Science 3
Presented on: Friday, October 15, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Science 3 and we're taking Mary Leakey and Richard Feynman as our pair and we're trying to, as is our technique here, we're trying to explore. The second year of the education is the differential cycle as opposed to the first year which is an integral cycle. So the title of today's lecture is Path Integral Prism Spectrum. The prism in the title is us; the person prisms possibility, not meaning but possibility. And the person does not occur anywhere in the cycle of nature. And so the old religious insights were right, our persons do not belong in the natural order but are technically supernatural. But this should not sway us, because the idea of a phantom spirit is universal, not just on this planet. And we have grown accustomed to a very peculiar reductiveness which does not serve us well at this particular time. And the reductiveness is due to a well placed suspicion about the mind which is not been corrected for quite some time, and this education is a assay towards developing a population of people who will be able to correct this skew of mind which has come to be accepted as the arbiter of the real, one that in fact is not the case at all.
If we try to place an emphasis, where in the mind does this go wrong, we have to carry ourselves all the way back to the Symbols section of the course, to the fourth section of the first year. It's in the mind that ideas and symbols complete what Richard Feynman called a Path Integral. That is to say there is a path, and in nature a path is quite objectively an integral form. So that in nature, one of the way stations on this path integral is the fact that particles occur out of energy. That in the mystery of nature, in nature in its mysteriousness, there in fact is nothing like a particle at all. In fact nothing like energy.
So that the deep intuition, whenever human beings have had the blessedness of intelligence, the largess of opportunity, the pointedness of accumulated tradition, there have always been geniuses in the human race who have come to understand that 0 does not occur yet is real. Now the development of the notation of 0 was done in the 17th century, in the 1600's, a mathematician in England devised the infinity symbol. And at that time there were very few individuals who could appreciate that there was an intimate relationship between the symbol for infinity and the symbol for zero.
And one of those individuals who later came to occupy a formative position in the development of modern science was a man named Leibnitz. He was a wonderfully Renaissance minded kind of an individual who was fortunate enough when he was a very young man to have detailed conversations in the Netherlands with a genuine first class mystic named Spinoza. Spinoza who had been drummed out of the Jewish formal community in his native city and was forced to live on the edges, on scraps of good will. Leibnitz met Spinoza when he was only about 20 years old, and it was very peculiar. As circumstance and nature sometimes devise, exactly at the time that Leibnitz and Spinoza, the more mature Jewish mystic who saw that God's geometry was not at all what Descartes, a prominent philosopher at the time, thought. That every line and every point, every shape in God's geometry is interfaceable with every other, and so there is a mysterious matrix gestalt to reality on God's level. And that man only sees snapshots. He only sees snapshots by ideas in his mind, and he must use his imagination to develop these snapshots into concepts. And we'll see that this is exactly where the snag in the mind gains its ill will.
Exactly at the time that Spinoza and Leibnitz were having their conversations, some Jesuits from China brought back and translated into Latin, the I Ching. It was a remarkable effort on their part and of course it was a self protective act. The Jesuits, the college of Jesus was set up to protect the Christian Faith against all comers and they wanted to make sure there was nothing in Chinese civilization that would threaten the logical underpinnings of the Christian Faith. So they translated the I Ching and dismissed it. But Leibnitz, even at 20 was a first class A+ mathematical genius and he is the first one to appreciate that the I Ching had a binary way of writing reality, with 0's and 1's, a forerunner of the modern computer. And in fact Leibnitz wrote a little dissertation, it's published by the University of Hawaii Press now, on the meaningfulness in the Chinese ideas of Tao and Te in the I Ching. He called it a natural mathematics.
Leibnitz had a vision out of this which is germane to what we're dealing with here with Feynman and Leakey. His philosophic vision is reprinted in a Everyman Collection of essays by Leibnitz, and you can find it in there, I think it's under the aegis of the title Philosophic Vision. At the very core of the vision, Leibnitz imagined himself in this enormous darkened cave. Not so much a Platonic cave, but rather as if it were an enormous cathedral dome that was without any columns whatsoever and completely darkened, and the floor of it was covered by human beings who didn't have any idea of what they were doing or what they were looking at. And so Leibnitz, in his vision, in his contemplation, decided to look up into the darkness and to crane his head so that he looked perpendicular to the surface upon which everybody stood. And as he looked up, in his vision, he saw a pin point of light at the very apex, at the zenith of this darkened dome. And he says, like a wonderful nature mystic will always say, the more that he looked at this point of light, the larger it became in the sense that he could see more. One is reminded always that in mystical vision, when you look to see, the very energy of differentially seeing allows you to see more and more and more. The difference between a nature trance and a visionary consciousness is that a visionary consciousness improves itself all the time, it's improveable. Whereas a nature trance stays where it is. A nature trance must stay in 0 whereas a conscious vision must stay in infinity.
So that consciousness has no limitation whatsoever, which Leibnitz came to understand in his vision, that consciousness is infinite and is deeply related to the zeroness that nature really, not is, because if you say is it gives an existential ascription. And especially in the West, and the same in the Chinese tradition, the same in the Indian tradition somewhat modified, but world round, the notion of an integral mind is that there must be a form and isness is one of the final arbiters of that form. So deeply ingrained is this that the ascription of a negative is given an existential form of is not. So that the conviction, East and West is that an is not exists as a polarity to what is and this is not true at all. It is in fact a projection of the mind. How does this Happen?
We brought into play a week or so ago, an early book on physics and Einstein's theory of relativity by Ernst Cassirer called Substance and Function. I think it's still in print, it was published in 1910 and Dover has it in paper back still. Cassirer, because we used Cassirer's book on myth and language when we were talking about mythology last year. His book on myth and language showed that language in its primordiality deals with images and that images are focuses of feeling tones sentience which act as nourishment for the way in which thought then furthers the meaning of images into symbols, into ideas. One page 81 and 82 of Substance and Function, Cassirer goes into the way in which logic baffled the development of nuclear physics early in the 20th century by a couple of bad habits that were left over and no one had noticed. There were a few exceptions at the time, when this was published in 1910 it was already 10 years after Max Plank had developed the beginnings of what became quantum theory. It was also five years after Einstein's first papers on Brownian Movement, the abstract random movement of incommensurate liquids, that molecules will move of themselves in an incommensurate way, not because you heat them, not because you put energy into them but because the molecules themselves have movement, because the atomic structure of molecules themselves have a movement, and that the movement is due to the electron. They used to be called the electron shells because the original conception of that went all the way back to a Spinoza type of a Jewish geometry, that there were shells to reality, a Cabalistic idea. It took a long time to realize that the orbital resonances of electrons are more cloud like than they are shell like and that the idea of a shell is also a projection, a Cartesian geometrical projection and not true, misleading in fact.
So that one of the two points that Cassirer is making in here which is germane both to Feynman and to Mary Leakey and to our trying to understand in science, what does consciousness need to do in order to prepare itself to differentiate on a Cosmic level? Because science is the large scale differentiation. It goes off the graph of measurement. And part of going off the graph of measurement is to be able to let the mind slip out of a formal delimiting logic based upon a geometry of measurement and allowing the mind to mature to a geometry of position. So instead of looking for form all the time, you come to understand the dynamics of field. And that fields and form have an exchangeable quality of complementarity so that waves in fields and particles in forms are different phases of each other. Thus you can write E=MC2. The energy of the mass times light squared are interchangeable, they're exchangeable. They're not identities of form. It isn't that this form E equals this form MC2. That's another projection from a Cartesian geometry limited mentality. That's giving an isness to is not. That's creating a polarity and the mind cannot be real if it's polarized. It has to make that twist, it has to shift the polarity into a complementarity before the wholeness begins to, not to form but to transform. Because reality operates by complementarity transforms and not by formation alone. It is very difficult to appreciate that which is why modern quantum physics often has now stacks and stacks of simple books saying, if you're trying to make pictures in your mind, you're not understanding what is being done here. The old caution against having graven images when you come to think of God. If you have a picture of an old man with white hair, that is a projection for sure. And so one of the two things that Cassirer says here, "projection and the imaginary in geometry". And the other one is "the transference of relations distinguished from induction and analogy."
We don't have to go into a logic lesson, just to know two little basic facts. Analogy since Greek times has always been paired with polarity. Analogy and polarity go together and they've gone together since Sophistic times in ancient Greece and that whole mentality, though it's been questioned professionally and profoundly many times during History, always there is a period like our current generation where the regression goes in and people are stupid all over again. You saw me throw a 1997 physics book on the floor in a nano second tantrum last week because of the author saying that he's never really understood Niels Bohr and he's writing this book on Quantum Location and using Bohr's name because it's a convenient label.
Polarity and analogy go together in classical Greece and imagination and projection go together in one of the all time classics of this was written by a mathematician named David Hilbert. He was one of the great founders of 20th century mathematics. A German, David Hilbert. Imagination and Geometry, and it's still in print from a reprint house after four generations. Cassirer writes in here, "The peculiarity of the method of projection and imagination in geometry". The whole thing about imagination and projection in a geometricity is a method and has a peculiarity. "The peculiarity of the method appears most clearly in its fundamental procedure. The most important form of correlation by which different figures are connected is found in the procedure of projection. The essential problem consists in separating out those "metrical" descriptive elements of a figure which persist unchanged in its projection. All the forms that can issue in this way from each other are considered as an indivisible unity. They are in the sense of the pure geometry of position, only different expressions of one and the same concept. Here it is immediately evident that to belong to a concept does not depend upon any generic similarities of the particulars. It merely presupposes a certain principle of transformation which is maintained as identical." Now this was a real difficult bugaboo when physics was getting to the sub-atomic level. And curiously enough it reappears again in almost every wave of development of ideation in the 20th century. It reappears in the development of ideas of early man.
One of the difficulties that Mary Leakey had, similar to Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr and Einstein and her husband Louis Leakey, they were looking for something which no one had ever seen before and which was not really believed to exist. For thirty years the Leakeys looked for something which was a piece of evidence that would show that man was very very very ancient, in fact older than old. We have to almost scrap the word ancient and say archaic. They were looking for evidence of archaic man. But even archaic is not old enough, because what the Leakeys found was indications that we are more archaic than archaic. That our psycho physical form has morphed for millions of years and not just for many thousands. So quickly does the visionary differentiation of consciousness proceed that here are two volumes, one by Louis Leakey the husband and one by Mary Leakey the wife, both published by Cambridge University Press, these are the professional monographs, this is volume one by Louis, this if volume five, the last in the series by Mary. Louis' book came out in 1965, Mary's in 1994 when she was about 80 years old. I've opened this book on the Leakey's to a picture of Mary Leakey at age 80 when this book was published. She is standing with a cigar in her jodhpurs overseeing the sights on the field. A toughy.
When you look at the illustrations in Louis Leakeys volume you find every plate deals with animals, every plate deals with the animals and the bones and the teeth, it deals with the context, the natural context, because they didn't have much to go on even though they had found a few specimens. Thirty years later in Mary Leakey's book you don't find any animal things. Every single photograph in here is about an artifact of man. Not only stone tools but bone tools and in 30 years the focus had come to understand that indeed man is an extraordinary occurrence. That his extraordinariness leaps out of nature. Their son Richard Leakey did this beautiful volume on a two million year old individual that they found, a young Homo Erectus hunter and here's the monograph published by Harvard University Press. It's interesting because on the back are bones like his father would have gone for and on the front are human qualities like his mother would have refined. And what was so difficult and is still difficult is that the geometric progression of projected development of form is incapable of understanding what happened, is incapable of understanding the History. Because it doesn't matter how many points of particular you have, the integral of the whole has a lot to do with the transference of relations distinguished from induction and analogy, the transference of relations.
Here's how Cassirer, it's a little long but I think we need to have this kind of, this statement. He's talking about, even by 1910, the realization at that time, fresh and new, that our own minds have gotten in the way of understanding by assuming that form is essential to understand the real. Whereas form is only essential to the mind for it to be itself. And that this is not the entirety of reality at all. In fact an idea which at this time was being expressed most eloquently in art. About 1910 is when you find people like Kandinsky and Picasso saying, what arbitrary forms of mind do you think are controlling us? Picasso's showing not the hero with 1,000 faces but showing the face with 1,000 heroes. That the cubist vision, already visionarily there in Cezanne, was able very quickly to be developed, not just that a Cezanne could see a Mount St. Victor in that way but that a Picasso could in a very short while look at himself in such a way that he did not dissolve into the cubist vision but that he differentiated into the cubist vision of person. And at the same time Kandinsky developing the notion that form is not even essential to a painting, that one can have an abstract painting, where color volume movement and even geometricity, and maybe not geometricity but abstract painting has its own esthetic quite distinct and different.
And we used in the art section of this education Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. And we saw that the incomprehension that Kandinsky first elicited from the critical audience in Europe and around the world, they didn't understand, we don't know what you're saying. And so he wrote a second little book to go with it, From Point To Line To Plane, to show the geometric progression, but to show that that geometricity of the progression has nothing to do with the mind's transference of relations and imaginative geometry of form.
In fact a point, even 2300 years ago in Alexandrian Euclidean geometry is quite clearly a focus of forces, it is a point with no dimension. The very first axiom in Euclid. A point is a locus of no dimension, and its first dimension develops when it moves. So that time, a time line, initially gives the dimensiality and as soon as that dimensiality is conferred, a spatial quality occurs. And its that time space that gives to geometry its ability to make not just points and lines and planes but that focuses of no dimension when they move give a vector and that vector can be called a line and can be imagined as a line, but to imagine it as a line between two points, connecting two points, being a correlation artifact is a deception. Lines may be connecting two points, they do not have to connect two points. In fact in early geometry there were never connecting two points. One gave a vector, a directions and you arbitrarily intersected that vector in order to make a form which could be talked about as an example of some limited case. So that Geometry in the classic sense of a line as a connection between two points is an arbitrary example for the mind's own explication of its ideas of form, and that's the limit of its reality. Beyond that that kind of geometry has no validity or soundness whatsoever. Which is why initially scrapping and junking geometry classically was the way in which nuclear physics and early mathematics developed. They simply sidestepped the whole issue.
We showed a couple of months ago, two books by the great physicist J.J. Thomson, one of them written in 1907 where he still talked about the Corpuscular Theory of Atomic Structure. The Corpuscular Theory of Atomic Structure was first talked about by Robert Boyle around the 1640's and there was still a book by one of the world's great physicists written in 1907 about this. Within a decade, he wrote the first monograph on the electron as the way in which atomic structure could be understood. And so one went from a 17th century geometricity of Cartesian geometry to a nuclear particle understanding of a spectrum of possibility in about one decade, and that decade was roughly 1907 to about 1917-1918. Exactly in that time period as we know, in that historical space, the entire social structure of Europe crumbled. It's called the First World War.
Now I might not get to it too much today but I brought in one very powerful thinker in the social sciences, his name is Alfred Schuts. Alfred Schuts who developed a phenomenological understanding. This book is called Life Forms and Meaning Structure. The three volume collected papers from the Hague, the very first one has the problem of social reality. Here's a study of his, The Phenomenological Study of the Social World, and so one. Social thinkers like Schuts coming on the heals of this tremendous decade of transform of shifting of coming into, not just another idea about reality, but to an entirely new mind. A mind that no longer limited itself to forms of integration, but kept a suspension of conclusion alert and alive in a realm called openness and that this realm called openness was not vacuous but had its own particular special quality. The French word (I hope my pronunciation is not so poor on this) from the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Dure, duration, pure duration. That consciousness has a pure duration and it does not have a form. It's like the wave side of reality whereas the mind specializes in form. It's like the particle side.
So that the mind in its natural way identifies with the brain. It says yes it's my buddy the brain, we drink together, we carouse together, we're good integral buddies. And there's no way to doubt that, in fact all of experience shows the connective bridge, in fact experience is the connective bridge between body and mind, for sure. And that there's a deep integral, a path integral that specializes in correlation so that the mind and the body correlate, they do very well. The difficulty is that the mind also has almost hidden like a secret denominator to its integral numerator, it has a differential denominator. So that the mind, rather than being just a form a numerable form, also has a mysterious basis, not a basis as a foundation from which it builds, but a basis which is discovered as it digs down, as it goes deeper. So that there is a threshold at which the formed mind penetrates it own resistance to understanding. And what was it resisting? What was it not understanding? That its forms are not the whole story. And in particular, its form of identity of itself is actually a chimera at best.
The mind says, well in that case, this is knowledge to be feared because what you're talking about is Jeckyll and Hyde. You're talking about our social self of being very proper and our hidden self of being very improper to say the least. Id-ville, dirty, really bad, and that's how early man was seen. What came before us was something unmentionable, it was too horrible. You remember Darwin, not that Darwin was unmentionable, but you remember talking about him landing at Tierra del Fuego and seeing the fierce savagery of the tribes, just living in mud and dreck and degeneracy and he was horrified because this was his worse fear. We've come out of this. Apes are clean compared to this. And so when critics would say, well you derived man from apes, he didn't take it so badly, but what he didn't want to recognize is that man came out of this, came out of something worse than apes, came out of ugly primitive distorted brutal madness. That's what we came out of. And of course this was correlated beautifully in Vienna by another cigar smoking character who said, indeed, all this creature wanted was what you see when the social barriers are let down.
What the mind feared more than this kind of madness chimera was to recognize that it was totally free, that an infinite freedom underlay all of the possibilities of form and that form is but a phase of possibility of integral objectivity and though it happens with bodies and minds, there are two different pairs of differential forms that are not even forms, the person and the Cosmos. And that the person and the Cosmos being differential forms, work as transforms in fields of possibility and don't really care whether they have a form or not. They don't really care whether there is a transference of relationalities on the basis of correspondence or not. They don't care whether it's imaginable or not or whether there is a geometricity that can be measured or not. They care about a relational positioning and gestalts of possibility and the caring and nourishing of complementarity. That, the Spiritual Person and the Cosmos care about a great deal. But whether or not this or that form is identical through a geometrical correlation with this or that other form doesn't interest them very much at all. Only as limited entertainments on Wednesday afternoons in the Universe.
We're going to take a break but before we do I want to come back and emphasize something which I'm trying to deliver here. Cassirer writes: "From the beginning induction proceeds from the particular to the universal. It attempts to unite hypothetically into a whole, a plurality, a plurality of individual facts observed as particulars without necessary connection. Here the law of connection is not subsequently disclosed but forms the original basis by virtue of which the individual case can be determined in its meaning. The conditions of the whole system are predetermined and all specialization can only be reached by adding a new factor as a limiting determination while maintaining these conditions."
So that the concept is a determining factor, in fact the determining factor of jelling the form. And without conception entering into the array of particulars, even though one has been very careful, extremely exact about the particulars, they don't come into a unity without a concept coming into play and giving a boundary, not a liminality, but a definite boundary. So that the early understanding of definition was being able to draw the boundary around something and then you had the form. Street language in this country used to call that bagging it. When you've bagged it, (I don't know if it's a Halloween phrase or not) when you've bagged it, you've got it. And in fact in ancient Greece, when Sophists would argue, they would clench their fist as a sign that they had delivered their point, did you get it. And that's the first use of that rather trite revolutionary kind of sign, did you get our meaning, did you get the statement that we're making. And to a differential spirit, it's rather boring. Let's come back.
BREAK
Let's come back and let's immediately pursue what we're doing and if you were here at the beginning of the course in Nature One the question was always what are we doing, what is it that we're doing. The further that we go into our education, the more that we realize that the elusiveness of being able to say what we are doing is an advantage, not a disadvantage. So that in Feynman's book on Quantum Electrodynamics, QED, the beginning of the third lecture he says: 'This is the third of four lectures on a rather difficult subject - the theory of quantum electrodynamics - and since there are obviously more people than there are here tonight than there were before, some of you haven't heard the other two lectures and will find this lecture almost incomprehensible. Those of you who have heard the other two lectures will also find this lecture incomprehensible, but you know that that's alright: as I explained in the first lecture the way we have to describe Nature is generally incomprehensible to us.'
And so it is with the language style that I'm using. I'm using a language style that's incomprehensible. Anyone who listens to a tape of this will tell you, you can play it for friends, they will hear nothing. A comment recently, it's almost impenetrable. What is almost impenetrable is the limitations of your mind, not my language. My language is iridescent, it's opalescent, but we have been schooled and trained and inculcated in such a limited mentality as to - it's either shame or havoc that we should cry. And so of course, this is like it always has been, wisdom is always revolutionary. We never heard it like that before and we can't hear it now because it takes awhile to recalibrate. To recalibrate our hearing and our seeing, to recalibrate not so much our perception, because our perception actually is quite adequate. Millions of years of nature have prepared us to be quite adequate perceptually. What interferes, what disturbs that kind of surface of imagery is the way in which the conceptual fingers keep going in and rippling the water, rippling the surface, rippling the mind. And so we're told an old integral truism, you have to quiet the mind. You have to quiet the mind so that you can see, and if you do, if you quiet the mind so that you can see, what do you see? You see and hear and taste and smell and even touch exactly what exists. The mind is made to do that.
We have a bias because of the Egyptian Greek origins of our intellectual tradition, we have a bias towards sight. In India the intellectual tradition is biased towards touch. But there is a quality - the Hebrew tradition is towards hearing. But there is a quality where the minds calmed and seeing or hearing or touching what is perceptually accurately there, discovers that without the interconnectedness the actually of what's there does not move - that the movement relationality does not depend upon perception at all but upon memory. It is memory that moves in the mind, and this is a startling thing.
So that we build from the world, from nature for sure from particulars into universals and we come to conceptions and ideas and then we have to learn to transform that, to shift gears out of that mentality if we want to continue to be real. Here's a paragraph from 1923, Schutz' great book on The Problem of Social Reality: 'It should be pointed out at once that there is this wide spread misunderstanding to the effect that transcendental phenomenology denies the actual existence of the real world, the real life world. Or that it explains it as mere illusion by which natural or positive scientific thought lets itself be deceived.' Maya. That when you calm the mind, when you see, when you hear, when you touch, when you taste exactly existentially what is occurring, and you don't bring memory into play, imagination tries to fill in and then you do have an illusion, it is an optical illusion, it's an audio illusion, it's a little more difficult to deceive touch because touch is actually easier than sight or sound to trust. The blind are actually blessed in a very peculiar way. But Schutz goes on to write - this is 1923: 'Natural or positive scientific thought lets itself be deceived rather for transcendental phenomenology also there is do doubt that the world exists and that it manifests itself in the continuity of harmonious experience as a universe.' And indeed the integral, the path integral leads and creates, the mind is very very good at making a universe, a Uni-verse. It will not naturally make an omniverse. It has to be educated, it has to be radically educated for that to do.
It's very difficult to come upon this. In Cassirer, he points out: 'In fact the new interpretation could be carried through only by a stubborn struggle against the supremacy of the analytic methods. Criticism of these methods begins with Leibnitz and is brought to a first conclusion with his founding of the analysis of position.' What is that analysis of position? Not only was Leibnitz establishing that but a man in England named Isaac Newton was also establishing it at the same time - calculus. That we need to consider not the thing in its existentiality but the entire ecology of its cycle of real. That this leaf is this leaf today but in a week its going to be curled and brown is also a phase of that leaf. It also was DNA at one point, the atoms that make it up were in some super nova who knows how many billions of light years away. So that when one is talking about what is real, you have to get serious and stop being naive and believing that Maya is something you can bank on. You can gamble on Maya but you can't bank on it. And this is a particular difficulty when it comes to our using the mind to think about itself thinking about using the mind.
It is so difficult that when the Asian wisdom, by the time Indian logical wisdom got to China the Chinese had for 1000 years absorbed it and did to it their Chinese way and you had somewhere around 1000 years ago a very precise document, it's called the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Diamond in Sanskrit is Vajra, cutter is Chadika and Sutra - Sutra originally meant thread, it came to mean a tract of written language which carefully walks you through an entirety of a cycle that wakes you up. And the Diamond Cutter Sutra is one of the most famous of all the documents of what is called the High Dharma in Asian civilization. And it works rather like one of Gauss' mathematical techniques. It takes a statement and then restates that statement with just one word added and it keeps doing that, it keeps building the initial statement to enough of a complexity that you begin to get the intuition of a gestalt and then it leaves a term out and proceeds down the ladder on the other side leaving out the terms that you have added in exactly the reverse sequence in which you added them. So that the last statement is the same as the first. So if that sequence, that ecology, that excursion, that thread shows you that the mind follows step by step and with an interval of no step, it reverses its polarity easily and logically without missing a hitch and goes back down the other way. It was revelatory that the mind naturally factors in a 0 at the very apex without missing a beat. That the mind not only has a cardinal counting capacity called numeracy, but it has an ordinal capacity to make orders of meaning and that it can transform from the cardinal to the ordinal quite easily by simply not recording a step - by letting a 0 take place. Any school child who's learning arithmetic knows that when you add up the figures in a column, you get more than what you can write, more than 9, you have to carry something over. That carry over place is called in Mahayana, it's called the storehouse consciousness. Jung thought it was the collective unconsciousness, but his collective unconsciousness is a complete misnomer for the High Dharma. First of all there's no such thing as an unconscious in the High Dharma. Un means un. It's called Shunyata, no savvy, no savvy unconscious, try again, wrong number. You keep dialing numbers for Shunyata, no one's home, its not even ringing and the fact that you still believe you have a phone in your hand shows how stupid you are. It's that kind of a peculiarity.
And so the Diamond Cutter Sutra was a case in point about 1000 years ago of how the mind factors in orders of meaning into a sequence of imagery. In this case one of the most primal imageries that we have of number, cardinal number sequences. So that arithmetic functions fold into the arithmetic of the cardinal series without leaving a trace. It's beautiful, it's like Tao and Te, they go together. So that you can not only count numbers, but you can operate arithmetically with them. You can add them, you can subtract them, you can multiply, you can divide. Those four arithmetic functions are like the four possibilities of logical operative matrix. It could be this, it could be its reverse, it could be its reverse, it could be the counter positive. And that quaternary is the original quaternary, it's the logical quaternary. Why is it a quaternary? Because the mind dices itself up into fours quite easily. And it does so without missing a beat. And any function that takes place within that matrix is still to the mind a part of counting, it's a part of numeracy so that arithmetic functioning was a part of the way in which one counted. Business depends upon that - you got to add right or multiply right or the profits go out the door.
But that entire arithmetic mind is an integral mind and it cannot do calculus. Because calculus is about the infinitesimal differences, the infinite differentials that occur in between the ultimate liminality, 0 and 1. And that as you approach 1 or as you approach 0 there is an infinite phase form differential, it's like the mystic seeing of someone who looks to see and as the mystic looks to see, he sees better and better. In Black Elk, Black Elk as a great eagle, visionary eagle, looks down upon his land and he sees the whole of the Black Hills and then he looks, he sees this village and he looks more and he sees somebody's face, and he looks more and he sees right into their eye - it's this quality of the visionary looking. In the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna gets his Tapas of his Yoga together and he is able to hold his bow and arrow exactly, the teacher Drona who has said to him what do you see, has said to his brothers and they say well I see this target and all of these things. Arjuna when he is in his Yoga says I see nothing because he's looking at the center of the void in the atom in the center of the eye of the bird he's going to shoot.
And so there's a peculiar mystical exactness that happens. Better even for me than Arjuna and the Bhagavad Gita, which I learned when I was about 17, but something I learned when I was about 44, I found out that Manly Hall was a great archer. And that he learned to shoot, not in European archery style, but he learned to shoot with the Marengo Indians out by Banning California and he learned that you don't aim. You become synergistic with the target and you just bow and arrow raise and shoot from the hip. And as long as that is a seamless motion you will hit the target. It's like a Sumie painter who has the table and all of the jars of the inks and he has the paper taut. There's one roller here and one roller here and it's drawn taut - if he pauses with the brush it will go through the paper. So he has to be a Samurai of Art. As long as he reaches for the brush and the brush goes into the ink and that comes to the paper and he makes his form and comes back, as long as that is seamless one motion he will have a painting, he will have a Sumie painting. If he has a hitch anywhere in the motion, it will ruin the paper, you have nothing but embarrassment.
So that time is a unity every time that duration is seamless. Doesn't matter how long it takes on clock time as long as the duration is seamless, it is all of one time and it means all of the space that's generated out of that time focus has the same form, has the same spatial form, that's why you never miss the target. Or Chuan Zu has the famous story of the butcher, the Taoist butcher who cuts the ox up in front of the emperor and he never has to sharpen his knife. And the emperor says let me see that knife, he says it's just as sharp as when you began. How is it that these butchers have to sharpen their knives because they're constantly cutting through muscle and bone and ligaments and you never have to sharpen your knife and you cut all the way through. And Chuan Zu, the Taoist says, well because they're cutting bone and sinew, I don't cut anything, my knife has nothing to dull it.
As long as we are seamless in the initial moment of time, that initial moment of time in its seamlessness can be extended to any clock time whatsoever. The Dure is of a dimension that does not allow for the filigree of illusion to rain out its reality into portioned parts. But once that happens you cannot glue parts together again and get a whole. It doesn't matter how powerful your mind is, how deep your belief is, how stringent your prayers have been, you cannot glue parts back to the whole. You never step in the same stream twice - Heraclitus. And his contemporary Parmenides, who truly looked like a God figure of Gothic imagination, long white hair, came from the Missouri of Ancient Greece, came from Ilea, where they argued about everything: you're wrong and we can prove it and if you give us time and enough beers we will prove it. And Parmenides with his white hair wrote a mystical poem, it's called The Way. It translates as the Tao. And Parmenides gave the polarity, the disjunctive polarity of Tao Te. The Premenidean disjunctive Tao Te: what is, is and what isn't, isn't and they never meet, they never have contact. And so oneness and zero never meet in actuality though they participate in a set all the time. And so the ordinal strategic consciousness is that the real is occurring but as long as we are not real, we are not occurring with it and the real is not real for us no matter what we think. And the more that we try to argue ourselves into a position where we can do so, the more we alienate ourselves from actuality and we feel it. We feel ourselves getting dry because of abstruseness or getting ridiculous because of abstractness. A little learning is a slow death and it's totally useless.
If we do not learn wisdom in its double full ecology, all of our learning is just so much weekend snags of excursions into tilting at windmills. And the more that we become addicted to that the more we're veiled - we're veiled with; what does Schutz write here in his little essay: 'Rather for transcendental phenomenology there is also no doubt that the world exists and that it manifests itself in the continuity of harmonious experience as a universe. [He understands Chuan Zu] But this indubitability must be made intelligible and the manner of being in the real world must be explained. Such a radical explanation however is only possible by proving the relativity of this real life-world and of any imaginable life-world to the transcendental subjectivity which alone has the optic sense of absolute being'.
This is very difficult, full of big words, not just 75 cent words. These are over a dollar. But there's one word in here which is unfortunate because it's a hold over conception that got into Schutz way, brilliant as he was. The word is subjectivity. There's no such thing as subjectivity. There is a differential objectivity which is most surely your person operating, but as to a subject, it doesn't exist, never existed, is impossible for it to exist. And so the Sanskrit term for it was Anata, nobody. Non existence doesn't exist. To think that non existence is a category of non existence and has that reality is to be not only in illusion but to believe in that illusion and that's called delusion. And delusionary is clinical. Why else would Cervantes say that the world is mad? Because he had seen it in himself. He says in Don Quixote, he says Don Quixote had read so many books on Chivalry and on great Knight Errant excursions that his brain completely dried up, and his brain completely drying up he resolved to go out and sally forth and go on his adventures. So he has the adventures of a no mind Knight Errant. There's a great Zen book by R.H. Blythe on the Zen of Don Quixote.
It's the epitome of the high Renaissance man just before the whole thing curls into the 17th century dilemma of Cartesian geometry. Don Quixote is published about the time that Hamlet comes out. And Shakespeare and Cervantes, two giants of reality seeing eye to eye that this is indeed a very mystical and mysterious universe for it is only real when we are, ourselves. Not a thing but operatively exploring our non-thingedness. Then we have a Cosmos, then the possibilities are infinite, then a prism spectrum is wild again and nature in its mystery occurs without any kind of seam out of that. So that the Cosmos gifts us with the mystery of nature. The objective Cosmos, not the Cosmos as a thing, but the Cosmos as the largest most infinite differential ongoing show of ordinal stardom. Heaven is Heaven because it's Heavenly not because it's some great idea of Earth. It doesn't matter how many fountains you imagine, how many ouris and how much food, it's not Heaven, it's just a good time, it's still Maya, back in old Maya again. It take an old cowboy to be able to ride out, yeah.
Feynman writes his second paragraph in the 3rd lecture, he says: 'In these lectures I want to tell you about the part of physics that we know best, the interaction of light and electrons. Most of the phenomena you are familiar with involve the interaction of light [photons] and electrons - all of chemistry and biology, for example. The only phenomena that are not covered by this theory are phenomena of gravitation and nuclear phenomena; everything else is contained in this theory'. So that light, famous light, famous light which is photons, which are particles indeed, but light which is also a wave. And we looked last week at the way in which the early books trying to express this kept old 17th century language, just like the old language of subjectivity, as if that were real. We brought a 1945 book here called Wave Mechanics on Schrodinger's wave equations. And mechanics comes from the time of Boyle and Newton. There's nothing mechanical about waves at all, and that's the whole point. That there is no mechanistic relationality when waves are operating because the transforms always are carrying you away as soon as you are anywhere. And so there's no where to be somewhere. And so the process is asymptotic. It goes always off the graphs and it even goes off the non-graphs which is beautiful because it allows for a recursion to occur so that it occurs again. It's like a Cheshire cat, just because the smile is winked out here doesn't mean the two eyes aren't going to appear over here. And that was the famous Koan of Schrodinger, his cat, whether that cat was alive or dead. And the cat is both alive and dead; both alive and dead.
So that reality was a set at the lowest nuclear level, it was a set, it was a set of pairs. And that you have to take what is and what isn't as a set and then you have a binary language within which one can speak. And so you have to learn, it's a high art it's very difficult to learn, you have to learn to speak a discursive language that has sets rather than particles. Rather than taking words as being this, this, this so that their referentials are one to one like particles in an identity bounded by an identity that is a form, you have to use a language that's supple all the time and keeps dancing and refuses to be photographed. The kind of language that's being used here now. So that yes you're not hearing in such a way that you can form a picture of something or an idea of something and that's done on purpose. The way we have to describe nature is generally incomprehensible to us. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have meaning, it's that it doesn't have a final mental identifiable form. There is a mental identifiable form but it's only one aspect in a matrix and equal to that is that non-form of it. And that when all of this is kept in an art of suspension in that kind of a flow, we use the classic ancient term that that flow is the solutions; the sol-ution. That the question and answer together as a set are factors in a solution, but that the solution is a fluid continuity without seams and that's why its an art. Because only someone who can swim in that kind of a mystical stew will be able to stay afloat because there's no surface that you can get on top of so that you can then breathe. You have to be able to breathe in the midst of the fluidity, which you can do. You can develop differential gills, you can be very strange fish. Astronauts do it and they're training all the time; they relinquish the ordination of gravity in weightlessness. The mind can remember that it didn't always have to have conceptual coordinates in order to function. It just was something that was inculcated. Children don't have it, babies don't have it, artists especially don't want it. Don't phone us, we're not here. There's no one here.
And the same for science. Science is another differential form like the artist. The scientist, the actual scientist is a differential form. So that there is a wonderful description, there's a description here of Mary Leakey at about 77 years of age, a real scientist. 'Mary was not even in her 70's the cozy comforting kind of grandmother but more of a grand Victorian matriarch; gray haired, weathered, she coolly puffed on her short cigars, enjoyed her whisky, delivered her tart opinions without a semblance of tact. Her blue eyes even her blind one could still snap fire or chill a person to the quick and though she gained a little plumpness around the middle, she had not gone soft at all but carried herself soldier straight. Even her high reedy voice held a note of command. She was after all the most famous woman archaeologist in the world'. With a whole trunk full of honorary Ph.D.'s. When she was in her 80th year she brought out the final volume of the work on Olduvai on the edge serendipi, uh Serengeti. Serendipitous Serengeti, you like that? What's curious about this is at 80 years of age this work completes the work that she did with her husband back in the 1950's and the early 1960's. Her science had gone way beyond this volume. She was 30 years, 30 hard working years beyond this volume when it came out. She was so sophisticated that this was like grade school level. Why did she do it? Because it was the completing of the set started by her husband and it was the combing through of the work that they had done together in the good years. And even though she was way beyond, almost a century beyond where this book was in 1994 personally, she knew that the general population of men and women hadn't even begun on the journey that she and her husband had started in the 1930's. Still had not cleared their minds enough to face the possibility that we are millions of years old in versions of this form already and that we are sophisticated beyond imagination. And that we fit into a seamlessness that exceeds this planet so far that imagination is beggared by its scale and dimension.
When she and Louis began their adventure was about the same time that you find nuclear physics under Heisenberg and Bohr and Schrodinger and Einstein, preparing such a mysterious quantum world that it took a trickster like Feynman to have mobility in it. And what gave Feynman the advantage was that he didn't believe any of the arithmetic that people were trying to talk to him about - trying to teach him. And because he didn't believe them, because he was enough of an outlaw, a New York City outlaw, he didn't believe them. He wanted to figure it out for himself - leave me alone, I'll come back and argue with you tomorrow, that Feynman devised a whole new language of higher mathematics that was a distinct improvement on Leibnitz and on Newton. So that in the future people will use Feynman's diagrams rather than the traditional calculus to talk about reality. And we're going to come back next week and take a look at things like Loop Integral, Self Energy, Fermion Fields, all kinds of very peculiar qualities that are there in a language which the man made himself and which everyone else is using now.
When Newton devised in his Principia a shifting of the very foundations of thought, it was only about 200 years from then until another book called Principia, this one Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead shifted those foundations again. Newton took it 90°, Russell and Whitehead took it 90° further and showed that logic and mathematics have the same operative field. What Feynman did is to take it the other 180° and to show that when you came back you didn't come back to the same starting point at all. You can't step in the same stream twice. That as long as you stayed with Russell you got into a disjunctive polarity by the very subtle structure of the way in which the mind thought it should work not in the way in which the mind does in fact work. Along about the time that Feynman was questioning this, Russell's co-author Whitehead was also questioning it and wrote a beautiful book called Process and Reality which hardly anyone could read and it's no wonder because 5 or 6 years ago someone discovered by comparing the text with the manuscript that it was so full of typos that you couldn't read it, and that no one had ever read or understood Whitehead's Process and Reality cause it was never printed correctly in the first place and all those philosophy teachers that had tried to teach it were bull shitting you.
Wittgenstein the other philosopher who questioned Russell came back to the same position that Feynman came to but without the diagrams and he's famous for a statement embroidered on the bibs of philosophers working as dishwashers everywhere: "Whereupon a man cannot speak therefore must he remain silent". More next week.
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