History 2

This is history two, and we're trying to appreciate a very odd happening. And that is that history is a process that is a higher order of vision. And that vision is, to use the term that the 20th century used most about it. Vision concerns consciousness and that consciousness is not an object but a process. It is a flow so that the term that was used in the 1920s. Stream of consciousness is probably the best Us metaphor that could be used. The term stream of consciousness owes a lot of its origin to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who, in a series of books culminating in a book called Creative Evolution, said that the central philosophic concern about consciousness is time. And that time is not at all what was traditionally ascribed to it, but that time is he used the French term a degree. It's a duration. It's an ongoing ness that has within it the ability to sustain sequence. And Bergson influenced a number of Profound writers and artists at the time, probably the most famous of the writers were that group, centered around Marcel Proust and his great epic of the stream of consciousness, A la recherche du temps perdu. The Remembrance of Things Past and the final part of Proust's great epic on consciousness, the conscious flow is that for human beings, the ultimate application is in the seventh section of his epic book, and it's called The Past Recaptured. Or in some translations, the Past regained, that we are able to bring back the past and factor it into our present. Another stream of consciousness writer was James Joyce, and his epic Ulysses is a stream of consciousness novel influenced by Bergson. We read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf's great novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Our stream of consciousness novels. William Faulkner. Many of his works are stream of consciousness novels we read as I Lay Dying. But also if you Look at The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! Most of Faulkner's great works are stream of consciousness. So with Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, you can see that Bergson's characterizing of consciousness as a stream was a very Influential. The idea that consciousness is a flow is a process. In our previous century brings back into play a medieval conviction and the group of people who men and women who had this conviction were called mystics, that consciousness is a mystic, dimensional flow which goes outside of the bounds of nature. Now, in the classical world, in the world of the Greek and Romans, their whole emphasis on what was real was formed, was objective, was something you could put a square around, something you could put a circle around, something that you could give a bound to. The Greco-Roman sense of actuality was bound up in, literally bound up in the sense that a definition which is accurate means that you can put a boundary around something so that, for instance, in Plato, you find in the course of platonic dialogues that Socrates, in dialogue with whoever he is in dialogue with, are attempting to put a boundary around something, give it a shape, and that once the shape is completed, one then has a definition. It will have achieved form for us, so that we can then have a clear idea of what this is, because we can outline it, we can give it a boundary so that the Greco-Roman Classical antiquity saw form which can be defined and therefore bounded by giving it a shape. We then make it real, and for them, one of the most difficult things of all was to recognize that the unbounded flow of the supernatural should have hidden within it some capacity to be bounded, so that out of that came a conviction passed on to them from a previous civilization previous to the Greeks and Romans in that part of the world was the ancient Near East, the ancient ancient Near East, bounded by the eastern Mediterranean and running to the Iranian highlands and the ancient Near East saw this whole realm as what they called the province of wise men who especially knew the secrets of magic. And so for them, for the classical precursors, this realm was a magical realm. But unlike the Greeks and Romans, who had this predilection to want to make a bounded form around it, the ancient Near East recognized that it was indeed a process, but that that process was not a part of nature. It was a part of the province of the gods who were supernatural in the sense that they were previous to nature, that while nature has forms, the gods live in a realm before natural forms came to be. And so the ancient Near East, with its sense of magic, focused on the difference between the language of man and the language of the gods. That magic was a question of magical language that was spoken by the gods, the divine realm. And so a magical language then had a syntax and grammar, which were not from the earth, but were from the heavens. So that magical language reflected the pattern of the celestial, whereas mythic language reflected the pattern of the terrestrial. And that in between these two great forms of language. Man tried to bring himself into focus in his mind, and so man's mind was like this forming ridge in between two great oceans. So that man's mind was like an isthmus in between two great oceans of language, one of the mythic of the earth, and one of them celestial from the heavens. And so in the ancient Near East, if you wanted to have what we would call consciousness today, you had to understand the stars. You had to understand the patterning of the stars, and in particular, the patterning of the stars was very difficult to establish. So the selection was on seven celestial bodies, five stars, which are the planets and the sun and the moon. And so the very earliest index for the magical language of consciousness some 4000 years ago was the sense that if we can understand the patterns of the sun and the moon and the five planets vis a vis the stars, we will have a way to understand the language of the gods and to apply it on earth. And that because earth is formed in obedience to the divine language, if we know that, we will be able to remake the earth. Not that we will stand in the place of the gods, but we will be the emissaries of the language, of the gods, and therefore we will have earned that position to be able to speak their language When the Greek Roman objectivity cemented itself really strongly into place for the first time in the sixth century B.C., for the very first time, there was a sense that for the those early Greeks, the Romans hadn't come much into play by that time. Those early Greeks saw that this was not at all the way in which antiquity of the ancient Near East had portrayed it. That this was a different process. And what happened was that man was not so much a spokesman for divine powers, but that man embodied divine powers and became divine himself. In the ancient Near East, the emissary speaking the language of the gods was always the king, so that the idea in ancient Near East times was that the king was the only spokesman for the gods, and that the wise men were the advisers to the king, so that he could utter these wise phrases and administer the order of heaven on earth, so that the divine King was not a God man, but was indeed a spokesman for having been selected by divine power. When Pythagoras in the sixth century BC concluded, about 36 years of study in Egypt and in Persia and came back. He came back with a completely different synthesizing index. He came back with a sense that there is a hidden form in the happenings of the celestial realm, which, when embodied in man, makes man not a king, but makes man a part of the divine realm. And so with Pythagoras in ancient Greece, there is a complete watershed that had not been there before. He's the initiator of a completely new style of human life. We might call that style of human life magical civilization. But he didn't call it magical. He called it mathematical, and the emphasis in the Pythagorean transform of civilization was that the mathematical use of consciousness meant that instead of looking at forms of things, you looked at ratios of things, the proportions of things vis a vis each other, so that you again, you gained a freedom from phenomenal referentiality. You could still use that if you wanted to, but you gained a freedom from having to use it. And so your capacities were that of the rational mind, the mind that could ratio things, that could see proportions. And when you can see proportions, you not only see sequencing within a flow of time, but you see harmonics, which are resonances that go out despite time. A time sequence only goes forward, whereas a resonance goes not only forward but backwards as well. But in a perfectly symmetrical graduated way. So that with Pythagoras came, they added sense that man not only lives within the sequence of something time, something temporal, but he also has the capacity to see deeper or higher both work and to see the resonant developing target around events. So that if you understood the harmonics of all the resonance together of an event, you would not only know the past accurately, but you would know the future accurately as well, so that understanding present events was no longer a matter of keeping kinglists in a chronological sequence, but gave man the capacity for the first time to see the ratios of history, not just kinglists in a chronological sequence, but to see the past linked with the future clustered around the present. And so, in the century following Pythagoras, the Greek mind was stunned by the possibility that they could develop a completely new capacity that had never been developed in man before. This, of course, was not only a startling challenge to them, but was of such an order of challenge that eventually, towards the end of the fifth century. Towards the end of the 400 seconds BC, the Greek mind balked at the responsibility and developed what was what is known as the failure of nerve in the Great Five Greeks. Five Stages of Greek Religion by Gilbert Murray, who was the great Professor of Greek at Oxford. This is the first edition of 1930. Um, the whole chapter four is entitled The Failure of Nerve. And from this Arnold Toynbee took this as the theme of his study of history, that if you apply this experience of the Greeks in the 400 seconds BC, if you apply it to all the other known histories of civilization. What do you come up with? And Toynbee came up with a startling investigation that took him about 40 years to complete in many volumes. I think eventually it became 13 volumes, a study of history. He found that every single civilization that men and women have developed has died because of a failure of nerve, not died of old age in a natural way, but died of a supernatural fright, of being buffaloed by their own powers, which they became afraid of. They became afraid of themselves. This, of course, when it came out at the end of the 1940s, the beginning of the 1950s. Toynbee's study of history, I think, was completed in the early 1950s. It coincided with the powering up development of the Cold War, and it became cause celebre at the time that maybe we were at the end of Western civilization. And one of the great emphasises in the early 1950s was a rereading of Thucydides Peloponnesian War, because the war between the Athenian League and the Spartan League read exactly like the pattern of the Cold War. You could almost read the American and their allies against the Soviets and their allies as a reliving of Thucydides Peloponnesian War. And it was a very scary thing, because in the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides says, knowing what I know now about human nature and about historical process, all of these things will happen again and again and again, because it is a structural, deep rut that is placed so deep into the nature of consciousness that we cannot help but do this over and over again. And of course, we didn't have to wait for the Cold War for that realization of Thucydides. One of the early prophets of this kind of terror of history was Herman Melville and Herman Melville, and his great epic Moby Dick has a poignant moment where Captain Ahab is being challenged by his first mate, Starbuck, who wonders if he has enough guts to kill Ahab so that they don't all go down to their doom. And Ahab says to Starbuck, it has nothing to do with you and me and this crew and this ship and that whale. All of this was rehearsed a billion years before the sea ever rolled. In his great monograph on the myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade, a great professor of religions at the University of Chicago. The last section is called The Terror of History. So that history for our kind, for men and women who belong in civilizations, has, for 2500 years been the source of terror and skittishness and not at all of encouragement. And history is the bugbear of civilization. No civilization on this planet has ever managed to navigate history for more than three generations in a row, in a sequence. And most of them only for one generation. And a great number of them for just a portion of a generation. A generation being about 20 years. We have been struggling against the demise of Western civilization for some long while now. The French Revolution was more than 200 years ago and said, we're finished with that historical form, and we start with the year one. And the French and American revolutions were very serious, each in their own way, about turning not only the page and the chapter, but turning to a new book on man, in one letter Jefferson wrote to James Madison. He said there have been many samples in historical memory of a person being freed, or of a group of people being freed, even for some long while. But we need to find out by a great experiment what it would be like to have an entire people freed indefinitely. What if you freed 4 million people on a new continent and let turn them loose without the terrors of history? And about contemporaneous with that letter that Jefferson wrote to Madison. One of the wisest men in Europe, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, wrote a poem to America in which he said, good luck to you. Do not do what we have done. Europe and the European mind has become so haunted by ghost stories of our own pasts and failures and powers, that we dare not act any further. One of the qualities that we're trying to bring out in this education is that history is the most perilous of all oceans, and it is a kind of an ocean that has a huge current in it, a current much like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. So that there are very strange boundaries to the ocean of history. There are areas where there are tropical climates in Arctic latitudes, and yet there are waters that are so cold in tropical climes and barren of nutrients, that no life will be sustained there. And so history is not at all a thing. It's not a subject to be taught. And the fact that every university in the world teaches history as a subject does not make it correct. It just simply is irrelevant to teach history as a subject. It is not a subject. It is a process oceanic in extent to be navigated. And that process to be navigated is an exponential transform of consciousness, so that history is a form of super consciousness, and it needs to be navigated not to be dealt with, especially by using ideas. Powerful ideas. Enormous ideas, like an ideology. And using that as some kind of a cookie cutter and stamping out on the dough of history shapes, then, that we expect will hold in a Greco-Roman way and hold indefinitely. Permanently. Absolutely. It never will happen, because that is all literally what Madame Blavatsky used to call metaphysically. It's a it's an inept metaphysics. This whole process has a mysterious quality to it, and the mysterious quality has to do with our persons. It has to do with the human person. Um, we're prejudiced by inculcation from birth, from culture, from tradition. Everything tells us that our person is a development from our character. In the science fiction film Buckaroo Banzai, Lord John Whorfin, the alien from the Eighth Planet says, character is what you do in the dark. In a way, it's very, very true. Character happens on an instinctual, experiential level vis a vis the activity of existence. Babies have character. Little kids already have character. Animals have character. Anybody who's raised an animal from birth can tell that this cat has that character, or that horse has such and such a character. Plants have character. There are grand trees. They're really bad weeds. They're all kinds of things. Character is not at all equivalent to person. A person is several orders of transform different from character. And so individuality, which is a Greco-Roman idea based upon a further integration of character, is a severely flawed template by which to work. And so in Greco-Roman times, though, all of the literature of the intellectuals talks about defining what you mean so that we know what you're talking about. The vast population of men and women did not live by that standard at all. They lived by a cycle of what is called mystery religions, and almost every man and woman in Greco-Roman times lived in a sophisticated version of what was there, not only in the ancient Near East, but was there for tens of thousands of years since Paleolithic times. Just a couple of months ago, they discovered a new Paleolithic cave in the Dordogne valley in France called Cussac. And Cussac is a huge system of caves filled with prehistoric paintings that have never been seen for maybe 25 30,000 years. They are there intact and eventually we'll see a books and publications come out on it. Paleolithic art shows that even 40,000 years ago, men and women very similar to us. We wouldn't be able to tell them apart if they were dressed like us. The confidence was that there is a cycle of transform whereby formed objectivity melts into its original process, and out of that original process, which gains a new quality by having the form melted back into it, that process gains a new quality. It's like once you've brought something out of a process and made it objective into a form, then you melt that back into the process. The process gains a qualities that were not there before, so that the new process is now a Saturated form of the old process, and what comes out of that new super saturated process is a super saturated form. And that once you understand that this is a cycle of how this happens, one is able to see that while existential things come out of the process of nature, once they melt back into nature, the next process that comes is a super saturated version of it. Life forms come out of the process of nature, but when life forms die and go back into nature, they carry something back into nature that wasn't there before. So that nature is no longer just nature, but becomes a supersaturated version of itself, and out of that supersaturated version of itself, new, more powerful forms can be developed. And the ancient wisdom for 40,000 years at least, has been that what comes out of the now supersaturated nature is our mind. What? The human mind is a new form. It's not on the same level as Existentials. It is a form that has come out of the supersaturated experience, the mythic level that it contains already in its flow, language and feeling, and that when the mind goes back, melts back into that process, not just of myth, but with death goes back into nature. A third process comes out of that. That is the process of the magical language realm of consciousness, the supernatural realm. And that if you could bring a form out of the supernatural realm, it would be doubly supersaturated. And those forms are art forms. So that art forms are two levels beyond what existential forms are. Phenomenal forms, if you can rate them one mental form, symbolic things would be two. But art forms would be a third level. But when art forms go back into the process of consciousness, when they melt back into the process of consciousness, it becomes that supersaturated quality known as history. What forms would come out of history. Out of the superconscious form of history. Those forms an ancient Greek word, for it was scientia. You would find scientific forms, and those scientific forms are the forms in heaven. Those are the forms in God's realm. And those forms, if they would melt back into reality, would produce what we experience as the mystery of nature, which starts it all over again. So that there was a great cycle of process and form coming together. And the key to it in ancient times they didn't have much to go on. And so they used the sun and the moon. The sun is the constant form. The moon is constantly going through phases. So at the moon is a symbol index for process, and the sun is a symbol index for objectivity. And so one finds again and again and again the use of sun and moon together as a set, as a pair, as the basic pitch pipe index made more sophisticated because the movements of the five planets are obviously related to this, one gets an index of sun and changing moon, and those together give you the sense of what we would today call a sine wave of energy frequency. They calibrate the frequency, but within that frequency there are definite notes, and the notes are the movements of the planets. So the earliest music is actually a cosmology, a cosmology of five notes, the pentatonic scale. Within the movement of sound and silence. And out of this comes a tremendous development of the sense of civilization. For the classical Greeks of the 400 BC. At the beginning of that time period, there was a conviction that they were on the verge of great discoveries. And at the end of that time period, there was the deep fear that they had outstripped their capacity to handle even themselves, and that the greatest enemy of all was self-knowledge, that what had been the lure earlier in the century was now the number one devil. And so you find in the Greek experience of the fifth century BC, a scenario which has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it becomes a mythic prototype. Now, the Greeks were never, despite all of the hoopla. They were never very powerful. They were always great convincers, great salesmen, great travelers, great raconteurs. But they were never powerful. The people who were really powerful were the Romans. And Rome was really powerful when Rome took over the world. It swallowed whole. The Greek teaching the Greek prototypes undigested and they swallowed whole. This entire mythology of the failure of nerve. And all during the Roman centuries, the Roman millennium, you find them trying to protect themselves from the inevitable fearfulness that self-knowledge is going to sabotage your power base. And in American history, it's known as Puritan fear. The one thing that you fear most is that you might really break through into ungodly, magical realms of deviltry, where your Faustian lure for self-knowledge really worked. Let's take a break. Let's come back. And we're trying to appreciate what a difficult process history is and why we can't handle history. And it's not only that we just can't handle history, but we can't handle history with ideas. Ideas are not strong enough in the sense that they are of the wrong kind of form to handle history with. When you handle the process of history with ideas, you get something which is reductive and masks itself as if that were history. And if you don't know any better, then you assume that that is history. If you try to handle the historical process with ideas, you put ideational forms on consciousness so that the mind assumes that those forms have a process which happens. And instead of dealing with history, you deal with politics. So that politics is a regressive form, a kind of a decayed version, masking itself as if it were history. And so when you work with the chronology of historical development and assume that by indexing it, by looking at the way in which political forms Deal with it. This goes into a further decay because regression always continues. It continues until it gets to the lowest common denominator. And the next regression is from the ideas the symbol level to the rituals. The ritual action level. And it's on the ritual action level, on the existential level that human beings coming back to it from a failure of nerve on the conscious level, try to enforce ritual actions which are given shape and boundary by powerful ideas. And because they're not easy to maintain vis a vis nature, because nature does not fit into political rituals at all. Not at all. Nature is oblivious to political rituals. It was pointed out by the first astronauts orbiting the planet that there are no lines separating the countries. There are no pink countries and yellow countries and green countries. You can't see political divisions on the planet. They don't. They're not there. So that all the globes of the Earth that have political divisions are regressive metaphysical fantasies. And this is an extremely difficult process to reverse, because the reversal of that kind of a reversal takes a double transform. And it's almost impossible to find a way to do that. The Greeks never found a way. When the Peloponnesian War was over, Athens, which was the head of one of the most powerful political leagues ever seen up to that time, became in the space of one generation, no more than a university town. It was a place for people to go and take an intellectual vacation. But it never again was a power. Sparta, which was on a level of Athens in political power, became nothing more than a forgotten village. There was a British classicist who went to Sparta in the early part of the 20th century and he was dumbfounded. He said, it's hard to believe that this village was ever, ever anything other than just a village. There are no buildings, there are no monuments. It's just a village. Athens maintained its place because of the colossal achievement centered around the Acropolis. The buildings on the Acropolis centered around the Parthenon, and it is the Parthenon, with its context of the Acropolis, set in the context of all the great writers of the fifth century BC that made Athens seem like it was still a power. But when Alexander the Great came to Athens Even as a young man, almost just still a boy in terms of age. He just told the Athenian city council that if they would behave, they would be able to carry on under his aegis, but that they had absolutely no power in the world whatsoever. And Athens turned over the keys of control to Alexander without any kind of conversation at all. In the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. He writes about the history of how this watershed came to be. And in his history, the synthesizing structure of the whole thing is the development of the powerful ideas that went into the war. But his differentiating structure is in terms of major figures within the history, the persons who made the history, who made the decisions so that persons in Thucydides are the differential structure and the ideas are the integral structure. And when you have them both together, you have the sun and the moon. And the fact that he was able to weave and braid them together to bring a, an integral form of structure into juxtaposition with a differential form of structure that makes Thucydides history one of the great documents in world civilization. Now we find in China the earliest history, the Book of Documents, properly known as the Shu King or Shu Ching. When you look at the Book of Documents, it is a collection of documents selected sometime around the six 50s to six 30s BC, and the selection of the Book of Documents concerns the development of dynastic China, especially the way in which out of the early kings like Yao and Shun came the First dynasty, almost known as a phantom dynasty, because until our time the archaeology showed almost nothing. The Shah dynasty And the Shah, followed by the first really powerful Chinese dynasty, the Shang, whose bronzes still survived to this day and show the tremendous crunch of power by taking animal forms and human power forms and intermeshing them and putting them into those bronze forms that, in a monumental way, show that the Shang were there to stay forever. But the Shang bronzes had their day, and the Shang dynasty gave way to the jo and the jo people. Instead of going for the kind of armored power, went for the bright newness of new ideas, and out of it, out of the birth of the Zhou dynasty, comes like the Book of Psalms, the Book of Odes, and eventually the selection of the Book of Documents came into a form about the time that the Zhou dynasty was shifting from what is called the Western Zhou to the Eastern Zhou, where the Western Zhou that had been the bright people coming in with new ideas. One of their ideas was to recut the I Ching. Instead of using a heavenly pattern for the I Ching, one used a differentially conscious harmony pattern from man. That man was able to handle transforms and transform powers, and that instead of being bound by the categories of previous divinatory structures, he was now given the powers to transform himself by using the previous limitations as just guides for a new kind of navigation, that the old forms were like the shoreline and headlands of land structures. But that man was now out on the open seas of his historical freedom, and he could navigate and sail around these coasts and land wherever he wanted to, and go back out again. And so with the early Joe, you find a completely different style. You find a Chinese style of historical awareness. That man is an actor who rewrites the stories is not limited to the myths, no matter how powerfully you commandeer the myths. And so the Shu Ching, the Chinese Book of History, is extremely important because it shows that about 200 years before the Greeks in Thucydides, that they began to have a sense of history. There is a history sense, but it's not until later that China, about 150 to about 100 BC. The greatest Chinese historian, Sima Qian. Sima Qian, in his records of the Grand History, puts forth that the events are all clustered around the synthesizing and differentiating capacities of great individuals that one must look to people. History is not so much just made by individuals, but history in its resonances Says, always carries the tone of the differentiating capacity of conscious persons. It's not power that makes history, but it's the ability to navigate powerful forms by personal artistry. So that one opens up a map of procedure rather than having to follow a plan of integral structure instead of ideas. By the plan being the way in which you act, you navigate freely in terms of where you want to go, in terms of maps that are available, but you don't follow the maps so much as you use the maps as a tool for your own navigation. Later on, many thousands of years later, a great linguist and logician named Alfred Korzybski was famous for a phrase he used. The map is not the territory, even though a map is very powerful. Don't mistake the map for the territory. Um. This quality in Shimkin is also here in Thucydides. About 400 BC. It's not an idea so much as it is a realization that powerful persons are important in political processes, but that conscious artistic persons are able to navigate in terms of the process of history itself. And so history belongs to those who literally can use the transforming capacities of the person. History is a spiritual power. To use a simple way of speaking is not at all a material power. This is a a special interest to us, because one of the most differentially conscious persons in world history is Benjamin Franklin. And we're pairing Benjamin Franklin with Thucydides for our exploration. And in particular, we're taking from Franklin his own autobiography. Now, what's interesting, as we said last week, is that there are so many versions of the autobiography. Franklin did not even begin writing it until he was 65 years of age, and he never finished it. And he wrote in it intermittently for about 20 years. And it exists in four parts, ostensibly, but three of the four parts were never published in English. They were published in French editions, and it wasn't until 1868 that there was an English edition of Franklin's autobiography, and immediately it was criticized by everyone as being incomplete, a very bad translation from the French. And why would we have a translation from the French when the original is in English? Now a very wealthy American named Henry Huntington, Henry E Huntington, a railroad magnate, bought the original manuscript and put it in his library, which is the Huntington Library here in Los Angeles, and that's where it is. And after the Second World War, the director of the Huntington Library got interested. Let's do an edition of Franklin's autobiography. We have it. Let's do an edition. And he found that it wasn't so easy to do, because Franklin's autobiography is not at all an integral, sequenced chronology of someone's life. It is a highly prismatic jewel of constant self recollection, of self-consciousness, and as you move through it, every time you add something new, you have to go back and reread what you already read in a different light. So that to use computer language, Franklin's autobiography is an algorithmic Self-improving autobiography, and the reader learns to do this every time he reads in it that Franklin's autobiography is not about him, it's about the reader discovering that you are much more than you thought you were, because you have, like a jewel, many dimensions that you were not even aware come into play, and that you have an art of living that is much stronger than the natural tendency to consider that when you die, your life is over. That human significance continues beyond death, beyond the grave, and in fact sometimes increases greatly. Benjamin Franklin is much more important in 2001 today than he ever was during his life. And he was the most famous man alive towards the end of his life. What is captivating about Franklin is an exponential understanding of what was captivating about Franklin in the salons of Paris, in the salons of Paris in the early 1780s. Every man in the beautiful big Louis the 14th rooms wore wigs. Franklin wore his hair natural, long and gray, and he smiled at the French ladies and said, I'm a natural savage. How about it? And whenever you see portraits of Franklin in the salons of Paris, all the women are clustered around Ben. After 50 years of marriage to his wife, Deborah Read in his 80s. Franklin proposed a possible liaison with the widow of the great scientist Helvétius Madame Helvétius, and she was in her late 50s, early 60s, and still very attractive. Used to have all the young men clustered around her because there was something mysteriously magnetic about her. And Franklin, in writing to her, said, you know, we would really be interesting together. And he was over 80 and she was nearly 60. It's this quality that a human being who becomes aware that their harmonic, the resonances of their conscious present, can change the very structure of the way in which nature works, and that Mother Nature loves us to such an extent that she welcomes us. She loves us in such a way that she gives us the freedom to be more than what we would have been if we'd remained at home with her. She turns us loose to go out into a wider world to explore, and loves us in this way. Whereas a political mother will never let you go, she protects you all the time by keeping track of what you're doing to prevent you from hurting yourself, to prevent you. And this call is monitored for your own assurance. So that big Brother tyrannies are perfect masculine versions of the overweening mother. And it's a very big problem. And it was a big problem in Thucydides time. It became intolerable in Franklin's time. But what's interesting in Franklin's time is that the weight of probability was completely against there ever again being any kind of individual achievement in terms of opening up a historical process to an individual. To put it simply, the weight of tradition and authority that had made political forms and their chronological sequencing so powerful and so dominant that they had co-opted the entire structure of the human mind in the West. The probability of someone looking outside of that realm was near zero. And yet someone like Benjamin Franklin pulled a coup on the situation. He simply changed the entire structure of his mind, and he changed his mind in a very particular way. He changed his mind so that it never again would be content to be formed, so that he developed a mind that was always open, because it was always learning and changing, and that as long as you keep it learning and changing and open, it will never regress because it doesn't have a chance to settle into the taste for an ideological form, it never then will regress back to a ritual comportment which is standardized. Now, this was extremely difficult in his time because of two great movements. One of them was Puritan Boston. The other was Quaker Philadelphia. Franklin, born in Puritan Boston and Puritan Boston, was dominated by the kind of beautiful rhetorical authoritarian voice embodied in a man named Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather was the most powerful preacher of the day. He had a son who became also very powerful, and his son was named Increase Mather. More of the same. And increased Mather when he found a Puritan poetic genius who came in from England. This Puritan poetic genius named Edward Taylor came into Boston. He joined the household of the Mathers. And here is the poetical works of Edward Taylor. Kind of interesting, because they found his manuscript in the Yale University Library, where it had been lost for 250 years. His manuscript was in the Yale University Library because his grandson, Ezra Stiles, was the president of Yale University at one time. After the founding president of the university, a great man known as Jonathan Edwards, who died before he was a year in office. Yale was founded and Edwards was the first president. Edwards, famous for his philosophical theology. Images or Shadows of Divine Things by Jonathan Edwards, written about 250 years ago, and Edward Taylor's grandson was the second president of Yale University. But Edward Taylor's great work is. This is volume one. There's another volume, equally huge upon the types of the Old Testament. His complex philosophical theology, welcomed in Puritan Boston, welcomed as the fundamental truth of all time. The ultimate Puritan theological philosophical characterization of man's mind and life and reality. And in it you find all the types of human capacity based on the Old Testament. And in the first half you find Abraham, Isaac. Jacob. Joseph. Moses, Joshua, Samson, David. Solomon, Jonah. These are the types. They're not figures in books that are nice to read. These are eternal types that God has decreed. This is how it is scripturally, and you damn well better learn it. And the second book is all about the vignettes of ritual comportment, which are eternal the feast days, Passover, Pentecost, Sabbath offerings, Feast of atonement, Feast of Tabernacles, unclean Touchings, Noah's Ark, pillar of fire, and on and on. These ideological forms impressed like iron cookie cutters into ritual. Comportments was exactly what was considered the saving intelligence of the day by someone like a Cotton Mather and Cotton Mather, whose great power as a speaker he was a spellbinding speaker, assured everyone that they had better watch out for their souls, because the one thing to watch out is the devil's lure of you trying to develop yourself beyond natural bounds, which God has already given to you. It's almost like in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the rings, where the faithful hobbit friend of Frodo, Sam Gamgee, meeting wizards for the first time, says, oh, Mr. Frodo, don't let them turn me into something unnatural. Wizards transform. And it's interesting to see that the Old Testament is the template. There's no mention in here of the New Testament. Whereas Cotton Mather put the ultimate condensation of the Old Testament into the figure of Jesus Christ. And the only way to make this the ultimate was to say, well, he obviously is the eternal type. Before there were any other types, before existence, before anything else. And in this Cotton Mather wrote a monumental book. It's called Bonifacius. Its subtitle is An Essay upon the good that is to be devised and designed by those who desire to answer the great end of life and to do good while they live and to do good in Cotton Mather's way, was to stay within the safe confines of eternal types. And this is doing good, that human nature tends to stray, and that we must let human nature have little driblets of straying, so that we can immediately pounce on them with directions from our authoritarian training to correct them so that you do not keep yourself confined so that you do no bad, but you let yourself have little bits of designated incremental freedom so that the bad tendencies will come out like sweat, and you can immediately wipe them with the nice towels of correcting doctrine. And by this way, you keep the population happy, under control and real in God's eyes so he doesn't get pissed off. When Benjamin Franklin was 16 years old, he took on Cotton Mather. He wrote a series of anonymous letters by silent do Good. Silent Do good was this anonymous woman who was having all this problem with men and life and herself. And she's got a body and God knows, as Mark Twain once said, we're all as bad as God made us, and some a great deal worse. But the effrontery of 16 year old Benjamin Franklin, he sent these silent dogood letters into his brother's newspaper. His brother who? James, who really commandeered in a good Cotton Mather way and was teaching his younger brother to behave, to be really nice and keep at those type fonts. And so here, Benjamin Franklin, setting type and setting his silent. Do good letters into. Type and printing them. And everyone in Boston was reading them. Well when it got out he had to leave town. And that's why Benjamin Franklin at 17 got out of Boston and headed for Philadelphia. And when he got to Philadelphia, he was there for about a year, and he had to leave town there and went to London. And he was there for a while in London, and then had to leave town and came back. And next week we'll take a look at the incredible morphing journey of Benjamin Franklin, as he kept leaving places so fast and so often that as someone once observed about Franklin, it's difficult to find the shape of the man. It's as if he doesn't have a shape at all. What he has is an increasing hurricane of activities and mental development that finally, instead of impressing themselves upon that dough of political expectation, began a feast of discovery that goes beyond the capacities of anyone to even imagine. By the time Benjamin Franklin died at age 84, he was one of the most extraordinary figures of all time. When he was 32 years old. A strange event happened in Philadelphia, which involved him. He was a printer of all kinds of things. This is a book published by the American Philosophical Society, which he founded in Philadelphia. He based it on the Royal Society of London, and it's still there. And this is a catalog of all of his printing, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And because in those days when you printed something, you had to set it by type. So Franklin literally read everything in this letter by letter, not just word by word. He printed all the political, all the theological, all the philosophical documents that were published. Most of the publishing was in Philadelphia at the time in the colonies. And so Franklin became de facto a man who had proof read the knowledge of his time. He literally had held all the language in his hand in the palm of his hand. It's almost like in the ancient beginnings of written language cuneiform, which is the first style of continuous written language. Cuneiform tablets were not big tablets. They were always palm sized, so that literally one to know something in terms of a written language grasped it because you could hold it in your hand. That's where the gesture comes from. You got it because you held it in your hand. Franklin literally did that in Philadelphia. He got interested in every kind of human activity, and he was interested, especially in those activities that tried to go Outside of the political and theological forms, and one of the forms that he got interested in was the early development of Masonic ritual in Philadelphia. And because it was such a strange thing at the time for colonials, several rough young men took a half wit and took him into the Masonic Lodge and wanted to make a parody of the initiations. And they had this bowl of brandy that they were going to get him drunk with, and they lit it on fire, and the brandy spilled on the man and burned him up to death. And the papers carried all of this, that Franklin was involved in these kinds of devil worship kinds of things. And so Franklin wrote to his mother and father, who was still alive in Puritan Boston, and he writes, doubtless I have my share. And when the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered with the unavoidable influences of education, custom, books, and company upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity, who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms that all the doctrines he holds are true and all he rejects are false. And perhaps the same may be justly said of every sect, church, and society of men, when they assume to themselves that infallibility, which they deny to the popes and the councils. I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects. And if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me. I am sorry that you should have any uneasiness on my account, and if it were a thing possible for one to alter his opinions in order to please others, I know none whom I ought more willing to oblige in that respect than yourselves. But since it is no more in a man's power to think than to look like another, methinks all that should be expected from me is to keep my mind open. No more next week.