Science 1
Presented on: Saturday, October 2, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Science 1 and we're shifting to a new square of attention. Our square of attention now is completely differential. That means the frame of reference that we have when we come to bringing science in, the more that we bring science in, the more that consciousness becomes the focus of attention and it means that nature becomes completely, for the first time ever, completely, let's say subconscious. Not unconscious - unconscious is a misnomer, but subconscious in the sense that when we were in Nature, consciousness was subconscious. Not only does consciousness have a mysterious non-registering presence in animals, it also has that same non-registering presence in rocks. A scientific mystic like Teilhard de Chardin trying to serve out his exile by the church in the Gobi Desert for forty years, assigned to be a Paleontologist all that time, came out finally with the realization that rocks are not dead, they are pre-life. So that there was something in the old alchemy, when they looked at the metals, the metals had a developmental cycle that went from lead to gold. Metals matured by being cooked in the earth and it was man who learned to speed up the cooking so that the gold could be achieved, not in geologic time but in human time. And that the key to inorganic development which has a phase form conscious quality to it; the way that metals grew was through the minerals being interjected. And it was the mineral hinges that allowed the metals to mature, to evolve, to occur. And so an inorganic consciousness has something to do with metals and minerals. Consciousness then in Nature has a mysterious presence but it doesn't register. It first begins to register when our quality of experience begins to come into play. For the first time we begin to get a sense that there is something beyond.
But now with Science, our frame of reference is Science, History, Art and Vision; that frame of reference. And that means that the Natural integral cycle now has a kind of a denominator quality because there's always a ratio, a ratio of the real. And the ratio of the real is that the numerator has a conscious registry and the denominator has a natural registry. So that in a short form one could say the real has to do with something with Consciousness and Nature. Not only do they have a relative relationality but they have in fact an interface, but that the interface is not a simple interface, it's very complex, and the complexity grows as the evolution of the square of attention evolves. And eventually when we get to Science, the interface of Consciousness and Nature is actually the boundary, the perimeter of the square in total.
Now this has been expressed in world wisdom traditions in very peculiar ways because it's only in our time that we have the language capacities to express for the first time exactly what this is, what this means, how it works and to learn it. The ancient Chinese way of speaking of this, the Taoist, not the early Taoist like Lao Tsu or Chuan Tsu, or even the Medieval Taoist like Wang Pi and Ho Shen Kong and that school, but much later on, even though it's a thousand years back from our place in History, the Taoist of the 9th Century in China had developed what we know today as calculus, the higher mathematics of calculus. But they used it as mental training exercises in the monasteries and they never realized that it had an application. But the phrase, the Taoist phrase at that time is that you could always recognize a Taoist master because the pupils of his eyes were square.
So that the interface of the Differential square of attention with the Natural square of attention is like two squares that come together, and they come together in a way where the one is the complement of the other. And they have a slight twist together so that when you view it as a process, the process is that infinity sign which is the ancient Egyptian and Western way of understanding it; the infinity sign. Whereas the infinity sign in its originality was not seen as a flow process like a flow chart, like an engineering flow chart, it was seen as an achievement, a static objective achievement and it was expressed as an infinity sign standing straight up which was the figure 8. So that in the Hermetic West the two squares of attention, pure Consciousness and pure Nature, the differential and the Integral were expressed as an 8 - a perfect 8.
And it was universal, because the same mind that was there in the Hermetic Egyptian Greek kind of tradition was there also in the Irani Sanskrit Indian tradition. So that you have in India, you have the Noble Eight Fold Path of the Buddha. And in Egypt you have the Octode, the Perfect 8. And when you look to see, like 5,000 years ago in the Egyptian Hieroglyphic expressions, the first time that written symbolic expressions are given, you already see that there is a flow process, a phase form process to that eight; that the eight is not indeed static, it never was static. The earliest that you find the eternity is expressed as an ongoing eightness and so you have in the Egyptian Hieroglyphic friezes, you have the Urias, the Cobra that is abstracted away from the crown of Egypt and you just have the Cobras by themselves standing in figure 8's that are linked together. So that you have this accordion of royal Cobras in figure 8's. And 5,000 years ago that's the way the Hermetic tradition expressed that perfection moving is reality. And so that the movement of perfection has a completeness to it and that completeness is not in a completed boundary but in a complementarity where boundary and context are interfaced everywhere together.
So that the Taoist who has the square pupils is able to see the world framed in its complement to that Taoist seeing. We today, by the beginning of the 21st Century, we can say well yes that's right. Your conscious square of attention interfaces everywhere with the integral square of the Natural development, of Nature. So that we come together with Nature in such a way at this level complete as well as perfect and thus real. That the conscious perfection and the Natural completeness go together, they fit together.
Now once upon a time when there was a need to re-express anew this kind of personal Cosmic Vision, about 400 years ago, one of the expressions that came out in England at that time was someone who had learned to deal with the pageantry of images and the refinement of symbols and had learned to put that through the Visionary distillation through the artistic transformation into the alchemy of structure. And that figure that I'm talking about now was named Inigo Jones; was one of the greatest architects in History. Jones who was a little bit younger contemporary of Shakespeare but lived on until the early 1650's, and originally was a designer of costumes and stage sets for royal presentations called masques. A mask is a ritual implement, but a masques is a symbolic presentation. And usually he did the costumes and sets for writers like Ben Johnson, one of the great Renaissance playwrights. But when he matured Inigo Jones became the number 1 architect at the time in the world, and his trademark was building special large rooms that were double cubes. They were 20 feet by 20 feet by 40 feet. It was three dimensional squares of reference paired and put together. And the double cube dining hall, banqueting house, hence the Renaissance term was banqueting house, the double cubed banqueting house, why banqueting house? It's where the Platonic symposium are held, where the banquet, symposium in English is translated as banquet. Where the philosophic exchange between all of nature and all of conscious happens with the human population who belong together because they are together in that act and so they should have an architectural setting that's commensurate with the personal Cosmic Naturalness of the event. And so a double cube banqueting house was Inigo Jones personal way of expressing it and where do you find these double cube banqueting houses? In St. James Palace, the Queen's house at Somerset, Somerset House on the Thames. You find them in all of the Royal places where the concourse of ideas was at its highest level at the time, in the personal places of the King and the Queen. And towards the end of his career, Inigo Jones was making structures that were for 200 years the norm of the way in which intelligent personal Cosmic Symbols were put into building forms.
And it's interesting to note because exactly at that time is the birth of what we come to understand today is modern Science. Exactly at that time is the birth, the transition, the transformation from the Medieval world, which even though there was a Renaissance, it still had, it still had a Medieval Nature and an incomplete differential consciousness. In fact the first person in the West to exemplify a completed differential consciousness with an appreciation for the entirety of Nature was William Shakespeare and that's why Shakespeare is so unusual. He's the first real person in this sense in the West for a long long time. And out of that comes, in this very peculiar way this understanding that Science has something to do eventually with the mystery of Nature, that the conscious achievement of knowing of knowing on the level of Scientific knowing doesn't stop there, it's not the dead end, it's not the finality then of reality, but like that 8 on its side it's a part of an infinite flow. And so Science flows back in and is the mystery of Nature. But instead of remaining in the square of attention Science begins to fold back subconsciously, so that Nature has a subconscious knowing of Science already. Which led men and women in both East and West, in China as well as in Egypt, in Japan as well as in Greece, in both those forms of Wisdom traditions, the Taoist and the Hermetic, it led them both to understand that in some way not yet understood, before Nature happened, there was a complete conscious form. Call it God or call it Tao, the Cosmos was understandable to itself before Nature even happened. How that occurred, they didn't know and the traditional wisdom way of saying was then that life was a gift of Grace, that it was not accidental at all but was intentional. Because the Ritual comportment that makes existence comes out of that mystery of Nature. It doesn't come out of Nature as a blankness, it comes out of Nature as a pregnant emptiness, that emptiness is pregnant.
So that 2,000 years ago the term that would have been used in a Greek language way is that the Pleroma, the void is pregnant. Not pregnant with existentiality but pregnant with openness, shear openness and that somehow shear openness is invitational. Where is it invitational? In the real So that the deepest Ritual wisdom was then not to make forms that were enclosed but to make forms that were cups that could receive the gift of life and of form and of blessing. So that the highest Ritual items were always those of the cup and not those of the box. The highest forms of Ritual dance were those where the dance generated a center which was accessible to the mystery of Nature. So that the Ritual were not compulsory to manipulate the heavenly powers to do this and that, to jump through our hoops but invitational, we have prepared a place for Thee to come to visit. Whereas a Black Magic is always a stupidity, is misunderstanding. You don't go through those Ritual steps to compel. You have to watch out for those things which you can compel, because they carry the frozen compelling qualities with them and if you invite those things in then of course you will become quite frozen and quite compelled, whereas if the invitation is open the invitation is one of life and Natural life leads to conscious thought. Natural life, when completely transformed is completely conscious love. So that love and life have this complementarity, they have this relationality. The fact is that one cannot appreciate that without Science. Because without Science, without going forward to that kind of objectivity which Science registers, the Cosmos does not really occur, and because it does not then really occur some surrogate attempt to compensate for that and the surrogate is always an artificial falsely imagined metaphysic. For men and women sophisticated enough to become persons, if they don't really achieve heaven, they will imagine a metaphysical heaven for themselves, which of course registers not at all in Science but goes all the way back and registers where? Registers in the mind, it registers on the last level of objectivity which can be sustained and that's symbols. And so instead of having the meal, you get a symbol of the meal and of course it's unsatisfying. And so one is compelled to try to go into the reasons why it is that we're not tasting anything and the basis of the symbols are the myths and so you slide all the way back into searching the myths to try to find something which only occurs in History because no Cosmos ever came out of Myth. That's truly a regressive mythology, that's truly a reductive symbolism and because it's unsatisfying eventually one gets lodged back into Rituals but on a compelling level, not invitational. So Science turns out to be not just some kind of decorative attainment for the few, but the heritage of men and women everywhere to complete their sense of the real.
In the 1600's, in the 17th Century, the whole emphasis, the entire thrust at the time by those friends of Inigo Jones that founded the Royal Society was that this material, these processes should not belong to the precocious precious few but should be public, public knowledge. Science should belong to the people. And probably the most beautiful place where you find this registry was in a very wise Englishman, his name was Elias Ashmole, who's collections of rare things are the foundation of the Ashmolian Museum at the University of Oxford in England. And Ashmole wrote a huge book called On The Order Of The Garter on the origins of knighthood and all the myths and symbols of knighthood and the Vision that came out of that and the personal artistic achievement of that, what does that mean then for history? And Ashmole was one of the founders of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Knowledge by including Science as part of the public education of men and women. And you can see, he says very specifically in there, this is so necessary for our realistic maturity that we cannot leave it in the hands of those precious few who will dole out to us as they see fit whatever bits just to keep us pacified, that's not it at all.
And so while there was Science before that the Science was confined to various courts, to various Royal venues, to esoteric groups. But about 350 years ago it was for the first time committed to becoming public in the sense that all men and women could avail themselves if they would of these achievements. And Ashmole says this is the reason why Scientific experiments from then on will always be published publicly and available publicly. And so you have the origins of Scientific publications. A magazine now like Nature is read by more than 1,000,000 people every week around the world. And you think to yourself well out of 6 Billion a million is like a paltry sum, but there have been many many centuries where there have been less than a dozen people who understood anything about these kinds of matters, even at this low levels of past times. The fact that there are a million subscribers and maybe 40 or 50 million interested men and women who could quite easily go into there is an enormous advance, is a real society.
We're taking today two individuals who exemplify a complete transformation of Science from what it was just before we were born. We're taking Richard Feynman and Mary Leakey, a man and a woman. And they come into play in a creative generation that went a step farther than just what 400 years ago was a commitment to make Science public. On their part this was a commitment that Science will also be personally public, because Feynman and Mary Leakey were extremely concerned with the fact that there might be an elite who will co-opt the publicness of Science and they will interpret it, well it's our public, our kind. People with Ph.D's, people who have chairs at various places, who have grants, who have contact with research corporations, etc. And both Feynman and Mary Leakey were tremendously committed that this should be available to whoever is interested. And especially Feynman in the sense that he refused constantly during his lifetime to be co-opted into any kind of academic establishment whatsoever. And he records at the end of his life when he was dying, he knew he only had a little while to live, he wrote two little autobiographical books, one of them he entitled Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. And it comes from an embarrassing moment when he was a graduate student fresh, graduate student at Princeton and he had to go to the Dean's for a tea. And he's like from a part of Brooklyn called Far Rockaway and he was un reformed in his manners, and the Dean's wife offered him tea and asked if he wanted milk or lemon and he said both and she said surely you're joking Mr. Feynman. He was mortified because he'd never had tea in his life, he didn't know what they were talking about. And the other autobiographical book was a quotation from his sweetheart Arlene. Arlene who died of a tuberculosis complication shortly after they were finally able to be married in the early 40's. And she said to him, it became a mantra for him, she said well Richard what do you care what other people think. So his two little books are entitled Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, and What Do You Care What Other People Think. And he had that kind of attitude all of this life.
And what was peculiar about Feynman is that he had this because his father elicited this out of him when he was in his highchair as a little baby. The father Melville Feynman took these colored tiles and he would make little patterns of white or red or colored tiles on the tray of the highchair and he would show the little baby that you could arrange them so that you would push a white one and only the white ones would fall, or push a red one and only the red ones, but there would be a master one that would make them all fall. So in an inadvertent way Melville Feynman happened upon the Froebel Principle of geometric colored primary shapes elicit from us a pre birth intelligence that woks instantaneously. It doesn't have to go through the steps of thinking to operate, it goes through the lightning of intuition. And so Richard Feynman grew up literally from the highchair trusting that there was such a thing as instantaneous intuition. So that he was never satisfied to take other peoples explanations even though they were the experts in the field. He always figured out from scratch for himself. And by figuring out from scratch by himself when he was finally accepted to his first undergraduate education was a MIT It was tough for him to get in because in those days there were Jewish quotas, you can have only so many Jewish students. And when Feynman went to MIT he was shown right a way that we're the professionals, we're the big grown up scientists and engineers and we know by the book learning how to do all these things. But Feynman had read a lot of very complex books on his own using his intuitive method and two of the upper classmen who were in this fraternity that finally accepted Feynman, there were only two Jewish fraternities at MIT, and one of them finally accepted him. And two of the seniors were doing a physics problem and here is freshman Dick Feynman looking over their shoulders and he said well you have to use Beroly's equation on this and then it's easy to solve. And they said well who the hell is Beroly. He never heard Bernuli pronounced in his life. And when they finally got it out of him what he meant they realized that the application of this equation of Bernuli in fact made it very simple to get the answer. And they looked at him, said well who are you? How do you know such stuff? He said well I read his book. Feynman on his own was able to read some of the most complex books, and one of the most complex books at the time, came out, a book by a man named Paul Dirac, he usually goes by the initials P.A.M. P.A.M. Dirac, The Principles Of Quantum Mechanics. One of the most difficult books in the world at the time. Even more difficult than Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the first edition came out in 1930. For some reason Feynman was able to read it and when you get to know a little bit about his life, you realize how he was able to read a book like this which was catastrophically difficult. He was 9 years old before his sister Joan was born. And of course as soon as he saw her sitting in the highchair the memory of him being taught in the highchair so he started to teach his sister, his first pupil, his sister. So he would teach her how to think intuitively about math problems and so forth. And of course she was told as a little girl in Far Rockaway in the 1920's that girls cannot be Scientists. Nice Jewish girls make homes, they don't do this stuff. She grew up to be one of the top Scientists at J.P.L. in the space program because she was taught by little Richard Feynman. Not only taught how to think but how to find a way to solve a situation by continuously going back again and again and taking what you had learned that far a hitting the ignorance again going back. He said if you cannot read a book right away, go as far as can and when you're stopped, stop go back to the beginning and try it again and try it again. He said eventually you will build up enough of an acquaintance that you'll be able to start inching forward. So he read Paul Dirac's book that way when he was still an adolescent, I think he was 18 or 19 years old. So that when he became a sophomore at MIT there was a special graduate course on advanced physics. And he decided that he was going to sign up for it even though he was just a sophomore. And when he went in there he found that lo and behold there's this wise acre other sophomore who became a good buddy of his. They decided we're the two youngest by far in here and all these graduated students are going to eat us alive and we don't know anything about this subject so we'll work together as a team, as a tandem. And they turned out to be very very special in that class, but Feynman was like the star. And the class was taught by a man named Stratton, Julius Stratton who later on became president of MIT. And within about a month Stratton would interrupt his lecture and he would say Mr. Feynman how would you solve this? How would you go about this? Because it had become apparent that this Brooklynese, precocious little kid really knew a lot of stuff but especially he knew how to get the right answer from very peculiar angles. He had this grab bag of all these mathematical techniques that he had read on his own and just collected like other boys would collect bubble gum cards. He had all these pet little mathematical techniques, these equations, these transforms and so forth. And so he would come up to a problem and he would keep badgering it until he solved it one way or another. And if he couldn't find something to solve it, he would make something on his own. He would create his own structure. And eventually, because he got tired of not being able to express his ideas fast enough, or his intuition direct enough, he devised his own Hieroglyphs and they're called Feynman Diagrams and they're used world wide now rather than traditional mathematics. Because Feynman Diagrams are his own Hieroglyphics made from scratch to express Nuclear Processes.
And so Feynman was this kind of character. And of course he drew attention. And when it came time to go to graduate school, his teacher said there's only one place for you to go. Don't stay here at MIT. He said abut I want to stay here at MIT, I'm at home. They said no, the place for you to go is Princeton. And so he was sent off to Princeton in 1939, a little Jewish boy from Brooklyn. And the big honcho at Princeton was Albert Einstein, at the institute of advanced studies. And the head of the physics department was a precocious 28 year old named Artjohn Archibald Wheeler. Feynman was 21 Wheeler was 28, Wheeler became one of the greatest physicists in the world. His text on gravitation is still the standard text used and Wheeler did an autobiography called At Home In The Universe. When you open it the first thing that you find are the seven Sibyls. Seven Sibyls of esoteric physics. And the sixth Sibyl, the sixth Sibyl is the Sibyl of complementarity. And complementarity, that Sibyl, she is the powerful guard against contradictions. Why? Because contradictions can only happen in a polarized mind. Contra-dictions do not occur in reality, they only occur in symbol objectivity. A contradiction is an artifact of logic, of a logical form which only occurs in the mind, only on the symbol level. And if you have enough consciousness you can see that contradictions never occur in nature. They don't occur in existence. They don't even occur in Myths, they certainly don't occur in Vision or in Art or in History or Science for that matter. They occur only in the mind. And that the Sibyl of complementarity as Wheeler prizes in his book, his autobiography, if one understands this, if you understand that complementarity is the actual context that's working in reality, you will find a way to step back from the contradiction that seemingly stops you and go back below it or go up above it or go to the side of it and find another way to put the problem so that a contradiction doesn't occur. Exactly the advice that Aldous Huxley's Zen psycho analyst in Paris told him, Hubert Benois. Benois said the problem with you Aldous Huxley, is that you think there are problems. When in actual fact there are no problems at all. So that the search for an answer is being duped by thinking that the problems are real. If you stop looking for answers, whole solution fields occur. And that's called getting along in life. Let's come back after a break.
SCIENCE 1: PART TWO
One of the peculiarities that consciousness begins to notice is that actually in Nature the most peculiar coincidences happen. Richard Feynman's mother, Lucille, went to school in New York City at the Ethical Culture Institute and nine years later a student at that same place was Robert Oppenheimer. And Oppenheimer figures massively in Richard Feynman's life. It's a peculiar quality, this unbelievable serendipity. For instance, the other person that we're taking today is Mary Leakey. Mary Leakey the wife and long time co-scientist with Louis Leakey, L.S.B Leakey. Mary, a very common ordinary English girl who became one of the most insightful scientists of our century, who mastered a re-calibration of time so that she could think, not in terms of minutes and days and years, but to think in terms of millions of years. She re-calibrated her sensitivity to think in millions of years. Whereas Richard Feynman recalibrated his sensitivity to think in, what we today would call nano seconds or pico seconds.
So that Feynman and Mary Leakey are the very small and very large; they're a pair. And a lot of their pairedness is that they recalibrated a way from what we would call standard time, the calendar time, the clock time, and showed not so much the kind of elasticity that psychological time has, that you find in literature, like stream of consciousness writing of Virginia Wolf or Marcel Proust. The elasticity of psychological time, one moment could be an eternity. But the scientific application that microscopic, sub-microscopic time has the same characteristic that macroscopic, farther than millennial time, millions of years; that geologic and sub-nuclear time has the same kind of a quality. If what you're looking at is all within the same shared time, interactions are not needed to be separately counted in the integral. The time acts as a single item. Whereas if you have a chaotic or fractured quality to the time then every aspect of every interaction has to be computed separately. Then time becomes like the proverbial grains of sand and it's like a computation grit that no one is smart enough to work in. Which is one of the secret reasons why History is necessary to navigate before science can be successfully brought into objectivity. There is a conscious mystery to History and if you haven't been following the History lectures, get some of the tapes and go back through it because we've been talking about this all the time.
There is such a thing as making History together, which is distinctly different from doing time. And it's like this world is a prison to which we are sentenced as long as we are doing time, but when we learn to make History together, we are freed by transformation into a realm where our shared time does not have to be factored piecemeal into the interface of events.
Extremely important, perhaps more graphically easy to understand when it come to Mary and Louis Leakey, the cue for the Leakeys was in Louis Leakey's childhood. Louis Leakey was born in Africa; he was born in what is today Kenya. And he lived in an area where there were no European boys. So that Louis Leakey as a boy grew up literally not knowing that he was white. He grew up like a Kukuyu boy and it didn't occur to him until he was sent away to university to England, and when he would sleep at night he realized for the first time that he dreamed in Kukuyu not in English. And so the title of one of his autobiographical books is The White Kukuyu. He was a tribal member; he was not an honorary tribal member, he was a tribal member. And when he was older he was a tribal elder, not as an exception but he was a tribal elder of the Kukuyu people. Which meant that when he related to the African landscape he did not relate to the African landscape as if it were an environment for colonists. It was a part of the natural complement to his person and had a sensitivity of the complementarity of the land and his spirit. So that when he met Mary, he realized that she had awoken up to that reality herself in a most peculiar way. She didn't have it with the English landscape, the English country side, she didn't get it there. She got it when she was a little bit older and she was taken on a holiday into France and while they were there they were shown some French Paleolithic caves, where there were cave art, and in those Paleolithic caves she got it. She felt mystically suddenly that she belonged with those Paleolithic petroglyphs in those Paleolithic caves and that she was real in that landscape. And she didn't realize it until later when she met Louis Leakey that this was a very peculiar realization that had suddenly gelled for he and that she was real in those terms.
And the experience is recounted most beautifully in one of Leakeys earliest books, it's called Adam's Ancestors, it appeared in the early 1930's. And he writes the sentence in here that "It was a matter of considerable luck too, that in 1926 the steamer in which I was crossing Lake Victoria from Kisumu to Entebe. (Entebe is now on the northern part of Lake Victoria and I'm sure that you'd recognize from the great raid on Entebe that was staged a number of years ago). So he's on this steamer crossing Lake Victoria from the Kenya side up to Entebe: "It had to change it's sailing schedule and pass a little island called Rusinga Island in daylight instead of in darkness. This enabled me to examine the stratified deposits of rock on the island with field glasses and make a note that the island looked very promising as a place to search for fossils. This little incident led to my making by first visit to the island in 1931". (By that time he and Mary) "And discovering on my very first day there, some fragment fossils of an ape jaw discovery which led to the finding of the famous procouncel scull by my wife on October 2, 1948."
There was something about Louis and Mary that when they met each other, after dancing around with the kind of European supposedly British etiquite that they recognized in each other this very peculiar quality that they were both real in the wild. So they got together and they found when they got together that this shared being real in the wild accumulates. It doesn't just add, it multiplies. So that together they were many time more insightful than they were alone. That there is an accumulation of the presence so that the presence shared between them has a higher energy. So that they were able to presence the immediacy and their insight had more of what is called in scientific yoga accumulated penetration. This process of going back to the beginning and going until you're stopped and going back to the beginning and so forth, all condensed within a timelessness of instantaneous. That instantanaity is a yogic quality. It means that the time dimension has been completely subsumed in the space time so that the time is now subsumed so that only the spaciality is needed and no time is needed at all to have the insight. Or it can work the other way around, it can be the spaciality subsumed within the time so that just an instant contains all of the volume. If you remember a time moment in the real, the entire spacial condition comes back with it. This is the speciality of Proust a la Reserche du Temp Pardu. One little bite of an orange and he remembers the whole scenario, everything is there, everything is complete. It works either way.
For Louis and Mary Leakey it worked so that the landscape began to whisper to them about things that are not in time. So when they went to Rusinga Island, the very first day they were there, they found the fragments that led to the discovery because with Pro Counsel for the first time there was an indication that we were not dealing with hundreds of thousands of years but we're dealing with millions of years. That our physiological skeletal construct goes back millions of years. Pro Counsel goes back into the tens of millions of years.
So that we are incredibly ancient, but that ancientness is only realizable consciously in an instantaneous presence. Because as long as you are co-opted into the artificial stratifications of a social world, you don't have any access to that calibration whatsoever. Whereas when you have access to that calibration on the very large, you also have it on the very small, just depending on how you were educated, how you are trained, how you are disciplined. Feynman was trained to the pico second, Mary Leakey was trained to the macroscopic.
So that Louis and Mary Leakey, when they got together, they go granting to search a place called Old Duvai Gorge, which Louis Leakey knew from his childhood because it's on land that the Kikuyu and the Masai inhabit on the edge of the Serengeti. And Cambridge University Press has printed, so far, five huge volumes of the Paleontology of Olduvai Gorge. And this one, volume 5, 1994, is by M.D. Leakey, Mary Leakey.
When they first went to Old Duvall Gorge, it was completely on the same kind of hearing the whispers of the land that Louis had learned to hear. And they went to Old Duvall Gorge and they were unable to find a single iota for more than a generation. They looked for more than a quarter of a century. What were they looking for? They were looking for some kind of fragment of fossilized bone that belonged to a species of man that no one had ever seen and that no one even believed existed except them. And it was Mary who found it. Mary who had imbibed in a way the thrust, the dynamus of the accumulated penetration. Whereas Louis had concentrated on the energia, the collecting of the sifting patience. So it was a very peculiar situation. Here was a man and woman who had exchanged positions; it was she who went out to earn a living and it was he who stayed home and cooked. But his staying home and cooking was to sort through bits of rock and bits of mineral and bits of dust patiently on tables in their tent, for a quarter of a century, while she went out and found these bit. That was her work, that was his cooking. And she drove back frantically one day - she smoked cigars, out in the field, and she had Dalmatian dogs, a whole pack of them with her all the time, she loved them. She came back, the dogs tongues and ears flying, cigar puffing, she came rushing in, she said I found it. And she had this little bit of rock, bit of fossil bone. And they tremblingly sat down and it was the first indication that this was not from an ape, this was from some kind of species of Homo, man. And it was the first time that anybody ever had found any indication that man wasn't just created 6,000 years ago by an act of Divine fiat. Here was the scientific evidence that man was millions of years old. That we are not recent dupes of some stupid artificial process, but that we are accumulated penetration of millions and millions of years of sophisticated mystery of nature bringing out something incredibly artistic, something incredibly scientific as a conscious being who knows themselves and can prove it.
And one of the most odd qualities of all of this is that almost as if the ancient Jewish tradition were right that that capacity is passed down through the woman; that it's in the blood line. Because one of their sons, the son who hated Paleontology, who refused to even participate with any of this kind of thing was Richard Leakey. Richard Leakey who didn't want to have anything to do with what his parents did, he wanted to do other things which a young man should be able to do, why does he have to do what his parents do? And became one of the greatest paleontologists in his own right. Proved to himself, to where his hair stood on his neck because one day, flying in a plane, over a lake in the African rift system, the edge of Ethiopia, a lake called now Lake Trikana. He looked down and with that land whispering, it said to him over her on this little spit of land, this is where it is. And he tried to ignore this, he tried to not even think of this, and within a year or two, he was back with a group and it was there that they found the first great complete skeleton of a young man two millions years old, who already not only walked upright, but was at 17 already almost 6ft. tall, and because he was hunting alone was a very capable hunter already. Who had the bone structure of somebody who could not just walk upright, but could run like the wind. Two millions years ago on the African Plain.
So that when someone like Richard Leakey then looked at the myths that man came from some hunched over Neanderthal clunker, said this is just a mess, this is not true at all. We're not recent arrivals from some kind of bent over clunker. We come from millions of years of sophisticated human capacity. And all of this has happened within our lifetime. No one, no Plato, no Newton, ever knew this, ever even suspected this.
So that we come into a completely brand new world that's never been calibrated. The educational quality that is given to us is still Medieval University systems improved by this that and the other. They've never been recalibrated to what's actually here now.
When we come back to someone like Richard Feynman, and we're going to take Leakey and Feynman for the next month. What stuck in Feynman's mind about Diary's book was something at the very end of the book and it's interesting how he remembered it. He remembered the phrase as like his little mantra. He remembered the phrase 'it seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed'. And so whenever he would get into these deep problems, which were intractable and there was no solution, instead of coming to a stop like everyone else did, that this is far as our knowledge goes and that's as far as we go. Feynman never stopped. He would understand that what had stopped us was a misunderstanding in the mind. A symbol level, mis-cue, which had to be recalibrated. Not that the mis-cue had to be corrected, but the mind totally had to be recalibrated. You had to go back and from scratch build it back up again completely. And that's what this education that we're doing is all about. How do you do that? How do you find what level you've matured to and where you're stopped and how do you go back to the very beginnings to not to some kind of Ur level which the mind makes up, but how do you go back and return into the mystery of Nature and re-emerge, re-emerge on the ritual participatory level of invitational cup making and go from there. And if you have to do that 500 times in a day then do it 500 times in a day. But there'll come a day when you don't have to do it that much. And there'll finally come a day when you can walk forward free in the phase form process of discovery. That day comes as a promise. Not a promise from someone else to you. As a promise from you to you.
The actual phrase the Dirac uses here, he comes to the edge of what was known in mathematical physics at the time, when the book first came out, 1930, this is the edition that Feynman read, this is the second edition of 1935. It's not the very copy he read but the phrase is "It is probable that some deep lying changes will have to be made in the present formalism before it will provide a reliable theory." Changes in formalism, what's the formalism? The formalism is the way in which the mind symbolically characterizes objective form. The colloquial myth is that, well you're not being logical. Well that's on level of stupidity. There are so many kinds of logic that you would be stymied to even choose between them. And there are many orders that go far beyond what a logical formulations would give. The wisdom traditions is to be able to go back and recalibrate so that you refashion your mind before it even comes into the symbol making capacity. And that you don't stop there but then you take that symbol making capacity and you put it into a transform which allows for consciousness then to play visionarily with unknowns. And in that play with unknowns what is achieved is a gestalt of prismatic possibility called the spiritual person. Not a religious phrase, a conscious phrase. That the spiritual person is a prism of possibility is definitely an operative objectivity. It works, and it works by not being an it. It works by working. How do you know? You know because you're knowing. It's an operative, and so it's like a spectrum that's thrown out from a prism. The complete spectrum of possibilities is there because you're doing it. So that if you weren't doing it, you would have no way for there to be a focus, a fulcrum, an objectivity upon which to base further action. And this is where Feynman was a genius. He always learned to look to the action, what's happening. Not what they're characterizing it as, not what they're saying happens or doesn't happen, what actually is occurring. And this is the very essence of the 17th century change. The way in which Science really began with just a few. It was called the new experimental philosophy. It was a philosophy, a love of wisdom, not by what you knew but by playing with what you didn't know. That's why you do experiments, because you're playing with what you didn't know. You're playing with the 0's and not the 1's.
And as you play with the 0's, almost as if Nature hears that invitation, she gives the 1's. You do experiments and results are there. And if you don't take the results as petrified fossils, but you see them as indications of a living reality, you can go on from there and continue. And so the experimental process continues and transforms experiment out of experience. So Myth deals with experience whereas Vision deals with experiments. And those Visionary experiments lead directly to Science. That's how Magic becomes Science. Not through the hocus pocus of regressing it to a ritual so that you burn candles or this that and the other to compel and get something done, that kind of action is like really dumb. That's the Neanderthal of Myth. That's the ooga booga, that is absolutely stupid. Whereas the other is really big magic because reality is discovered in that activity.
And so Feynman came to call the cycle of that action the Path Integral. And the Path Integral is trustworthy as the spinal column of Integration, not because it'' a spinal column, but because it's like the spinal fluid carrying the neural gestalt forward into the brain of realization. And that you may cripple it by prejudicing what you're going to get by asking a limited question. So what you're looking for is not an answer so much to this question, this question is the tab, the little indication that it leads to a whole field of possibility of answers called a solution. And that the solution is not just a solution to this problem, it may be a solution to everything. And so one has to keep oneself open, open to the magic of discovery. And on this level, science really flies, really makes progress. It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are needed here.
About the time that Feynman was sent to Princeton where Einstein was and John A. Wheeler was the head of the department, Second world war was beginning, Hitler's Nazis, the persecution of Jews and it worked in a very peculiar way. Wheeler left Princeton to go to a secret government project in Chicago. It was a project to make the first atom bomb, the Manhattan Project. And Wheeler was chosen because he was an incredibly brilliant gifted young physicist. And so he let people know that he needed to have Richard Feynman. He needed this younger, even more mathematical, more insightful genius. And when Feynman was approached, he was in a complete quandary. He didn't like the military, he didn't want to work for any government thing. He'd spent a summer working at Bell Labs under a military contract. He didn't like the way that they treated people. He especially didn't like the hidden prejudice that was there in that corporate world of 1940-41. And on top of it all, the woman that he loved, Arlene, had come down with Tuberculosis and just when they thought they had beaten that, the Tuberculosis went into the lymph system and they knew that she was going to die. And they wanted to be married, even under these conditions, before she died. Princeton said, if you're married you loose your grant, you can't have the grant to pay for your education. That's how stupid the world is sometimes. But the resistances go deeper. It isn't just that the world is stupid, it's that it seems almost demonic. Because the conditions were that the Tuberculosis that she had was contagious. And everyone was worried that if they even kissed he would get it too, he would die too. So even with that fractal breaking, heart wrenching condition, they still married. And he was with her until she died in the hospital.
Exactly at the same time that the Nazis were not only threatening to take over all of Europe, but what was said to him by a man named Robert Wilson, who was the liaison in charge of the atom bomb project. He said the Nazis are definitely working on an atomic bomb also. And if they get it first, then there's no end to the extortion. And Wilson said to Feynman, the very day that he told him, this was in the morning, he said there is a meeting in my office at 3:00 and if you change your mind about working with the military on this project with Wheeler in Chicago, be there. Otherwise we have to go without you. And a few minutes before 3:00 Feynman realized that he was in one of these peculiar crunches. And he had this insight that he was indispensable to the success of that project because he was perhaps the only person who had the capacity to go into the unknown in this kind of, how can we say it, this mathematical Shamanic way. He knew that he would not give up until he found the solution field for what it was that they were trying to do. Because Feynman, oddly enough, was the first person in the world to do something which no one had ever done. This is from John and Mary Gribbins book on Feynman and they write here "On one occasion early in his time at Princeton, Feynman was able to calculate, using Quantum Theory, the value of a perimeter that one of his fellow students needed in order to explain certain of the way an atomic nucleus captures an electron. In the process known as inverse bata decay. It was the first time that he had made a calculation that was needed in connection with the current experiment at the cutting edge of physics." No one else in the world had made such a calculation, no one understood how to make it. Feynman made it. He seemed to have this capacity on the subatomic time pico second level to be able to calibrate so that he could understand Visionarily, visually, how inner atomic structures worked, what their action was, so that he could call the game. He could narrate in terms of the mathematics what was happening there so that one could understand and put it into an experiment and it would work.
He was at the meeting at three and at four they put him at a desk on the top secret Manhattan Project. And little bit of time he was working with Oppenheimer and Wheeler and a very little time after that they were at the founding of a place called Los Alamos in New Mexico, the high plateau country to do something that seemed more unreal than Science Fiction at the time. Not just to split an atom, mathematically, but to physiologically take that splitting of the atom and put it into an accumulated penetration which would result in a nuclear event, a chain reaction, an atomic bomb. Feynman was the indispensable figure. He was as they say, he was the point man on the penetration into how this action works. No one understood it because no one knew whether that action that they were looking for really existed or not. And in some kind of deeply mystical way that Louis and Mary Leakey would have understood, that action never was real until it was understood. And then it was real forever. Let's come back next week.
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