Art 6
Presented on: Saturday, May 12, 2001
Presented by: Roger Weir
Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 71 of 104
Art 6: Civilization is an Art Form
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, May 12, 2001
Transcript:
Part of our problem in the 20th Century was with the procedure of abstraction. And abstraction is a wonderful function; its a process and function of the mind, and in order for the mind to think, it needs to perform abstraction. But in the 20th Century abstraction was assumed by shoddy conceptualization to be an essential also for ritual, and produced a century of tyranny and terror. Because abstraction in ritual is a neutering process and leads to death every single time.
So one of the problems that we have here in the 21st Century is to recalibrate the disease of the 20th Century and to bring abstraction back into the family of functions, so that thought again participates with life and does not egotistically, whether through advertence in some kind of ideology, or inadvertence in some kind of ignorance, lead us on a swift road to demise.
And so this education, at this particular juncture, is concerned with a whole spectrum of procedures and issues, of phases and functions, of not only an ecology but a double ecology, and how it works together in paired complementarity and not in opposite duality. This is a very difficult process; the recalibration of this is particularly difficult, and it was in fact an issue in the beginning of the second quarter of the 20th century. Only those individuals who took the time, who had the talent, who devoted their lives patiently to dealing with this issue were just a trace element of the population. (cell phone rings) And theyre showing still by machines.
About 1926, 1927, 1928 the maturity of some of the mathematical insights of Einstein, based on work that had gone before him and contemporaneous with him, had come into a focus with an individual named Niels Bohr. And Niels Bohr, around 1913, had come into a vision that the structure of the basic unit of existence, the atom, was quite different from what it had been supposed. The supposition was that the atom was an indestructible unit and Bohrs atom, by 1913, was that it was in fact a miniature solar system. That it had a nucleus and that it had orbiting bodies, like planets or moons, which were the electrons. And so this miniature solar system invited right away, for the trace element of humanity that were able to follow the math at the time; who had the opportunity to be given the vision at the time, the concern was, this means that the atom is not an indestructible unit but is some kind of penetrable structure that we can go within; that we can open up the atom to an inner universe.
And so the subatomic particle field was available. And the strategy of approach in the vision to this, for Niels Bohr, was the Chinese symbol of the Tai Chi, the Taoist symbol. And later on Bohr even went so far as to put the Chinese Tai Chi symbol on his family crest; a Dane with a Taoist family crest.
The quality of work that Bohr did on what he called complementarity produced very quickly - by 1927, 1928 there were papers and books and conferences on something called the quantum universe, the quantum world. And today at the beginning of the 21st Century, some three full generations later, we have books like Quantum Networks, Dynamics of Open Structures. Or even farther Quantum Dots.
So that technology has come back again to the issues of the early atomic era, mathematically, in the 20th Century about the time of the First World War. We need to understand that even quantum dots are not zero.
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