Science 2

Transcript (PDF)

This is Science 2, which means that we're generating. We're generating a quality which has not only a furthering, but it has what is called in mathematics, it has a recursive tone to it. In terms of mythology, we're sensing more and more as we go into Science, a return back to the origins, a return to the source. And this recursive quality of returning, of coming back, that you are somehow, you've gone so far out that you are now returning and you are coming back, has a deceptive quality to it. In one of the more esoteric little books to come out of Nuclear Physics, Space/Time Structure by Erwin Schrodinger, famous for understanding paradox so that Schrodinger's Cat is the ultimate apocryphal Koan for the late 20th century. The diagram that he has in the very center of Space/Time Structure is that of the curvature tenser which has the paired vectors. And he shows that mathematically, if you take that tenser and rotate it around a geometricity, if you come back to the beginning, you do not get the same values. Which is an object lesson in reality for those who are scientifically precise. Why would you not return to the exactness? Because the myth is that you would return to the purity of the origins. The whole myth of the eternal return, Mircea Eliade wrote a beautiful book, a monograph, entitled the Myth of The Eternal Return. This is one of the archetypal themes of world mythology that you can, after long journey as a prodigal, come back home. And you can in an archetypal way go through the journey of life and come back to your pristine origins. So the myth is that you can return to the starting point. But in scientific exactness, we know that that is not possible, it's not true and it's not possible. There's a slight difference.

So that if you were making a diagram of reality from the mythological standpoint you would make a circle. It would be true in terms of everything that nature is, true in terms of everything that integration does, that you do come back to the starting point and therefore you close the circle, and that's true in integration, it's true in nature. But in consciousness it is not true. Because consciousness does not operate integrally, consciousness operates differentially and so if you rotate around the entire cycle and you come back to where you began, you come back not to A but to A Prime. It is significantly, though sometimes minutely, never the less significantly different. So that the circle of truth in nature is a spiral of truth in consciousness.

So that conscious, the conscious cycle of the real, does not coincide with the natural cycle of truth and this is a very upsetting thing if you need to believe that this coincidence of identity is necessary for truth to remain true. And one of the paradoxes of Nuclear Physics was its struggle, its struggle to learn that our capacities in consciousness have a little bit different form of truth from the truth of nature. And at the beginning of the 21st century, we're just now being able to breath deep enough to understand that the spiral of consciousness does not deform the circle of nature. That the ecology of nature in itself and in its own way is accurately true as a circle, as a cycle which completes itself and returns to the starting point. And that we have a part of that in ourselves as natural beings, as beings that have bodies that exist even as beings that have minds that symbolically objectify. The mind and the body are not at odds, they do agree, they both participate in a path integral. But consciousness does not. So that consciousness, the spirit, if you like the spiritual person, the consciously spiritual person complements nature but is not an integral part of nature at all. And this would be extremely difficult to understand were it not for a very simple scientific example. If you have a copper wire, you can run a linearity of electrical current through that wire and you will have an electrical connection. Nature is like the electrical line. It integrates along that linearity and you can count on it. But in the act of actually having a current go through that wire, a magnetic field is generated around that wire that's not contained by that wire. And though on a level of a single copper wire, the magnetic field is not very big, if you have a huge electrical current, you can have huge magnetic fields. So consciousness is like the magnetic field around the natural electrical linearity.

So that in essence we can say that consciousness is a field rather than a thing. And as a field it has a different capacity for description. And we say quite interestingly that while there is a geometricity to nature there is a whole realm of supernatural possibilities in consciousness. So that for someone who is really conscious on the scientific level, one of the most fundamental problems is how to interface with nature again. And if you're stuck with an old paradigm of needing to fit back into the circle of nature, you subconsciously automatically truncate by projected limitations so that consciousness will fit back in and it will be a circle and will fit the circle of nature. And this is a self deception of the mind of the first order. It's not a deception done out of malice or anything demonical (coin drops), it came up heads (laughter). It means that consciousness has a chance to open up the unknown, whereas nature being integral, favors something which we're all familiar with in myth and that is myth is all about tradition. It's about the traditional that you can trust and you can count on. And that whatever sachet an individual might make, there is a way to be folded back into the tribe. There's a way, there must be a way, we will find a way to reinitiate someone to come back in so that the passages of cultural initiation folds you back in. And myth is that primal function of experience to further the integral in nature. The mythic experience, we saw, is a feeling toned language inflected experience that bridges the body and the mind, that bridges ritual, the ritual comportment of what we do, the action of life, with the idea, the symbolical objective understanding of what that means, and the bridge is the experience. The bridge between the sensate objectivity of the body and the thinking objectivity of the mind, is the feeling toned relationality of experience.

And all of this is fine until we get far enough into consciousness. It's noticeable right away at the threshold, but even on the tribal level, even thousands, tens of thousands of years ago, men and women like ourselves understood that there is a way to reinitiate someone who has gone beyond into the supernatural, back into the tribe. Someone who's gone into the magical realms, there's a way to work them in. But as consciousness, as the phases of consciousness, as the spiraling of consciousness begins to really get its torque, which is only begun in vision, but when it's furthered in art, it becomes almost impossible for the tribe to factor a really good artist back into the culture. And so the initiations are not individual but they're group. We have to find a way to factor, not, we can't fit Van Gogh back into the tribe but we can find a way to fit Van Gogh's paintings back into the tribe.

But when it goes further, when the spiral of the conscious cycle goes further and goes beyond vision and beyond art into History, it becomes almost impossible to factor that back into tradition. History is like an acid that dissolves tradition. History specializes in dissolving the myths and so is a colossal problem for the integration cycle, for the natural cycle, for body and mind to factor History back in, to bring it back in. And where the rare visionary person can be brought back, reinitiated, and occasionally the works of the artist rather than the artist, be factored back in, it takes a whole super culture to factor History back in and that is very tenuous. But what cannot be factored back in is Science. Because Science has gone so far that the spiral of consciousness has completely opened itself and it will not close itself back into a circle very easily. And the only thing that a integral tribe can do is to pray for deliverance that the Divine will come to their aid to help with this, this is beyond man's capacities to factor back in. And so one of the most difficult things is for a scientific consciousness to find a way to return to nature, knowing that there's going to be a paradox involved. You're going to come back if you can but you're not going to fit in, you're not going to fold in and so you have to find a way to live with that.

The pair of people that we're taking to start Science are two people who successfully did that. One of them is Richard Feynman, in the realm of the very small, in the realm of Nuclear Physics, in the realm of mathematics of things so small that particles of light are too large. And the other is Mary Leakey who dealt with the very large, in fact a large so macro that she saw human life not in terms of thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years of tribal History, but she outstripped the capacity of the tribes to calibrate time. She dealt with us in terms of tens of millions of years. Really a macro vision. And we talked a little bit last week about how this English school girl never awakened to the English country side. She was folded into, she was blended into the English culture of the early 20th century and she was just a part of that. Her awakening, her Shamanic penetration out of the circle of integration, out of the way in which nature makes sense as a cycle, her experience of going beyond, her first supernatural vision was in one of the Paleolithic caves in the South of France where she saw the petroglyphs and something in her responded deeply. And she belonged, she knew, she belonged to a realm of mankind that was so old and ancient that it went outside of the confines of the tribe as the English culture of the early 20th century understood it. And she, because she had very few people to talk to about this, she hid that as a secret in herself. And she was shocked one evening to meet a man that she instantly recognized belonged to that other world. He was an ancient being. And that man became her husband, Louis Leakey.

The Louis Leakey who, one of his earliest books has the wonderful title of Adam's ancestors. That outside of the mythological framework of what we believe is true, of what we understand has happened, of where we are. Not beginning with Jesus, not beginning with Moses, but beginning with Adam. Curious thing because Richard Feynman dealt with Atoms and Mary Leakey dealt with Adams. And when she saw Louis Leakey it was like a shock to her that there was someone else, and she could hardly believe that this man was comfortable walking around in the very sophisticated England of the university lecture cycle, and he belonged to something that was pre-Paleolithic. I invented a word one time called pre-Sapien. Here's how it's written in one of the things that Louis Leakey wrote, autobiographically. I mentioned last week that he was shocked when he was at Cambridge University, he went there to study from his native Africa, and when he was dreaming, he realized that he didn't dream in English he dreamt in Kikuyu. And that he had this relationship to the African land which made him a stranger in England. It's interesting because there have been a couple of English "English People" in our time who had a similar kind of a quality. Lawrence of Arabia felt at home in Arabia, not in England. When you read J.R.R. Tolkein, Tolkein is an African, a South African. He looks through the English tradition as if it were just some kind of deceptive mirror and that there is something deeper behind it, the realm of the Lord of The Rings. And Doris Lessing, one of the great novelists of the 20th century who was born in Iran and was largely a Persian Sufi before she ever saw England. Who when then she saw England it looked absurd to her.

Louis Leakey was that way. And in the White Kikuyu, he gives in like a third person quality, the meeting of these two, of Mary Leakey for the first time recognizing that there's someone else who belongs in this other realm. Who hasn't just discovered it but who lives there all the time. It was at a nice dinner party that she almost missed that Mary Douglas Nicol met Louis Leakey. "The geology student from London University had heard that there would be a lecture and it sounded dreadfully dull. But at the last minute she decided to go anyway, perhaps it would be short. When the handsome young man with the rakish mustache stood up and began to speak she realized that she might be wrong. As Leakey described the excitement of the expedition to Olduvai Gorge [on the edge of the Serengeti, what is now Kenya] and the incredible significance of the findings, his own passion for the subject began to affect her. If he noticed the lovely young woman sitting in the back row, he gave no indication of it. Perhaps he had remembered other things"

What did she see in this man. She saw a man who's scientific consciousness had gone far enough out that when he was coming back recursively to nature, he had a reserve quality that Europeans haven't had for at least 7 or 8,000 maybe 10,000 years. He had the primordiality, the living primordiality of the African people. His playmates were Kikuyu or Masai boys who did not live in some colony in Africa, they lived in the primordiality of an Africa that was there for geologic ages. And one of the qualities that young Louis Leakey developed in order to come back into nature, not to come back to fit into some idea of nature, not to come back to fit into some kind of tribal cultural tradition which didn't admit of visionary capacities, he came back with a specific capacity focused so that he returned, not so much to nature, but he returned, he re-immersed himself like ancient man did in the mystery of nature. So that scientific consciousness can come back seamlessly to the mystery of nature.

One of the greatest examples we have in world literature; in the entirety of world literature, literature of the entire planet for all of written time, one of the most beautifully simple documents of a highly scientific consciousness coming back to the mystery of nature is the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu. He talks in there, in the 42nd, what turns out to be later on the 42nd chapter of the Tao Te Ching. When Lao Tsu wrote it, he didn't write any chapters, he didn't put any chapter headings. The original Tao Te Ching was a cascade, a seamless cascade of highly conscious, scientific conscious language that flowed back through the mystery of nature enflamed into what became the Tao Te Ching. But when it was cut up later on and the reason it was cut up is that China was experiencing a dynastic problem. The old beautiful power of the original Dynasties had turned corrupt and was fracturing and running out and a new kind of social order was being born and the social order that was born at that time was the Roman Chinese, the Han Dynasty which came on the heels of the first great unifier of China, who gave the word Chinese to the people. Because his, the core of his name was Chin and after that anybody who lived anywhere in this realm was Chin-ese, Chinese. He's the one who built the Great Wall.

And about that time that that was coming into play was when they made chapters out of the Tao Te Ching. And in the 42nd chapter, what we now have is the 42nd chapter, Lao Tsu gives us a five phase, a pentatonic scale of how that process, that ecology works. And that pentatonic scale does not start with 1 but it starts with 0. He says in the beginning, before the beginning there was Tao which has no name but if you're going to insist on using names, then the first name that you can use is the Mother of All Things, which is Te. So that Tao is a 0 and Te is a 1. And because there's a relationality between those two, Jen, which is in the 3rd place, but records as 2, the designation 2, Tao Te Jen. That that Jen not only records the Te but it records itself relating to Te and so Jen or human heartedness has a relational element as well as an existential element. And so man, according to Lao Tsu, according to his pentatonic, his five phase Taoist energy cycle, ecology of the real, he says that man in his naturalness, not only exists, but the relationalities that he has exists also. And that's why his Jen, his human heartedness, he trusts, because it's complete, it's all inclusive, it includes the Te of existence, but it also includes the 2 the 2 quality. I struggled in the 60's to try and find a way to talk about it and I finally hit upon a kind of a metaphor, I call it the tuning fork. Lao Tsu's Jen is a tuning fork. It's the 2 but it's the 2 that are related together in such a way that if you strike them they strike like a tuning fork. So that Lao Tsu's Jen tunes whatever it relates to or tunes whoever's doing the relating to that. And so Jen and the 3rd place but with a 2 generates something farther and that Lao Tsu gives the Chinese word "I". "I" are the objective symbols, the objective symbols that are emerging out of experience. The "I" come out of language and so they're the essence of the meaningfulness of language. "I" as in I Ching. The meaningfulness is because the changes make the Te and the Jen able to be fertile to carry so that those things come out and are naturally integral with those who are bringing them out and with the facts of existence. And in the 5th place but the 4th, Lao Tsu says that all of this when this phase form development happens to this point, it completes itself by the world of 10,000 things. And he says, when this has started from Tao, the 10,000 things flow and factor back into Tao without leaving a trace.

So that the circularity in Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching quality, the circularity is, yes it is a circle and it always will be a circle, but it's a circle that does not have a beginning at 1, it's beginning is with 0 and so to graphically show it, you do not complete the circle but you leave a space in between. That the beginning of the circle is exact and you curl it around like a Sumie brush, but you trail off the end of it so as to leave like a synapse gap.

Louis Leakey was able to find a way like Lao Tsu found a way. He was able to find a way to come back into the mystery of nature and bring all of his scientific consciousness with him. And the technique that he found was in modifying a rock. He was the first person, probably since the stone age, who learned to make stone tools. Louis Leakey became the best person in the world for maybe 10,000 years to take two rocks, chosen, well chosen rocks and to use one of them as the striker to pressure fracture exactly the way that he wanted so that you would get a cutting edge on the first stone. So that you could use it as the most primal tool that man had. Because a rock with a pressure flake taken off has a perimeter of sharp edge which you can use to cut the meat away from the bone. It's hard to gnaw raw meat with all of its muscles and sinews and everything from a bone, which is why there's a difference when you see the way that animals will chew on a chunk of meat and chew on a bone, it's not like perfectly clean. There are teeth marks yes, it's not perfectly clean. Whereas early man, early men and women, we're talking about millions of years ago, with a pressure flaked stone, a rock made in just that way, you can scrape all the meat off the bone. And it leaves certain scraping marks on the bone. Leakey learned how to make a simple bone scraper, he learned how to make all kinds of things up to fine arrowheads. He could make beautiful Paleolithic arrowheads and by having learned, having taught himself how to make stone tools, Louis Leakey, no matter how educated and sophisticated he got scientifically, always found a way to come back to the African landscape and look around and find out of nature, the rocks from which to make the tools to make a living if he had to, he learned how to hunt also.

What Mary Leakey came to recognize in him, when she was still Mary Nicol, was that Louis Leakey belonged to the primordial mystery of nature and that she had had an initiation into that and that there was something beyond the natural cycle. No matter how complete a tradition is, it never encompasses the mystery of nature. The mystery of nature as one goes on in the integral cycle becomes more and more distant so that you have to have more and more interfaces. On the ritual level, we saw that the ritual comportment is always to be in tune with nature. The ritual cycle follows whatever the natural cycle is. If you're in a tribe that lives by reindeer, you follow the reindeer. Your life journey is the journey of the reindeer. If you're living in the Amazon jungle and you're living on monkey meat, you learn the ways of the monkey. You learn whatever ways of the nature of the time and if something is introduced to transform that natural ecology, what you get right away is a vision. You get a supernatural explosion of capacity to look beyond, to look over nature.

One of the great examples in this country, in the United States, was the introduction of the horse into Plains Indian culture. The Plains Indian culture had been there for tens of thousands of years unchanged, and when the horse was introduced to that culture, within one generation, you found great visionaries. And we find in a book like Black Elk Speaks written by, in his old age, by one of the original members of a handful of visionary prophets of the Sioux Nation. Someone like Black Elk, belonging to that same tribe would have been Crazy Horse. And many military historians have offered the opinion, looking at the way Crazy Horse engineered battles, that he would have been another Napoleon if he had had the troops. He was that good of a general. With the little bit that he had, he made unbelievable military strategies and decisions. But he was a visionary, which is why he's called "Crazy" Horse in the first place.

So that the horse made that difference because it was a transform. It was a transform that evoked visionary consciousness that had to be factored back in. And as long as it stayed on the visionary level it could be factored back in. And even when it got to the artistic level. In Black Elks time, there were Sioux artists who not only painted the designs that went on the Tepees, the mythological designs, but they began to paint on the back of skins, historical events, like the battle of the Little Big Horn. There's a mural of it on a skin by a Sioux artist, which meant that they'd gone as far as History. They were starting to work History back in, but they didn't go as far as Science.

With someone like Leakey, Mary and Louis Leakey, they discovered that together, because they both had this capacity to go into the differential cycle of consciousness individually, that when they were together, they found they had more current, more amperage. They could go further and deeper and what was of interest to both of them was not to go deeper to get more abstracted away from nature, which is the quality of the mind; the last phase of integration is for the mind to abstract itself and then for the natural integral cycle to have to work abstraction back into the path integral does include abstraction but it's very difficult to do. It's almost more difficult than to work vision back in. Mythology can work magic back in much easier than it can work ideas. But even so, ideas belong to nature. But what Mary and Louis Leakey found together is that they were not interested in integrating ideas back, they were not interested in integrating their personal vision back, or even Louis' art of tool making. They even went beyond the Historical quality into Science. What they wanted to find was a way to increase that plunge of Science into differential consciousness until it reemerged into the mystery of nature all over again.

Because what they were looking for were not human beings who belonged to the normal nature, to the traditional nature, that didn't belong even to the existence as we understood it, but who belonged to such a deep primordiality that the traditions of existence didn't even include them. No one before the Leakeys had any idea that there were human beings older than Adam. No one in their wildest imagination had ever realized that we are millions of years old. When you read in the Indian Paranas of Culpas of so many hundreds of thousands of years, this is a mythological talking. What the Leakeys were doing was pioneering the Scientific talking about man being millions of years old and no one had ever seen anything near that. The oldest fossil record of man were just a few scattered reports. The earliest one from the Neander Valley that had some fossil and it actually turns out to be a fossil of a middle aged Neanderthal who had severe rheumatoid arthritis and was deformed because of that.

And so the myth about the oldest man is that we came out of brutes. T.H. Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog. Darwin himself believed it. And when Darwin's ship, the Beagle went around the Tierra del Fuego tip of South America and he saw the primitive savagery of the Tierra del Fuego tribes, he was horrified, he was scared. Because he saw there the demons of his worst nightmare, that if these are the earliest people, we came out of a degradated shit slinging savagery that was just frightening. That man's origins are in a distorted Dr. Hyde monstrosity. And so Darwin's interested shifted from man to something else. His evolutionary work, yes it still had man, but what he became interested in were like flowering plants. A lot of his later work is all about evolution in terms of plants. Whereas the exact contemporary of Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, when he went to South America, he went to the Amazon Jungles. But he lived there with these primordial tribes and he saw the naked little boys of the Amazonian tribes swinging on vines and playing and they were happy and healthy and there was nothing degradated at all and Alfred Russell Wallace understood that primordial man was beautiful beyond belief. That he was natural beyond belief and that the misshapen people were the contemporaries of him, the Victorian English. They were the ones who were misshapen. And that's the way it was for a couple of generations; is this approach avoidance duality. Did we come out of monsters, mutated monkeys who were monsters? Or did we come from some beautiful Divine fiat which made beautiful people at the very beginning so that it was a golden age.

This kind of mythological dualism was what was in place until Mary and Louis Leakey almost single handedly, over several decades of pressing the outside of the envelope, because the only chance that they had to find anything, they didn't know what they could find, they didn't know where to find it, what is there to find. It was completely unknown. The only thing that they could trust is that their energies together, the synergy of them together had enough amperage to carry their scientific consciousness back into the mystery of nature. And that the mystery of nature would deliver to them whatever was there to find. And it took them about thirty years together, and they were the first ones to find it.

About the time that they were doing this, about the time that it began to be apparent for the first time that Adam had ancestors, and that the ancestorship went back, not just that Adam had a father or a Grandfather, but that you could count the generations before man in terms of tens of thousands of generations. About that very same time is when Richard Feynman, coming from this little homey suburb of New York City, Far Rockaway, out near the John F. Kennedy Airport, on the other end of the spit that Coney Island is on, as far as you can go in New York City before you. . . .

BREAK

So that an advanced consciousness looks to share presence with the mystery of nature. What does the Super Scientist, what does the Super Yogi, what does the masterful Cosmic Person do? They appreciate. Not THE mystery of nature but they appreciate in the limitless mysteriousness of nature. It's this kind of a quality. When you are tribal, when your are on the ritual level, when you're on the most primal existential level what's important for you is the phrase by Lucien Levy Bruhl, "participation mystique". That there's a mystique of participating with nature which you surrender yourself to. The primordialness of existential excellence is to live in such a way that you are seamlessly with nature, so that you are absorbed into nature and you do not stand out. For a differential consciousness you are coextensive with the mysteriousness of nature and that co-extensiveness is not a geometricity. If you can imagine a geometrical extension you have regressed. Just like books in nuclear physics have regressed. Here's a book from 1997, Cambridge University Press, Quantum Chance and Non Locality. He admits in the preface "Perhaps Niels Bohr took such an attitude, I do not pretend to understand what Bohr wrote, but his name is a convenient label" (tosses book down). The regressions creep in everywhere.

Ninety years before that, someone like Ernst Cassirer, who's book on language and myth we used in the myth section of our education, a book called Substance and Function. Substance as the objectivity, function as the process. Substance and Function. What does Jen pair tuning-forkedly (that's a new word)? Pairs existence and relationality and understands that whatever relationality the human heartedness can experience, already has that participation mystique with nature. So that substance and function is a very primordial pair, it's the pair of objectivity and relational process together as a set, actually occur as a set and are the existential roots of what later on in higher math and nuclear physics become symmetry. Cassirer writing in 1910, still classic enough, still fresh from some of his earliest books, the earliest one was on Kant and the next year he wrote one of Leibnitz. And the young Ernst Cassirer, struggling to try and understand, there's a revolution going on in physics, there's a revolution going on in mathematics. It isn't finished yet, it's just beginning, but what is it that is happening to us? We need to understand and what do we use to understand? We use the mind. And we're using the mind in a formal way, that is to say logically, and we've gone far enough to know that formalism is flawed in and of itself. So then how are we to proceed, how are we to understand. And So Cassirer's Substance and Function comes our about the same time that Kandinsky is making the first abstract paintings, about the time that Picasso and Braque are making Cubism. Out of the Vision of Cezanne, Picasso is making Le Demoiselles. All of this is happening at the same time and the key to it is to go beyond, visionarily go beyond seeing in a mental geometricity which is severely limited. They didn't know al the reasons, they didn't know in 1910 why, but they had that intuition.

Cassirer writes, this is 90 years ago, "Modern geometry first attains a strictly logical construction of its field and true freedom and universality of method in advancing from the geometry of measure to the geometry of possession." That as long as you stick to the measuring, the calibrated formalism of a measured system, the mind which uses that has already inculcated an abstractness away from the mystery of nature and begins always counting with existentials. So that the language (sirens), it's a warning. So that the language that would be favored by the mind in that kind of formalism is a language where words are referential to things. This word is meaningful and can be defined because its relation is to this thing under these definitional terms. And all of that is flawed in more ways than anyone can even enumerate. It is not a flaw that's the danger though, it is a ceiling, it is a limitation that the mind then is convinced that anything that it does not understand does not exist and cannot be real.

And one of the problems that someone like a Cassirer came out with at this time, tried to understand, trying philosophically to understand, what are we doing with mathematics and physics now that is so eerie. What is it that we're doing? We're trying to stretch a formalism, that the more that we put the pressure on it to stretch, the more brittle it becomes and it crumbles instead of stretching. And you can see the fearfulness. When you look at the comfortable Victorian world of this time, of 1910, what you find is a horrific undercurrent of fear of the occult. You look at the writings of someone like a Henry James at this time, and you find Daisy Miller, you find The Turn of the Screw, you find the Golden Bowl, you find occult London seething with stuff that makes the mind curdle and makes experience doubt itself. What is going on here? You get the beginnings of a Kafka.

Cassirer was educated enough, he saw that this is reminiscent of the tone that happened to the European mind in the 17th century. This is dejà vu, it's happening again. That in the 17th century you had people come along on the basis of the program of advancing learning of Francis Bacon, on the principles of the discovery of many elements of surprise in the Universe. Like Kepler in his astronomy discovering that the mathematic shows that there are no perfect circles in the heavens. That the planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits and the moons go around the planets in elliptical orbits. And so the phrase that someone like, I know it sounds strange, but the first great holder of the chair of astronomy in London, at the Gresham College, 1657, was Christopher Wren. Before he was an architect he was one of the great astronomers of the day. His speciality was investigating Saturn. And the problem at that time was to understand what are these odd little appendages, these arm of Saturn that we see in these telescopes. They weren't strong enough to resolve and a Dutch Mathematician name Huygens worked out that these have to be rings. What we're seeing optically is a cross section of rings which are orbiting the planet and so there are not only planets and moons and suns and stars, but there are all kinds of things, there are particles, and the universe is full of particles. And it's the beginning, at that time 1650's, it's the beginning of the realization that it's all much more complex than we thought.

We had a Zodiac where we had these constellations of linking the stars together, but however many stars there are there are billions of times of smaller particles and in fact there are trillions, in fact you run out of the ability to write zeroes in. Only instead of finding particles orbiting Saturn, they were find that there are particles orbiting the nucleus of the atom. These particles are electrons and what they are occurring in they're not occurring in Divinely appointed circular orbits. And what's even more disturbing, they're not even in elliptical orbits. But they are occurring as, the math was showing, they couldn't believe it, it's go to be wrong, we're mis-computing, what they're doing is they're occurring in clouds. That atoms, the most ritually objective existentiality of all matter is a cloud of electrons around a nucleus. They couldn't believe it, they couldn't make sense.

One of the top physicists of the day, the Victorian crown prince of electrical physics was a man named J.J. Thomson and he had a book that came out in 1907 on The Corpuscular Theory of the Atom, of matter. And they were confident that this held because that corpuscular theory went all the way back to Robert Boyle in the 17th century. Boyle, the founder of chemistry. From Boyle to the early 20th century is was standard, it was in the textbooks, our math bore it out, it wasn't true, the math was wrong. And within a little more than a decade you found J.J. Thomson delivering a series of lectures in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on the discovery of the electron. We were wrong completely, we didn't understand at all. Atoms are not corpuscular, they're not existential things that stay put and are there. It turns out that they are dynamically only there as long as the way in which we're characterizing them is in terms of particle, but as soon as we go to a frequency energy function, they're there as a wave and not as a particle.

And it was impossible for about 25 or 30 years to get used to this, you couldn't, men and women simply couldn't talk about it this way. So that when you see, even as late for the development, but as early for us, this is 1945, Oxford University Press, Elementary Wave Mechanics. They're still talking about the mechanical conceiving of wave like light, like photons, like electrons, and it goes even beyond this. Finally one of Feynman's great books is The Photon Hadron Interactions, he goes very far beyond. And yet by the time of 1972, that Feynman with his joking quality is able to bring thought recursively back to participate in nature mysteriously. You find a frontispiece, it looks like a very surreal pyramid. This is Feynman's kind of pin up humor. "This unique image was created with special effects photography, photographs of a broken road, an office building and a rusted object were superimposed to achieve the effect of a faceted pyramid on a futuristic plane. It originally appeared in a slide show called Fossils of the Cyberg, From the Ancient to the Future, produced by Synapse Production, San Francisco. Because this image evokes a fusion of classicism and dynamicism, the future and the past, it was chosen as the logo for the Advance Book Classic Series".

Because someone like a Feynman made an enormous difference. Before Feynman, as he occurred on the scene, he was dropped into the scene that was white hot and all but not understandable. And the easiest way to characterize it is, I took four individuals who in early nuclear physics, trying to make sense, trying to have a scientific consciousness that goes back into nature and works with it and yet is still commensurate with the mind. You can see that the problem was exacerbated because you not only factor science back into nature but it has to have a harmony with symbols. The Cosmos and the mind have to jibe together because if they don't jibe together, if they don't make a larger tuning fork of the real, you can't go back into nature. You stand out not only like a sore thumb, but you stand out as the explosiveness of a disjunctive polarity that ends up being not nuclear energy but a nuclear bomb. Because the problem is exactly exacerbated there in that bifurcation. You either make nuclear energy or you make an atom bomb. And what was peculiar is that the very first thing that was made was the atom bomb; was the mutually exclusive disjunctive polarity, and the trigger man was Richard Feynman. He was like the boy genius, he was the boy wonder.

He was dropped in the midst of a white hot cauldron that can be characterized by four individuals who tried mightily, they were like the Moses and Aaron of the nuclear age. You had someone like an Einstein who in his way understood that paradox has certainty. And the reason why he was making relativity, that paradox can have certainty in relativity, is that there were two physicists who were absolutely so distinctly at war and different from each other. One of them was named Werner Heisenberg, and his conclusion was that when you factor space and time into the nuclear events, you cannot be certain of one of the elements, either space or time. And so an uncertainty came out of this, whereas Schrodinger was convinced that there is a paradox but that it's really not understandable except in math. You can work it out in the math but that doesn't mean that it works out in the world.

And so Schrodinger became very cavalier about life, like a womanizer. If he had been Chinese he's have been a great gambler. Whereas Heisenberg became more and more tenuous about what you do with all of this and he was like one of those people that the Nazis were counting on to just work into their new Reich. Whereas Einstein, genius that he was, was trying to work the uncertainty of Heisenberg and the paradox of Schrodinger together in a way so that one could be mathematically exact, yes, but still appreciate the paradox and still work in the uncertainty but have it so that you could apply it so that it would work in the world.

And so in a way Einstein is like that Moses. But it wasn't Heisenberg or Schrodinger who was like the Aaron. I don't know if you remember your Old Testament, but Moses had the vision but he had a speech impediment, he couldn't speak. So that Aaron was the spokesperson. The spokesperson at that time was Niels Bohr but unlike, he had his own independent vision. He saw that it isn't uncertainty and it isn't paradox but it is complementarity. That they don't go together in a kind of relativity paradox to deal with the uncertainty, but there is a complementarity, and his mode of insight is very similar to that of Lao Tsu. He's the only European to adopt the Tao Te Ching symbol, the Tai Chi symbol on is family crest. So you have a Danish gentleman who has a Tao sign on the family crest. When they held a great commemorative, I think for his 60th birthday, and they published the results, they put a tai chi symbol on the cover. Papa Niels Bohr.

And we're going to take Bohr as one of our figures next. We're going to put Bohr together with Stephen Hawking. Because they carry forward the kind of accumulated penetration that this education specifies as it's exact new application. Because what we're looking for is like what Mary and Louis Leakey were looking for, it doesn't exist yet. Not only is it not there because we don't know where they put it, there never was a they who put it there, and there's nothing put there, and it's our method of looking that helps generate its actuality in the first place. And so we have to keep the style of our looking open because we don't want to predispose it of just being some kind of mental artifact. We don't want to predispose it to have to fit to existential criteria of referentiality because that will reduce it for sure and limit it even more. So we're like idiot savant orphans, we're trying to find something that's not a some nor a thing. And that we're trying to find in such a way that we're not trying. That if we try, we're going to find only what we're trying. And so we're like fellow geniuses who don't know and cannot know ahead of time but as we do this process of discovery it will occur. And that's something that Feynman was brilliant at.

He was brilliant at slamming himself against the unknown, all day, all week, all month, all year, he never gave up, he was tenacious. And the more that the problem loomed insoluble, the more that he tried to do end runs around the problem. It's not insoluble because we can't find the answer but because the question is mis-formed. That's why we're not finding the answer, because the question is prejudicing something and that's why there's nothing there. All that we're finding is a reflection of our own frustration. And so he would take it out on his bongo drums, or later when the stakes got higher, when he went from the comfortable university life and he was dropped into the Atom Bomb Program, and he realized that this is really, this is Tolkein, Dark Lord, serious epic shit, he went from bongo drums to safe cracking. In other words, he became a genius thief, not to steal stuff but to show them that he could any time. He's the first one who hacked the planet. Whatever you want to keep from me, you set out the conditions and I Richard Houdini Feynman will find a way to get it from you. I don't want it but I'll take it from you anyway so that you won't have it either. That kind of cavalier quality but it was a genius ploy.

It reminds me of the high Dharma ploy that happened in Tibet about several hundred years ago 3-400 years ago. There was a thief named Dusim Chemba, and he had this roundish kind of monkey face and he was one of the best thieves of the time. No one could keep anything from him, he was like the Pink Panther, he could get in anywhere. And he kept stealing bigger and more expensive things. And finally it came to the attention of this very powerful Yogi named Gam Popah who had been the Dharma inheritor of Milarepa. And so Gam Popah let it leak out so that Dusim Chemba would hear about it that the greatest treasure of all was the treasure of enlightenment about reality and that it was there in Gam Popah's mind. And it turns out that he knew, just like Dusim Chemba knew that his added little bit of advantage over everybody else is that Dusim Chemba was a natural telepath which is why he could always steal whatever you had, he would read your mind, well where did you put it, Oh. So when he heard that Gam Popah had the secret of enlightenment in his mind, he read his mind and Gam Popah was ready for him. He gave it to him. And Dusim Chemba became the first Karmapa, like that (snap). So that a Dharma lineage in differential consciousness is different from that in tradition. You don't pass it on like this, there's always some weird way in which it happens.

This quality was there in Richard Feynman. He was Dusim Chemba. And he realized when he was there at the origins of Los Alamos that these guys were serious about taking the stuff off the blackboard and putting it into an atom bomb. And the more that he saw this, he looked trying to find some way that he could participate in this in a peculiar way that would leave him free, and he discovered that the head of the project, Robert Oppenheimer, had gone to the same little school in New York that his mother had gone to. And Feynman had the contact. He was not chosen by Oppenheimer because of any kind of a contact, Oppenhimer didn't know anything about him. The way that Feynman got to the Atom Bomb Program was through Professor Wheeler. And we brought in some of Wheeler's things last week, I think I brought one, yeah, Johnny Wheeler, At Home In The Universe. He was the one who's frontispiece has not this collage of the pyramid, but has his seven Sibyls, Sibyls for sciences. It's his way of coming back to the mystery of nature.

It's his way of taking a very highly differential consciousness, not only back into nature but back into ritual, back into mythology. Because by the time you come back, not just to nature, with a highly differentiated consciousness, but you come back through existence back into experience, it means that you re-approach the mind fully conscious. And when you re-approach the mind, through not only just experience but a fully conscious phantom pairedness with it, the mind undergoes a radical transformation. It's just like Dusim Chemba reading the mind of Gam Popah that had the thought of enlightenment, or had enlightenment in it. The mind undergoes a surprise attack by its own transcendent essence and it gets shocked that its not alone. Because one of the problems with minds in nature is that they are isolate, they are alone. That they make a prison out of their own boundaries, whatever boundaries they are, those are the walls of the prison. Whatever they are it doesn't matter, they can be as large, as gorgeous, as convoluted as you want, they're grand prisons. And so the natural mind is always incapsuled and it gets always surprised by the sneak attack by its own freed consciousness going back to revisit it. One's reminded of the 100 year old George Burns if he was glad at this event where they were naming a street after him, he said at my age I'm glad to be anywhere. The mind gets surprised that someone who knows it better than it knows itself has arrived. Woah as they say some place in Van Nuys. And so the mind gets shocked that it was imprisoned and doesn't understand how did that happen. And so there is that kind of a quality.

Feynman realized that when you cross that abstracted threshold of the mind, when you first penetrate it, it has an existential reaction which is fight or flight. It thinks that your spiritual consciousness coming in is an invasion and it needs to fight that or that it's just too powerful and it needs to run from it. And it will gladly choose death or madness over enlightenment every single time. And so understanding this, differential consciousness does not come in a geometric straight line. It knows that that's a loosing angle. The angle of this incidence of directness will never work, will end up in death or madness. So it trusts to its own spiraling nature and comes in on an easy trajectory to make an orbit and then makes a gentle insertion that way. So there's always a sophisticated strategy of your own consciousness penetrating the prison of your own mind to free it from its formalism. And that this not only happens in individuals, it happened in the 20th century to the entire civilization. Only not everyone went through that initiation. Just a handful of people.

If you look at a characterization of one of the books that we're using, Feynman's book QED, Quantum Electro Dynamics, The Strange Theory of Light And Matter, one of our texts that we're using with Mary Leakey's autobiographical book, Disclosing The Past. QED and Disclosing The Past, they are our tuning fork. They are the way in which we are coming back to our own minds to free it. QED, Quantum Electro Dynamics, there's a whole book, QED And The Men Who Made It, by Julian Schwinger who was a physicist, published by Princeton, 700 some pages. But if you come back and take a look at a simple little characterization, this is John and Mary Gribbon, their little biography, popular biography of Richard Feynman, "Quantum Electro Dynamics is a theory that describes all interactions involving light, that is photons, and charged particles, and in particular all interactions involving photons and electrons." In other word the cloud of steam that makes atoms atoms, and light which links all those atoms together into a visible universe. And that QED is the theory of how all of these and all of these interface all the time everywhere with allness. And because the interactions between atoms, that's not inner atomic but between atoms, because the interactions between atoms depend on the arrangement of electrons in the clouds around the nuclei, that means among other things QED underpins all of chemistry.

Now most of the people at the time who were struggling with this, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, they're all physicists. The first one to understand this in terms of chemistry was Linus Pauling. And that's why his book The Nature of The Chemical Bond, this is the third edition, 1960, the first edition came out in 1938 and so much was leaned in one year that he had to have a whole second edition where he rewrote it in 1940. And exactly when the second edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond came out, is when they began working with the Manhattan Project to make the atom bomb.

Now Pauling understood that what was happening here was that he was the carrier of a revolution of a revolution. That some 300 years before him Robert Boll had mad chemistry out of alchemy. Had made the science of chemistry, that it held for 300 years, and that oddly enough what he was doing now was turning that chemistry back into a higher alchemy. That there was a kind of a mirroring, there was a peculiar paradoxical doubling back so that you found, someone like Pauling very much like Bohr. Bohr recognized that he was closer to Lao Tsu than he was to any of the people around him in Physics. And Pauling recognized that he was much closer to the alchemists than he was to the chemists. And you have to understand that when the 3rd edition of this came out in 1960, it came out because of the work on DNA and Pauling was just hours away from being the one, not Watson and Crick, to find the structure of DNA. But while Watson and Crick were the first to find the structure, it's really Pauling who is the genius, the universal genius in chemistry in our time. Because he's the one who took the math and the new atomic particled Cosmos and showed how this applies to the way in which all chemical actions and things occur. And that they occur in, not in some kind of defined limited way, but they occur in a prismatic spectrum of possibility where anything is possible. Not just whatever you can imagine is possible, but there are more possibilities than you could imagine. There is as much possibility in the actual scientific Cosmos beyond what you can imaging as what you can imagine. In fact if outdistances it in such a way that the total of your wildest imagination is but a drop in the rainbow of the spectrum of possibilities.

So that in this kind of a quality you can see why the mind prefers to flight rather than fight, because what's approaching it is so massive, and it's not a thing, a differential objectivity is not like an integral objectivity, it's not there objectively because it integrates, its objectivity is there because of stable differentiation. And what's stable in differentiation is that the variables are more important than the existing structure. The transforms, not only happen, but as they happen, they create more possibilities for more happenings, which is one of the mysterious things about an effective transform. It continues to transform everything so that they become transformed. In other words it magnetizes, so that you get a magnetic field of possibility that staggers the mind, And it's greatly humiliating to the mind especially if its been brilliant, that it was a brilliant idiot.

It's like Louis Leakey once said, Neanderthal man made beautiful spear points idiotly. He made the same great spear point for 200,000 years and it never improved. He found a great way to make it and then he never had a variation of it. Neanderthal man made spear points for 200,000 years exactly the same way and when they died out they died out because they had no variation whatsoever. They had factored their tools back into the lowest efficient level of ritual comportment. They had a larger brain than Homo Sapiens. Our brain is much smaller than Neanderthal man. It's not brain capacity. The principle is one that Brahms discovered in musical composition, that of developing variation. You don't just make a variation but you develop a musical way so that the variation continues and then every performance of it becomes individual. And because you've heard Wertwanger do a Brahms 4th Symphony doesn't mean you shouldn't go and hear how Bernstein did it, or somebody else, Esa Peca, or whoever it is. That the performance of a piece of art is as important as the piece itself.

No matter how glorious was the 1st performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, no one ever even imagined in the 19th century, that they would perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony when the wall between the two Berlins was torn down and the population was open for the first time in several generations. And they played the 9th Symphony to sing what Beethoven had originally sang. Not defiance to the universe, but defiance to the closed genius mind that thought the universe was all thought through, that the plan was finished that the system was great because it worked to our advantage, and who are you to question it. And they could defend against anybody else, but they couldn't defend against their higher selves. Their own people tore the wall down. It wasn't the troops from any other place that tore the wall, they, the Berliners tore the wall down, they said enough of this. This bifurcation, this duality is stupid and we're not going to have it anymore and they tore the wall down and that was it.

It's the same quality of discovery that the mind fears about itself. And when we come back next week, we'll take a deeper look at the way in which Feynman and Mary Leakey found novel ways to infiltrate their own minds so that they could open up for further discovery. (Make sure you have a seat, you're going to stay here all week.)

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