History 6

This is history six. And we're looking at a process of learning. And this process of learning as it goes deeper and deeper into what in physics is called now a path integral. Something radical occurs. And instead of an integral furthering itself, you get a complete transformation. And instead of more integration, what you get is differentiation. It's a very Simple real process, and in a Zen monastery it is exemplified. The entire ecology is exemplified by ringing a bell. I'm sure that you've all seen in Japanese gardens, if not in Japanese monasteries in Japan, in the Huntington Museum, here in the Japanese garden at the back, there is a big, huge bell, which is typical of this kind of phenomenon. And the bell is struck by a huge log, which is on some kind of a swing rope. And when the bell is struck, this deep gong sound permeates the entire garden and environment. This is a very simplistic, refined Find way, which the Japanese always have, of taking a very complex process and taking it to its bare bones, and then just simply depositing it. The entire integral action is objectified by the bell, by the casting, by the making of the bell. And the trigger for the sound is the striking of the bell or the gong. It's a very simple process, but if you could see with molecular eyes, if you could see with atomic vision, if you could see the pattern of the sound that comes from the bell. The sound waves are resonances of the shape of the bill. You literally the bell shape is reproduced further and further out, larger and larger, so that you get a resonant target. And what is peculiar is that when bells are made right, every sound wave has the entirety of the shape of the bell. It isn't that this part of the garden gets only the curve of this part of the bell. It's that when bells are made right, every vibrating molecule in the air carries the shape of the entire bell. In physics, this is known as the process of a isolation, and it is the part of the way in which reality works. The mind, when it is integrated in just the right way, and it is struck by just the right kind of gong, will do the same thing, so that every iota of attention will have the entirety of the mind complete in it. And instead of noting something partially, one notes it totally or once. D.t. Suzuki, in an interview in the early 50s with a very young Huston Smith, searched for an English word. He said, it's like totalistic that Zen seeing is not seeing perceptually, nor is it seeing conceptually, Sexually, but it is seeing seeing this itself and is complete. Or to use a traditional word, which religious literature in the West is favored for about 2000 years. It is perfect. It is complete in the sense that its integration is exactly what it is, and that its reverberation is perfectly cloned and reproduced, so that the completeness goes out from the object itself and redistributes its precise, total, complete objectivity perfectly throughout the medium in which it occurs. The drive to approximate this simple ecology in philosophy dominated European thought in the 20th century, and it was a severe attempt to try to get as pure and as real, as reduced down to actualities, and build up from those atomic actualities into a factual, scientific, methodical view of life so that thought could be mature. The figure that we're taking, Hannah Arendt, figured prominently in the development of this entire career in philosophy, And we're pairing with Hannah Arendt of the 20th century, the greatest Roman historian of the first century A.D. because many of the issues that came up in the 20th century were already there and already refined in the first century AD, so that Hannah Arendt and Tacitus are not just an interesting pair for our education in history, because they involve the cream of historical events at their time. They also make a parentheses together, which gives the last 2000 years of historical development in a very succinct set, so that when they're paired together, we can Appreciate why it is that the 20th century was a complete failure. The 20th century is one of the most tragic centuries in the entire history of the world. It ended in a complete and utter failure, a tragic failure. Its culminating half was absorbed in the Cold War, which, as we saw before, is the perfect thucydidean kind of polarity that happened in ancient Greece between Sparta and Athens and caused the complete demise of the classical Greek ethos. There was never a Greek empire after that. They simply x themselves out. They the two sides exhausted each other. Athens became a university town, Sparta became a village that eventually disappeared into the ground. Rome, on the other hand, is still around and the Roman Empire is still intact and still structures the way in which cultural developments that are agglomerated into national empires are still held together and structured in a Roman way, and the Western mind in particular, is still schooled in a Roman Empire ethos, so that it is very difficult for someone to go back to a Greek ethos, especially a classical Greek ethos and escape from the Roman ethos that lays like a thick sediment in mud, over the mind and over the external world, in the culture, in the civilization. It's a it's a famous problem. And the most successful group at doing this were the a couple of the early American Founding Fathers. Oddly enough, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were the most successful group of people to escape from the Roman Empire mud, and to go back and appreciate the pristine dilemma which the Greek civilization had, and realized that they couldn't find a home anywhere in the past because there was no home there to. Find. And therefore one had to put one's trust in the future, and that the home. Of man was nowhere in the past but could be there in the future. But that you. Had to work for it, and that the essential ingredient of a future home for. Man was to educate human beings to become themselves in a resonant way. In which they could be either individual or in a community, or in a. Very large nation. And that the scale individual, family, community. Nation would not distort as you went up in scale. And unknown to Jefferson and Madison and Franklin. This is the classical view of Chinese learning Chinese civilization in its late Joe, the spring and Autumn period. Pre-han formulation was always that these five levels your individual person, your family, your village, the empire or the nation and the universe that all five fit together in an array of sizes and that the right way of living in reality is to be able to go through the entire range of these comfortably and never have to distort or contort yourself, that you don't try to make yourself fit in, but that you are resonantly real on every level. This, of course, is the way of thought of Lao-tzu and the Tao Te Ching. And the structure of the Tao Te Ching is startlingly simple. It has two phases which are classically not delineated by subsections. The two phases are Tao and Tay. And for the classic Daoist outlook, Tay is always a unity and Dao is always, as we would say, zero. It is not only zero based, it is zero indexed as well. So that tau and tae as a complementarity constitute a way in which the resonance on all five levels individual, village, family, village of nation, state. The name for China is middle country. It's the center of the world. It's the basic country. And beyond that, the fifth is the universe. So that there is a five step resonance of scale. And the dovetailing with that is a five phase energy cycle. And that in that five phase energy cycle, Tao and Tae are the first two phases, and the third phase, which is the indexing Ring modulation is what the ancient Chinese phrase the word for it was. Zhen zhen zhen translates very easily to human heartedness. The human heartedness is at the indexing center of the five phase energy cycle that, when it is working in its smooth ecology, allows you to go through the five level orientation of the scales of life, and that this pentatonic scale also then becomes the formula of structure for music. And so Chinese civilization classically was enormously modulated in a very realistic way. Now, none of this was available to Jefferson or Franklin or Madison. It was available in the early 20th century, but the regard for it was colored by a European arrogance that saw the Chinese culture as being both ancient and quaint, and not at all viable after all. Lao Tzu lived 2500 years ago. He's a contemporary of Pythagoras. And are we still Pythagoreans? And of course, in the early half of the 20th century, any intellectual, any scientist would tell you that we're we're completely advanced beyond those ancient things. Whereas in the second half of the 20th A century, it was increasingly apparent that, as somebody at Caltech once said, we're all really Pythagoreans. We all really understand that proportionate, ratioed resonance that can be harmonized is the essential condition of analysis. The whole possibility of having a critical attention is based on that kind of measured, measurable scale of conscious appreciation for the possibilities and the proportions, and that they can be modulated together. This, of course, was at the center of the problem that someone like Hannah Arendt became almost thrust Into the development, the center, the stage front unfolding of this whole drama of 20th century European thought. And so Hannah Arendt is, oddly enough, the most revealing protagonist of 20th century thought. And it's no great surprise when one comes to appreciate that that she is the most important single individual in 20th century philosophy, because she is not some great, enormous philosopher per se. But her life touched all of the great philosophers in such a way that she came to understand that the trigger mechanism, the gong that sets the bell into motion, is the translation into political application of your philosophy. Of your philosophic understanding. And she wrote in mid-century 1950 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a legal brief for an indictment of Western civilization. She makes the case very clear that it isn't that the left should be preferred to the right, or the right preferred to the left, that the Nazis and the communists are in the same business of tyranny, and that this business of tyranny is correctly called totalitarianism, and that it can occur without any kind of political party. Even you don't need a National Socialist party, a communist party. It can occur in any kind of large civilized institutional structure. And one of the first great readers of Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism was Eric Hoffer, who a few years later did The True Believer. The true believer is dangerous. He's not only willing to die for his cause, he's willing to let you die for his cause. And as Hoffer says, they are everywhere on the march. In his first edition of. 1951, the subtitle The True Believer Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that all mass movements have, as it were, a biological profile, not a biological profile so much. But they have a sociological profile which can be understood to a T, and that this sociological profile is a has been so correctly brought into analytical integration and differential application as to constitute a virtual science. And that one of the pioneers of that entire facility of sociological theory and application, the Greek terms are theoria and practices that always went together. Theoria is the ability to contemplate and practice, or practically as the ability to apply, and that the interface between theory and application, theory and practice. That interface is the most mysterious membrane in the universe, and it's a membrane that cannot be understood very easily. It's really a Zen type of equality that it really doesn't have a quality, and yet it really does do stuff. The founding sociologist, who studied ancient civilizations close enough to see that the modeling happened the same way Everywhere all the time was named Max Weber, and he took three classic ancient civilizations to try to ruin his theories to see. Maybe I'm Eurocentric and maybe my theories are not right. So I will go back to three ancient civilizations. And he went back to ancient China. He went back to ancient India, and he went back to ancient Judaism. And Max Weber again and again came out similar results that this aligns, and that what one comes to understand is that at the center of this entire ecology of repetition of problems is the city. And so he wrote a great monograph on the city Also, Max Weber was the mentor, the friend, the major professor of a young philosopher named Karl Jaspers. And Karl Jaspers was the lifelong friend and mentor of Hannah Arendt and Hannah Arendt, and Jaspers correspondence is about 800 pages, so that Max Weber is like the grandfather of Hannah Arendt's outlook. Deeper. Deeper than that. When Jaspers was a young professor, he became a professor about 1913, just before the First World War. He published a couple of little monographs, and then he didn't publish Again until 1931. He spent all that time thinking, living, refining, and when he finally brought out his big three volume philosophy in 1931, everyone was astonished because he had been written off. He had been written off since the early 1920s as someone who was washed up. He had a couple of little tiny monographs in him, and that was it, because there were a lot of professors who do that, who write something in order to get their professorship, and then that's it. They can't produce anymore their one shot guys. At the same time that Jaspers was entering into this period of silence, of professional academic silence. The other mentor, the other deep philosophic influence on Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger was becoming more and more and more famous, more and more radically famous. He was becoming, in fact, the voice of the most powerful, radical, Zen like sophistication of understanding reality on the European continent, where Jaspers mentor and friend and guide was Max Weber, Heidegger's mentor. And you can't even say friend because he was the kind of man that is not very friendly. But his mentor was Edmund Husserl, and Edmund Husserl in the 19th century had been a mathematician, an Engineer, and when he turned his attention to philosophy, he found it a complete jumble. A complete junkyard. It's so full of ambiguity. Nobody can do anything. Nobody knows anything. And being a mathematician, being an engineer, he applied himself to clean up philosophy by introducing a logical procedure, a method. And in 1901 he published it in two big volumes. This is the English translation. It's simply called Logical Investigations. Logical investigations. Here are some of the subtitles on the title page. A Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Expression and meaning. The ideal unity of the species. So the mentor for Martin Heidegger was a completely different kind of figure from Max Weber. Max Weber, who was a classic founder of sociology and of sociological forms within which human beings struggle to discover themselves and to find relationalities not only with each other, but with the forms, and that the forms take the not the aggregate of all of the struggle and morphing, but the forms themselves influence the outcome of the way in which it happens, because those sociological forms themselves seem to have almost like Pythagorean fundamental shapes that always surfaced, no matter what kind of people are trying to do this, whether they're ancient Jews or ancient Chinese or modern Europeans, That these kinds of forms come out because they are brought into play by the kind of application that the theorizing develops, so that the fundamental chef who produces this standardized food is the mind, is the brain, and that human brains apparently all work the same way. But many are very slovenly, a few are very refined. And so if one understands exactly and precisely how the mind works vis-a-vis the things of this world, then one will have a structure which is logical all the way through, and you can have an engineering application of human lives. We will figure out exactly what we need to do, and we will exactly do that. And that turns into the National Socialist Party in Germany in 1933. They took over the entire country. Hitler, which Martin Heidegger was the number one intellectual arguer. He was made the rector of the university. Very difficult for him. Very, very difficult, because the problem at that time was that in order to find a way to have a motive, to purify to this level in sociological terms, you need to find a scapegoat. And the Jews became the scapegoat of the Nazis even more than the communists. Communists are slovenly 19th century philosophic dupes, but the Jews are a historical issue that goes back to the beginnings of the Roman Empire. And Hannah Arendt was Jewish, and it was very embarrassing for the great university professor, the most famous philosopher in Germany in 1933, to admit that he had been a lover of a young Jewish woman who was just a student of his, and he was already married. He already had two sons. He was already a university professor. All of it was very embarrassing. And he knew that years before. When he met Hannah Arendt, she was 18 years old. But someone like Hannah Arendt at 18 is already enormously capable, fantastically sharp. She was concerned with the way in which reality flows through the mind and creates a philosophic array of ways of looking at the world, and wanted to investigate this. And Heidegger seemed to her to be not the knight in shining armor, but the most radically esoteric thinker alive, and who was handling this dragon of chaos. And he was in the midst of this is 1924. He was in the midst of formulating for himself, a massive philosophic work that would do what Logical Investigations called for. It would go deeper than the mind. It would go to the atomic levels of reality and likewise evoke the universal characteristics of the universe. And he called that work being and time in German Seine Zeit being and time. Now it's very, very strange. He was getting the ideas for this exactly at the time that he met Hannah Arendt. And in later correspondence and later interviews, in later discovery in piecing together the history of that time, it turns out that she was the inspiration for being in town. His involvement with her was not just purely sexual, but that the Eros was intellectual passion as well. He who had been mentored by Edmund Husserl, whose whole program and method was not to have passion in thought, thought must be the English term for the procedure is that you have to be able to bracket things of this world and bracket things of the mind, so that you do not have any ambiguities, no distractions, no contextual difficulties. But what you have are phenomena. And his method, the study of phenomena is called phenomenology, and it is phenomenology. Then that becomes the central issue in Edmund Husserl. This is one of his books in translation. All his books are all still in print. All this is very current. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Why? Why transcendental? Well, because there was a German philosopher named Immanuel Kant who went into the Critique of Pure Reason and found that there is a transcendental quality to the mind that has the ability to absorb a priori structure. And it is this critique of pure reason that for 200 years was a problem for German philosophy and Edmund Husserl, in bringing this issue to the forefront. And Heidegger in being and time, trying to refine it and bring it out of the forefront into a universal application, a critique of the atomic structure of being and the application to the universal structure of human lives. The second part of Being in Time, which was never written, never completed, was to be on Immanuel Kant. Oh, he did notes for it, and he published it separately. Being in time was published in 1927, and two years later he published his work on Kant. Cant. Its called cant and the problem of metaphysics. But this is hardly a unified philosophical work. Its very difficult, in fact, to read, not just because the language becomes haunted by German hyphenation. Odd Greek based syllables put together with many hyphens in order to create a new language to methodically typify reality. The difficulty is, is that reality doesnt typify. It doesnt hyphenate. Anyone who has looked at it at all realizes that it rather flows wildly. But this didn't stop Heidegger. It didn't stop Husserl. It didn't stop the other student of Husserl, who was French, who decided that Heidegger was very close, but that he was too Germanic. And the other philosopher was Jean-Paul Sartre. And Sartre's book is not being in time, but being and nothingness. After the break, we'll come back and we'll take another look. But one of the deep problems for Sartre. And he says it in Being and Nothingness. One of the deep problems is nothingness. It is a very eerie thing To philosophically bring one's mind to bear upon this problem. And Hazel Barnes's great translation, the section called The Phenomenological Concept of nothingness in a section called The Origin of Negation. He writes, and it translates this way. Heidegger, while establishing the possibilities of a concrete apprehension of nothingness, never falls into the air, which Hegel made Hegel a great competitor with Kant about the same time, a little bit later. Heidegger does not preserve a being for non-being, not even an abstract being. Nothing is not. It annihilates itself. It is supported and conditioned by transcendence. We know that for Heidegger, the being of human reality is defined as being in the world, with hyphens being in the world. The world is a synthetic complex of instrumental realities, inasmuch as they point to one another in ever widening circles. And inasmuch as man makes himself known in terms of this complex which he is, this means both that human reality springs forth, invested with being, and finds itself in being, and also that human reality causes being which surrounds it to be disposed around human reality in the form of the world. But. And here Sartre gets on the brink, on the edge of an abyss. But human reality can make being appear as organized totality in the world. Only by surpassing being, not by becoming human, but by becoming superhuman. The Superman, the Nazi Übermensch. This passing beyond the world, which is a condition of the very rising up of the world as such, is effected by and he uses the term that Heidegger uses in being and time all the time, by design, by the phenomenologically abstract being there. Which directs the surpassing towards itself. The characteristic of Selfness, in fact, is that man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world, and he looks from the horizon towards himself to recover his inner being. Man is a being of distances. This, of course. When thought through in a more sophisticated way, leads to nihilism is not just a gap, it is an unbridgeable gulf. And Sarge, who is not at all. A second rate thinker makes it a fundamental issue of being and nothingness that one can see being and nothingness in a complementarity, the in itself and the for itself, and that in their relatedness this somehow bridges over. But the way in which it is bridged over is not to make a unity. Or rather, it is simply to make a unity. The strategy here is purely integral. It's purely mental. It's purely, in fact, symbolic, which if you start from Husserl, you're going to have a symbolic answer because you're playing a symbolic game. I'm talking about really high level game theory. If you think by the rules of monopoly, you will be successful if you play only with monopoly rules. But you can't bring clue rules into monopoly. It's not. Not the game. The difficulty. Is that consciousness becomes in the mind a whole. It becomes a whole of nothingness, which, in order to be relational, must be filled with phenomenological things. Because only by filling it with things does it fit together with the rest of the mind which is being in itself. So that man becomes not inquisitive to know which would be knowledge, which Sartre thinks that's what he's talking about, but because. But because he's trying to fill this hole which can never be filled, he doesn't become inquisitive. He becomes acquisitive. He wants things. He needs things, and he becomes addicted to controlling the material of the world, including other people's thoughts. In The Canterbury Tales, the wife of bath says she understands what man wants, and one of the Canterbury pilgrims says, well, I understand what women want. They want to control the thoughts of their husband. It's humorous. Let's come back and let's re-establish a bit of a track for ourselves. Let's come back to the fact that The True Believer came out in 31. The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt came out in 1958, and The Origins of Totalitarianism came out in 1951. We're used to thinking that the 1950s were like a Milton Berle, Sid Caesar carnival, and the 50s were haunted. The 50s were haunted. In fact, the one of the great essayists on the 50s, I.F. Stone, who used to put out a a weekly newsletter he has collected essays, was called The Haunted 50s. In 1950, you had the first science fiction films that really got to the public. You had Howard Hawks The Thing From another world and you had Destination Moon. The docudrama of the first flight to the moon from Robert Heinlein's script. The next year, you had The Day the Earth Stood Still about visitors from other planets that had come, and the government was trying to keep them quiet, and they wanted to walk around among humans to see what life was like, had brought a message that the nuclear capacity of man was disturbing to other civilizations on other star systems, and that we were being told to watch our step. Within a couple of years, you had movies like them about giant ants. That nature was going wacko because of radiation, because of atomic interference by man and nature. Culminating in 1956 with the great film Forbidden Planet. So at the 50s had this peculiar tone. The haunted 50s. What haunted the 50s was that World War II was not successful. That nothing was settled. The same thing happened in the 1920s in Europe. The 1920s in Europe were haunted by the fact that the First World War had settled nothing. And it wasn't called the First World War. It was called the Great War. There was a line called the Maginot Line in between the French and British and the Germans that went for hundreds of miles of dug in trenches. And after four years of millions of young men being killed, those lines were pretty much where they were when they began. It was like a psychotic fracture of the very land of Europe that went from 1914 to 1918. And after all of that, it was apparent by 1919 that nothing had changed. Nothing was settled. In Germany, the industrial military complex was being given loans to refashion itself and come back exactly as if nothing had happened. And in Great Britain, you had a lone voice in the figure of H.G. Wells, who kept saying, we are in a very dangerous, even more dangerous situation than we have ever been. We faced a break and a breakdown in the Great War and the next war we will face oblivion. And you had in the midst of all of this. The development of what we've been looking at this morning, one of the most powerful philosophic projects ever undertaken to completely recalibrate all of thought, all of civilization. And this program was being developed. It was being designed. It was being planned for in the 1920s. All with a mind towards applying it. The Greek term for this application is praxis, and the 1930s was the praxis of this philosophic design and program, and in the 1930s the ultra right and the ultra left polarized and confiscated the creme de la creme of all these plans. And what you had was Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. And the 1930s Praxis led directly in almost like a ballistic trajectory to the Second World War. And it led to the Second World War in such a way that people, men and women who were intelligent at the time, saw that this was unavoidable because the circumstances had prepared for this event. It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Second World War was not an accident at all, nor was the First World War an accident they were planned for. And in the haunted 50s, it was apparent that the Second World War had settled nothing. That the Cold War was not World War Three. There was no World War Three. It had become ingrained as a way of life, as a strategic, institutional, ongoing plan to keep everything in this mix indefinitely. Part of the hauntedness of 2001 is that the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 settled nothing. So that the 2001 to 2010 decade is going to be haunted as well. But this time on a deeply macabre level. Because it is not just that certain groups are planning. Or that certain structures are repatterning themselves all the time, but it goes even more insidious than that. It's that we cannot change. We are suicidal as a civilized species. Now, the good news is that that's not true. But it carries a price. And the price is. You have to struggle to learn to be other than what you were taught. Because what you were taught leads directly to murder and suicide all the time. All the time. Because the forms of civilization in their powerful, integral 2000 years ago were set that way, not just by the Romans, but the Han Chinese set the same tone. The Han Chinese were the Romans of East Asia, and they were just as good at it. When Han Wuti Tsai took office in 140 BC. He was the only person in China who counted, and he had 130,000 people on his hierarchical staff, making sure that he was able to do whatever he wanted to do. Because the founder of the whole dynastic program, the Emperor Chen, had given his name to the people, and after that they were called Chinese. Before that, there were many scattered populations. After that, there was only one way to be institutionally correct, and that was to be Chinese. The same in the Roman ethos there is all roads lead to Rome. But not only all roads, but all power. Trajectories lead to the Emperor. He is the princeps in the sense that he is the first, as in everything will be cloned by the way in which this man decides it will go. Except that Augustus Caesar learned from the assassination of his uncle Julius Caesar, assassinated by his friends, assassinated by his political allies. Augustus Caesar learned to cover his tracks in a very subtle way. He learned that you do not assume power, but that you manipulate the conditions so that they all point to you as the obvious center. And so he labored behind the scenes to make sure that everything pointed to him. He contracted Virgil to write the great epic, the Aeneid, to epically found the Roman Empire. And he made sure that the historian Livy, who was an exact contemporary of his, wrote his History of Rome so that all of it led to him. It was obvious that he was the only person that really counted. I said last week that the title of Livy's history, AB Urbe Condita. I always translate it as towards the urban condition because that's its import. It means the city Controls, and the controlling city is Rome one place? Livy meant it in his Augustan Latin. Notice that even the literary term for the age is Augustan literature. Virgil and Horace belonged to Augustan literature, and so does Livy and Livy's. The title of his work actually means from the foundations of the city. It means that this was the original template from the foundations that come down all the way and lead to here. It leads to Rome, surrounding the forum, surrounding the building center that Augustus establishes. And he was subtle. He was subtle because he didn't want to Protest that he was not the center, but he wanted to graciously accept your inevitable conclusion that he was the center. So instead of making the greatest building of the age, the greatest domed building of the age was called the pantheon. Not the temple of a god, but the temple of all possible gods, the pantheon. And it was the largest dome structure in the world at the time, and it was built and designed by his right hand man, Agrippa, who was at the same time the head of Augustus Caesar's navy. But instead of making the pantheon as the obvious center of power, he made this little tiny building, the Ara Pacis Augustae, the center. And that if you went in, you would not find Augustus Caesar at the throne, but you would find a big sculptural phrase of Tellus mater of Mother Earth, with little children and cornucopia, all the fruits of life. All of life leads to this context, where it's quite natural that Augustus is the center, because he holds together something indispensable to your life. He holds together the Latin term was pietas. He holds piety together. Piety is much deeper than power. Piety is respect raised to an ultimate level, an asymptotic level. Without piety, there's no holiness. There's no relationship to the divine, so that no one, no human thing, has any bridge to the divine to God, unless it goes through this center occupied by this man. It's extremely difficult to appreciate how skewed something like Livy's history is, because his language is so refined even in that time period. The great writer on style, the great teacher of rhetoric, one of the most brilliant and erudite human beings who's ever lived. A man named Quintilian styled Livy's Latin as milky smooth. When you look at a book like this, Livy His Historical Aims and Methods, pg. Walsh, Cambridge University Press, about 4050 years ago. We must therefore reject the views that Livy seeks a religious revival because of a blind inheritance to state religion, absurdities and all. And at the other extreme, that he pays mere lip service to theological concepts, which he regards as absurd in order to achieve a morally healthy society. The true explanation must surely be that he sees in these beliefs a symbolic truth. He attempts to sift from the mass of superstitious myth a central doctrine from myth a doctrine. An In ideology, the imperial ideology of the Roman Empire. He attempts to sift. This is the historian Livy. Notice how history and myth are subtly merged without anyone really noticing, so that what seems to be a historical, the history of Rome from the founding is actually an imperial mythology. Very Augustine, very mild. There's nothing radical about it. It's all very easy to accept. And it leads to a very clear conclusion. You know exactly where you are, and it's so easy just to accept it. Why? He attempts to sift from a mass of superstitious myth, a central doctrine of the relationship between men and gods. It's all about man and God. And if the state mediates between man and God, then you really want to be careful. If you criticize it, you may be interfering in something that you don't know about. Watch out, watch out. Notice how subtle it is. Notice how massively intimidating it is. A central doctrine of the relationship between men and gods, which will lend order and significance to human life. Where are you going to go? Are you going to make your own private world? If we don't like you, we'll put you outside the city. And then what will you do? The theme of Logan's Run, a science fiction movie, by the way. This is the fundamental force of Livian pietas, a reverence for the Godhead which ensures the right ordering of men's lives. It is this conviction of a symbolic truth at the heart of Roman religion, which alone can explain the pattern of belief, consistently and even passionately expounded in Livy's interpretation of the past. Livy died about the time that Augustus Caesar, near the end of his life, finally accepted the role of Pontifex Maximus. Pontifex Maximus is was the head of the Roman religion. He was the Pope. He was not only the emperor of the political structure and the holder of all the economic power that mattered and the master of the military, but he became the Pope as well. Now his uncle Julius Caesar, had seen the potential of being Pontifex Maximus right away, and one of the reasons he was killed is because he had become divine, because the Pontifex Maximus becomes the arbitrary figure chosen out by destiny to represent the only point of contact between man and God. The Pontifex Maximus is the only contact between man and God. All other beings, all other men and women, have their contact with God ordered and significant because they have obedience through pietas to this contact here. Who is infallible in the Chinese Han dynasty imperial power. It was the same thing. A new emperor coming in went to sacred mountain Tai Shan, and he performed two ceremonies. The Fang and Shan ceremonies. The one ceremony, he went to the top of the mountain alone and made his contact and received the mandate of heaven. And then he came down from the mountain at the foot to the collected leaders, and he gave them the impress of his mandate from heaven. And then they knew that he was the chosen one. It's exactly the mythology of Moses. You get the Ten Commandments and come down and show them who is going to argue with you. It's not that this is wrong, it's that this is a pattern of projection which recalibrates the whole integral structure of the way in which human life happens. And that it leads, unbelievably, to violence and war all the time. It leads to universal death, finally. We know now it is radioactive. There is no way that it doesn't go there, because that's a part of its ecology. Because in That recipe. The only way to transcendence is through death. It's the only way to have a new world is for the world to experience. Oblivion is truly monstrous. It's insidious beyond belief. In the appreciation of Livy in his time, only Tacitus had the genius and the historical capacity to shred the entire imperial mythology and the imperial ideology abstracted from it, refined from it, and promulgated as the Great Solution, as its form of a Nazi Final Solution, Because it was actually very similar to the Nazi Final Solution, because it became apparent when the Caesar line of emperors failed, that they failed because something was left out of the power mix and what was left out the next dynasty, the Flavians put in because they commandeered it, and what was left out of the Caesar lineage was the sense of the Jewish relationship to God. It had been left out. They were considered marginal. They were not important. But in analyzing why it was that things went from bad to worse after Augustus, things went to Tiberius, and that was bad enough. And then it went to Caligula, who was truly crazy. And then it went to Claudius, who was like a temporary Figurehead, while the entire Roman society went to hell in a handbasket. And then came. Nero, who decided to just burn it all down so he could start again and have Nero ville. When it was apparent that all of that had led to a complete breakdown in the year. 69 A.D., there were four different Roman emperors in one year. And finally, the whole dynasty was junked because it had not co-opted the Jewish god into the Roman pantheon of power. So the next dynasty, the Flavian dynasty, with Vespasian as the new emperor. And I talked about last week of him being made emperor by acclamation of miracles and military might in Alexandria. That's a long story of why it was Alexandria, but it was Alexandria because he had already set in process his oldest son, Titus. To draw the reins of Roman power even tighter in Palestine so as to. Force all of the revolutionary and Jewish groups throughout Palestine to. Either flee from Palestine outside the Roman Empire, to go to places in Persia. Or to collect defensively in one place. That was the city of Jerusalem. And then Titus laid siege to Jerusalem. He surrounded it completely. It was a huge city. It was 600,000 people. No one was allowed to enter and no one was allowed to leave. And the news kept going tighter and tighter until, of course, there were skirmishes. And because the skirmishes started to kill Roman soldiers, the noose became more and more vicious, and finally they entered into Jerusalem en masse with one point in mind. And that was to level the Temple of Solomon completely, because it was the center of Jewish religion. It was the amulet that preserved the contact between God and man and the Jewish religion, and that by effacing it from the earth, there was no more point of contact of the Jews with their God. It didn't occur to them. It didn't occur to any of them. None of the Flavian dynasty. Did it occur that there was any such thing as an individual access to divinity? It came through power structures that were traditional for thousands of years, and if you commandeered them, you had it. And before the Temple of Solomon was destroyed, Titus made sure that he took the amulet that held as they believed. Good Roman religionists always believed that the power was in the amulets, and the amulet that he took was the great menorah from the temple, and it was so huge it had to be packed on an elephant's back. And at the entrance to the Forum in Rome, they built a great big arch that's still there. It's called the Arch of Titus. And in the center keystone is the menorah from the Temple of Solomon being brought in triumph to Rome, so that the Roman state religion now had all the pieces of the puzzle. They had left the Jews out, and now they had it. But in order to cover their tracks, they had to make sure that there was a Augustan implication of intimidation against the Jews. Not just an anti-Semitism, but a whole ethos that somehow these people never cooperate and therefore they must always be left out. Except that we have to make sure that before we do that, we have to commandeer the juice of their power, of their relationship to the divine. When you look at the Augustan imperial program with the eyes of someone like Hannah Arendt, you realize what a scary thing history has been for the last 20 centuries. Really scary because we have been inculcated to not understand. Our minds have been structured, our education tailored, our culture, our civilization all made so that all of this has a consistency and it's only a matter of refining the consistency so that it gels and takes forever, that the glitches are not glitches of protest, but because the mixture hasn't been homogenized enough and that if it's homogenized enough, then it will be like a Portland cement floor and it will stay and you won't have to worry about it ever again. One of the glitches in this is a thing in Western history that was not planned for. It's called the Renaissance, that there would be such a thing as men and women who recovered. Not the Roman way of thinking, but the more the older, the more profound personal assessment that came from the Greeks. But not just the Greeks of Plato's time, but the Greeks from Plato's time, who had in an underground way, become more and more sophisticated and had finally matured and gone to Alexandria. And after several hundreds of years in Alexandria, the refinement of Greek and Jewish culture together made a Greco Jewish Hellenism that was so refined that it became like an atomic structure that reached critical mass. It exploded into a consciousness of light so that all the language of the early first century Greek, Hellenistic, Jewish, Greco. Language is all about the person of light. You find it in the Gospel of John and the Proem. In the beginning was the word, and the word was made manifest, and that became the. That light becomes the life of men, and you find it in the Hermetic writings about the. Same time you find it in all of the writings there. And that directly influences for the next. Thousand years, all of the esoteric groups along the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, so that you find when the Islamic civilization becomes strong enough to be able to commandeer the old Roman ethos centered not in Rome but in Baghdad. The esoteric group in Baghdad is called the Ikhwan Al-safa, the Brotherhood of Light. And when you look at what they're writing, what are they writing? They're talking about what Plotinus was talking about, who was talking about what the Hermetic writings were talking about is going back to an old Greco Jewish, not synthesis, but a transform. The difficulty from scholarly standpoints is they always look at it as syncretistic synthesis. And it's not a synthesis at all. It's a differentiation. It has nothing to do with integrals. It has everything to do with differentials. It has to do with resonances that carry everywhere, anywhere. The entirety of the integral, without having to remain in an integral mode is a difference. That's monumental, of course. In the Renaissance, the most poignant historical mind was Machiavelli. He's famous all over the world for having written The Prince. The prince means princeps. It means if you want to be an Augustus Caesar, if you individually want to be an Augustus Caesar in your own turf, this is the handbook of how to do it. It's a very subtle Augustan way of overcoming augustinism. There isn't just one Caesar. There isn't just one Augustus. Anybody who knows how to do it can do it in their own territory, which means that it is democratized. And because it's democratized, there's no limit to what levels of smallness a person could be in. Augustus. In their own lives, you could be an independent operator. And there were in the Renaissance, there were there were warriors called condottieri who licensed themselves out. They have sword will travel. And they were fierce. They were like Italian samurai. They were unbeatable. If you had a couple on your side, the war was over. You made peace because you couldn't beat these guys because they were individual princeps. They were individuals unto themselves. But Machiavelli in The Prince, this is just the academic selection. This is not the important work. The important work are the discourses and what the discourses are are Machiavelli's comments on Livy. Because you can't be a prince unless you have an organization that will allow you to stay a prince. Well, you have to have hit men and power men to make sure that your princess is understood by others. And at the center of the Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is on conspiracies, because the taproot of maintaining an ideological control over a population is to have them more afraid of conspiracies than of what's going on here at the center. Well, Machiavelli in translation is very clear. He always was clear. He never pulled punches. I did not think I should admit an analysis of conspiracies, since they represent a grave danger for both princes and for private citizens. In other words, there can be conspiracies in your own life and you better know how to handle them. Anyone is ultimately suspect of trying to horn in on your power. You get it. It's a very insidious thing. This means that our pairing together of Hannah Arendt and Tacitus is not just accidental. Nor is it according to some Hoyle plan, but it is a phase of development where we're trying to understand why is it that our best ideas, when we go to apply them, always turn out different from what we expected, and they never work out the way that we had planned? The best laid plans not only of men, but of mice. It turns out mice have the same problem. They can't handle history. Let's come to thoughts on history. And then we're going to take a break and come back next week. I brought all kinds of books here for you to take a look at. Um, the book I studied Roman history first when I was 17 at the University of Wisconsin. Is this the history of the ancient world? Rome by the great Rostovtzeff Mikhail Rostovtzeff and I brought the first volume of Sir Ronald Syme's Tacitus. Because understanding Tacitus is the beginning of pulling the tab on the fabric of the Roman Empire. And the more you pull on that tab, the more the whole thing unravels. Because Tacitus said it that way, because he lived through it, unlike Livy, who did all his learning in comfortable imperial sponsored libraries, clean Togas. Lots of women and food. Tacitus fought wars, went through political travails, lived through the events of the time, and only when he was old and at a position, he was the governor of the province of Asia. When he began to write that, he realized that from this point of privilege he had to warn everyone, like Thucydides, that we're talking about patterns of events that self repeat unless you learn not to do them. And it's not a matter of learning not to do them within the patterns. If you are co-opted by the patterns, it doesn't matter what opinion you have. It's like trying to walk your own direction in a landslide. You don't have a chance. The only opportunity is to change your nature from being dependent on integral plans only and acquiring a differential transform capacity that can balance that. You don't have to junk the one for the other, but you have to have both. I call it the principle of the snowshoes. There's a heavy snowfall called civilization, and you cannot get to safety without snowshoes because if you try to use your own natural feet, you will sink more and more in every step into the snowfall, and you will never have the strength to get free of it. You'll never get to safety. It's insidious beyond belief. Here's from our course outline thoughts on history with a mythological horizon, one lives within the language forms. The language forms are not contiguous. Here the meaning is content oriented and feeling toned. Content oriented like phenomenology. Let's get to the things. Let's get to what counts. Let's be objective. The addiction to objectivity ensures the regression of consciousness. It's like needing a fix of certainty. And eventually you will pay anything to get it. Psychic energy is a stream of conscious flow, a current mode, not objective at all. Interiorized meaning focuses into the symbolic vision. Here the forms of language are conscious and one is abstracted from or transcended from the feeling tone content somewhat deepen the integration and lessen the feeling content have more the tranquility of the deep self in there. Finally a being without images image lessness no objectivity whatsoever. At the height of the wisdom, the high Dharma tradition in Central Asia, there was a technique developed. It was so akin to the ancient Western idea that the wise person is like a jewel that has been cut like a diamond, and the sutra was called the Vajracchedika Sutra. The Diamond Cutter Sutra, and the Diamond Cutter Sutra has exactly the same language phrases that build up and the same language phrases that build down. It is a perfect paired parentheses going towards one statement only. The only statement in the entire sutra that counts, the rest of it is winding up to be there and winding down to be back wherever you started. The statement is awaken the mind by not letting it rest on anything. More next week.