History 12
Presented on: Saturday, September 18, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
History Twelve. History is a parallel to Vision. Vision is a process, but it's a differential process, it's not an integral process. Vision works exactly the other way from how Myth works. Myth mores towards integration, Vision moves towards differentiation. So that Vision and Myth are counter energies, they have a counter dynamic. Someone who tells myths in tribal society is a revered part of the tribe. But the rare occurrence of someone who has a vision in tribal life is supernaturally not a part of the tribe. On the mythic horizon of human experience, even the term, myth has to do with experience, experience folds into our sense of how things come together, of how things belong. Whereas consciousness does not fold in, it changes everything. So that visionary consciousness is quite distinctly the opposite of mythic experience. In between these cross currents is the mind, and the mind maintains its objectivity, its stability because it makes a choice out of habit and prefers experience to consciousness. The mind never unlearns the physiological basis that it has a brain. Whereas consciousness is radically different from the mind. The mind snaps its finger and says to consciousness 'you pay attention to me, I know because I'm intimately connected to the brain, I know what's going on.' And consciousness says 'cool out mind, the brain is only a part of the whole central nervous system and that central nervous system has resonances beyond those which you know and you have a lot to learn.' And the mind says 'the hell you say'.
And so consciousness has to learn first of all that it must train the mind. And the traditional way in which Asian wisdom put it in India a long time ago, was that the mind is like a wild horse. And that the way that you train a wild horse is that you tether it. You put a stake in the ground and you lasso the wild horse and you tie the other end to the stake and then you just leave everything alone. And a wild horse will, in its movements and actions, eventually establish a response pattern who's limitations are the extent of the rope. No matter what movements it has, what varieties of bucking and humping and shucking and whatever, when the tether is taught, that is a radius of the circle of possibility. And when the wild horse has gone through all of its permutations, it will have established for itself a circle of which the tether is a radius. And it is that circle which forms the first discipline for the animal. It's the first step in domestication. So that the rider of the horse uses the reign which is a transformed tether and that the circle becomes extended to wherever the rider wants to go.
To understand how a tether becomes a reign is the key to understanding how a transform of consciousness works. And in ancient India, when it became necessary to educate a lot of people, not just one person at a time. It used to be wisdom was just passed on one person at a time, that was it. And not every teacher, not every sage would be a teacher. There were many lifetimes where there wasn't anyone to teach at all. And having more than one student was like really rare. But there came a time where you had to, because of a crisis of civilization, you had to teach comparatively a lot of people; maybe only several hundred at the time. And the beginnings of that kind of teaching wisdom to more than one person, in ancient India, was the origin of the Upanishads. And the first Upanishad is the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, the Great Forest Breath Upanishad. And the first image that you have in it is that of the horse. Only in the Brihad Aranyaka, The Great Breath Forest Teaching, the horse is the meteorological event of the sky. The Sun is the eye of the horse, the whipped cirrus clouds are its mane, the wind is its breath and the Yogi is meant to understand that you have to learn to ride the Earth vis-à-vis the horse of the sky. Because that's the scale at which now wisdom has to work.
That was twenty-eight hundred years ago. Our scale today is unbelievable, it's enormous and the kind of sky that our horse is, is unbelievable, in fact unimaginable, is really huge. And the challenge is catastrophic because we don't have any kind of indication whatsoever, normally as to the scale. And so this education is a pioneering attempt to acclimate us to possibilities of scale for a wisdom that would survive the horse of the Cosmos.
History is a parallel to Vision. And just as Vision as consciousness has to train the mind, History is a parallel process to Vision. Is a process that has to train the person. And in a way History is a process of interpersonal consciousness. History is that flow, that process of shared Vision. Don't take too many notes on it, just listen, because this is something that's new and we don't know what it means yet. In fact the whole thing about History is that we do not know what it means, because the model of our meaning is based upon the mind which is outdistanced by several layers of order, it's several orders less than capable. It is an embarrassment for someone who has a trained mind to understand that. It's even an embarrassment to someone like a trained artist who's person has long since been used to the fact that the artistic person is much more comprehensive, much more encompassing than someone's symbolic idea operative mind. But to find a Cosmic teacher is really something else, there's nothing that can be said.
So when we say, for the first time, History is a process of interpersonal consciousness, it's not an idea. It is a science recovery of recognition that comes out of a process movement that's related to vision and completely encompasses all the integration of which the mind is capable. That means the entire cycle of nature in a very paradoxical way is but an atom, but a speck within that unimaginable wind. And this produces, as you can imagine, very paradoxical problems. And what has been called History is replete with examples of how peculiar all of this is. Of how men and women who have broached upon this unbelievable realm have shied away for many very good reasons. And the two historians that we've been taking the last month, Jacob Burckhardt and Hegel are indicative of a crisis that occurred in consciousness about 150 years ago and which has not been able to be shaken off in all that time and has all but destroyed the twentieth century. We were all fortunate to survive the twentieth century.
In between Hegel and Burckhardt is a very profound historian named Leopold von Ranke. He lived to be 91 and when he died in 1886, he was the god of history. He comes in between Hegel and Burckhardt. He published his first works in the 1820's when Hegel was still alive. And if you recall, Hegel had worked his way up the so called academic ladder. He was not only a professor of philosophy at the most famous university on the continent at the time, the University of Berlin, but he was the head of the University of Berlin. He was an academic god which was strange because his language was not comprehensible intellectually. And the reason for this is that Hegel is a Romantic Hero and not a figure of the Enlightenment.
The philosopher, the great philosopher before Hegel, Immanuel Kant is an Enlightenment figure who lives on into the Romantic period and many of who's ideas were taken over by Romantic figures. Perhaps the most famous idea taken over from Kant's Enlightenment philosophy is the idea of a transcendentalism. And out of that you get figures as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists in America. And also the transcendental qualities that are there in German culture, especially German poetry which edge over into a Romantic development later on in people like Hegel. The example that we used for that was the German poet Holderlin, Hegel's buddy, his college buddy, his closest friend. Holderlin who literally went insane because his sensitivity splayed out so fine that he had no mind with which to bring it back into form, and he lived the last thirty or forty years of his life as a very gentle idiot, living in the house of a carpenter and his family, in a little tiny town in Germany. This horrific destiny scared Hegel. And part of the Romantic umph of his Philosophy of History is to not go that way; to not be splayed out into the fine spun realms of insanity and to find some way to come back into form. And that if you can't find, then make a way, make a tether which will bring consciousness back into form.
And so all of Hegel, Hegel's philosophy, Hegel's Philosophy of History especially, Philosophy of Art, is centered upon a method of tethering which he made famous called the dialectic. That there is a method, like good old Lee Strasberg's method acting. There's a way and it's specific but you cannot tell somebody in advance what the specificity is. They have to discover that by their way of doing it and then in remembrance you can share and you can talk about the method and how it works. But that each person has their own version, their own variant and thus the method has a kaleidoscopic hidden principle of developing variation that works within it all the time. And that part of the mastery of the method is to forget the the in method and to make method with a small m not a capital. That you have to work at the play of discovery. And so two different things: work, play have to be brought into tandem, they have to meet. And bringing work and play into tandem was exactly what the method of Hegel, his dialectic essentially was all about, when you put it into experiential feeling toned emotional words that become symbolic ideas that you can think about and put together and get a concept of it.
In the dialectic, Hegel said somehow it moves from having formed a thesis. That that very action calls forth from the general encompassing contextuality, calls forth a formed antithesis which mirrors, in scope and form, the thesis. So that whatever the thesis is, it evokes an antithesis which is related to it like a mirror image, like a shadow to a form. And that those two forms sharing size, shape and through opposition, meaning, have a capacity of being brought together. But as they're brought together, both morph towards something new called a synthesis. And that that synthesis, whatever it is, is the number one nominee for the next thesis. So that there is a movement that happens, and that this movement applies on all the scales that there are. It happens in the most small actions, it happens in the largest Cosmic movement called History. And that the largest movement is that of History, because in Hegel's vision, History was the movement of God. And this heavily influenced Ranke who was scared of the Hegelian storms of philosophic genius, and decided that he's not going to ship out in that way, that he went into an opposite, and antithetical mode to Hegel. He decided that he would be the Historian yes, of God's mysterious secret movements called History. But that he would do it in an objective way, patiently by basing it on facts all the time. And so Ranke is famous for developing the idea that History is based upon specific facts; that you consult the archives over and over again and you patiently build up from that basis, objective History. And ever since then, academic History has been taught all over the world on that basis. You must know your facts before you develop any kind of sense of History; it has to be objective, otherwise you're just dealing with imagination, you just dealing with opinion.
Now a curious thing is is that there is a parallel, a parallel to that whole development in ancient Greece and in ancient China and conspicuously not there in ancient India. The parallel in ancient Greece is that that dialectic was also developed by Plato. Plato's dialogues are all about how there is a movement between speakers. There is a dramatic dynamus that develops, and not just in plays but in a variant of plays called the philosophic dialogue. So that the Platonic dialogue is a dramatic dialectic episode and the protagonist, the lead actor in those usually is Socrates. Socrates who will single someone out and single out of that person their most famous idea and proceed to show, by a dialogue, by a dialectic engagement (I can't say that in the French way, engagement?) which involves Socrates and the speaker of coming together slowly into a synthesis. And that the synthesis shows that the original idea that the person had, their best idea, the idea they're famous for was but only an opinion and could be refined by the engagement (I'll stick to English), and developed, refined into the better synthesis. Only in Plato the opinions (in Greek opinion is doxa, out of which we get, when somebody believes in an opinion to the death it's sometimes called doxology) that that opinion is capable of refinement in a limited number of steps. That there are not an infinite number of steps but there are limited number of steps. And if one looks at the wisdom cycle of Plato's dialogues: I once did 27 lectures on Plato's dialogues to bring each one out objective History, so that someone could get, in about 40 some hours of lectures, the whole spread, the whole rainbow of Plato's dialogues. And that what emerges, out of seeing that rainbow of Plato's dialectic is the pointed realization that there is a geometry to the mind, which is what the Greeks are famous for, that the mind is geometrical.
And the Greek mind should be geometrical, because the whole education system was based upon Homer who was one of the best literary geometricians ever. There was a British scholar, H.T. Wade Gerry, one time did a book on the Iliad, and in the back there was a fold out of a diagram showing the structure of the Iliad and how it was perfectly paired and poised upon one central focus. And that the entire epic were parallel brackets that went out to the beginning and the end, like concentric circles of a tree. And that the Iliad was like this diagonal line that was put across the whole circumference of the event so that one could learn by repetition to imbibe the geometricity of the mind vis-à-vis events. Notice the radical superiority of Homer to the idea in the Upanishads of a tether which is a radius. Homer's tether to the mind is a diameter, not a radius. It's the full diameter and not just a tether. So that Homer's yoga has a paired spread, whereas the Indian yoga has a single radius measurement. And that's why History never developed in India and why History was a particular speciality of the Greeks.
Because the first time that we find someone attempting a History, Herodotus, who was a contemporary of Socrates, he went everywhere, traveled everywhere, collected all of the memories and remembrances and traditions and talked to everybody and put it all together in a book and he called it The Histories, the birth of the word, Histories. But in the very next generation to him, a younger man, lives overlapped quite a bit, Thucydides, who we took a look at, saw with Homeric eyes that there is a diameter which gauges the entirety of that form, that a History is a form and that the diameter of that form would give you the complete structure in a geometricity, so that the mind can understand it, can understand all of its parts, how it leads, how it develops, and how that line, that diameter is radically different from a myth. That the diameter of history is radically different from the plot line of myth. Though they are initially similar: a myth has a beginning, a middle and an end, and if you took any kind of a simple historical theme, it would be very indistinguishable from a mythic theme. It would have a beginning, it would have a middle and it would have an end, but the difference is the kind of line. The mythic line moves by imagination and by feeling, by experience, whereas the diameter of History moves by consciousness, by a personal artistic forming and by an energy not yet determined, the energy of History, the energy of an inter-personal consciousness, as yet to be determined. That however wild consciousness is, History is all of the consciousnesses that there are in an entire Cosmos, in a soup, in a wind, in a phantom energia.
So that one of the great critics of Ranke, a man who survived Buchenwald, Pieter Geyl, writing From Ranke to Toynbee, said in his work, History is infinite. Part of the difficulty that we have is that we keep thinking that we understand History because we have an idea of it, but every single idea of History is an opinion. And if there were only a Socrates to tease out from us, every single idea of History could be shown to be an immature opinion, even someone as learned as Arnold Toynbee. Even someone as delicately massively learned as Arnold Toynbee. Why Toynbee? Because he took History, the study of History, not just to make a History of something else, but to make a History of History. And saying, as a good Greek would, there is an ultimate form who's diameter we can take, and the ultimate form is that of civilizations. And Toynbee counted 21 different civilization and then took up the monumental task of drawing diagonals through those 21 Histories and comparing the spectrum. And saying that the ultimate dialectic is that between challenge and response. That whatever it is, there is a challenge and there must be a response adequate to that challenge. That thesis, the challenge, must be met by an antithetical response which moves both of them towards a synthesis. And that only when the synthesis is achieved is there such a thing as salvation. Geyl delivering his lectures at Smith College in 1952, seven years after he was let out of the concentration camps, said this is curiously mythological to me; this doesn't seem Historical at all.
This is exactly the kind of limitation that someone like a Leopold von Ranke had. And it's interesting because one finds that the Historian who comes profoundly after Plato, after his dialectic, is very similar to like von Ranke coming after Hegel, after his dialectic. And the Historian that comes after Plato's dialectic, bringing that somewhat into play, his name is Polybius. And Polybius positioned himself to write the greatest History that would ever be written on the Earth, because he felt he was there at the creation of the ultimate empire, he was there at the creation of the coming Roman Empire. And Polybius wrote two hundred years before the Roman Empire was founded. But he could see it already because the power of Rome had expanded and had taken in, not only all of Italy, but for the very first time had not only conquered a foe, the most terrible challenge that the Roman people ever faced, the challenge of Hannibal, the Carthaginian. The challenge of the Carthaginian Empire. And Polybius said, well the battle that Thucydides thought was the greatest epic battle of all time, the battle between Athens and Sparta, is nothing compared to the battle between Rome and Carthage. And there's no general on either side of the Thucydides History that matches up with the two great generals that finally faced each other off in the (what are called now) the Punic Wars. The wars with Carthage.
There were several of them but the big one was where the Carthaginian general was Hannibal and the Roman general was Scipio Africanus. And Scipio Africanus, the great biography of him, written in the 30's, the subtitle of it was A Greater Than Napoleon. Scipio Africanus never had a Waterloo and he did everything and more that Napoleon did. One of the greatest generals of all time. Perhaps the only person comparable to him is Alexander the Great. Scipio Africanus, who during his elegant elder age, once when insulted and abused by the Roman Senate, went before the Senate with the charges in his hand and stood before them and tore it up, in person, and dropped it on the floor and walked out. And they did nothing, because they realized that he was too much for them. The man who not only defeated Hannibal, but who had effaced the Carthaginian Empire from the face of the Earth forever. Scipio Africanus had the elan, the aura, the charisma that Douglas MacArthur had at the moment when he was fired by Harry Truman from the Korean War. I remember as a grade school student, being ushered into the hallways to listen to the radio broadcast of MacArthur, where he gave that famous speech that old warriors never die, they just fade away. Of course meaning they just fade away until you remember that you need them and they are the first person that you call. Scipio Africanus was a Roman Douglas MacArthur.
And Polybius was the best friend of his descendent who bore the same name and was in the same family and Polybius also thought, I have the right theme because the line of diameter of this form, of this next Punic War, where I have the front row seat. The theme is that the controlling element in History at long last is discovered. The Greek word for it is tyche, it means fortune. Out of that comes the ancient phrase "what is operative in reality? Fortune and men's eyes". That fortune, if one could understand the operative movements and workings of fortune, one could understand why it was that Rome was rising and was destine to rise and control the whole world. And Polybius' History is all about the movement of fortune in the diameter of the Punic Wars where Rome emerged victorious, never ever to be superceded.
So that when Rome went into its fall, into its decline, in the 400's of the AD's and the 500's of the AD's, the most obsessive antithetical image in the collapsing Roman Empire world was the image of "Dame Fortune". The mysteriousness of a fortune, of lady luck. Just who is she, we obviously misunderstood. And the greatest poet of that whole era, took for his name, Fortunatus. And out of that comes the whole image of the wheel of fortune which becomes even a Tarot card. So that the diameters of a History have an eerie capacity to not only stamp themselves upon the Historian, but to stamp themselves upon the Historical process itself so that anyone who comes into play in that field discovers that the field is not empty, it's full of very large vicious formidable beasts. Unfulfilled themes that are raging and powerful like dinosaurs from the past who are still alive. And it turns out that Jurassic Park is very much a very good image of the contemporary chaos. They're still here and they're still dangerous. Let's take a break.
BREAK
If you take a diameter, which is not a mythic plot line, then History is possible form. If you take a radius History is not possible no matter how refined you are. In India, the yoga developed scientifically, accuracy to take a radius precisely even of nothing. So that you could really, you could come up with 0 accurately as a 0 radius of a non-movement. Yoga was developed to that extent. There never was a History. The closest that India ever got to it was with two sages, one named Viasa the other named Velmeki who wrote the great epics of India. Viasa wrote the Mahabharata, and Velmeki wrote the Ramayana.
Viasa came very close, because one of the chapters, they're called parvans, one of the parvans, the sixth parvan of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita. And the Bhagavad Gita, very much, is a diameter of the mind, but it stops there and only allows for a resonance to go the spiritual person, called in Viasa's Sanskrit, Parusha, the Parusha, the golden being of spiritual truth. So Viasa was able to take the diameter of the mind and allow its resonance to go as far as the person. Valmeki was able to be reflective and self reflective enough on the language to understand the language form and he had the patience to use that language form, he discovered the sloka, the two lined poetic form of Sanskrit poetry and Sanskrit epic and almost all great Sanskrit literature's based on the sloka. He had that kind of patience; his name means white ant hill. He meditated so long in one of the jungles of India that white ants built a mound over him.
But just having the accuracy of conscious language and the form of the differential person is not enough to develop History. History is so encompassing. Because eventually one comes to realize that even though you can take a diameter of the mind to an accuracy that would stagger most people, and you can develop the prism of the person, differentially, to be that of a world class artist, History as an inter-personal consciousness encompasses all that and goes beyond it on all sides, all dimensions. China developed History very late and part of the genius of the Chinese development of History is that it was a reflection upon a process of tethering which had taken two different halves, the integral half and the differential half and it put them together into a complementarity.
The ancient Chines integral yoga was the first I Ching. In Chinese lore it's always ascribed to Fu Shi. Fu Shi lived about 3,000 BC and Fu Shi's heavenly pattern of the I Ching was always the integral synthesizing norm for Chinese civilization down to about 1100-1200 BC. And then it changed epically. The I Ching basis was shifted from a natural integral to a human differential. And the pair of men who did this were related. One of them was the King, King Wen. And the other was his relative the Duke of Cho. And they not only rewrote the I Ching but they founded the Cho Dynasty which replaced the Shung Dynasty and changed the whole nature of Chinese civilization from an integral nature based radius to a human differential radius. And you look at one of the great documents, the first collection of poetry in Chinese history comes from the same time as the rewriting of the I Ching. In fact they completely shunted aside the old I Ching. They said this old I Ching went by a divination process which was based on the cracks in the tortoise shell. It's an old Paleolithic Shamanic act which we reject as old fashion, and the new one is to use the yarrow stalks, which is a Neolithic Shamanic process, much improved, much more powerful. Man has tamed nature.
And so you find in the first Chinese collection of poetry, The Book of Songs, poem after poem about the glories and the splendors of the men and women of Cho who have this talent to not only tame the plants and animals of the world, but to tame the celestial powers in man so that they become human sized; they become focused in refineable educational human endeavors. That nature comes down to the prism of the Person, and the Person then uses their radius to restyle and transform and make nature anew so that it's usable by men and women on their scale. And it was glorious, epical, and in The Book of Songs you find again and again one of the great figures that emerges is that the Cho people came from a section of China, huge valley, where horses were raised, and they were fantastic horsemen. And so you have this interesting thing, that the old ancient antique vision of Chinese civilization, from the first Dynasty, not from the Shung, but from the Sha Dynasty, 2200 BC. The Sha Dynasty which is contemporaneous with like Sargon of Achad, with ancient Sumeria.
But the image of the Sha Dynasty is of the Chariot, the teamed horses with the Chariot. And of course the Chariot is not Chinese, it's imported; it's a Middle Eastern civilization symbol. It comes from the ancient Irani grasslands from where Zarathustra came from. So when the Cho wanted to have some way to really separate themselves, they had not the Chariot but the lone horseman, the individual on a horse. The mobility of the person who had tethered the animal of mobility, which set him way above the Paleolithic warrior. No matter how great a Paleolithic warrior was, a man on a horse was superior. And so the Cho image of themselves was that of the radius of the human proportioned differential prism of possibility which goes back and transforms and re-cuts the whole natural cycle. So that the I Ching that we have, that comes down, its name is Cho I, the book of Cho. The Chinese actually means symbols of Cho. "I" is symbols. It means mind forms that have transcendentally been taken out of the mind and put into practice in the world by men and women. Who has done this? We have done this. And we intend to do this.
But for all of that genius, it was only the other side of the coin. It wasn't a full diameter at all. The first person in Chinese History to take the full diameter, to take both Fu Shi's radius and the radius of King Wen and the Duke of Cho, was Lao Tsu. And the Tao Te Ching is the first time that you get a diameter of Chinese civilization; someone who's really comprehensive, someone who indeed makes Fu Shi look mythic and makes Duke of Cho and King Wen look provincial. And of course the apocryphal image of the wise old Lao Tsu at the end of his life, to sort of capture him, capture him in a mythic image, capture him in an enduring symbol, capture him in a visionary conscious moment, capture him as the Chinese Parusha of all time, but capture him in a Historical moment so that one could begin understanding and remembering the significance of meaning on a differential as well as an integral, the last time any Chinese saw Lao Tsu was, he was riding over the Han Ku Pass. In ancient times the beast that he was riding is very reminiscent of the most ancient Sha Dynasty creature, because the most ancient figure was that of the mystical Queen Mother of the West and what she rode was a reindeer. And so in the really old Chinese Taoist stuff you see that Lao Tsu is riding an antlered reindeer. Later on provincial China reduced it down to a water buffalo, but you would never ride a water buffalo into the Gobi Desert would you?
The Han Ku Pass separates the old China from the new; separates the China that has rice as its diet from the China that's way out in the vast reaches of the Gobi Desert that ends only when you get to the Irani grass lands, all of Asia way. And at the Han Ku Pass is where the keeper of the pass begged Lao Tsu to leave some words behind and the Tao Te Ching is what Lao Tsu said to him, and the keeper of the pass wrote down. And in the archaic Chinese, the Tao Te Ching has no divisions, it is a cascade of magical language without any kind of punctuation; there are no chapters, there's no punctuation, it's just a cascade of language. So that the first people that made some kind of a form for it, totaled up the number of Chinese characters, divided into two sections, the section on Tao and the section on Te and then totaled how many characters there are, and the total of it was something like 5,555 characters with no punctuation. A waterfall of differential prismed diameter of Chinese civilization that from then on it was understood the Chinese ideal, and their civilization was that man is the bridge between heaven and earth. Man is the fulcrum of the heavenly radius of Fu Shi and the earth radius of the Chu I. There isn't anyone in China in 1999 teaching this, not out of 12,000,000,000 people, not a single one of them knows this. There are more Taoists in Los Angeles than there are in all of China.
But out of that, out of Lao Tsu, out of the Tao Te Ching came a kind of an inter-personal consciousness that within a couple of hundred of years matured, and the first Chinese historian is Sima Qian. His father was a archive keeper, not for the Cho Dynasty, it had its long run and then it fell. And there were records, there were annals of the late Cho, they're called the spring and autumn annals, and there are annals, there are chronologies, there's even a Confucian classic book called The Book of History, The Shu Ching, but it's not really a History, it's more lists. But in the Historical records of Sima Qian you find real History. He's the Thucydides of China. And you see that when you look through, this is just a selection, Sima Qian's History is half a million words, huge, massive, and the operative transform in it are people, human beings. Not human beings who are like just differential prisms, but the central operative transform is that being who's at the fulcrum who balances all these people with all this nature, the Historian himself. You can't have a History until there's a Historian; you have to have someone who's capable of occupying the center of the diameter of the form and that cannot be done by a yogi, no matter how masterful they are. And it can't be done by a spiritual Parusha no matter how glorious.
So that the crisis of consciousness in History is beyond the capacities of yoga or spiritual form here to to developed on the planet, because its challenge outstrips the capacity for response, no matter how perfect. And so the challenge is unmet because the response has been to imagined versions of the challenge that were always partial, in fact were artificial, they were so inept, so childish. Only these children have nuclear weapons and genetic manipulation and they are not going to live more than another generation unless they learn. And they have to learn a lesson that was never ever learned on the planet before, because there was never anyone to teach it.
So the problems that are here are incredible. One of the difficulties that we have is to understand how it is that History operates as a medium, as a transformational process and our only clue is that it operates as a larger version, a big sister to consciousness. And that consciousness is already a formidable ocean. And consciousness found in its visionary process that it answered as a whole, whatever its extent was. It answered in its infinity the call of nature as a mysterious whole, and one finds it very clearly. In Chinese History the tradition was always that it, it meaning whatever it is that you're really interested in, that has something to do with nature and man. That has something to do with nature and consciousness as they work together, as they interplay. And that Tao is that, is the mystery of nature but not a "the". And that man's doing, his person, his consciousness, his vision, has something to do with Te, with the objective wholeness of that radius, of his capacitied realm. And that those two together somehow, they not only go together, Chuck Berry said it best, he said they go together like two straws in a Coke. Can you imagine that. It's like boyfriend girlfriend time. It's like there is a romance that's happening when they are together.
And that's what Hegel found out. He found out because of his genius, his enlightenment genius, tutored by chewing on Kant until he got that kind of precision, but also tutored by his friend Holderlin who would write poems like this: To The Sun God. "Where are you. Drunken my darkening soul reels at all your rapture. For but a moment's sense I saw the young enchanting god tired after his day's travel. Bathe in the golden cloud, his boyish curls. And now my helpless eye pursues him. But gone is he and far, to peoples living in piety who still revere him. Earth, I love you, for with me you are grieving and like hurt done to a child our sorrow changes to sleep and as the winds flutter and whisper among the strings of a musical instrument till the master charms the lovelier tone from it, swirling dream and mist around us play till our lover return and life and the spirit catch fire in us."
This is romantic talk. It has nothing to do with cheap romance, this is big time romance. This is where Hegel came in and when you take his Phenomenology of Mind and you stop reading it as dry as the dust rationalist Kant, which is so difficult to understand, and you read it as romantic epic poetry, you finally get the tone. It's someone who's dancing in the wild contortions of infinite wonder at the pretzel like movement of the mind eluding its own pins that would tack it down and limit it. "In those systems where the elements involve general self sameness, this character connotes at once the self sameness of knowledge and of things themselves as well. But this expansion of those self identical characteristics, each of which describes undisturbed the entire circuit of its course and gets full scope to do as it like, necessarily leads us readily to its very opposite. Leads to the confusion of these characteristic. For the qualifying mark, the general characteristic is the unity of opposite factors of what is determinate and what is universal. It must therefore break into this opposition, if now on one side the characteristic over masters the universality in which its essence lies and on the other side again this universality equally keeps that characteristic under control forces the latter to its boundary line and there mingles together its distinctions and essential constituents, observation which kept them apart in orderly fashion and thought it had hold there of something stable and fixed, finds the principles overlapping, dominating one another, sees confusions formed and transitions made from one to the other, here it finds united what it took at first to be absolutely separated." That's a German Tao. That's a German Tao Te Ching. [Dog outside scratching itself against the window] Don't mess with me [laughter]. Reminds me of the time I was lecturing up at my place and all the students were staring and I had this big Jeffersonian window behind me and opossum had climbed up this tree and was looking in as if it were listening. There was a woman in the series at that time who left and never came back. She saw me after a lecture drinking a beer. She said no yogi would drink beer. [Dog scratching again, laughter] Right!
When we come to stew with the problems that are around and the situations, we've done this long enough, many thousands of years long enough, that we've come to understand that what really works is the ability to have latitude and longitude and verticality, to have all of this dimensional space within which to make adjustments. That the adjusted trajectory will get us there because sometimes the there that we thought we wanted to get to is not really the there we wanted to get to and we have to have the freedom to change our course mid-flight because it may be a different there. Or it may be that we change and the there that was right or not right is irrelevant to who it is that we are now. And so I've been working on what's called a yoga of civilization, very pragmatic as a matter of fact. Not at all day dreamy as you would find in university courses. They're the daydreamers. The actuality is that in practice and theory both, bringing that full diameter, that Tao Te of education, the more that you are in this kind of a process, the more variations are available to you of who you are. And it isn't just that it's you who are being educated, but the you is morphing and changing as that goes on. And in a very realistic way I'm a teacher teaching students who become, have more capacity as they go on then they did at first. And as they have more capacity, I have to enlarge so that there's more space for them to be free in. And so the challenge is not some simple challenge of remembering ten thousand pages of stuff, but of being alert enough in honesty to not be caught in my own forms of expectation. To no use a language which was recognizable a month ago because if my language is not creatively new now today, what was the line in, I think in The Longest Day, the Second World War D Day film, Richard Burton playing an RAF pilot is in a bar and one of the guys says well we're loosing all our guys, I guess we have to go up again. And Richard Burton says yes, today, this hour, this minute, now, and then he reaches down and he says that is as soon as I finish my beer. You have to have that kind of playfulness and that kind of exactness to even tender this kind of language, because the language is alive, living language of the spirit.
In Homer, one finds the phrase 'winged words'; a language which flies off the page. But the winged words refer to Homer as an oral poet, so it isn't the page of paper, it's language which is winged vis-à-vis the mind. So that the Homeric Greek symbol for that language which is winged, which flies off the page of the mind, was a butterfly. And the Greek word for it psuche means psyche. The psyche is the differential consciousness which flies off the page of the mind into what? Into a space that it makes by its flight. So that if you don't let it off the page, there's no space there to have. No space has been made. So that the Homeric Greek psychology, 3,000 years ago already was that unless you have freedom and form together there is no way that you're going to know either. You have to have them together. You have to have the freedom to let your consciousness fly and you have to have the form to have a mind from which it can fly. And so that the integral and the differential go together. Yes. And the differential person and the integral mind are really good buddies after all, but they do not come together like two straws in a coke very easily. And so the spiritual person has a closer friend than the objective mind, and that is the objective body. The body gets the spirit much faster than the mind. Because the mind is used to its objectivity of being abstracted from nature. So that when the spirit comes back to the integral party, its first drinking buddy is the body. The body says you mean you're related to me? I have Hollywood insight of what to say, give it to them loud and dirty. It's like John, let's go sing, no shit. He delivered that beautiful line in 2010 when Roy Sheider shows him that the little button to shut hell off is all set up.
The body and the spirit understand each other because they're both objective in exactly thesis and antithetical ways. So that their synthesis is very simple, it's very pure. Whereas the mind, because of its abstraction from the body, also feels equally abstracted from the spirit and suspects the spirit of being in cahoots with the body. And this for good reason, because very often the vision has regressed back so that it goes back to a kind of a wishy washy worldly level. So that one sees that it isn't vision at all but some kind of 'ism' that's a decayed degenerate vision, has become an 'ism', has become some kind of doctrinaire quality. And so that the person has degenerated into a conditioned life. The Nazis are a perfect example of that; of a powerful vision that got regressed back into an imprisoning ritualistic existence that was actually death oriented, not life oriented. And so of course the mind picks up on this right away, picks up on the possibility. And so the mind must be won by the balance of the spirit and the body together, those two straws in a coke. Then the mind can come in. But the mind when it does that, true to its structure, thinks that it's synthesizing those two and immediately makes itself more important; I brought them together, I have done this.
And the crisis of civilization in our time is that minds have become very used to this, they've become addicted to this. And the resolution of this, the sabotaging of this in reality is that there's another objective form, not just the body, not just the mind and not just the person, the spirit, but the Cosmos, the Divine is also objective and has to be brought into play. You can't make a final computation without that objectivity also. But that that whole objectivity does not even come into play until the juices of History are digesting and stirring. Why do you suppose the old phrase was God is the Lord of History? Where would they get that phrase from? Not the judge of penalties on infractions of laws. The Chinese went through that whole thing 2,200 years ago. They got completely identified with a god who was a judge of penalties and laws and they set up the Han Dynasty on the basis. In fact they set up China on the basis because the ruler who used that outlook, that Historical so called vision was the founder of the Chin Dynasty from which the Chinese get their name Chinese. And who as soon as he died was completely effaced by a power group, an oligarchical power group who founded the Han Dynasty. The Roman Chinese are the Hans, the Han Dynasty.
The place that you find it is in the way in which Confucius was man handled. And the man handling of Confucius comes in the Li Chi, the Book of Rites. The book of ceremonial rites, ceremonial usage's, religious creeds, social institutions that not only found the Han Dynasty, but they found the Chinese civil service that was in business until 1911. It was in business for 2,200 years. And all the changes in dynasties never touched that kind of institution, and it was founded upon Fa, law and Shing, penalty. These are the ritual comportment forms which you must fit into or you will be a such and such a penalty. And so law becomes a ritual surrogate which the abstract mind, in its confusion identifies as the right method by which to sustain the equilibrium. And that kind of mind is exactly antithetical to science. And we will see that the great difficulty is not a war between science and religion, but a war between legalism and science. It is a great battle; it is a fearsome battle, and it's going on now, everywhere. And anyone who can speak to the freedom of the butterfly of the person in the realm of Historical operation towards a real Cosmos is a threat by the authoritarian structure. They don't want to hear it, they won't hear it, they refuse to hear it. And as Stravinsky said, the original sin in our time is non-acknowledgement, a truly insidious evil. We never hear of you and no one else will either. That's the mummy that's carried over from the ancient Egyptian, the tyranny of a Historical zombie that's still around. And still there.
In the attempt to try to find a way out of this, Historians like Hegel and like Jacob Burckhardt tried somehow to find a way to write Histories and this is where Jacob Burckhardt, after he had died in 1897, they published in 1905 his reflections on History and here's a paragraph from that: "But every individual, we too, exists not for his own sake but for the sake of all the past and all the future. In fact of this great grave whole, the claims of peoples, times and individuals to happiness and well being lasting or fleeting, are of very subordinate importance. For since the life of humanity is one whole, it is only our full powers of perception that its fluctuations in time or place are a rise and fall, fortune and misfortune. The truth is that they are generally governed by a higher necessity. We should try to rid the life of nations entirely of the word happiness and replace it by some other while as we shall see later, we cannot do without the word unhappiness. Natural History shows us a fearful struggle for life and that same struggle encroaches far upon the Historical life of nations. Happiness is a desecrated word exhausted by common use. Supposing that there was a world plebiscite to decide on the definition of the word. How far should we get? Above all only the Fairy Tale equates changelessness with happiness."
And in this kind of pragmatic transforming, changing, morphing possibility, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, we have lived through the entirety of the century and have found that nowhere is there any maturity whatsoever. There is no Historical understanding that holds for there is no Historical understanding that is able to be free in its own form. However improbable, still, there has been a development of some science. And last weeks lecture was entitled Active Optics History. And human beings, men and women much like us, have learned to see what was improbable even in Fairy Tales, how to take a single photon of star light and understand that that star is a binary that has such and such a life pattern and has a couple of planets circulating around it and is half a million light years away. We've learned to do that. But it's been on a basis of jumping over the challenge of History rather than answering it. And if you go to a place like JPL where there are five thousand men and women, working everyday, in a work realm.....
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