History 3

This is history. Three and as you can see, it's a very difficult procedure to keep flowing in a process which is so hyper conscious as history. We are taught from cradle to grave and from the beginnings of civilisation to today, that we know what is going on and we don't need to learn. And it is this naivete that has been exposed now for several hundred years in a very scientific, mathematical way. Two individuals stand out in this exposé. One of them is Sir Isaac Newton, whose 1687 monumental Principia mathematica established that the natural perception, common sense understanding of nature is severely limited and does not go into the necessary proportions and ratios that mathematics can probe and deliver and give man a capacity to explore reality, and not just his belief. The second individual was David Hume. David Hume, whose treatise on human nature, An Inquiry into Human Understanding, established the great philosophic, monumental understanding that perception is discontinuous. Along with Bishop Berkeley and several other writers at the time in the early 1700s and by 1751, though almost no one was reading it, no one was appreciating it. Yet there was someone who was reading Hume who appreciated him. There was someone who understood Newton, and that was Benjamin Franklin. At the same time that Hume was bringing out his inquiry into human understanding, Franklin was having his first letters on a theory of electricity written to Peter Collinson in London, so that Franklin's work on electricity is coming out exactly at the same time as David Hume's enquiry into Human Understanding.

These works make it plain that the classic understanding of the Greeks clustered around Socrates and Plato in Athens around 400 BC, that human opinion is not trustworthy. The Greek word for opinion was doxa, and out of this comes the word which English? Protestant Christianity used to make doctrines of final belief called doxologies. The emphasis that Socrates placed in the Athens of the time was the emphasis also that is, there in the original sense of history, and it is in the sense of history that we find the first revelation of the Pythagorean understanding, that secret ratio's secret proportions that are not available to common sense, that are not available to opinion, that do not register in naive perception, Option control the structure of reality. One of the most succinct phrases that comes down as one of the sayings of Pythagoras. The Greek term was ipse dixit. He said it, the master said it, and these little phrases were kept for about ten generations before they were committed to some kind of written matrix. One of the sayings of Pythagoras is that geometry is history, geometry is history. And of course, one of the great developers of that Pythagorean insight into structure was Euclid, whose geometry is a Pythagorean exposition of how to develop the mind's rationality and wean it away from opinion.

Wean it away from belief by teaching it to discipline its progress of inquiry, to develop from beginning axiomatic seeds the expansion of a particular kind of mathematical mind, so that one learns to see the hidden structure that is behind the play of phenomenal reality that is, underneath the quality of perceptual common sense belief. Now, this is extremely difficult for us today. It was almost impossible 2300 years ago. It was called Mystic Visionary who knows what 2500 years ago? In order to wean themselves away from criticism, the early Pythagoreans moved to southern Italy. And after a number of years there, their community was burned out. People were slaughtered. Pythagoras himself was killed even though he was near 80, so that there has always been a quality of a kind of quasi Frankenstein lurking behind the intelligence that goes beyond common sense, that goes beyond belief. And so human beings, men and women have for the last 2500 years especially kept a guarded quality of releasing. The education that leads to this kind of freedom. Franklin himself is a case in point. The characterization of Franklin. Here is a 1989 World Literature Guide to Franklin's autobiography in a standard academic series. The author, PM Zahl, Paul Zahl written a number of books on Franklin, mostly the wit and wisdom of Franklin, and he also co-edited the addition of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography that we're using. Zal is a very quiet, well-groomed, personal academic who inhabits the lower floors of the Huntington Library.

When I was researching Franklin, he hardly ever talked to me, even though I was there for a year researching in the same aisles of the same material. There occurs in here a characterization of Franklin, which is very peculiar. This is 1989. It's still current. 2001. It's held as a standard in universities around the world that this is the way to look at Benjamin Franklin. How does it read? Although it is silly to speak of Franklin as a romantic. I do believe his private morality places him in the tradition of Christian humanism, and thus closer to the more celebrated moralist among his contemporaries, Samuel Johnson, than to his friends Hume and Voltaire. In their eagerness to transfer the seat of moral authority from religion to some kind of universal common sense that was unfortunately limited to the philosophical elite. Though enlightened as to his philosophical friends, Franklin retained the respect for religion he absorbed with his mother's milk. I'm sure that if you put on a table mother's milk and Voltaire and Hume, that Franklin would have had no difficulty Distinguishing between those two choices. It is a catastrophic lack of courage of heart that is demonstrated in these kinds of things. Not that Zoll is any different from 20 or 30,000 scholars who occupy comfortable sinecures and have not only for generations, but for thousands of years. And to paraphrase Andrew Marvell.

If we had world enough and time, dear scholars, it would be no crime. But we don't have world enough and time. The powers of human capacity, with atomic and molecular and cellular and genetic manipulative capacities have reached a threshold where we must become conscious on a populace level. And so this kind of education comes to history as a culmination of processes that become increasingly refined and to dismiss, for whatever reason, the pressing of our inquiry into these levels is to misunderstand. Now, if I move my hands in space, perception and common sense are fine. The ritual structure of gesture and of movement founds itself on Existentiality. And it is something to use the phrases of one US president. Perfectly clear. It's perfectly clear. I'm waving my hand in space. What is not clear is that I'm moving my hand in space, and it is indexed by time. You can't taste time. You can't see time. Ordinarily, you can't hear time provisionally. And yet space does not have any existentiality without a time base at all. So that the first deep critical understanding in the 20th century is that time is not a fourth dimension added to space, But that time is the first dimension out of which space blossoms. The characterization of time as the first dimension means that change is fundamental to a reality and not existence. That existence is a flowering of change so that existentials are not cut outs that occur and as always, occur in exactly that way, and that you cannot track down the ritual comportment of objectivity to snapshots and cut outs that you have to consider in all truth.

The development through time of any existential. If you take a time lapse photograph of a flower, you can see it coming out of the stem into the bud and flowering and then going through it's wilting and going back into the earth. By the time of Newton and Hume, it was certain that not only is there a time dimension in space, but that there is a conscious dimension in space as well. The phrase that Hume used, I believe, he said. Hume, an observation is an indelible part of the way in which nature occurs. The human mind was identified at that time as being the locus of consciousness, and still is largely. The mind is from the brain. The brain is in the head. The head is in the cranium. The cranium is part of the body. And therefore all of this consciousness must come out of the mind, brain, head, body. But the Pythagorean tradition was very clear 2500 years ago. And at the same time that the Pythagorean understanding came out in India, the classical historical Buddha was teaching the same insight. And in China, Lao-tzu was teaching the similar insight that Conscious dimension is not an epiphenomenon of material at all. The mind is not the brain, and consciousness is not the mind.

That there is something else that has happened that is occurring, and it's related to the way in which there is a development, there is an evolution. It's related primordially in the way in which space comes out of time. That spatial expansion comes out of time is somehow deeply related to the way in which feeling comes out of the cadence of music, so that one of the earliest qualities of philosophy, the love of wisdom, was that the harmonics of music that index the structure of feeling have a deep parallel to the way in which existence in space comes out of time's changing sequence as fundamental. You can't get more fundamental than that. So that there is a quality of intelligence that comes into play and stirs around for several thousand years in China and India and Greece, many other places. This quality of understanding is that somehow The process of feeling is related to the process of nature in its primordial changing ness, and that flowing in a similar way is a third process consciousness. So that insight and feeling and nature do not align as things, but that they resonate together into a harmonic as like wave flows. That the energies of nature's change, the energies of feeling, tone, experience and the energies of conscious insight can be arranged in a wave front, an energy pattern which contains within it an encoded Informational base that translates into the world as we know it, as well as the world in which we can discover it.

What was staggering in the 400 seconds BC was that there was not only the resonance of nature and its change, and the resonance of myth and its feelings, and the resonance of what we call today consciousness and its insight. But that there was a fourth process, and that process was history, and that history is a process related to those great processes of nature, myth and vision of our consciousness, and that the combing out of this enormous quadratic of process was so formidable that it was considered at the time of its discovery. In the 400 BC in Greece, it was considered a threat to all the authority of the time. Thucydides was killed, Socrates was killed. Anyone dealing with it was simply killed. We have talked about how when you look at Thucydides history, his emphasis goes upon the working part, which is responsible for the array of the historical process being in consonance with the process of consciousness and insight as its functioning, and having an inverse relationship to the further back process of myth that somehow history is very similar in its process and resonance to vision, but is like an inverse process to the way in which myth works. And that this was noticed by Pythagoras and passed on, especially through a lineage that came to Plato. His teacher was Socrates.

Socrates teacher was a woman named Diotima, and Diotima was a Pythagorean of the first generation, so that Plato's understanding of the cosmos is Pythagorean. Direct line. The Timaeus is very Pythagorean. The understanding was that as history is somehow an inverse process to myth, Pythagoras saw that consciousness is somehow an inverse process to nature, not that it's unnatural, that would be a polarity, but that it had a different kind of relationship. It wasn't just a similar repeat of nature on a higher level, that would be a metaphysics, but that consciousness was a complementarity to nature. So to history, then, is a complementarity to myth, So that history is not at war with mythology, but is a complementarity that seeks to bring out hidden structures that were not accessible because they were not visible, they were not knowable on a mythic level. And because myth, styles culture, it wasn't culturally possible to even guess at the powers and structures of history. No tribe, though all tribes have tradition. No tribes have history. All cultures have tradition. Their very essence is to sustain that tradition by passing it on. And none of that is history. None of that is history. So that there is a deep Quality of mysteriousness when it comes to consciousness, and the deep quality of mysteriousness is raised to an exponential level when it comes to history, so that no human populations have ever dealt with history conscientiously and realistically for more than a couple of generations.

And just a handful of people just trace elements, really. So we're dealing with something which is extremely rare. And as you can see, many people think that this is dismissible. This is exactly the point where one needs the yoga to stay with the inquiry, because an inquiry in a yoga is that you keep evenly distributed the activity so that you do not overweight any part over any other prematurely. And this is what finally yields science. Not the dispassionate inquiry, but the evenly distributed inquiry is scientific. And because our problem is historical in our time, but within that historical problem is a scientific peril. And the common traditional cultural ingrained response is that the authority of the state, the authority of the tribe, the authority of the culture, is endangered by science. That we are seeing now, in 2001, the beginnings of a real witch hunt. The United States Congress is debating whether or not to stop stem cell research. Because this is a threat. These are this is against life. This is like some version of abortion and all of these other qualities which are actually extraneous. You could take 2 billion stem cells and none of them would ever become an individual. It has nothing to do with that doesn't even become an embryo. The failure to understand science is a failure to navigate the oceanic processes of history. Because the failure to navigate the oceanic process of history is directly related to the way in which the mind regresses and chooses to have a ritual basis for its confirmation of objectivity, whereas the real basis of objectivity for the mind is neither the body nor itself the mind, but is the person.

Art. Art is the objectivity. And this sounds very peculiar, because we are so miseducated that one leaps immediately to all kinds of conclusions that have that are extraneous. No one is saying that, well, art is more important than than the mind. It's more important than the body. That's not tenable at all. And indeed, put that way, it sounds ridiculous. But the facts are recalcitrant and don't go away. And the facts of the issue came out most poignantly in the 1700s, in the 18th century, and Benjamin Franklin was really at the center of the whole issue. One of his motives for searching out scientifically, the way in which electricity works, was to establish a clear, distributed understanding of the universal energy. In the 18th century. Electricity. Lightning was the was God's fire. It was the basic reality of process by which nature really works. And his work on this, his writings on this form, the basis of his fame at the time. Now, I've brought the first volume of three. It's a three volume set. This is the first time that Benjamin Franklin's works were collected together as a first edition.

The date on it is 1806. Thomas Jefferson was president. Had just been elected president again. And this volume was not published in the United States. Was published in London. The Complete Works in Philosophy, politics, and Morals of the late Doctor Benjamin Franklin, now first collected and arranged with memoirs of his early life, written by himself, and they explain it here that they have had to use the French translation of Franklin for his autobiography, because they could not get access to the original writing of Franklin. Why? Because Franklin, when he died, he made as his literary executor William Temple Franklin and William Temple Franklin went to London to make arrangements to have a trilingual edition of Franklin's works, including his autobiography, Published simultaneously in English, French and German. And it was never published. Even though the galleys were set up, the arrangements were all made, and here, in 1806, you find an account. I'll read it to you, because almost no one has ever seen this other than a few antiquarians. The character of Doctor Franklin as a philosopher, a politician and a moralist is too well known to require illustration, and his writings, from their interesting nature and the fascinating simplicity of their style, are too highly esteemed for any apology to be necessary for so large a collection of them, unless it should be deemed necessary by the individual to whom Doctor Franklin, in his will, consigned his manuscripts.

Doctor Franklin consigned his manuscripts to William Temple Franklin and to him. Our apology will consist in a reference to his own extraordinary conduct. And here it is in bequeathing his papers. It was no doubt the intention of the testator. That's Doctor Franklin that the world should have the chance of being benefited by their publication. It was so understood by the person in question, his grandson, who accordingly, shortly after the death of his great relative, hastened to London. The best mart for literary property, employed an amanuensis for many months in copying, ransacked our public libraries that nothing might escape, and at length had so far prepared the works of Doctor Franklin for the press that proposals were made by him to several of our principal booksellers for the sale of them. They were to form three quarto volumes, published and unpublished, of Franklin, with memoirs of his life brought down by himself to the year 1757, and continued to his death by the legatee. They were to be published in three different languages, and the countries corresponding to those languages France, Germany and England on the same day. The terms asked for the copyright of the English edition were high according amounting to several thousand pounds, which occasioned a little demur, but eventually they would no doubt have been obtained. Nothing more, however, was heard of the proposals for the work in this. It's fair market. The proprietor, it seems, had found a bidder of a different description in some emissary of government whose object was to withhold the manuscripts from the world.

This is history. Ladies and gentlemen, not to benefit it by their publication. And thus they either passed into other hands, or the person they were bequeathed received a remuneration for suppressing them. This, at least, has been asserted by a variety of persons, both in this country and America, of whom some were at the time intimate with the grandson and not wholly unacquainted with the machinations of the ministry and the silence, which has been observed for so many years, respecting the publication gives additional credibility to the report. What is so dangerous about Benjamin Franklin's writings and his memoirs? One of the little asides William Temple Franklin once said, well, I didn't have any idea that this was important. Really? I thought it was a first draft. The original manuscript, by the way, is now in Los Angeles at the Huntington Library, and it's there. But to try and research it, to have access to it is another issue. I was there for a year, and finally was told that I could not sit at a table. Because tables were reserved for people with big grants from famous universities. And being an independent scholar, I had to read Standing Up. This is 1990. What is the difficulty? What is in jeopardy that is so important that for 2500 years, people are killed for this, that the documentation is shunted aside by enormous, elaborate ruses, that something like this has to be delivered in a small, friendly enclave like this and isn't possible to put out in any kind of expanded forum without real danger.

What is going on here? What is going on is that the problems of history go in such a reverse manner, with the authority of myth, that it becomes a moot point whether anyone still in the mythic womb, still addicted to thinking that mother's milk is all there is, sees anything else as radioactive contamination. Indeed, consciousness for at least a 4 or 5000 years was considered such a contamination that those that investigated it should take themselves away from the world and become monks or recluses. The understanding in Franklin's time. This is from. This is from Jonathan Edwards. And Jonathan Edwards, one of the best minds of the early United States. He was the first president of Yale University. He was one of the most famous preachers of his day, enormously capable. His 18 volumes of collected works are published by Yale, and Just finished is excellent. But hidden away are few sentences in Edwards which have escaped attention, or if they have seen or been seen, they've been shunted aside. Here is a paragraph from a book of Jonathan Edwards, a contemporary of the early Benjamin Franklin. Edwards died in 1757. Images or shadows of divine things. Images or shadows? Shadows are the reverse of images.

There are things. There are images of things that are shadows. Do images have shadows or do things have shadows? There are all sorts of things to bring into play and are shadows of things the same as shadows of images? There are many deep things. Here's how Jonathan Edwards phrased it in this book, hidden away. It's on page 120 of the edition that Yale put out Shortly after the Second World War was published in 1948, when people were not watching as closely as they are watching now of what is released, Edwards writes, and this is directly related to Franklin, to David Hume and his skepticism about the connections of things with their images or the mind, with Newton, with Pythagoras, with the entire tradition. Edwards writes, it is in the natural world as it is in the spiritual world. In this respect that there are many imitations and false resemblances of most things that are the most excellent in the natural world. Thus, there are many stones that have the resemblance of diamonds that are not true diamonds. There are many ways of counterfeiting gold. The Balm of Gilead and many others of the most excellent medicines are many, in many ways, sophisticated. So is Grace counterfeited? And he says a little bit later on that it is the natural way of people who come to a transform of spiritual understanding and seeing through counterfeit ness, that they withdraw from the world.

They become ascetic. They become monks. They go into retreat. They do not any longer participate with the world. It is exactly this monumental flaw that Benjamin Franklin directed his entire life against. Let's take a break. Notice how space energizes. And you can actually work with energized space. I had a Finnish friend of mine who was a jet pilot, who survived a crash in Vietnam at about 200 miles an hour, and I counted him out for dead. And when he was put back together, he had this deep physiological capacity to bawl energy and throw it at someone and hit them. Let's come back to the way in which. Not only is space energized, but time is energized when conscious form composes itself. Art is that kind of conscious time, space, form, and the human person is an art form. So when we talk about person here, we're talking about a conscious time space, a five dimensional form. And it's a powerful realization that a five dimensional form is not imaginable by a four dimensional form. There was a famous little science fiction story called flatland, where two dimensional beings have trouble imagining the third dimension. And people who are in a culture where three dimensions is all that you keep track of because it's only what you can pound, are stymied by the fourth dimension. You'd be surprised to look at the weird science fiction stories about the fourth dimension in the 20s and 30s and 40s, as if time were difficult, as if a fourth dimension into the fourth dimension is some kind of metaphysical, transcendent, who knows what kind of realm when all time space is four dimensional? This is why the equations for both the general theory of relativity and the specific theory of relativity are so poignant and precise.

Why? The Einsteinian universe is much more precise in terms of its cosmic Application and in terms of its subatomic application than the Newtonian. There's nothing wrong with Newton's mathematics for the general four dimensional continuum, but when you go below the atom and beyond the realm of stars, when you go to the galactic and the subatomic levels. Newton's time did not take in to consideration because their consciousness didn't extend that far. And so the mathematics doesn't really apply there. You need a different kind of mathematics to talk about a galactic scale or a subatomic scale of nature. The same is true all through our history, not just for being able to talk about in mathematical terms of a physics, but men and women for many tens of thousands of years have had to recalibrate the way in which they express themselves about nature to each other because of expansions, expansions of consciousness. And the one of the great mysteries is how rapidly our species came into possession of an untrammeled earth about 40,000 years ago, by the introduction of art, of cave art, of Paleolithic art.

Up until that time, the quality for our kind of species of advanced primates was that several species could exist at the same time, and this had been true for millions of years. There are at least three different Pre-homo sapiens species that occupied the Earth without very much difficulty. The same Earth at the same time for several million years. But when a higher calibration comes into play, nature itself seems to take a cue from that and to recalibrate itself. And we're going through a time period now where that's happening, where there is a expansion of consciousness, and nature is responding in such a way that the old forms are simply atrophying because they don't have the vitality necessary to sustain them. And so an education like this is to make available at least an opportunity to inquire as to ways in which one might recalibrate. It's certainly not the only way, but it is a way. And it's a good one. And and will work. We're trying right now, today, this week, last week, the week before and next week. We're trying to bring a consideration of a step of a stage of inquiry. But just as when we talked about vision or art And now we're talking about history. And in a couple of months we'll talk about science. The steps are not existential. They're not steps like you would step going upstairs.

Differential steps instead of being steps are better characterized as phases. They are phases. And thus, instead of having a form of a stairway which you can ascend, these are phases which transform in such a way that they constitute a differential form rather than a set of stairs. Now when we look at the subatomic or the extragalactic scale of reality of nature in its real, we can also look below the cellular level and find a similar realm. And one knows now, in a common kind of opinion that DNA structures life. How does DNA structure life? How how do organic forms come out of the DNA sequencing and they trigger the composing phase? Is there in proteins and proteins fold and its protein folding in myriad ways that are the transforms, the prisms that allow for the DNA sequencing information in time to come into organic forms in space, and that there is a direct complementarity of the way in which consciousness comes into informing space and time, and changing the way in which it calibrates. It isn't just that the observer interferes with the experiment. The observer is a part of the experiment all the time. Benjamin Franklin more and more looks like a pioneer on the scale of Pythagoras. He's one of those individuals who whose life is exemplary of a comportment of discipline, which led not only to an understanding of life in its physicality because of the mind being clear, Player, but of an open ended array of vision, because his consciousness was differential and not limited to an integral mode for its operation, could work integrally very well, could work as well differentially, and that when that kind of differential consciousness, which is generated in vision, is further presumed by a form known as the spiritual person or the artistic person, you get a higher energy array, which is history, and that has a direct quality of calibration based on persons.

Now in Thucydides, the great operating mediating prism are the speeches given by persons. Thucydides composes and makes up. He says. These are speeches that are as close to what report has them, and what they would have said to have expressed themselves at these junctures on these points to these people, so that this history continues its process of unfolding, so that this historical technique of Thucydides, of putting speeches strategically in the mouths of the persons who are making the history, is a special technique. Now There were no translations of Thucydides into Chinese for a long, long time. There are no translations into Chinese of Thucydides until the 19th century, and then sporadic. And yet, one of the greatest of all the historians of China, Sima Qian, puts speeches in the mouths of persons in order to carry the historical process in a conscious way. He does exactly what Thucydides does, even though he's writing about 300 years later.

But Sima Qian is extremely sophisticated in a way that Thucydides is not. Sima Qian lived from about 145 BC to about 85 BC. He lived in that time period. It's the Han dynasty, but it's a particular quality of an era in the Han dynasty, where there was a great intellectual ferment and one of the great heroes of planetary culture, uh, collected a group of intelligent people around him. And in their discussions came the beginnings of a new kind, a new style of historical philosophical discussion, and the book in which the samples of their discussions was preserved is called the Huainanzi. The Prince Liu of Huainan related to the emperor's family. In those discussions, there is a distinct Tao Te Ching quality to the flow of how the historical process actually occurs, which is not there in Thucydides. So that in reading a historian like Sima Qian with great differential consciousness, one comes to understand that this was a tremendous advance in historical development even beyond that of the Greeks, because the understanding here and Sima can, even though he was clearly as constrained as Thucydides by the authorities of the day, he had to watch out what he wrote. There were not as many literate people in the China of Sima Qian as there were in the grace of Thucydides, and most of the literate people in the time of Sima Qian account where all devoted to the service of one man, the Emperor Wen.

Sima Qian was born. The great emperor was Han Wuti. Han Wuti had 130,000 people who ran the Han dynasty for him alone. He made all the decisions, and Sima Kun, when he angered the emperor over something that ostensibly we would have considered a matter for discussion, Sima Qian was given a choice he could either be killed by the state or castrated, and he chose castration so he could complete his history. So he was careful. And yet, in Sima, can you find a very similar use to Thucydides, that it is the composed speeches of people and that index the way in which the historical phase actually unfolds, because it is in the persons that the enfoldment of differential consciousness has achieved form in the first place. Just as in existence, protein folding is the key to the structure of the way things will be existentially. So consciousness folding into the form of the person is the way in which the historical process will read out. It isn't that history is made by great men. That's an idea that veils the deeper realization that's going on here. And of course, one of the classic problems in ancient meditation. Ancient prayer. Ancient yoga was not so much that the mind obviates reality. That's easy to deal with relatively, but it's that the own accomplishments of you as a person obviate your understanding of the science of the process.

You can't understand the cosmos objectively, unless you can bring the form of the person to an evenness of tone. And this is an extremely difficult point. To give you an example. The most sophisticated of all yogas in India that are not from the Buddha Are summed up and presented in the Bhagavad Gita and in the Bhagavad Gita. Yoga is specifically defined. It's as we would call it intellectually. It's a it's an understanding of karma yoga. Yoga specifically defined as evenness of mind. But in the radical development of the implications of the historical Buddha several hundred years after him, the understanding was clearly that evenness of mind is not the highest yoga. Evenness of person is a higher yoga than evenness of mind, and evenness of person is extremely difficult to come by because the mind cannot even itself out. The mind must rely on a transcendental context to put it in words, to even itself out. So to the differential conscious person cannot even themselves out. They must have likewise a kind of a transcendental process by which they even themselves out. And that process is history. So history is an advanced hyper yoga. It's as much more difficult as traditional karma yoga as karma yoga is to tribal ceremony, which is why almost no peoples have ever dealt with it more successfully than just a handful of people. Or if it's a group of people, no more than about three generations, which means that by the time of the grandchildren, the direct personal contact begins to run out, and without the direct personal contact, you lose the calibrating differential tone of the person.

Sima Qian, in one of the great little sections of his history, talks about a man named Meng Tian. You probably never heard of Meng Tian mentions the man who built the Great Wall of China. Yeah, there was somebody who who built it. Meng Tian, his family, the Meng's, were very trusted by the first Emperor of China. The Emperor Chen, who gave his name China Chinese to the Chinese people. Meng Tian's grandfather Mengyao is the one who established the province of Sichuan and added it to China. So you can tell how big scale that they really worked. When Meng Tian was, according to Sima Qian. Uh, Meng Tian was the grandson of Meng Yao. In the 26th year of the First Emperor, notice that he doesn't style him as Emperor Chen or First Emperor like Napoleon was First Consul. Like Augustus, Caesar was the the prince, the first person in the Roman Empire? Always first. Why? Because the one is the template for all the other existentials that are then subservient to that one. Let me put it more succinctly for you. No matter what other others there are, they are but variants of the first one. So if you are the first one, you are the archetype by which anyone else's existence in life happens in the first place.

You're not an authority because you're more powerful. You're an authority because you're the archetypal fount of their reality. Do you get it? In medieval scholastic terms, God is not a white bearded figure. He's the first cause. He's the first mover. Whatever movements happen in the universe are due to the first mover. So you have to understand that this is a power authority hierarchy, which is universal in integral modes of cognition, and that there is no cognition without that mode in working condition, but that consciousness is not a cognitive process. Consciousness is a recognitive process. It's based on memory recognition and not on cognition in any causal way whatsoever. One of the points, as we mentioned earlier today, of David Hume is that there are no connectors in actual empirical fact. It was a great cause celeb in the middle of the 18th century. It meant that there was an impossible gulf between all the elements that are supposed to fit together to make causality, and that the rational assumption that there was a net of causality was completely brought into radical question by Hume's empiricism, and by Bishop Barclay's empiricism, that the empirical fount was that this doesn't happen. On that basis, because it is impossible structurally for it to happen. And if you go back to the radical development in China or in India, you find also there that same skepticism that it doesn't happen that way, that Reality does not happen in the way in which doxa or belief or opinion or tribal tradition says it should happen.

And it doesn't especially happen the way in which ideologies of any kind in the mind understand them to happen. It just doesn't work that way. Nature does operate within a limited range internally, but as soon as you go in any kind of sophistication, higher or lower, deeper, more profound, it doesn't any longer happen that way at all. And one learns that it never did happen that way in the first place. So that the traditional ascription to deep wisdom was shh, don't tell anyone. They will not believe you. They will not know that it's true. And eventually you'll become very reprehensible to them. And they won't come to your lectures anymore. When Simon Kent is writing about Meng Tian. He says in the 26th year of the First Emperor, Meng Tian was able to become a general of kin of the Qin dynasty and pinion kin on account of the long term service given by his family. He attacked Qi and inflicted a major defeat upon it, was appointed prefect of the capital, and Wen Qin had unified all under Heaven. Meng Tian was consequently given command of a host of 300,000 men to go north and drive out the wrong and barbarians, and take over the territory to the south of the yellow River.

He built the Great Wall, taking advantage of the lay of the land and making use of passes. And then Sima Qian goes on to show that when the first emperor died, the next emperor who came in wanted to do away with not only Meng Tian, but his entire family. Because they were threats, because they were still part of the resonance of the old authority. And now the new authority wanted its own authority, wanted its own people in there. And this is the way in which an integral tribal 11 level authority always works. And when it is projected on and grafted on to larger And different forms of humanity. Instead of getting the preservation of a tribe, you get the tyranny of a civilization. And you get the dead end of life on a planet. And it happens extremely fast. In Greek Roman antiquity, the way in which the cosmos was seen as a form was the Ptolemaic universe. Before Newton, the Ptolemaic universe was simply the way in which God had structured everything. And that's how it was. Ptolemy lived in Alexandria, and he lived there in the early second century. He was born about 100 A.D. in Alexandria and lived until about the one 7180s A.D.. Here's a recent little publication on a special book of Ptolemy called The Optics, and you might know enough about science and physics to realize that the first great thing that Newton published that everyone could read was not the Principia mathematica.

That was beyond almost anyone of the time. But Newton's optics could be read, and it was Newton's optics that affected the 18th century's view of how things worked perceptually. Optics is how you see. It has to do with light. It has to do with the eye. It has to do with perception and its relation to conception. Reception. It has to do with light and the way that it creates forms that are visible. So all of that is based together. And Newton's optics displaced Ptolemy's optics. After about 1500 years of uncontested supremacy in the Western world, it's. This little book is published by the American Philosophical Society, Independence Square, Philadelphia, set up by Benjamin Franklin a long time ago. In the preface here we read. Why this particular study at this particular time? Why? Why would you take all the trouble to put this out? 1999. Why would you do this? I can think of at least two reasons, writes the author. The first is historiographical. Historiographical. The title of today's lecture is historicity. Virtually all survey accounts of ancient science leave the mistaken impression that ancient ray theory shared the same basic aims and methods as its modern counterpart, and therefore that the two are generically linked. The source of confusion lies in the fact that, for the sake of simplicity and brevity. Textbook authors emphasize those aspects of Greek ray analysis as specifically applied to reflection and refraction.

Reflection as in like mirrors and refraction, as in like images that have arrays, like rainbows, those aspects of Greek ray analysis that seem most innovative and forward looking and that are thus most resonant to the modern reader. So textbook writers clean it up so it can be easily explained, and so that when people read it and they say, oh, I understand that, they think that that's the way it was. And we're entering into areas where the mind sabotages, by simplistic belief and opinion, the very development of consciousness that leads to understanding and that this happens all the time. This is not just this case in point. It happens all the time, every day, Every minute of every life of every one. It is a chronic illness. It's called thinking that you know and not being able to learn. Viewed selectively in this way, of course, Greek ray theory looks very much like its modern counterpart. In reality, however, the two have little more in common than Neolithic trepanation and modern neurosurgery. Whatever their crude similarities, at a procedural level, ancient and modern ray theory are worlds apart in conceptual and methodological foundations, and the same holds for their fundamental aims. This is not to say that Ptolemy was an idiot. He was the most learned man of his day. But consciousness has expanded enormously and came to rest. Not so much in the presentation here of Ptolemaic optics being not only outdated by Newton's optics, but outdated by the kind of optics that we have at the beginning of the 21st century.

But the deeper issues and problems were in physics. And one of the writers in physics, who's been sort of outlawed to the margin is Wolfgang Pauli. Wolfgang Pauli, who was the head of the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and unfortunately, fortunately was teaching there at the same time as Carl Jung in the 1920s, and that Pauli Paulie became associated with Jung and thus was associated with the idea that these are like metaphysical people parading as scientists. And so a lot of Paulie's work has been set aside, except for his fundamental law called the Pauli Exclusion principle, which we'll get to next week. Here's a little volume, the message of the atoms essays and Wolfgang Pauli and the unspeakable. The unspeakable is the differential conscious complement to the speaking of myths, not myths as falsities, but the way in which myths must be speakable you must be able to narrate the stories on the basis of the images. Otherwise, myths are not real and they have every right to be real as myths, but the language mode needed to talk about differential consciousness on level of scientific form is unspeakable in that way. Not only unspeakable in that way, but not imaginable in the mind. Niels Bohr used to say, if you have images of what I'm talking about, you are misunderstanding me.

You cannot understand quantum mechanics if you have images in your mind. Now, if you're of the Jewish tradition, you realize that this was said about 4000 years ago. If you have an image of God, you're really worshiping a false idol. God is unsayable and unimaginable. It's fundamental, basic tenet of Jewish tradition. If you're worried about some guy with long white hair and a long white beard, you're a barbarian. It isn't that at all. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do. I think the the usual aphoristic way was that man's extremity is God's opportunity. When we come to the end of our capacity to integrate and we stop, not because we need to stop or want to stop, but because we can't go any further. What can we not go any further? We cannot go any further than reacquiring oneness, oneness to reintegrate all the aspects to one, and yet Reintegrating all the way to one is not a stopping point. In fact, one can say in high drama way it is a stopping point. But the momentum goes beyond that because beyond the one is a whole realm of non-connected zero ness. The Tao, which as far as you would care to see, has no walls, has no limits, does not occur in the way in which one would expect forms to occur. It occurs as a differential array of freedom and has nothing to do with mental form at all.

So one of the ways in which one can understand the calibration of art is to Recognize, recognize, recognize that art forms occur in freedom. Our persons occur in a context of freedom. For real. We have no boundaries on us whatsoever in terms of our spiritual person at all, ever. And to not know this means that you're miseducated. It's not that you have the wrong religion, or the wrong metaphysics, or the wrong beliefs. All those are issues that are 4 or 5 orders down below the educational level, where one can know that you are free beyond belief and that the person occurs because of that context being real and not because they are guaranteed rights by some kind of documentation that is speakable. An ideology is just a further integration of a myth. Of a mythology. But at Bastardizes mythology, by bringing it into an ism in doctrine. Rather than leaving it where it is at home, in narrative and in story and in tales. And when you bring image bases that are fluid in experience into a forced, juxtaposed, juxtaposed form of a ideational, doctrinaire idea. Then you, you do a travesty to everything in the message of the atoms. Um, Larry Kenon, uh, a very famous Finnish physicist writes. However, nowadays the investigation of the foundations of quantum theory is dominated by, quote, realism, which means that the influence of the psyche on our conception of reality is ignored.

This book is an attempt to show that this is not possible in quantum mechanics. Not only is this the right choice and that's the wrong choice. Any other understanding is not possible. Contrary to Bohr, Pauli did not avoid the discussion of ontological implications of quantum mechanics. Bohr understood, but he was very cautious of putting it out in such a way that would draw such criticism. That research would be terminated like it was for Polly is excluded. The author of the exclusion principle was excluded. I know, and Polly found in Jung's Unus mundus the Latin phrase means one world. In fact, there was a great Spanish existentialist named Don Miguel de Unamuno. Senor. One world. Polly writes of a cosmic order which is beyond the distinction of physical and psychic as separate aspects of reality. It means a fusion of the outer and inner world, and such considerations led Polly to the borderland between knowledge and belief. And perhaps this explains the repression of his philosophical thought among colleagues in physics. A new quaternary view of science was characteristic of Pauli in his later years. This is in harmony with the holistic nature of quantum theory. The quaternary an attitude emphasizes interdisciplinary wholes, while the present Trinitarian science results in more and more isolated disciplines. This is a very, very deep problem. It is not a problem of opinions. It is a problem of the structure of reality. And we'll look at it deeper next week.