History 11
Presented on: Saturday, September 11, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to History 11 which means that we're beginning our motion to conclude the set of presentations on History and to look for the final set which concerns Science. And Science is the most difficult and remote of all of the concerns of human beings, but Science is like a real estate in another realm that can only be broached by going across a bridge of History. And this image, this primordial image of bridging to another world, to another realm is an ancient Mythological image. You are all familiar with the bridge to Valhalla. Corespondent to that ancient Mythic image, in the early Irani civilization there was a bridge called the Chinvat bridge, very much like the bridge to Valhalla. All of the resistances that become demonic seek to pull you off that bridge. And as one continues to go along that bridge, and as the resistances become demonized objectively now are trying to dissuade you, the bridge narrows until it becomes a razor edge. And the Chinvat bridge becomes so narrow that it almost disappears in upon itself and only because there is a graceful guide coming from the other side to meet us, are we able to bridge the narrowness into vanishing of the bridge.
And this is an ancient way in which civilizations sought to express, in Mythic feeling images, what happened to them when civilization emerged. Civilization is a dry land that emerges out of the ocean of History. It's a fabled land, fabled because of the associations that we have for understanding it carry us back to our animal Nature, primally. And in beginning to understand it we literally go back to fables, which are the first indication that we're dealing no longer with Myths but we're dealing with fairy tales. Because the fable is a moral story using animals as the protagonists to carry the meaning which delivers into a realm other than the realm of Myth, the realm of the exemplary story; the realm of the fairy tale for which there is a peculiar structure and the structure of the fairy tale, no better ever said that J.R.R. Tolkein in his little essay on fairy tales. The fairy tale gets darker and darker and darker, until the very last moment, a moment longer than you thought it would take, so that the sudden happy ending occurs after you had given up hope. Now this is extraordinarily important because History has this kind of a process cycle. Before there is any advance in History, any real movement in History, any new development in History, all the hope in the world is extinguished. And it seems in that darkness that man's voice has been silenced forever. Only someone who has gone through that kind of initiatory threshold can appreciate the gorgeous beatific humbleness that out of nowhere the gift of life comes again. That we are able to live again.
And the conviction even at the origins of civilization, even at the beginning of the shift from the Neolithic to Civilized societies was that something magical had happened to man. (cell phone rings) Like a phone call from God. This ringing of the cellular phones in seven or eight thousand BC happened in just a few areas of the world. One of the first areas of the world was Jericho. And if you look to see, as one of the great archeologists of the middle of the 20th century, Kathleen Kenyon, who did all the excavations at Jericho. If you look to try to see, is there anything that survived, is there anything that continued from that earliest trace of Jericho, 10,000 years ago, the only thing that she found that survived all that time was the path that led to the water supply. And 10,000 years ago, the water supply was like a fresh water oasis, but over the 10,000 years the build up of dust and sand and rock has made it a huge tunnel cave that goes down many hundreds of feet to the water. And the women of Jericho still go along that path down into that cave to fetch the water, for life. This is another version of that bridge; of the bridge which disappears. Because if you do not carry your own light with you, that cave tunnel to the water is lost in darkness. And if you stop along the way in that darkness, there's only silence.
So at the beginnings of civilization a great spiritual crisis occurs for which our species, or any species on any planet in any star system, is unprepared. The crises that occur in life before that, occur in Nature. The crisis of existence, to get food, to propagate, to have shelter, this kind of a crisis, or even the crisis of the mind when intelligence begins to abstract itself from the world and become powerful and makes a crisis then of disengagement, of being lost in alienation. The crisis of existence and the crisis of the mind are paltry compared to the crisis of civilization. The crisis of civilization has to do with consciousness. And when consciousness is in crisis, Nature is of no help whatsoever. And it is the silence and helplessness of Nature that terrifies man at that juncture. When he had a crisis of existence he could always reach out to mother earth and the compassionateness of the mother would respond. We would find some way to appeal to her and she would respond; she could respond, did respond. And when we had the crisis of the mind we found a way to reach out and call out to the father. And father Nature would respond, would be there. But when consciousness has a crisis, there's no mother or father anywhere in the universe that can respond. And so part of the terror of the crisis of consciousness is this isolated orphaned realization that one has been dropped into nothingness, beyond hope. And so the fairy tale motion of, instead of hope being rewarded, hope has been squelched along with everything else. Rebirth comes as a gift out of nowhere; it comes as a surprise. And the most devastating context within which this entire scenario is acted out, generation after generation for the last 6 or 7, 8000 years has been that anvil of the crisis of consciousness called civilization. Civilizations only occur when there is a Historical process happening. And History, as we have talked about several times, turns out to be an acid rain. History dissolves the structures that generated it so that they cannot survive.
And so we are faced in civilization, eventually after going through that dissolution pattern time and time again, not just generation after generation but millennia after millennia, men and women caught into these situations, these repeating scenarios, have come to appreciate that there is no hope whatsoever. That History dissolves the structures that generated it, so that we have no chance, we have no hope whatsoever. Except for a mystery that occurs; a mystery of consciousness that occurs and that is that History, while dissolving the forms that came before it, that generated it, is a fruitful solution, having dissolved those old forms, that one could dissolve, could precipitate out of the solution of History, new forms that were never there before. And so the realm of Science is literally made alchemically from the dissolved remains of the old. And that's why the scientific Vision of the Cosmos is that it is pristinely new every single time it is discovered, because it was just recently made, it was made just that instant where one precipitated it out of the dissolved chaos of the old.
And so at that cusp where the courage of the old Paleolithic was still a common denominator in the waning centuries of the Neolithic and at the beginning centuries of that civilized development, you found this most interesting ancient wisdom that the new, that the Cosmos, that the starry expanse of the night sky was new every single night. And that creation was not something that happened in the past but happened every single day. So that the conviction, most poignant in the earliest records of the Egyptians, 5000 years ago you find it already pristinely developed, already elegantly remembered, already laid out complete in its entire cycle, that the spiritual realm of the Cosmos is made new each day and that the night time expanse of the stars are the fruits of victory for the travail of the day. That during that day, men and women worked their alchemy on the dissolution by the acid rain of History of the past and all of its structures and everything that they used to depend upon, and during that day the courage was made to make the night journey, the nechia, the night quest that would bring the new day. And the stars of the night were the promised land given because the previous day had been real. So that History was something that had a very peculiar double entendre. It was in a cycle of repetition, but the repetition happened not in any kind of rote way but happened creatively each day. When Ra rises in the morning, crosses the horizon of the earth and rises into the heavens, we in our conscious spirit rise with that Divinity. One of the most ancient prayers is not to the sun. The prayer is to that presence behind the face of the sun. And the earliest remembrance, in Sanskrit Tat Avam Asi, Thou Are That, you are the presence behind the face of the sun, because you have created out of the alchemy of the dissolution of time and space and world and past, a new life today and you rise with Ra, all of us rise with Ra. And that that new day becomes the only reality, the only working unit, the only moving gear in time. That what was called past time dissolved completely, there was no past at all, where is it. And the future beyond today has not occurred at all, where is it. The only moving gear in all of it is the present day. What was the old Elizabethan admonition, "sufficient unto each day the troubles thereof"? Sufficient unto each day the pleasures thereof also. And the early Egyptian reckoning of reality was that reality for us occurs day by day. Thus the Egyptian Book of the Dead bears the correct title, The Coming Forth By Day. And they would have heard with great religious awe the end of gone with the wind where Scarlett O'Hara says there will be another day. There will be another day only because we work to have that new day, and our work is a double kind of a work. We must allow the past to dissolve completely so that there is no trace of it. For any trace left of the past, in any kind of firm objective way would be a snag around which the solution of the present would falsely constellate. And instead of there being a pristine new Cosmic day there would be a partial crippled repeat of yesterday. And any partial crippled repeat of yesterday begins a sequence of a false world, a false realm, a realm of untruth.
Now you can hear versions of this all over the world today. There are teachers all over the world teaching this today. But if you speak from a false world, you add to the falsity of the world because words then are crippled and it takes a pure language to deliver truth. And that pristineness of that delivery comes from a presence which has no snags from the past whatsoever. But it puts a great incumbency then on those who speak and those who hear that they must have not only a pure voice to speak purely, but pure ears to hear purely. And if you're looking to hear anything that's rememberable or recognizable from the old you're listening with the wrong mode. For spiritual listening is to listen to the unknown, the unexpected which emerges suddenly, "behold I come quickly" out of nowhere. And so wisdom is always a surprise, a surprise gift from where, no one knows because all past has not only been effaced and dissolved but no longer has any existential objectiveness; no longer has any real mind objectiveness. Instead, whatever is there is an artificiality, an artifact of deceit.
The earliest prophetic warning about this deceit that we have comes from the ancient Egyptians: Beware of the world encircling serpent that presents cycle which is circled without end so that the repetition is exactly the same, this is a deceit. And well warned men and women could watch out for such a world encircling serpent, such an ouroboros, that would imprison them in repetition without end. But it's very difficult to see that this is exactly what happens in mundane bureaucratic regressed society which clings to traditions that defend the old because we are doing what those before us did and we must do it exactly in that way. And this is exactly where the deceit mimics that archetype of imprisonment and makes of the daily world a prison; an imprisonment from which the escape is not apparent at all. For there is no way to go out of the liminality of that world circling serpent, that great dragon of repetition in the mysterious depths underneath all of it. As Dante in his Divine Comedy showed at the end of the first section, The Inferno, the only way out of Hell is through the center of it. That the wheel of existence, not just the rim made by the great serpent but the whole wheel of existence, that whole wheel against which all have been splayed and imprisoned in the choreographed repetitive scenarios of deceit upon deceit; trite cardboard figures acting out the baleful and mournful tragedies of millennia of failures, the daily world. The only place not moving is the exact dead center of that wheel through which a kind of an axle, or as they say, the great philosopher Jaspers called it axial, the axial wisdom beyond this world sends a synthesizing core which reaches out beyond the wheel, reaches out beyond that imprisoned time space into the halo of spiritual consciousness that's both above and below that wheel, that great sphere, that sphere of possibility of spiritual consciousness, blemished only by an apparent diameter of a wheel of deceit which has only an apparency for objectivity. For if everyone left that wheel, it would not exist. The pure sphere would be clearer, it would be empty.
And thus in the Renaissance when you had the beginnings of the remembrance of ancient wisdom of the way in which men and women some 1200 years before had come to understand that there are images which deliver us, there are Symbols which deliver us from this kind of deceitful realm, this deceitful world. And those images are arranged in sets and those sets are arranged in orders and that whole pattern of ordered sets of images gives us a kind of a Symbolic Aikido by which we side step the deceitful images and learn to arrange the chaos of the deceitful images into their ordered sets and arrange the sets into their order so that the pattern of the whole emerges. And it's a pattern which runs perpendicular to the wheel of travail. It has a different orbit, it has the same center, but it has a different orbit. Instead of being a kind of an equatorial diameter of deceit, it is in this way a great cycle of adventure which yes can go down to the nadir, can go down to the lowest point, but can also rise to the zenith, go to the highest point. So that the two motions are related, the descent and the ascent are related, and that when one is on this kind of perpendicular wheel or diameter, instead of repeating the same old dull round, with bureaucratic efficiency, with traditional authoritarian approval, one finds oneself living an adventure that sometimes seems to be leading to the worst. But after going through the worst, one can experience that you are rising to the best.
It's this quality of this journey that is called Beauty. And the earliest way in which this was given a description, if I can find it here, Plotinus, who taught about 1700 years ago. I was reading the other day, someone said well there are great teachers everywhere but not in Rome. Plotinus taught in downtown Rome for about 40 years in his own house and did a very goo job. He writes in this way, this is on intelligible Beauty: "We must ascend therefore once more to the good which every soul desires. If anyone has beheld it he will know what I say and in what manner it is beautiful for it is as good that it is desired in all appetancy is towards goodness." That is to say instead of having an appetite for a thing, one gains a capacity for a process of relationality. "But the attainment of the good is for those who mount upward to the heights, set their faces toward them, strip off the garments with which we clothed ourselves as we descended hither. Just as those who penetrate into the innermost sanctuaries of the mysteries, after being first purified and divesting themselves of their garments, go forward naked, so must the soul continue until anyone passing in his ascend beyond all that is separative from God, by himself alone contemplates God perfect simple pure." And one recognizes in Plotinus, the great Hermetic Hymn of The Robe of Glory.
But also that most pristine and archaic of wisdom adjuncts of the descent, that great spiritual cycle written by Sargon's daughter Inhehudana. She wrote it in Akkad about 2200 BC, The Descent of Inanna. That as Inanna descends to the center, the nadir, she must divest herself. In the archetypal story of Inanna it is seven items of her royalty that she must divest, her crown, her scepter, her robe, anything that comes from the world, the image base of the equatorial safety of deceit must be divested as she goes into this spiritual crisis of the descent, but one is not descending to lose, but descending to transform. Not to transform there but the descent itself is a transformation. For what one is loosing are not the objects like a scepter or a robe, one is dissolving the things of this world. That you don't arrive nude as a centerfold bathing beauty, one arrives in the nudity of emptiness of this world. So that at the nadir, there is nothing there for any demonic objectivity to grasp and one passes through like a Divine phantom, for there is nothing upon which snags can be operative. And so the ascent is not an ascent in time, though the descent seems to be in increasing psychological time, the ascent is instantaneous. As the fairy tale structure goes, as Tolkein says, when beyond hope time and space have ended, all opportunity has ended, there is an instantaneous achievement of glory.
One is instantly saved and this great orbit, this orbit of the transformational was something that appealed to the young Hegel. We're taking Hegel and Burckhardt in History and we're trying to understand one of the worlds most complex thinkers. Hegel's systems of the History of philosophy, his development of the logic of dialectic have been for 200 years the bane of world History. There would have been no Soviet Union without Marxism and Marxism is Hegelian deceitfulness. Deceitful not because Marx was deceitful but because of the actions of that misunderstanding for which Marx's books deliver with all great humility. Never the less they make an artifice of this bureaucratic realm. If anything distinguished the Soviet Union it was the endless bureaucratic lines of daily life.
And yet within that, if there's anything that cheered the 70 years of tyranny, it was the moment when Yury Gargarin went into orbit. And the tears of washed out bureaucratic styminess, for a moment were there in the achievement of a Soviet man who had gone beyond the limits of the earth, was able to circle the entire earth beyond all the boundaries. And it was an invitation, it was a crack in the egg. And only one figure understood it at that time, a young poet, Voznesensky, Andrei Voznesensky, who came out with a volume of poems where he took the anti world as the challenge. And that the anti world was the dialectic antithesis of everything that this world had. And that if that world met the anti world they would dissolve mutually in that mutual explosion of matter/anti matter, world and anti world. And Voznesensky's little volume of anti worlds had very few people who could listen to it, who could hear that new kind of a language.
And one of those was a man, fellow poet named Yevtushenko who'd been banished by the authorities for being a bad boy. He would go to other countries to read his poems and he would read the kinds of poems that the authorities didn't want him to read. I remember one time Yevtushenko in San Francisco, and he was reading a poem called The City of Da and the City of Nyet, the two cities, the antitheticals. And the translation was made by Richard Wilbur and he read it in English, but first Yevtushenko read the poem in Russian. He paced around the room and his eyes flashing and the purport was that he was lost in the shuffle between these two cities and could not go back to either one. For that when he went back home they banished him again. And they banished him back to where he'd come from, back to Siberia. The Soviets somehow thought that Siberia was the worst thing that could happen to you. Only Yevtushenko had been born in Siberia so he went home. And when he went home he found the new hydro electric station on the Irkutsk side of the Angara River and this station was called Brotherly Station, Bratskaya, Brotherly Station. And so he wrote a great long epic poem called Bratsk Station and like Inanna he went into the depths of the hydro electric station. Like the ancient pattern of the women in Jericho, he went all the way through the complex layers that had been built up of technological society down to where the water was. And the water at the center of the hydro electric station was hundreds of feet down this tunneling corridor sequence. And he had to divest himself of all that he was familiar with so that when he got down to the water at the center of the hydro electric station the plunge of the Angara River falling about three hundred feet down hit all the hydro electric turbines there and turned them with such a ferocity that they turned so many times that all one could hear was a deafening hum, and yet Yevtushenko heard that in the hum a single word occurred and reoccurred and reoccurred without end, not that it was repeated but that it occurred presented in a presence without end. And the word in Russian means in English, everything. And he came out and his ears were ringing with the word everything, everything, everything and so when any of the bureaucrats said anything to him, he heard everything, everything, everything. And when he tried to speak that's all he could gibber, everything, everything, everything.
And it's in that cacophony of the allness that Jaspers says the encompassing presents us with the halo of spirit that surrounds the darkness with an infinite light. And it's exactly at that point that the young Hegel, he was 26 years old. He'd been teaching for 3 years in Switzerland; private family, they had gone for the summer to their summer cottage on one of the lakes over by Lake Neuchatel, Lake Gabiel, and standing out one night in the darkness and silence of the Swiss landscape, Hegel who'd been puzzling over the crisis of History, the crisis of consciousness in civilization, came to a realization. He had written a life of Jesus to try to find where was the place most likely where the false world had built up to this authority of institutional structures that made it impossible to get down to the waters of life again, and he found in that darkness, in that silence, that he had been delivered in a Vision back to a pristine moment in ancient Greece, not in Athens, but in the initiatory little shrine town of Eleusis. And he wrote a mystical poem to his friend Holderlin, the great German mystical poet, and he entitled it Eleusis. And in the poem, he gives the silence of the darkness, of that night where he saw this Vision and was transported back to a present that was not in his past, but somehow it had been gifted to him so that he had a new past, had a point of presence which became a departure for a new personal History. And sure enough, because then the mothers and fathers of the world work again, but they work in a new realm, within a couple of weeks he got a letter from his friend Holderlin saying I found a new position for you. You can leave these lower echelons of the material world, the kind of trite traditional safe Swill life that you've been suffering through, you can come and join me in Frankfurt Germany, there's a position here.
And within a couple of years both of them moved to a new center of civilization, a little town called Jena, where Schiller and Fichte and Schilling and Holderlin and Hegel made this little town of Jena the center of European civilization for a few years. And it was there at Jena that Hegel wrote one of the great books of the world, it's translated as The Phenomenology of Mind. And when you open it up after the prefaces and so forth page A is called Consciousness, on a single page. Take a break.
BREAK
That was the saying in What Makes Sammy Run, the quintessential Hollywood novel by Bud Schulberg, where Sammy Glick in one of his favorite sayings is "we die with clothes on, therefore we cheated someplace since birth". His other saying was "never promote a promoter". Which brings us oddly enough back to Hegel. Hegel is the most difficult of all the philosophers to understand and I spent 5 years in the 50's at the University of Wisconsin and there was only one course on Hegel and it was limited to graduate students and limited to those who could pass an interview and only five people passed. And so there were dozens of us who were hungry to get in there and couldn't get to it, and so we had to read him. I mean many of us gave up trying to pass the German language exam because you had to be able to read philosophic German which was all post Hegelian which meant that you had to understand that talk.
What's interesting is that our presentation this morning before the break sets us up to appreciate and understand that with the Visionary young Hegel, by the time he was 26, he like Yevtushenko had passed through a tunnel of darkness to an archaic source of water. He had touched a stream of Paleolithic presence in himself and the only person that he felt any affinity to at all, who had any chance to see him as he was, was his friend the mystical poet Holderlin. Holderlin who's mind broke under the strain of massive subtlety and pyramids of sophistication and spent the last 30 years of his life as a, literally an idiot savant. He was taken in by a carpenters family and he just was a very kindly blob in the household for about 30 years. One of the greatest poets of all time.
He was a college friend of Hegel's and Holderlin and Hegel and their other college buddy, the great philosopher Shelley were students when the French Revolution was consummated and they stood to give a toast to the freedom of the human race, that we're emerging from this stupid sediment mud of centuries and millennia of devious abstract institutionalism and we're emerging into the enlightened light of History. For the Enlightenment was all about History - emerging into History. That reason is a good guide and knowledge will help us to divest ourselves of all of this trash, all of this garbage, all of this imprisonment and we're going to come out. And Holderlin's the one who said before we toast, before we drink the champagne we have to shout at the world that we're free, and he did so. And the kind of poem for which Holderlin is famous - here's a couple of lines from a poem, the title translates as Song For Two In The Night. It's a she and a he, the she says 'How sweet the night wind glides across the fields and rippling through the trees how it runs while brash day is silent still you hear the thronged celestial powers whisper rise upward humming into delicate songs the tuned airs and breezes sing and sing.' He replies 'Yes I hear most wondrous voices now by the warm wind drawn voluptuously along while with its streaks of wavering light heaven itself seems might have flown away.'
So Hegel looking in anticipation after three years of being a private teacher for a family in Switzerland, wrote a mystical poem about Eleusis. And he tried to make the poem itself the reality that this is not a poem about something else, it's a poem about the poem. So that the only way to understand the poem is to read the poem and every time one reads the poem one returns back to the poem itself. So that his mystical poem written at the age of 26, Eleusis, is all about the transformation of the philosophic understanding back into its mysterious roots of presence. And only then after that first part of the poem, it's called a proem, does he have this opportunity to address his friend Holderlin that he's going to look for this fantastic new life that is possible now. In the proem, in that first part of the poem, the lines that led to the realization that he was going to be reunited with his friend Holderlin, the great poet, those lines were crossed out and he wrote new lines which delivered the moment of presence, not from meeting with his old friend but with meeting himself at the initiatory center of Eleusis in the ancient world. Or to put it more precisely that that initiatory threshold of Eleusis reemerged pristinely in the presencing that was Hegel at age 26, in the dark night along side that lake in Switzerland.
So that when we come to one of the thickest passages in The Phenomenology you have to hear it as a mystical poem and not as a philosophic language which is complex. And if you listen to it as a mystical poem, you get it that what's happened here is an explosion of intelligence, that as it puffs out in smoke, it enfolds in fired. So it has a double action, it both has this kind of thunder cloud development, but it has this lightning implosion at the same time. And that the lightning implodes in a complementary equanimity with the explosion of the cloud, so that the presence is made perfectly still in between the fire drilling in and the smoke billowing out. And this is exactly the quality that mystical poetry has. In Rumi, I just finished a translation of 50 poems of Rumi with a friend of mine, Irani friend of mine, and the characteristic quality of Rumi's poetry is that the images billow out in smoke and thunder, whereas the lightning of spiritual insight crackles within and penetrates within and the presence of the poet is maintained without movement. No wonder Rumi established the Whirling Dervish Order, the Mevlevi Dervish, who spins, who throws the body into this frenzy of spin and puts the mind into a subterranean presence of focus so that the person is suspended in an eternal present in between the spinning body and the dwelling spirit. And that when the mind is perfectly still like that in that presence, when it has that perfectly still quality which is the quintessence of any yoga, which is the center of any prayer, which is the operative non-mind of any meditation, the whole diameter of the wheel of complicated deception, has nowhere upon which to pivot and it disappears. The saying in ancient India is that it disappears to such a perfect extent that not even a wisp of it is left. And what occurs then is perfect clarity without any obstruction of artificiality whatsoever.
By the time Hegel was 36 years old he understood this but he had not been trained to use language in a way that was artistic, and so he writes a mystical poem that looks like a complicated page of gobble-de-gook philosophy. But if I read it to you as a mystical poem, even in translation, you can hear it with a calm mind. Forget the meaning, the meaning is just bubbling out. And forget the insight, the insight is auguring in. But both those are ledger domain compared to the unmoving stillness of the mind which presences. The section is headlined The Truth Which Consciousness Certainty of Self Realizes, The Truth Which Conscious Certainty of Self Realizes: 'In the kinds of certainty hither to considered, the truth for consciousness is something other than consciousness itself. The conception however of this truth vanishes in the course of our experience of it. What the object immediately was in itself whether mere being in sense certainty a concrete thing in perception or force in the case of understanding, it turns out in truth not to be this really but instead this inherent Nature proves to be in a way in which it is for another. The abstract conception of the object gives way before the actual concrete object, or the first immediate idea is cancelled in the course of experience. Mere certainty vanished in favor of truth. There has now arisen however that which was not established in the case of any of these previous relationships a certainty which is on a par with truth. For the certainty is to itself its own object and consciousness is to itself truth. Otherness no doubt is also found there. Consciousness that is makes a distinction but what is distinguished is of such a kind that consciousness at the same time holds that there is no distinction to be made.'
What's happening here is that as the language, as the words, as the sentences are making a powerful thunderous cloud of philosophic assertions, the auguring in of the insight of the deeper secret meaning is taking away the resonances that would go beyond the cloud muffling the thunder, so that what you have is actually similar to an explosion without sound. So that the presencing spiritual mind has abstracted itself from the further rebound complications of mentality. Not allowing itself to be distracted by the gorgeous possibilities of thought and just letting the happening of thought occur. So that one learns that you do not have to compulsively go that way. You don't have to dutifully follow the mind in its speculations, let it go. Where will those speculations go? The fact is that they don't continue one inch further than your interest being withdrawn from them. They don't have a life of their own, they don't have a career of their own, they don't even have an existence of their own. They're resonances of your bell and if you ring yourself in such a way that you ring only silence, no sound occurs.
And so Hegel then applied this, said alright I have this capacity, what then is History? If I look at History with this capacity then what do I see? And that's where our book comes in, Lectures On Philosophy of World History which came out a quarter of a century later, came out at the end of his life. He was working on it when he died of an epidemic. He was no longer the little junior unpublished, not even yet a philosophy teacher much less a professor. Hegel was the head of the Berlin University. He was not just the head of the philosophy department, he was the head of the whole university. He was the most famous intellectual force in Europe, and he suddenly died. And he died writing this book; writing this preface to an understanding that History is the most mysterious process which we encounter in reality. That when we encounter in Nature the process of Nature we are so enfolded into Nature that it is not a problem for us. The only concern that primordial man had was to participate in Nature and as long as primordial men and women participated in Nature it worked, you didn't have to think about anything; you didn't even have to feel about anything because you could just be. That existence is quite objective within the process of Nature.
But the first threshold beyond which this doesn't happen like it used to anymore is when feeling develops. Because as soon as feeling develops, feeling generates something which does not automatically happen in existence. What comes out that is new from feeling is experience. And when men and women now have their experience to factor into their participation of Nature, they have to have a way to do that which Nature doesn't provide. What provides that is the process of language. Language is the process by which we factor experience into our participation with Nature so language and Nature are two great processes; they go together, they go together in human life.
But just as there was a threshold beyond which feeling generated experience which had to be factored into our participation of Nature, when thought begins to occur, when we go beyond the threshold where the mind happens to start working, we think that the way in which experience was factored into the participation of Nature is good enough, but the mind thought is different from feeling. Intelligence is different from sentience. While feeling factors itself into Nature very easily, because feeling, that whole Mythic horizon is a process in itself. The whole process of Myth fits into the whole process of Nature because both are integral processes and they're like double rings of Saturn that go together. They orbit in the same way, they move in the same way. And so the motion of the process of Myth is very easy to make affine to the process of Nature and so Myth and Nature flow very easily together. The old Chinese Symbol of it is two birds that hunt together, they fly together in the same sky. What is that sky? That sky that, the motion of Nature of Nature and the motion of language flying together is the whole ecology of integration, of how things are what they are and they come together in their being in their existence. And they come together again in their understandability so the objectivity of reason, though it's somewhat different, so that the mind thinking, intelligence, knowledge, even though it has to have a little slightly different way, Symbols have to integrate in a slightly different way from Myth, they can be brought into participation with Nature. It's a struggle but it can be done. But when one goes beyond the mind over that threshold, beyond thought, and what's beyond thought? Beyond thought is, I think it's here on the page by itself, I think it reads just consciousness, yeah A consciousness, that's it.
Consciousness being a process has a movement to it, but its movement is distinctly different from the movement of Nature and distinctly different from the movement of language. Vision as a process moves exactly in the opposite way that Myth moves as a process, that Nature moves as a process. So that Visionary consciousness, when it occurs, it's said to be supernatural. It's of a different Nature. And History is a resonance of that Visionary process, that Visionary consciousness. History has the same movement as consciousness but on a Cosmic level. So that History moves in an opposite direction to Myth. History moves in an opposite direction to Nature. So that someone who is trying to use Natural orientation to deal with Historical situations is bound to fail and bound to fail in a direct opposite way. The more Natural you try to become the more the failure is exacting. And by trying to raise that level of Natural participation which always served us, by trying to raise the process of Nature up to the level of the process of Myth - if Nature won't work then we'll use Mythic processes, we'll use language and we'll use feeling and we'll use experience and with our language and feeling and experience we'll be able to deal with Historical problems, won't we? And the answer is no we don't, not ever. In fact we make them worse because we're doing the exact opposite.
So that thought, the mind trying to figure out what in the world is going on here. And because men and women have never been stupid, understand that there's something strange. It's like the mind if it's used in a mirror like fashion, because the mirror actions go opposite, that there's something if you use the mind as a mirror, you see the way that it's happening. And we call that mirror function reflection. Reflection. So that the mind is using thought in a different mode from what it was originally in integration. It's reflecting. It's not thinking naturally, it's not thinking Mythically but it's using thought in a Visionary sense and trying to train itself to use thought in a Historical sense. This is very difficult to do and it becomes very complicated because the better that one gets at this, the more that one sees that the mirroring motif is in itself a Mythic image and that it isn't mirroring at all that's working, that that induced a kind of a false Mythic confidence in using the mind in this way and that one had fallen unbeknownst to you into a Mythic pattern all over again. Well then what do you do? And the question becomes poignant because the operative puzzle in that question is who is the you. When you say what do you do, who is that you? Are you the you that's there because of your experiences? That you who's there because of experiences is a Mythic figure quite able to participate in Nature, quite viable in your language, quite viable in your feeling and it's that same you in your experience that when put into a powerful mind, a mind which works by abstraction, that you of your experience that was at home in Nature is now alienated from Nature. The you is certain that it's safe as long as it maintains its abstract isolation, doesn't get involved in Nature which is now very suspect, doesn't commit itself to just mere feeling, feelings will get you into trouble, is not satisfied with experience, there are many things that common sense experience don't alert you to at all. If you live in a natural world where everything is natural then you're safe in Nature, but when you live in a world where there are radioactive elements you can't just glibly go and pick up the plutonium laced flowers, you have to be skeptical about what's going on here.
And just about the time that that kind of maturity of thought comes into play a philosopher named David Hume writing a book called A Treatise on Human Nature, proved that the function of the mind itself works perfectly only when it is skeptical. And that this is really what is empirical about Science, is that it shows us how certain skepticism of experience in the mind is. And it was in response to Hume's radical empiricism, his skepticism that Immanuel Kant wrote his great Critique of Pure Reason, came out when Hegel was just beginning in school. That alright reason is a different realm, the abstractness of the mind is a different realm, it has a different kind of objectivity, but the bridging of religion brings the mind and the world back into relationality. It's here that the young Hegel developing, is trying to figure out, is this response sufficient. And when he was a young man all he wanted to write about was religion and religious qualities of philosophy and philosophy with an eye towards trying to make an understanding of what would a real religion be then. And by the time he was 26 years old, at the time of writing that mystical poem Eleusis, he also wrote A Life of Jesus. Because he found that the core of the complications - he didn't know anything about the Buddha, he didn't know anything about Lao Tsu, but he knew that the civilization that he had become bound up in a suspect of and hoping to reform, that the figure of Jesus had become the most complicated center of Mythic confusion, of Symbolic misapprehensions and that this would be the perfect test case to see whether he had learned to be clear about consciousness in himself, making him enlightened to the extent that he was independent of the civilization that was so self deceived that it was a mess and at war almost all the time. And Hegel's confidence that somehow if one could write a new life of Jesus, that would be the starting point for the renovation of civilization. It didn't matter whether you were Christian or not, it didn't even matter if you were Western or not. It was a case in point of a figure, of a Symbol, of a Vision, of a person, of a Historical threshold that was so involved in the structure of the way in which civilization had developed that this would be something that one had to do.
Now Hegel's Life of Jesus was translated in 1984 and it just appears here, University of Notre Dame Press, just about 50-60 pages. The technique of trying to find a life of Jesus for the next hundred years became the secret desire of the Reformation of world thought in the German language sphere. All the great German figures tried to find some way to have new life of Jesus. And the last one in that whole scheme was a man named Albert Schweitzer who at the turn of the century wrote a book, The Quest For The Historical Jesus. And showed that there was no chance to have a Historical Jesus at all because of the Nature of the complications of our minds, of our feelings, and that one had only a phantom chance beyond hope, that is if you could get outside of the chaos encompassing one's life and one's feelings and one's thought. If you could get outside the - if you could go beyond the edge of civilization, you might be able to find a chance beyond hope, and so Schweitzer did exactly that. He resigned his religious positions, he went back to school, he became a doctor and he left Europe and he went to Africa because he found that he was outside of the stretch of the umbrella of the confusion. And so he camped out there, outside of this mess, this umbrella of complicated Historical stupidity and he camped out there to understand what it was that was real spiritually about men and women, and spent the rest of his life there. The book that he wrote, the most gorgeously beautiful book that he wrote about this was called At The Edge of the Primeval Forest. That he had gone back to the pristine reality of human life outside of the storm of devious chaos that European civilization had become, and he never would go back.
Hegel tried to do this a hundred years before Schweitzer when he wrote The Phenomenology of the Mind. He tried to go, as you saw from the little page I read to you, he tried to go beyond the edge by going into the middle, in the old tried true Yogic way, in the Dantean kind of a way. That if you go to the middle of Hell there is a way out because there is an axial point at the very presence that is not a part of the whirl of confusion and at that still point of the exact center one can go out. It's like today, we look in astronomical research and the latest thing are called active galaxies. That at the center of most galactic structures are black holes. And while the black holes pull in material to their vanishing, beyond that threshold, beyond that event horizon threshold where time space no longer are real for the existentiality of those atoms, those subatomic particles vanish from this world. But surrounding a black hole at an axial perpendicularity to the wheel of the galactic structure are two shooting jets of material that are freed from the galactic structure. They're not subject to the gravity, they're also not subject to the time space of the whirl, they are independent of that and these great jets of light millions of light years long shoot out along this axial core to galactic structures.
As that was realized that this is in fact happening, on incredibly stupendous scales, but that earth bound optics are not able to look at this because eyes in a natural way are not able to see this. Even eyes in an intellectual Symbolic mental way are not able to see this. And even if you envisioned it, there's no way that the artistic person could see this, even with differential consciousness, you couldn't see this. You had to go one step further, you had to develop Cosmic Scientific Vision to see this, to see this scale of actuality. And so a whole new kind of optic had to be developed, an optic that is today called Active Optics. Here's from Scientific American, October, 1999, this months Scientific American: 'Thick mirrors are unacceptable for the same reason.' [Thick mirrored minds are unacceptable] The volume of air enveloping a conventional telescope makes large apertures far less effective for they reach thermal equilibrium too slowly. Finally it becomes apparent that beyond a certain aperture it is simply impossible to build a passive mechanical device that can be put into and eventually can be put into alignment to within optical tolerances, so that we must eventually concede the need to provide adjustments of some sort to obtain the intended high performance. Analysis then reveals that the concepts involving computers and precision mechanisms led to radically new designs. The adjustment on a nearly continuous basis [so that the adjustments are not made once and then they're adjusted, the adjustments are made constantly so that there's a continuous adjustment being made] of a fragile and flexible telescope is what constitutes active optics. Censors on the telescope such as the Schack Hartman Wave Front Censor [which is nicely explained in this book that they're reviewing] provide input to computers which are programmed to drive mechanical actuators to produce counter distortions in the optics resulting in a high quality image regardless of temperature, regardless of wind, regardless of local air, seeing pointing tracking behavior of the telescope. Beyond producing a telescope that is impervious to its own errors, the goal of active optics, astronomers are now striving to eliminate atmospheric seeing effects making their telescopes diffraction limited. [You see to the limits of the capacity of the material] Apart from the obvious advantage of being able to resolve small objects from one and other the efficiency with which faint stellar objects are detected and recorded depends on this perfection of optics.'
So that this capacity is like a differential consciousness being applied Historically on Scientific level. So that Science is big magic. Not the Science that is usually done. Somebody once asked Carl Jung at a seminar, he said what happens in these scientific places. And he said 95% of Science is meal talk. People just getting through the day, talking about what they're going to have for lunch, who are they going home with. That very very rarely is there anything that really happens that is Science, but when it does happen, it is on a scale of objectivity that is unimaginable until one participates in the doing of that. But in order to get to that scale, one has to cross the process of Historical transformation and that can't be done unless you can presence beyond the deviousness of the atmospheric effects of the mind as well as the body as well as the civilization, as well as the cultures, as well as the doctrines, the institutions, the advice, good bad and indifferent, and a whole telephone book. A bug list which is literally the index of all the stuff that there is. So that it takes a peculiar kind of a courage to go one step beyond the threshold of experience and it takes complete madness to go beyond the mind. But that's exactly where Vision and History invite us to step, not because we're going to go mad but because we're going to live on a different scale of real. Because we can then go back and we can participate in Nature all over again. We can participate in the existence of life and babies and things all over again. We can feel Mythically again, we can think Symbolically again, but all of that informed because we've come back through and recognized that the operative mystery of Nature that was never realized are our own transformed capacities coming back into play again. More next week.
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