History 8

Let's come to history eight and I want to contrast for you two contemporaneous writings that typify a deep gulf in the classical world, because next week we shift our focus to a new pair of books, a new pair of concerns over history, over what is happening to us. What are we in that is so torrential? And is there any chance of us having some control over how we navigate this stormy ocean called history. And next week, we come to two of the most powerful theories of history ever proposed. One of them is the idea that there was a renaissance 500 years ago in northern Italy. And that the Italian Renaissance was a rebirth of the classical world after a long medieval. Hiatus of not much happening. But we want to today look back and see that the Renaissance. The rebirth of the classical world was the rebirth of a severely schizophrenic frantic realm. The other historian that we start with next week, paired with Jacob Burckhardt's classic The Italian Renaissance, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, we're going to pair with it one of the short, powerful writings of Friedrich Hegel, who, along with Kant, was one of the most powerful philosophers about 200 years ago, who set the tone of the last 200 years of philosophic development. Whether one was a Hegelian or an anti Hegelian for a long time was the only thing that mattered in teaching philosophy anywhere in the Western world. Karl Marx was a variant of Hegelian thought, and we're going to take from Hegel his lectures on the Philosophy of World History. But whereas Kant belonged to the enlightenment, Hegel belongs to the Romantic Revolution. Kant belongs with figures like Voltaire. Whereas Hegel belongs with figures like Beethoven. And so when we get next week to the Renaissance and the romantic revolution in history. That history is dominated by a world spirit whose immense tides and currents flow through the millions of human lives and the dozens of years and the centuries to catch us up in the swirl of some great huge river that has a dialectic structure to it of thesis and antithesis. We want to be able to be clear that the Renaissance, which was countered by a reformation which was finally brought into equanimity by the enlightenment, which was scrambled completely by the romantic revolution. We want to see all of this concerned the ancient classical world at its apex and at its apex of power. And I want to begin today by showing you that at its apex of power, the classical Greco-Roman world was insane. It was clinically technically insane. We used to use a technique in the 1960s in San Francisco of texts without Out comment. And I'm just going to pair two short excerpts so that you can hear for yourself, both translated into English, but you can hear the difference immediately. They're contemporaries. These two documents were written about the same time. The first one. The Therapeutae, a name derived from therapon, either in our sense of cure because they profess an art of healing better than that current in the cities, which cures only bodies, while theirs treats also souls oppressed with grievous and well-nigh incurable diseases, inflicted by pleasures and desires and griefs and fears, by acts of covetous folly and injustice, and the countless host of other passions and vices, or else in the sense of worship, because nature and the sacred laws have schooled them to worship the self-existent who is better than the good, purer than the one, and more primordial than the monad. We still have to deal with the question of men, habitually ferocious and who rejoice in human blood. Are they angry with those whom they kill, neither having received injury at their hands, nor supposing themselves to have done so? This is not anger, but savagery, not an infliction of harm for injury received, but a positive readiness to receive injury so long as harm can be inflicted, then urge to lash and to lacerate, not for retribution, but for pleasure. The source of this evil is indeed anger, constantly indulged in, satiated. It comes to forget mercy and casts out all sense of human solidarity from the mind. Turning at last into cruelty. So people like that laugh and enjoy themselves and derive much pleasure with a look very far from anger on their faces, ferociously at ease. The first selection was from Philo of Alexandria, the most famous Jewish philosopher of the day. The second was from Seneca, the great stoic philosopher and playwright who was the tutor of Nero Caesar. They are incommensurate. They are incommensurate. Not only worldviews, but they are incommensurate. As one would say in an old fashioned psychological way. The temperaments are not counter. They're extraneous to each other. Seneca was the tutor for Nero for 14 years. And in all Recountings Tacitus, whom we are using Tacitus Annals, he recounts that despite the conniving madness, Nero Caesar was very capable of speaking well and fancied himself a great poet, an epic poet, an epic song Maker, and he says in the same paragraph that all the Caesars were well-spoken. Even Claudius, who was impaired in his speech, still knew how to write eloquently. How to speak correctly. Caligula, who was certifiably mad and finally was murdered because he was just really crazy, could always speak well and declaim all of the Caesars, from Julius Caesar to Nero. All of the Caesars could speak. They could bowl you over with their language, with their eloquence. It was as if it wasn't just a rich family. It was the most rich family in the world. But they had an imperial style, and part of the imperial style and power was to be able to deliver the authority, not of exclamation, but of proclamation. And so they were taught. They were tutored. They had the best teachers in the world at that time, so they thought. It's not as if they were bunglers. It's not as if they were not able strategically to convince. As a Tacitus pointed out, Tiberius Caesar, who was the daughter of Augustus Caesar's wife Livia, second wife Livia by another man. And when he decided that he wanted to have Livia as his wife, he adopted her son Tiberius as his heir. And Tacitus says that all the time that Tiberius was growing up, no one knew anything. And while Augustus was alive, no one suspected anything. He was well behaved. He was outstanding. It's only when he became emperor of the world that the hidden personality of Tiberius came out, at first slowly, and then finding its current finding that there was so much fearfulness about the power that he had come to inhabit and to wield, that the sycophantic, luxury loving crowd around him grew and spread and infected everything. And the ferocious, poisonous serpent Personality of Tiberius Caesar came out. But Tacitus in his Annals shows that this flaw, which started as a crack in the personality of Julius Caesar and was bridged over constantly by Augustus Caesar in a very odd kind of a yoga, he always surrounded himself with the creme de la creme with the most important intellectual brain trust. So he thought, and so everyone thought in the world at the time. His brain trust included an old, elegant Etruscan impresario named Maecenas, who sponsored several of the greatest writers in the world at the same time, who numbered in that coterie around Augustus Caesar, the greatest epic poet outside of Homer. Virgil was commissioned by Augustus to write the Aeneid so that the Roman Principate, as he called it, so that Augustus rule would have an epic background to support it. Like Homer made Greek civilization, Virgil's Aeneid would make Roman civilization its equal. The historian Livy we've seen redid the entire history of Rome in such a huge book with such beautiful, milky rhetorical language style, so that everything flowed quite easily, elegantly and naturally to the feet of Augustus Caesar. Horace, the greatest lyric poet of his day, was a personal friend of Augustus Caesar. Ovid was a friend until Augustus Caesar took umbrage and exiled him to the opposite end of the empire, to the other shore of the Black Sea, never to speak to anyone who had ever read a book for the rest of his life. And one could go on and on. The greatest architect of the day, Agrippa, who was also a naval general, built some of the most imposing buildings that architectural history has ever seen. He built the Pantheon in Rome. So Augustus started the Caesar way of surrounding himself with all of the greatest cultural voices and intellects of the day. Every single aspect of life was carefully planned for, Modulated included, and it was built and based upon a style that had evolved not in Rome. Republican Rome was never like that. It had evolved from an original plan that was behind the development of the city of Alexandria and the city of Alexandria, which was the personal creation of Alexander the Great, to be from scratch, the only city in the world to really have complete power over the entire world. Alexandria was made from scratch by Alexander the Great, to be the place where all the power and knowledge of the world came in one place, and it belonged to he who ruled from Alexandria, who ruled Egypt, who ruled the world empire. And though Alexander died in his 30s, his generals bickered among each other to have his prize possessions and built little kingdoms of their own. It was his general, older general friend Ptolemy, who also had been educated by Aristotle, along with Alexander the Great, who seized Alexandria, and it was the 300 years of the Ptolemaic dynasty developed in Alexandria that set the tone and style for the way in which a ruler who rules completely universally must rule every hierarchical level of human life. You must not only have their bodies, but you must have their minds, their hearts, their feelings, and not by just commandeering, but by convincing. By making sure that they were educated, to know that this was the right way to be. And so Ptolemaic Alexandria set the tone of the intellectual authority of the political form of the Hellenistic kingdom. And when the Republic of Rome, in its expansion, it's kind of very naive sense of expansion, came to a crucial juncture in its history. The juncture was actually forced upon it. Roman shipping lanes and Roman, uh, colonial lanes had finally reached to where they kept bumping into another empire, the Carthaginian Empire, inheritors of the Phoenician trade routes, and the great Carthaginian general whose father had been the great general, but whose name became the terrific, haunting Phantom of the Roman Republic. The man known as Hannibal and in the struggle for a whole generation vis a vis and the Carthaginian Empire. The Roman Republic slowly got used to stoically. With holding victory by keeping a stamina of stubborn facing of the terrific military genius of Hannibal in the background, and finally the Roman power and might developed itself militarily strong enough that they could challenge the Carthaginians, could challenge the military genius of Hannibal because they had developed a general of their own who was a military equal of Hannibal named Scipio Africanus. And when Scipio Africanus beat Hannibal, he beat him in such a way that he wanted to capture the city of Carthage for Roman glory in an old republican way. But the Roman aristocracy said, they have terrified us for a generation, and so we are not only the victors over them Militarily, we are the victors over them in a historical vengeance. And so the aristocratic rulers of Rome at that time, Scipio's time, ordered the complete destruction of the city of Carthage. By complete, they meant that not only were all the buildings torn down razed to the ground, but that the foundation stones of all the buildings were pried up and cast into the sea, and that the land was poisoned with salt and waste, so that there never ever would be a city again there. Carthage was erased from history, from the earth. And it is this brutalization that the great historian Arnold Toynbee, who wrote two great huge volumes called Hannibal and the transformation of the Roman And psyche. And it was the grandson of Scipio Africanus, who then became the great military hero who became the hero of a great history by Polybius, great Greek historian. And it is Polybius. Here in his great history, points out that the Roman people had become the recipient of a kind of a power that dominates history that no one can withstand, not so much its military might, though it had developed that nor its political and engineering infrastructure, which it had developed also very well. But it had something even greater on its side. It had fortune. The Greek word that Polybius uses is tai chi. Tai chi rhymes with psyche Tai chi that Tai chi is the the lady of fortune behind the mystery of life and therefore of history. And that if you have Lady Luck on your side, there is no way anyone can beat you. And this pride of being the recipients of a historical destiny to rule the world, set into the Roman psyche at this time. And unbeknownst to him, the old Scipio Africanus, who had in terms of the ancient Roman Republic when he had served his country well, retired to the countryside, took himself out of service. He was notified by the Roman Senate that he had to appear to testify. Over some conditions that they wanted to investigate in, Scipio Africanus came to. The Roman Senate, with his great toga, and in front of the entire Senate, tore up the charges. And threw them down on the floor of the Senate, and steely eyed, stared at all of them and walked out. And set a precedent that the really strong Roman man is not responsible to the Senate, but is responsible. To marshal the destiny of the Roman people, so that whenever the standards of Roman military might. Were held up after that, they bore the letters SPQR, the Senatus at Republica Romanum, the Senate, and the people of the Roman Republic, and that this was the standard upon which everything was based, and by the time of Augustus Caesar, 250 years after Scipio Africanus, having seen his uncle Julius Caesar fail not because he was ever beaten in battle, he never lost a major battle, nor was he ever beat in any kind of political fight. He always came out on top. Nor was he outmaneuvered or outflanked by other power concerns. By the end of his successful campaign, Julius Caesar not only became dictator for life, but he became Pontifex Maximus. He became the head of Roman religion, so that worldly power and religious power were brought together in one man, and Julius Caesar had himself declared divine as the first Roman man to become a god. Divine Julius. And he was killed by his closest friends for that. Augustus was always careful never to let anyone call him a god, and did everything he could to let you know how godlike he was in his patience of not letting it happen, so that he brought together all of this brain trust of Virgil and Ovid and Horace and Livy and Maecenas, and the list goes on and on. It is the greatest power play in the world Because he wanted to become what Alexander the Great had not become. He hadn't lived long enough to really manifest his world empire. But when he took over as the undisputed leader and he took over in 31 BC, most of you know the story of how Anthony and Cleopatra tried to raise a huge naval army, and they were beat at Actium, a bay not very far from where Odysseus and Nestor lived in ancient Homeric times in Greece. And after the Battle of Actium, Augustus realized that he was the undisputed power figure in the world, but that he needed to have a transmission to himself. He was always careful to make sure that everyone understood that the transmission didn't come to him simply from Julius Caesar, that he had a historical transmission of power to him, and that it didn't come from Julius Caesar and the Roman Republic transformed into an empire. But it came to him through Alexander the Great and the destiny of a world empire. And so when he took over Alexandria after Mark Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide in their own ways, Augustus Caesar went to the center of the city of Alexandria, a huge city, about 2 million people at the time. The whole Roman Empire at the time was only 4 million people. Alexandria was enormous Warmness and at the very center of the two widest boulevards, they were wide enough to have ten chariots abreast ride in parades, and where these two big boulevards came together the boulevard of the sun and of the moon, there was a great building called the Sima, not the Soma, but the Sima, where the body of Alexander the Great was kept in a great glass coffin so that everyone could see that the power of Alexandria was based on this man who was still there, and who knew? Perhaps he was just asleep, like an Egyptian mummy of Hellenistic world destiny import, and he might come back. He was the once and future king and Augustus alone. He had everyone leave the building and he spent the night alone. Now this in the Sema with the body of Alexander the Great. Now, this is the classic way of getting a healing vision in ancient classical times. You went to a temple of Asclepius not to get tested for your body, but to sleep and have a dream. And the dream would bring you the cure that you needed in a cosmic sense. And so Augustus Caesar performed his Asclepius healing vision quest vis a vis himself, alone with the body of Alexander the Great. And during that night, all we know is that in the morning, the tip of the nose of Alexander the Great's mummy corpse was broken. So obviously Augustus had himself lifted the glass of the container enough to touch the man's nose to get the direct transmission of that power. The sympathetic magic of receiving the power of the man's nose, or through that. One of the things that Tacitus says about Nero Caesar towards the end of his days, when he was going completely grandiosely mad. He had a very powerful Roman figure, an ex-senator, an ex-consul, framed and killed and had the head brought to him, and he was overheard to exclaim, well, Nero, why should you be afraid of a man that has such a large nose? The line from Augustus Caesar to Nero is a line of trying to commandeer historical power. Historical energy. But its template was not the Roman Republic, but its template was Ptolemaic Alexandria, the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Alexandria, and because of its importance to Augustus Caesar, it was the result of his his vision quest, if you will, of his healing world vision. He kept the city of Alexandria as his private possession. He did not allow it to become a part of the Roman Principate. It didn't belong to SPQR. It belonged to him not only Alexandria, but all of Egypt, so that the province of Egypt was his personal possession. He owned it. It was his ranch. Alexandria was his ranch house. No one else had it but him. But in Ptolemaic Alexandria, the core to its being able to manifest an Alexander the Great kind of world vision was that you had to be able to not only be the dominant power of people who were like you, and therefore understood how you got to be powerful and respected your power and authority. But if you had a polyglot population of many, many kingdoms, you had to have some international strategy for convincing them that you had world class power. You were not just a king, but you were the King of kings. And so the Alexandrian political ethos always paired the palace, which was called the Bruckian, with a long walkway called the Etcetera. And at the other end of the etcetera was the Great Library of Alexandria, the Great Library, much like the Library of Congress in our time. Not just a library, not just the greatest library in the world, but all the greatest scholars in the world studied there. So that it was the first international university in the world. It was huge. And all the scholars lived there, and all the books in the world were brought there. Copies were made of everything. And when the library and the Bruckian Palace were linked together in this way, it formed the brain trust and the political power, so that the political power backed by the military and the brain trust backed by the comprehension of historical power. Wed them together, and it was like a Magdeburg sphere that nothing could separate these two halves when they were brought together in that way. And it was during the reign of the second Ptolemy, Ptolemy's son, who was known as Philadelphus. The word Philadelphia comes from his name Philadelphia. It means in Greek brotherly love. Because Philadelphia's styled himself as being one of the ancient pharaohs who preserved the royal blood, he married his sister so that she had brotherly love in this deepest historical sense that he had the pure line, the pure blood. Always one looks to see worldly Authority always cinches itself by blood. Always. Which is why the bloody altar is always a worldly ambition. Anyone who sheds blood to cinch their power, even metaphorically, is after worldly power. But when Philadelphus, who was an intellectual genius, his father had him raised on the island of Kos in beautiful estates, and he was he was trained to be brilliant. And he was he was unbelievably brilliant. And then he found that the great library was missing a complete tradition of wisdom that was not included. And the piece that was missing, the only piece not there was the Jewish wisdom. And so Philadelphia being a very complete magisterial model on which Augustus Caesar based himself 270 years before Augustus really started to take intellectual power into Roman hands. Philadelphus in Alexandria made sure that he sent to Jerusalem. He sent to the temple, to the Second Temple, and had translators come to Alexandria to translate the Jewish Torah and prophets and wisdom books into Greek, so that they would be there in the great library, and the circle would be complete. It was the last missing part. And the Jewish Scholars that were sent numbered 72, and it was commonly called in Greek the 70 and the book. The translation of the Bible into Greek was called the Septuagint, and it exists. It exists to this day, and it became more widely read than the Hebrew originals, because it was not only read by a huge population of Jews in Alexandria. Philo says that in his day there were more than a million Jews in Alexandria, but not just Jews. They were the holders of a lot of professional positions, and they were holders of tremendous wealth. Philo's older brother personally bankrolled the construction of the seaport of Caesarea all by himself. He had that much money. So when Herod wanted to build a new seaport, Caesarea, he got Philo's older brother to finance it for him, so that the intellectual and cultural and financial power of the Jewish population of Alexandria made the Septuagint famous as being read all over the Hellenistic empires, and it made Jewish wisdom a part of the international world. History. When Augustus found that he had brought together all of the power of the world, and Tiberius came into power, and Caligula, and then Claudius and Nero, and finally the whole Caesar dynasty Fell after decades of madness. The founder of a new echelon of Roman power, replacing the Caesars, a new dynasty, the Flavian dynasty. Vespasian did it in Alexandria and did it by co-opting what he felt was the writing point of Jewish power, occult power, Jewish historical destiny, wisdom. And that was to see to it that he fit the description of the Messiah that, in addition to being the new Roman Emperor, that he himself was the Messiah of the Jewish prophecies. And it is Tacitus who gives us in his history this kind of incredible. View and report. It is Vespasian in Alexandria who is the first one to make the lame walk and the blind see. Those miracles are ascribed to Vespasian by Tacitus long before they were transferred to Jesus, and for the same reasons they were transferred later on, because it is a way of showing the rightful position in Roman imperial power, as it had evolved over hundreds of years. Now, it's very difficult to realize how eerie those times were until you get to someone like Hannah Arendt and Hannah Arendt's great criticism of Arianism The Origins of Totalitarianism. She wrote it during the 40s, and it was published right at the mid-century 1950. One of the most incredible events in Roman mythological and theological history happened in that same year. In 1950, when this book was published, there was a papal bull making sure that the mother of Jesus was a celestial divine figure. She was turned into a god. She was proclaimed officially to be divine herself. Jung made a great thing at the time out of an essay saying that this was this was very dangerous, archetypal projection, and that we had survived these kinds of projections from Nazi Germany and from other sources. And what strange things are happening in the world from that, Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism that it's filled with a complete, paradoxical commitment that all people shall obey the same set of authority and obedience, but that authority and obedience also, that has to go out to all the different kinds of people that there are. And in a way, not only is everything expected to be similar or the same, but at the same time, the totalitarian power is able to go out and be chameleon like and apply to everyone's life. And so today's lecture is called Chameleon Totalitarianism. It becomes very good at disguise, because it is. It must disguise itself so that it can convince you in whatever way that you live, that this is the only real option that you have. And Tacitus points out philosophy used to be the search for answers. It became turned around so that it was the search to simply question. And that's why totalitarian governments never offer answers. They only offer indefinite interrogation. They will question you and question you and question you until, like Josef K and Kafka's a great The novel, you weary of having to answer questions that you never were prepared to have any answers for. And finally, in your silence, you will sign the piece of paper that's given to you which says that you were an error, not an error, because you had a solution different, but because you've run out of the ability to answer our interrogation and you no longer have the strength to counter us, and therefore you are guilty and we will deal with you accordingly. Let's take a break and we'll come back. So to ask the question that Tolstoy once asked, what then must we do? If there's this in the background, what must we do? And of course, the monumental reply, which is differential and large, is that all of this is a game. Everything that has been done on this level is on the level of a game, and is not complete at all, is not real at all. First of all, Alexander the Great was not the first international Empire builder at all. 2000 years before Alexander the Great was this man whose name was Sargon the Great of Akkad. He's the one that linked the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea in the Fertile Crescent. 2350 BC and his daughter. In a Deewana was the greatest epic genius of her day. She wrote the epic of Inanna and most likely wrote the Gilgamesh epic as well. They were Semitic. They were Semitic. He was a Semitic king of kings at least 400 years before Abraham's father was. Terah was even born. And Abraham's father, Terah, as we've mentioned before, lived in Haran, the city of the crescent moon, the moon goddess. And Haran was at the apex of the curve of the Fertile Crescent. And he owned the great caravan business that ran caravans along the Fertile Crescent, and that the beasts of burden for the caravans was not the horse or the camel. This was long before horses and camels. The beast of burden for those caravans was the black, tough donkey, and the original symbol of the people who ran that great caravan route was the tough black donkey, not the burro, but the really strong stamina beast of burden, because it could survive to carry and link all of the kingdoms together in one great, not empire, but vision. Sargon's empire was never called Greater Akkad or something like that. It was his vision of mankind as a Family Array and Alexander the Great, coming 2000 years later, was trying to reinstitute at the beginning of a new age. Then what was the cream of the previous vision, World Vision? And it was Sargon who had that first. There are so many hidden dimensions, but just because they are hidden, they are hidden only for those playing by the rules of a game. They are only hidden as long as you're within a game. History is an event horizon that sees with a kind of an energy. What kind of energy does it seethe with? It sees with conscious vision, but conscious vision. Not just on the level of vision, but of conscious vision. Who's light, who's conscious? The vision in the form of light that is diffracted through the prism of persons. The prism of art forms the prisms of objective spiritual happening so that consciousness, when it is diffracted into the rainbow of presumed energy, it's that spectrum that is the energies of history. And so to think that these idols that are made out of stone or clay or something have anything to do with God is really a level of very primitive superstition. And so even 400 years before Abraham, the understanding was that God has no iconographic representation whatsoever. And that what presents rather than represents, what presents God is life itself, that the spectrum of the ongoing wonder of life itself. This is indeed a where one reads the book of nature and comes to understand that life is not statically objective, but is transformable, i.e. always in process of new relationalities, and that this is where the intelligence of understanding the divine, not the divine plan, but the way in which God works in a divine way, in a differential conscious way. And so Tacitus, when he's trying to present the way in which Alexandria, in its Alexander the Great vision, was brought later into fruition by the Ptolemies, he is the one, the classic case, the reference that all of us have had to use because all the other ones were destroyed. He's the one who tells us that the Divine God of the place. The spirit of the place of Alexandria was a named Serapis, and that Serapis had a big temple, and that in the Temple of Serapis there was no altar. There was a statue of the seated god Serapis, and he was seated in such a way that this statue faced an enormous wall, an interior wall that was made possible because of massive columns, unbelievably massive columns that held a structure, and that this structured wall contained all the variety of plants and animals that could be found in the world, so that it was a zoological Biological mural of living things, and that the city of Alexandria had a great zoo and a great botanical garden, so that these things could be brought in so that Serapis faced the variety of life, and that God did not have authority, but wept. He cried. Later on, when, um. When a formal, doctrinaire Christianity became the official religion of the New Roman Empire out of Constantinople in the three 70s three 80s A.D., the word went out from the Christian bishop of Alexandria, Cyprian, to destroy that statue of Serapis and get rid of it, that this was pagan idolatry. And so a wrecking crews were sent in under the Bishop of Alexandria, and they destroyed at great sacrifice of energy and time the statue of Serapis. And it was very difficult to do, because it was covered with ground jewels mixed with a resin that was almost an impenetrable shield, so that the god Serapis, though he wept at the array of life, was surrounded by a jeweled dust. And because it was so tough to break this up, they finally decided to just topple the statue and pry it. And when they did, the statue of Serapis when it fell forward, revealed a Saint Andrew's cross in the middle of the floor underneath it, and the superstitious Bishop of Alexandria for many weeks would not allow anyone to touch it. He didn't know if he'd committed a really deep sacrilege. If he had known how deep a sacrilege he had created, he probably wouldn't have been able to survive the afternoon. The wisdom of the world is millions of years deep, and just having power 2000 years is nothing at all. Nothing at all. But not only can one go outside by expanding, by true learning the clutches and reaches of false authoritarian games, you can do it also within that structure, by play the activity of creative play. It's hard to maintain face if you've got the Marx Brothers loose. But there's something that was there in Philo that is an even deeper clue. And that is all authority rests ultimately with someone being the one. And Philo says that's why we began today's lecture. He says the self-existent who is better than the good? Purer than the one and more primordial than the monad. This is a very, very deep wisdom. That we always have the capacity to not only get to an integral oneness, but to go deeper than an integral oneness into the ratios and proportions of transformation that one can transform into what? And when it transforms, does it remain one? No, it does not. For one to become other than one, it has to, at least momentarily, at least temporarily, go into a neutral gear of existential objectivity. It's in modern nuclear physics and quantum cosmology. It's called a singularity that reaches the vanishing point. And it's that vanishing point. The old Sanskrit word for it was bindu. And there are many yogas developed in India, Even 7 or 8000 years ago of taking integration beyond single pointedness into the vanishing. But the Sanskrit word bindu, it carries over in pre transformative India. In transformational India, about 500 years before Augustus Caesar was even born, there was a figure there who brought it to the attention of a discipline. He was known as Siddartha and he became the historical Buddha. And he called that not Bindu, but Ekagrata. Ekagrata. And what it means is one pointedness that is held firm. And what is it that holds one pointedness firm? It is the mind One Pointedness becomes a singularity. Not in reality, but in the mind. So that one has to go beyond the mind to find something more primordial than one ness. That's why. Sorry. That's all right. I'm sorry too. That's why Zen is called No Mind Wu-wei. Because the mind is only the launching pad for an expedition into the unknown, deeper than the one beyond the many. Now, what is curious about this is that Hellenistic Judaism in Philo is very cognizant of this is amazingly, beautifully conversant with it so that it was passed on through this particular prism into matrices that are astonishing in their outcome. An exact contemporary of Philo, who took this kind of Hellenistic Judaism to India is named Thomas. Thomas. Doubtful. Thomas. And Thomas went to southern India. He went to Kerala. There are still descendants of Thomas's vision there. In fact, the tomb of Thomas is Visitable in southern India. And what he took was Hellenistic Judaism. Which is also at the same time in Thomas the seed of a kind of Pre-pauline Christianity. He went to India in 41 A.D., about the time that Philo went to Rome. And Philo went to Rome because the new emperor, the intellectual, mad, crazy brat Caligula, got it into his mind that it was the Jews of Alexandria who were responsible for his having troubles with the occult levels of commandeering world history power, and with getting financial wherewithal to do the kinds of things that he wanted to rebuild everything according to his own crazed scheme. And so he had all of the property of all of the Jews of Alexandria confiscated and had them all rounded up and put into the big amphitheater called the Hippodrome. And so the Jewish community of Alexandria sent a delegation of five people, headed by Philo, to Rome to present the case to Caligula personally. And he was unable and unwilling both to hear their case. He had them tag along with him as he went around the city of Rome, inspecting buildings for flaws and for decorative purposes, and he would have them talk to him on the side, and every once in a while he would stop and he would yell at them. All of this gauged to crush them. And Philo wrote an account of it. The delegation the legation to Claudius. Gaius Claudius Nero to Caligula, and it still survives. That's a firsthand report of how they would stand in their meditative, contemplative clarity together, and they would withstand the dragon's breath of the emperor of the world who was trying to break them spiritually. He could have killed them physically at any moment for any reason. He had no compunctions about that at all. None of the Caesars would have ever hesitated killing anyone that was in their way. But they presented to him a problem, because they had a calm which could not be intimidated by imperial power, and he didn't know where that came from. And so he wanted to break them, because once you break them, then you have them. The thing that made it difficult for Caligula, as Philo points out, is that before there were individuals who were able to do this. But this was the first time that a group of people, even though it was just five, five men, but they presented themselves as a small seed of a community. And so, for the first time, Roman imperial power understood that there was a power of community that they had not co-opted into their power structure. And so, at the much larger game of intimidation, when Nero Caesar decided to burn the city of Rome down so he could build a new Rome, he blamed the Hellenistic Jews, especially the sect known as the Christians. They're the ones who did this. And Here's Tacitus. The burning of Rome. By the sixth day of the fire. Enormous demolitions had confronted the raging flames with bare ground and open sky. It had burnt and burnt and burnt and burnt, and the fire was finally stamped out at the foot of the Esquiline Hill. But before panic had subsided or hope revived, flames broke out again in more open regions of the city. Here there were fewer casualties, but the destruction of temples and pleasure arcades was even worse. This new conflagration caused additional ill feeling because it started on the estate of Tigellinus in the Emilia district. For people believe that Nero was ambitious to found a new city to be called after himself. Tigellinus was one of the most brutal perverts, and he was chosen by Nero because he knew that he loved perversion and could always be trusted to be perverse, and never would try to take over the power himself. And so Tigellinus was raised within a few years of being this brutal guard to being the most trusted inquisitor of other people, because he loved to frame innocent people and to torture the innocent. He liked doing that. When Rome burned and the whole structure. This was in 64 A.D., the whole structure of the Roman imperium became shaky on the grounds that there was something missing. Radically missing. There was something cosmologically wrong, something historically lacking that they couldn't get Ahold of. They couldn't pull it in and tie it up. And so they did what a totalitarian view will always do. If we can't co-opt it, then we will do what our ancestors did to Carthage. We will efface it from the earth. But this time it wasn't Carthage, it was Jerusalem, and it wasn't the city of Jerusalem so much. It was the temple that was at the center of Jerusalem. And so that had to be effaced from the earth. And while preparations were being made for that. In 68 AD, Nero went way too far. He had conspired to have his brutal, conniving mother Agrippina finally killed, and after plot after plot was foiled because she was more mean than he, he tried to have her drowned in a special built boat that would fall apart, and it killed the Rudder Man. But she swam ashore and still survived. So finally Tigellinus said, just kill her. So he sent three professional maniac murderers to her place, and they just bludgeoned her to death in front of whoever was there. In 68 A.D., Nero died, and the next three men within the next year who tried to be Roman Emperor, also died. Four men in one year tried to be Roman emperor, and every time one of them came into the place of power, he was completely zapped exed out because it became like a metaphysical, occult hot seat that no one could sit in. It was as if the god Serapis chair will hold someone who will weep for the transiency of life, but not for someone who will commandeer it. And that's why the fifth man, Vespasian, sought to co-opt the power by becoming the Messiah of prophetic Hellenistic Judaism himself. Now, this is a very peculiar situation, because when the National Socialist Party took over Germany. They found that there was a convenient archetypal scapegoat in the Jewish population all over again, for the very same reason they not only didn't fit in, they wouldn't fit in, and not because that there wasn't some ideological way to mulch things together, but because there's no way to co-opt a zero ness, a vanishing point, into an integral pyramid. It doesn't happen. It can't happen. So that the classic way of expressing it, the way that it was expressed by by a group of men who read Tacitus when they formed a new country by the men who formed the United States of America, they decided to put on the number $1 bill. The pyramid that has whose capstone is not a stone, but is an eye. An eye that is raised above the rest of the pyramid. It's on the money. Because the founders of the United States knew their Tacitus. They understood the complexities of history. They understood that political forms of integration have a limitation, and that that limitation tends to preemptively protect itself by co-opting all the avenues of meaning, like language or purpose or finances or vision or whatever for itself, and that you must put it exactly at the most popular place of exchange on the $1 bill of its population. So if they're schooled right to know what they're doing and why this stuff is here, they will remember and won't go the way of all empires. But of course, you have to have an educational system that does this, and if you don't, it doesn't happen all by itself. What happens all by itself is the old ritual dead end circles that always lead to death. And on their way to death, they lead more and more violently to attempts to keep the power collected. The difficulty. Is that in keeping that power integrated. The number one process that's kept in tow is the mythic process. The process by which images are generated by experience and images generated by experience can be held by very powerful ideas that are woven into doctrinaire structures, and that the mind can be co-opted in that way. Seneca, in his writings on anger, is clear to point out to Nero and all of his students of the day that anger is not a visceral response by the body, but is always coordinated by the mind. And if you keep the mind Disciplined into its doctrinaire pattern from youngsters right on through old age. And you keep the doctrinaire inculcation integrated ideologically by a powerful idea. And that that is linked mythically with a ritual comportment which is repeatable in all of its chameleon multiplicity. Then, with that structure in place, one should be able to rule forever. Rome would be, and was expected to be the eternal city. Because what would there be that would ever threaten it, that would ever change it? Because anyone who would come to power would come to power with a very similar thing. And you could always say, well, we have the power already. We'll work you in. You can be a part of the ongoing structure, but the transformation that zero makes possible ignores that entire ecology. It has no appeal in reality whatsoever, because it always, in face of the immense infinity of reality, is a sorrowful little game. It's like truant grade schoolers parading as adults. And so it becomes patently ridiculous, but only as long as there is an educational capacity to expand. Those who can see beyond the handful of natural, transformed people, so that there has to be an educational aspect to make it general for a population. I think we have a quotation at the beginning of our course outline from Benjamin Franklin from 1759. We love to stare more than to reflect, and to be intently amused at our leisure, than to commit the smallest trespass on our patients by winding a painful, tedious maze which would pay us in nothing but knowledge. I used to have a quotation from Jefferson to Madison, James Madison during the 1787 Continental Congress, when the Constitution was being made, Jefferson was in Paris. He succeeded Benjamin Franklin there for five years, so he wasn't at the Constitutional Convention. And Madison was there keeping detailed notes so that Jefferson could understand exactly the detailed chronology, the historical drama that was unfolding. And in addition to saying to Madison that the Constitution is deeply flawed and therefore must have a Bill of rights of the individual, he also, in that same letter to Madison, said, we must trust in the common good sense of the educated basic population, because only by that way will tyranny have a foil, because tyranny is always an integration to a singularity of the political forms of power, which are always mental games. Political forms are closely allied to what I used to call arcade games. So our history section is a very difficult phase to get through. And one of the assignments that we have, which is very useful, that helps center it for you, is to write a history of your past two years. If you're in this education, if you're in this process, history is now the seventh quarter. So it means that you have a chance to look back over the whole education and that that's one year and three quarters of the two years. And what you would include are the three months before you began this course. And that would be your two years. And to do a history of that is not just to get the chronology, but to bring into play all of the artifacts for something which integration cannot do, it cannot analyze in terms of a harmonic, there is no harmonic analysis available in integration. It takes a proportionate ratio anality of differentiation. In order to be able to carry out one of the great flaws in Aristotle. I don't have time to read the whole thing, but you can see for yourself. I brought the book in, I think just a sample somewhere around here, a book. Here it is. There are many books like this Jonathan Lear, Aristotle and Logical Theory, and I'll start next week off by reading the quotation from it. It comes to this kind of a conclusion. The proof, by means of refutation, is constructed so as to real reveal to us that Aristotle's opponent is in a contradictory position. Prima facie, it might appear that the revelation that one is in a contradictory position would hardly be felt as damaging to the opponent of the law of non-contradiction. But Aristotle is not trying to persuade him. The argument is for our sake and not his. Aristotle thinks he has shown that there is no one who does not believe in the law of non-contradiction. So the strategy to adopt is one designed to get us to see the incoherent Coherent position. Aristotle's opponent is in. This cannot be achieved merely by having him admit that he is in error. Just signing a confession that the state is right and you were wrong. That's not enough. Oh, no. Although he admits to this, we do not yet recognize the incoherence of his position. Proof, by means of refutation, is designed to show us that if the opponent is capable of saying anything, even if what he says is that he is opposed to the law of non-contradiction, then his assertive and inferential practices, his general behavior, must be in accord with the law of non-contradiction, and when a man is sufficiently confused to assert that he does not believe in the law of non-contradiction. His general behavior is a far better guide to. His beliefs than his assertions. The behavior. And then skipping over a little bit. Argumentation is useless to persuade him to accept the law of non-contradiction, whatever that might mean. But his very ability to argue. His very ability to argue reveals that the alleged opponent is not genuine, even though we may have thought he was, the opponent may cheerfully admit that everything he says is false, and momentarily we may even find that amusing. But after the proof by refutation, we will not find it deeply interesting. This is a very subtle double twist in the whole thing. You are not worthy of being included in the state, because the state is eminently rational. And your opposition was not just that you didn't understand the rationality of our being in control, but your very ability to question it shows that you were rational after all, but you didn't even know about your own rationality. Tyrannies are so deep and so startlingly brutal and so massively insane that it is impossible in a brief concourse to describe it. The best that's ever been done. Was the great epic of consciousness written by Cervantes called Don Quixote. To be a knight errant against the tyranny of that kind of empire, you have to be able to wage quests against the ridiculous. And only that capacity entitles you to go free, because they cannot co-opt your courage of heart to endure the quest in face of the ridiculous madness. They can co-opt death. They can handle that, but ridiculousness they cannot handle. Harpo Marx doesn't fit into any kind of empire.