History 11

Today's lecture is appropriately entitled The Terror of History Regressed as History 11. We have been in a protracted struggle for a very long time. Not only many generations, but many centuries, and actually to someone largely civilized for many millennia. And that's why all this work. And for a long time. For longer than our species has been around, which is about 120,000 years. There have been those who have gone out and continued to work. So that's what we're doing here. We're working in a very realistic way, and our process of inquiry eventually not only brings revelation, but it brings realization. The events of this week for this country are rather horrific example. But we need to understand that there is a very fundamental, not a principle, so much as was understood about 200 years ago in one of our philosophers of history that we are taking, Hegel understood that there had to be a philosophy of history, a philosophic history that went into principle, went into structures of the mind. And 200 years ago that was about as good as someone could have done. But it also had its own repercussions during the 19th century, and a certain spur of the Hegel philosophy of history was seized and taken and changed and inverted and promulgated by Karl Marx, and it led to the several revolutions that collectively established the Marxist-Leninist state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And the 20th century saw not only the catastrophic results of that implementation, but also of the direct opposite of the Bolshevik Revolution was the revolution of the National Socialist Party in Germany that became the Nazis. And so the radical left and the radical right in their philosophic, historical antagonisms toward the entire 20th century apart. The tens of millions of people that were killed during the 20th century made it the most vicious and tragic of all centuries, and this in a bloody world. And of course, the 21st century must not be given over to that kind of a pattern, because our powers of dismemberment are permanent. One of the many really difficult qualities to appreciate is the way in which reality develops. If a dimension has been brought into play. Reality seems to expect then that that dimension will be factored into the scope of the activity of the. In our case of the way in which life in a human, civilized form will continue to develop. If this does not happen, if there is a curtailment that energy that would go into the development. Backs up. It doesn't disappear, but it backs up. This is the whole principle in a psychoanalytic understanding of psychic energy, that a trauma cauterizes and stops the growth at a certain level. And not only does energy build volcanically behind that trauma, but it spreads laterally to begin to change and affect and infect, and that the developmental energies that would go forward actually go into a reverse and devolve. And that there is no end to devolution other than reaching a self-destructive level of activity. And of course, this happens all the time in the universe. There seems to be, though, a guarantee of dimension beyond the ability for trauma and regression and the reoccurrence of this kind of a terminal mode. There seems to be a definite weight to the cure for that. So that there is not only the universe, but there is a cosmos, and that the cosmos is truly grand, and that there are beings much related to ourselves who simply operate grandly, and we quite frequently operate quite grandly now, at the beginning of the 21st century. The trauma that occurs does not occur originally, but we're wise enough now after being civilized in a written way for at least 6000 years. We understand on deep consideration that these great traumas reoccur. They reappear and we recognize parallels and we recognize resonances. And so it has been possible for a long time, for quite a long time, to understand that there is something which is like a circle of events which reoccurs and 2000 years ago, the strongest way of saying this to the most powerful human group then in power was in Ovid's Is. Written in the first decade of the A.D. era. And dedicated to making Augustus Caesar. Permanently enshrined as a divine power. At the very end of the Metamorphoses. He, Ovid writes of the way in which his uncle, the divine Julius Caesar, the moment of his death, his assassination in the corridor in front of the Roman Senate in the center of world power, that as soon as Julius Caesar was killed, the goddess Venus stood there and within the Senate house, unseen of all she snatched from Caesar's corpse the new freed soul before it could dissolve into the air and bore it up to join the stars of heaven. And as she bore it, felt it glow and burn. At the beginning of the Metamorphoses, Ovid talks about the pattern of eternal return, of how there are four ages, an age of gold, an age of silver, an age of brass, and a final age of iron that is full of decadence and horror and how the world becomes barbaric and that there is an end to this cycle of devolution. And at the end of the age of ire, the world is consumed either by a solvent of universal fire or of universal water. That these four ages follow each other in a devolutionary circle, and that after the last vestige of the age of decadent iron perishing in its apocalypse, a new age of gold is reborn, emerges out. This cycle of a circle of events was a theme of a book by the great Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, and his last section is called The Terror of History. But this cycling, this circle, this ingrained grain of the experience of man in a cultured in a civilized way. Has its deepest advocate philosophically in European history, in Friedrich Nietzsche and Nietzsche, a little deeper, considerably more genius than Eliot. And his basic understanding was that it's not an eternal return. It's not a cycle of just a simple circle. Nietzsche's presentation was that, and the title of this book is much more specific Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal recurrence of the same. This is deeper. The eternal recurrence of the same. And the author of this study, one of the greatest of all the history of ideas, professors in Europe, I believe he was at Vienna for a long time. He was the head of the History of Ideas program in Vienna. Karl Löwith and Lowth's great book that in the 1950s we, all of us who were in universities studying philosophy and politics, we all read it. His great book is called Meaning and History The Theological implications of the philosophy of history. And when you look at Lois, The Meaning of history, the very first section in the table of contents is Burckhardt, and the third is Hegel. And we're using Burckhardt and Hegel here, the culmination of our history inquiry and our process of differential conscious education with deep advisability. The eternal recurrence of the same. And when you look at the Augustan Principate, the way that everything was commandeered to solidify authority and control permanently, not only with the epic of Virgil's Aeneid Did, and with the great buildings of Rome itself, with the establishment of Roman law, with Ovid's cycling of the mythological energies of the universe into the pattern of the four ages of man in the Metamorphoses, to the establishment of every conceivable occult underpinning. One of the central ceremonial vehicles by which power and authority are made manifest was the integration of all of this in the re-entry by the Roman Empire emperor into the city of Rome, and this procession of reentry into the seat of power was called his triumph. And the Roman tradition of the triumph for the returning heroes has been ingrained for several thousand years, even before Augustus. It was well entrained and entrenched and ingrained, and put there that there is a procession of triumph by which one reassumes the authority not just of the Empire, not just of the power that one has, but of the ability to maintain the pace and control of the circle of eternal recurrence of the same. And that man has universal power and a universal state. Not because he has all the land, but because he has control over the pace of the circle of events that always occur in this universe. One of the most careful additions to the Augustan Principate, to the founding of the Roman Empire, as we talked about a couple of months ago, was the inclusion of astrology into the mix of power and the world's first great textbook in astrology by Manilius. The Astronomica was written at this time for specifically this purpose to be woven in with Virgil and Ovid and Horus, and the Sibylline records and the Roman laws and the entire structure of Roman power, and all of it to cement a fabric that would last forever, because it was geared to be in sync with the pattern of the circle of eternal return, which, even on a deep level then was seen as the eternal recurrence of the same. And that's why astrology was held to work, and that's why the successor to Augustus Caesar became an astrological freak, Tiberius Caesar. Because astrology shows that the pattern of the eternal recurrence of the same holds in the heavens as well. Even the gods are subject to this, so that it is a deeper. Geometry of power than the gods. And that while the gods structure the mythological imagery of the world, this deeper structure is the understanding of the geometry of heaven. That this is the way the universe works, and even the gods are subject to that. In the Renaissance, there was a rebirth of this confidence in an astrological way of looking at the heavenly influences that come back and choreograph the eternal recurrence of the same. And there was at the same time a need to have an earthly reoccurrence of the same pattern, and based on the way in which human power had developed within the Roman aegis, the Roman Empire aegis, which had extended all this while, was still very strong in the 15th century Italy that we're talking about Burckhardt's Renaissance Italy still very, very, very strong. Still strong today at the beginning of the 21st century, no less. So that the complement to the astrological pattern became developed in the various courts of northern Italy, where there were families and oligarchical groups of people of power trying to put together some way to express the pattern of eternal recurrence of the same, the circle of destiny as it's sometimes called. And these various courts in northern Italy at the beginning of the 1400s, in order to establish this, looked towards the way in which the Roman Empire had bled its energy, its occult energies, its sympathetic correlation energies into the medieval world. And they looked to bring back out of the medieval world, much like tapping a tree for its sap to bring that sap back out of the disabled forests of the world, so that that sap could be then alchemically distilled so that one could come to the fundamental structures of images and symbols that had been dispersed in the medieval period, to bring them back and to hold them in a reformulation of the ancient pattern. And this is the origin of tarot decks. And all of the courts of Northern Europe had their own versions of this. The Mantuan court of the Gonzaga, the Milan court of the Sforza. There were many different kinds and the most Powerful of all of the New Renaissance tarot decks were those of the Visconti-sforza family, and this tarot deck of the Visconti. Sforza became based in such a way that the four suits that were used in the game of tarot in the card games were indexed by a circle of eternal recurring symbols that controlled the limited ways in which the imagery could play out, so that one could come to understand how to tell where someone where anyone was in this circle and give their fortune in terms of relating it to this great wheel of eternal recurring circumstance. And that indexing group were called the triumphs. In Italian it's called Triomphe, and it's the same word that the Romans used for the procession of the Emperor coming back into Rome and Reassuming power. The Triomphe. In the 20th century, Carl Orff did a series of musical pieces called Triomphe. The most famous of them is Carmina Burana. Done in the 1930s in Germany, about the same time that Leni Riefenstahl was doing triumph of the Will, her film about the great Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party, which is one of the films that we use. And when you look at it, you will see the Führer and his triumph entering into Nuremberg with all the great symbols and images of the eternal recurrence of the same coming to rest in their hands. This is a very difficult time to be considering this kind of power. And yet we need to consider it because we're going to pull the plug on it. Perhaps the most beautiful, intelligent handling of the tarot deck was done by a very small woman. She was a librarian in New York City, Gertrude Moakley. It's called the tarot cards painted by Bonifacio Bembo. It's the Visconti as far as a deck, and she did a nice little thing here. The New York Public Library published it themselves. No one else wanted to publish it in 1966, and it's one of the best, dearest books. She's like Jesse L Weston. She's one of these relentlessly quiet, enormously sensitive, fantastically cultivated women who just quietly piece it together the way it really works. There are, of course, European cultivated family members who understand these things also. And the best book from that kind of tradition, the aristocratic occult figure is Basil Ivan Rakoczi. The Rakoczi family being the Hungarian esoteric family, called the Painted Caravan, a penetration into the secrets of the tarot decks Published in The Hague in 1954, and one sees not only the tarot symbols that occupy the circle of the eternal recurrence of the same indexing, so that someone who controls that circle of destiny must control the way in which the universe is going to work, despite what anyone says or does. And of course, this quality of arrogance, of hubris ruined the Renaissance. And left a legacy that, for the last 500 years, has progressively shredded almost every attempt to make a variation on it. But the Renaissance was not ruined because of its culpability, but because it revived. It brought back to life not only the gorgeousness of the mummy of antiquity, but also the Boris Karloff mummy of antiquity. And so both aspects were brought back into play, and there were so few people who really understood at the time that you could have counted them on one hand at one time. And after Ficino died, the most perspicacious of all of the Renaissance writers was Machiavelli. This not only applies to European history, but one has to understand that the Roman Empire extended not only from. Britain to India, but also took in North Africa. It also took in Egypt. It also took in what we call today the Middle East. And when you look at the spread of Islam, you can see that it was subject in its genesis to a double pronged quality of circles, of eternal recurrence, of the same circles of destiny. Kismet, in its deepest, most pernicious untruth, subjected not only to the Roman Empire, ecology of authority and power being based on being tuned to a universal structure that relentlessly will happen regardless of what anybody says or does, that the development of personality is but a fleeting wash of watercolor on something that can, if not be destroyed by pouring water on it. You can pour acid on it and dissolve the paper to. You can just take it away. You can efface this. And this is a particular kind of arrogance that we saw this week. We don't have time to go into detail of the other aspect of this. The other aspect being that Islam is actually a Protestant form of Judaism, a form of reformation that just like the Protestant Reformation in the Renaissance had its own violent schizophrenic polarity operating at the same time. Just to give you a little bit of insight so that you can have a context within which to understand the current events, I'm going to give you a little bit of a precis from a book published. This is published in London in 1838. It's called Secret Societies of the Middle Ages. It takes three secret societies. It was not a very esoteric book. It was, in fact, in one of those early English reading libraries for the early middle class. It's called the Library of Entertaining Knowledge. This was the beginnings where men and women in their own personal homes had a little bit of extra money, had a little bit of extra time, and they used to read things for the first time other than the Bible. They used to read novels. And about this time, writers like Jane Austen were being read with relish. And the Bronte novels in the United States, James Fenimore Cooper had decided to run the European English Novelists, a competition. He started writing his novels, and by 1838 he had written, I think, 3 or 4 of the Leatherstocking novels. The only one left to write was the The Deerslayer. He'd already written The Pathfinder and The Last of the Mohicans. So this came out about that time. This is the time of the beginnings of Charles Dickens great novels, appealing to people so that the middle class, the people who were not aristocratic and the people who were not servile, but everyone in between who was trying to find some way to express their humanity, to expand the world in which they lived and were active. And this was the beginnings also of the Industrial Revolution. It was the beginnings of the confidence in engineering that one could do things that seemed impossible to previous ages. This was the age where the beginnings of great railroads were first being laid on. One enterprising engineer put a bridge across the Firth of Forth and linking England and Scotland together, one of the greatest engineering feats of all time to build at that time. The bridge. The railroad bridge over the Firth of Forth was astounding to people. And one of the culminations of that whole era was the building of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which stunned the world in a great, joyous way in which we were stunned this week by having the most conspicuous tower in the world, its twin towers decimated by medieval violence, revisited as if coming from the past. What past did it come from? It didn't come from the 1991 Gulf War. It didn't come from the difficulties of the 1950s or 1940s or 1920s. It didn't come from the era of the Mahdi and Chinese Gordon fighting them out in Khartoum in the 19th century. It didn't come from any kind of austrian-turkish war. It didn't come from the Renaissance. It came from the year 1090 when the Crusades were powering up. And it came in the person of someone well known in Islamic history. His name was Hassan Sabbah. And he was the founder of the order of the assassins. And terrorized the medieval world. Not just the Christians, especially terrorized the Muslims. Even the great Sultan of the time tried to make peace with them of giving them what we would call today tax breaks and land and fortresses and jewels and gold. They didn't really want that. They wanted to kill because they were linked to the conviction that only by bringing this corrupt age to an end quicker can there be a new golden age of the righteous and virtuous, and so maiming and killing indiscriminately by terror, by assassination? At that time it was assassination largely of individuals. Now it's assassinations of cities, of cultures. Of the world, if they could. The great fortress of the assassins was called Alamut e Alamut, and my Arabic is not too good. Alamut translates as the Vulture's nest. It was an almost impregnable fortress. This 1838 publication has an engraving of it on page 55. You can look at it later. Be careful. It's almost falling apart. How was the order of assassins finally brought under control? They lasted for centuries and became corrupt within themselves. The leaders of it. But the end to the order of the assassins was a general named Hulagu, who was the greatest Mongol general of his day. And the Mongols simply did what the Mongols do. They eradicated them all. They stormed the Alamut, their special storming troops. They had at the siege, as it says in here, a thousand Chinese families. What they meant by families were technical support groups. And what each of those Chinese technical support groups did is they had special fire, a way of igniting naphtha and casting it like napalm into the fortress. And it would spread. And with a thousand of these special Chinese, they were called Chinese firemen in the English translation, not to put out fires, but to start them siege by Greek fire, as the Europeans called it, and it was the modern, the version that we have today of napalm. And they simply burnt them out. They destroyed the entire fortress, the unassailable fortress that for 200 years had held the center of the assassins, the fortress out of which Hassan Sabbah never moved for 50 years. Was once or twice in half a century seen on one of the terraces, looking out over the wild, mountainous, cavernous region over which he, in his genius, plotted inside the strategies of killings, of assassinations. All of this is coupled, by the way, with a second section on another secret society of the Middle Ages. The Templars was the Crusader her side. We are going to reoccupy the Holy Land for Christianity. And so the great crusade polarity of the Christians and the Muslims. And squeezed out and not consulted, not ask at all during the Crusades were the Jews. Whose holy land supposedly it was. But the Christians and the Moslems fighting for the right to have that holy land for themselves, for their purposes, because the eternal reoccurrence of the same had come around, and it was their turn, and destiny belonged to them, history be damned. As someone in the 60s in Berkeley used to say, this is all garbage. There is a deep understanding of the flawed ness of all of this. It was flawed then. It is flawed now. Will always be flawed, except that the flaws are so fissured by this time that those plates will not hold food ever again. They are gone, and the regressive reaction is only possible early in the 21st century because of a massive regression of history, because of a traumatizing of the civilization. And just for convenience sake, one of the great difficulties is that you cannot develop the capacity to go to the moon and then bring it back and keep everyone here. You can't satisfy the growth of a multidimensional, at least a five dimensional conscious cosmos that once you are born off a planet, that you are going to be stuffed back into a womb. You can't put a baby back in the womb. It will kill the mother. It will kill the baby. It becomes radioactive. The commandeering of the ability to use industry and technology and science historically to go into space. You cannot limit that population of people onto a single planet and not expect it to be traumatized. And for history then to devolve and those energies to go back. And we're living now beginning to relive medieval episodes that happened a thousand years ago and have no place in the modern world. They didn't even have a place in the Renaissance. They didn't have a place in the enlightenment, and they most certainly don't have a place in the 21st century. We don't have to take 200 years to wait for some Mongol horde. Because the whole process of this false circle of destiny can be dissolved in a very, very short time, with learning, with consciousness, with a pragmatic application of humanity. Let's take a break and we'll come back. I knew a very cultivated bhikshu who used to do that. He used to make a sound when he finished his gassho. Gotcha. And he didn't realize that. That's not it at all. In the high drama, there's no sound for a split second, and then there's a harmony. It's a different thing. This education is not based on work. It's based on effortlessness. It's a whole different thing. It's the difference between yoga as a calisthenic exercise and Patanjali. It's a whole different thing. And just because it's presented by somebody that looks like me. Don't let that fool you. Let's come back where we're in history and we're moving towards science. And when we come to science, the very first thing we're going to come to is a new pair of books for ourselves. And you might go out and try and find them for yourself. And if you haven't done this so far, you might realize that the educational inquiry that we're in is an activity which has its own yoga. I used to call it years ago, The yoga of Civilization. Instead of getting the body ready like this or or getting your neurological psychophysical energy there, we're getting the entire civilization ready to to do its. Its emergence. Its birth. Civilizations are too large for a planet, and they're about right for a star system. The challenges of being at home in our star system are formidable. And for the next 200 years, that should really keep us rather humble and friendly. So that's what we're going to do regardless of what anyone is doing or says. That's what we're going to do. Let's come back to the triumphs. The triumphs. If someone looks at the tarot decks for the last 500 years. They're court versions. That are a subsection of games. The Italians love card games even today. And they play with tarot decks. Game of tarot card games and a lot. All the card games are variants of this and come out. To hold up as a pattern of deep wisdom is not quite the case. Towards the close of the three hundreds AD. There was a period of three years when a young, very educated Roman emperor came into play. Julian called by the Christian church Julian the Apostate, because he tried to take the Roman Empire out of Christianity and take it back to the ancient Platonic Pythagorean wisdom tradition. So he was an apostate. Vis a vis the church. Julian lasted not quite three years before he was killed, because too many people in power didn't want to go back. And about that time when he was killed. Laws were passed that it was a capital offence and crime to teach the ancient, now called pagan wisdom pattern. And anyone caught teaching that was killed and the materials confiscated and burnt. So at that time, in the three 60s, many panicked teaching facilities tried to find ways to deal with this terminal condition. One of the ways was to do what the old Jewish tradition had done, and that is to take your sacred materials and bury them, seal them up and seal them away like the Dead Sea Scrolls. And one of the caches of material that was found was the Nag Hammadi material, which was buried in Egypt along the Nile River by the little Indian village Egyptian village called Chenoboskion. And they were all buried in 365 A.D. and not found until 1945. But this happened many times in many places. And one of the techniques that was used by one of the Egyptian wisdom groups was to take symbolic summations of whole integrals of images, and to arrange these in an order that was a set of symbols that if they were opened, they would redisplay the complex interpenetration of image bases and re-establish a language referent realm whereby wisdom could be taught again. And in antiquity in the three 7380s. These were the archetypal origins of what was rediscovered in the Renaissance and became the tarot decks, but they bore no resemblance to tarot decks other than that they were collections of sets of symbolic images. And so some people in the Renaissance who were very great artists and really remarkable scholars and also visionaries on their own sense. The truth of this, these matters, and perhaps the most important of all the Renaissance tarot decks, is that of the great artist Mantegna. Andrea mantegna done about 1475, when he was still young, vigorous. And I brought that deck in during the symbols section of this course, because at one time, about 30 years ago, 500 copies were made, and at that time I was teaching alongside of Manley Hall, and we sent to get as many decks as we could, recognizing how rare they were. And we got just two decks, and I kept one of the two and he kept the other. The Mantegna tarot deck does not have a major Arcana that goes in some kind of eternal recurrence of the same indexing of a minor Arcana. There are five sets of ten the tens because of a Pythagorean structure, and the each of the five sets of ten can index each other so that there is a star, which is the human hand. The human hand, drawn without raising the stylus from the paper, makes a hermetic star. It's the same star that appears on the shield and livery of Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and it's called the pentacle, not the pentagon or pentagram, but the pentacle and the pentacle was the ancient hermetic star symbol that came from Pythagorean antiquity, as the way in which the hand is able to not only index, but mobily use and explore, and to also bring together and grasp the ability for the primate hand to grasp was, in classical antiquity, always considered the fundamental symbol of the way in which one could understand philosophy that in the Athens of Socrates time, if someone was presenting an argument, the conclusion of the argument usually was that one would do that. Did you grasp it? Even our language today connotates that. Did you understand by grasping are you able not to hold it? But are you able to handle it? Can you use that rather than have that? And so that the love of wisdom was not to possess knowledge, but to be able to use ideas which are the essence of an integral of knowledge, as tools to further inquire, to do, to apply oneself to the world, this world, and also to a world that could be. So that philosophy was not only the site of the truth, it was the foresight of possible truths that could be discovered. And so it was an adventure of learning. And so the grasping was not proprietary, but it was. You're ready to go ahead and do more to further oneself. And that pentacle, that hermetic star, was always the sign that one is ready to keep unbroken continuity and to continue to explore. By the way, the ancient use of the hand and of the star motif goes back to Paleolithic art some 40,000 years ago. So by the time the Pyramid Age came 5000 years ago, it was very late in the game. We're as close today to Lascaux as Lascaux was to the original Paleolithic caves. So the tradition is very old, very ancient. And that's only the written symbolized quality of civilized passing on. It goes much deeper. When we get to science, two individuals are going to help us at the beginning to orient ourselves. A woman and a man. The woman is Mary Leakey, and her book is called Discovering the Past. When Hegel and Burckhardt were writing. The oldest that human beings as a species could be counted on was to go back to the original Adam, created somewhere around 4004 BC. By the time Mary Leakey finished, man was at least 5 or 6 million years old. So she really patiently with her cigars and her pack of Dalmatians. Out there in the African wilderness. For a whole long lifetime. Did more than anyone to bring in the perspective that wisdom has held. In its deeper expression, that wisdom of man is millions of years old. In the Egyptian inscriptions at the beginning of writing hieroglyphics. In the Pyramid Age, the Lord is the Lord of millions of years. And that one comes pair em, or one comes forth by day. Meaning that the coming forth, the emergence is into a time form of a day. But that the further linking of each day together into millions of years is the humility of learning how to extend your coming forth by day into eternity. This seems, of course, to have fallen on deaf ears during all the Dark Age medieval times that there ever have been, including the one that's lurking around today. And we're simply not going to let it go there again. Along with Mary Leakey, we're going to take Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City. He was a genius, a mathematical genius. He was chosen as a youngster, Robert Oppenheimer to be one of the mathematical honchos on the Manhattan Project of the development of the atom bomb. He was by far the youngest. And Feynman because he was so precocious and so fast in his mind, didn't learn the regular mathematical notation for some higher mathematical applications to physics. So he made up his own system, and they're called Feynman diagrams, and they turn out to be more useful as hieroglyphics of high mathematical transform applications than the traditional notation was. And so Feynman diagrams are used worldwide today to teach some things that are not imaginable, not symbol able, because images and symbols are rather the field where the mind is at home. But consciousness can roam far beyond the mind, and this is one of the delicacies when it comes to understanding that philosophic figure that we're pairing today and have been pairing this month with Jacob Burckhardt, with Burckhardt's history of the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, we're pairing with that Hegel's little introduction lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Called at the end of what turned out to be the end of his life in 1831. But the big transformation in Hegel's thought came when he went in 1800, about the time that Jefferson was elected president. He went to a university town, which was at the time the intellectual center of Germany. He went to Jena and a number of his Works from that period. Are led up to by this little book, three essays 1793 to 1795. The two begin essay to begin the place in Germany where Lutheran pastors were largely trained for the ministry and intellectual center. The burn fragments burn in Switzerland, a place of great promise for Hegel at the time, and the life of Jesus, because in the 1790s, the mid 1790s, the French Revolution was still reverberating and all these young men were trying to make sense of a new world where the French Revolution was recalibrating the way in which history was understood. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar and said, we are here at the year one, Whatever has gone before is irrelevant to us, and we begin counting now. Hegel at the time, in these essays, struggling with what is what are we to understand? What are we able to come up with? And in the introduction, the editor of this writes. Hegel did not find much food for thought in the Christian doctrine of the Last Judgment. But already in his early 20s he began showing a profound interest in what we might call the First judgment the urteil, The original separation of the human and his divine aspect from the rest of the animal realm. The First Judgment, the bringing of man forth from the from the animal realm into the human, and at this time was seen as a decision, a divine decision, a divine act. And that it happened now at some now. So that later on. This became a haunting theme for Hegel. Still the young Hegel, several years later, fresh at Jena, a young professor teaching with all the big names in philosophy at the time, Schelling, Yeah. Picked himself. And so for the first few years there, he began to search around to find a way to join the ranks of these great figures. And by 1805, having taught then for about five years, he came to decide through his philosophy courses that he was teaching, that philosophy of history and history of philosophy was the most misunderstood of all of the realms and philosophy. And out of his concern he saw that the biggest fulcrum of problem was not so much history of philosophy and philosophy of history, but that they were like target concentric circles that came to a core, that dealt with consciousness and that at the core of History was an energy tunnel of consciousness, and that somehow the passage of consciousness in this core generated all of the complexity and all of the structure that philosophy could discover that was going on. And he wanted to know about this energy, that it had something to do with the German word, for it is not mind the German word for it. Geist is spirit. Spirit, and it doesn't mean the spirit of the mind. It means a divine energy flow that is free in this world that moves through its structure, and what Hegel meant by a Geist in his great book called Not Phenomenology of Mind. It was, as it was translated in 1910, but it translates clearly as the phenomenology of spirit in an 1807 when he published the book. It made him the star. It made him the rising rock star of philosophy in Germany. And it was extremely complicated. It was difficult to approach. It still is difficult to approach. I can remember the University of Wisconsin, 1959, a course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was offered, and it was limited to ten graduate students. And that was it. No one else was allowed in. And it was like an inner sanctum and you wanted to get whispered digests of what were they saying? And we all bought our copies of Hegel and trying to read, and it was complex and it was very difficult. And if you look at the table of contents of the Phenomenology of Spirit, after a preface which is particularly focused on scientific knowledge in general, that there is a field that is not delimited of on scientific knowledge in general. Then the beginning section, a large section A is called consciousness. And section B self consciousness. And then when you go through those A and B, the C of it. Is entitled free concrete mind consciousness self consciousness free concrete mind. Yeah. Concrete as in like concrete. Because the conviction was that the mind to have the effect that it has must be objective. There must be an objectivity. And indeed the mind is objective, but hardly concrete, free, concrete mind. And then finally, when one would wade through the hundreds and hundreds of pages, you would come to the realization that the free concrete mind has several sections within it. The first section, designated AA, is reason. The second section, designated B, is spirit and then the third section CC. Is religion. And then, like a coda, rounding out the fourth Rd section for. Absolute knowledge and just the outline in English. The three sections of absolute. Knowledge one. The ultimate content of the self which knows itself as all existence. Two. Philosophical science as the self. Comprehension of spirit. And three the return of spirit so comprehended to immediate existence. In all of this complication and sophistication. Is still the lingering cloak of a medieval scholasticism, of a Reformation response to a romanized antiquity. And hidden in all of this, rapt is. A non-understanding of high Dharma. Nor is there a high understanding of the cosmos, a possibility that was there in Hellenistic Judaism. And so there is a curious kind for someone in the early 21st century looking at it, that the Language even in and it's a fairly good translation. J.b. Bailey is a not bad. But when we read it, it seems that the language begins to show itself as like a suit of clothes, beautifully tailored, but a suit of clothes beautifully tailored that doesn't fit. The original nature is the thought element. So right away you're in the mind. You're in symbols. How do you start with symbols? Well, you have to get there. There had to have been an integral ecology to get there. And this is one of the difficulties that was later work done at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the philosophers who looked at the dimension of time vis a vis this formulation, this beginning, was Henri Bergson. And he wrote two really penetrative studies. One is called matter and memory, and the other one on determinism and free will. And then he wrote a book called Creative Evolution, in which the ongoing dynamic of spirit is an élan vital and not at all something which can be subsumed by the mind. And out of Bergson's philosophic considerateness a phrase passed into the literary population of the time stream of consciousness that somehow there is like a vibrant, fluid rainbow of energy that can flow through the mind, and that the mind, if it is organized, has the ability to be not so much as a mirror for its own original energies of integration, but to be like a lens which allows for that rainbow of energy to diffract and differentiate into a practicality of indefinite possibilities. That there are no ends, no limits, there are no corrals, there are no bounds to The possibility. And that whereas probability always can reach and only come to a saturate 100%. Possibility is not limited by 100%. There can be 2,000,000% in possibility. And so the possible worlds are without end. That's the ancient prayer, by the way. World without end. Live and enjoy the sunshine of your being in world without end. It's a very ancient blessing. And quite true, incidentally. Here's how it reads Hegel. 200 years ago, struggling mightily with this. The original nature is the thought element, The implicit factor as against the action. Thought and action. Thought and deed. And of course, the original formulation some 4000 years ago was always a triad. Thought, word and deed. You find that in the Goths of Zarathustra about 2300 BC. Thought, word and deed. Deed is a ritual. Word is the myth. Thought is a symbol. Those three together are. What is graspable about the ecology of nature? Nature itself is not graspable. And so nature is mysterious. So that anciently the understanding of this world is that the given mystery of nature with thought, word, and deed Is the comprehensible amphitheatre of doing. Or we should perhaps say and use the dramatic language that was used in ancient Athens. This is the theater of man's world, because the theater of man's world is in the ecology of nature. But the amphitheatre is the visionary. Beyond all the world is a stage, but beyond all this world is a stage is the celestial realm, which is an amphitheatre. Not of man's action, not of his thought, not of his word, but the amphitheatre of wisdom. And that this is the divine realm, and that we are able to go there as if we were returning prodigal children home, that we belong there as well. And in fact, we more belong there than we do here. When you look at the sizes. If our son was the size of a grapefruit. The earth would be a little tiny pea. The sun vis a vis the earth. If the earth is here in Los Angeles as a little tiny pea, as a baby, the sun is a grapefruit would be about where Denver is. And on that scale, the first star would be about at the orbit of Saturn. And that's just the first star. There are galactic sawdust without end. So don't worry about being corralled no matter how much power you have. There's plenty to explore, and there isn't a hand in the cosmos that can grasp that, to hold it because no one on that level grasps to hold. They reach out to help. That's the nature of the cosmos. We know now it's very interrelational that time and space, in fact, are always cooperating. Otherwise neither exist. And they both welcome the music of consciousness because then they get to dance instead of to goosestep. Let's come back to Hegel for a second. It's not quite time to get on the soapbox. The original nature of thought is the thought element, the implicit factor against the action in which it gets first gets its It's reality. So that here a Hegel is very profound. He's understanding. The mind's thought definitely needs to have a correlation. I rather like T.S. Eliot's language in this. There is a correlative here. That the objectivity of thought and the objectivity of action, symbol and ritual do have a correlation, a correlative position. There's no doubt about it. But when it comes to that, thought first gets its reality. Here is an error. The bar of referential correlation is not the metronome by which the real occurs in its infinite variety. There is no way for a calibration to stick in that realm. It's like trying to pin the color at this moment of a kaleidoscope in beautiful motion. You are not understanding what's going on if you tried to do that. Oh, this kaleidoscope is now blue. No. It's pink. No, it's. One gets into a kind of a stutter called in Hellenistic Judaism, they use the Greek term for it at the time because Hebrew didn't have a term for it. It's called glossolalia. Confusion of tongues. And when the disciples of Jesus tried to formulate what they were seeing, they spoke in a confusion of tongues because they couldn't say anything, because it was so kaleidoscopic that their ability to talk was not silenced, but was stammered into chaos. The figure, who was not stammered into chaos, was silent, and that was Mary Magdalene, because she saw with reoccurring penetrative harmony. And there wasn't anything to say. When Hegel returns, or we return to Hegel here, he says what we've read. And now this is the fourth time. By going back over it, we slowly build. We build a kind of an amperage so that we can begin to penetrate. It's like an Archimedean screw of being able to go a little bit deeper each time. Alfred North Whitehead called the technique accumulated penetration at some times. This is the way that you you learn to see. An amateur astronomer learns that you don't look at the stars that you're looking at. If you continue to stare, they will move. They will blank out. So you use what's called averted vision. You learn to minutely look at all sides of it, and you build up a tolerance to see quite exactly by that pattern of averted vision. And one learns to see in this way accumulated penetration, that you can follow the resonances. The resonances will build if you follow them to the harmonic. And once you hear the harmonic, once you hear the chord that structures the sound, then you will hear the music. That's the way music is heard. Sound becomes through symbol music. So we're looking at one of the most difficult philosophic works in Western history. We're looking at the section. The section in Phenomenology of Mind that we're looking at is the section where the heading is individuality, which takes itself to be real in and for itself. And the heading on the subsequent pages concrete individuality. Now notice that individuality is apposite here, another section which follows it in phenomenology of the mind. And this is the section Self-conscious individuals associated as a community of animals and the deception thence arising colon. The real fact and the label from then on is society as a community of animals, individual and a community of animals. The separation, the first judgment of man from the animals, the establishment of individuality. And this is where Hegel is a Renaissance philosopher, because it was the individuality that was at the core of the Renaissance in northern Italy, but an individuality which held a two pronged hook hidden within the bait. And once that bait was taken, those who took that bait received the hook, the double pronged hook. Burkhart, who was magnificent, talks about the arrogance of the Renaissance man, the egotism, the the brash individuality that came along with the cosmic potential, and that whereas one would have a great individual like a Michelangelo, you also had some of the condottieri who were merciless killers on a grand scale. And he says in the section on society and festivals that these individuals began to assume the stance that they were individual emperors of their own view of the world on the world. Better watch out for them. And he says, vis a vis Triomphe. Renaissance. Triomphe. Nevertheless, the secular Triomphe were far more frequent than the religious. They were modeled on the procession of the Roman Imperator, as it was known from the old reliefs and from the writings of ancient authors. The historical conceptions then prevalent in Italy, with which these shows were closely connected have already been discussed. We now and then read of the actual triumphal entrance of a victorious general, which was organized as far as possible on the ancient pattern, even against the will of the hero himself. Francesco Sforza had the courage in 1450 to refuse the triumphant chariot which had been prepared for his return to Milan, on the ground that such things were monarchical superstitions and so forth, so that it wasn't just the arrogance of the individual that they held for themselves, but the general populace forced it upon them. What does Malvolio in 12th Night? Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. The Medici family that we have been following in Florence, in Burckhardt, after several generations, after a century. The last of the Medici, Really a medici was Marie de Medici, and Rubens painted a whole series of 22 paintings and the life of Marie de Medici and her arrival in France, and her carrying the individuality with all of its protein possibility and all of its arrogant individuality, to the court of France. She married a king. She was the mother of a king. She was the grandmother of a king. She was the Queen mother regent for a while of France. But it isn't just the France of Louis the 13th and the 14th that is a Renaissance triumph. Move to another country. It's the fact that she got angry when her own son tried to put her in her place because he was king of France. So she had, like a good Renaissance mother prepared her own general. A young cleric named later Cardinal Richelieu, and while the descendants of the male offspring of her would be kings of France, she would run France through her chosen general, and Aldous Huxley wrote the all time great biography and called Grey Eminence. You never in a real sophisticated tyranny put yourself up as king. You're always the one who tells the King where to go for his ceremonies. Thank you. Thank you.