Special Presentation

This is a special lecture, a special presentation because we have 52 weeks. And so this is a rare interval between the two halves of our course. Not halves so much but the two years which form a pair. You know there's an old saying that a glass half filled. The optimist says it's half full. The pessimist says it's half empty. And then there was a version of that glass full of water where if the glass was full of water, you couldn't add anything to it. And that that was a metaphor for education about 40 years ago, that we were inculcated and filled so much with habit that we could not learn anything fresh. We could not learn anything new. And so the style 40 years ago was to find some way to empty yourself out, to get rid of what had been put in you so that you could learn something new. You could come into an experience of. At that time, it was called a radical realization. But the glass half full and the glass completely full are deceiving metaphors for learning, for education. Because one can take any amount of liquid in any kind of container and apply enough heat and spin and magnetism, and you can plasma the effect and come up with a form which is so distributed that all of the emptiness and all of the fullness is equally present everywhere. To polymerize. A plasma like this in a high level magnetic field is a part of the reality of the cosmos, and this education addresses itself to the way in which beings of our type Can mature and be at home on that scale of the real. And so it's a different sort of learning from the one in which we would find in any kind of an education in an ordinary way. And yet this education is traditional in the sense that it is a development of wisdom, education going back many thousands of years. In fact, I trace it back at least 40,000 years. It goes back to the old primordial Paleolithic cave art and matures itself all the way through a whole sequence of historical phases. And one of the driving, synthesizing elements in that kind of a history, that kind of a chronological development, that kind of a phase form maturation. One of the driving engines for the integration is time, and the time factor is something that I want to take a look at today in the sense of a periodicity of time, which occurs in language and also learning. And this periodicity is very often just colloquially called cadence. This storytellers came from Cameroon's West. Africa is the way in which an old African storyteller would keep his cadence. And yet, if you look at the symbolic storytellers cane, though it's made in 1970s Cameroon, the head is an ancient Egyptian scepter. This was the sign of the king in ancient Egypt, and one used this not just to keep cadence for telling stories, but to establish the authority of delivering the cosmos to human life. For that was the old pharaonic meaning of this particular symbol. And so a really primordial wisdom education delivers a bridge to the cosmos for those beings who would like to find a maturation, to not equal that of the universe, but to emerge completely beyond integral form into a differential consciousness whose harmonic is the cosmos itself. This precludes an education that limits itself to the mind. And this goes beyond the liminal boundedness of ideas and mental form. And so it presents a very difficult series of problems. It itself as a strategy is problematic. And though it was done in ancient times by rare individuals for themselves, generally guided by someone who had done this before them on a one on one basis, there were experiments to try to enlarge this so that there would be a community, rather than just someone who learned some Sheila, some disciple, some student, some carrier of a lineage rather than just an individual to have the maturation of a community. And from time to time in the history of our species, those communities did emerge. They did exist, sometimes for quite some long while. In classical Greece, the Pythagorean original mystical communities lasted for about ten generations before they too went the way of all flesh. The way of all flesh is not a flaw in us. The lack of permanency in forms having to do with ourselves, is not a Gnostic indication that we are flawed, or that the universe is flawed. It's simply that the time vector, which is the most primordial dimension in the universe, must continue. And if it doesn't continue to continue, then it naturally regresses. It has a regressive quality which is completely natural to it. And there is a devolution as well as an evolution from the same momenta. So that one of the qualities of a wisdom education is to build in a kind of an encompassing strategy that co-opts that natural tendency of time. And we would call this in mathematics instead of a regression, a recursion, to recursively come back for a moment and pick up a stitch and then go forward again. In one of his great speeches, when the Chinese John Wayne was still a champion of his people, Mao Tse tung said the way to advance is one step back and two steps forward. That you build in a recursion element into the dynamic itself. We now would style this a little bit differently. We would say that we put a self-correcting algorithm into the genetic process of generating the field of possibility. And indeed we do that. We do that everywhere except in education. And education is still where it was left dead more than 40 years ago, and this education has undergone a tremendous development since then. And I thought you might like to see some of the evidences of its history, of how it got to be what it is today. I looked back through dozens of boxes. I couldn't find the original course. It's still there, someplace hidden. The original course that came into this education that you have before you today was offered at San Francisco State in 1965, late 65, early 66. And it was a course on the Renaissance, and it was styled the Hermetic Renaissance. And it was an invitation at that time to reconsider that the San Francisco of 1966 was very similar to the Florence of 1446, that there was a recursion element that was going back some 520 years and catching up something, bringing something forward in a massive catching up of a stitch. And that was that. The ancient wisdom learning of the Egyptian, Greek, India focus that had been the pinnacle of educational wisdom, learning about 300 A.D. and had largely faded from the scope of Western history, was picked up again in the early 15th century in Florence, and the figure who most poignantly shepherded this renaissance was a man named Cosimo de Medici and Cosimo de Medici, who had suffered great ignominy from his fellow Florentines. They had exiled him from the city. As a young man he had lost in a machiavellian power struggle, and he went to Venice to hang out, and there in Venice he, being Cosimo de Medici, got a brilliant idea. He realized that the city of Byzantium, that Constantinople was going to fall to the Muslim besiegers of the city led by Mahmud II, and that the last traces of power and authority and lineage from the ancient world, which had all this time been preserved in Byzantium. That the classic heritage of ancient Athens and ancient Alexandria and ancient Rome, that had been moved to Constantinople by the Emperor Constantine the First. That Constantinople become Byzantium still held the living seed, the little Promethean fire, the pilot light of ancient civilization, and that there was going to be a mass exodus of the last holders of all of these lineages from Byzantium. And they were going to come to the West. They were going to come particularly to Italy. They were going to come to Venice. And Cosimo de Medici, who arranged behind the scenes for his competitors to be exiled themselves from Florence and he invited back, got the venue of this great ecumenical meeting of the last pilot, light of Antiquity, lighting the new flame of a renaissance. He got the venue moved from Venice to Florence, and in 1439 there was a universal, an ecumenical meeting of East and West, of Roman Catholic and of Orthodox Byzantine, of all of the polarities of the ancient world. And it was held there in Florence, and it was the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. Not that it was the beginning completely. It was a recursion not only back into antiquity, but in Florence, some couple of hundred years before Cosimo de Medici, there had already been a tremendous realization that there was still a lineage to carry on. And the great Florentine poet Dante writing the Divine Comedy using Virgil, the great epic poet, for Roman civilization as his guide, reinstated a new cosmos a instead of a Renaissance cosmos, a continuation of the ancient Roman cosmos into the high medieval Gothic cosmos of the Divine Comedy, and Dante understanding that Virgil was the Roman version of the Greek Homer, so that he not only brought ancient Rome and its Roman civilization into a new level of high medieval continuity, but he changed the language from Latin to Italian. And so when Cosimo de Medici started the Italian Renaissance, it was on the basis of transforming a form of high medieval Italian language civilization, and not just to bring back the old Latin civilization, not just to bring the Romans back, but to bring the Roman civilization, the ancient Italian civilization, back in the form of transforming Dante's version of it. And so the guide was not Virgil for Cosimo de Medici. Dante used Virgil as his guide. The guide for Cosimo de Medici was Plato, because he understood that the Italian civilization of Rome was not original with the Italians, with the Romans, that they had based themselves on ancient Athens, where Plato was the great genius and held forth. And so Cosimo de Medici did a double recursion. He went back to the Roman Classical Empire, but not in its Latin language mind, in its Latin language version of its Greek language mind, and sought then to have the most important book to be sequestered secretly out of Byzantium and brought to Italy at. That time it was a complete works of Plato. And so he searched to try to find. Someone who could learn Greek classically well enough to speak like Plato spoke, so that he could translate Plato not only into workable Latin, correcting the medieval manuscripts, but to translate Plato into an Italian not just the language, but an Italian, a Florentine Italian, a Florentine Italian Platonic Renaissance lifestyle that were not, after translating a book so much as bringing that pilot flame back into life again. We're going to unwrap the hidden mummies of the past and bring them back to life and have them be our friends and teachers again, and we will live again, those ancient lives of high wisdom and take it from here. And so this ambitious plan was thwarted by only one thing there was no one alive who could do that. But Cosimo de Medici was thwarted by that. He decided that he would take a young man. He took the son of his personal physician, and he had little Marsilio Ficino, educated in a special way, so that he would grow up to be the translator of the ancient platonic way of life into the modern Florentine Italian Renaissance way of life in the person of a living master. And in the midst of this Maturation and the translation of Plato. Master from Byzantium. Very esoteric. His name was Plato, brought secretly to Cosimo de Medici. And he said, you know, the Plato which you're basing your new Italian Renaissance civilization on had been refined about 500 years after Plato, and it was refined to such an extent that when the last of the classical Platonists, his name was Plotinus, refurbished the entire Roman understanding of Greek civilization. Plotinus has never been translated into any modern language, and so Ficino was given the task that he was to translate Plotinus as well as Plato, so that one would have the origins of the Greek civilization and the final distilled rare liqueur of that Greek civilization. Except that Plato said, you cannot understand Plotinus. You can't understand how Plotinus relates to Plato. You can't understand Neoplatonism and its relationship to classical Platonism without understanding that there was a fundamental transformation, and that that transform had something to do with changing the form of the mind. Plotinus mind is not just an improvement of Plato's mind. Neoplatonism is not just a further integration of the platonic integral. Plotinus is a differential range of possibility of transformations that can come out of the platonic classical mind. So you have to have some understanding of how transforms happen, and that the classic understanding of how transforms happen is what the ancient Hermetic wisdom was all about, that the Hermetic documents together, as they call it, the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of Hermetic writings, had appeared in Alexandria about 90 A.D., and that they were the teaching of the transform of how you take a classic understanding and transform it into an unlimited range of possibility. And so Cosimo de Medici used that particular scenario. Plato to the Hermetic Transform to Plotinus, and he commissioned Ficino to devote his entire life to this, and which Ficino did. He interrupted his translation of Plato long enough to translate the Hermetic documents, so that the dying Cosimo de Medici could hear them complete on his deathbed, and he was satisfied, and towards the end of his life, Ficino translated all of Plotinus for the first time in almost 1400 years. 14. The year was 1492, the year that Columbus discovered America. Ficino finished his Plotinus, and the Italian Renaissance reached an apex. And yet. True to the way in which regression is naturally built in to an integral. Exactly. At that time, Florence was undergoing a repressive throwback to medieval theology, an ideology of fanatical monks who wanted to purify the people against all of these new things and take them back to the old. And so a monk named Savonarola began executing people and having them put into torture for being participants in the Italian Renaissance in Florence. Savonarola himself was seized by an irate population some years later and burnt publicly at the stake in Florence In front of all of the statues of Michelangelo, in front of the place where Ficino had taught. In front of the Duomo, with the Giotto tower and its Brunelleschi dome, to signal that this regression will not continue and will end. But a variant of that particular Savonarola issue, or what was seen as a variant several years later, came to pass in northern Europe, and it was the Luther reformation of the entire Roman Empire in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church continuing the Roman Empire in a medieval kind of a strategy and structure. All of this was the kind of education that I ran in San Francisco in 1966. My first course was this. This is what I taught 35 years ago. And it was successful beyond belief. And I was asked to present a future course at that time. And I was asked by a group of people from the city of San Francisco. And so, as a compliment to the Italian Renaissance course, I offered a course on the cosmology of Teilhard de Chardin. And then someone at San Francisco state said, you know, your courses are so popular, why don't you do a course which we can put into our curriculum? And I designed a course called job and Forced Two Faces of Evil. And this is the original little pink mimeographed sheet from 1967 spring 1967. Job and forced. I used the King James Version of the Book of Job, the Anchor Bible. Carl Jung's answer to job. The Book of Job is a Greek tragedy by Horace Kallen, a friend of John Dewey's. Jb, a play by Archibald MacLeish. The William Blake engravings of job. Ralph Vaughan Williams. Music for the Masque. For Dancing of Job. I put in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Goethe's Doctor Faustus. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. The film that Richard Burton was later to do hadn't come out, but his recording of Marlowe's play was available. Gounod's opera on the Faust. Busoni's Doktor Faust. Opera. Boito's Mephistopheles. Opera. Berlioz's La damnation de Faust. Music. Scenes from Goethe's Faust by Schumann. Wagner's Faust overture. Lists. Faust. Symphony and I threw in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. So I was offering courses like this 35 years ago. The difficulty was not the success. I had more students than I could manage. The difficulty was that it punctured holes in the very program in which I was a teaching assistant, the very academic fabric that I was supposed to be getting advanced degrees in began to fray and be poked through by my activities. At that time, I was in an interdisciplinary program. There were only three of them in the United States at that time. Columbia had one, the University of Chicago had one, and San Francisco State had one. The two coasts and the middle of the country. It was specifically a graduate program of interdisciplinary learning. And yet the interdisciplinary learning was on the basis of subjects which overlap. And everyone assumed that what was interdisciplinary were subjects that overlap. And because you focus on the overlapping, this makes it interdisciplinary, and somehow that's something new. It didn't occur to anyone at the time that this is a regression, and it doesn't have any algorithmic improvement. All it has is a they used to call it smooshing a smooshing together so that you got subjects with. They even called the program the University Without Walls. You lost all sense of form and thus the integral synthesizing dynamic, and settled for something that was like a mush turned to vapor. And that was like real cool to have that. There were seminars at the time in the in the 60s in San Francisco, graduate seminars. I remember one the leader of the seminar had a galvanized washtub full of cabbages and carrots, raw cabbages and carrots, and he was barefoot, soaking his feet in to get the right vibrations. And I remember one suited, tied black man who was is trying to do the program to improve himself and was paying hard earned cash. And he got so fed up one time in this seminar that he slammed his books down, stuffed them into his briefcase, and stomped out. And about 20 minutes later, the professor said he stole our energy. This kind of vaporous mush doesn't do anything for anyone except make a costume of pretense, for phoniness. It didn't do anything at all and prepares a ground for a really deeper regression, one that the country is suffering. Now we have people who are going back some 25 or 30 years, coming in to think that they're going to do an administration in the 21st century. They were outstripped 25 years ago. This is a peculiarity that education is a learning how to learn primordially what has to be prepared to be prepared before there is any dynamics. Otherwise, the energy takes you over automatically. And it is the classical Greeks who were the first ones to understand that there is a difference between energy and dynamics and the focus of it. Though expressed beautifully ultimately in Plato, the focus in classical Greece is not in Plato, but in Thucydides. It is in Thucydides history, his history of the Peloponnesian War, that one finds a discussion that the dynamic integration in history if not consciously paid attention to, takes over the mental structures and throws them into a pretense mode which naturally regresses. And Thucydides says of his own city, Athens, that what started out several hundred years before, as a Delian League of colonies that had a common language and homeland, turned into an Athenian empire that sought to dominate every little town in Greece. And so, of course, they made a pact among themselves to fight against the Athenian empire under the village name Sparta. And you set up a cold war that ruined classical Greece, because after 35 years of war, they were all economically bankrupt. They were all spiritually exhausted, and it was nothing at all for a 20 year old named Alexander the Great to just march over them without any big battles whatsoever. And Greece became a little province in Alexander's empire, and Athens became a university town. It became about as important as Cambridge. Massachusetts would be a good university town. But you're not going to win national elections, and you're not going to fight a Cold war from that basis. One of the difficulties about an education is that it is not real. It will become unreal and increasingly unreal, because an education that prepares you to be prepared has a transform that kicks in vision, and without vision, the people perish. Regression will happen whether you want it to or not, unless you have a way of algorithmically going back and introducing consciousness to the path integral all the time. Every time. The regression is like an infestation of ants, they're always going to be there. You have to deal with them all the time, and that's the only way to continue. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. So, said Jefferson. So after several years, four years in San Francisco, of offering courses like this at the same time as being the prize teaching assistant, I was hired to go to Canada to design a complete 16 course interdisciplinary program for a completely new structure. At the time, the Province of Alberta was had more money, more oil money than Saudi Arabia. They gave back money to every citizen of the province. They gave them several thousand dollars every year because they had such a surplus after they spent everything they could. They still had hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus. So they decided to have the best schools, the best hospitals, the best roads. And in building a school in Calgary, which was the center of the oil money. 400 oil companies had their head office in Calgary. When I went there first it had 300,000 people, and when I left five years later, it had 700,000 people. They had unlimited money to build the ideal utopian university, and they brought in the best educational future planners. And they decided that instead of having a traditional university, they would have a variety of this university without walls. And so architecturally it was designed by a company. The name of the company were Stanton, Leggett and Associates, who had built City College of Chicago, and they specialized in a kind of a second hand Le Corbusier architecture. That is to say, Le Corbusier had stressed that bare cement was beautiful to show the power of form in architecture. The borrowing of this was by a man named Mario Campi, who left the wood grain of the constructs so that the bare cement would have wood grain texture on the surface, and so they built a 15 acre building that had no walls, that it had exterior kinds of supports that went up about 50 or 60ft, and huge football field sized domes everywhere. And they had three floor levels that you could look across as if it were like maybe 20 parking lots. And in this huge spaceship of a building, a new kind of education was supposed to happen where you didn't study subjects, but you studied interdisciplinary ways of shifting your focus, and my responsibility was to design the program that would make all of this come true. And so I went up at 29 years of age and worked on this and designed it, designed the whole thing. And this was the initial statement. In general education. The idea is to fill in the gaps and interrelational spaces that have naturally developed in the contemporary world as a residual of increasing specialization. This specialization has taken the prominent form of well-defined subjects and accurately delineated processes. The universal application of the scientific method to entities and the logical analysis to procedure has benefited everyone by presenting reasonably clear pictures of the world. In this act of focusing, however, the background has been eliminated. The interconnecting tissue of things and their movement has disappeared, not from reality as is so ignorantly lamented, but merely from man's microscope perspective. This programme restores the consciousness of this background and the requisites of human character commensurate with that restoration. Let's take a break. Before the break, I stressed the Western. Part of a set. And for me, I'm rather ambidextrous. Asian wisdom is as comfortable for me as the Western tradition, and I thought you might be interested that being raised in the United States in the 40s, no one ever told us about anything Asian. And so it came as quite a surprise to me that I could understand such things as if they were familiar. And I remember the first time getting into one of those proverbial university arguments. I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin 1958, and we got into one of these long discussions. And finally, an Indian man, he was a soil agronomist from central India, is from Nagpur in the Deccan. And he took me aside and he said, You Westerners are so ignorant. You don't understand anything at all. You think that you know, and you're just clanking around in your mind with ideas that are undigested. And before you go to sleep tonight, you are going to hear some Asian wisdom to open your eyes. And so, Mr. Puri, his name was Sudarshan Puri, started telling me basic insight, wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita. And it turned out that I was evidently a very good listener. And so he spent the entire winter's evening. We started walking and went out of the bar, and of course, the bars closed at about two in the morning. And the University of Wisconsin is on the shores of Lake Mendota and directly across Lake Mendota is the insane asylum, and there was always a joke that when winter got really severe, the students could easily go home. So he turned out to be quite a learned soil agronomist, and he began reciting the Bhagavad Gita and in Sanskrit and then explicating. And by the end of the evening, he was astounded. He said. You must have had previous lives. There's no way to account for this. So he gave me a book to read. It was by Heinrich Zimmer, called Six Philosophies of India. And of course I was at that time an electrical engineering, and it seemed to me very strange. There was no mention of thermionic emissivity, of molten metals or anything that I was interested in. And as I began to read, I realized that there was a whole other tradition from the West that was quite learned and quite sophisticated. And in fact, in time, when I was at San Francisco State working on the beginnings of disenchantment with education, one of my major professors was Kyushu. Kyushu was not only a professor of humanities, he was also the editor of the Chinese World newspaper in San Francisco. And he had been an interpreter for the American commando units during the Second World War. His teacher in Nanjing had been went to the very great Chinese poet of the 20th century, who was machine gunned in front of his students by the Japanese in The Rape of Nanjing to show the Chinese intellectuals that they were in charge. I remember during the worst of the riots at San Francisco State, I was. I had been selected as the only graduate from San Francisco State in 1968, out of 20,000 students. They graduated one person. Me and Kyushu said, we will not be intimidated by riots on whatever scale. If I survived the Japanese rape of Nanjing, we are not going to be shut down completely. And so I was selected to be the only graduate and being the only graduate, my orals were held off campus with about 25 professors, and I was saved from hours and hours and hours of grilling after 2 or 3 hours. One of my professors, Jacob Needleman, professor of philosophy, said, this man needs a drink, and he brought out the champagne and he was very wise. He knew that the faculty would get into the champagne, and they got into arguing with each other, and I was spared any further. I learned from you that there was a profound difference between China and India. That while India was cognate with the West, that China was a completely on the other side of possibility, that the only way that east and west meet is in a complementarity. They do not even polarize that there is a completely different outlook and take so that it is not a polarity, but it is if there was a diagonal in a contrapositive way. China, in its ancient wisdom tradition, is the inside out obverse of the Western wisdom tradition. And so I applied myself to catching up and to learning. And in fact, when I was taken to Canada by an invitation to design this interdisciplinary program, the first lecture I gave was on the Bhagavad Gita. And because the school was not built yet, it was held in the City planetarium, which was the only environment that was able to handle the kind of, quote, courses that I was designing and planning to give. And when I learned that it would be in the planetarium, I, of course, designed a planetarium show to go with the lecture. And I had them play a Ravi A Shankar composition on the loudspeakers. It was a composition that he introduced to the Monterey Pop Festival that year. It was called Dune, and it was a raga based on American bluegrass. And we had that playing and the cosmological show and my lecture on the Bhagavad Gita. And at 29, I was still rather torrential pacing. Tiger. And afterwards the director of the planetarium offered me a job. He said, you know, there isn't a dry seat in the house. Sig had a homey way of making his points. But the favorite text that I worked with in those days, and still forms the fount out of which this education begins, is the I Ching. That the I Ching is an extraordinary fount. It is the Chinese traditional way in which civilization in East Asia generates itself out of the set of zero and one, that there is no way to have a beginning, that the beginning at any particular directive, oneness, any starting point, generates a falsity which eventually ends up in dead issue cycling cloning, and does not lead to any kind of a fruitful return and a regeneration. So the I-Ching became a foundational work for the education, and the beginning of the education always starts with the I-Ching. There was at the time also. A problem because of trying to find a way to introduce the ancient East and the ancient West into a contemporary version that I looked for ways not to overlap so much, but to get a synergy in the integral and a multidimensional range in the differential. And one of the things, just to give you an example, in the classic West, um, the understanding was that human spiritual personality was such a complex form that it could not be seen against any kind of a natural background. That spiritual man was such a scintillating complexity that the natural context within which he could be seen was an insufficient background and dulled the presentation of self, as we would say sociologically. And so in the early second century AD, the great intellect of that age was Plutarch. Plutarch devised a method by which the Greek form of conscious person could be seen not against a background of nature, but against a background of another person, so that in order to present the complexity of the differentially conscious person, you set it in a complementarity of parallel lives that you paired lives together, and that you could only see a human life against the comparative background of another human life. And so the parallel lives was an educational technique in the early second century AD of the great Hermetic West tradition, the Neoplatonic, platonic, Hermetic West. So I sought to try to find a way to do a parallel lives in the Plutarch tradition, but to use as the lives Asian figures. And so here is a course from 1974. The parallel lives are Mao Tse-tung and Mahatma Gandhi, using a life from India and a life from China in a Western platonic method of teaching, so that instead of having an overlap of subjects, be interdisciplinary, that it was truly an algorithmic, self-correcting interpenetration of complementarity that was being delivered. And I must say that this was not being delivered to intellectuals, but to young Canadian adults 18, 19, 20 years of age. It was enormously successful. There were hundreds of people who signed up every time it was offered. I made the mistake one time of not putting a population limit on the symbols course, and when it got nearly 400 people, the administration called it and said, you've got to do something. We have almost 400 people in this course. And one of the Canadian rules in academia was that after a certain number, I think it was 90. You had to technically, legally have a teaching assistant for every 13 people over that number. So I had this huge room full of teaching assistants that were brought in, and of course, they didn't know anything. They didn't know the material. They didn't know how to teach, especially the new style that I was pioneering. And so I added them to the student body. So I had this huge auditorium of people rather frightening at the time, because there were a lot of faculty members who were beginning to try to use some of these techniques for themselves. So I would have sometimes more than 500 people being taught. And of course, this was in a university without walls beyond belief, a 15 acre building. Um, one of the techniques that I used was curious because the expanse was carpeted in a kind of a fireball, orange indoor outdoor carpeting, and because the huge football field skylights let in too much sun that triggered the the fire extinguishing. And you get water all the time. So the opaque, these skylights, which meant that it was too dark and because the ceilings were these concrete honeycombs about 60ft above the floor, they had to have really powerful lights to get down. So they used mercury arc vapor lamps like parking lot lamps. And they finally had to have these five foot high room dividers they called them, that were portable, and you could move them around. And they were carpeted with purple indoor outdoor carpeting. So you had the mercury vapor lamps. You had the purple and the fireball orange. It was curious because after an hour in the building, you could blink your eyes and you could see a cacophony of all the images you had just looked at. So, being industrious, I took a cue from the Inuit people, the Eskimo. And I designed these glasses that would have these narrow slits that the Eskimo used to prevent snow blindness. And students would go around with these little slit glasses. They look like space beings. And because I always had these projects, people were making sculptures and paintings and, you know, hands on stuff. And because I would have hundreds of students and after five years, I'd had thousands of students, and I had this archaeological mound of all their projects and stuff, and travelers from all over the world would come through the building and they would see this archaeological dig, this tell, this creative mound of stuff. And of course it became cause celeb time. This is the way in which the parallel lives of Gandhi and Mao Tse-tung in the Plutarch's Parallel Lives was described in the early 70s. China and India include nearly half the human race in their burgeoning populations of 1.5 billion persons. It's now two and a half. Two minds dominate this half of humanity in the 20th century Gandhi and Mao. We must make some effort to understand. We simply cannot ignore half the world. To appreciate Mao, Joe and Lai must be included in this study. They are inseparable. And of course, I used Kyushu's great biography of Mao of Joe and Lai. He subtitled his biography of Zhou Enlai, China's Grey Eminence. Grey eminence is the appellation for Cardinal Richelieu in Louis the 14th France. Zhou Enlai as Chaozhu Kyushu portrayed, was a classical Daoist master who never was number one, but was always number two, was always the background substructure, recalibrating all the time. Everything that Mao Tse-tung did so that when Mao Tse-tung died, China didn't revert back to a pre Mao Tse-tung or to some second rate version of Mao Tse-tung, but it became a genuine ly transformational structure. Uh, Deng and all of the Chinese, uh, um, people today running China are all very conscious of differentially conscious history. The first chapter in Kyushu's Zhou Enlai is two mothers and six uncles that Zhou Enlai learned from a little boy how to live in a household where there were two powerful women and many men who were trying to organize factions to work their way between these two powerful women. So Zhou Enlai raised himself as a little boy to be the ultimate diplomat to get things done, weaving one's way, not in between polarities of two different warring factions, but how to get something really done that you would like to have done and get both sides to fight about who was going to help you most. So, just as Zhou Enlai was necessary to understand Mao Tse-tung in appreciating Gandhi, Vinoba is essential. Vinoba Bhave. Still unknown in the west. Vinoba was one of the most incredible figures in world history. Vinoba was an intellectual prodigy who was raised by his mother to be in ancient Judaism. The idea was put into the term Nazarite. The first Nazarite in Jewish history was Samuel, the prophet Samuel. That is to say, he was consecrated to the service of God before he was born, when he was in his mother's womb. Jesus is not of Nazareth as a place. He's a Nazarite. He's consecrated to God's service before he's born. That's the true meaning of that. Vinoba was that in India, and his mother consecrated him because she lived in an India where Gandhi was really the working spiritual force. He was consecrated to help Gandhi, and when he was 20 years of age, his mother sent him to Gandhi. And when he arrived, Gandhi was astounded by the capaciousness of this young man. He was truly astounding. He was an intellectual prodigy of the first order. And so Gandhi said, I want you to go to the center of India and establish an ashram, and instead of teaching others, teach yourself. And I want you to teach yourself every religion in the world. And so Vinoba at 20 went there. Gandhi had given him the proviso that he would like a report after a year, to see how he was doing. And true to form, because he was a karmayogi of the highest order. Vinoba appeared to the minute a year later to let him know that he had begun, and that ashram today in the centre of India, the geographic centre. It's out in the deserts, in the very centre it's called Wardha. Wardha w a r d h a Wardha. And so Vinoba taught himself every language in the world, and he read all the religious documents in the original, in Arabic, in Greek and Latin and Sanskrit, in Chinese. He read them all. And when he was ready to be called at long last, when in the throes of the Second World War, Gandhi wanted to initiate a satyagraha. Satya means truth. Graha means grasping a truth. Grasping Campaign. Not a polarity of holding up protest signs, but someone to initiate a complementarity generating reality. Seed. A satyagraha is someone who initiates a truth holding seed into a reality. So it's not only a karma yoga is an integral, but it's also a differential kind of a yoga. It's known sometimes as Raja yoga, the kingly yoga because it applies to everyone for all time, the entire range of human possibility. And so Vinoba, being a great Raja and Karma Yogi together, was chosen by Gandhi to be the first satyagraha in his campaign to wake the world up in 1942. And of course, Vinoba was arrested immediately and put into prison and not let out until the late 40s. Not let out until Gandhi had died. And so Vinoba was very much like Gampopa vis a vis Milarepa. He thought that he would never get a chance to serve something that he had been born to, because his master had died. He wasn't there anymore, and he didn't know what to do. And like Gampopa, Vinoba wandered for several years trying to find what to do. And for Vinoba, because he had spent all of his life literally in just a few places his mother's home, Wardha, the British prison, he began walking and he walked all over India. And he's known today as the walking Saint. And he came upon a technique called Sarvodaya. Not the service to a master. Savo means service. Daya means it comes from the Sanskrit word for heart. It means service of the heart for all service to man, not as mankind, as a form, but to the whole potential of our maturation, which is far beyond what we are currently or ever have been. We are scarcely embryos of what we really are. And this development from Vinoba changed the whole face of India. It's still not reported in the West, but there are several hundred million people living in Sarvodaya in form societies and Satyagraha seeded spiritual lives in India. So, along with Zhou Enlai and Mao Tse-tung, Vinoba and Gandhi. I not only did a parallel lives of Mao and Gandhi, but I brought in Zhou Enlai and Vinoba also in a parenthesis, so that you had a pair of pairs. You had the ancient hermetic pair of pairs square, which was not just a square as a form, but was a quaternary as a differential range. Because once you have a quadratic form like that, you can produce all kinds of differential functions. Analytical possibilities that would never have occurred in nature would never have occurred in just a mere integral. Well, integrals are very strong and they're very powerful. They're quite limited. Their largest field of activity is the mind and reality on level of a spiritual person so outstrips the mind's limitations as to be almost comical. That's why it's called the Divine Comedy, because the cosmos is the largest form of a differential person. So I, uh, in this syllabus description. Right. Asia is already here on the national personage of Japan. But Japan is just a bit a preliminary of what Asia is in total and will be inevitably for us now in the emerging world. We must look to it. The imperatives used above are not placebos of sentiment, but used in recognition and recognition of a necessary task. The confrontation with Asia is the whole future. The whole of Europe in the coming world is just another A country, its total history and heritage. Just another nationalism in this new world order. Thus this course. Realistic. Necessary. That was 26 years ago. This was the kind of language used for the symbols course in 1975. An interdisciplinary learning situation moving by person discovery rather than by abstract definition. We develop patterns rather than prove models. Prepare to be prepared. We respond to process rather than react to things, preferring relation and function rather than chain and command, rejecting the closed and manipulative circles of magic, incantation and rituals, as well as those of logic, validity and languages. We note the continuity and discontinuity of experience emerging through rituals and languages to the expression of human meaning and symbolic form. We transform ritual awareness and linguistic structures into symbolic meaningfulness. We create an environment wherein the student, as subject matter and energy, can act freely in self-recognition. Your world is there. Symbols. Just focus your attention. And so eventually an entire eight part program was developed. By the summer of 1975, all of the recognizable first year is there. None of the second year is there. By 1975, the pioneering of this particular form had mastered the integral ecology, but was as yet unknowing of the full range of the differential complement to it. There was nature as the beginning, and the second phase was ritual, as we have the third phase. Mythology. The fourth symbols. But the fifth phase, which is vision now, was called at that time ideas showing that the understanding was still projective from mentality, because it's very difficult to do an end run around thinking with thought. It can't be done. The end run is not done on the basis of thinking about thought, but of transforming awareness us into consciousness, which is a different thing. Totally. It has a relationship between spirit and body rather than between spirit and mind. The body takes transform quicker than the mind. Bodies are made to transform. They transform existence into experience naturally, and so they take transform much more readily. The mind being already a higher level of integral. The transform has to be a much finer rot. You cannot transform the mind without an undistilled liquor of consciousness, whereas the body can be transformed by consciousness, raw as it comes out of pure vision. The sixth phase that was that now is art was at that time 25 years ago called groundings and it was paired perception and language still obviously ideas of the mythic horizon being projected out the seventh development. It's called developments. What now is history. But the example was historical periods. And so history was already nascent there as a differential phase process. The eighth was called explorations and the example was parallel lives. And of course, science is that today and the move from explorations in parallel lives to science is rather a very complex, long ranging development. By 1975, I had Develop the entire situation and thought that I would apply myself not in Canada, but in the United States. I was asked to give up my American citizenship to stay in the privileged position that I was in. I had been given tenure, so I was a tenured professor, the head of the department, and the designer of the whole program, and I quit. I made the the foolish mistake of resigning on April 1st, 1975, and they thought it was an April Fool's joke. No tenured professor had ever quit. And so I came to the United States with the idea that I would explore what was going on educationally. So I had my secretaries send out 60 letters to various places to see what kind of programs they had so I could go and visit, and I didn't get a single response. There were replies that we don't have jobs, that you have to go through channels, and I wasn't asking that at all. And it occurred quite poignantly that by 1975, I had outstripped the capacity for the educational establishment to hear me. I remember in correspondence with Norman O'Brien at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which in the mid 60s had developed a History of consciousness program, and they brought in such great figures as Maurice Natanson of phenomenological existential fame, Page Smith, the great American historian, A Sydney Tolman, the great English developer of the history of science and philosophy of science, plus Norman Brown himself, who had been a great classical scholar. His first book was called Hermes the Thief, and it had become famous in the 60s for a book called Love's Body and Life Against Death, and Brown wrote back, he said, we have all left, and I am leaving. There's nothing here. The University of California has ground our program back into a degree granting, subject matter oriented pablum. None of us will be here. Don't come. So I searched around, came down, came to Los Angeles, and I found someone who was conscious and alert and executive of a university who was truly, Efficiently able to understand because he was an engineer. An aeronautical engineer. And he was also a mathematician. And his name was B.J. shell. He was the president of Northrop. University in Englewood. And so I was invited to design the humanities program for Northrop University by President Shell. And we were all set to offer it. I worked on it in 75 and 76, and just as we were about to initiate it and offer it. Iran had a revolution and the Ayatollah Khomeini came in. And overnight, 25% of the student body of Northrop University, who were Iranians, were cut off from funds, and all development was curtailed. Northrop at that time had just opened a law school, and they had to keep that going because they had a program already. And so my program was put on the back burner because of the Iranian revolution. And of course, when you look at The omen. The omen, I had left Iran out of the whole range of development. God forgives but does not forget. As a peculiar way, in whatever language of saying you. Well, I have made amends. I learned enough of Aztec. Ancient Avestic language is the ancient language of the Iranian people thousands of years ago, and helped make a complete translation of the Gathas of Zarathustra a number of years ago and have translated a whole sheaf of Rumi out of Farsi, so that at least those amends have been made. But the interesting thing was, just as the Iranian chunk missing was made manifest, the whole development of Buddhist involvement. Not the Bhagavad Gita, but of Buddhism in a very peculiar way. I have to explain, because some of you are not. Acquainted. The original Buddhism of the historical Buddha is a transform of a distillation of Hindu wisdom that occurs in the Upanishads, the great Vedas that structured the core of Indian wisdom traditions for a thousand years, eventually became distilled in little parts of large wisdom scriptures. The kernels of those wisdom scriptures were the Upanishads, and the range of Upanishads are. About a dozen or so major ones underwent a transformation by the historical Buddha, so that the original Buddhism is a double distilled Vedic quality, and because it's double distilled the original Buddhism, it is called Theravada, the way of the ancient ones, and it meant not the ancient ones as in ancient society, but the ancient ones in terms of ancient existence. The historical Buddha said, I am not the first Buddha. I am the latest Buddha. I am not the last Buddha, and that the original lineage of the Buddhas goes back into geologic time. Dipankara taught enlightenment kalpas ago, and I bring it back into play. And just as my teachings are brought back into play now. The veiled resistance of the time dimension will water down these teachings also. And there will come a time when it looks like a subject of ridicule for those searching for wisdom. And at that time another Buddha will come, Maitreya. And that Buddha will bring that teaching back. Well, that Buddhism, that Theravada became transformed Tripoli. It was a triple transform of about the first century of the common era, the first century A.D., and it was triply transformed, once out of the distilled Upanishad by the historical Buddha, and the second time that distillation was again distilled even more refined by such an unlikely candidate as Hellenistic Judaism. The first work that mentions the word Mahayana is by Ashvaghosha, and it is called the awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, and faith is a Jewish concern. It's not a concern of the Vedas. It is not a concern of the Upanishads. It is not a concern of the Theravada Nevada. Buddhism is a concern of Judaism. The awakening of faith. The Sanskrit word estrada. And Shraddha pada. The way of faith was introduced into India by a man named Thomas, a disciple of Jesus named Thomas. And Thomas went to India about 40 A.D. he went to southern India. He went to Kerala. In fact, his tomb is available to be seen there. And within 50 years, the influence of Thomas's The Gospel of Thomas or the Sayings of Jesus in seed value. You can read the Gospel of Thomas. There are 117 seeds, and what they are are seeds for unfolding differential consciousness, rather than in growing attached to a traditional integral. It's a way of making the personal prism give a not a fractionalization, not a diffracting, but a differentiating of the seeds that language, the mythic language phrases that perform the transformation of symbolic understanding into vision. The Gospel of Thomas is all about how vision matures out of the seeds in the mind, by transforming mythic language into the magical language of spiritual disclosure, not the mythic language of stories, but the conscious language of disclosure and ashvaghosha founded in his little book that came out about 90 A.D., about the same time that the apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, was written, about the same time that the Hermetic books were written, the Corpus Hermeticum about 90 A.D. and Ashvaghosha founded Mahayana. As opposed to the Theravada, which was a distillation of India, Vedic India was distilled by the liqueur of the Upanishads, and that distilled again by the Buddha into Theravada, and that radically transformed into the Mahayana, which became a completely different spread. And so I worked to bring. The translation of the Mahayana into its jet stream version, which is called the Vajrayana and the Vajrayana Ana means diamond vehicle. In 1975, I brought Carma Tindal to Los Angeles to teach the Tibetan language and the Karmapa's history and Tibetan Buddhism. So because I found coming back to the United States that almost no one understood at all, had no idea that the Tibetan language is not a folk language. It was tailored and made, like the city of San Francisco, to be expressive of differential conscious disclosure, and had no mythic origins. It was designed and made from the beginning, from the get go, to be a conscious disclosure medium. Thus, it is a different sort of language from all of the other languages of the world. We've run out of time, and I will eventually write a book and discuss the mounds and mounds of explorations, and hopefully that'll come out next week. We begin with vision. And we begin our year long adventure and learning, as Alfred North Whitehead called it, an adventure in learning that consciousness dwarfs the mind and its capacities are unbelievable because they're not based on belief. They're based on adventure.