History 10
Presented on: Saturday, September 4, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History 10, which means that we're balancing ourselves. We're about to complete History and we're going to move to the final phase of Science. And Science is either very easy or very difficult depending on how we move out of History. And our technique has consistently been to use a pair of books, sort of like posts that make the goal. So that the pairs of books are establishing kind of a goal post for us. Not that we have to score but that we have to play a good game. We don't have to understand these pairs of books as if they were like academic texts we are studying to pass exams and things. But they are more to give us a parenthetical threshold which we can approach.
And in higher mathematics, the ability to approach either 0 or 1 has been refined to an nth degree of exactitude. The whole science of calculus is based on the ability to refine a calculation of approach to 1 or 0. And this quality of our 21st century consciousness is something which this education process is attempting to awaken in you; a quality of conscious regard for yourself, for the material of our lives, for the quality of Historical context which generally surrounds us so distant from us as to be almost as distant as a sky, and the figures of History to be almost as distant as unknown gods. And that we become haphazard victims of unknowing underneath this kind of immensity of the Historical Mythological sky. And a great deal of the helplessness that comes in our sense of life is that we just don't understand what's going on. We don't have a chance to ever make a position for ourselves where we know where it is that we are, where have we come from, where is it that we're going, and what is this place and what is this life that we are living.
The old Medieval poem in English, written about 1300 years ago likened a person's life to a banquet in a great hall at night, and that there are high windows up on the wall on both sides which are opened slightly and a bird flies in from the night and flutters around aimlessly for a little while in the hall and then flies out into the night again. And that we are living lives like this; that when we try to look up from the daily grind, or look up from the entertaining spiel that keeps us going, whenever we have moments where we look up, where we presence ourselves to notice, we realize that we are in some very strange situation called life. And we get curious, do other people sense this? Yes they do. Have other people sensed this for a long time? Yes they have. In fact almost any human being who reaches a threshold of being able to feel about their feelings reaches that quality of wonderment. We call that ability to feel about our feelings, sentience, when we become sentient. Long before we're intelligent, we're sentient. Little children can feel about their feelings and they wonder. Even animals can be domesticated to such an extent that they can begin almost to feel about their feelings. And so animals like little children also dream. The ability to begin dreaming is the rudimentary origins of sentience, of being able to feel about feelings.
And this quality when it matures becomes the ability to think about thinking. And when we can think about thinking, we call that intelligence. And intelligence is a higher order, it's more powerful than sentience. Sentience is more broad and more primordial, feeling certainly is that. Intelligence is further integrated and so it's more pointed. And it has more power in that it is pointed like the tip of a pen or a pencil or a paint brush; intelligence is able to write and the writing of intelligence is what thought is. Thought is the ability to write intelligently, what we think about what we are thinking about. And it models itself, as any natural process would, on what went before, and what went before was how feeling felt about feeling. And when we take a look intelligently at how feeling felt about feeling, we realize that what was most conspicuous is that there are certain images, which when we behold them, largely they're visual images which we see, sometimes they're audio images, sometimes they're olfactory images, a smell, sometimes a touch. Some sensate image comes to us and releases a memory. Marcel Proust wrote a huge work called A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, The Remembrance of Things Past, in seven huge volumes. One of the greatest works of literature ever anywhere. And The Remembrance of Things Past explores how an image will evoke from us a memory which is complete. We can relive, we can go back into that memory via the gateway, the threshold of the image and suddenly we are there again and we relive and there's a different quality that's there.
And so when intelligence begins thinking about how we feel about feeling and thus think about thinking, there are moments when we come into what we call a dejà vu. We have been where we are now before. We have seen this before, we have heard this before. And what is released in us is this quality that we cannot remember when but it wasn't in this life. Something is familiar, someone is familiar. The puzzlement I know you, somehow I know who you are or I know where this is. These mysterious, these secret kinds of qualities are indications to us that the forms, the forms of images are not really objective but they have a fluidity to them. In fact images do not come boxed in forms, but images flow. It's almost as if the level at which images occur is more of a process than a stability. And yet it has a kind of a quality of being able to be stable rather quickly. It's almost as if it were not so much the flow of water but it was the flow of crushed ice, like a slush.
And so our image base has this kind of fluidity where just a little bit of heat and energy makes it flow faster. Or just a little bit of distance, the coldness of an abstraction freezes it and it becomes quite solid. This quality of imagery, this slush, this is the mythic horizon, the mythic level. It's a mythic horizon because the earliest dealings of it, the earliest that human beings like ourselves dealt with this, dealt with images which thinking about thinking had gone back to inspect and found that these images flow or they coagulate depending on a kind of an intentional energy. If we give them energy they flow more, if we withhold energy they freeze dry and they become a position. And the earliest that human beings dealt with this was about 6000 years ago. And written language begins to emerge at that time. And written language, written images that became words are the first attempt to try to abstract, to make the flow of images a little colder by abstraction and freeze them into these hieroglyphs, freeze them into these characters, into these pictographs.
But just as intelligence, being an integral process uses a previous model for its operations; thinking uses the operations of feeling as like a template for itself, intelligence follows sentience. Intelligence models itself on sentience to develop itself. And yes it does go further in a way, it does go differently, but it goes in a very similar way. It follows the same characteristics, the method of integration. Thinking condenses more than feeling, goes further along the path of integration. So when pictographs, when hieroglyphics, when Chinese characters first occur, when a written language first begins to occur, it follows a previous pattern. And the previous pattern in every case was that people learned to count before they learned to make alphabets. They learned to count, in fact, before they made pictographs.
So that we know now, by the beginning of the 21st century, that before there is a literacy, there is human beings developed a capacity which is called numeracy. That is they could not only count, but they could write the numerals. And that in fact, in a test case, the development of literacy in Sumeria, Sumerian literacy developed about 5500 years ago. But numeracy was viable in the Sumerian region for more than 3000 years before they were literate. So that numeracy precedes literacy by many thousands of years, hundred generations of people. So that the model for a written language in its original form followed the integral path that writing numbers and counting, that membering the world had already done for many thousands of years.
Now when we look at this counting, the counting always concerns the mundane practical operation of business. It's literally ledger keeping. And in Sumeria, when the great archeologists were working in the 19th century in the early 20th century and they were uncovering all kinds of interesting monuments, interesting buildings and cities and gold and sarcophagus and all of this stuff. And they would throw all of the earth that they dug out onto big heaps, they became great slag heaps next to the revealed treasures. Somewhere about the middle of the 20th century, a few die hard archeologists went to the slag heaps to sift further to see if anything small and valuable had been thrown away. And they found hundreds and thousands of little geometric figures out of clay; little squares, little triangles, little circles, little stars that had been thrown away because it was part of the slag from the recognizable treasures. And it turns out that these geometric shapes, and some of them not so fundamentally geometric but actually shaped so that one could see that these were little clay sheep. They were abstract cut outs of a sheep or of cattle or of bottles of oil or whatever it was they were dealing with. And that these little toy cut out shapes were the monopoly money of a literate human culture thousands of years before Sumeria ever developed writing. And that towards the end of the numeracy period, because business was booming and there were so many, and you would have maybe two or three hundred that would be sold on one lot consignment, they had to have something to contain two or three hundred of these little chits. So there were these pouches, these clay pouches that had in them, like a pita pouch, all the things in this transaction to this person; all of the things from this transaction to that company. And eventually it got so cumbersome, because there were so many, the pouches couldn't hold them. So they got to keeping a kind of table of contents on the outside of the pouch and they would mark down: these are sheep, and here are marks meaning, not just 1, 2, 3, this mark means 100. And there are three of these marks by the sheep, so there are 300 sheep, so we don't have to put 300 chits in the pouch, in fact we don't have to put anything in the pouch, we just have to have the cover of the pouch. And that's how literacy began to emerge out of numeracy. Because there began to be so much good business, there was a whole vocabulary of things for whom the signs were now recognizable, not by everyone but by quite a large population of businessmen, of entrepreneurs. And of course if you're a farmer or you're a husbandman, you want to keep track and make sure that you're paid for everything they take.
And so that numeracy sprang into literacy when the numbers were taken away and you began to put these characters together and the pouches became the little clay tablets. And it's amazing because the original clay tablets for literacy are not large clay tablets, those come later. They are clay tablets which are small and fit in the palm of the hand. So that the earliest habit of someone who was literary was literally to be able to grasp what they said. And so deep is the traditional trust and confidence in human beings, that what worked to get us here will work to get us further. That in Plato's time in Greece, when a philosophic argument was delivered and was finished, that person delivering it would clench their fist as if to say graphically, did you get it.
This quality, this indelibility of the way in which intelligence, thinking, the symbolic mind, follows the feeling tones of the way in which language emerges out of experience. All of this, when it comes to developing larger civilizations, not just Sumerian city states, but even 5000 years ago already, there were the beginnings of alliances of cities. So that you would have urban leagues and eventually there were leagues that were comprised of many alliances of many cities. And about 2400 BC a man named Sargon put together the first great international civilization. His civilization ran from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea and eventually even went up to the Black Sea. His civilization, Sargon of Akkad made what he called the Fertile Crescent, that everything in the swath of civilization, everyone spoke two languages. They spoke the language of the region and they spoke the great language of the empire. And so the model of a world empire was established there in the Akkadian Middle East about 2400 BC. The idea of that kind of human organization spread very quickly. Within 200 years, you find the first Chinese Dynasty. And the first Chinese Dynasty in terms of Chinese History is almost unrecognizable, in fact the Sha Dynasty is called a phantom dynasty, 2200 BC. Because the qualities of the Sha Dynasty are not very Chinese. They're somewhat Chinese but they're not very Chinese. The first great Chinese Dynasty, the first Chinese empire that has a Chinese tone that one can recognize is the Shang Dynasty about 1700 BC. That five hundred year dynasty before the Shang, the Sha Dynasty, when you look at what was important to them, the way in which it emerged, the qualities that it had, the tone of those people, you can see that they're partly Chinese and they're partly Middle Eastern. That the origins of Dynastic China are based upon their version of Sargon's Fertile Crescent Empire about 200 years before. That there is a deep Mesopotamian quality to the original dynastic development of civilization in China.
Now, we live in a time where these great historical realizations are tutoring us to expect that we have not only found great wonderments by understanding the new past, that the past is no longer what it was, it's no longer what had been passed down to us traditionally. That our new past is much more complex, much more revealing, is in fact a historical process that is so rich that it will take several hundred years at least to be able to digest the rich diet that is now before us. But we're noticing something which Proust already noticed, which Sargon already noticed, which the Sha Dynastic Chinese already noticed, and that is when you develop a historical sense, it not only changes the past, it radically changes the future. Because when you can re-cut the past, it makes the future a more open possibility. And that when you realize the future and the past are related, they're like a pair, they're like a parallel pair which work exactly in the opposite way so that the future and the past are like complementarities and that where they come together, their interface, where they're grasped is a present moment so exact that we have an English word for it now, we called it Presence. That one can not only become Present, you can, like feeling about feeling or thinking about thinking, you can become Present about Presence. And that this is what meditation is for. This is what contemplation does. This is what prayer hopes to evoke. This is the high conscious quality of presencing and that this is the fulcrum, the axis upon which a conscious person is able to occupy time and space in their life in a conscious way, and that consciousness swirls to fill all of the time and all of the space so that you have a five dimensional continuum of conscious time space. And that when a man or a woman begins to live personally in a conscious time space, they are aware that they not only cognize things but that they re-cognize relationalities. That we recognize relationalities as well as are able to point to things. And that conscious recognition, which we call colloquially remembering, that remembering is the process by which History works and not by the process of just membering.
So the title of today's presentation is Not Membering, But Remembering, remembering. But to think that remembering, that memory is somehow the same process as the little clay pita pouches of numeracy, and that we're just putting little marks on the clay tablets outside, and that's what memory is, is to cling to a 5000 year old habit that went out of date in Sargon's time. And the fact that it's still around is extraordinary, it's unbelievable. To mistake memory in that way is a clinical sign of psychotic regression. If someone were a doctor of civilization, you would simply admit them immediately to the ward. There are so many people packing the ward that we call the planet the ward. A saying in one place is that Earth is well known as a home of deviants.
This quality, this quality of having the insight for memory is an activization of insight going into play and rearranging into new relationalities what had been previously a stable structure in thought. That thinking had already come up with a stable way to think about; that these images had been arranged into a pattern which thinking then could cognize. The sign for three hundred with the sign for sheep means 300 sheep. That kind of representational language is based upon the template of numeracy, of membering the world. And it's alright as long as you're in business, in business on a small scale; as long as you're living on a very small scale it's O.K. But if you begin to live on a larger scale, like you would like to inhabit the entirety of your life, much less the entirety of many lives, then you have to stop counting on your fingers. Then you have to let that quality which is very precise in intelligence, when it's dealing with things and their representation, when it's just membering the world, but you have to let that go, you have to transform that into a higher intelligence, into a higher capacity which involves the dimension of consciousness added to time space, which involves adding insight to thinking and feeling and sensation.
So that when all of those are brought into play together; one word that has come down for about 4000 years that has a quality, whether it's China or the Mid East or it's the European tradition or it's the African development of Egypt, wherever it is, even in the new world where the Chinese influence on the early Mayans from about 400 AD, they have this kind of a quality too, the English term is quintessence, the quint-essential. That there is such a thing as an essentiality and then there is such a thing as a quintessentiality which is the essential of the essential. And quint in our English Indo-European kind of linguistic, quint is always five. It's always the fifth element. In theater it's called the fifth business. It's where the magic of relationality is seen to be working here now. That our quality of presencing our presence has a magical quality. It's the magic of consciousness, it's the profound transformational tone of personal presence. That when someone who is personally present is in a time space that time space reverberates to their tone. They have a charisma; what they do has a resonance. So that if they touch something, it isn't just that thing, it now has that energy.
Even on primordial tribal level there are things that are charged with mana. There are Australian Aborigine stones that have that spirit, that come from the dream time. That that primordiality was not something that was achieved just now through some kind of very high achievement of intelligence gaining a transform to insight and becoming quintessential, but somehow that was already there but was there hidden. Where was it? It was in nature. That nature had a mysterious quality that could not be indexed by numeracy. That count precisely as we may, nature herself had mysteries, had a mysteriousness. The ancient Egyptian way of speaking of this is that Isis had a veil. That who Isis really was, was always behind a veil. And that simply to see the veiled Isis was the best that insight consciousness as a quintessential opening of thought and feeling and sensate experience, when all of those were all opened, what was revealed from insight, thinking, feeling and sensation together as a square, what was revealed is that the mysteriousness of nature operated in a way that was very similar to the way in which insight operated. That nature's mystery was a kind of primordial consciousness, because it operated very similar to consciousness.
The metaphor that came to people about 300 years ago was the metaphor that light as an energy, when it enters into material things, becomes heat. So that light when it goes into the materiality which is the lowest level of existence, when it goes into the clay, it heats it up and changes that clay to a ceramic. That light in the form of heat transforms the Earth into a vessel. So that the idea of transformation is intimately tied up with the development of pottery. The entire mystery of nature is revealed in this very simple process. And especially of interest is not the pottery which one would make to make bowls or cups or wine casks or whatever it is. The deeper mystery is in those clay pita pouches that became the vehicles that writing as a literate form were developed; the Cuneiform tablets, those kinds of vehicles.
When we look to see, what was that original, what was that earliest sense when the insight and the thought and the feeling and the sensation were opened so that the square of those four functions were not sealed off as an opaque piece of clay, but were just left open as if it was a window, as if it were a threshold. The film director Antonioni used to carry around with him a 35m slide with no slide in it and from moment to moment see something, he's hold that up to look through to get how this looks in the calibration of the openness of his artistic seeing. And what was there was no longer just Monica Vidi looking blank against an industrial wasteland with a little bit of puffs of smoke behind, but was like the beginnings of some kind of poetic image for a film called Red Desert, about the ennui of the nostalgic nothingness of modern life. And that there was something in that in the mystery of nature because the modern nostalgia for nothingness was an evoked dejà vu memory from the origins of civilization. That somehow all of this important and imposing as it is comes out of a fundamental nothingness and will go back into that fundamental nothingness after a certain time. And that one cannot have confidence in any kind of industrial strength in this world at all. The confidence has to be in the nothingness and how does one do that.
When we look at the beginnings of the way in which the Egyptian development of Hieroglyphic language, in a book published by Stanford University Press, just released, Re-membering Osiris: Number Gender the Word in Ancient Egyptian Representational Systems. Consequently the notion that being is an island or episode between nothingness and nothingness must also be called into question. Remember the Medieval hall, the banquet hall with windows open to the night and the bird that comes in, comes from who knows where and goes who knows where. That image sequence in a literary form is called a trope and the trope of that Medieval image relationality, that whole episode comes from the Gospel of St. John. In the Gospel of St. John, a man named Nicodemus, trying to find where do we really come from, where do we really go, hears a chance to ask Jesus what is this. And the answer given to him was that the wind blows, where it comes from and whither it goes no one knows. The answer was mysterious just like nature, mysterious just like high insight consciousness. Not to say that no one knows, but that knowing itself is inadequate to understand where it came from and where it goes. Because the understanding that matures to the point to where it could begin to remember where it came from and to remember where it goes, would be transformed to such an extent that it would be continually transforming and then it would lose interest in a small question that was frozen in the form of where does it come from and where does it go. It's a little bit of high Dharma to have a break.
We're talking about how language forms itself, not out of a cloud of gibberish like a baby would talk, but exactly the opposite, a written language forms itself out of thousands of years of numeracy which precede it and condition it. So that written language has at its very origins a notational designation which is purely representational and only in the ongoing concourse of using it did the mysteriousness of the process reveal itself to those who were using it that they were playing. I think we have to say it in this way: that they were playing with Divine fire. They did not understand, they didn't know. So language, the discovery of what playing with language brought out of human beings was much like the discovery of what fire brought out of human beings half a million years before.
That human species who first played with fire was before our species even occurred in evolutionary history. That species, Homo Erectus, grew and spread over a great deal of the Eurasian Asian land masses. The earliest Homo Erectus skeleton that we have is from the Rift Valley, the northern Rift Valley, and it dates back about 2,000,000 years. Not at all a primitive cave man. It was a male figure who was about 17, was almost 6 ft. tall. The skeleton shows that he was an incredibly fast runner, was physically very adept, and was walking alone, therefore he could survive in a world 2,000,000 years ago, on his own. Very formidable. Already a man. But the skeleton also shows that the species Homo Erectus could not talk like we talk. In fact the skeletal record, as we've talked about before, shows that even though the species that came in between Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens, which we are, that species called Homo Neanderthal also could not talk the way we talk, even though the brain case, the brain capacity of Homo Neanderthal, surprisingly, was larger than ours. But they could not talk. And that where there was extra brain matter for Homo Neanderthal from us, where we have the advantage is that we have extra brain matter in our spinal column. Our whole neural system is superior to that. Not just the brain but the whole neural system. And that especially is the thoracic region of the spine we have several times as much capacity for neural tissue as any other species before us including Neanderthal. And a woman about twenty years ago asked a very pointed question, what is all this extra neural capacity for in the thoracic region of the spinal column. And that region is a region that controls breathing, breath. Because in order to speak, you have to have an enormous neurological capacity for breath control. To speak like I'm speaking now, I have to modify my breathing dozens of times per second continuously in order to be able to even physiologically give the pressure and tone and variations to air to come through a larynx which then delivers sound modulated enough to be a language which we can speak and hear as we do.
So that all of us share a most miraculous gift. We can differentiate the natural process of breathing into a prismatic fractical delicacy; a lace of potential so that we can talk to each other. We can sing together. And this is the very essence of a Divine choir. What is the closest in all religions that have a God? There is a Divine choir. In Dante's Paradiso, the legions of angels in paradise are like petals of a great celestial rose and those closest to the Divine presence are Divine choirs singing. When you look at the large beautiful Lotus Sutra scrolls from China, and later on then also from Japan and wherever that East Asian civilization spread, when you look at those scrolls of the Lotus Sutra, all of those figures in those scrolls are all studying. They're reading, they're writing, they're speaking to one and other, they're singing together also. In fact that whole capacity for a differential flowering is not positioned in some kind of static stable way, but is put into the highest dynamic stream lined motion; is like a form that is thrown into infinity and as it is thrown into infinity it differentiates in such a way that it's stability as a thing evaporates into the moisture of a full speed comet of potentiality.
So that when explorers, at the beginning of the 20th century in 1900, went to the middle of the Gobi Desert, went to the wastelands that for 1000 years had been a sand blown desert, they found trading cities that had been abandoned when the Gobi Desert became too dry to even sustain caravans. And one of those outposts is called Dongwang, which today has a huge museum. Dozens and dozens of caves have survived in Dongwang. The buildings are all gone but the caves survived, and in the caves the decoration of the caves is famous, it's a Dongwang style. And there you have almost like a Matisse action painting. You have greens and blues and dashes of red and yellow and these are like the stream lined fragments of figures who are floating in an unknown ether and they are bringing gifts of flowers and song and this treasure of something that goes even beyond a five dimensional conscious/time/space. They're evoking the actuality that we don't just exist in time space, and we further are not even limited to a conscious/time/space, but we have other dimensions beyond. Indeed. But that these other dimensions require a higher energy. And it's not like a metaphysics that requires a higher energy, it's a higher energy of the differential speed with which the heat of things glows, and the light of conscious things gleans and out of that comes a further state. And that further state is disclosed in a creative transformative medium known as History. That History is not somebody keeping accounting ledgers on clay pita shells. That's not it. A chronological recording archive is not the basis for History. It's a ritual level that already needs to be transformed by feeling sentience, and that transformed further by thinking intelligence, and that transformed even further and radically by insight consciousness. But there is another transform that goes even beyond that and that's the transform, not out of the body and not out of the mind, but the transform of the person. Because the person is an objective form, but an objective form in a differential mode, not in an integral mode.
We've used a metaphor several times, a person's like a prism. That when insight is introduced into a mental, into a symbol, it's like introducing light back into something so that it glows, it shines, it becomes illuminated. And that conscious insight light, even when it comes to the clay of existential things, they glow as if they were warm, as if they were heat, they're psychically hot. A psychic can pick it up. The heat of the body, the light of the symbol, the illuminative light of the symbol is different in the spiritual person. The spiritual person, not only has the heat and that kind of light that makes it illumined, but there is like the function of a prism where the entire spectrum is revealed. Why would you think that in Genesis, in the first book of the Old Testament, when Moses is looking for some way to convey that God has made a new kind of relationality with man called The Covenant, that the indication of that covenant was a rainbow. Why would that be; why would that be chosen of all things? Because a rainbow is the spectrum that the spiritual person as a prism releases from its integral limitation. The rainbow is capable of all colors. And while Abraham makes a covenant with God and has the, I think the translation of Genesis is that in order to commemorate that this Covenant is real, God sets his bow in the sky, his rainbow in the sky. But fourth generation down, the rainbow has transformed. It's no longer the rainbow that's up there in the clouds. It was up there in the clouds, it was that kind of distant for Abraham. But his great grand son, his son Isaac has a son named Jacob who has a son, in fact he has twelve sons, but the son of Jacob who inherits The Covenant is Joseph. And what does it say? Joseph is the man who wears the coat of many colors. He wears the rainbow.
So that there is a Historical development, there is an acquaintanceship which takes something that was out there and progressively makes it a part of the way in which we are in our lives. So that he who wears the coat of many colors, who wears the rainbow of Divine language, becomes an archetypal form that you find all over. The Druid Shaman who's operating in an Ireland of 2000 years ago wears a coat of many colors. So that it was a conscious symbol. He who is the poet of the people wears the rainbow cape. And you find someone like Yeats absolutely entranced by the fact that he could understand that it wasn't just a cape that you wear on the outside of your body, but that that rainbow cape goes into one's person. That you begin to have a whole spectrum of color within yourself and this is the artist. And that when the spiritual artist begins to live that kind of life, something else happens that never happened before, History becomes real. What they do actually not only happens in existence, it further happens in the kind of thinking mind with existence and further happens with the spiritual person who has a mind in a living body. Why else would there be all the concern with threes, with trinities, with Trismegistus? What is all this about in the first place? It's all about the tri-loca, it's all about the trinity, it's all about the three, it is so primordial that the Egyptian mathematical genius focused on the problem, a problem, the single problem. They never understood trigonometry but they understood one trigonometric proposition and that was how to find 2/3 of any number. There's a little Dover paperback called The Egyptian Mathematics, I think a man named Giddings.
The Egyptians learned to find 2/3 of any form, 2/3 of any quantity, 2/3 of any number. Because once you had 2/3 of that you could make a pair, 1/3 and 1/3. And when you had 1/3 and 1/3 the missing 3rd would reveal itself by the interplay of those two 1/3 together. So that the nuclear spiritual family was a mother, 1/3, a father, 1/3 and a discovered new 3rd, the baby, the Divine Child. What do you think that is? But only when this 1/3 and this 1/3 were in a paired harmony could the missing 3rd be discovered. Because the missing 3rd only emerged from an interchange between those two. Not a Yin Yang interchange but a Tao Te interchange; something more primordial, something fertile, something fertile. That just as insight can enter into a time/space object and liven it so that consciousness occurs, on a higher energy, the spirit can enter into a conscious form so that life occurs. Not life which has a limitation because it's existentially based, but a life eternal. Eternal life. This is what the Egyptians were getting at, trying to find 5000 years ago already, what it was in playing with language that they had found was happening to them. And 5000 years ago when they discovered that the mystery of nature had some kind of a relationship to the transformational consciousness and that the mystery of nature was like 1/3, the transformational consciousness was 1/3 and the other 3rd was an eternal life that was a mystery of the Cosmos. That nature's mystery and consciousness' mystery together, when they were fertile together, discovered that the Cosmos, eternal life, was mysteriously also real. Was amazing, was phenomenal.
All of these concerns which were there for the Egyptians, which were there for the Sumerians, which were there for the early Dynastic Chinese, all of these qualities, having vicissitudes through thousands of years of interplay, came to a crux about 500 years ago in Northern Italy in a period which one of our books that we're using, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, by Burckhardt. Because the Renaissance, the rebirth of learning. What was reborn? Yes learning was reborn. Well wasn't there learning before? There was a clumsy writing on clay kind of learning. What was rediscovered, the Renaissance, the rebirth of learning, was that there was such a thing as the mind having a consciousness of consciousness. That it was different from thought thinking about thinking. It was different from feeling, feeling about feeling. That there were similarities, but in among the similarities were also distinct differences. And just as thought was like a higher energy, thinking about thinking made it possible to index feeling so that feelings could be grouped together so that instead of having just an emotion one could have many variations of that emotion and more subtle variations of emotion become feelings, more refined. And that each feeling could also be even more refined so that you could have nuances of feeling.
So that Renaissance music is different from Medieval music. That Renaissance music is remarkably different from Medieval music. Renaissance music begins to have notation, musical notation where you're instructing the flute, you're instructing the string, you're instructing that instrument to play this in a certain mode with a certain pitch, with a certain tambour, in a certain time frame so that musical scale begins to develop and you get musical scales. You get a sense that the rediscovery that an octave is not just 8 notes in a block ascending, but that it is a scale, that an 8 note scale, this kind of tone coherence can be multiplied and you can have a musical instrument which is tuned to several sets of these octaves, like a piano is tuned to, I think, 11 octaves. Very sophisticated. The early harpsichords and so forth, less. And the earliest instruments even less. Never the less they had this development where the spirit began to be able to free itself from the numbness, the mumness of just being clay or of just being a kind of a fancy clay that could think. Became capable of very refined elegant singing and this was apparent.
And the Renaissance was this rediscovery that once upon a time men and women had had this level of sophistication and that it had been lost and therefore it had to be protected. And the best protection of it was not to lock it up in monasteries, that how it fell in the first place. Not to lock it up with the professional few, that's also how it fell, that's how it got lost. The Renaissance discovered that education was the only guarantee that it would not be lost. That you could not trust the wonderfully sophisticated few to protect it, that it belonged in the hands of whoever was attracted to it. That it was to be able to be communicated freely to whomever could hear it. That education became a public domain and not just the province of a monastic few or a rich court here and there scattered like islands in the night.
And as the Renaissance began to develop this and play with this, out of it came a realization, a conviction that part of the problem, part of the difficulty of how it got lost and how it would not get lost if it was kept in play had to do with the way in which the art of language was practiced as a personal spiritual capacity. They discovered that at the height of antiquity, at the apex of the most sophisticated that the classic ancient world got, the way in which men and women proved to themselves that they were spiritually masters of a creative language, was that they had the ability to write poetry spontaneously from themselves. But especially the kind of poetry which could be sung from themselves. And so the sacred hymn, the ability to pray in print and read it out loud of you own work became the alchemical acid test of whether you were a viable spiritual artist in you own life. Could you pull out of your life, your body, out of your mind, out of your vision the capacity to make an original poem of praise for god; an original hymn of thanks for life.
So that one of the first persons to understand this, yes in Italy, but a couple of hundred years before the official Renaissance, according to Burckhardt, the first person to learn that again was St. Francis of Assisi who as a young man was the best spontaneous spiritual poet that Italy had had for about seven or eight hundred years. He was a poetic genius. And when he rediscovered that capacity that the spontaneous spiritual poem, coming out of the whole spectrum and range of your spiritual, mental, physical life, that you addressed yourself in such a way that the medium of the world changed and instead of just being business as usual, like on pita package clay, became something radically different, it became History. That time itself was heated to a flow that it hadn't had before and it was just a kind of a slush. That time in the mind is still slush. But that time for a spiritual person flows, more than even just a liquid flows. It flows like a Cosmic gulf stream of the spirit. (something drops) Somebody's dropping the keys to the kingdom already. You're never going to get back to hell, just leave those keys.
This quality, if we can come back, you see the point is not there to be made, it's not there for me to remember to be made. The point is just growing spontaneously out of the language being delivered and my only concern is to remain a prismatic as possible and just let the language flow. When it happens that way, History is made because time changes. What before was limited to simply moving forward in step by step linear sequence, changes. It already had changed in the mind. The mind also instead of just having clock time has psychological time. The mind can lengthen a moment or can shorten moments. The mind's influence is famous, infamous to some people. When you're having a good time, time flows so fast you wonder where the time went, just like that little bird flying into the hall and flying out again. Where did time come from and where does it go. The ancient Egyptians said time is a form and that we keep track of time in the most fundamental way by the day, by the day. A night and some light, a day. And that if you have a set of seven days, that's like an octave of time. Whereas there're eight notes in the scale of music, there're seven notes, called days in the octave of the week. So that the music, the musical scale of time is the week. Or it can be any sequence, it can be by fives, it can be anything at all. But it happens a great deal in the traditions which we are still living in that it's seven, seven days.
The ancient Egyptian understanding, which finally was raised to a peak about 2000 years ago in the classical Greco-Roman world has a very similar kind of tone with the mind's ability to recognize that its lengthening of a moment or its shrinking of a moment has not at all changed the essential pace of time which can only move forward. Psychological time is elastic but it can only be elastic for the forward direction of time. Whereas the spiritual person recognizes that time is elastic, not only in its length, moving forward, but it is also elastic in going back and that the future is not necessarily limited to that same kind of blocky membering counting, even if you squeeze the members or you extend the members, you can dispense altogether with numbering as a linear set for the scale of time. For the spiritual person, one becomes free, radically free of time's constraint. And in doing so, this radical freedom of the individual, like an artist who is painting now a new kind of time, paints in the same way a new kind of space, cause time is space, they're very related to each other. And if you paint a new kind of space as well as a new kind of time, the spiritual person discovers that very close to them, even closer to them than changing time and changing space, one changes consciousness. That conscious/time/space, that all of that kind of a form gains what the spiritual person had gained, a new capacity for further freedom. And that's when the spiritual person looks to see where am I now, where do I live now. And the answer that men and women find is that we live now in a total opened unlimited freedom of possibility called a Cosmos, for convenience. And that all of the forms that we had before were like children's playthings, they were like toys, they were like games that we played because that's all that we knew, no one ever taught us anything different. And we can see now that we are not only free to play with those toys but we're free to play on levels where toys can be whatever we would like. Divine play.
This quality came intensely when the Renaissance had been officially, like someone to Burckhardt's keeping, when the Renaissance after 100, 200 years of men and women dealing with this, refining this, music had grown from the kind of early Renaissance material that you had, to someone like Bach. From the Renaissance Pavon of a complicated dance step to a Mass in B Minor, to a Bach Cantata, to a Bach Trio Sonata. By that time we don't even call it Renaissance anymore because it had intensified, it had become quintessential many times over, and that period is called, that Historical period is called The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment because people were getting that inside of this (snap) was another (snap) and that one kept going into higher and higher or deeper and deeper orders of realization and that after 2 or 3 or 4 of these, one discovered what something like Plato's Dialogues had alluded to and you discovered that it was true now too. That there are a limited number of (snap, snap, snap) levels that happen before you don't have to snap your fingers anymore. That (snap, snap, snap) this is like trying to get a lighter lit and that after 2 or 3 the lighter is lit. And when the pilot is on for the spirit, it doesn't ever go out and then you are free on a scale that you hadn't even thought of. You thought freedom had something to do with choices, with preferences of toys and choices within games. And that all of that was sandbox stuff. And that what was occurring now was something called reality.
And so at the apex of The Enlightenment, when it had been going for a hundred years, comes our second Historian, Hegel. Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History; section we're looking at: The Realization of Spirit in History. "After the creation of the natural universe, man appears on the scene like an antithesis of nature. He is the being who raises himself up into a second world. The general consciousness of man includes two distinct provinces, that of nature and that of the spirit. The province of the spirit is created by man himself and whatever ideas we may form of the kingdom of God it must always remain a spiritual kingdom which is realized in man and which man is expected to translate into actuality." So that we discover that we have, not only capacities, we have purposes. And that those purposes morph and transform and mature to the extent that we morph and transform and mature and that there's such thing as keeping pace with one's reality.
So what I've been delivering today in the lecture is not new, it's 200 years old and what I have to deliver is so new that we have to get there 200 years ago first before we can even begin to explore what's really new now. And it's very new and it's really now. How to go ahead? Try picking up your pairs of books and try leaving them around your place and see what these little thresholds might evoke. You never can tell. More next week.
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