History 3

Presented on: Saturday, July 21, 2001

Presented by: Roger Weir

History 3

Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 81 of 104

History 3: Historicity
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, February 6, 1999

Transcript:

This is History 3 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 civilization to today that we know what is going on and we don’t need to learn. And it is this naiveté that has been exposed now for several hundred years, in a very scientific mathematical way.

Two individuals stand out in this expose: 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 is David Hume. David Hume whose treatise on human nature and enquiry into human understanding established the great philosophic monumental understanding that perception is discontinuous. Along with Bishop Barclay and several other writers at the time, in the early 1700’s 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 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 doksa, 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 ratios, secret proportions that are not available to common sense, that are not available to opinion, that do not register in naïve perception, 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 Ipsa dikson; he said it. The master said it. And these little phrases were kept for about 10 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 minds 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’s a 1989 world literature guide to Franklin’s autobiography, in a standard academic series. The author P.M. Zall, Paul Zall, written a number of books on Franklin, mostly the wit and wisdom of Franklin, and he also co-edited the edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography that we’re using. Zall is a very quiet well groomed personal academic, who inhabits the lower floors of the Huntington Library. And when I was researching Franklin he hardly ever talked to me, even though I was there for a year researching in the same isles and the same material.

There occurs in here a characterization of Franklin which is very peculiar. This is 1989, it’s still current in 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 moralists among his contemporary Samuel Johnson than to his friends Hume and Voltaire in their eagerness 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 Zall is any different from 20 or 30 thousand scholars who occupy comfortable sinecures and have, not only for generations, but for thousands of years.
And to paraphrase Andrew Marvel: 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 phrase of one U.S. president) perfectly clear. 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 a first dimension means that change is fundamental to reality and not existence. That existence is a flowering of change. So that existentials are not cut outs that occur and does always occur in exactly that way and that you cannot tack down the ritual comportment objectivity to snap shots 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 its 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 human 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 teaching the same insight. And in China Lao Tsu 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’s 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. It’s 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, in India, in 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 changingness 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 toned 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’s 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 or 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’s 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 Diotema, and Diotema was 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 too 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 the 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.

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 with something which is extremely rare and as you can see many people think that this is dismissable. This is exactly the point where one needs the yoga to stay with the enquiry. 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 enquiry 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, engrained response is that the authority of the state, the authority of the tribe, the authority of the culture is endangered by science. And 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, 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. It 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 are extraneous.

No one is saying that art is more important 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 1700’s 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 God’s fire. It was the basic reality of process by which nature really works. And his work on this, his writings on this formed the basis of his fame at the time.

I 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; the 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, it was published in London. The complete works in philosophy, politics and morals of the late Dr. Benjamin, now first collected and arranged with memoirs of his early life written by himself. And they explain in here that they have had to use the French translation of Franklin for his auto biography, 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 tri-lingual 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 Dr. 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 Dr. Franklin in his will consigned his manuscripts. Dr. 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 Dr. 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 emanuences for many months in copying, ransacked our public libraries, that nothing might escape, and at length had so far prepared the works of Dr. Franklin for the press that proposals were made by him to several of our principal book sellers 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, 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 its fair market. The proprietor, it seems, had found a bitter 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 remuneration for suppressing them. This at least has been asserted by a variety of persons both in this country and in 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. 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 was 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 reuses. 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’s 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 4 or 5 thousand 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 Jonathon Edwards. And Jonathon 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, excellent. But hidden away are a few sentences in Edwards which have escaped attention, or if they have been seen they’ve been shunted aside. Here is a paragraph from a book of Jonathon 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 and there 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 Jonathon 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, it’s published in 1948 when people were not watching as closely as they’re 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 Gilled and many others of the most excellent medicines are 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 counterfitness 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.

BREAK

I had a Finnish friend of mine who was a jet pilot who survived a crash in Viet Nam at about 200 mph and they counted him out for dead and when he was put back together, he had this deep physiological capacity to ball energy and throw it a 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 stories about the fourth dimension in the 20’s and 30’s and 40’s as if time were difficult. As if a four 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 into consideration, because their consciousness didn’t extend that far. And so the mathematic doesn’t really apply there. Your 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 eachother because of expansions. Expansions of consciousness.

And 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 sapien species that occupied the earth without very much difficulty. The same earth at the same time for several millions 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 an 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 will work.

. . . . . .

INCOMPLETE


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