History 4

We come to history four and we're bringing our, our set of a pair of books. Thucydides Great History of the Peloponnesian War and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. We're bringing that pair to a close. And this pair has a set, have introduced us to history, and we're going to move from this set of books, this pair of books, to a new set for the next four weeks. And the new set includes another classic historian Tacitus and another, more modern historian, Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition. I would have used the portable Hannah Arendt, but I want to stick with her book on the human condition. What we're doing with these pairs of books is we're creating a set, and a set allows us to do differential. Analytical, computational, and compositional methods. Applying techniques which belong to consciousness and not just to be stuck on dealing with existentials in a natural, Integral way. Now we're not doing something unnatural, but we're doing something which is a deep outgrowth of transformational nature. As long as we remain within the integral mode, within the integral ecology of activity, of identification, of association, of bringing actions and language and feeling into thought forms, into ideas, into symbolic meanings which can be expressed in an integral way. We're operating in a traditional educated mode, but we are not using the full capacities that men and women have enjoyed for several tens of thousands of years. There is a whole expansion of nature that comes through transformation, and the very first indications that there is something beyond nature, there is something deeper hidden within nature. There is something special that's able to be distilled and goes above nature. All of these kinds of phrases refer to a heavenly quality of man, an above world, or an after life quality of man, a nether world, or a hidden quality of man, an invisible world. And that above world, that nether world that invisible world forms, as it were, not three separate areas, but a great arc of mystery, a great sphere of the unknown. And it is only by our capacity to go from the planes of identifiable shapes in an integral way, from the geometric properties of the planes and the intersecting of planes, to go to the trigonometric functions of spheres, that we have been able to discover a capacity to think beyond the mind in a rational way. Men and women, for as long as our species has been here, have been able to go beyond their minds into realms that at one time were called magic, shamanistic trances, religious ecstasies, higher states of mystery. But about 1800 years ago in Alexandria, the techniques of trigonometric functions were able to be derived and developed from the higher mathematics of the day, and with that one found that there are not only ceremonial functions, but that there are coefficient trigonometric functions that one can understand rationally. And from then on one would have used the term consciousness rather than magic. One would have used the term Expanded capacities rather than some kind of shamanistic journey. And the mystery realms behind life, below life, above life. That whole sphere of the unknown became an area for exploration and the adventure of exploring that completely changed the classical world. That change came in the third century of the common era, the third century A.D. it was the poignant lack of confidence in the old authoritarian structures of understanding that contributed to the collapse of confidence in the third century A.D. and allowed for the emergence of new kinds of mystery religions, among them Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, Mahayana Buddhism, the development of a kind of sociological utopian Taoism in China all over the world, one found the development of men and women in communities of searching the mysteries with a new chance to make it rational to themselves to investigate. And it was no longer a question of just initiation into something magical, but of education into a more conscious way of living. This entire realm is something Which led to the disappearance of empires that had been established on the basis of centuries, if not millennia, of preparation. In China, you found in the third century AD the collapse of the Han dynasty. In the Roman world, the Roman Empire never recovered from the third century A.D.. In India, one finds a tremendous upheaval in the third century AD that eventually, like in the Western world, led to a period a couple of hundred years later of an attempt to bring it back, bring back the old authoritarian power structures with a Baroque efflorescence of newly synthesized speculative metaphysical rehashing in India, you had the Gupta Empire, and in Rome you had the new kind of Christian Roman Empire, not recognizable in any modern sense as Christian, but as a new form of Roman power, this time using a kind of a cribbed Jewish Christian Greek theology as the basis for its authoritarian structure. And in China, of course, you had the period after the Han dynasty of one little petty kingdom after another, trying to take over. And finally the constellation of those petty kingdoms into three big kingdoms. And that romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of the great Chinese novels written in the 17th century, about that time period of how difficult it was for people, for men and women, to make up their minds, of who has the authority, who has the authority to make a structure for life, for understanding, for meaning. In this expanded realm. China took. An adventurous road of trying to bring a new dynasty into being, in terms of the development of the increased capacities of history and science, and it was known as the Tang Dynasty, and that Tang dynasty for the first hundred years or so was an efflorescence called the Golden Age in China, but very quickly, it was apparent that that efflorescence was jeopardizing the very structure of authoritarianism that went to holding it together. And the Tang dynasty, though it went on for another couple of hundred years, ended in a civil war that claimed one third of the population. The population of China about 750 AD was about 51 million, and the population of China and about 780 AD was about 35 million. All due to civil wars, conveniently called for a long time with the discretionary term the An Lushan Rebellion. He was the great general of the day. What's interesting is that the Chinese experience that ruined the Tang Dynasty and ended a great deal of history and science in China. Also appears in Thucydides Peloponnesian War. The pattern is there, and we can take Thucydides at his word, saying, knowing what I know now about myself, about my fellow men, and about the apparent structures of the mind and the patterns of history, all of this will happen again and again and again, until we change the way in which we deal with ourselves, our minds, the world, in terms of a very high powered method of approach that is able to navigate its way in some kind of an energy called history. That history was a process of energy that needed to be navigated, and that there were no seafaring people anywhere in the planet. No one knew how to deal with the powers, with the qualities, with the intricacies of the process of history. The other book that we're using, Benjamin Franklin, is a poignant reminder. He was born about 300 years ago. Poignant reminder that when you look at Thucydides or you look at the Tang Dynasty, you look at the great history of China from the high point of the Han. Sima Qian, when you look at the great historical works, Thucydides at the in the first century, where the Roman Empire had just been formed and was at its genesis and high. Point of delicacy, power and understanding. All of the great historians of the world. Align themselves not in a straight line, but in a great arc of understanding that somehow the process of history involves human beings on a scale where they have not only integrated understanding, but they have differentiated their consciousness. That consciousness is not an element that can be integrated, that it has a complementarity to the existentials, it has a complementarity to the mentals, and that consciousness cannot be kept in a can. It can't be kept in existential forms. It can't be kept in mental forms. That consciousness is not an element amenable to integration, that consciousness is a process rather than an element, and is amenable to differentiation and not to integration, and that somehow the integral and the differential capacities belong together in a set, and that as long as they are taken together, paired in a set, we have an opportunity for the adventure of inquiry to try and find out how they work together, but that if we separate them and take either by itself, either by itself devolves and involves us in that devolution to a point to where we literally are unable to operate. Once you are conscious, you cannot continue to integrate exclusively. It no longer works. It's as if you're trying to play a hand at cards, where the more you play, the more cards turn into jokers, and that eventually every card in the deck is a joker, and that the rules of the game, though they may abstractly hold, no longer apply to any activity. Now, why this should be is not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of analysis. That this is so is a structure which is in place not only in the mind, but in nature, in the way in which the universe works. One of the greatest approaches to this came poignantly enough. In a book. It was written on behalf of the National Defense Research Committee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was written in response to the developments of the Second World War, which included the atomic bomb. It included the V-2 rockets that were captured. It included all the developments of the time, and what the Defense Department wanted to know was, what can we expect? What's in store for us? We have atomic bombs. We have rockets that are apparently going to go to the moon. All the science fiction stuff. Maybe there are aliens. Maybe there are UFOs that are captured. Who knows? But we do know one thing that our rate of expansion of capacity has reached an asymptotic level. It doesn't just double every 18 months, it seems to expand itself into a sphere that goes faster than we can keep up with it. That the avalanche of change, just in terms of the quantity of information this is the 1940s, was already outstripping our ability to keep up with it. That was a half a century ago, and it's only expanded more sense. It's as if you're building bigger and bigger telescopes to look deeper and deeper into the universe. And as you do, the universe expands exponentially more as you can look more so that you're involved, apparently in a situation that in terms of integration is a no win situation. But that same situation in terms of differentiation is an all win situation. If you're trying to look to put a bag around something and you can't, because structurally there's always more every time you try it. If you're addicted to putting bags around things like definitions like empires, political forms, mental structures, you are going to go crazy. Because every time you try to not only bring something together, but to stop leaks, more leaks occur. And it's a maddening process. But if you shift gears and you stop looking at it in terms of a severely Limiting madness and see the same process as an invitation to infinite inquiry and adventure. One becomes joyous, joyous to the point of delirious. The madness of frustration and the delirium of false emulation go together. They are the same coin. Two sides. They are exclusively either integral or just differential. It is only by taking them as a set, as a pair together, that there is an opportunity for something real called education for something. Let's put it into a different word called learning. Learning is only possible if you take integration and differentiation together as a set. One of the all time great examples of it is the Tai Chi symbol. Not yin yang, but tao te. T stands for the one, for Tao for the zero. But no, they don't stand for that. There's no representational function that has any traction in terms of that reality. It isn't that one little part of the symbol represents something that's there, which you could call T, and the other one is representing something which is who knows where representing Dao. That is a carryover of the old integral mind. It is keeping the addiction to integral process alone and transferring it whole hog to a situation that obviates the very nature of that kind of process. And a very similar analogy can be drawn by somebody who goes into differentiation alone. Apparently, wisdom lies not in a median between the two, but in a complementarity of the two modes together as a set. And so deep wisdom is different from knowledge. Knowledge is about understanding the structures that pertain to either integration or to differentiation, whereas wisdom are the two brought together, not just in a synergy that's an integral word, but brought together in a complementarity. One of the earliest Westerners in the 20th century to really understand this was Niels Bohr. The development of quantum mechanics, the development of the extension and expansion of the Bohr atom. And when he understood this, Niels Bohr petitioned in Denmark and got the Danish courts to allow him to put the tai chi symbol on his family crest. He's the first European to have a Taoist symbol on his family crest. This quality is directly related to the way in which science develops out of history, because without understanding the process of history, science is not possible. And without science and history, there is no way to understand why art is indelibly important. Because art is a conscious form and doesn't belong in an exclusively integral mode whatsoever. Art works are differential forms and that the human person is a differential form. One of the shibboleths of modern psychology is that you better get yourself collected so you can find yourself. No one ever found themselves exclusively by collecting themselves. What you find more and more is an identifiable role which you can fulfill. Benjamin Franklin, showing the person as an art form as early as 1771, says at the very beginning of his autobiography, he says, when I was a boy, my father, who married twice, his first wife, had seven children, his second wife had ten children, and out of the 17 children, ten of them were sons and I was the youngest son. I was the 10th son, and so his father, being a good religious person, decided to tithe and to devote his 10th son to the service of the church. And they decided that he should be able to be schooled so that he would fit in and be a good minister. But the difficulty, Franklin says, hidden away in a very quiet phrase, he said, though I started school at age eight, I already could read very well because I can never remember a time when I couldn't read. Franklin is similar to me. I learned to read at age three, and by the time I went to school at age four, I was already reading, and so I dismissed a lot of what was happening. Franklin did the same kind of thing when they put him into religious education. He had more questions than the ability to just believe what they were telling him. And so by the age of ten, he was already a rebel on the level that he was unmanageable. And they took him out of the program. His father didn't know what to do with him, so he apprenticed his ten year old Benjamin Franklin to help him in one aspect of his business. And so Franklin, at age ten, found himself making candles. Candles were the source of light before electricity in the human world, whether they're candles from the old Sumerian oil trays or the tallows of colonial North America. Franklin was making the implements of light, and it's Paradoxical that he was the discoverer of electricity when he was experimenting about 30 years later. But he says when they were expecting me to be a minister, all of his uncles gave him the handwritten copies of books of sermons. He said, I suppose, though, I would have a stock of ready made sermons for my work when I got around to it, he said, because they wanted me to fulfill the role of that character. Franklin, at 1771, was 65 years old. He was saying they were giving me a role which I was too large to play because I couldn't fit into roles anymore. What is reminded of a transformer? There was a famous poem written at a poignant A moment in Russian history when Stalin died. The great poet of that age was a Yevtushenko. Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Yevtushenko wrote a poem. You couldn't criticize the government, so he wrote a metaphorical poem. And the poem is called monologue of a Broadway Actress. And in the monologue of a Broadway actress, she decries that life is so petty and constrained that there are only bit parts and not one great role, and that she, as a great Broadway actress, is waiting to have the role of her life. Franklin would have amended that and said, there is nothing but roles to play, and I am alive and real. By the way, if Yevtushenko, after monologue of a Broadway actress, wrote a famous poem of two cities. He said there are only two cities available to man in our Soviet society the city of da. Yes, and the city of nyet. No. And that you're keeping trying to get to the city of da. But they keep bringing you back to the city of nyet. And he says, I'm getting exhausted and tired because the best I can do is keep shuttling back and forth. And I am nowhere all the time. You have to realize that you have Tyshchenko was born in Siberia, and Irkutsk was his home city. That's the city of da, and Moscow was the city of nyet. And every time they were dissatisfied with them, they would exile them to Siberia. And he would want to go because he would be at home, and then they would interrupt him and they would imprison him, and he couldn't go either place. Benjamin Franklin is that kind of enormous individual who created not only a city of Dar, but created a whole country, a whole continent of Dar. One of his creations at the United States. He's not the father of the country. He is the mathematician who figured out how to do it. Because the United States is a historical form, it doesn't belong in the standard histories of empires, though by 2001 it seems as if it has skewed back recursively, automatically closer to that sort of thing. When it was being formed. It was being formed in a completely new way. It was being formed not in terms of politics and political histories or in terms of military and military histories, but in terms of persons and person generated history in a thucydidean way. We will see, when we get to Tacitus next week that Tacitus is the next great historian in between Thucydides and Tacitus. There is a very great historian named Polybius. And Polybius is trying to understand how in his time Roman might was going up against, not against competitors, but against something that by his time Polybius lived in the third century BC, Polybius realized that the biggest challenge in history is not the competitor powers, but something which he called chance, fortune. The Greek word is Tyche, and that the problem with history is that Tyche. The caprice of Dame Fortune, the caprice of chance, is your worst enemy, because to make historical forms that hold, you have to be able to bring a transform into play so that you are freed from the range of possibilities, being only in the realm of pure chance. Because if your range of differential conscious Possibilities is co-opted by chance in the least bit. You will automatically lose and regress and fall the way of all flesh. Everything you build will go back there exactly to where the ruts of established procedure leave them. And Tacitus, in his time, is not only carrying on Thucydides, but he has one ear cocked to the voice of Polybius, and he sees that the most powerful group of people before the 20th century on the planet, the makers of the Roman Empire. That group, the brain Trusters, gathered around Augustus Caesar, who made the Roman Empire, were the most. They were the smartest bunch of people ever collected together in a concerted concern to make a form that would last forever. The. The great polemicist for the Roman Empire was the epic poet Virgil, who was personally commissioned by Augustus Caesar. We need an epic poem to found that part of our civilization. And so the Aeneid was written to underwrite the transformation of the mythology of the Greeks to accommodate the form of Roman power. And another poet who was conscripted to do the same vis a vis change and chance, was named Ovid, and Ovid sabotaged the Roman Empire power structure. He wrote. Instead of taking mythological chants and changes and leaving it in the integral where it could be co-opted by powerful ideas, he put it into a realm where it was going to transform differentially forever, and because of that, Augustus Caesar personally to serve. Notice on everyone exiled Ovid to the edge of the Roman Empire. He was put in a little fishing village on the far end of the Black Sea, and not ever allowed again to talk to anyone who was intelligent. And Augustus Caesar was powerful enough he could ensure that this would happen. In other words, he made a living death for Ovid specifically. The most speculative writers have always assumed that Ovid had written about the sexual caprices of Augustus daughter and had embarrassed Augustus, and so he exiled him for that. These are world power systems. They don't care who you sleep with. They care that their power is intact from any attack whatsoever. And Ovid had sabotaged it. Now, most people reading Ovid's Metamorphoses would never know, because the education system has been co-opted for so many thousands of years that it doesn't even. It's not even apparent to anyone why this would be so. But Ovid was, in one generation, the favourite reading matter of a very intelligent man, and his name was Shakespeare. And he used Ovid's Metamorphoses as a workbook to write his plays. Because at the end of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the last section is about Pythagoras, about the Pythagorean mathematical transform to include consciousness in a complementarity to mythology through history. One of the favorite phrases that Ovid used from Pythagoras is the phrase geometry is history. That if you can follow the intellectual development of geometry specifically straight through its axiomatic development, bringing in all the aspects of the way in which the integral mode works in symbolic Understanding of meaning to very clear, diagrammatic, abstract images of ideas. You will come to a threshold where geometry transforms into trigonometry, where the plane becomes a sphere, and when you lift the language of the plane off the page into the whole world is a stage. The whole world is our sphere. Then you get a language which has trigonometric functions of transform possibility that go into infinity, and no one ever again will be satisfied with any empire, no matter how strong it seems. You can wall the entire planet. But if you get into space, it's only one planet around one star. There are 300 million stars just in the neighborhood, and about 4 billion planets that are habitable, so that the curtailment is to keep everything Earth bound, because that's the only way to preserve the traditional forms of authority on the planet. It's the only way because someone who leaves orbit becomes independent. And this is a very curious thing. It's a function of the mind and the way in which the mind works. I'm going to talk for just a minute about this guy smoking this cigar. His name was Norbert Weiner. Norbert Weiner was the great professor of mathematics at MIT. He is the one who introduced cybernetics into the world in 1948 and within 40 years it led to. This is the first of several tomes. The title is just simply Neurocomputing, also published by MIT press. Neurocomputing means the interface of the animal and the machine, so that they can be merged under a single system of control. The book that we started with, also by Norbert Weiner, also published by MIT and under the aegis of the National Defense Research Committee, published in 1949, the year following cybernetics. It's entitled extrapolation, interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series. Smoothing means smoothing it out so that you can control it So that you can manipulate the flow, he says in here at one point. In the process of gathering or transmitting, transmitting information, gathering or transmitting information by mechanical or electrical means, either mechanically or electrically. Computers are an electrical form of gathering and transmitting information they fit in. That's why it's called neural computing. Not only computers, but the neural networks of our brain system. All of this is consolidated in a single array, a single approach. This is 50 years ago. It means the in the process of gathering or transmitting information by mechanical or electrical means, the signal that contains the information frequently becomes distorted among the diverse sources of distortion. There may be tracking errors, crosstalk, thermal noise, or poor characteristics of pickup, transmitting, or receiving equipment. When the distortion has random statistical features, it is called noise. And so the problem already 50 years ago was not to do this, but to filter out the noise to make sure that there are no crosstalk voices whatsoever, that there is no difficulty in Standardizing the receivers and standardizing the transmitters. So it works exactly the way it's designed to work, and only that way. So that one will have a super neural computer Roman Empire that will truly be unchallengeable. Well, it's very, very strange because Wigner found out that there is a fly in the ointment, and the fly in the ointment is the nature of time. That time is a crucial problem. And when we come back from the break, we'll take a look at how we dealt with it. Let's come back to where we are looking, not at something, but we're looking in such a way that we're trying to be aware of how we're looking, as well as what we're looking at. And this is called consciousness. Consciousness is clearly an alert context for the mind. The mind can have its thoughts, but you can train yourself with a little bit of work. It doesn't take very much at all. You can train yourself to see that the mind is a limited perspective. For instance, if you're driving along in a car and you start thinking about something, suddenly you come to and you realize that you weren't paying attention to the road. Daydreaming can obviate the focus of the mind, and daydreaming is not very powerful at all. Consciousness is really powerful, and it can obviate the mind's focus in such a way that it doesn't occur. It's not that the mind is blank, it's that it's shifted into a neutral gear. And now you can call it consciousness without an object. Or you can call it the Zen of No Mind, however you wish to style it. And that can be done. And the techniques for doing this by this stage of history are numerous. What used to be trails several thousand years ago are now 20 lane highways. You can really learn to do it very quickly. The first really effective application Technique for achieving that and transmitting. It was done in India about the time that the Roman Empire was being fashioned. And by about one 7180 A.D., there was a tremendous, brilliant man in India, and his name was Nagarjuna. And Nagarjuna is the one who introduced the notation for zero into mathematical thought. And he's the one who originated the term which has been used in Asian wisdom for ever since then. Shunyata Shunyata. And if you look at the origins at Nagarjuna's presentation of it, which is classic. It's been translated to every language in the world. You will see that his concern with Shunyata is one of a pair of concerns that form a set. The set is not just shunyata, it's not just zero, but the other element of concern that is always paired with it. The Sanskrit word for it is tathata Tazetta. Tazetta translated means Suchness. It means the existentiality of it carried to its limit. We would say, in our parlance, in our way of speaking, that tathata is the stuff which is real because it participates in the actuality of the universe. It isn't just something which is a thing or which is existential, but it has taffeta, has suchness in that it participates with the unity of the universe. That quality, if we can come back to this and bring ourselves into focus on it, we're focusing on Tathata and Shunyata as a pair, and they occur as a pair because they are a complementarity. They always occur together for us. And it is not that they're a polarity. They are not Yin and yang. Yin and yang are a polarity within. They are a subgroup within. They are a subset of tathata All polarities are polarities, because both exist, because both participate in a time substrate sequencing. And that's why they can gear together. And you can have in time a positive and a minus within a sequence. Otherwise, there is no way that you would have an interval in between anything that would count in Shunyata. There are no intervals and there are no unities. They don't occur either. Don't occur. There is no yin and there is no yang in the realm of shunyata. So that zero ness is really zero. It's really empty. It is a set of which not even emptiness is a member. Now this caused a lot of consternation in European mathematics. The first man to really realize this and think this through was a man named Cantor. And Cantor, because of his Jewish background, found that the only symbol that he could make that would express what he knew was, he said, there is such a thing as Aleph Zero. That the origin, the aleph, the A of it was zero ness and that Aleph zero, though it can be included in an equation expression never commutes as if it were a unity, an element. And it changed the nature of Western mathematics because it made it apparent that there is such a thing as finite mathematics that are applicable and can be diagrammed, and there is such a thing as infinitude in mathematics that is indistinguishable from zero ness. Now, after Cantor, one of the world's really smart geometry teachers, a man named John Venn did a book of about 500 pages, and he invented a thing called Venn diagrams. And when you take college courses, finite mathematics, one day you learn first of all about Venn diagrams that if you have these circles that are representational and geometrically Of areas and states and situations and processes and you overlap them. The overlapping part takes place with both circles, both qualities brought into new syntheses. And out of this you get a whole development of intelligence, which is quite applicable. You can do a lot with it. And we have. But there are realms in consciousness which are like mathematical fields that are unexplored forever, because you can't explore them in the sense that you can't come to the end of them, that the more that you explore in them, the more there is to explore. Like, we began talking early this morning so that differential consciousness is not an integral mode ever Though it can be brought into complementarity with it, so that consciousness becomes a dimension equal to the power of the three dimensions of space and equal to the dimension of time. So that when it comes to deal with an art form or a person, you're dealing not with four dimensional space time, but with at least a minimal five dimensional conscious time space. And that polarities in a five dimensional realm simply don't have traction for reality. They only have suppositional traction for games. You can only play as if games, And you can play beautifully complex, as if games and the universe in its graciousness, will accept the application of those games on the level where they apply diagrams and existentials, but they have no applicability to the higher energies of consciousness, like history at all. You cannot play games and win a historical challenge, no matter how well you play those games. There are no supercomputers that will ever be made that can dominate historical processes, because history is even more complex than weather. It's a very interesting programming problem. We were looking at not only Thucydides and Benjamin Franklin, but that way in which there is a limitation built in to the way in which things happen. And we're looking at the way in which a certain mathematician at MIT who developed cybernetics 50 years ago, Norbert Wiener the following year, 1949, working for the Defense Department to try and get it straight of how to apply these things. And he writes it in this way. He mentions in here methods of a man named Fourier. And Fourier was a Frenchman about several hundred years ago who developed methods of integration in mathematics that were so astounding methods of transformational delineation that were so astounding that he was decorated by the French government. And there are portraits of Fourier with all of his. His French starred medals, and looking like the great savant that he was. And now, most high school students who study mathematics think of Fourier as a bunch of problems that are hard to think through. Here's Weiner writing about some of the curious limitations that creep in because of Shunyata, though he doesn't know about Shunyata in order to express it, but he's conscious enough to know where the limits of application really are. And so he writes this 1949. This went directly to the Defense Department. If you're not old enough to remember, 1949 was a catastrophic year in world history. For the first time, two polarized powers both had atomic bombs. And it was apparent in 1945 that we were in. I think the phrase is deep shit. To have atomic energy. Itself was already terrifying, but to have it in two antagonistic camps was not just doubly terrifying. It was petrifying because the intelligence of men and women at the time quickly zeroed in on Thucydides, and they realized that the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its dependencies were involved in a war that was structurally very similar to the Peloponnesian War, and that in the Peloponnesian War there were no winners. Both sides lost. Somebody, a Roman traveler named Strabo, visited Sparta, and he had trouble finding it. This world power was such a small village with no remains, that he could hardly believe that it could have been taken seriously. And when he went to Athens, he was over awed by the Acropolis and by the Parthenon dominating the Acropolis. And he wondered, how could Athens have ever feared this little village, Sparta? But we'll get back to that. Let's come to talking about Fourier. Wigner 1949, about mathematical processes and their limitations, and why they work only in games. As long as you co-opt zero into the nomenclature as an existential or as a symbol mental form. We repeat that owing to the very nature of the problems considered, this book makes extensive use of methods of Fourier, or, as they're known, trigonometrical analysis, and that this is due to the fact that these problems are not tied to any origin or epoch, but are invariant under a displacement of time. In other words, these methods are good universally, forever, and every scientific application because they occur in a displacement of time. They don't occur in time. They occur in a specific displacement of time. In the sense that if we start a time series late by an interval of time t, we shall also start any prediction or the result of any filtering late by the same interval t. So that the mystery of nature is very peculiar. It will allow your fiction to seem as real as you want, as long as you are consistent in the time displacement counting as long as you count the same way no matter what you begin, will end up just as real if you count the same way. If you keep the time sequencing accurately measurable so that all of it is displaced in the same way, it will occur as if it were real. He says. 1949. This statement simply asserts the repeatability of our methods, and is indeed a necessary condition for the existence of any scientific theory, whatever is really startling a scientific theory bound to an origin in time and not freed from it by some special mathematical technique, is a theory in which there is no legitimate inference from the past to the future. Why? Why is this so? Because there is no present moment that is real. There is no tathata because tathata is a complementarity to shunyata. And if shunyata has not been brought into reality. Tathata also has not been brought into reality. And what you are left with de facto in any goddamn star system you want is a game. That's why, right after this was written, the next most powerful mathematician in the world, John von Neumann wrote a book called The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which is styled World Economies for the last 50 years. As long as we call the shots of the game, it will play out according to our rules. And what we have to watch out for. Is anyone smart enough to pull the rug out from under our game by pointing out that these are limited conditions, and not necessarily true? So the whole thing is a house of cards, and as soon as someone begins to manufacture the big magic of being able to put a joker in the deck, which proliferates like a virus, the whole computer system falls instantly. It doesn't take very long at all. It takes one split second. It's called popping the bubble. It doesn't matter how big the bubble is. One little needle pops the bubble. Because when you lose surface tension of a game by infracting the authority of the rules, no one can play. Do you hear it? The big demon empires are as vulnerable as can possibly be. And as Gandhi once said, it only takes one spiritual warrior to put that dragon out of business. It doesn't take an army. It doesn't take a committee. It takes a majority of one. So let's finish up with 1949 to the Defense Department, because they understood this really well. The Secretary of Defense at the time was a man named James Forrestal, and he immediately, on reading this and understanding this, put an end to the space program. The White Sands Missile Base research base. Earlier in 1949 put a two stage rocket. They put a whack with a corporal, a WAC rocket with a corporal rocket, and they shot at 250 miles high, which is high enough to go into orbit. And all you needed was a third stage to give it a boost. And you would have had an orbital vehicle in 1949. Forrestal stopped the whole program. He said, we don't need to have a space program. We need to have missiles that carry bombs. And so the MX Program began to be initiated in 1949, and the space program was militarized as a missile artillery branch of the Pentagon and not a space program, so that this had a lot of repercussions. Also, the relationship with the Cold War changed from a geopolitical semi-historical thing into the Cold War as a game theory of antagonists in a polarity. So that all possibilities were run through by braintrust to make sure that we've covered every possibility. And if something comes up, we can have them consult their special file and bring out plan R, as in Doctor Strangelove. Plan R calls for drastic measures. There was no plan. Elf. Aleph zero. But there is now. And all the games are through. But in 1949. Here's what this meant. This statement simply asserts the repeatability of our methods. We can do it over and over again, indifferently and with universal applicability, as long as we stay within our planned displacement of time. It's indeed a necessary condition for the existence of any scientific theory, whatever a scientific theory, bound to an origin in time and not freed from it by some special mathematical technique, is a theory in which there is no legitimate inference from the past to the future. There is no history. No. There is no history possible. There is no memory because there is no memory possible. There is no consciousness, only intellectual reification of ritual actions on mythic bases. If scientific investigation were a game with the world in which all rules were subject to a future revision, unknown to us, it would scarcely be a game worth playing. Why? Because the revisions would obviate all of your best laid plans, especially if they had to recalibrate and you would have to start all over again. And so, any freedom of possibility becomes the very trigger mechanism that you defend against. All Cold War scenarios were based on not letting there be an unknown, not yet imagined alternative to the scenario, and it held for several generations, if you can imagine, for the entire planet. Can you imagine? A dependence on starting time connotes such a change in the rules. If events are functionally dependent on a starting time, then one has something called chaos theory. The fractal universe comes into play, and Mandelbrot sets begin to proliferate indefinitely. He goes on to say, this mode of invariance under a translation of the origin in time is indeed shown by Newtonian laws of mechanics, the laws of heat flow, the laws of electrical flow, the Maxwell field equations, etc. it it is expressed by the fact that they lead to differential equations with coefficients constant in that time. And then he goes on to talk of other things. The problems of history are in realms that are beyond imagination. History is a process that is not imaginable. It is even preempted by the process of consciousness, which already is unimaginable as well. One of the elements in in quantum mechanics very early on already in the 1920s. If you can make a mental picture or diagram of what you're thinking about, you're not understanding the reality that you are falsifying the actuality and that you are literally playing mind games with yourself, and that you can't do any really good physics on that basis. You can't do any good mathematics on that basis. You can't do any good astronomy on that basis. And so men and women, three quarters of a century ago, not very many, but enough realized that they're going to have to start learning how to be real in a wonderland that has more dimensions than the tribal myths told them there were. That the old mythic images of gods and goddesses were but pasteboard cutouts compared to the wide open possibilities of man, much less divinity. And that the old thing. If you have a picture of God in your mind, it's the wrong picture. There is a question and we'll get to it next week. The question centers around why authoritarian structures that seek to hold power try to co-opt not only consciousness, but history within mental forms. That mental forms are meant to be the sine qua non of objectivity, and that within that mental objectivity is the ultimate arbiter of what is real because it has an alignable referent to existential forms. We know we have power because we own the stuff. We can put it where we want. We can do with it what we want. And of course, the Kafka raising the hand question is, does that mean that we're property too? Are we existentials in your form also to be moved to be owned? And the answer ultimately is yes. And our response is no. More next week.