History 9

History eight last week presented the very difficult situation that arises for men and women when they come to realise that they are immersed. Are the machines immersing us? We're good. We're immersed in layers, and these layers have been accruing for quite a long time and they are like geological strata. And when we look back now, from the beginning of the 21st century, we're able to see that what we call culture, human culture goes back farther than our species. In fact, it goes back further than the genus hominid. It goes back to the primates who came out of the development of life on this planet more than 70 million years ago. We know from the work of Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, who became chimpanzees about 70 million years ago, that there is a very peculiar quality that develops even in chimpanzee culture. The males patrol the boundaries of the territory, and the females occupy the center of the territory, but they are able, at a maturation point of their sexuality, to go from the center of this territory into another territory and not be challenged by those males, and occupy the center of that new territory, and to keep the bloodlines of the chimpanzee population fertile without getting caught into local dead ends. Tens of millions of years later, this quality comes down in human culture as kinship groups, and one of the ways in which kinship works is that certain relationships are forbidden and others are encouraged. Which means that in primordial groups before the genus Homo was made evolutionarily and before the species Homo sapiens within that genus was made, already, kinship groups had their forms and their protections of exclusion. So that in the late 19th century the discovery the making of the science of anthropology. The first anthropology book in the world was by E.B. Tylor, 1871, just called anthropology. The discovery that kinship structures are the way in which human forms seem to fit into nature in such a way that life goes on in a real way. In the late 19th century, when this was being mooted as a science of anthropology. There was a another crisis in the way in which political forms, which are the intellectual form of kinship groups, the way in which political forms had again reached a third crisis point. And the 20th century was unfortunately a terrific miss, working out of the karma of that particular crisis. What was that crisis and why was it a third crisis, and what was the what were the two previous crises and why are they there? All of these are questions of history. And to simply say that in 2001 here that we are in a non historical formlessness doesn't mean very much until you come to understand why and how that works and how that doesn't work. And all of these issues require a tremendous attentiveness towards historical development, and why it is that our persons and the relationships of men and women and the relationships of men and men and of women and women, why Human interfacing has a scrambled quality which cannot be thought through. It's not that the mind is not capable of thinking through it, but the dimensions of the situation outstrip the integral capacities of the mind structurally. No one will ever figure it out mentally. And yet the conviction at the end of the 19th century was that intelligence makes the template within which consciousness works. And all during the 20th century. This assumption, this presupposition, sabotaged every attempt by every person in the entire century to be real. And it just ain't true. Intelligence is not the arbiter of the forms within which consciousness works. Spiritual vision so exceeds the capacities of idea and concept as to be like the like the universe compared to a star system. Why does the star system may be beautifully complex as it may be? The universe. The cosmos is grander than one could imagine or believe. And so there is a mysterious quality that always needs to be reminded here, early in the 21st century, that we're dealing with a mysterious nature and a magical consciousness, and that there are adventures of learning that are capable of having ideas, of having concepts, of being integrated by symbols, of being presumed into differential arrays, of possibility. All this is certainly true, but that they mystery of life and the magic of spirit are very operative and need to be constantly reminded to us, especially at this time, that all this is real and true, and that we are really having adventures of navigation into the unknown and must not be satisfied by playing intellectual games. And there's a great deal of difference between somebody who is a gamester and someone who is a trickster. A trickster always respects the mystery of life, always participates in the transformation, and always is ready for a complete unknown in consciousness. Where a gamester will plan for every contingency and file it away in some Pentagon vault and say, we now control the situation because our computers have played all the war games and we know how to win in every case. This is indeed pride that comes before the fall. But before we go into this, before we see that the crisis before the beginning of the 20th century was just a hundred some years before. And that the events of the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the Romantic Revolution brought together were a tremendous crisis at that time that set into play what happened during the 19th century and led to the crisis of the 20th century. And just in a gist, the 19th century progressively dematerialized. The conviction of certainty in things that were portable evaporated during the course of the 19th century. And where at the beginning, in 1800, you had the confidence in one of Dickens's novels, a man, a character named Gradgrind says facts, I want the facts. And in 1800 the conviction was, is that there are facts that are concrete that can be had. And on that basis, one can make judgments that will hold of this, that and the other. And by 1900, the confidence that that was true was completely gone. By 1900, you had someone named Max Planck come up with a mysterious who knows, universal constant that is always there in every exact mathematical equation and just what it was no one knew. And five years later, Einstein's theory of relativity began to come out. That we do not know, because it is not knowable, because the relative relationality of reality is infinite. And the 20th century slowly came to understand that one can be confident that even not knowing with certainty leads to a very good close approximation of possibility. But the difficulty in the 20th century is that they could not separate that from gamester activity. And so the 20th century ended as a carnival nightmare of gamesters in power and authority everywhere. And that they are living in a dead world does not occur to them, because they do not understand that life is quite real and quite mysterious, and the spirit is quite wild and free beyond all their diagrams. And the 21st century, like the 14th, is a mystical century of the rediscovery. That reality of the spirit is really wild, elegantly wild, and that we are the children who play in those realms quite easily. It isn't that Mother Nature is there, it's that the lady of the Wild Things is there, and she likes us to play. But before the revolution of the early 20th century and the revolutions of the late 1700s early 1800s, there was an original revolution called the Renaissance. And that 500 years ago, men and women who were quite conscientious, they were enormously conscientious, discovered that they had cracked the form that for a thousand years had held, and that that cracked form necessitated two things one, to either make a new form or find some way to repair the old one called for a transformation of man. The other called for a reformation of form. And we're going to look at a figure who characterized the Renaissance, the historian Jacob Burckhardt, and a philosophical historian, Hegel, who characterized the Romantic Revolution. Two figures. The Renaissance is a cracking of the medieval form, and Hegel's philosophy is a cracking of the enlightenment forms of understanding. We tried using the plural here for the chair, because there are so many wonderful minds that are brought together as an orchestra. And I'm just a conductor. We tried to present for the first two months of history how it was that when history, when historical consciousness first began to really get its powerful competence in classical Greece about 2500 years ago, focusing on Thucydides, that that Greek history was commandeered whole, swallowed whole, uncritically, whole by Roman power, and that Roman history became an expression like another layer, another version of that Greek history. And they tried to put Roman touches on it, but having swallowed it whole, having not digested it, it came across in such a way that it was not really annealed. Use an alchemical term. It wasn't really annealed. Roman history was never a real alloy. It was always a gilding. And even the greatest historian, Tacitus, was a gilding onto Thucydides, so that when it came time for a power struggle in the Christian era, where it became the Christian religion, became the official religion of the Roman Empire, displacing the mythological Jupiter, the Roman Jupiter, who was their version of the Greek Zeus, so that the pantheon of Greek mythology that had become Roman mythology was displaced by Christianity. The undigested Greek mythological matrix. Influenced the new official Roman religion of official Christianity in such. A way to distort it. And what came out was a different kind of a gilding. The New Rome gilded. Not the old Rome, but rich gilded. The old Greek mythology. So that the new Rome, Constantinople eventually gave rise to Byzantine. Civilization, which is a Greek Orthodox Christianity that would have been unrecognizable to Uh, the early Hellenistic Jews who were the original, uh, population that became so-called Christian in the first century A.D. and in reaction to the rise of the Byzantine power of the new Rome, the old Rome got its share of powerful people who said, no, we're still in control. And so Rome had its own version of Christianity that was patiently hammered out the way Romans always hammer things out by committees, by conferences, by centuries of legal points that are decided and made into doctrine. And the slow build up of Roman Catholic religious law and doctrine came finally to see that there was a political split between them and the Eastern Orthodox. And this massive splitting. Of the Christianity into a Roman Catholic and a Greek Orthodox camp was the theme of the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. One can look and see that there were many precursors in Italy as early as the 12th century. You could say that there was a 12th century renaissance. In fact, a great Harvard professor, Charles Haskins, wrote a book a long time ago, 90 years ago or so, on the 12th century Renaissance, and made a very good case for it that when you want to look at the Italian Renaissance in Florence, how about, uh, Dante? How about Saint Francis of Assisi? How about Joaquim de Ferrara? How about Petrarch? Boccaccio? It's a fantastic murderer's row of cultural heroes. Wasn't that? Yes. That was a renaissance. It was not the Renaissance. The Renaissance, the high Italian Renaissance begins with an audacious. In fact, we have to use the old comic book term bodacious. A bodacious act by an audacious man. Cosimo de Medici began the Italian Renaissance. He was a young man. He was enormously elegant. He had made a lot of political enemies. The Albrizzi family, especially in Florence, hated his guts because he was too talented and they got him exiled. But instead of pouting or feeling bad, Cosimo de Medici went over to Venice and had a good time with all of his friends. His family was in banking all over Europe, and he was like a Rothschild 500 some years ago. 600 years ago. And while he was there, he planned very patiently because Cosimo was a master social general. He planned not only to go back to Florence, but to go back in complete control, not only of Florence and getting the El Breezy Bruzzi family out of power, but he wanted to go back to Florence and bring the center of the world with him to Florence. And he found the perfect Event to do this. It was the world's fair of world history. The new Rome, Constantinople, Byzantium was falling to the Moslem siege. Mehmet the Conqueror finally set up rows of new cannons and just kept firing day after day, week after week, month after month. And the supposedly impregnable walls of Byzantium were just being gouged out of pocket by pocket by pocket, until finally they were going to be breached. And so all of the wisdom of the Byzantine New Rome Empire for a thousand years had to flee. The Muslims would burn it, so they had to flee and they were looking for a place to flee to. And the most natural place for them to flee was not to Greece, but to Italy. And they wanted to go to Venice. Only the problem was, is this was territory run by the Roman Church. So they had to find a way to make at least a temporary peace with the Roman church so that they could come into their turf and not be exed out. And Cosimo de Medici, the young genius, decided that this ecumenical council of bringing East and West back together again should not be in Venice, but should be in his hometown, Florence. And so he used this enormously powerful conference as his deck of aces to convince power structures all over Italy to support him, because this was the biggest game there was. And of course, when Cosmo went back to Florence with a certainty that the Ecumenical Council of the world was going to be held in Florence, the Labruzzi family had been so effaced that when he rode past their villas and mansions, he stood up in the saddle of his horse, and he looked at the empty villas of the opponent's families and silently just surveyed the fact that they were gone, really gone. Their empty villas were proof of his new rising power. But in 1439, when that convention, that conference, that ecumenical council was held in Florence, starting the Italian Renaissance, it became apparent to someone like Cosimo later on called the father of the country. Pater patriae, the first in a long time to be called father of the country, like they call George Washington the father of the country. Now, that phrase is a Renaissance phrase, and it applies to Cosimo de Medici. He saw that it wasn't just enough to have Florence the venue of this. Florence also had to have someone who was masterful at understanding the new ecumenical world that would come out of the meeting of East and West. And he saw that the reason why the split between East and West and Christianity was so dogged for a thousand years was that the philosophic basis of Roman Catholicism had been scrambled in a sense. Because the understanding of ancient philosophy had not been very clear in the Middle Ages, and that there were many issues that had to be brought out. And one of them was that the Aristotelian bases of Christian doctrine had to be annealed more properly with the Neoplatonic basis of Byzantine theology, and that the figure who was able to bring those two Aristotle and Neoplatonism together was Plato. Plato Neoplatonists were from Plato, but after Aristotle, and that somehow if you brought Plato into the mix again, it would be the missing ingredient of the philosophic resin that would bring East and West together. And so Cosimo de Medici planned like a master general, not only to have this conference there and in Florence, but to have someone who could do an edition of Plato's works to bring him back at the center, so that Aristotle and the Neoplatonists would be folded in together and synthesized anew, and that he could not trust any of the Byzantine scholars to do this. He could not trust any of the Western Christian scholars to do this. He could only trust his own new vision. And so he decided that he would have some young boy trained to do this specific task for him. He would be neither a Byzantine scholar nor a Roman Catholic scholar, but he would be a Cosimo de Medici scholar. And so he chose the young son of his personal physician, Marsilio Ficino, who was only 12 years old. Cosimo said to his father, I will take your son under my aegis, if he will carry out this task for me. And then he can do whatever he wants with the rest of his life. I want him to translate for me the complete works of Plato, and I want him to do it in an ecumenical way that is neither Roman nor Byzantine, but is Florentine. I want it done in a Florentine way. And of course, when Ficino began making his studies as a teenager to learn Greek, he was told that Greek is extremely refined. It isn't like Latin. It isn't built like Roman law. Latin on precedent and engineering principles, but that Greek as a language was tremendously acrobatic in its mentality, and that the key to learning Greek was to be able to sing in Greek, because it was only through the lyric acrobatics and pyrotechnics of Greek syntax that one could understand the subtlety in Plato. And so Ficino learned that when you learn philosophic Greek, you learn it musically. And so, even later in life, they used to celebrate Plato's birthday on November 27th in the beautiful villa, the vicarage. The big. Yellowish stucco villa up on the rim above Florence and Fiesole that Cosimo de Medici bought specifically and had refurbished specifically to be the Florentine Platonic Academy. Ficino's home. And they would celebrate Plato, and they would have a great banquet, and they would play the lutes, and they would sing the original songs in classical Greek, and they would drink and they would eat and they would have a philosophic banquet. And in this way they were really Platonists in a Florentine way, in a Cosmo de Medici way. They were not medieval Romans, they were not medieval Byzantines, but they were a new breed. They were Renaissance Florentines. Now, in the succeeding centuries, the pristine simpleness of that glory was covered again and again and again, and it had to be rediscovered in the 19th century. And the man who rediscovered it was Jacob Burckhardt. And when he published his book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, even though it was an old story Of 70 years old. It was new in 1860 to the 19th century. In the midst of their dematerialization, it struck them as a peculiarly attractive new thing, that there was such a thing as the Renaissance, and it made not only the Renaissance real as an appreciable form, but it also made the medieval period formed in such a way that it could be appreciated also as a form opposite from the Renaissance. And so you had the rise in the late 19th century of a whole cultural tone of people who went back to the Gothic medieval quality and enjoyed that, or people who went on to the Renaissance quality and enjoyed that. And all of this is due to Burckhardt's genius. And we have to understand that Burckhardt is born in Basel, I think around 1818. He was a contemporary of Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, he and Nietzsche were buddies at one time when they were young men. I think they sold books together in a bookstore in Basel. They were always buddies. And as Nietzsche reformed by a spectacular romantic revolution in philosophy, Burckhardt did the same in the sense of cultural history. Nietzsche's first book is trying to understand why it was that Greek tragedy was such a powerful trance form. Why is it that that those forms in Greek tragedy allowed for a transform of the kind of Greek culture that was before it, to the classical brilliance of the Greek culture that was there of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, Plato, Thucydides, the whole group. Why is it that there was this classical Greece at all? Classical Athens? Because there was a transform capable because art forms had been made that did that. And Nietzsche's first book is the appreciation of the power of the transform of Greek tragedy as an art form. And it came out 1872, about 12 years after Burckhardt, the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy directly related to it, because it's in Burckhardt's book that he points out that Renaissance man is a different kind of man from medieval man. Yes, there were individuals in medieval period, but there were no self-conscious, historically alert individuals in the medieval period. Why? Because in the medieval period they were buried in the story. The story? The mythological river was so wide and so deep that they didn't know that they were in a river. They thought, this is how things were. It's always been this way. And if it wasn't, why, it would just be anarchy. Whereas Renaissance man learned to swim in that mythological river and get on top of it and learn to see that there are shores that are outside of this river, and how to climb on shore and go explore the land. So that Renaissance man became self conscious historically of himself. And the Renaissance man is not a man who can do everything. That's like a cliche. It's not that at all. It's that he can do one really great thing. He can extract himself from the mythological surge of the biggest river and climb on shore and live his own life beyond mythology, no matter how powerful, how attractive that mythology is. He lives his own life, but he runs into a danger because when he climbs on shore, everyone that he knows is now different from him, and he is exposed to alienation. It's different. It's a terrible thing to be different, to be catastrophically different because you not only don't fit in with the crowd, you don't fit in with crowd ness at all. And you learn that the individual then must fill out and become the unfortunate phrase is the one that carries over from one of Joseph Campbell's lecture. A modern man has his own mythology. He becomes as complex as a whole tribe. This is a typical Joseph Campbell misunderstanding. It isn't. That man develops his own mythology at all. At all. It's that a man transforms out of the mythological current into the historical indefinite array of possibility. He learns that Mythologies are an inferior form in the sense that they always carry you along where they're going to go, and there are some times that you don't want to go there. And so the individual must find himself historically. Whereas medieval man, it never occurred to him to find himself historically at all. He found himself safe in the cycle of repetition. That is a huge, huge, huge difference is a monumental difference. And when Burckhardt published his book, he realized that he had hold of a theme that he had just scratched the surface. And that meant that he, Jacob Burckhardt, as as a man, had to find his way in history for himself, which meant that he had to find a way to understand how did all this happen? How did all this come about? One of the most powerful books that he wrote early on, then, was to take a look at the founder of Byzantium, at the founder of Constantinople. And so he wrote The Age of Constantine the Great. He went back to try and find. All right, how did all that work out in the early three hundreds A.D.? So the age of Constantine the Great. Then it occurred to him that it isn't just that the Byzantine New Rome founded by Constantine the Great is in itself the final context against which then, to understand the Renaissance, one had to understand well, this is the new Rome. And it came out of the old Rome. But those two came out of Greece, out of classical Greece. So he, uh, wrote a huge book published late in his life, The History of Greek Culture. He went back. He went back to try to understand the Greek matrix, out of which both Romes came in the first place. And all the time that he was doing that, it occurred to him more and more that he had a hold of the problems of history. And so he had books published, judgments on history and historians, and after his death, a book published of his essays, Force and Freedom reflections on history. And all of these concerns came to two focuses. One was that the immediate transform of the medieval power structure in both the Roman Christian authoritarian form and the Eastern Christian authoritarian form, that the central temple of both forms was the cathedral, the church, and that the center of those architectural centers was the altar, and that the altar in both Roman Christian and Greek Orthodox Christian became focused on a study that was not published during his lifetime, probably for good reason. The altarpiece in Renaissance Italy. The altarpiece, because the development of art, of making an art piece out of the altar was a Renaissance idea. And when he did this, this book was not translated into English for a very good reason until 1988. Never translated? Don't mention it. The other great study that Burckhardt went into was on an artist named Rubens. And Rubens is a largely underestimated in the 20th century, and he is on a level with Michelangelo. And one of the things. This is a detail from one of his paintings. This is Pope Leo the 10th. This is a pope who was a medici. And when he became pope, his first phrase was we now have the papacy. We're going to enjoy it. Let's take a break. Let's come back. Let's come back to where we left off, where we're learning how to inquire in such a way that we don't get caught up in the metronomic sequencing of ideational supported ritual mythology. We're trying to learn to swim in the ocean of history, rather than be secure in the stream of myth, myth and history, to use a chemical term, are not miscible. When brought together, you can emulsify them, but if you let them set for a while the oil and the water separate. They're not miscible. They don't go together. In a way. Mythology is like water. It is a natural solvent that belongs in the natural ecology. Fire and water are natural solvents, but there's a third solvent in nature, which is generally hidden. And that third solvent is alcohol. Alcohols are also natural solvents. For instance, there are some minerals that are soluble in water, and there are some that are only soluble in alcohol. But it's interesting. It doesn't become apparent that alcohol is a solvent in nature. Naturally, it's only when you distill grape juice into wine. It's only in the fermented, transformed stage that alcohol occurs as a necessary organic solvent in nature. And so one calls that spirited liquid and not only fermented as in wine, but further distilled as in liquor. A liquor is a chemical term of something that is doubly transformed. It's fermented and then it's distilled. The wine becomes cognac. It's a different thing. History is a double distilled, transformational medium, and it is full of spirit. Is very powerful and if you try to remain just natural history will get you. Drunk very quickly and you won't know till the fresh air hits you and you. Collapse. So. It's a question of getting used to a reality that includes not only water, but wine and also cognac. It's like the mythic water can be fermented and it can become the visionary quality. Fermented language is magical language, but one can distill by art the magical language so that it becomes historical consciousness, so that art is indispensable as a further transform Symbols in the mind can integrate, and that integration is available for a transform into differential conscious vision. But works of art are like prisms. They take that wine, that fermented water, and they distill it into a more potent, powerful exponential quality, like a rare liquor of consciousness. And so history is really formidable, formidable process. It's a hyperspeed of vision. And so history is very difficult to deal with. And if you try to remain natural in the sense of having a mythic language integrated by ideas that fortify, then a ritual Comportment. History is like a sandstorm that'll just destroy you. And every form made by man has been sandblasted by history, and none of them have survived. And so we're trying to learn not to do that and to develop a different kind of form, like understanding that there is like a crystalline structure that is there in the multifaceted work of art, and that the personality as a work of art, the person as an art form, is able not only to live in a historical process, but to navigate in it. You can go where you would like to go, but the difficulty is, is that we are carrying all this luggage and it's not only luggage, but we're carrying the whole train station full of luggage on our back. And so the difficulty is somehow to get free of that and not fear, because all of our identifications are made that that's the only security that there is. And without that, where will we be? We will be nowhere. And of course, this is fearsome. In his book on the altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, published after he was dead, he would not have it published while he was alive. He died in 1897, published the next year. Because he's taking it by the throat. He says. Chapter two the decoration of the earliest Christian altars Jacob Burckhardt. Perhaps the greatest of all the differences between antique and Christian art relates to the fact that whereas in the Pagan temple, the Most Holy place was occupied by a cult image in the church, it was occupied by the perpetually celebrated sacrament. The Christian altar could be decorated in a number of different ways, and it was often surmounted by a rich baldachin supported by four columns. During the service, splendid vessels, crucifixes, candlesticks might be placed on the mensa, where, while reliquaries and golden lamps might hang from the baldachin, the supporting columns might be decorated the whole way round from top to bottom. Relief carvings representing holy figures and stories, as at the high altar of San Marco in Venice. Indeed, there was no limit to the possible splendour of the altar, especially if it also served as the tomb of a saint, Or was placed as in San Marco above one. And generally one would read such a thing in cultural history courses, in art courses, in history courses, maybe philosophy courses, and just read that and pass over it and you have to stop there to close the book. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The altar of a cathedral is the center of its architectural focus. The altar is also usually over a tomb. What is going on here? That the cathedral is also a tomb. What is going on here? Why? Why all these crucifixes of death at the center of an architectural, supposedly celebration of of life and its its capacities for transform. Why is that? And for that, you have to go beyond the cathedrals, and you have to go back, and you have to go back a long ways. You have to go back maybe 10,000 years or 40,000 years. Let's go back. Um, let's go back about 8 or 9000 years. Just take a median. Let's go back to an example. In Ireland, northwest of Dublin, about 40 miles, it's called Newgrange. Newgrange is one of the last of the Paleolithic temples. It's a big mound, and cut into the mound is a long late Paleolithic cave. And that corridor. That long corridor that goes in has an entrance stone. And on the entrance stone you see spirals. You see three spirals that are linked together. Two of the spirals link in a classic S form, with a third coming off it. And if one went down this long corridor more than 100ft, you would come to the central place, the tomb, and it has two antechambers, and it's built high, and the stones are built so that they layer up and they make a structure. Later on will be called some 6000 years later in Greece it'll be called a beehive tomb. And you see, that kind of a structure in ancient Mycenae was the royal tombs for the kings of ancient Mycenae. A thousand years before classical Greece, contemporaneous with King Midas on on Crete. But there it is 7000 8000 years ago. Newgrange. It is that hive like, resonating chamber, hive shaped, resonating chamber out of stone that has the transform place. It has the altar and the tomb together, but they are not Transformed, except only one brief moment of one day of the year, because the cut into that mound heaped up over that long temple tomb, is oriented so that the mid winter solstice sunrise coming up, the first rays of the sun shine all the way down a light corridor above where one would walk and illuminates the center of that mound, and where it is dark all year long on that moment. On that day it glows rosy red. The rocks become the color of transformed wine, and one sees that the triple spiral is also there on the altar stone. That was the sarcophagus where the ancient Irish kings were laid. After they died, and this was their transformed place, and that their spirit was able to follow the sun beam ray out of death into universal life. 5000 years before Christianity was even thought of. It's the same principle that later on, some 4000 years later, would be the pyramids in Egypt. It's already there 4000 years before that in Ireland, but it's there 35,000 years before that in southern France, in the Paleolithic caves. The whole understanding is always that death is not an end of life, but is a second transformation. The first transformation is that life is born. Birth is a transform, and death is a second transform linked to that. And they are linked together in such a way that there's not just a concourse through it, not just an alignment, not a straight line, but that there is to the form of life, a spiral that goes into another spiral that also can come back or can go off by itself and be complete in its infinity, or it can come back into life and and recirculate rebirth. All of this is so ancient, such an ancient wisdom, that one has to understand that those spirals present in the briefest compass, a kind of crystal prism transform built on the integral form of the maze, and that the ancient maze was always a puzzle for those who were not initiated in how to navigate, how to transform yourself, to go through. You can get lost in a maze, which means that you never know where you are, because the repetition of the pattern is indefinite. You will always be in a rut of procedure that's exactly the same all the time, and that it cannot be figured out because it cannot be indexed by sequence. Time does not index a maze. What indexes a maze is the transform of consciousness. Consciousness changes it. If you come to a simple book a couple of years ago, Celtic designs spiral patterns, and the author is trying to write popularly to people who just don't have any experience with Palaeolithic wisdom, says in, uh, in the volume that the secret of passing through a complex spiral interlock maze to cross this maze neither stick to any extreme nor an unvarying regular pattern, but first establish a pattern and in the end, break out of that pattern, for the path of moderation can be so much of a handicap as that of an extreme. Avoiding extremes can be taken to extreme. This principle of not sticking to one way or another, nor alternating between both is the solution in terms of right and left hand turns. We call that chirality. The decision is yes, right or left. And one can see in this kind of polarity, usually out of a very simple maze. If you maintain going left all the time or right all the time, you'll come out as long as you maintain consistency. But a really complex maze that feeds like an S double spiral. If you go try to go left all the time or right all the time, it's the same as alternating left and then right, left and then right. You will always flow in that's shape form. If there is a third maze that goes off to the side, what would that third maze be? Why is it there at Newgrange 8000 years ago? Because this is the way the mystery of birth of a new person is brought into play. A baby or a new person. They are born from parents, they are born from two. And that third that comes out sometimes called the resolving third. But the resolving third doesn't mean a median. It doesn't mean that one gets distributively clever and goes alternately left and right, left and right if you do not put a hitch into your cadence. If you don't double up and put two lefts in occasionally, even just once, and two rights in occasionally even just once, you will never get to that third spiral, because the way of that path does not allow for consistency or for mechanically distributed alternation to work. It doesn't carry you there, and you will never know that it's there, because your seeming path as you live it is unbroken. And the integral habituation of consistency seems to be proof to the mind that this is what it is. But this is real, and this is certain because it's consistent. Whereas actually inconsistency or discontinuous business is the proof of the pudding. This is one of the great discoveries in 1900 by Max Planck. Energy realistically occurs in quanta. It's never continuous, it's always discontinuous in reality. And one of the gifts of discontinuity of the energy continuum is that energy, because it occurs realistically in quanta, can always be known to any degree of specificity, because you don't have to quantify the interval. The Dow doesn't have to be quantified. In fact, it is not quantifiable because it does not participate in unity at all. It participates in zero. And consciousness can always hold zero in the set with one, and can always ratio out to any degree of specificity whatsoever. Integral and differential calculus is a technique made to know infinite specificity. Exactly, and it works in ancient wisdom, Paleolithic wisdom. This ability to go into a discontinuity of seeming safe, experiential, mythic flow was always experienced by the mind as a death threshold and always shied away from. So that the tomb and the temple were always brought together montaged onto each other to show that the real God doesn't have to be kept track of all the time to be real. The mind can let it go sometimes and it'll be okay. You can go to sleep at the end of the day and you'll wake up tomorrow. You don't have to have a logical consistency unbroken to find reality. If it's logically consistent and unbroken, you will find an integral truth, but not reality. And so all of this wisdom comes down, transformed and brought back each time in each age. There are always men and women who get it, who understand it, who bring it back and re-express it. And again and again and again this happens. In the Renaissance, it was recognized and realized about. 1015. Years. Ten. 12 years into the project. Cosmos. Young protege. Ficino coming along. Cosmo the wealthy, cultivated banker making sure that he got the complete big book of all of Plato's dialogues so it could be translated and built the Laurentian Library so that it would have things there. And all of a sudden, in the midst of that whole project, somebody from Byzantium, a wise old character named Plato, said, you know, the really sheltered secret teachings are the distillation of the transform of Plato. And Cosmo, being Italian mafioso of the First Order, said, well, we we got to have that too. And Plato said Plato was fermented and turned into wine and that wine. In the early centuries of the common area, the first century A.D., those Hermetic dialogues became dialogues of Hermes Trismegistus. Yeah. That the Hermetic writings were the wine of Platonism. And that's not enough just to have all of Plato. This is a very good program you have, but you have to have a deeper program. You have to have a program that includes the hermetic writings as the fermented dialogues of Plato. And so the corpus hermeticum in Greek was secured at very great expense and cost. Ficino's translation of Plato was interrupted, and Cosmo himself said, before you finish Plato, I want you to do the Hermetic writings, the crash course, because he's getting old. He didn't know how long he was going to live, and one of the pleasures that Cosmo had was when he was dying. Ficino was able to come in and read him for the first time in a thousand years. The rediscovered Hermetic writings, the fermented platonic dialogues raised to the dialogues like the poimandres, is the mine shepherd, the crater, the basin, the alchemical transform vehicle, and the rebirth and many of many of the classic classics that hadn't been seen. Cosmos grandson Lorenzo IL Magnifico, being a real Medici, learned that there was a double transform, that the Hermetic writings had not only been the fermentation of Plato changing it into wine, but that the hermetic wine had been distilled into a super liquor of wisdom, and that the figure who was the center of that was Plotinus. That Plotinus's writings are the cognac. He's not Neoplatonic directly from Plato, but he is a distillation of the Hermetic writings, which are the neo Plato. And so Lorenzo de Medici made sure that his grandfather's program was carried out to the nth degree, and that Ficino, before he would die, he would complete his works, not only translating all of Plato and all the Hermetic dialogues, but translating Plotinus and his translation of Plotinus was finished right on time, exactly the same year and the same month that Columbus was discovering America 1492, he put Plotinus out right on Hermetic time, and there it was, the completion of the entirety of the ancient wisdom tradition that had not only come to an integral, but had been fermented and then distilled, was available in the same language for the same people for the first time since the mid three hundreds. And then they discovered that one of the great documents, because they could read Plotinus for the first time. They could read him direct. And they discovered that one of the great documents upon which the medieval theology was based, a book called in Greek, the Eisagoge, was a confusion of Aristotle and Plotinus mishmashed together, and that now that they could read Plotinus, they could separate Plotinus from Aristotle, and they realized that the medieval world was a political propaganda machine, that all of it was built with one purpose only, to keep those in power who ran that authoritarian form to keep them in power. It had no ability to ferment or to distill the spirit, and that's why they began to call it in Burckhardt's time, when they read it again after 300 years of having it covered over. The term came out that these were not medieval ages. This was the Dark Age, the Dark Age when he was a young man. Bertrand Russell, writing his great history of Western philosophy, likened the medieval period to a dull gray plane of mediocrity that had only one original thinker in almost a thousand years, an Irishman named John Scotus Eriugena, who learned to read Greek so well for himself that he translated Plotinus for himself. And he was chosen by a very tough bunch of people surrounding Charlemagne to redo the power structure of the recapturing of Europe by Charlemagne and his heirs. And that this was then. It's now called historically the Carolingian Renaissance. But because Eriugena was quite limited in his application, yes, he had someone like Charlemagne and his crowd behind him, but they didn't have the historical context that the Italian Renaissance had behind it, nor was it as powerful as Burckhardt rediscovering it by 1860, in the middle of the 19th century. And there's something deep in here to understand. When Burckhardt's book, The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy came out in 1860. It was at right at the beginning of the powering up of an era that's usually characterized as the Victorian period. Ruled largely by the British Empire, ruled largely by Queen Victoria. And the Victorian period has always identified with the fearfulness of sexuality, with the covering up of the human form. And all of this is like a Paleolithic mystery play, because it isn't about the Victorian period, isn't about fearing sexuality, fearing nudity so much as the entire 19th century is a century involved in dematerialization, and they were fearful about getting to anything that was poignant, and sexuality and nudity were just the most conspicuous cultural icons for that kind of bareness. Also, they feared just as much as sexuality and nudity. They feared the kind of open spaces in design, so they would fill everything every little corner, every little niche, doilies on top of doilies. Don't let anything be. Don't let it show the grain, because this is dangerous territory. We're getting down to where things are revelatory out of themselves. The two words in German that connotate that are Existenz with a Z, Existenz and Dasein. Existence is an existential quality that we experience, but design is a deeper spiritual quality that's inside of our existence, and it's fearful to be nude in the body, but it's doubly fearful to be nude in your existence. But it is triply fearful to be nude in your design. And this haunted, haunted the 20th century. 20th century is a nightmare of terror at this, and all the violence and wars and craziness are an attempt to distract themselves from getting real. It's unbelievable. Mystery play. You can never be secure to go to heaven by living like hell. That whole world is a junkyard. And were it not for compassion, the disdain would be permanent. The 21st century is different in at least five different orders of complexity. And this is an education made to go into that in such a way that you can not only find yourself, but you can lose yourself for a while and not worry about it more next week.