History 12

This is history 12 and it means that we have completed the set of history 12 lectures in history. It means that that set now takes its place as a phase, and it joins the previous phases that we have. The phase previous to history was art, and there were 12 lectures on art. And the phase previous to art was vision. And we have 12 lectures on vision. And rather than having these phases linked together by some Adjacent abutment there separated each one of them by an interval, so that the phases do not act as a line. They do not have geometric city. Their alignment is not on the basis of geometry. We even had a previous year where there were four phases, each one having 12 lectures and each one also not abutting, not adjacent, nor do they overlap. They don't make a chain and they don't make a line. They have a different structure, and their structure is mediated all the time, Consistently by an interval and the interval is not geometrized. Also as well it is non geometrical. That is, it is one week. A 13th week. A 13th lecture each time. But the value within that time mode is a wildly plastic and able to be assessed almost indefinitely in a differential way. We're going to take as the interval at the end of history. We're going to take a classic book from about the early second century in India. It is a book which belongs to a literature known historically as the Prajnaparamita Sutra. Literature. And that sutra in ancient India meant a thread. Sutra means thread. It meant a thread of understanding that one would have and 23, 20, 400 years ago in India, they had the same idea of continuity that the Greeks had, that there was a geometric linking thread, and that Greek philosophic discourse was this continuity, this thread of the argument that one could follow. And in India, classically, there was such a thing as a Sutra, which was the thread of the delivery of the classic Buddha of his sayings, and so sutra meant the thread of the sermon, the linking geometric line that made it all happen. And when you look at traditional Buddhists, those of the Theravada, of the old way, of the old path, when there is a special occasion for the Theravada monks to chant together for a ritual, they will sometimes hold very lightly in their hands in a circle a light gold colored thread, so as to emphasize the efficacy and the ritual shape and the symbolic A correlation of that sutra of that thread, and that this has the effect on nature of conferring form, of conferring continuity. And Greek philosophic arguments are of the same ilk, that those arguments are logical because they form a geometric consistency and continuity. But the Prajnaparamita literature, some 6 or 700 years after the Buddha, is of a different nature. It is no longer geometrical. It has no longer the confidence that a sutra should have a thread in it. The confidence was found to be Placed because the mind unknowingly usurped the function of consciousness for itself and conferred in the same unconscious, assumptive way upon the ego, the support of the mind, so that the ego then became inflated with a confidence that was based upon the mental certainty, and that this certainty and this feeling toned image based language, using ego inflated confidence, used the tandem of ritual and symbol To enforce its view on the world. And that the way that one combats this is to have an opposing view, and that one would then argue, and that the stronger view would win out over the weaker on the basis of not just emotional confidence, but on the basis of symbolic structural certainty. And in the classic Buddhist time in ancient India. Professional yogis who would wander all over India looking for the right teacher, would espouse the arguments and the sutra continuity of their teacher until they ran across someone who could best them at argument, at debate. And if they were bested, they didn't feel defeated. But they converted, and they became devotees of that teacher and adopted his arguments. And in the Buddha's time, the Buddha's arguments were the best that could be presented. But within the historical development of Buddhism, its own fabric of certainty and confidence and ritual confirmation became apparent to its own sophisticated practitioners about 6 or 700 years down the line, that it was full of holes, and out of that came a radical transformation of classical Buddhism, so that they called the new radical Buddhism the Mahayana. And that the old path was in fact a Hinayana. It was a little vehicle, little in the sense that it worked for an individual, but that it didn't work beyond the individual. It didn't work in the orders of application that were intra and inter individual, that you could go deeper than the individual to like what we would call today, the molecular or the atomic or the subatomic, the nuclear, or are they even got down because they were very good yogis to the quark level of meditative exactness, and saw that the intra individual application of mental, logical certainty and emotional confidence, even backed by a ritual confirmation of consistency, was full of holes. And so the sutra we're taking next week called the Ratna Guna Samkhya Sutra Gatha, they change sutra to gatha, which in the ancient language meant a song. So instead of calling it a sutra, they shifted it to gossip. So its name is Ratna Guna. Samkhya katha. And what it is, is a song that is, the translation of the title really comes out to be that there is. Surrounding our mind, our mythic emotional, image based language, our existential ritual, action, world, even nature, that all of that takes place as if it were like a wheel within an infinity. And because it takes place within that infinity, the resonances of that wheel are indefinite. And the way that those resonances are carried most strongly is because that wheel has a harmonic, and that that harmonic is a music of wisdom which makes that spinning wheel sing, and that the cosmos is alive with the harmonies of the songs of the spiritually free. And so the Jewelled Night, Jewelled Wisdom song that we're going to take next week is not a sutra, but Agartha. And it comes, incidentally, the ancient term Gatha comes from a pre Sanskrit language. Pre Sanskrit, pre Persian, pre Farsi. It comes from the high ancient Indo-European language which was known as Avestic and Avestic, is the language from about the third millennium BC. About 5000 years ago, and the original authors in that language were the authors of Zarathushtra, written about the time that. The Epic of Gilgamesh was being written in Sumeria, written about the time that the mythological epic of Inanna was being written. And so they're cognate, and they come from that time period. And the reason for the Mahayana choosing to have gothis was poignant in the second century AD, but by the end of the second century AD, they were again being called Sutras because of a sliding back into a habitual orientation and habitual language, even though they meant something different by it, radically different. We know now that at the time that the Prajnaparamita literature was being written in India and Central Asia, that there was a deep transformation happening in the West as well, in the West, centered around Alexandria. And what was happening at that time was that the Western mind was learning that it cannot trust geometric, logical, mental forms to be real. And so the development of geometry that had been for several hundred years, the sine qua non of logical education and development, began to undergo a transformation. And in Alexandria, about the time of the Prajnaparamita literature, you found the development of a new form of mathematics called trigonometry. That geometry transformed into a trigonometric consideration, no longer content to have plain geometry. The geometry of lines and angles and forms within a plane. But that the plane was transformed into a sphere. And that in the spherical geometry of shape, geometry is only of beginning use, and you have to carry it into trigonometric functions in order to be able to talk about this larger order of reality. And they got very close to the next step, which was to transform trigonometry into calculus, to go outside the sphere and to realize that one can understand mathematically the infinite relationalities not only within a sphere, but vis a vis two spheres that are quite distinct and yet have a relationality, and even the deepest level of actuality that occurs, and that deepest level of actuality that occurs is not just the relationality of infinity between two spheres, but between the fundamental pair structure of any form, no matter what the pair of zero and one. And so one got down to the doubt of mathematical structure. It took a long time for calculus to come through. After the discovery of trigonometry in second century Alexandria, it took another 1500 years so that these steps that can be taught in high school, now that they give you in the 10th grade geometry, they give you in the 11th grade trigonometry. And right away you're doing calculus in the 12th grade as if it were nothing. You're going through thousands of years of reconstruction patiently, and that this thousands of years of reconstruction is like a reliving of the way in which the development occurred historically. Unfortunately, we do not live the development as it occurred historically, educationally, but we live a virtual game form of it. And so today's lecture is entitled vision Not Virtual, because there is a great deal of difference between the mind's arrogance and the humility of reality is an enormous difference. And it grows the more that the mind uses its arrogance with power. So there is a very deep quality that is here. And our whole structure of our education is not to make a symmetricity, not a line of argument. My responsibility is to conscientiously forestall all the time from you to leaping to conclusions and making clear ideas out of something that has no clear idea about it. An education that ends up with clear ideas is fodder for the ideologues to come. And they count on that, and they always have. So what we're doing here is a completely radical transform several orders beyond what you would think education is. All of this has been. Presaged historically the developments in the second century, whether it was in classical Greece, northern Egypt, in northern India, in western China, wherever it was. Those developments at that time led to an expansion beyond the mind, so that one could come to see that experience that integrates, always integrates within a space that has been generated by a path integral so that the mind is an integral form, but that consciousness is not limited to the mind. It can inhabit the mind, but it can also pass passed through the mind. So if there is such a thing as consciousness passing through the mind and not stopping and going directly to the body, and that's what a Zen is all about, because consciousness can inhabit the body without having to show its passport to the mind. Consciousness can even go directly to nature and not even consult either the body or the mind. And it's not being lost in nature. It's being at home in the wilderness. Even such a sophomoric, supposedly old fashioned kind of a writer like James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales, puts it right at the beginning of his great works. In his last Leatherstocking tale, written in 1841, the Deerslayer, he says the welter of events produces upon the mind the sense that time has a continuity. And yet we know that there is a great elasticity to this historic sense of time, and that in the new world, in America, in the United States, so many events of major happening have occurred so quickly that it gives the sense that we have been at it a very long time in our history is already very ancient, even though it's only been several generations since the wilderness was first explored. Later on Virginia Woolf, Into the Lighthouse or Proust in the Remembrance of Things Past, or Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. Any stream of consciousness work the there is an elasticity to time. Virginia Woolf called it psychological time as opposed to clock time. Faulkner called it comparing the myths to the consciousness. Proust called it the recovery of the past in a present, which then is at once futile. There are many ways to express it, many ways to say it. One of the most poignant ways, as in Proust at the end of his great Epic. He calls the final section the past recaptured, not recaptured as in aha! I have it now. The argument is going to be clear now. The mind is going to be certain. Now the ego is going to have confidence. The rituals are going to be spelled out, exacting and accurate. What he has recovered is a wild freedom to be conscious infinitely, even beyond the ego and the mind. And in Proust, one comes to appreciate that the writer is like a prism who shows a rainbow of spectrum of possibility that has infinite refined ability, the infinite rainbow that we belong to a spiritual domain that is not an idea of spirit, is not some kind of logical structure of spirit. Certainty is not an ego sense that, oh, this is really good. It's mine. Not that at all, not that at all. And that all of that is what in mathematics would be called ultimately extraneous. It's a great humility to discover that one's mind, one's ego, and even one's body as a powerful triumvirate are extraneous to what is real. And yet what is real welcomes us when our body and our egos and our mind can get together and learn the songs of harmonics that allow for resonances of themselves to also be real. And in this way one is dealing with vision and not virtual. In our world in 2001. We face again peculiarities. One of the historical peculiarities is that, as the old Harvard elegant professor George Santayana observed. For those who do not remember history, you are condemned to repeat the past. And we are sliding into a medieval world again, a medieval world of assassins and crusades and trade guilds and Hierarchies and feudal kingdoms, and we don't have to do that. And the way out is very quick. We don't have to wait another thousand years or even a hundred years. Maybe just one year, maybe not even that, if we could get going. But you can't get any traction if your confidence is egotistical and your sense of certainty is mental and your comportment is ritual, because all of that, that entire ecology is subsumed under a path integral that's only, at best, half the story. One of the things that we're going to look at after the interval, when we get to the final phase of our education, to science, to the 12 lectures on science, the first thing we're going to look at is Richard Feynman's QED Quantum electrodynamics, the strange theory of light and matter, and not so strange in terms of reality, not so strange in terms of the universe, but strange to the mind in its logical certainty, the ego in its emotional confidence, and the ritual comportment that didn't have any idea of what was real. That zero and one turned out to be so fantastically primordial in the universe that one can hardly believe how simple it all really is. And one doesn't have to go to ancient wisdom of Tibet, or even to enlightenment. Transform mathematics of calculus. Here's a little thing that appeared Peer in nature. Nature is the international journal of science. It appeared in the August 31st, 2001 issue. It didn't appear as a basic new development, but as a historical reminder that 50 years ago to the day, the ground state of the hydrogen atom was discovered and finally recognized. The ground state of the hydrogen atom is a hyperfine doublet. It's a pair. The splitting of which determined by the method of atomic beams. And then they give the exact measurement that came out in 1951. Transitions occur between the two components. The upper component is given the designation of one and the lower the designation of zero. This one and zero components of the hydrogen atom, called a magnetic dipole, operate by two processes radiation and absorption. And because all of the atomic elements, all of the elements in the universe are built out of, they're based on hydrogen and its structure and functions, all of the 92 elements based out of it also exhibit radiation and absorption capacities together, so that there is a symmetry, there is a paired functional and structural quality that always is there, not only in atoms on the atomic level, but is there when atoms make Larger orders of constructs called molecules. And even when molecules make larger organic constructs called cells, and that cells as a life. Atomic molecular structural element make us that these are not just fundamental qualities, but that they are cosmic realities that are not approachable by a simple path integral, no matter how sophisticated it is that, in fact, the more sophisticated a path integral is, the more that it comes to a state which has always been called perfection, always been called perfection. And that perfection, the high wisdom of perfection, is that when perfection is achieved, one understands. That there is a very strange world in reality. And that is that certain paradoxes have such a nature that if you tweak one. The other wiggles, and that this is called a quantum relationality. And now we're experimenting, and we're coming into a field of quantum mechanics that will bring quantum computers in the next decade. Also on the same page as the ground layers, the pair of one and zero in the hydrogen atom, in quantum mechanics, one plus one can equal 0 or 4. So much for your geometry. So much for your logic. So much for your confidence. And your certainty. And your ritual. Goosestepping education. As a matter of fact, both paths are possible. And their pairs. That Zero and Faunus have a relationship between a politeness, but that the paired ness is not between 1 and 1, but between 0 and 1. And this is a very deep thing. And 1900 years ago it was called. When it was first discovered in India, it was called the High Dharma. And those high Dharma men and women then said of the old dharma, which was based on law, which was based on truth. They said, yes, there certainly is dharma, but that all dharmas are empty. And it became the basis of the most famous refinement of the Mahayana and its Chinese development, Chan that became Zen. In Japan there was a very super Yogi whose name was Dogen, and he tailored it all down to say that not only are all dharmas empty, but that one could make it into a koan, a riddle that the mind cannot solve, that the ego cannot solve, that ritual cannot address. And it is the koan. Emptiness is form, and form is emptiness. That zero and one that all in its unity and nothing in its not ness are a quantum mechanical pair. You tweak one and the other curls, and that may be the Big Bang was a very quantum nice outcome of some perfection of emptiness happening. Let's take a break. One of the great difficulties in an education that doesn't have a geometric deity is that if you're inculcated with that sense of form, you constantly look to check to see where you are to keep score. And this kind of an education doesn't have any score. Its structure is like a fairy tale, and a fairy tale is, Tolkien observed, so wisely, a fairy tale has a special little twist near the end where everything turns out because there's magic involved. A fairy tale always has magic involved. A fairy tale is a magical language narrative, and the closest thing to a fairy tale is a riddle or a joke. You have to stay in there for the punchline. Otherwise, there's no laughter. You have to stay with a riddle not to solve it, but to resolve its paradox. And the same with the fairy tale. Stay in there because the darkest aspect is always right near the end. It seems that the world in September 2001 is near its darkest. Stick with it. Time and space itself are transformable by consciousness. And there's plenty of juice available, so just stay in there. Let's come back to. We're dealing with our final pair of books with Burckhardt's, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and with Hegel's. Oh, very, very difficult late lectures on the philosophy of world history. And we'll get to that in just a second. The context. Of the world that came out of Hegel and Burckhardt, who belong. Hegel's book belongs to the 1830s, the beginning Burckhardt's book to 1860. There are only 30 years apart, and they are two of the most formative works in the 20th century for history. Because both of these works influenced the development of political forms and political philosophies and social forms and social philosophies in the 20th century and the first half of the 20th century was catastrophic in an external way. Not just the big nodes of the First World War and the Second World War. But there was a lot of disruption on every level in the external world. What's not apparent so much is that the second half of the 20th century was even more destructive of the interior world. That interior realm, and it was not only maimed and attacked and bruised, but it was shredded and a great deal of it just evaporated. In 1949, this was apparent to men and women who really saw that the Band-Aids that had been made to handle the catastrophe of the Second World War, even by 1949, it was apparent that they were band aids that weren't going to work. And so there was a symposium at Yale University. This is the volume that was published by Yale University Press, 1949, edited by the great professor of law at Yale, F.s.c. Northrop, who was Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale, about his pedigree as you can get in the United States. And Northrop did a beautiful book on education and its problems. This one is called Ideological Differences and World Order Studies in the Philosophy and Science of the World's Cultures. And when you come to the introductory preface, the very first paragraph tells the tale. This is 52 years ago. The need for world order bringing international disputes under the rule of law, rather than leaving them subject to suicidal decisions by force is obvious. Unfortunately, the difficulties which contemporary investigations in the social sciences and the philosophy of culture reveal to be in the way difficulties which centre in considerable part in ideological differences, are not so generally recognised yet are nonetheless evident in real. In fact, the neglect of them is probably the major reason for the failure of the League of Nations and for the serious weakness already evident in the Court of International Justice, in the organisation of the United Nations, and in proposals for world government 52 years ago. It becomes imperative, therefore, if the latter institutions and proposals are to become effective, that less attention be paid momentarily to the goal of world order and that of greater attention being given a to the ideological differences which present obstacles on the way to that goal, and b to the methods suggested by contemporary social sciences and in the philosophy of culture for the removal of these obstacles. It is with this undertaking that this book is primarily concerned, and when you look at the symposium, it's a who's who on world wisdom. China is even represented by Feng Youlan the philosophy at the basis of traditional Chinese society, and Chuang Yi the philosophic basis of Chinese painting. And it goes on and on, expert after expert. And most of them one would recognize Pitirim Sorokin, Julian Huxley, even Northrop himself. Finally, even the philosophy of the Navajo Indians by Clyde Kluckhohn. They surveyed the entire world. And what they found was that the processes and forms of Western civilization were not workable. It wasn't that they were not working, they were not workable, and that only an infusion of power and inflation could keep up the pretense that they were usable at all. And so, three generations later, we inhabit a world that is largely waking up out of a nightmare. And it's better to wake up because it's only under that condition that we can do anything at all about it. Burkhart's book is entitled The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. It's not about Italy being in the Renaissance as a phase of civilization, but that this book is about the civilization in Italy between 1350 and 1550. This, the Renaissance, was a civilization. And Burckhardt takes great care to say this civilization is important for us to consider in 1860, because it is the mother of the civilization that we participate in now, and that its influences, like a mother's influences, is affecting us all the time. But this book is incomplete. This book is just half of the book that he planned to write. This book is the political half and the book that he intended to write on the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was to have two parts that fit together, became like a pair, and the second half of it was to deal with art. This deals with politics, political happenings. It begins with the state as a work of art. It begins also with the notice that the individual had an ambivalent bifurcation in the Renaissance in Italy. The individual was capable of cold, calculating Machiavellian action, even to the extent of terrorizing others. At the very same time, that very same individual had a creative drive and élan that could try new things and make up things, so that these two aspects in ambivalence characterize the individual in the Renaissance, and that that individual was the atomic structure of the state, and that the Renaissance state also had that same ambivalence. The art volume that was to go with this, that was to fold in so that you had the full deck. That you couldn't play the game of history without the full deck. Burckhardt didn't understand at this time. No one at that time understood that the deck has more jokers than it has playing cards, and that the game is really wild. The second volume, the art volume, couldn't be written. It wasn't that this was published in 1860. Burckhardt lived another 38 years. He was one of these workaholic, German speaking professors who loved to do his stuff. And he did fantastic complete stuff. He was really an ace. He didn't do it because it's not possible to write a differential text that folds into the same integral. Art doesn't integrate with all these other concerns. Art is a differential form and not subject to the the integral, the path integral ecology at all. You have to reduce it. You have to use a virtual form of it. You have to use some kind of game plan about it. But art doesn't reduce so that the other volume, it couldn't be written as a volume. It was written by Burckhardt, but he didn't recognize that he had written it in the only form he could. A series of essays that collected together loosely are the other volume, Go With It, and one of those I showed three weeks ago, just published for the first time a few years ago in translation, wasn't even recognized that it was missing. And we're talking about people using this as a textbook around the world for generations. Didn't even know that it was missing because they're miseducated as a doctor of civilization. They were really sick. One of the volumes that he wrote was a study of the altarpiece in the Renaissance, and the way in which the altarpiece in the Renaissance underwent a transformation out of the geometry of the medieval cathedral, through the trigonometry of visionary functioning into the calculus of the art, of aesthetic appreciation of the divine and the human in relationality, and in tandem that the altar in the Renaissance is not an iconographic focus, but is a prism for the person to find new possibilities creatively with the divine. It's a whole different form of the altar. There was a Elizabethan critic. Cf Tucker. Both had a beautiful southern name. He did a study of the medieval cathedral in terms of its ritual function. This was after Jesse L Weston and Sir James George Frazer and Malinowski, and he looked at the floor plan of the medieval cathedral as function, and he found that there were 22 distinct functions that could be put onto the floor of the medieval Gothic cathedral, and that when you put those 22 functions together, they made a form that was very much like the major arcana of the tarot deck. That the floor of the cathedral functioned in that kind of way, but that the building itself pointed up from that to something beyond its bounded scale of ritual comportment, that the building itself was transcendental, that it led not back to the floor, but into the light. And even at that point, the cathedral, the Gothic cathedral, even in the high medieval period, was already like a clarion call that this floor plan, esoteric and complete as it is, isn't the whole story. It's only the beginning, and that the whole story is some kind of functioning that happens in a larger sphere. It happens in trigonometric functions of stress and strain, because you can't build a Gothic cathedral on the old floor plan Have just post and beam geometric structures. You have to be able to compute the stress loads and the distribution. And that's why Gothic cathedrals are so huge compared to Roman buildings. Roman buildings, which seem so incredibly huge to antiquity and to the Middle Ages that they were thought to be natural hills. Even in Gibbon's time, when he went to Rome, Gibbon was a kind of a ugly, portly, bad smelling sort of a guy who had one of the most brilliant minds that was ever on the planet. And he was there in the 1700s in Rome, and he was noticing, even in the 1700s, that the peasants in Rome had leaned to shacks built up in these hills, and that these hills were the ruins of great Roman buildings, and that the peasants didn't even know that they had been buildings, they just thought they were hills. They thought that quarrying these little bricks and blocks was that they lived in a very fruitful, natural place to build. One time Mark Twain, when he was in Rome, and the Italian guide was saying, you know, this is Saint Peter's built by Michelangelo and all these sculptures of Michelangelo. And they came out and Mark Twain pointed to the paving, and he said, Michelangelo, as if the street was also made. Gibbon, when he saw this, realized that no one knew what history was at all, because one couldn't even see nature as distinct from man's creation. On the medieval level. And one of the signs is that the Renaissance came into being because there was a skeleton crew of doers who knew how to transform the medieval Romanesque building into a transcendental Gothic structure. And probably the finest example of that is Charlotte Cathedral in Henry Adams great book on Charlotte and Mont-saint-michel. He says the building of Charlotte was the apex of Western civilization. That happened around 1100, about the time that the order of the assassins was beginning the Muslim terror in the Crusades in response to the Crusades. And all of that is being revisited a thousand years later because of falling back into a medieval mode temporarily, where the world is having nightmare deja vu because of not continuing with the present harmonic that was leading elsewhere. It works very simply. The gas is expanding, and if you put a bound on it, it will build pressure. And if you add a spark to that pressurized gas, it will blow up. It is a universal principle and one can deal with it in a whole variety, in fact, an infinite variety of ways. The worst way of all is to create a false pressure where an explosion can happen. The misunderstanding of historical energy is very much like the peasants in the ruins of Rome that gibbon saw 300 years ago. It is catastrophically ignorant. When Burckhardt was writing The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and pointing up the power of the political state, the power of the individual, and the ambivalence of the two, how easily and how quickly one could vacillate between these two, seemingly polarized and Indistinct qualities. How could this happen? Part of the difficulty comes out in the fact that the art half of the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was never factored in. It's in Burckhardt's art essays and the introduction by the great History of Germany, Professor Hajo Holborn. His three volume history of the of Germany, published by Alfred A Knopf for many years, was the standard history of of Germany. And he points out that Burckhardt's History of architecture and decoration of the Italian Renaissance was published in 1867, and his Notes on Renaissance Sculpture, posthumously published as late as 1934. They did a collected edition of Burckhardt, and the 13th volume in the 30s was this volume. Plus he did Art collectors, the altarpiece, the portrait, three essays, and all of these artworks by Burckhardt together form what would be the complementary volume to it. But because it was missing, doesn't mean that it wasn't operative. This book wasn't that important. In 1860. It became important after Burckhardt died in 1898, because at the beginning of the 1890s, there was a whole movement in the architecture world of using the rediscovery of renaissance of forms, and it came to a culmination in, of all places, Chicago, Illinois, in 1893, the World Columbian Exposition. At the same time as the World Parliament of Religions met in Chicago in 1893, and in Chicago, the site for the World Fair was built with all white buildings in Renaissance style. And that's why, in one of the films on Frank Lloyd Wright, the narrator says, almost every small town in America that was developed in the late 19th century, early 20th century have little downtowns that are Greek Revival, Renaissance architecture. All the little courthouses, all the little public buildings. All the banks. They're all Podunk. Echoes of Renaissance. Rediscovered architecture. The biggest critic of that at that time was Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor and teacher at the time. And Louis Sullivan said architecture is not about reviving anything. It's about creating works of art that give us the way to present our own possibilities. Art is all about releasing the creativity and not keeping it pressurized by outdated forms. One of the difficulties with the past is that the spores and viruses and germs survive. And if you bring something from the past in like, if you create dinosaurs out of DNA, you're going to have dinosaurs. Not just very pleasant things to examine, but something that will eat you up. You're going to get a Jurassic Park effect. So if you revive something from the past, you better know what it is. Because the Renaissance revived the Roman Empire, antiquity and all of its fearsome wholeness. And they never knew what hit them except just a handful of people. One of the smartest guys in Florence in the Renaissance was Machiavelli and his two little books, The Prince, which is about the number one individual who always claims that it's all for him. You better listen up and his discourses on Livy that he always finally takes his story in a digested way to prove that he's the one. There's always a Third Reich that goes with the Führer. And that those two go together, and that the cure for that is to know the history of the place in which this pastiche is being done. So one of the least read books of Machiavelli is the third book by him is called A History of Florence, and Machiavelli's history of Florence is one of the great histories of the world. He shows patiently. Like Burckhardt, only Burckhardt is writing from the 1850s. Machiavelli is writing right there. At the time, he knew most of these people, and Machiavelli's History of Florence is really an eye opener of how page by page, section by section, he shows that at least someone there knew what history was. As a conscious, expanded dynamic, it's a transformation media. And that by reading that history, one doesn't just interiorize information into a mind. One doesn't just activate the emotional spores that are waiting or get back into rituals that should now work because boy, didn't it work then. But that there is a transform that happens and that history is a transformational medium, is related to the way in which vision is a transformation of medium consciousness. So that history as a process actually is like a super consciousness. Whereas consciousness flows easily in and out from someone's your mind, your mythic experience, your ritual comportment, even into fundamental nature. Not fundamental so much, but mysterious nature, mysterious nature. But there is such a thing as the two spheres of two persons who are conscious of relating with each other. And this was the province of Hegel. This is where Hegel was really brilliant. Hegel understood that the real problem is not so much with the individual and the state. The real problem is the interpersonal social realm out of which the state emerges, not because someone is forcing it to. But because of its inevitable dynamic. And the real problem is. That the individual, no matter how powerful and well grounded they are. Doesn't have any effective traction vis a vis that kind of historical process. So one of the really profound works of the early 19th century, about 25 years before the text, that we're using lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. Actually, phenomenology of spirit. We don't have to go into it in great depth, but there is a wonderful volume by Terry Pinkard published by Cambridge University Press. Hegel's phenomenology. The sociology of reason. There are limits, severe limits to Hegel, but he really was profound. Pinker says. Strikingly, Hegel argues that the modern European spirit can come to terms with the path that is taken and the place it has ended up only by understanding the sense of religiosity. It has also developed along the way, and by finally understanding this sense of religiosity itself in terms of what he calls absolute knowing, so that while you're doing all this, while the history is building up, while the past is becoming present, it's presence becoming past, and all of this is happening There is something that's building up. And what is building up is building up within an even larger field so that there are several levels, at least three orders of levels of activity and of structure that are happening concomitantly. And that his book Phenomenology of Spirit, The Phenomenology of Mind is a bad translation for it. Phenomenology of spirit is, at the time it's being published, the culmination of all of that. In which a full reconciliation of modern humanity with itself is seen to be possible. Having come down the path of despair, the modern community thus turns out to be the self Consummating skepticism that has within it the reflective resources to be able to continually renew itself against its own self-generated forms of skepticism. So if there's a civil war structurally going on all the time, Hegel thought it was going on all the time in reality, and that the only way to know it was through reason. It's a function of the mind. Didn't understand that this is a scenario that plays and replays itself in the mind, not in reality, and only in a certain type of mind, not in all minds at all. And in fact, the mind by itself doesn't have to play those games at all. It plays out because that's the way in which it was trained, born and bred and trained to be addicted to. One can go on, and in fact, 200 years of philosophy been based on chewing this over, trying to understand. This is. A little something that a friend of mine made. This is a rubbing of two footprints. These footprints are in a big stone dais that's in front of the Bodhi tree in India. And they were. That dais was put there by King Ashoka 2300 years ago, and they used to have beautiful lotuses in the instep of the feet, and the toes had nice rings on them, because at that time that's what you had. And over the 2300 years, so many rubbings have been made that they're worn smooth. It was simply to position in front of the Bodhi tree that it isn't sitting at the Bodhi tree that does it. In fact, in Ashoka's time, it was well understood that the Bodhi tree was only one of four trees, and that each one of the four trees has a seven day meditation altogether, making 28. And that that cycle of 28 is a lunar cycle That the phases of the moon are a complement to the UN phasing of the sun, and even late in the Vajrayana, you still find the sun and the moon. The full moon and the full sun as the two hands, one that is unchanging oneness and the other that's constantly phasing and goes through a zero that that double cycle, that paired cycle, that zero and one cycle come together not in a meditation under a tree, and then that's it. But that there is a path. There's a path that one can take. There's a path integral that one can take. And it is that application, that dynamic of taking wisdom into application that develops consciousness because that is not subject to an integral perfection, it is the complementarity to it, which is that that perfection, when applied to an infinity, fans out in an array of possibilities that's likewise infinite. And that's what freedom is. Freedom is not freedom of choice, but freedom of developing freedom indefinitely. Later on, some 2300 years after Ashoka put that up, this was the original flag of India. This is the Gandhian flag for India before the Indian When Congress adopted the wheel 16 spoked wheel. This was the original Gandhian India A. Trigonometric development of the Buddhist path. A phrase used to be at this time one Buddha B.C. one Gandhi A.D.. That was the little mantra in India at the time. This is a spinning wheel. It's called a charkha, and that the charkha was the distribution of yogic meditation sophistication throughout the peasant population of India. Gandhi said India is not its leadership. It is 700,000 villages and that the energy of history needs to obtain and radiate From that 700,000 villages, and not from the plan of people in Delhi, or in Bombay, or in Calcutta or London or any other place, that it must come from a distributed freedom among the population of the people, and that the charkha was their meditation, because the Charkha and Gandhi went through a great deal of difficulty to try and find one in the 1920s. They couldn't find one. The British monopoly on textiles had so aced out any kind of homespun spinning that they had to find. I think they found one antique charkha and somebody's grandmother's attic. And then they made millions of them. And Gandhi himself, always after that, whenever he was sitting quietly, he was sitting spinning. And he would always tell a Gandhian because they were always spinning, never idle. Because this charkha the name is very close to chakra. Chakra is a wheel, is a psychophysical wheel, but a psychophysical wheel not of psychophysical energy as in like the chakras with the kundalini rising big time marquee stuff. But when consciousness in its perfection goes into any chakra, any chakra, it transforms what is done ritually into something else. It transforms whatever mythic experience there is into something else. It transforms the mind into something else. It transforms myth into history. It transforms ritual into art. And it transforms symbols into vision. One of the curious things about Osaka. You may never have sat with one, but as the wheel spins, it hums. And it hums. A very interesting modulation. It's a very quiet analog to the sound of a diesel train whistle. The train whistle in the United States is one of the most refined sounds ever made by man. Millions of man hours of research went in to make a sound that would not scare anyone on any level. And that's why one feels, any one feels. Does it matter what race, gender, background? Everyone who hears an American train whistle feels a moment of gentle nostalgia. The Charkha produces that sense spiritually, that there are other dimensions where we are free and welcome, and they can come to us any time the gate is open. This activity opens the gate. That's called supercomputing. Thanks.