Nature 10

This is nature ten and this presentation has a very curious title. The title is gender, pair, pair. And it's rather reminiscent of the name of our species, which is not just Homo sapiens, but Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens sapiens. Tii means wisdom, wisdom, man. But our species is named wisdom, wisdom man. It's doubled because of a very odd characteristic. Preparedness is so deep That primordial, the primordial pair itself is paired. So that you get the archetype of the square. And from that the corollary archetype of the angle. And all of our languages, all of the informed languages of this planet, have a characteristic geometric metaphor that there is such a thing as an angle of vision. There is such a thing as coordinates, and the angle from where the coordinates meet out, that that angle of vision gives us an angle of vision into an Area which, even though unspecified most of the time, is the interior area of a square. And so I have used a term called the square of attention, and that r square of attention. Is rather like what the British Empire used to call the big picture. It is the largest frame of reference. Notice how the language just has it built in. And that in a frame of reference we have learned in the last especially 1800 years. That the frame of reference is actually a cube. So that there is not just a plane of. Two dimensions, but that there is a cube of three dimensional space, and in addition to the geometry of a square, there's the trigonometry of a cube, and that the cube has a definite relationship to the sphere, so that as the square and the circle are related together, the cube and the sphere are related together. From the earliest development of cubes and spheres, there was always the connotation that if you want to understand integrals, you use squares and circles. And if you want to understand differentials, you use cubes and spheres. So that if you wanted to understand the diagrammatic accuracy of an idea that someone would have in their imagination. You would use a circle or you would use a square. But if you want to understand the mysteries of nature, you have to use a cosmic sphere or a cosmic cube quality. I'm using a kind of a language which goes back both to the more ancient, integral sense of wisdom, but also bridges instantly into that more developed wisdom. Wisdom or wisdom squared kind of sphere or cubical quality of language. And this language was developed. The language that I'm using was developed in the 1960s originally. And I've been trying to give you examples of poetry of mine from 40 years ago, 35 years ago, to let you see how the language at that time, in its genesis was coming to be. What the complex language that I use today, its roots, its origins, and give you a sense of acclimating yourself to something which is rather sophisticated by now. So I'm going to give you a poem from 1967. At this time I was studying Chinese in San Francisco and discovering, as my major professor was telling me, that my feelings were Chinese. And the reason I had such a difficulty growing up in Western culture is that I wasn't Western in terms of feeling. And so here's a poem about the most famous of all the Chinese poets, Li Po, from 1967. And it was in a moment where I realized that the Chinese sentience, not the intelligence so much, but the sentience that Chinese language feeling understanding was much more acclimated to a physics of relativity than were any Western language minds, and that eventually, in time, Chinese physicists would probably take the lead in planetary development. This was in 1967. So this is a poem called Musing on Li Po with relativity. He was madly the greatest poet who ever lived. And madly still is two. Who dreamed of him? And thought of him even. At the world's end. If with a little more wine in time. And pure space in place of place. I could just now greet old Taoist. Li Tai poem for poem. Contemplated. Rather stared. Glared straight through the moon's reflection. Wet. Sent his thousand autumn name downstream. Fast to the equation. If one old MC squared can do all that, we are never oddly going to get sober. This quality of a poetic displacing. What? It's a language that has a poetic which displaces rhetoric, because the classic integral of a language form is always subsumed under a discipline known in Western times from the Greek as a rhetoric. Rhetorical. It has rules of expression. It has rules of grammar. These rules of grammar have a logic to them. This logic is consonant with an arithmetical quality of being able to count on it. And this grammar and this logic, this arithmetic, belong together and go together, and that these disciplines are together. But in addition to that, it was recognized that there are other disciplines that are related to them, but that they are transforms of these, that the language of grammar and logic and arithmetic are good for squares and circles, but you have to develop them in order to deal with spheres and cubes. And so the development of arithmetic goes into geometry. The development of a logic goes into a music. The development of a grammar goes into a cosmic discipline that's like astronomy. And rhetoric was always grouped with the easier with the more basic integral set of grammar, logic and arithmetic, so that grammar, logic and arithmetic and rhetoric were always a square. And they were so well known as a square that they were passed on in the Middle Ages in the West as a set known as the quadrivium. The quadrivium, and music and geometry and astronomy were passed on as a triangle. It was called the trivium and quadrivium as the square and the trivium as the triangle were the seven basic arts, and they were put together in the sense that the square was learned first, and then the triangle like a lintel over it, so that you learned the way that integration happens by these four disciplines grammar, rhetoric, logic, and arithmetic. And you learn the development of those to project them out into a larger realm of the cosmos by music and geometry and astronomy. And those seven liberal arts were the basis of learning for many thousands of years in the West. In the high classical antiquity, Medicine and architecture were always added to those seven so that there were nine. Nine basic liberal arts. And as a matter of fact, one of these was transformed. You had the sense of rhetoric being transformed into poetry. And when rhetoric was transformed into poetry, it recalibrated these nine disciplines so that the disciplines are morphed into something different. And you had, along with poetry, then one of the arts that was there was epic poetry. Epic lyric poetry was always lyric. It's personal expression. And history came into play as a new discipline. And so instead of the old nine disciplines, the core of which was the square and the triangle, you had nine disciplines that were not so much disciplines, but that they were gifts of divinity to man. And each of those nine had a muse, so that as soon as rhetoric was transformed into a poetic, the whole scale of what human beings were capable of in terms of structuring themselves and the world in which they lived, transformed, transformed out of disciplines into the arts, which suddenly were gifts of divinity to man, gifts of God to man. And those nine muses had a separate kind. Of an ordering, a second kind of grouping. Those nine muses were grouped together. And made a perfect ten, because there was a not so much a leader, but that there was a central zenith. Towards which all nine of those developments led. And that 10th, the nine muses were gathered together by a 10th, and that 10th was Apollo. So that the whole quality of a poetic language led to Apollo, whereas the quality of the disciplines led to schoolmasters, exemplified by supposedly wise professional schoolmasters who in Greek were called sophists. So that if you use a language which has rhetoric as its driving engine, you end up with sophistic understanding. Whereas if you use a poetic language, you end up with an Apollonian grandeur of the ability to include within your purview a creative, transformed cosmos. The one leads to being disciples of some clever teacher. The other leads to being at home in a cosmos which is ever growing and ever changing. And so we use a poetic language rather than a rhetorical language, because the rhetorical tradition of language, especially in English, Had reached a dead end. Not just a box canyon, but a dead end. It reached a precipice of absurdity. And had reached that by the middle part of the past century. By 1950, the English language had become bankrupt of the ability to generate meaning. Two of the most competent exemplars, not so much critics of the language, but exemplars of the difficulty of using English expressively in any rhetorical way, were Samuel Beckett in drama and Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy. And Wittgenstein's Silence pairs up with Samuel Beckett's dramas, which lead to the protagonist being reduced to an absurd pair who are waiting for Godot, who will never show. Or leading to the Beckett drama, where two trash cans on the stage each have somebody living in them, man reduced to living in a garbage can. And the only possibility of discourse is to nag at your fellow trash can dweller. So that the language itself had to be transformed completely. The entire base of its vocabulary, the entire quality of its grammar, its entire syntactical operation, and its a visionary capacity had to be completely redone. And that was done in the second half of the 20th century, so that you have now before you a kind of a language which has gone through a tremendous historical development and for the last 40 years has been transformed again and again and again, until it no longer seeks to find some kind of stasis which has a rhetorical certainty, so that it has some place to stand, some place to which it can just tack itself down and rule out new lines of grammar and logic, new lines of rhetoric and arithmetic, but instead a language which has learned to fly and doesn't need to find any kind of stasis ever again. A language that is home in spaceships, even if spaceships aren't made out of metal. The language of musing on Li Po with relativity in 1967 became the kind of language that was able to translate the Tao Te Ching into English some 30 years later and reads somewhat like this. This is chapter 28, the two Chinese characters at the head of this section resuming Uncarved. Who knows? Presence masculine keeps presence. Feminine becomes heaven. Earth tuning. Fork being heaven. Earth tuning. Fork eternal. Tae not left. Returns goes to beginnings. Who knows? The white keeps the presence of black becomes heaven. Earth's Measure being heaven. Earth's measure eternal. Tay not mast returns. Goes to non selflessness. Who knows deep glory and keeps humility becomes heaven. Earth's intention being heaven. Earth's intention eternal. Tay then intact goes, returns. Uncarved uncarved ready beings vessel spirit Gen utilizing this then being is our official chief. Therefore for great handling. Don't carve up. And good old not. Doctor, giving us a way which no longer balances between polarities, but learns to pirouette spontaneously into a synergy syntax that doesn't have to alight anywhere. And out of this kind of capacity, the language, the Chinese language of Lao Tzu some 2500 years ago, within about five generations, matured and morphed into the language of Zhuangzi, which Chuang-tzu could say very easily that he was a bird who had flied so long going north that he would just now fly south. It's the capacity to do a spontaneous 180 degree abrupt movement. That's within the continuity of the movement. And this takes time out of a sequence, out of a ruled line sequence and puts it into that bow tie. Eternity. So that by the time of Zhuangzi, some 2300 years ago, 2350 years ago, the Chinese language got a syntax of pirouetting freedom within which to express any kind of transformation, any kind of morphing that was possible, all the differentials and all the integrals. Compared to this, the English language was not able to do this until the time of Shakespeare some 400 years ago. So that Chinese as a language over 2000 years Of history of development long before English was able to do this kind of high drama. Acrobatic. In classical antiquity in the West, the way in which a civilization was structured was always because there was an epic basis upon which the entire structure was founded. Classical Greece, as opposed to the previous phases of Hellenic civilization. Previous phases, including Mycenaean Minoan Greece, which was operative of 1000 years before Pericles ever had the Parthenon built. But Classical Greece was based upon Homer, and in that way Classical Rome decided that it needed to have its own epic so that Rome could be founded on a firm, epic basis. And on that note, Augustus Caesar commissioned the greatest poet of his age, Virgil, to write the Aeneid. And the Aeneid became the epic basis of Roman civilization. Like Classical Greece founded on Homer, the Roman Empire was founded on Virgil, but Virgil chose as his model for the way in which the Aeneid used language. He used the Iliad of Homer, but there was another poet, not commissioned by Augustus about the same time, a little bit different in temperament from Virgil, and he used the Homeric language of the Odyssey rather than the Iliad. The Greek in the Iliad has a sombre, relentless pacing to it when you hear the Iliad chanted in Classical Greek. Someone once characterised it as the launching of a great grey battleship in a fog, and it slips monumentally into the bay. And all that you hear is the great wash of water as this deadly machine takes its course. Whereas the classical Greek of the Odyssey has a light tripping cadence, almost as a skipping kind of a dance, and the Roman epic poet who used that kind of Latin was Ovid, and his epic is called the Metamorphoses. It's not about founding Rome as an empire on an immovable foundation and basis. The Augustan Principate determined that the Rome of its founding would be an eternal city. It would never be pried loose from these foundations. In Rome today is still called the Eternal City. The Roman Empire is still intact in the minds of more than a billion people. The Roman Empire is still operating exactly the way that it was planned 2000 years ago, exactly the same way. But whereas Virgil was enshrined with approval by the Roman state, Ovid was sent into exile. He was sent to the farthest, bleakest post in the Roman Empire, to the far reaches of the Black Sea. And he was never allowed to set foot into Roman Empire territory again. And the mystery of Ovid's exile haunted scholars for 2000 years. Why was he sent there? Did he write some kind of a poem about the sexual shenanigans of Augustus's daughter? Something? Far more serious, he challenged the Virgilian epic basis of the Roman Empire by writing an epic. That shows change rather than eternal solidity as the model upon which human beings could trust their development. And when you look at the metamorphoses of Ovid, most people, most students, most literatures read the first 14 or 15 books, but they hardly ever come to the close of the epoch and at the very end. Ovid shows his hand at the very end of the Metamorphoses in the last book, the 15th book. You find a long section on the doctrines of Pythagoras. Pythagoras, who was the great Greek genius who took exception to the Homeric basis upon which classical Greek civilization Periclean Athens was founded. Pythagoras was not an Athenian. He was not interested in the Acropolis, in the Parthenon, in the Athenian norm of civilization. He had been born in the far Aegean island of Samos, and when he was mature, when he was developed, he went on a long quest to improve his wisdom, to take himself out of the ethos of the Greek language world, and he studied in Egypt for 22 years with the Heliopolis priests, where he learned the high Dharma hieroglyphic ways of transforming thought far beyond what classical Greek was capable of. And after that he went to Iran and studied in Persia for 11 years, and only after 33 years did Pythagoras return back. And by this time he had so outgrown the Greek ethos that he could not stay in any kind of Greek territory. So he went to the Wild West of 2500 years ago, he went to southern Italy, and there in And primordial primeval southern Italy. He founded a community of seekers who sought to understand the transformational mysteries, summarized in one of the most puzzling of all of the Pythagorean maxims that geometry was history, and that if you could understand the further developments, not stop with the geometry of a plane, not stop with the squares and the circles that were at the supposed foundation of rhetorical integration, that gave you the grammar, that gave you the logic, that gave you the arithmetic by which you could count this world out into portions so that man could rule along those lines, make those dots, Connect those dots into shapes which he controlled. Pythagoras showed that all of that is a hollow deck of cards. As soon as you move into three dimensional space, as soon as you move off the page from the square into the cube. As soon as you go outside the circle into the sphere, already with the three dimensional context of space, feeling changes. It no longer is interested in cut out shapes of identification by which to catalog feelings. But that feeling takes an intelligence which is much broader than any kinds of stamped out squares or stamped out circles. That man's feeling realms become indeed cosmic, and that feeling, instead of being some kind of accidental Trigger correlation to promulgated shapes of logic and grammar and arithmetic and rhetoric that language, feeling toned freedom outstrips that capacity, lifts the words off the page into a dimension where feeling becomes so intelligent that we have a word for it. It's called sentience. Sentience. That feeling awareness can become so refined that it does not any longer need the rules of logic in order to be expressive. It now can sing to music, and when language has a capacity for musical presentation, the old rules of rhetoric, give way and show themselves as being nothing more than. Building blocks for grade school children and that human beings can very quickly mature so far beyond that, that they leave that whole childhood behind and enter into a maturity that's different from that. But old Ovid didn't leave well enough alone. Not only did he make the esoteric point of putting all the doctrines of Pythagoras at the end of the Metamorphoses, but he closed the entire epic with a couple of pages that cemented and made sure that he was going to at least be exiled, perhaps murdered. The last section of the Metamorphoses is called the Apotheosis of Julius Caesar. The apotheosis is the making of a The God of raising man to a god. The making of the divinity of Julius Caesar, who was Augustus Caesar's uncle, who was the model upon which he built the Roman Empire. And it was Julius Caesar who first laid the technique, the strategies, the array of tactics that his nephew followed and succeeded where Julius Caesar had just begun to succeed. He was known as a divine Julius in the Augustan period, and because of this, because of this disclosure, Ovid was exiled, never to return to Rome. So it's always been dangerous in the West to teach the higher developments Beyond the squares and circles of rhetorical and logical and grammatical and arithmetic confidence. And so schools today are all run on that basis, every single one of them. And only on those graduate levels, only on those higher levels, is one given a glimpse of the geometry of the music, of the astronomy and only rare individuals of the medicine and of the architecture, but those nine all have vectors that lead not to a focus, but lead outward, differentially, to a wider realm that goes beyond the sphere, to a wider realm that is outside of the cube, and that is a thrice greatest background of unlimited freedom. And there is where the education of antiquity in the West went from Pythagoras on to that more cosmic realm, even beyond the spheres. That kind of education was discovered and rediscovered by men and women for about 2500 years, until now, at the beginning of the 21st century, you have an educational cycling that includes all of the integral, all of the logic is there all of the grammar, all of the arithmetic, even the rhetoric is there, but it's there only as a step through which to go. Another step beyond into that spherical, into that cubic quality. And even that is just a step, because that is there to let us take a third step, a step that's always been called beyond. And it's not a step off a flat world into nothingness. And it's not a step into some realm where the sphere ends and then we're going to be in chaos. One of the great medieval illustrations of the tremendous fearfulness that always surrounded this third step was a great sphere of the cosmos, and some philosopher wise man, leaning over and having looked outside of the final sphere, saw the gears of God that moved this final sphere, and the expression on his face was one of abject horror that he had seen, as Melville says in Moby Dick, he'd seen the foot of God on the treadle of existence. Melville said that of the cabin boy Pip, who fell overboard and plunged so deep into the ocean that when they fished him out, he was always in a mystical trance. And Melville said he had gone so deep that he saw the foot of God, and the treadle of existence and pip forever after. The only thing he could do was when he sensed, mystically, that something was not right. He would rattle his tambourine like a rattlesnake, would rattle his rattle. And at the end of Moby Dick, where the push of Ahab to make sure that his vengeance line of geometry was going to rule the ocean, rule the mystery of life. What does Ahab say in one part of Moby Dick? He says to Starbuck, he says, man, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. Pip's tambourine sounds throughout the Pequod, which is silent with this kind of trance that they have crossed a threshold. They've gone beyond the spheres. They've gone into a beyond which was kept always in reserve as some kind of mystery that one should not talk about. Oddly enough, the experience in China had a very similar kind of a take to it. And after the development of the Chinese language in the time of Zhuangzi, of being able to give in this humorous, cosmic way. The third dimension. Beyond space and beyond time. Into the eternal. There came a Chinese figure who founded a dynasty that ruled forever the way in which Self-conception would happen there. The Emperor Chen, from whose name the Chinese take their name. We are Chinese, we are Chinese. The maker of the Great Wall. And the follow up to him was like Augustus Caesar following up Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar set the tone and then was killed by his own friends because they feared him. But it was the follow up by Augustus who founded it. The Emperor Chen lasted about 16 years with the people who followed him founded the Han dynasty and the Han are the Chinese Romans, and they ruled the same way that the Roman Empire ruled. At one point, Han Wu TI, one of the great emperors of the early Han, had 130,000 retainers whose only responsibility was to keep him happy. This quality, where empires are made on the basis of ruled lines, led the man who received the Nobel Prize in 1950, Juan Ramon Jiménez, to say in the Nobel Prize speech, if they give you ruled paper, write the other way. Let's take a break. I like. We mentioned Moby Dick and we also mentioned the Odyssey. And in addition to the pace that we have in our education, and the pace is maintained by pairing books together, and for many reasons, books are both our promise and our bane, because the entire civilization, east and west of this planet is founded on books. The whole structure of the mind, the whole character of integration, and thus in a very peculiar way, all of the demons of deception have long since acclimated themselves to books. And so by using books as a vehicle, we are able to engage to get into a life and death struggle with both the basis that allowed for the development of our minds and our civilization, our sensibilities and our heritages, and at the same time get into a life and death struggle with the demons. We're using. Though something which has never been done before, we're pairing books together. We're using pairs of books because our strategy doesn't come from books. It doesn't come from the integration of the squares and the circles, nor does it even come from the spheres and the cubes. But our strategy comes from, as one might say. Another realm. A third eye. A different quality that is not susceptible to time and space as being limitations, but only as being liminal, provincial possibilities which we can well handle and move on without having to bid them goodbye or even to say hello again. So this is a different kind of education. It's never been done before. This is a technique that is characteristic of wisdom traditions, but it's completely new both in its language and in its strategy. So along with the pairs of books that we use, like a metronome to keep ourselves paced, every month we shift to a new pair of books. Every lunar cycle we have a new pair that we deal with just temporarily for a while, so that the text quality of the books is lost in the shuffle is left behind by many transformations all the time, keeping the brightness intact. We have a single book which we use during the entire course of a year, and then the second year we choose a second book as the year long reading. And this year long book acts, as we would say in molecular biology, this is an enhancer. This is a a quality that adds to the ability for the trace elements to record with a little bit more. Verve. And every 12 weeks we stop the parodies of the books and we take some classic from world spirituality like the Tao Te Ching. Yeah, I'm using my translation because it has an English language that interfaces with the entirety of the strategy of the course, as well as with the language used, a kind of a 21st century English. So that these books for the intervals are actually what are called, in scientific parlance, buffers, so that we have not only the pairs of books that we use as a pace, as a rhythm for our Development, but we have an enhancer and we have buffers and all of these together work in a choreography. And if you'll just work with them, I can guarantee to you that it will work. It'll happen. One of the things about these enhancers is not to read them all at once, but to portion out to distribute the way in which the reading experience of these enhancers, these year long journeys, these quests for an entirety of a cycle, and to just read 5 or 6 pages a week to distribute this kind of reading patiently changes the way in which these books function. It allows for the enhancer function through this methodical snowshoe distribution to change the way in which our attentiveness happens. Now for the readings in Moby Dick this week. The readings are in a section called The Masthead. And just to give you a taste of those who are reading Moby Dick of the core, the 2 or 3 paragraphs in this chapter of Moby Dick, the masthead a big old sailing ships had these tall masts, and at the top of the tallest mast was a lookout. And that was called the masthead. And it was from this highest point on the ship that lookouts were kept, in this case in Moby Dick, lookouts to look for the whales. And often it was a young crewman who was sent aloft. And Melville writes this way very often do captains of such ships take those absent minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient interest in the voyage. Half hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain. Those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect. They are short sighted. What use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home. Why, thou monkey, said a harpooneer to one of these lads. We've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here. Perhaps they were. Or perhaps they might have been shoals of them in the far horizon. But lulled into such an opium like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie, is this absent minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts that at last he loses his identity, takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep blue bottomless soul pervading mankind and nature, and every strange, half seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him Every dimly discovered uprising fin of some undiscernible form seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people, the soul. By continually flitting through it in this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came. Becomes diffused through time and space, like Wycliffe's sprinkled pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore, the round globe over. There is no life in thee now, except that rocking life imparted by the gently rolling ship. Borrowed from the sea and by the sea from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on. Ye move your foot or hand an inch. Slip your hold at all. And your identity comes back in horror over dishearten vortices. You hover. And perhaps at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half throttled shriek, you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea. No more to rise forever. Heed it well, ye pantheists. So that not only can you go off the page, you can go off the globe into a transcendental nowhere. We used to call that courtesy of the old Greek bias chaos, and there was nothing more fearful than chaos. Chaos was exactly the polar opposite of order. With order, you had the plain whereupon stamped shapes of grammar and logic and arithmetic and rhetoric could make a stable certainty. The square upon which you could build, you could found ideas through our ingenuity. One could raise great structures on such a secure and certain basis. But what of the thin air? Thin air is where the demons lived at the beginning of one of the films that we use in the education. The right Stuff. The pilot. Jet. Pilot. Narrator says that the jet pilots went up in the early days trying to break the sound barrier not from the challenge of technology, but through the challenge of confronting the demon who lived out there in the pure air, at the speed of sound. And when the sound barrier was broken, it was understood that the demon lived at even faster speeds, and in the film there is a great showing. Philippe Kaufmann, the director, has a sequence where Sam Shepard, who's playing Chuck Yeager, is finally in a jet plane that's able to go more than Mach 2.5, and at that speed, the air turbulence becomes like a circulating rotating hole in the sky. And of course, he gets a dramatic A conk out and the ship almost crashes and he brings it back. And when he lands, he tells one of the other jet pilots, I really chased that old demon today. Those holes at Mach three in the sky are real. They're not just artifacts of some kind of projection, but they occur because of a confluence of hyper phenomenon where time and space are contorted. But it's nothing compared to leaving the sky behind. Of going so far outside of the sphere of the planet that one leaves the atmosphere altogether. And the first jet pilot to do that. His name was Edward White. He did the first Eva extravehicular activity. And when he went outside of his Gemini space capsule, he was shown on camera held by James McDivitt from inside the Gemini capsule. He went out and as he went out, the sun light was so strong that it brought the gold tinting into his faceplate. And so this solid gold mask of a man looking for the first time outside the entire globe of the sky. They had to pull him back in because when he looked, the life support systems were on an umbilical cord that was also coated with gold. And this gold umbilical cord went into the Gemini space capsule. And when white was out there, he was the first man to hold up his hand and eclipse the entire planet with his hand. And he looked into the endless, not the horrific void. He didn't go mad or crazy. He was struck by the mystic beauty of reality, and he refused to go back in. He had been born physically into eternity, and all of the commands from Houston were of no avail. Mcdivitt had to physically pull him back in and cram him back into his seat. Nasa struck all of this off from the transcripts. This is a report from a personal friend of White's. Our capacity to patiently learn until we learn to Learn and having learned to learn are transform becomes accelerated. And once we have learned to learn, we're no longer wise. But we're wise about being wise. And we begin not to look back for certainty upon our foundations, but to look forward to possibilities. And someone who has learned to learn begins to bring into play the patient structures of seeding, future possibilities that may or may not be used at any given time in any given place. And more and more, the differential strategy of a conscious person is to build, to seed, to nourish the further possibilities of indefinite freedom. And this is why spiritual persons are free. They are not free to have choices. They are free beyond the constraints of choice itself. Now, anyone who is still clinging to the hierarchical authority to the needed structures of those squares and those triangles and those circles, not to mention spheres and cubes, which are thought to be the ultimate. Those people are suspicious of anyone who gets free. They want to pull them back to edit out what they say, what it is possible to say, because all of this is fearful. There was a time, for about 1500 years in the West that one could not talk about the void. One could not talk about infinities for scholastic logic. These were truly fearsome ideas. Not to be mentioned, not to be dealt with. They were part of the chaos to which we will certainly fall worse than any hell. We have learned that chaos itself completely random, completely mad chaos, generates its own structure out of the way in which reality occurs. It occurs with pairs as double attractors and generates an infinity sign overlay, especially in the most wild random chaos, so that reality operates beyond the rational. In the so-called irrational and the Greeks and the irrational long an undiscussed subject in academia, undiscussed together for the irrational was always a part of the reality of the classical backgrounds East and West. The whole motif of developing Greek tragedy was the ability to confront an irrational threshold, and to demonstrate to oneself that you lived through it. Greek tragedies were not plays to which you went for an entertainment or special dates through which you went for some kind of high elevating experience of culture. Greek tragedies were mandated for every man and woman of Mature age, you had to go. There were special proctors who searched the houses, who brought out people who were reluctant to go. There were groups of city police who strung a cord between them, a rope, and corralled down every major street in Athens and ushered everyone at the appointed time to go into the theater of Dionysus. That's where the Greek tragedies were presented. Because they were not Apollonian forms. They were Dionysian forms, Dionysian formlessness. They were forms that led to this infinite void outside of the spheres, outside of the cubes, outside of rationality. And one had to have the experience that you do not die, that you are not shattered, that one does not go mad, and that freedom is not a limitation. So that freedom is something within the limitation, but that freedom is an ability to have a concourse through all of the liminalities so that one is at home in the pair of limited and unlimited. One of the first of all, the Pythagorean of opposites, limited and unlimited, that there was a quality where your breath of capacity was that you could live in either state equally, and it made no difference to you, and thus you were freed from the constraints of having to clutch at the last offered safety of limits, which were always in the hands of those who had the most authority. And so human beings learned to live outside of the hierarchical territories that were centered upon what upon the most basic primal, animal generated sense of experience. One of the books that we're using is Jane Goodall's Through a Window. Her book, written in 1990 after 30 years of experience with the chimpanzees alongside on the eastern coast of Lake Tanganyika in what is now Tanzania. Jane Goodall, who was hand-picked for this as a young girl by Louis Leakey, Her mother, Van Goodall, was a good friend of Louis Leakey and Louis Leakey, the man who had grown up understanding Kikuyu before he could understand English. Born in an Africa which is now, that section is called Kenya. Leakey grew up as a member of the Masai tribe, and he spoke Kikuyu and he didn't know he was a white African until he went abroad. He went to study in England and at Cambridge he discovered, to his great surprise that he dreamed in Kikuyu, not in English, that he was a tribal elder. When the Mau Mau of terror broke out in the 1950s in Kenya, Louis Leakey was the only European to be able to go to Jomo Kenyatta and the Mau Mau hierarchy and to make a case for not killing all of the Europeans, that there was such a thing as the deeper humanity of reality, which even the Mau Mau had to respect. And Louis Leakey, in the sense of being a free man, that the unlimited as well as the limited was at home to him, was the first human being on the planet to be able to envision the characteristic sentience of beings who did not belong to our species. Not only didn't belong to our species, but didn't belong to the whole hominid line of many species, he was the first human being to be able to empathize with forebearers of ours, going back millions of years before the hominid family of species even developed. His angle of vision was held by the way in which stones can be paired, that you can take by a selection out of nature, a certain kind of a pair of stones, and that you can use the one to pressure flake off the other in such a way as to generate a cutting edge on the second stone, and to make a primordial scraper, something which primates learn to do about 10 million years ago. And Leakey learned to do that. He was the first man to make stone tools, to make Paleolithic tools perfectly. He could make Scrapers and points almost at will. It was this Louis Leakey who picked Jane Goodall as a young girl, to do something that no one had ever done to go and live with a pre hominid species with the chimpanzees and just live with them. To live with them every day, week after week, year in, year out, until she was at home with the chimpanzees as a chimpanzee. And this she did. It took her two years before she could even come anywhere close, within several hundred yards of any of the chimpanzees. She ended up by not only knowing all of the individuals as individuals in the area, but all of the different animal species, so that Jane Goodall literally knew the personality. The character, perhaps, is a better term of all of the animals of this area. And today, Gombe is a national park in Tanzania. When she first went there, the hills were wild as far as anyone could see. Now it's only a two mile diameter by several miles long strip along the coast of Lake Tanganyika. Her scientific work is published by Harvard University Press. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Patterns of behavior. Patterns of behavior. And it is Jane Goodall's through a window that we're using as one of our texts. And she learned something so startling in the primordiality of it that it challenged the entire mind set of the 1960s. She learned that chimpanzees can make tools, that they can modify certain selected blades of grass or twigs, shaped them to use them to fish. For ants in ant hills, these African ants have a severe bite, and that this technique of tool making can be passed on, inherited through a cultural pattern of behavior, so that chimpanzees from other districts do not know how to fish for termites, do not know how to select and tailor and make these tools, but that all of the chimpanzees in this one section, the Kasakela section of Gombe, acquired that capacity. And then a few years after that, she discovered, to her horror, that not only do chimpanzees occasionally eat meat several times during a monthly cycle, catching the young infants of colobus monkeys, but that occasionally some severely impaired chimpanzees become cannibals and eat infants from their own little group, steal them away, and then discovered years later that there are occasional cycles where chimpanzees go to war, and groups of male chimpanzees from one territory invaded a territory which had split off for several years, where they males of this other territory had split up long enough that the males of the original territory now took them as enemies, and methodically went through a program of isolating them and killing them all brutally, one by one, until they were exterminated. The chimpanzee DNA line split off from our line 70 million years ago, so that when we are dealing with issues like war, we're not dealing with a hominid problem. When we're dealing with problems of society and institutional hierarchies, authority, territory, sexuality. We are dealing with issues that were there tens of millions of years before our species group even emerged. So that the answers are not sociological. They are not psychological. They are not from being good or feeling certain or confident about certain bases, that all of these solutions are extraneous to the severity of the ingrained depth of the problems, and that they are intractable. Until we are able to go deep enough into our educational freedom to go not only into the past, but to be able to recalibrate the past, and to discover that that recalibration also has a resonance because it recalibrates the future as well. That possibilities that were never there before suddenly emerge into the realm Of noumenal possibility and increasing strategic probability and finally occur. As a tactical definiteness, and one of the very first activities that emerged in that way was the ability to go to the moon. The Apollo strategy of going to the moon when it was announced was not possible. It was not technically possible. It was not mathematically feasible. We had to learn how to do it. While the process of making that activity mission come into being was put into operation so that we learned within about six months of actually doing it how to do it. And great as the Apollo achievement was an even more startling long distance example of recalibrating the past so that the future possibilities emerge that were never there before. Was the Voyager mission when Voyager was launched in 1977. Its transmitters were not strong enough to send a signal that could be detected anywhere by anything on the planet, much beyond Saturn, and it was only through ingenious recalibrating and learning and re-engineering that Voyager was able to send back information from Uranus almost twice as far as Saturn, and then three years later, send back information from Neptune, which at that time was the farthest planet out in the star system, and to receive Information even into the 1990s that was so faint that it was not possible to. Imagine in 1977 that a signal that faint could be recovered from the chaos of the. Natural occurring radiation of the edge of the star system. We learned how to create possibilities that were never there before by recalibrating the past accomplishments. This is a scale of freedom that we now have in the 21st century, and this is a kind of an education that recalibrates the entire past of the planet in terms of the civilization and the mind, because these are the real junkyards. They're the real sites of the real demons. Our minds and our civilizations are worse hells than anyone could Imagine, but they needn't be at all. Those are all artifacts of ignorance. They have no bearing in reality whatsoever. Not only do the demons get vanquished so that they do not leave sooty trails of being vaporized, they don't leave any impress on existence at all. And in that sense, the old way of talking about them is true. They are illusions. As long as we are kept into an optical ignorance, where those illusions have identity and correlate with the angles of vision that we limit ourselves to, those hells are real. And so the activity of this kind of education is to free forever our capacities. So that we do not have to stay in those terrific horizons of suffering. We can not only literally engineer ourselves out, but engineer ourselves out permanently. We never again need to do that. Now, this kind of this kind of activity, this kind of use of language to rise above the squares of the page, to rise above the circles of endless cycles without end, is characteristic of the way in which Chinese as a language transformed in the early Tang dynasty. Tang Chinese was a monumental transform of the Chinese language, and thus Tang poetry was for almost a thousand years. The high water mark of the way in which expressive differential consciousness was able to style a lyrical, personal relationality with a cosmic unlimitedness. At one of the historical cruxes, where the Tang dynasty raised itself to one of the highest levels of civilization that the planet has ever seen. The entire civilization broke like a pencil that was over sharpened, and overnight, China was plunged into one of the worst atrocities and nightmares of its entire history. It's called in textbooks the An Lushan Rebellion. China's population at the outbreak of the An Lushan Rebellion was about 51 million people. Within two years, 17 million were dead through unbelievable butchery wars, ceaseless activity right at the pinnacle, at the crux, at the apex of Tang brilliance. And at that point, the two greatest poets of Chinese history, Li Po and Tu Fu, were banished to opposite ends of the Chinese Empire. Tu Fu was banished to the farthest north. What today is Manchuria, and Li Po was banished to the farthest south, almost down by Hainan Island, where there are monkeys and jungles. Tu Fu wrote a pair of poems. Both of them have the same title Manglicmot dreaming of Li Po from the ends of the world. And this is one of those poems I translated about 30 years ago. Dreaming of Li Po by Tu fu. Death. Partings always cease. Sobbing. Life partings. Anguish. Again and again. Jiangnan. Swampy. Coffin. Country. Exiled. Man sealed. No news. Old friend. Entering my dreaming. Marking clear where my thinking is. How you are in legal fetters. How then these feather wings. No fear your living spirit. For distances of unknown road. Your spirit comes through Maple meadow light. Your spirit goes through mountain past dark. Sinking moon fills these roof beams. Perhaps yet fleshing out your features. Deep waters, broad waves. Dragon waters. Don't get got. So 1300 years ago. That's the way one of the world's greatest writers characterized the freedom of beyond the Spiritness can be personal, but that still doesn't change the ability for regressive, deceptive tyrannies to wipe out every single context, every single Development and to leave a grey horizon of ruin that looks very much like a. Yves Tanguy surrealistic painting. And yet, and especially yet, we have learned that one of the characteristics of reality is that it does not begin counting from one, it counts from zero, and that as one can collapse back into zero, when zero collapses, it re-emerges as one every single time. You can count on that. More next week.