History 7

We keep coming together, and we keep sequencing our meeting so that these meetings begin to take on a line of development. And were we to rely upon the minds that we were trained to have in the culture in which those minds were supposed to work, we would come up with figures of understanding that eventually could be brought into precise focus as geometries. The fact that this is impossible to happen indicates a couple of possibilities. One, that the educational system in which we were originally raised has ceased to function. Two, that the culture which that educational system was supposed to service has ceased to function. And three, that our range of possibilities has exceeded the shaping limits of that education and that culture, and therefore we are feral and wild. And all three of those reasons would be correct. So our coming together and our sequencing of our Saturdays together into a development doesn't assume a geometric city at all. If you could experience in a deep contemplation what actually does happen, you would come out with a very interesting meditative image. You would come out with the image of a pool of liquid without any discernible shores, which had a random rain of pebbles, which gave you an overlapping pattern of ripples that do not make any kind of sense in terms of an expected geometric. That particular image, when it is unconscious, or rather we should use the term subconscious when that image is subconsciously possible. That is to say, it's brought into play but is not recognized as such, runs up against all of the expectations of our previous education and our previous culture, and our previous identification of our selves, our identity, our place in the world. All of this becomes so scattered that we shy away from continuing such a process. So that we are Consciously supported in a decision not to educate ourselves in this way. So the fact that you're continuing to be here is irrational and shows an interesting pathology in terms of expected patterns, both cultural and educational, mental, and which is symbolic and ritual. So that our educational process and procedure at this stage runs counter to the ritual and symbol expectations of both our minds and our cultures, and the expected educational link between the two of them. And this is as it should be, because it is because what we are doing is we are educating ourselves in a more primordial way, in a more complete and profound way than the culturally formed mind and civilization which we were born into would have allowed. Now, when we look at the history of that culture, the history of that mind, we don't have to go back an infinite, regressive number of stages in order to formulate why this is so. The easiest whole number to go back to is the founding of the Roman Empire, about 2000 years ago. All of the telltale signs are there already. In fact, they are brought into cinched knots at that time because they were never supposed to be undone. We have used in our education for those who have been pursuing this, and for those who are new, you'll have to understand that this has been an ongoing educational process for quite some time now. It's almost a year and three quarters that we've been going into this, which means that we've been going into a sequence of about 90 Saturdays in a row so far, and we're building up a stamina. We're like athletes, but not athletes of muscle, nor athletes of mental strength, but as athletes of consciousness, as athletes of the spirit. And in fact, the phrase that was used in the late Renaissance was spiritual athletes, men and women who took the care and concern to disenfranchise themselves from the expected culture, from the expected responses of miseducation, from the mental habits that were inculcated before they were alert enough to counter them and modify them. Men and women who at the time about 400 years ago, 500 years ago, began conscientiously to say no to the expected trails of empire. And we have largely inherited a counter tradition. A counter mentality. One which says that this old Roman Empire is not the model to follow, and that the Roman Empire mind is not the mind to accept, and that the education which cemented and linked those two things together should not control our lives. And that counter culture, that counter mentality, is characterized the last 500 years or so in historical thought as the rise of the individual, as the rise of the personal focus of intelligence within a consciousness which is able to bring body and mind and something else called spirit into play in such a way that they are in a deep complementation and are not arranged in some geometric line. That even though the body and the mind have an affinity for alignment, and that one can be aligned. The alignment between body and mind is the plot line of a myth. The line of a myth links body and mind together, and when mythologies are superimposed with ideologies, the mythologies lead in nice geometric lines, so that ritual action of the body and mental meaning of the mind are brought together in a nice package, which is called the circle of meaning, the circle of knowledge, the circle of learning, and that this is the way in which a large population group of people, even from disparate areas of the world, are held together in one political form. And the greatest example of that, up until the 20th century, was always the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was founded on an ideological way to geometrized the mythologies into an official form, which it would hold forever. It was never expected to be undone, and in fact holds for a very large population of the world today holds Not only for its form, but for the counter forms that are made in resonance with that form. And if you look at the population of the world, at least half the world is still caught in that web in that design, and not caught so much as endorsing it with their actions and their lives. Now, this is a remarkable thing. And in the history of the last 500 years, the rise of the individual, the rise of the personal consciousness as a navigational pilot to go against the grain, if you need to, to investigate your own personal experience on the level of not accepting an imposed or a delegated authority also gave rise at the same time as the rise of the individual gave rise to the development of science, and so the development of the personal, the art of the person, and the development of a cosmic based science, as opposed to a science that was endorsed by authority. There's a war going on right now. In 2001, in the good old US of a between the science of authority and the science of investigation. With the stem cell issue today still going on. So we're gathered here, and we keep gathering here, and we keep our process of inquiry because we are trying to understand what are the options available to us, which includes not only the future options that we would like to have before us so that we can choose. But the past options, some of which seemingly, though closed off, are still viable and could be revisited, reactivated, juiced, and some of that nutritional energy used to bridge to some future possibilities that otherwise would seem unreachable. The two, the past and the future are both coherently focused in something called the present, and one term that I've used for a long time for that Momentary present is a term that was used to great effect about 100 years ago by actually the. The original poignant writer who first used it in incredible accuracy was the founder of French Symbolist poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé. Stéphane Mallarmé used the term presence, always paired with another term which translates as absence. That presence and absence together form a set. They form a pair, and that this set, this pair of presence and absence, is always operative in what we would know come to realize as the present moment, the now, so that now always contains presence and absence together. Always. The French word for the absence was now. Nothingness. Nothingness and mallarmé's. Perception. In 1866, that presence and absence always were working together, and that nothingness meant that it was not a thing. And that presence was such a thing that there was no other thing. And so, in his own way, 135 years ago, the founder of French Symbolist poetry came to understand that Tao Te was the operative complementarity of reality. He knew nothing about Lao Tzu. He knew nothing about the. Tao Te Ching. But he did understand that his model of investigation. Charles Baudelaire was also founded very deeply upon the kind of. Mysterious apperception of an American writer who was very famous at. That time, due to the translations of Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe. And that from the French translations of Poe and Poe in France. This is a little bit different from Poe in the original American English. Translates in such a way that the syntactical experience of reading. Poe in French leads to a deeper quality of subconscious alertness, so that one's appreciation is no longer captivated simply by the objects of sense perception and the mental response to the sense perception, the conceptions that the existential ritual perception and the symbolic conception no longer match in such a way that the correspondences obliviate the mysterious background, and so one becomes aware more and more that language itself is a veil which is not complete, and that if one could train oneself not to look at what language was pointing to, but one could acclimate oneself through A discipline of being present as completely as possible to the syntactical sense of the language, not just what is being said now in all of its subtlety, but to the even more profound possibility of what could be said by this language totally, that the syntactical mysterious resonance of language indicate that not only are things presently here, but that there is a syntactical mysterious absence, and yet which is also here all the time to train himself. Mallarmé, who was reduced to being a teacher out in the provinces, exiled from his beautiful, interesting Paris. This impoverished schoolteacher genius used to go out in the middle of the night and look at the stars and watch the dazzling, cold, glittering array of the heavens, and he began to understand that as he looked, he was not only seeing the stars, but that he was aware of the syntactical space between the stars as a noun which was not there, but nevertheless his consciousness was able to let it function along with the stars, and that the only way that the stars formed groups formed constellations was because consciousness had factored in the night with the presence, and that absence and presence together gave the sense of Gestalt and that gestalts are not things, but that they are realistic apperceptions along with perceptions, so that consciousness is an expansion of what the symbolic mind initially is capable of, and that consciousness is able to go back to the symbolic mind and erase the boundaries of things from expected form, and to allow for new forms to generate within the mind. And Mallarmé identified this quite accurately with the process of alchemy that there was such a thing as as an alchemy of language. Just like the old alchemist dealt with metals, he was part of a new alchemy that dealt with words, with language, and that you could change by the consciousness of reality, by introducing the consciousness of the non-identifiable and yet functional complementarity of nothingness, of absence of neon with symbolic form, that the language would then reflect back, and disclose to one that in fact the bodies of this universe, the things of this universe, the existentials of this universe, had nothingness as a part of their very constitution. And so French symbolic poets led directly to the epic understanding of someone like Proust. For Proust, what was real was what could be remembered. And it's in the act of memory. Circling back, looping back. Consciously bringing the transformation to the symbolic mind and eventually allowing that transformed symbolic mind to realign itself with the existentials of this world, disclose that the existentials of this world were not solid things at all, but were just focuses of forces that were energy and points of matter that were in deep complementarity to that energy, and that existentials were really energy and matter brought into temporary focuses. And of course, all of this was Concomitant with the rise of science at the time of physics and of mathematics, of discovering that the solid atom was not solid at all, but that there was an inner atomic world, and that atomic walls are not walls at all, that the hard little babies of atoms are not hard little babies, but they're like miniature star systems that have a sun and of electron planets and moons, and that this gestalt is really what is there. And that what was assumed to be there before was an illusion, and that believing in that illusion was a delusion, and that the delusion of political form must therefore be just as deep as the illusion and delusion in language and in symbols. And all of this led to a deep revolutionary distrust of political forms and a desire at the beginning of the 20th century for man to go even deeper than the French or the American revolutions, to say to themselves, this time we are going to be free. Historically, in such a way that our consciousness can reconnoitre back through the mind and through the existentials, and not find any little jail cells which trap us and leave us high and dry from the concourse of actuality. So you can understand that a hundred years ago, hundred years ago, already, men and women were fed up with delusion. And yet we are deeper in delusion today than ever before. Everywhere in the world, and curiously, the most free place in the world today is China, because their delusion was so paper thin that by now it's apparent to everyone that it's bad for business to to keep the old Communist Party ethos as the sine qua non of reality. And so you find a place like Shanghai, the most realistic city on the planet right now in terms of process of doing business. We've chosen in our investigation of history to look at the parentheses of this entire development. And the first part of that parentheses has to be a Roman historian. I've chosen Tacitus because he was the best Tacitus, who was there at the founding of the way in which the Roman Empire finally worked its authority out, and. Hannah Arendt, a woman of Jewish lineage but born into a Germany of 1906, where she was taught that you have to be European and that everyone has to work together in this European cultural milieu. And only when she was completely ridiculed and exiled by event after event, did she finally come to understand that there is something fundamentally flawed in the way in which the European ethos was formed, evidently in the first place. Not in terms of culture, not in terms of symbols, even, but in terms of political forms and that political forms are the suspect bacteria, the suspect viruses in civilization, and that one has to be able to look with new eyes at what is going on, what is happening. For 18 years, between 1933 and 1951, Hannah Arendt was stateless. She had no political rights whatsoever for 18 years, from the time that she was literally fleeing for her life out of Nazi Germany in 1933, until the time that she finally filed for American citizenship in 1951. And in between, in the early days in the 30s in Paris, in France. Hannah Arendt personally had to navigate her way without having any political form that she could count on to be a context for herself. And so she wrote our second text. Our first text is Tacitus, the Annals of Imperial Rome, and the second text, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, published first by the University of Chicago Press at the towards the end of the 1950s. So Tacitus and Hannah Arendt, a man and a woman, are the parentheses within which this dramatic, epic event, this great drama is playing. And we all the time are looking at the players, and the players are only actors acting out a script which is not written by any of the actors, but is written by the playwright, which is known as the political forms. It's the states as autonomous political forms that are writing the script, that human beings have been acting out, killing each other for all the rationalizations under the sun. There's always some reason to hate someone because they're always so different. The trouble with you is that you don't look like me is the way in which I think in a movie called Earth, Girls Are Easy. One of the blondes sings, uh, you know, if you could only look like me, we could be friends. Something like that. It is such a melodramatic, unbelievable tail that no one would believe it for a long time. Almost no one in the 20th century would believe it. And even now, in the 21st century, it seems too incredulous for words, and yet is a scientific understanding, and one can learn to go back and scientifically work it out so that you can test it. And one of the ways to test it is to see whether the results of your experiments, leading to a hypothesis that this hypothesis now is able to go back and clear up events and make them meaningful in such a way that they don't follow the habitual geometries, but they develop into trigonometric functions of whole spheres of activity that check out. And one of the proofs positive is to be able to go back and look at something like a pair of books. Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Chosen at random, or even if selected, selected from a almost indefinite array of books that would be possible to bring a pair of books together in such a way that they operate as a tuning fork, so that one could calibrate the entire range of energy operative in the system. And that one could do this with almost any pair of books, if you could go deep enough into them, into their parents, and the ability to make pairs of books into tuning forks is one of the proofs of this education that one can come to understand that this analysis yields what we would, on the highest level, call rationality, not rationality, in that the categories expected are filled, but rationality in that the ratios and proportions check out all the time. No matter what elements you bring into juxtaposition as the determining ratios. This is startling. It's new. It's new applied to education. It's old, applied to science. At least 500 years ago, already 800 years ago, really, this kind of experimental science was being practiced. The earliest practices of it, by the way. We're in two universities, the new at the time, the University of Oxford and the University of Paris. The universities of Oxford and Paris were some of the earliest universities in the world. I think the University of Bologna was the first. They were called universities because their educational procedure taught you how not to know subjects and things, but how to know the entirety of the universe, which included you. And so they were called universities because the learning was universal, whether you learned it in Oxford or in Paris or in Bologna, you could then look at anything you were looking at with comprehension. So that identification was not the model for university learning, but comprehension that you could look at the entire range of whatever there was to investigate, and you could come to understand not only its array, but its calibration. You could come to measure it. And so experimental science was born 800 years ago. The greatest tandem of teacher student at the time was actually at Oxford, Robert Grosseteste and Roger bacon. And when you, as someone once said, if you compare Francis Bacon with Roger bacon separated by 400 years, it's a toss up of who understood science better. Grosseteste, by the way, as I've said several times over the past year, means great head. It's interesting that a teacher would be called Mr. Greathead, Professor Greathead, Robert Greathead. And when one looks at the writings of Roger bacon. Most of them are indecipherable because they were all written in code. Because he spent almost all of his adult life imprisoned, imprisoned by the church, who saw him as a real threat. And so he wrote most of his books in a private code. He wrote his language upside down and backwards, so that unless you could transpose it twice in your mind, you couldn't read the language. Not only is it like the mirror opposite, but it's the mirror opposite, upside down so that it's a diagonal. It's what in a medieval four part logic would be called the contrapositive. It's a language in the contrapositive form. In the Renaissance, the genius who adopted Roger Bacon's form was Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote his notebooks upside down and backwards to make sure that he wasn't killed in his time by the same authorities who were still operative. And it turns out in world history that it doesn't matter who's in power at all. All authority always works the same way, and anyone who is a jeopardy to an established authority is an outlaw. Or rather, as it's styled publicly, a criminal. When we come to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and we look at the sections of it, the first section, The Human Condition, is just about 20 pages, and it's more like just an introduction counting. From that we see that there are five other sections. Section two is called the public and the Private Realm. The private realm. The public realm. The inner private. The individual's realm. The public realm. The culture, the educational mind that is made to fit that culture and that there is something of the private and the public that in order for us to be sane, to live at all, to earn a living at all, they have to mesh at least most of the part, so that the public and private sectors, the public and private realms, fit somehow together and where they fit together. The seal that holds them most together is the relationship between public property and private property so that real estate the stuff of real investment. Who owns the turf? Who owns the houses? Who owns the places of manufacture? That's the interface. That's the place where it comes together. Then there are three sections in the human condition one on labor, one on work, and one on action. And it's like a formulation that these are the activities, labor work and action that produce all of the elements, produce the property, make sure that it is operative. And after these three comes like a coda, like a summation of the entire book, a section called the Vita Activa and the Modern Age, the Vita activa, the active life, the Active Life, and she focuses on this, and she focuses on the discovery of an Archimedean point that, in fact, there is a point in the active life that we need to focus upon. But before she gets to that, the discovery of the Archimedean point is section 36 of the human condition. Maybe you'll read it on your own, but section 35, which is like the prologue before you get to that, is entitled world alienation. World alienation, and the term used here, alienation is a term from political philosophy that owes its generation into a marxian understanding of historical process, founded upon a Hegelian understanding of matching, that the political process in its forms goes back to a historical understanding of the importance not only of property and economics, but that somehow economics is braided, always with political forms, so that one would talk about it as political economy, and that political economy is a form generating context which emerges from something known as History, and that this historical process, in terms of Hegel, had a particular method of its structure, a dialectical method, and that in this dialectic of this method there was a deep, profound epic logic of understanding of how structure achieved form in the first place, and why it was that political economic forms, being the largest operative forms, would eventually produce a world government form, a world economy form. And the old word for this was empire, that eventually any successful political economy would lead to a planetary empire. Not because that's only where it leads, but because that's always where it leads. Because the process does that. Autonomically. And the only way not to do that is to bring consciousness back into play and keep erasing the boundaries as they form. Because if you don't keep correcting it as it happens, you don't notice that you're being co-opted into a process, a methodology, an application of which is built into the deck. Because it's not in the cards, it's in the rules of the game. As long as you play that game with any deck, it will yield this result. And at the beginning of the 21st century, it's very sobering indeed to realize it doesn't matter what political party you belong to, or what political theory or what economic status? It's all in a tapestry that's controlled at a much more profound level than that. It's built into the very structure of the mind. It's built into the structure of civilization itself. And that it leads to universal oblivion every single time, which is why the transformation needs to be effected before it affects us. As Jung once wisely observed about archetypes, he said, no one has archetypes. They have us. Marcel Marceau could have done it. What are we left with Is the question. If presence and absence are always concomitant within a set that establish the real. How does anything happen? Does an absence always cancel out presence? And the answer to it, surprisingly, is yes. But absence and presence together yield equanimity and not a negation. So this is a very difficult logical reality to appreciate that as long as they are taken together as a set, they establish what's known throughout the world as equanimity, so that if you go into meditation or if you go into prayer, or you go into contemplation from any angle whatsoever, with enough discipline and profundity, one comes to not only understand, but to appreciate that the real in fact occurs with equanimity. That emptiness does not mean no, and that existentiality is not corruptible ever. This is the good news, as they say. This is why one of the most fundamental activities of purification was always giving. It is the equanimity of giving. In Sanskrit it was called Dana. In the West it was encased in the virtue of charity. But charity not as charity case, but caritas as the offering. Constantly, because the giving without expectation works to establish the deep harmonics of equanimity. In the Jewish tradition, the central understanding was always in the code of Maimonides, where he says true charity is that no one knows who gave and no one knows who received. There is only the givingness ongoing and the acceptance ongoing, and somehow the co-distribution of these two activities together occur as God's beneficence. It was a very profound understanding, by the way. Not at all medieval. When we come to Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition, written after a lifetime, half a century of suffering, of difficulties almost beyond belief, difficulties that were accentuated because her contacts were with the creme de la creme of philosophic thought of her time. When she was just a teenager, her mother would take her to the demonstrations of a political group called. Historically, the Spartacists, and the Spartacists eventually became the nucleus around which Rosa Luxemburg formed the beginnings of communist parties that had an interest not in theory but in practice, in the application, the praxis. And this led to a development in European history that swept up people of Hannah Arendt and her generation, and the generation after that, and the generation after that, three generations. She, when she entered university, became apprenticed Us to Martin Heidegger, who became the most famous existential phenomenologist in all of European thought in the 20th century. She became deep friends with Karl Jaspers shortly thereafter, who was one of the most profound thinkers in 20th century philosophy. And next week we'll take a little look at his understanding of history. Jaspers understanding that historical process has a peculiar equanimity in its actual concourse, and he uses a term which, translated into English, comes out as encompassing historical reality is encompassing. It extends from the personal to the cosmic without distorting the way in which the harmonic proceeds so that one can move harmonically from the personal to the cosmic. It's not like a geometric study of an alignment, but it is rather like the resonance being combed out in laser light so that the infinite ultimate is consonant with the intensely personal, so that there is such a thing as a spiritual understanding of the cosmos from an individual standpoint. Not only does it exist, but it is more certain than existence. If it were only existent, then it would only be confirmed in the mind. It would only be the right idea of how existence and existentials affected symbolic integration. And though that's a very nice code. It's rather a yardstick compared to the kind of calibration that atomic clocks give. The kind of calibration atomic clocks keep always include the displacement, because if you don't keep track of the fact that your measurement is a displacement from the real, then the accuracy though it be to the nth degree of integral specificity will always be mistaken for the actual. One of the difficulties faced by that generation, and brought out in the very title of chapter six of the Human Condition, the Vita Activa and the Modern Age, and she uses a quotation from Franz Kafka to Be the setting for the chapter and translation. The Kafka quotation reads. He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself. It seemed that he was permitted to find it only under this condition. What is that? Kafka? An Archimedean point. That point not of equanimity, but that point of exact mental authority, which in the moment of its generation x's out. The spiritual negates it, so that one is left precisely understanding that you are nothing. And of course, the fear of coming upon the realization that one is nothing is worse than death or madness, because it is neither death nor madness, but oblivion. And the difficulty with the 20th century is that it kept shying away from facing that there is no such thing as oblivion. There are only signals. I don't have time to go into it all. It's all going into a bowl. Here's a little quotation to make a setting here. This is from a book published by Cambridge University Press about 20 years ago by Jonathan Lear. Aristotle and Logical Theory. Lear, who towards the end of his little discussion of logical theory, comes to a revelatory realization about the nature of logical Difficult process, but he prefaces his whole book with a quotation from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Marlowe, who is an early contemporary of Shakespeare and who have not died in a bar fight, would have been a most interesting challenge to Shakespeare. Marlowe had red hair and a university degree, and was a full bore when he died in a bar fight. Doctor Faustus is one of the few late, great complete plays, and here Faustus says to himself, settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin to sound the depth of that thou wilt profess, having commenced to be a divine in show. Yet Lovell at the end of every Art and Live and Die in Aristotle's works, Suite Analytics. Tis thou hast ravished me. The analytics that he refers to are one of Aristotle's great works, the Prior Analytics, which leads up to a sequence of works that begins with the Nicomachean Ethics and leads finally to the politics. And it's Aristotle's Politics that sets the table for the way in which the mental understanding of the Roman Empire came to be finally cinched, and when it came to be finally cinched by the original Caesars as aggressive and completely Tunable to every nuance of authority and power. The Caesars are hard to beat. The tandem of Julius and Augustus Caesar, Julius Caesar, and Augustus Caesar was not only precise and comprehensive, but the suspiciousness of their adopted hair. Tiberius Caesar carried it even one step further. Tiberius realized, when he was the inheritor of the newly established, brightly tied into eternal knots Roman Empire, that one particular thing had to be integrated fully into the power structure of the empire, into the political undertow of how forms were not only vis a vis nature, but vis a vis the universe. Made sure that it was there, and his focus was on astrology. And Tiberius Caesar, confident that it handled the military and the political forms to a t. The mythological forms to a t and Augustus had brought that t to the exact place where it needed to be, with one man only in conference with an oligarchy of power, a limited number of very powerful men and women, who always were included in the dictator's decisions. They were not the brain trust, but they were the political economy trust that he always brought with him on his coattails. And because he did, they always had confidence that he would do the right thing for them stay in power. But Tiberius was very loath to think that the astrological element of the Augustan Principate was secure, and so he became more and more superstitious about the uncanny ability of astrology that the heavens maybe are not going to cooperate fully. And he always looked for astrologers who could do something which proved that they knew what they were doing. So he would invite astrologers to his little country palace on the isle of Capri with the intent to kill them, and they were brought to a tower overlooking the beautiful Mediterranean to be sacrificed. And only those who could predict the moment of their own death was imminent were allowed to live. Part of the way in which Augustus had brought all the levels of power together. Layer upon layer. One was to commission Virgil to write an epic, the Aeneid. On which the Roman Empire would be founded. Another was to co-opt Livy to. Write a history from the foundations of the city right up until his reign, so that everything showed that he was the true fruit of the power circuit. And a third, and there were many. A third was this little book called the Astronomica by Marcus Aurelius. It is the world's first astrological power handbook. It's how to teach yourself why astrology is so easily understood as a system that can predict the heaven's effects upon the earth, and it was written exactly midway between the end of Augustus Caesar's realm and the beginning of Tiberius Caesar's realm. Book one and two and part of three were written right at the end of Augustus's reign, and the rest of book three and books four and five were written at the beginning of Tiberius's reign. And so this little book, first translated into English in 1977. Shows a very interesting way in which the layering of political power was cemented 2000 years ago, to make sure that not only was everything covered that you could see and everything covered that you could think of, but everything was going to be covered in terms of celestial influence beyond the Earth, so that their power was going to be secure from any angle of attack, even from occult divine areas. And when Manilius proved to be ineffective in the fourth century A.D., his book was thrown away. And there wasn't a single reference to it for almost a thousand years. And even then it was only someone learned. And why was it thrown away? Because astrology was displaced by the Roman Empire's co-opting of the Christian religion as the Roman Church, the official theology of the official ideology of the official all time political economy. And part of early Christianity was that all this is superstition. But when you look at the original of Manilius, it's interesting to see that the 1977 translation has a colored frontispiece. It has a map of the world. And in this map of the world, this colored map of the world, it looks like the seed of all the political globes of the earth. This is the seed out of which they come, where all the different nations are different colors on the globe. And we will only have one globe when the globe has only one political color. Then it will be complete. And what's interesting about this world of Manilius is that the entire landmass is surrounded by water, which incidentally goes back to the old Homeric Olympian pantheon idea that the world is an island surrounded by a flowing water called Oceanus. But what's interesting in this map is that the Mediterranean Sea is a bay that comes in from Oceanus and comes to the center of the world, that the Mediterranean is the angle of vision to the center of the world. But when you look at the map that so discloses this, it's interesting because the focus of the center of this map is not at Rome. The focus of the center of this map is at a place somewhere in between the Sicilian Cilician Gates that come out of the mountains in what was Asia minor. Now today is Turkey, at the border of Turkey and Syria. And the big city at that time was Antioch, Antioch in Syria. And where the Cilician Gates open up to the sea coast is a port called Taurus. And it's there that Saint Paul was born, and it's in Antioch, that Saint Paul established the official fifth gospel Christianity that became the foundation of the Roman Church. And that's where the center of the world was in this political geography. So that this map does not date from the time of Augustus Caesar. This map dates from the time of the fourth century AD, when Manilius was still being read as an official justification, and in this justification, in this beautiful presentation of the astrological concourse, of the pattern of the sun through the stars, the plane of the ecliptic and its constellations, its 12 constellations that make up the measurable calibration of how celestial influence comes down to the Earth. The most incredible realization is that the 10th of the 12 constellations, the constellation called Libra, is given over to a goddess whose name is Fortuna. Fortuna. Maybe you've run across her under some other names. She sometimes is known as Dame Fortune. She's also known in Guys and Dolls. Damon Runyon language as Lady Luck, and she's not so much a lady, but she is the celestial Queen who favors those who know how to throw the dice so that you win. It's interesting because for fortune in the Greek is not pronounced fortune at all, but is pronounced Tyche. And Tyche was the controlling factor in the way in which history unfolds itself in the histories of Polybius. We don't have time to bring all of it in, and we're just bringing a few things in. Polybius. His histories are in Greek, but his histories are a bridge between Thucydides and Tacitus. Polybius is a Thucydidean historian. He's looking for the patterns that will always reoccur, so that his history will be timeless, in the sense that what happens here is a model for why the way in which it will always happen. But his theme is not the Peloponnesian War, the war between two factions of the Greek world. That was already, by the time he was writing in the 200 BC, already passé. He's writing about the way in which Roman power was taking over the world, because it was favored by Tyche, by fortune, that they had fortune on their side and there was no way that anyone could resist them. And the fact that Polybius's histories showed the pattern of why Rome was going to be the conqueror of the world by the time of the Caesars was immensely important to them, because it was like an outside justification from a Greek source, no less. They have confirmed that we have not only every right to power, we have every right to expect that that power is blessed by heaven and even by fortune. We are unbeatable. We have all the power in the world. We have heaven on our side and we have good luck to boot. Now, this is extremely interesting because at the time that Shakespeare was deepening to a level that perhaps Marlow would never have been able to. Appreciate and actually built on the bank side of the Thames. The Globe Theatre. Above the stage of the globe was the old astrological circle of the 12 signs of the zodiac, so that all and every Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre was acted under the influence of the entire Zodiac. And when he said, all the world's a stage, it meant that this stage, these plays, are so true that they enact themselves around the entire globe all the time. We don't have to take a survey of everywhere else. Just understand this precisely. And if we do, we will know how people act all the time given these limited conditions. And therefore, once we get the alphabet of human typography and we get the permutations of the way in which they will act out, we will be able to computerize our energies and our material so that they are in sync with domination complete. And of course, it was at that time that the British Empire was planning to displace the other empires that were trying to displace the Roman Empire, the dregs of it. And out of this came a very interesting set of circumstances. Let's come back here to Hannah Arendt before we go too much further. She says. Chapter 35 World Alienation with the Kafka quotation. Three great events stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character. The first is the discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole Earth. The fact that the map of the Roman Empire, which could be put on a flat surface, now, had extended itself so much further that there was about 88 times the land mass that the Roman Empire had. It was the entire globe. And the discovery of America was like the symbolic beginning of the fact that one had to have a global empire now and not just dominate the Roman Empire map. The Mediterranean is not the center of this. Rather, the oceans of the world as a single body of water are the key to it. And so British Empire power went to a navy and not to legions, not to an army. The second, the Reformation. The Reformation, which by expropriating ecclesiastical and monastic possessions, started the two fold process of individual expropriation and the accumulation of social wealth. You can't imagine how much wealth was tied up in the monasteries, in the church properties. And it's not just that it happened in Europe during the Reformation. It happened in China as well vis a vis Buddhism there. In 848 A.D., Buddhism was formally proscribed in the sense that the wealth of the China of that day was so frozen. In the Buddhist monastic circuit, there were more than 300,000 monks administering a financial empire that was larger than the imperial revenues. And so in 848, all that was outlawed. The young men were thrown out of the monasteries. You got to go and work. We're taking over the wealth. And out of that, the sung dynasty suddenly shot up and became so much more wealthy than any Chinese dynasty before that time that it really was the richest empire in the world for several centuries, so much so that it became a glittering prize, so that the Mongol natives north of them said, we would like to get this plum, since they've made this beautiful plum, I think we think it should be ours. And the yuan dynasty was a Mongol dynasty coming in and taking over China. It was too luscious to ignore. But the difficulty here is not just the discovery of America and the realization that one has to have a global empire, or the Reformation in the fact that domestic authority must be the controlling political economic factor in this structure, but also the invention of the telescope and the development of a new science that considers the nature of the Earth from the viewpoint of the universe. And you recall that at the very beginning of the human condition in her prologue, Hannah Arendt begins it not with a statement about the tremendous historical events that had happened to her in her life, but about the current event that had just happened. As she was writing the prologue in 1957, an Earth born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the Earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies, the sun, the moon, and the stars. That man's power has reached to the heavens. It's curious, but this morning at about 4:00, when I rose to begin preparing the material for today's lecture and stepped out into the Los Angeles at 4:00 in the morning with just the bright stars, and Orion is just beginning to rise above the horizon. An hour or two before dawn of one star moved very carefully across the sky. One very faint star, the space station Alpha, was clearly seen as a very low magnitude star. Keeping a measured pace across the sky, keeping its man calibrated orbit of the entirety of the planet, linking that power with everything beyond it on the same scale. So Hannah Arendt, who is writing here, she's writing this 1957 1958 at the beginnings not of the Space age, but at the beginnings of a radical closure to a transformation that had started several hundred years before. That radical transformation that started several hundred years before was the development of individual capacities, not just to go your own way, but groups of individuals coming together in new relationalities to explore what hitherto had been impossible realms of extension for human beings. And those realms, apparently now, despite temporary setbacks in some countries where certain research is going to be forbidden for a little while or without limit. But when she writes the vita, the vita activa, the active life, the the life of activity, what is she referring to? And the original reference on the active life comes from another Jewish writer who lived 2000 years before her. And his name is Philo. Philo Judaeus or Philo of Alexandria. His book on the active life was destroyed. I wasn't allowed to exist. It never reached the modern world. It never even reached the medieval world. In fact, most of Philo is intact and reached us because he was exiled by all factions at the time. He was a pre rabbinic Hellenistic Jew, and so Rabbinic Judaism didn't want to discuss Philo. The Christians assumed that he was Christian all the way up until the council held by Eusebius, under the aegis of the new Emperor of the new Rome, Constantine having founded Constantinople in about 310 A.D., he wanted to make sure that he would co-opt the true Christian religion, which meant that going back to its origins and Eusebius, who handled the conference to make sure that the imperial co-opting of Christianity as the official state religion went back to its origins assumed that Philo was a Christian. Philo died in 42 A.D. He died at least 7 or 8 years before Paul even had his conversion and began his journeys. Yet, Eusebius says in his official report to Constantine, and believe me, if anyone would kill you for any reason, Constantine was it. He was as ruthless a man who has ever lived. The sculpture portraits of Constantine show a perfectly deadly, wooden, ultimately powerful sociopath. Eusebius, in his official report to this man, says, we know that Philo is a Christian because his secret writings reveal the inmost rituals and thoughts which are at the esoteric center of the Christian faith. And follow was never other than a Jew. But his book on the active life was purposely lost, and the only thing that survived is the book called The Contemplative Life and the Contemplative Life begins with a reference to his book on the active life, and supposes that we will have read that before we read this. And he writes, I have discussed the Essenes, who pursued persistently the active life and excelled in all, or, to put it more moderately, in most of its departments, so that the original active life was a characterization of the pattern of life activity of the Essenes. So why is it then, that the life style and pattern of the Essenes was so important, not only to be included, but was important for to also be excluded from the founding of the Roman Empire and carries all the way up into Hannah Arendt, writing in the mid 1950s that the forms, the intellectual forms of political patterns hold for an active life do not hold. If you go back to a contemplative life, and that the contemplative life is in fact letting the air out of the balloon of the active pattern of life. And why then, would they not lose the book on the contemplative life and keep the one on the active life? Because the Philo book and the active life shows that that whole program was a Jewish lifestyle, and not at all amenable to be being co-opted by the Roman authoritarian power. Very difficult, because in Hannah Arendt's generation, it came up again, exactly the same damn series of tragic issues, because the new collectors of power to make an empire were the Nazis. The same pattern. Exactly the same pattern. And the same population of people were singled out, not because of dislikes for any list of bad manners, bad qualities, but because of an insightful realization that you cannot have a world empire based on this kind of authoritarianism. By including the insight of this Hellenistic Jewish community, the Essenes. You cannot have it. It won't work because the political forms no longer keep their glue, because once one goes into they kind of active life that the Essenes went into the whole notion that there is an authoritarian possibility of form for man becomes ludicrous. There is no way for man to make a glue and make a material that will hold as a form for himself, other than the absolute reality which God is. Everything else is. A displacement in a game is just an arcade game of power politics and of made up economics, and has nothing to do with the actualities. And curious enough in Shakespeare's time, which is a direct forerunner of the way in which it came out in the 20th century. The realization is that if you have a global empire, then the sun moving through the 12 signs of the zodiac are not enough to give you an astrological index of the constellations. You have to have all the star constellations for the entire globe. And it turned out in Shakespeare's day that if you took all the star constellations together for the entire globe, there weren't 12. There were 88. Curiously enough, the same number of keys is on the piano. Was there an astrology of 88 constellations? Not likely. Anyway, more next week. We'll take that as a sign to mosey out.