History 1

We start today with history. And this is the most difficult of all human endeavors. History is even more difficult than science. Because history is where we have had complete failure in our species up until the present time. There have been individuals who have been successful in swimming in the ocean of history, and there have been times when human groups have been successful in navigating. But the art of navigating the oceans of history has never been able to be passed on to more than three generations of people. And always there's an atrophying of the ability to sail and to the detriment of civilized populations. History has become a very fraught, danger fraught, perilous voyage. One of the assignments that we have in history is to write your own history of the last two years. And in writing your own history of the last two years, it gives you an example of how difficult it is to simply do this nominal task for us. If you've been following the education, the history section comes a year and three quarters into the Education so that in a complete, more perfect world, you would be writing a history of the past two years, one year and three quarters of which would be covered by the course, and that the missing quarter would be the three month period, the one quarter just before you began the education. And so this two year history is something which is seemingly so simple and yet nobody has ever accomplished it. People have come close. One of the things always missing is that in history you have to verify your data, verify your facts, verify, as Thucydides in ancient times would have put it. Verify your evidence. And it is the evidence that is so important in history and that the evidence being verified involves a personal involvement, and that's just not a double positive. It involves a personal involvement. It means that the process, the method of looking at the evidence, has a parallel course of the style in which you then write up the evidence critically reviewed by your method, so that history has a braiding of three different qualities three different factors evidence, style, and method. And when someone does a history with all three together. The personal style of writing it comes out more and more so that there are such figures as really great historians who can be read at any time after they have written their histories. For instance, today, in 2001, you could read Edward Gibbon On The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, even though it was written 200 years ago. You would learn an enormous amount from that history, even though many of the facts, many of the evidential qualities of Gibbon, would have been refined in the last 200 years, so that he would be astounded at what we are able to know now in terms of evidence. But the style of Gibbon and his historical method, and the evidence which he marshaled, brought together, make the multi-volume set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a world classic. You can still read it. We're looking at two historical books. We're looking at one of the first great historical books by Thucydides. Thucydides, who lived 2400 years ago. His history of the Peloponnesian War. And we're looking at Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. And when we're looking at Thucydides and Franklin, it seems on the surface that this is dry, academic stuff, and nothing could be further from the truth. For instance, probably very few Americans are more famous than Benjamin Franklin is even more famous in the world than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. He's the archetypal American. And yet, Franklin's autobiography is so peculiar in its historical emergence. Here is a volume that was published here in Los Angeles, published in 1949. University of California Press. It's Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs, a parallel text edition, and it was written by Max Farrand, who was the director of research at the Huntington Library just over here in San Marino, outside of Pasadena. And this is what Max Farrand wrote in his introduction in 1949. Few, if any, documents of modern times have been subjected to such gross and persistent misrepresentations as has fallen to the lot of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. This has been due primarily to the different editions of its composition, and to the unparalleled confusion. Attending its publication and then skipping down. It seems incredible that three of the four parts of this great American classic should have been published for the first time in French translations. Yet such is the case, and the complete autobiography was not printed in English from the original manuscripts until 1868, more than 80 years after Franklin had died at age 84. But it's even worse than that after Ferran's edition came out, because the Huntington had the has the original manuscript to researchers J.A. Leo LeMay and Paul Pemsel went through and found that there were many missing aspects, and they published a new edition. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography was published in 1981, and then in 1986, even further pages of Franklin's work were found, and in 1986, a completely new set of pages came out, a book called Canon of Benjamin Franklin, that is the standard edition of Benjamin Franklin for the years 1772 to 1776. New attributions and Reconsiderations were published in 1986. And so when you come to the World Classics edition of Oxford University Press, 1993, they make it clear that people are still finding Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and trying to get the real edition of it. Five, four and a half years from now, Benjamin Franklin would have been born 300 years ago. So we're looking at a situation. I'm reminded of the Eskimo word for the origins of creation. The English translation of the word unpronounceable in Inuit is slush, that the world begins in slush, and it's only later that it becomes hardened enough so that one has a surface that you can walk on and deal with. Franklin is one of the most mysterious figures in world history, and part of it was that Franklin was always covering his tracks. Even while he was making the tracks, he already prepared ahead to cover them so that Franklin becomes more and more one of the most elusive spies in world history. Not a spy for any government, but a spy for the freedom of humanity. Someone who was dedicated to the proposition that a human being has the right to be uncompleted, that we have the right to the freedom of indefinite development, and that no one has the right to close a door on us and label us. And Franklin was a spy for this conviction. And he was the great exemplar. And so it's no wonder that even centuries after his death, he's still being rediscovered. Franklin's collected works are being published by Yale University Press. They started in 1959, and in 1999 they got up to volume 35, and it's still incomplete. So Franklin is the exemplar of a human being whose personal scope is not yet measured. Thucydides as a pair to this. And we always pair materials here. We pair them using an old technique that was developed in the first century AD by a great teacher named Plutarch, and in Plutarch's Parallel Lives he wrote that a human being is so complex that the form of a human being cannot be seen against a background that is less complex than man's personal form, and so there was no background in the universe as complex as a human being. And so he used parallel human beings so that you saw one in terms of the other, and that the parallel lives was the ability to appreciate that what you had here with a pair of human lives, that when you really got deeply into it, it was like two mirrors of the cosmos. And that human beings are of indefinite complexity. Plutarch Wrote in Greek, and he was an inheritor directly of Thucydides, of Thucydides. Conviction in his time, some 500 years before Plutarch. In ancient times, that 500 year cycle in history was called the cycle of the Phoenix, the return of the great bird of the spirit. After a 500 year period where it was born, it lived, and then its whole meaning decayed to where it was nothing but ash, and out of the ash of its own demise it came back again. Thucydides is like the beginning of a cycle that reoccurs with Plutarch in the first century A.D. this thucydidean conviction he puts at the very beginning of the his great work on the Peloponnesian War. He writes in it. This out of book one, section 21, where he's been talking a little bit about why he's doing this history. And then he comes back. He comes back to the beginning, but in a new way. We call that technique in mathematics recursion. That one comes back recursively, not to repeat, but to catch up all the stitches and to present them in a new rhythm, so that what one is doing is laying down a periodicity of expression, and that after a while you go back and you catch up that entire periodicity with a new cadence so that you get an overlay now of several cadences. And why would you have a multiplicity of cadences to escape being trapped by ritual? One of the most fundamental things in the universe is that ritual holds its objectivity. The learning of the dance steps specifically help you to do that dance and to repeat it. Exactly. And we need that capacity. But there are higher capacities which, if they are stuffed back into the ritual capacity alone, proves to be a fatal limitation. And one of the first things that a wisdom education learns Do not stuff a process into a form. Don't stuff experience which is a process into a ritual form because you will get an inculcation. Where the exactness of the letter kills the spirit. But just as you cannot even stuff myth back into a ritual, the myth, the myth process comes out of the ritual action. There's no doubt about that. Experience comes out of what we do, but experience becomes larger in the sense that it's not just a larger form, but it is the process that is released through the objectivity in its multiplicity, and it is later on the function of the mind to be able to reform, to bring back into a new, a different objectivity, the variety of experience. And so symbol, objectivity, symbolic forms in the mind are a reforming of what was there initially as ritual form. And was able the ancient way of talking about it was that ritual done right? Perfumes the universe with experience, with the kind of experience, the perfume of which is feeling that the mythic horizon is a feeling toned perfume that is capable of being expressed in language, so that the mythic process of feeling toned language experience comes out of ritual, but is reformed by symbols, and that when symbols reform them, the experience gains meaning, so that symbolic form is objective as to meaning, whereas the ritual form is objective as to action. And it's true that you can align symbol and ritual. They align beautifully, and one of the great tasks of human culture was to make sure that the alignment of action in ritual and meaning in symbols, that that alignment was straight, that it was true. And in between the ritual action and the symbolic thought was to make sure that the mythic language feeling toned language was also in that alignment. And so, 4400 years ago, one of the very first expressions of high civilization in the mouths of Zarathustra, he talks about thought, word and deed. That when thought, word, and deed are aligned, then man discovers something about himself that that very alignment helps him to penetrate through a threshold that he didn't know could be penetrated. And that what that lined alignment of thought, word and deed, ritual, myth and symbol What that alignment penetrates through is the transform into insight that the realm of vision becomes available to men and women through the penetrative, not through force, but through alignment. It's the exactness of thought, word and deed together that when they're integrated together, they naturally give up the limitation that they had of always being integral. And they acquire a new found ability to be differential. So that insight. Vision is a whole different mode from integration. A vision is something then that becomes necessary to human life in its transformed capacity. I think one of the great classical quotations is without vision. The people perish. Saint John. Meaning not people. If they're just living animal existences, they don't need vision. And not people who are living just rote existences. They don't need vision. But for men and women who awaken to that capacity, that they have consciousness. In their lives, they need vision. And vision is a process, is like myth is a process, but it has a different language form. Mythic language is all about generating experience so that when it interiorize, that experience is able to become meaning which can be objectively brought together in an integral by the mind, and that whole ecology can be described as a path integral. And indeed, there is a whole mathematics of doing this in many ways. Path integrals. But just as there are path integrals, there are also paths that lead to differentials. You can have differential equations in mathematics very easily and they go together. They don't obviate each other. They're not disjunctive. They're complementarities. And so one learns that conscious insight goes well with ritual myth and symbol. And that vision, ritual, myth and symbol make a very nice conscious ability to have a picture, but something in this calls out for a further objectivity for a further form, because vision itself is a process. It is in fact a language process. And to make the traditional distinction between myth and vision. Myth has a mythic language. Vision has a magical language. Magical in the sense that it whatever it says in the way that it says it, it carries a transformative quality. That conscious language, when brought into play, not only describes and characterizes and express, but also can transform, can change the way something is. So that we found in our education that the next form that comes not just ritual form and not just symbol form, but there is such a thing as art forms, and that art forms are not in the integral mode, but they're in the differential mode. So that art is a differential form is able to complement ritual forms, able to complement symbolic forms, but complements them, does not merge with them in an integral way, so that art forms always bring into play a capacity that is just then newly created. Art is creative in exactly specifically this way it brings in the whole ability to see ratioed form. Art forms when brought into play with ritual forms, show a proportionate ratio ING. When art forms are brought into play with symbol forms again. And that's why instead of just saying one has a brain or one has a mind, when art forms come into play for men and women, they begin to have a kind of mind which ratios and proportions, so that one then has a rational mind. But since the 17th century, the term rational mind has meant the reductive symbol indexing mind alone. And this is not it at all. This is a kind of reductive stupidity. The rational mind does not stuff things into egg crates. We learned that when we were only mythic hundreds of thousands of years ago. And so that kind of reductive thing, oh, the rational mind Of course, men and women who have a feeling for life are going to be suspect of someone who's trying to stamp out onto their lives somebody's idea of what a rational mind is. And these are the limitations. And you better fit in that kind of rational mind actually does not belong in the differential scope of expanded human capability, but belongs in a specific, reductive, doctrinaire integral method called ideology. And we saw in the 20th century, unfortunately, our grandparents and parents and ourselves, those of us who lived through the 20th century, saw what happens when ideologies try to rule the world. It doesn't matter what kind of ism it is the whole cookie cutter stamping process of making people live by isms is flawed, deeply flawed in many ways, not just because of a regression. And usually the flaw carries because of regressive technique goes to the lowest common denominator. It doesn't just stop with ideological convictions which are imposed upon you, but there are ritual action limitations which are imposed upon you and not just curfew's. At 6:00, the limitations become more and more and more because regressions always gain speed. They snowball the snowball effect. They always end not only in box canyons, but in dead ends. Faulkner once said in one of his books, he said the mistakes of men, if not corrected, lead to universal death. Because when man dies on that scale, he takes the whole planet with him. We will not let that happen, because our species has survived for millions of years through all kinds of permutations. Because we don't let that happen. It doesn't occur. And then the way in which that is corrected is to bring a new lens into place, so that the mind learns not to make dead ends, not to regiment itself in others in this death process, but to learn to respect life again and to engender creativity. Not just to have something new, but to have a conscious form in its artistic differential prism. Bring color back into a world which is increasingly only black and white. And so art brings that rainbow spectrum of possibility into objective form, just like a prison. And that rainbow that comes out of that prison goes two different ways. It goes back to vision, but it goes forward to history. So that history is a differential process related to vision. And as that not at all a process related to myth, so that when the historical consciousness comes into play, those men and women who learned to deal with their historical consciousness have to let the mythic process go, not to get rid of it, but to let it become part of the general background rather than the square of attention, so that the square of attention in history is symbol, vision, art and history. And we would never be able to do that were it not for the fact that art assures us, through its actuality, that art can displace ritual, and that we do not lose but gain by that? Because the square of attention for art is myth, symbol, vision, and art that for corner, that square, that pair of pairs. Ancient technique of making the picture, the frame, that square of attention always has a four part or a quaternary, or a four angle composition. It's one of the ways in which one proceeds with confidence. But the corners, the sides, only two of which are objective and the other two are processes so that you don't make a square of objectivity, but you have a parallel of objectivity and a parallel of processes, so that you always work with a square of attention that has both objectivity and process paired, so that there is an art to this. And while there probably is in very high yogas and very deep prayer, while there is an art to consciousness, to vision, it's so exceedingly nuanced as to be almost unapproachable in refinement So that it's really art, where we first discover that this is true, that we can let ritual go so that it's no longer a part of the composing form, and that art begins then with feeling toned experience, and that it is our experience, even though that is a process and not an objectivity that allows for the special frame of reference, the special square of attention of art to come into play. Art does very well by beginning with a process rather than beginning with an objectivity, and this is a very great quality. It's the civilizing quality of art. It teaches us by example that we can do this, that we don't have to have things that we can pound as the basis for our attentiveness. We don't have to rely upon Existential things. We can rely upon our experience. We can rely upon our feelings. That feeling turns out not to be wishy washy, but feeling turns out to be capable of its own kind of intelligence. The word for it is sentience. So that someone who has incorporated art in their lives is able to see that you can trust feeling toned experience explicitly, even though it's not objective, it's still can be trusted quite explicitly. And so the artist raises human experience to a differential form, and this is called the art of the person. So for the very first time, persons occur, and history is a process that rainbows itself out of the interplay of persons. So that history is a very strange medium. It is a medium which takes consciousness and puts it into an exponential energy. History is a higher form of consciousness itself, just as myth was a higher form of nature, that the process of nature achieves a higher calibration internally through feeling, through language, through that capacity. So to history is an exponential form of consciousness itself, but not as a higher integral, but as a higher differential, so that history becomes the way in which differential process achieves such an expansive quality capacity, such a freedom. History is all about freedom. Oddly enough, that only one possibility will finally emerge out of this, and that is an infinite cosmos that the cosmic form has built into it an indefinite exponential freedom. This is a very great discovery. And in Thucydides, for the first time in Western history, one finds the shock of recognition that this is true because Thucydides, he was born about 460 BC. He died about 400 B.C. He was killed. He was murdered. He was murdered by the same group of tyrannical 30 as those men who sentenced Socrates to death. Socrates was killed in 399. Thucydides. Just the year before in 400. Why? Why were human beings like Socrates and Thucydides killed in Athens? Because they had posed themselves as a danger to the state. The tyrannical authoritarianism of the state of the city state of Athens at that time saw them as, um, arch traitors, because they were teaching the young men and women to question critically all the values that were being inculcated by an ideological state. Thucydides himself came from a very wealthy family. His family owned gold mines in Thrace, that part of Greece that's in between Turkey and Albania and Macedonia. And he was during the very war that he wrote about the Peloponnesian War. He was elected what the Greeks used to call strategos. That means he was one of the commanding generals. And in 2423 BC he was relieved of duty. They said, you have lost a crucial battle. He lost a battle to the greatest of all the Spartan generals, Brasidas, who died the following year. There was no shame to lose to a general like Brasidas. It's like losing to Napoleon But the city of Athens said, you have betrayed us because you were talking with Brasidas, because Thucydides was always working on writing a history of the war and checking his sources so that he would even interview his enemies to get their side, their application of what was going on. Because he says in book one, then we'll take a break after this. He says, knowing what I know now about human history, all of these events will repeat themselves again. And I write this not for my generation, but for those future generations who will collide with these same scheme of events again and again and again, because nothing will change until we learn by it. Those of us who lived through the 1960s Vietnam experience read Thucydides with an eerie quality. Until we talk to our teachers who had gone through the first and Second World wars, and they said we had the same experience of inequalities, and our grandfathers told us about the civil war, that all human wars have a very peculiar quality, that the large form of violence has a form. It's like some kind of huge goyaesque phantom who devours his own children. That wars are made to kill man. Not for victories, but to kill men. And that when one understands this, it's not that you take a stance of nonviolence or antiwar, but one understands that you have to go through a transformational medium called history. The problem is not violence or war, per se. The problem is that history is an ocean in a hurricane mode, and everyone drowns who doesn't learn to navigate it. Let's take a break and we'll come back. We'll come back to history one. And we're trying to look at a dimension of our lives, which has been a problem for our kind forever. There's never been a human population yet who have learned to navigate history for more than a couple of generations, because it is so difficult. Something that is a differential context cannot be stuffed into an idea. And this is part of the difficulty because we are taught in our education through tradition to think our way to form and then to use that as a basis to act. And that's true, that ritual activity can be done that way. But you cannot do consciousness that way, and you can't do art that way, and you can't do history that way, and you certainly can't do science that way. One way to check yourself is to recognize that if you have an aesthetic before you deal with the work of art, you're using an Aesthetic in an ideological way. A vibrant aesthetic is developed as you make a relationship to art, and it's always new just now. And if your aesthetics are not new just now, then they're tending to slide regressively to an ideological stance. This was at one time known in a variant of this as the intentional fallacy. That in order to understand a work of art, you had to know what the artist intended. You don't. You don't. But the intentional fallacy, while it is pernicious in art, it is devastating in history. And the ideological form that haunts the historical process is political forms. To have political forms based on an integral alignment of ritual, myth and symbol, and to try to apply those to the historical multidimensionality is a fool's play. And it invites a rapid, plummeting regression instantly so that political forms, while they are very useful symbolically, are almost inapplicable historically. And yet, every educational school in the world usually pairs Paris. Political science with history in the 1950s at the University of Wisconsin, having a double major in philosophy and political science, I was given a history minor because I took so many history courses, and it was assumed that this was the way things were, and this was an enlightened university. It's flawed, that entire educational strategy is severely flawed, and it has been flawed since it was brought into play. And it was brought into play in Greece in the fifth century BC. That's where its origin is. And that's why Thucydides is so important, because Thucydides gives us a chance to see a historical form deep enough and conscious enough to be able to see our way through to understanding this whole range of problems. Now, when Farrand was editing Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the manuscript here in Los Angeles at the Huntington, he said, um, at the end he said, uh, the whole subject was so bewildering that whenever this study was interrupted, even by a few weeks, as has happened many times, it was necessary to spend hours and sometimes days in tracing the pattern out again among the tangled threads, so that there is a devilish aspect to it. The complications Are there not to be weeded out and combed out, to be integrated into firm, objective ideas. That strategy actually is madness. Strangely enough. And one of the difficulties with human history is that it is a case study in certifiable insanity that we have survived this long as just a tribute to the gorgeousness of the spirit and the largesse of opportunity. If we find some kind of political form beforehand, and then apply it assiduously to handle the problems of history, it reduces the historical process to a mythic process. And that mythic process, because it's even pre-symbolic, tries to find a ritual form in order to gain its surety. And it leads directly to the excesses of Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia, or the Roman Empire, or the tyranny in Athens that killed Thucydides and Socrates. It leads directly to that is a severe problem. Another way to understand Thucydides and his importance, and that his history is an objective presentation that sits in the middle Of two great discoveries sandwiched around him, and one of them is Greek tragedy and the other is the philosophical dialogues of Plato. Thucydides history comes right in the middle, in the from the development of Greek tragedy and the development of the philosophical dialogue, so that Thucydides is like a ridge of high ground that slopes steeply on one side. The development of Greek tragedy leading up to him. On the other side, the development of the philosophical dialogue that plunges after him. The further away you get from Thucydides and Plato, the less Plato is philosophically dialogue able, and the old Plato already himself, if you can believe it, reverts back to the old bad habits of having plunged regressively to an ideological format. The old Plato wrote the laws. And laws is a huge, thick book, and it means just what it says. It's laws. Socrates hardly plays any role. The philosophic dialogue of critically finding one's navigational way through a differential ocean of possibility is no longer there, even in Plato, even in his own time. Even more so, the star pupil of Plato, who studied with Plato for 20 years and then became as famous as Plato himself. Aristotle. You do not find in any of Aristotle's works, the philosophic dialogue. It doesn't use the form. It doesn't use the method. The earlier that you go from Thucydides on the Greek tragic side, the more that you find a ritual basis that fears a symbolic formulation. In Aeschylus, at the beginnings of Greek tragedy, when Greek tragedy first begins with his, the first extant tragedy is The Persians, and you find in Aeschylus a kind of a high falutin language that soars almost vertically, like some kind of literary eagle. And because of that capacity, the old Aeschylus often was parodied as his bald head of being an eagle's egg. He was an original egghead. Aeschylus tries to show that one should be fearful of the mind's power to make ideas which ideologically lead to the impasse that is presented in The Tragedy of the Persians. Now, it's interesting because the Greeks and the Persians were competitors when Aeschylus was a young man, and when Thucydides begins his Peloponnesian War, he talks about the Persian Wars. He says those were not really great wars. And he says of the model on which Aeschylus based himself, Homer, he says, even the Homeric wars, the Trojan War, were not very great wars, but that this war is the greatest war in human history. Because this war is not about some king who wants to get his wife back, and he's got so much power and money that he gets all of these petty princes to donate ships and men and goes off to Troy and decimates them. It's not about that at all. Thucydides says, in our time, Athens and Sparta became engaged in a protracted war that went on for several generations that neither of them could get out of, because every attempt that either made to get out merely exasperated the situation. It poured fuel on the fire. Any attempt to mediate the conflict raised the conflagration so that more and more people were absorbed into the fray. Until, he says, almost all of the known world was taking sides, just like the Cold War. And he says this was a form that was so pernicious that I have written this history to try to inoculate future generations so that they will not suffer the full virulence of this plague. That this is a plague of normal human capacities, that under the stress and pressure of an expansive capacity that should have been there in history, has been stuffed back into the mind so that the mind is infected by a plague that's there as an artifact of the regressive pressure. And not because it was wrong, not because it was an error in the first place, but because in its regressive form, it becomes wrong. And what was the regressive form? The regressive form was making ideologies on the basis of mythology. That taking a mythological tack to experience the regressive mind makes ideologies so that the mythology is coopted in such a way that it comes out as a tyrannical, authoritarian death move. And Thucydides again and again says, we have got to protect ourselves, because this is a disease which comes to us out of our own failure to exercise the capacities which we engendered in the first place. Now, one of the qualities of Thucydides Peloponnesian War that has been noticed for several thousand years is that there are a lot of medical metaphors, as it were, medical ideas. And in fact, one of the great contemporaries of Thucydides, along with Socrates, was Hippocrates, the Archetypally great doctor in antiquity. And there is a Penguin Classics edition of the Hippocratic writings. The most famous of the Hippocratic writings is the Oath. The Hippocratic Oath begins I swear by Apollo, the healer, by Asclepius, by health, and to all the powers of healing, and called to witness all the gods and goddesses that I may keep this oath and promise to the best of my ability and judgment. I will pay the same respect to my master in the science as to my parents and my share of life with him. And in this way, Hippocrates in his oath says, you must make an equality between the powers of mythology and the powers of scientific learning. From, he says, from his master, it means that the historical lineage of your science is as important as the mythical lineage that leads to its symbolic ideas. In a short form, you have to learn to balance science and symbol But that in balancing science and symbol, there was something hidden that the fifth century Greeks didn't know about. They just didn't know it had come too quickly, too suddenly. And that is just as when art comes into play. Art obviates ritual from being in your square of attention. And just as history, when it really comes into play, it obviates myth from that square of attention. But when science comes into play, it obviates symbol from the square of attention. The mind, in its symbolic capacity does not play a role in real science. What plays the role in real science of the mind is consciousness conscious vision. That's why science is about experiment and not about proving someone's ideological conclusions. And this is a very, very difficult thing to understand. It's almost never been appreciated. But all great science comes from men and women who have understood. It's not your opinion, nor is it your refined opinion, nor is it your idea. That's the beginning of the experiment. It is a consciousness that there is a range of inquiry that is possible, and one undergoes that. And out of that will come the science. Science doesn't prove anything. It inquires after and discovers further. And so history is extremely important and difficult. Without vision, there is no art. Without history, there is no science. Now, when Greek tragedy increased its ability to handle myth, it moved closer and closer towards a maturity that one finds in Sophocles. In Sophocles, the Greek tragic handling of myth is perfectly poised, so that the Greek tragic art form, say, of Sophocles greatest play, the Oedipus Rex, the myth of Oedipus and the art form Oedipus Rex occupy such an equanimity that the ideas symbolically and the conscious vision of Sophocles are perfectly, even and perfectly matched. You will rarely find anywhere in human civilization on this planet. A more equanimous spirit of artistic presentation than Sophocles is almost like a calm, even horizon of the mind and consciousness that flow together so evenly that you can't tell there's no way to wait one over the other. And so it is the equanimity of Sophocles that's like the Greek yoga. The greatest master of yoga in ancient Greece was Sophocles. But as you move further from Sophocles towards the writing of Thucydides history, the equanimity of Sophocles gives way to a deep, passionate bias that's there in Euripides. Euripides This is not the soaring, divinely inspired Greek tragedy of Aeschylus. And it's not the equanimity of Sophocles, but it is the the, the push of the great outraged humanist that in Euripides one finds the outrage that we are still doing this to each other despite all of our efforts, or even more perniciously because of our efforts. What we have been doing to ourselves has increased in virulence. What in the world is going on? The more that we try to be conscious, the less conscious we are. What kind of a paradox is this? And of course, right at the end of his great career, the last great Greek tragedy from Euripides is The Bacchae, which we looked at in our myth section of the education, and in the Buckeye it becomes clear. As Faulkner once said, Euripides was a great enough artist to realize that after this he had to break his pen and to break his pencil, break his stylus, because he had come to a complete impasse. The Buckeye is such a great work of art that it shows that its own self is an impossibility, that it shouldn't exist. And this was one of the great perceptions of Thucydides history, is that Greek history, Greek historical form on this level should not have existed. It should have been impossible for a Greek to have had this, to have done this. The great philosopher who brought this out was a man named R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood's collected works were published by Oxford in about eight volumes. He died in 1943. In the Second World War, early 50s, still a young man, one of the really great writers. The principles of art, the idea of nature, many wonderful things, Collingwood says in the idea of history. It is not only improbable, it is impossible for a Greek of that time to have written this kind of a history. It should not have been possible at all that the whole ethos of the Greek mentality was anti-historical. It was all weighted towards a a conviction that symbolic form, mental ideas were the apex of human achievement, and that anything beyond them was beyond them was the realm of the gods, was the realm of the irrational, was the realm of of of mysteries that are beyond man. And the only way that we have access to that is through mysteries and not through thought. That thought is not capable of transcending itself. And yet in Thucydides, his stated method and style again and again present the fact that as we read his history, we become aware that we are involved in a transformation that's literally like turning ourselves inside out and upside down, and that when we do so, when we have gotten used to doing so, we learn to see the world, oddly enough, as it really is, that the mind has inverted and turned inside out. The world as if the image in the eye, the pupil of the eye, is exactly what the mind has, and that the mind converts into this not just reverse, but this diagonal, the reverse, and then the obverse of that, so that the mind sees a diagonal misstatement of the real habitually. And one can learn to rectify that. But in order to do that, you have to be able to find your focus in a work of art, because it is the work of art that's the corrective lens on the self-deluded mind. Oddly enough, art is indispensable to civilization. Without art, civilization is not possible at all. And without art as an initial prismatic beginning, the forms of science would seem to be phantasmal to man. He wouldn't believe them. And so the arts and sciences are aligned together, but they're not aligned like an integral line. They're aligned like expanded resonances. So that science deals with the harmonics, of which art deals with the resonances. And so by learning an art, one learns to tune oneself to the real for the first time. Because the real for us is not just the natural world of animals and plants and minerals. It's not just the integral world of thoughts, words, and deeds. It includes those transformative dimensions and qualities like consciousness and history, and art gives us the ability to learn how to be human in terms of those expanded capacities of which we are not only exemplars ourselves, but we are the protagonists ourselves. In this, there is a peculiar quality that comes out when one looks at this. Collingwood says in his critique, for history must have two characteristics. First, it must be about what is transitory. And secondly, it must be scientific or demonstrative But on this theory, what is transitory cannot be demonstratively known. It cannot be the object of science. It can only be a matter of perception. The Greek word is aesthesis, whereby human sensibility catches the fleeting moment as it passes by. The curious thing is that perception is not at all a ritual activity, that human perception is a creative activity, that there is always a compositional element at play when everyone sees. Because what we're looking at is not just the purely natural, but we're looking at the transformed realm as well. And so perception is creative from the get go. There never is for us a perception that is not creative. And so art is at play all the time. But if it is not at play in the sense where art continues its resonances towards an expanded possibility, then it by default regresses. And so the creative aspect of perception, naturally, if it doesn't grow, it shrinks. And when it shrinks, it plummets back regressively to the last objective level where it can register, and usually it comes back to the body. Usually people's minds are not developed enough to be objective enough to register there. So it comes back to the body. And so man by default systematizes his conscious Possibilities and reduces them to tumors, reduces them to dysfunctions. Reduces them to to death and dying. And because the more that he tries to think himself out of this, the worse it gets. He learns to fear his own thought. Bertrand Russell and his History of Western philosophy said, men fear thought like the plague. Any chance you get to not think is welcome. And so we get ourselves into a curious bind. And Thucydides in his history, goes into it again and again and again. And he uses a technique which has become world famous from him, and that is in his history, as he writes the events, as he is critically examined people, many people on As this critical juxtaposition of different viewpoints is presented, and he gets to a pivot where the action of the event takes a human transformative new direction. At that very point, Thucydides puts a speech, and the speeches in Thucydides history are like the haiku and basho's travelogues. They are moments where consciousness does its pirouette in the dance of meaning, and brings into play the awareness on the part of the reader that you are just now participating in this dance yourself. This is not just something that Thucydides did 2400 years ago in this history, but you, as a reader, are now doing yourself in your own life, and you're learning how to do this kind of conscious dance, which leads to the ability to experience this as a work of art, which tunes your capacities for resonance so that you can navigate history and get to the harmonies of living in a cosmos. It's a very startling thing, and it comes as such a startling aspect, because it happens just now for the first time. Originally we talked in art series how art is always original, the moment of appreciating a work of art. That work of art at that moment is just now again, original. It has that capacity for originality, not just that it's new, but that it is pristinely present for the very first time in exactly just this way for someone new. So that art is continuously fresh. Real art is always new. How is it going to go out of date? What kind of date? How is it going to go out of style? What style? You have the ability to appreciate an infinitude of styles so that there is a quality in Thucydides in his history that 2000 years later becomes distilled in Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Franklin becomes one of the most interesting protagonists in world history. He becomes a consciousness that gets used to not trusting his mind to make up ideas, to carry himself through life. And so Benjamin Franklin, even from a teenager, was someone for whom science was a reality, even at the age of 16, when Benjamin Franklin wrote his first little anonymous letters that were published in the family New England Courant newspaper. The silence dogood letters. Already people were talking about the fantastic intelligence of this anonymous letter writer. It was 16 year old Benjamin Franklin. We're going to come to Franklin next week and use Franklin more as the lead, and bring Thucydides in two aspects of Benjamin Franklin, where his science was astonishing. The first came he used to go to London from Boston or Philadelphia or New York quite frequently. And he's the one who discovered the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean Can you imagine coming to the transcendent realization that there are rivers in the ocean? And if there's one grand river, like a Mississippi or Nile that courses the entire length of the Atlantic Ocean. Second, Benjamin Franklin is the first person in history on this planet to capture a universal energy called lightning, and to show that it was electricity. And that man could not only find that out, but he could save it and he could use it more next week