David Hume. And Newton in his Principia Mathematica, in his optics, in his physics, showed a quality of relationality which was so superior to the Medieval world view, to the hierarchically static frozen cosmology of the dead past, that it took awhile, it took about a generation for language to begin to reflect this Newtonian revolution. And one of the first English language poets to get this was a man named Wordsworth, who was accused at his age of being sort of like a daydreamer, wishy washy romantic poet, when actually he was a very refined conscious Newtonian poet.

The other, David Hume, as a very young man, I think he was in his early twenties when he wrote his treatise on human nature, he showed that the mind's ability to perceive and to conceive, that nothing quite touched. And what's really happening there are gestalts and not certainties. No tinker toys, nothing really connects. And so one has to become empirical about the world and skeptical about the mind. And after about a hundred years of that, the English language physicist gained a tremendous impetus with a stubborn Scotsman named Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell. And a hundred a twenty years ago he wrote a two volume set, still in print, The Theory of Electromagnetic Energy, which formally dissolved the material world certainty and the mind's belief that it is certain when it knows facts. The relationality of a universe in constant sub-atomic sub-atomic flux became a mathematical certainty and reality.

This quality becomes exacerbated in History. That History and Historians have grappled with this for a long time. We saw that the first really conscious person to deal with this was Thucydides, who we're using along with Franklin. But it reached a culmination at a time, the same time as Maxwell's Equations on Electromagnetism in a Historian named Wilhelm Dilthey. Here's a little selection: Pattern and Meaning in History. A little footnote, page 103, the little footnote section is entitled How Representation is Based on Experience. And the first sentence reads "What happens when an experience becomes the object of my reflection?" And a little later on it says "Because remembering involves recognition, everything past is structurally related to a former experience by being a reproduction of it. Future possibilities are also linked to the sequence because of the range of possibilities, of potentialities mapped out by it. Thus in this process there arises a view of the continuity of mental life in time which constitutes the course of a life. Every single experience is related to this whole." And that was as good as anyone could do a hundred and twenty years ago. That was a fine as anyone could do. Here, within five months of the twenty-first century, these are children.

The complications are more than anyone could imagine, but the advances are also beyond imagination. But there is no way to tell someone in any kind of a clumsy language, where words are still tied to things as if they were a ball and chain on the legs of experience. You cannot tell prisoners who are weighted down by balls and chains that they are free. They are not free, they can't take a step without reminding themselves that they're prisoners. The only thing that one can do is issue an invitation and make a process of opening out so that you can, not free yourself from the ball and chain, but to recognize that it was never tied to you in the first place. Yes there is a ball and a chain, but there's no last link on the chain to your leg. You can literally walk away. It's straight but it's odd, but you can walk. You can walk away from the imprisonment that never was your heritage. It was only accidentally there because there were hundreds of years, even now thousands of years where no one knew what to do about it. Whereas two thousand years ago, there were men and women who knew exactly what to do about it and they freed themselves and they did well.

This quality comes out where the personality becomes differentially prismed by a conscious time/space that uses a language that continuously opens up. A language for which the dictionary is constantly growing. There are some cults in our time who pride themselves on using dictionaries to find the meanings of words and that's like a totally dead end process. A poet who has to go to a dictionary to find out what a word means is a mere versifier on his way down. A living language is learned by having, it's like learning music, you hear someone play it, you hear someone speak that living language and you get used to the expansiveness of it. And so after awhile, just by being free and unknowing, swimming and floating in that, you acquire the evocative taste and sense of just doing it. It's like the way children learn language in the first place. Little babies don't study grammars. They jabber and in their jabbering, they learn to speak. And so if my language to you sounds like jabber, play with it. It will do its stuff. And there'll come successive thresholds where you will be able, on your own, no one will have to tell you; you won't have to look up in any kind of a book, you don't have to go to some other gurus, or even think that there is a guru. Because all of that is a sociative extraneousness. I have to make up a Joycean word, extranianity. It is so far away that's it not even away, it just is not. And you will notice successively that when you hear other people speak, you hear a certain kind of a cardboard quality. And then you begin checking yourself that you want to say something a little more refined than you used to say it and you begin to change. And those little nudges over, the gibberish comes into play as beautiful small voiced sentences, and you're on your way.

When Arnold Toynbee, in his study of History, trying to understand, not what the History of this or that was but what is the History of History, brought a remembering consciousness to, not the integral object (a History) but to the differential flow of History as a super conscious process, let's study it. When he comes to his seventh volume of the study of History, about universal states and universal religions. He says all civilizations that we're able to look at in History, all died. And they all exhibited the same kind of stages. And the last stage before their death was declared was that there were universal states that were tyrannies, and universal religions that claimed that they alone had truth. And in this, towards the end of his seventh volume, he quotes Thucydides because it's apparent when one gets familiar with this whole range and this whole realm that Thucydides put his finger on something indelible more than even he knew. He comes at the same time, he is of the same generation as Socrates and Sophocles. And they put their fingers on the same thing at the same time. It's like an indelible quality. And after the break we'll come back and we'll look at the quotation.

PART TWO

Let's come back. Let's come back to a theme that we've talked about and returned to, and on returning to it again and again, you can see now that this is a process of remembering. Literally, Isis the giver of life, puts back together Osiris who is the God of immortality, of life eternal, in that his death does not stay put. He doesn't stay dead. He is re-membered, which means he comes back to life. That any time Isis puts Osiris back together, he lives again. Now it's true that there is an esoteric glitch in this, the one part she cannot find is his penis. The penis of Osiris is eaten by a very strange fish that lives in the Nile, the muddy Nile River. And it's a fish that is physically blind, cannot see. And over the millions of years that this blind fish has lived in the Nile River, it has developed a kind of a radar which it generates by its body, an electrical radar. And so like a bat, using sound waves, this fish uses a body magnetic wave to navigate and to see. So that when esoterically, Osiris lives again, he has no penis until he is brought into conjunction with Isis who supplies that aspect to him by her whole reality with him. It became an esoteric mystery in two thousand years ago when the penis Osiris, the re-membered ability to consummate the fructification of life again, became the fish Symbol of early Christianity, so called. There are a lot of esoteric mysteries that are there. And someone can go into them, but you could never go into these kinds of things in a clumsy way. Clumsy language doesn't work. The syntactical complexities of a magical language, of a Visionary language, tax the ability of representation to operate, especially because there's no capacity for representational vocabulary, not just names, nouns, or relationalities, verbs or as a predicate or the kind of prepositions or adjectival forms or adverbial forms, but all of those kinds of language fall like a rain of detritus from the swirl of a conscious use of language. Dictionary vocabularies are sloughed off like old dead skins by live poets. By visionaries. So that you find radical changes in language, radical changes from time to time. And we live in such an era now where the English language is changing radically. Thirty years from now people will speak in this way. They'll look at the artifacts from the twentieth century like village stuff, handicrafts, quaint. Not very useful. For one thing all of the context are so small, people are still thinking in terms of bank accounts and geography. I can't tell you how wide the Cosmos is; we don't know. But it's wider than anything.

The kind of language that was evolved two thousand years ago was language which so beggared the previous meaning, that there was another layer, another level of meaning, a whole other, like a parfait, whole other layer was brought into play and this further layer was called allegory. But in between an allegorical level and a material level, a representational level, where words are cognate to things, and of the level where words have another meaning, a hidden and different meaning. Allegory, metaphor, complexities that build. The relationship between those levels of meaning is very mysterious. And it's mysterious because in the integral cycle, even though all of Ritual, all of Myth and all of Symbol can be co-opted into an imprisonment and even what one takes of nature can be co-opted into that, never the less, there is still an aspect, an element of nature that is not co-opted and that's the mystery of nature. The mystery of nature cannot be co-opted. No one can get to it. The early wisdom was that because you cannot get to it, it's not objectively available, you can't have it except indirectly. You can't perceive it, so you have to have an apperception of it and so the strategy that men and women of wisdom used was to prepare a context whereby the mysteriousness of nature would be invited to come in, to come in to play. And a circle of ceremony would be made with the Ritual foundation and the Mythic overlay and the Symbolic conception, and all of this integral construct was left open to receive the mystery of nature. Something unknown is invited to come into play here with what we do. So that one of the earliest forms of prayer, of invocation (open hands), it's called the Orans posture or gesture. One is pointedly open to receive.

What is the most fundamental physiological material that one can receive in the universe? And that is the photon. It's hard to receive electrons knowingly. And when you know by nuclear physics that every electron has a hole and that you have to receive not only the electron but the hole, otherwise there's no current. It's very difficult, but everyone can receive light, even plants can receive light. Sun light, star light. There is such a thing a galactic light.

This quality of receiving that photon, the photon energy, is the very mystery of the gift of life of Isis and the re-membered Osiris must be open to receive that light and that's why there's no physiological penis. Because his re-memberedness is now an openness exactly where it would have been closed off, had he remained a physiological material being, now he is re-membered, but he is differentially open, exactly in his sexuality, in his regenerativeness, he's open. So that instead of being a member, the fourteenth member that would be a part of that then unit, Osiris, the re-membered Osiris has thirteen parts plus an openness which is the zeroness, which is the mystery of nature. So that the re-membered Osiris is many times more powerful than the original Osiris. And this of course is one of the mysteries for The Satan. The Satan never understands, never gets it. The Satan is always stupid about power, thinks that power is having the thing, whereas power is in participating in the openness of exchange. And The Satan never understands that.

The most poignant, beautiful, brilliant delivery of that in world literature is in The Book Of Job. The Book Of Job begins that there comes a day when everyone presents themselves before the Lord. And of course The Satan comes and is asked right away, all the time, right away, who are you? Where do you come from? And his reply is always the same, not his, its. Its reply is always the same, I come from Earth, I'm the honcho on Earth, I'm It, I'm The It of what counts of power. And he's asked, Oh you come from Earth, do you know my servant Job? Yeah, I know about Job, what about him? He's the finest there is on Earth. Well so you say, turn him over to me. And so the interrogation in its filigree comes down because The Satan never understands that the eternal occurrencing of Job is because he has an unending prayer of exchange with the Lord. His openness to God is always open and it is never a thing. Not only is it not a thing, so that it would have an integral objectivity so it could be lost, but on a deeper level, it's also not a logical relation like plus, minus, times, divided, equals, whatever. Because those relationalities logically are things also and must be kept track of as things. It extends the family resemblances, as Vitkinstein used to say. You have to take a lot of things into consideration that you wouldn't. But the great wise writer of The Book Of Job, the teacher of righteousness, understands that deeper than any kind of logical argument, The Book Of Job has logical arguments from three friends of Job, including his wife makes a fourth. From all four corners, and they become very precise, there's three different waves of these four focusing in ever finer on Job. And the whole quality of their logicality is that you're suffering and therefore you must have done something to make you earn this suffering. They have a basic belief in causality. Look at this horrendousness you are suffering, you must have done something wrong. And Job's prayer without end is to maintain his openness, because he knows that he has done nothing wrong at all. His pride is also the very point on which he is saved. The mystery is right there. He knows he has done nothing wrong so that all of this has an error of injustice. But the deep, deep, deep, deep, esoteric wisdom in there is that he pridefully identifies the nothing as something. That he did nothing, therefore that nothing is a something. And he has to learn to let go of the pride of thinking that he is innocent because he did nothing and that that was some kind of negative action, and therefore had some kind of registry as an objectivity. And he refines himself that last little iota and he lets it go. He lets go the idea that he did nothing and that that was a non action. A true non action is not even considering it as a nothing. It's an esoteric point.

The zeroness counts, but cannot be counted, because all of the powers above the simple level of digital correspondence factors zero orders in all the time. And whether it's like the holes with the electrons, or the zeroes with one, you cannot have a movement of language beyond the unit without factoring it in. So that two thousand years ago, coming back to the Prajna-Paramita-Ratna-Guna-Samcaya-Gatha again, this kind of language: 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.

The Historical Buddha never called himself a Buddha. He referred to himself as Tathagata which translates as suchness gone. Tatheta means the fundamental stuff of stuff. It means the sub-atomic particle extantness upon which anything is based except for the mystery of nature, it's not based on that at all. The Tao is not based on the Te. So that understanding that, one radically transforms the way in which you view power. Power can not be founded on ones or stuff or anything like that, it's founded on zero open. And that zero open is a source not of power as a thing but as a conduit of continuity of possibility. So possibility itself is part of the openness, the spectrum of openness of consciousness. Consciousness has eternal possibility. Every possibility has fractally an eternal possibility. So that when someone speaks of spiritual freedom, they're not talking about freedom of choice at all. They're talking about freedom to the nth degree. And that freedom to the nth degree becomes disclosed by Historical consciousness achieving Cosmos; achieves that kind of objectiveness. And that taste of truth, opens to such an extent that if you're at all confined, just hearing about that illumines the confinement and temporarily makes it uncomfortable. But every time one hears it in that way, it's like the differential obverse of the pearl. The pearl is secreted integrally, little by little and one builds a jewel. This is the integral obverse where little by little the layers of complication dissolve and leave only openness.

So that the form of ancient wisdom is exactly the obverse of the form of future wisdom. Ancient wisdom prepared an integral cycle of ceremony to invite, through the openness, the invitation. Whereas the future will be exactly the inside out of that; complete openness which invites the focus of thusness to come into play. The openness of the past was to invite the zero in, the openness of the future is to invite the one in; to make a place for one to be. For sure. And this quality begins because the Cosmos as an objective differential form has a cognate structure. The only cognate structure there is in all the Universe, there's only one other kind of differential object that's like the Cosmos and that's the Person. The Spiritual Person is the only other, the only cognate object to the true Cosmos. And so the Spiritual Person is a focus where we can arrive, all of us, each of us, every of us can arrive. But we cannot arrive there integrally. Because it's not there integrally. What's there integrally, at the best, is the center of the mind. And what happens is that the center of the mind is always aligned, always aligned in its objectivity to the center of the body. And what do you find at the center of the body? The center of the body you find the spinal column flowered into the brain. And when you look deeper, what's at the center of the spinal column? You find that central nervous system. And as you go deeper and deeper into that alignment, you can see that the mind and the body, when they're aligned and when that indelible geometry of focused, realized objectivity, integrally brought to focus, that the original basis upon which this entire vectoring is founded, is not on existence, but on the mystery of nature. The mystery of nature is primordial. It comes first. It has a priorness. So that zero is always prior to one. It's a bad habit to break, counting by ones, and the bad habit recursively, subconsciously introduces the oneness into zero, so that we get used to, even on high wisdom, of thinking, well zero is that zero there. When it simply, purely, truly is non-occurrence at all.

So that the transform from Symbol to Vision is literally the factoring in of the actuality of the zeroes. And one learns that you're not limited anymore to the arithmetical operation of integration alone, but a higher mathematic becomes available. Powers of numbers. Not just numbers, but even imaginary numbers become quite operative and effective.
That Person, that Personage, that art of the Person is one of the qualities that Thucydides, again and again, points to in his way, as being the key to what power is all about. And we're in a position this morning to sort of appreciate that that's what it is. Thucydides: On Justice Power And Human Nature. It isn't about political power as a subject matter that you would learn in a university, or you would practice in the wards of big cities. It's not that at all. It is a differential conscious spectrum of play that occurs in History. And so Toynbee, writing about Universal States and Universal Religions, saying that this is the ossifying state, this is where all civilizations die. They die because their living juice gets absorbed because the shell requires all of that energy to maintain itself and so they become hollow. About the same time that Toynbee was writing this, T.S. Elliott was writing one of his great poems called The Hollow Men, who's voices sound like randomly swaying straw in a meaningless wind.

Here's a quotation from Thucydides that Toynbee chose: "We cultivate the arts without extravagance and the intellect without effeminacy. Our politicians do not neglect their private affairs and the rest of us devote ourselves to business without loosing touch with politics. We are unique in regarding men, who take no part in politics, as being not merely unambitious, but unprofitable. And we are all sound judges, if not creative statesmen, in public affairs. In short, I maintain that the commonwealth of Athens is the school of Hellas (Hellas is greater Greece) and that the individual Athenian will never meet his equal for gallantry, self reliance, adaptability, versatility and distinction in whatever situation he may find himself. The proof that this is no empty boast but is sober reality, is afforded by the power of our country which is the fruit of our national character." This occurs in book two of Thucydides, and by the time you get to book six, seven and eight the confidence in that has all evaporated in Thucydides. It's one of the great points of his History. He starts out with all of the arrogance that the age of Pericles would declaim because they had arrived consciously at the focus where Men make History. And they lived long enough in that generation to see the tears of disappointment wash away the very forms of their being, the very tissue of that confidence. And what they were left with increasingly were phantoms where once before there were men in their pride. Athens became literally a ghost town, a ghost story. And at the very center of this occurrence, as Thucydides is asking it about History, is the center of the target, Thucydides as the great target of asking how does this happen. How does a whole population of men in their power, at their prime, become completely dissolved, in one generation, into almost nothing? Tatters of phantoms. His neighbor, Socrates, asked the very same question about the smaller differential objectivity, the Person. Especially, not just the person as an individual culturally; not just the individual as an existential ritual objectivity, or a mind symbolic objectivity, but let's take it to its nth degree, how about the Spiritual Person; how about the Art of the Person. And Socrates found what Thucydides found, that upon examination the Spiritual Personal objectivity of man dissolves also; it's not there also, it's gone also.

Time and time again in Plato's dialogues, you see Socrates take the great confident conclusions of the day, in the best examples, the teachers who were the most famous of their day - Protagoras, perhaps the most ostentatious of all the Sophists, Protagoras who's phrase "man is the measure of all things". But when you read Plato, Socrates dissolves Protagoras' position so that one is left with a very big quandary. The superficial power mongers in the Renaissance take Protagoras' position as if it's established by Plato - "man is the measure of all things". Leonardo da Vinci does that - "Man is the measure of all things". But the point in Thucydides, the point in Plato, the point in Socrates, in the Protagoras is that when you look closer, the closer you look, the more that all of this certainty dissolves, because the forms do not hold. Not only do they not hold, but they have this eerie capacity to show that they mold into some kind of radioactive demonic regression that demonizes us. And the very confidence that was the key to our glorious splendor is exactly the sabotaging element that reduces us back to the demonic. And so the question asked, Thucydides, Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, they all asked the same, variants of the same question: if this is so then who in the hell are we? What is man? What's going on here? This is supposed to be a fruition. And History is supposed to be the fruition of the fruition, and the more we get into it, the more that we realize that we are at best clever saboteurs of anything true or real. And so one of the great contemporaries of these great figures: Sophocles and Socrates and Thucydides, one of their great contemporaries was a man named Diogenes. He stripped off all of his clothes and he wore a barrel in the Agoura, downtown Athens. And the little quippy sayings of Diogenes, many of them still preserved. Diogenes, one of his quips was "man is a precocious biped without feathers".

And so the skepticism of Diogenes became a sabotaging key that increasingly was factored in and every time Greek wisdom wanted to talk about certainty, that kind of skepticism would come up at the same time. And it was like an ink blotch that would not go away. And every time you wrote something to make eternal sense, there were blotches there and it spread. It was like a recursive disease, it was like a virus in a computer, that the more that you used it then the more that the disease spread. So that the Greek confidence in the existence of life and mind completely dissolved just like in our time. Completely dissolved.

So that they had to develop wings to fly above the decaying mass. And the wings that they developed were the mystical insights of philosophers like Plotinus. And in Plotinus you never find that Periclean confidence, that arrogance that man is anything at all. But you find the more beautiful humble certainty that as long as we continue to discover, there'll be more and more to discover. And that in this process, we may save ourselves after all by creating the very conditions that never were.

Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize speech, which he put into his great novel A Fable. The old general, The Fable is set in World War One, in 1918, the false peace. The old general says "I know man, that's why we fight these wars, to give him something to do, to keep going". And the man says to the old general, the wise mysterious figure says "I'm not like you, I have confidence in man, because I know that man is not finished." And because he's an ongoing possibility, there may come a time when man discovers or evolves some way to be beyond his tragic destiny, beyond his own self sabotaging shit, he may learn how to not do that and be free.

And so that's the confidence that's here in this education. It's the confidence that's there in the personality of Benjamin Franklin. That as long as we continue discovering, generating new possibility, bringing as much into play as we can, keeping to a minimum the regressive qualities that are always going to come up, that even though I can't keep track of everything all the time, if there is a large enough population of us, critically discussing all the time, there's a population that's consciously able to navigate History, not because they know it, but because they know that they don't yet know and they're willing to try to find out.

And so the Benjamin Franklin personality does not belong in Periclean Athens at all, but belongs in something that was not yet then called the United States of America. Called that great experiment. Not the constitutional republic, that was a Roman thing. If you look at James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention, Jefferson was in Paris so Madison took detailed notes of every moment of every day and sent them off to Paris so Jefferson could follow it, could read. And another set was sent to Franklin who was old, he was in his eighties. And if you follow those notes, you see that Madison is keeping track of the fact that this is a completely regressive activity. It's like trying to redo the English Empire version of the Roman Empire version of Periclean Athens. So the first thing that happens when Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and those, that hunting group come into play, with the election of 1800, the very first thing they do is that they change completely so that the form is not a constitutional republic but is an open ended experiment in finding out. And the difference between the United States in 1801 and the United States in 1799 is monumental, monumental. Mean time they managed to put a chunk of openness, concerning the Person, into the constitution so that it would not work in a regressive way. The chink is called The Bill Of Rights. Not of the State, but of the individual.

So that this quality, this is a Benjamin Franklin ploy. A Benjamin Franklin ploy is improve-ability is better than certainty. Because today's certainty may be a mill stone tomorrow. And it is a very deep subtle error to think of uncertainty as superior. To have uncertainty is a surreptitious form of arrogance. You can't have uncertainty. It's not a thing that you can have. So maintaining the possibilities, the range of discoverableness, the undiscovered country, is not discovered yet. And so exploration, the adventure of learning, as Alfred North Whitehead called it. We don't know but we're still capably of inquiring. And so let us continue. So that education turns out to be a prayer without end. A secular prayer without end, that's stateless. And someone who is constantly improving themselves, a la Benjamin Franklin, does not participate in the Peloponnesian War. Does not participate in party politics in the age of Caesar. Lilly Ross Taylor's great little monograph that has been forgotten for a long time.

When he protested in his beautiful book call De republica, Cicero trying to bring Plato's Republic back into play in a Rome that was fast sliding into Caesarism, the opponents raided Cicero's house, killed him, cut his hands off, took his hands to the podium in the Roman Forum where all the Senators meet and nailed his hands to the podium to show everyone graphically that if you oppose us, this is how you will end up. Whereas someone like a Tacitus is of that group of people, mystical because they understood you have to come from the mystery of nature first, saw that the hands had been stupidly nailed so that they were grabbing the podium and that the invisible Cicero was in fact there and always going to be there. And you get a different reading of that event. Instead of being warned off, you're encouraged to take that alignment and put your hide on the line.

We're going to come back next week to Tacitus and to Hannah Arendt. In Tacitus, I think it's very good just to go to chapter one, From Augustus to Tiberius. The big problem with tyrannies is who's going to be next, who's going to follow. And Tiberius Caesar was the adopted son of Augustus. He never had, nor could he trust for his own family lineage to be handed down. Oddly enough Augustus Caesar did not trust his own blood line. His own daughter was the worst whore in Rome. He was convinced that by adopting Tiberius on the basis of imperial insight and power, that he had chosen someone who would have this Cosmic advantage. And of course Tiberius, believing that, took upon himself that his closest advisors would be astrologers. And he would test them, because he would take them to a tower in one of his country estates with the intent of killing them once they got to the top of the tower. And he would have the astrologers cast their horoscope while they're going up. And the only astrologers he kept were those who refused to go any further. Yeah.