Nature 5
Presented on: Saturday, February 4, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Nature 5 and we're shifting our frame and our frame is four presentations that make a month and that frame is a lunar cycle and we're trying to adjust our learning to the deepest possible, natural rhythms. The day night cycle, the diurnal cycle is not a polarity and it's not a dualism. The best way to describe it is: the day follows the night naturally and the night gives place to the dawn and the new day emerges. In Ancient Egypt, even before 3000 BC, the first dynasty and the Nakarta culture, Nakarta II especially, that was there for several thousand years before the first dynasty, 5, 6000 BC, there are already deep traces that the wisdom cycle was always posited on the way in which day and night have their special kind of co-operation. That the day emerges into form from the night's passage, so that the night is a dynamic and the day is an energy form. The night has the energy in a dynamic process and the day emerges as an energised form that now marks something which we would call form, but the relationship of process and form, day and night, that diurnal, is not a polarity, not a duality. The stability of form is made by polarity. That in the process phase, what one has is an ongoing flow and as that flow enters into a curl, a kind of a chiral curl, it ties the momentum of the dynamic into a bow, which at the end of the duration of the form, the bow is untied and you have the flow of the process again. So the ancient understanding of forms is that they are tied in a bow because polarity allows for this, to cinch it and keep it stable, but if you pull on it in the return to the dynamic, the bow comes free and one has the process again, unencumbered. And yet one can retie, one can rebow, one can remerge. And the reason for this is that the re-emergence is not a static thing. If it were a static thing, it could not go back into its dynamic easily and sometimes not at all. This is known as cinching a knot instead of tying a bow. So if you make forms that knot, so that they don't go back into a dynamic, now you have an interruption of nature.
One of the earliest interruptions of nature, is the way that people used to keep track of days, of time, by tying knots in a string. In the Inca language called Quipu, it is an ancient way of counting the knots and then tallying up what you have, in terms of form, that has been taken out of its process and now one can have those forms, whatever those knots represent. Whatever those days are, one can own those days. The same thing as fencing in land; now you own this plot of land, it's no longer in nature, it is in your ownership, your portfolio. And so owning by measurement has two distinct modes: one is to knot so that now you own this and you can buy and sell this on your own and you don't have to consult nature. Nature now is commandeered in such a way that, what can it do? And of course we live in an age where with earthquakes and tsunamis and many other...hurricanes, we understand what nature can do very well and mostly in the past, men and women around the world have understood. Do not tie knots, tie bows. You can use those forms and still have a measurement, but the measurement is not one of a static thing, but it is the emergence of an energised complement to the dynamic. And what we're looking at in nature and the way that we're looking at it, is to have the sense that nature is this dynamic and we're spending a whole three lunar months cycle, called a season, we're spending a season looking at nature and then we will spend a second season looking at ritual action that makes existential forms that hold, they tie bows in such a special way that one can now shift one's attention from the dynamic to the form. And so our learning will have, for the first half year, two seasons of three lunar cycles each and each lunar cycle will have 30 days, or four presentations on a Saturday morning. Because we're taking a look also at the way in which the day, when kept track of in a bow, has a rhythm to it quite naturally to amount to a seven, to a week. Days built into a week and four weeks built into a lunar cycle month and those lunar cycle months, when you have three of them accumulated together, are a natural season and four seasons will make an annual year. And all over the planet, for all time, except for the last couple hundred years, in the kind of hubris that the Industrial Revolution introduced in spades in the early 1800's, more and more our sense of civilisation skewed away from founding itself in nature and the reason why it did this, is that in the 17th century was the first time that there was a triumph of tying knots in such a way that those knots seemed to stay. And the first place where this really took hold, in a deep, philosophic way, was in France. And the star person of that era was Descartes and his Cartesian geometry was geometry to make sure that the mechanisation of civilisation could now proceed. And the first computers were mechanical devices made in the middle of the 1600's in France. And the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800's was a development eventually out of that matrix.
Our learning is both an emergence of form out of process, without destroying eithers' actuality and to understand the relationship between them, is one not of a static this and that, or duality, but that form itself, because it is the dynamic energy brought into a temporary, polarised form. It isn't brought into it statically, but iteratively, vibrationally. So that everywhere in the universe, whatever exists, exists not just as a thing, but exists as a very high vibration, a very high iteration running into the trillions of times per second. So when we look at nature, we're at looking at nature to understand in a progressively layered way, deeper and deeper, just how we have come to appreciate, by the early 21st century, all of this actually has occurred vis-à-vis ourselves, at a very crucial transform in our planetary development. We're taking pairs of people and of their books to give ourselves that tuning fork, metronome, to carry that energy frequency, that vibration, in a very deep, natural way that eventually will have a mysterious quality to it. And what makes it mysterious is that the energy wave will have a reference wave that is related to it, but not related in terms of a Cartesian geometry. Not limited in terms of a mechanical, logical referentiality, but in terms of the living flow which allows for another flow to be with it, but neither interfering with each other and setting up now a complexity of that flow. Decades ago, when I first was pioneering this, I used to use the Amazon River as the exemplar. The Amazon being an enormous river, has from the Andes on down, a certain distinctive colour. But one of the largest rivers that flows into the Amazon is the Rio Negro, because the Rio Negro, because it comes from the Venezuelan highlands, has a lot of loamy silt in it and literally the River is black, the water is black. And when it flows into the Amazon for hundreds of miles, the two rivers flow with each other without mixing and it's only hundreds of miles downstream that you begin to get enough of the turbulence and interchange that the Amazon slowly then becomes some kind of a third mixed colour, all the way out to the deltas in the Atlantic Ocean.
Culture, as a dynamic process, flows with nature in a very similar way. For most of the natural level, nature consists of just the dynamics and the flows. And the fact that two flows can flow together, is a mysterious quality of nature. That they can eventually, under special conditions, begin to mix and make a third, introduces a third level to nature, to mysterious nature, to a magical nature, that has transformed. And so we're looking at the way in which the dynamic of the universe works in three level [13:50 parfait], all the time for us. We do not know when the first civilisations and the first planets and the first star systems occurred. Our star system was only formed 4.6,000,000,000 years ago and the universe as we know it was in business 10,000,000,000 years before there was even a star, or any planets where we are. And where we are, of course, is moving all the time, moving not only because our star system with about 25 others have a local group with their own kind emotion and a swirl, but that that local group is embedded in a whole swathe of local groups that run into the billions, that is an arm of a huge structure called the Milky Way Galaxy. And that some of the most prominent stars in our sky, like the Orion constellation, those stars are extremely close to us in terms of the Galaxy, but they're not in our arm of the Galaxy. And so when one looks to see Orion on any night and you look to see those bright stars, the bright yellow star at the top left is Beetlejuice and the bright star on the top right is Bellatrix and the bright blue giant, Rigel and then the three stars for the belt, those stars all exist in another arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. And in-between these arms, there's over a thousand light years of rather open space.
What we're looking at, is the appreciation that nature becomes more and more dynamic and expansive of its scale and increasing of its depth and that all the time that this is occurring to us, a mysterious quality of nature begins to, like sap, rise through the ability to have experience flow with it. And so experience itself begins to be experienced as part of the emergence of the mystery of nature and later on when there's a second transform into the magical, it will not be experience that deepens nature, not the flow of mythic culture that makes nature mysterious, but there'll be a third flow called consciousness - visionary consciousness - which will add the magical layer. It is still nature, but it has transformed again from the mysteriousness into the magical, into the conscious. And of course the easiest rule of thumb in nature is water. In mysterious nature it has fermented and become wine and in visionary consciousness, the wine has been distilled into Cognac. And so the alchemical term, 'liqueur,' refers to a double transform. The alchemical symbol was always the double pelican, or the hermetic caduceus of the two, or any kind of a tuning fork. Any kind of a quality where it isn't just two things, but the two meet and they branch from the same cognate origin and this holds all the way through. And the old Pythagorean esoteric thing was to recognise that the Greek letter lambda was the shape of how the tuning pair was not just two paired in a cognate polarity, but that they were able to carry each one different orders. So that those orders now had between them a special mysterious quality where the cognates were also in tune. And that one of the Greek lambda lines in Pythagorean theory was that these are squares: one, two, four, eight. Whereas this line are cubes: one, three, nine, 27. And that therefore, in mysterious nature, they are able to have ratios that hold in terms of oneness, so that two and three have a harmonic, resonant capacity. And that four and nine will have and that eight and 27. That one has the ability now to have ratios of the real, the real form being always oneness, but a oneness that allows for there to be further, deeper, ratioable proportional resonances and that one can even go into a deep conscious transform of those ratios, of those proportions. And instead of just having stars and planets, you have the planets in their gravitational resonances that hold in special ratios. And it was discovered about 400 years ago by a very lovely man named Kepler, who was trying for the first time to understand why the orbit of Mars was not a circle, but an ellipse. And the ratios and the math of the different planets, if they were also in ellipses, how could you come to...and he found that if you take the squares of the period, times in ratio of the cubes of the distance, that ratio will always be one. And so if you take the squares of the period and the cube of the distance to Saturn and work that out mathematically, you will come close to one. The same with Jupiter, the same with Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Earth.
The return to unity is assured because the conscious transform...because it is distilled, fermented, a carrier of nature, one is able, consciously, to go back to the unity that is in nature. But to go from the conscious understanding - from the magical - one doesn't go right away back to nature, one goes back to the mystery. And so the mysteriousness of nature is always the middle way, it's the Middle Path. The Buddhist Middle Path is neither nature nor consciousness, but mysterious nature and it's that Middle Path that we're understanding now in this next lunar cycle, of the phase of nature. In the first cycle, the first lunar cycle, for four presentations we took Thoreau and the I Ching, going back to nature à la nature. A man who was...his most famous quote that I use in my DVDs, 'The most natural man is a man who is himself in all four seasons.' In Chuang Tzu one of the phrases, 'Joy and anger occurring as naturally as the four seasons.' That one can go back to nature and immerse oneself deeper than the culture does; the individual can immerse themselves back into nature and be absorbed by it. One can literally go back into nature in such a way that there is no cultural difference that's apparent in your experience. One of the greatest examples of this was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was one of the French Enlightenment geniuses, who was taking great umbrage to the Cartesian canonical world view of nature. And he was greatly troubled by this and he was also troubled by his own inner nature, which was to be somewhat of a rake when he was younger and feeling guilty and feeling angry and feeing unmechanical, he rowed himself out on Lake Geneva and decided that he would just simply stop rowing and just sit in his rowboat, way out on Lake Geneva. And as he did so, in his Confessions he describes it beautifully and classically, he rode the motion of Lake Geneva until he disappeared into the motion and he was just another drop of water of Lake Geneva and for a long time. And when he came to out of that, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was totally changed forever. And out of this came a critique of culture-based society that ties knots and he called it The Social Contract. And it was the beginning of the Enlightenment critique that faults society was a knot abstracted out of nature and therefore it had no way to be mysterious whatsoever. And no way to go from the mysterious onto any higher orders. And so what had to be done first of all, was the ability to return back to nature. And of course just about the time that Rousseau was doing that, many of the Europeans that had come to the New World, especially to the United States, at that time were experiencing that it wasn't that they were fearful of the savages in the wilderness out there, but that somehow they were becoming acclimated to the land, to the landscape and they were dissolving their individuality back. So that for the very first time, about the time that Rousseau was out on Lake Geneva, was the first time that you had Americans who became White Indians. And of course the all-time great description of that transformation is by James Fenimore Cooper about Deerslayer, who at 17, running through the forest with Hurry Harry and later on with his Mohican adopted father, Chingachgook and his adopted brother Uncas, had become a White Indian. What is extraordinary is that that experience of going back into nature in such a way that it obviates all of the knottedness of, all of the quality of being separated from the natural flow.
These are some of the drawings by Mary Leakey, of prehistoric rock paintings in Tanzania in Africa. And her ability to go into these primordial sites and areas, is one of the curious hallmarks of her person. Her father, Erskine Nicol, was a painter, an oil painter and he was kind of a free spirit. And he didn't like to be tied down to any particular place, so he would go to various places in Europe and Africa and Asia and he would paint for a while, until his money ran out. And then he would gather his paintings and go to London and sell them and immediately clear out of town because he didn't like to be tied down anywhere. When he was in Egypt one time, doing his paintings, he fell in love with a beautiful young woman and they hit it off immediately. And of course, rather immediately they not only got married, but she was found to be pregnant. And they were living on a houseboat on the Nile and they talked about having the birth of this child - who would turn out to be Mary Leakey - on the houseboat on the Nile, but finally the more civilised family members got them to go to London immediately for the delivery. But they did not want to go to a hospital to have the child, so they went to a house of a friend and Mary Leakey was delivered there in that house in London. But all of her life she was always with her father's travelling wanderlust and her mother going along, so that she never had regular schooling at all. She was always immersed in this oasis of painting and this oasis of landscape and this place and so she got this sense, almost like a mystical child, that home was not really any particular place, it was wherever you were interested to be. That could be a home as well. But on the other side of her family, her mother's family were the Freres. And the Freres were quite famous in English history. One of her ancestors was, in the 1700's, in possession of some of the rarest Stone Age implements that were found in a brick quarry in Suffolk, England. And he wrote a monograph on it that when it was published, it caused him to be banished from the better parts of society, because he claimed that these stone implements that were found were back at a time when not only the landscape, but the flora and fauna of England, were completely different. That the bones belonged to animals that were only found in Africa now, but that they had lived where England is, who knows how long ago? And of course, there is Mary Leakey says, 'The better educated people in England of the time' - Enlightenment England yes, but only so far - 'They were still readers of the Old Testament.' Man was created and Adam was the first man and that was datable to 4004 BC. And obviously that puts it at a date that no human beings could have possibly lived, since the first man is 4000 BC. So nothing more was heard from that relative, or no one mentioned that particular publication, for over 60 years. And then when it was mentioned again, it was mentioned because Darwin had brought out his Origin of Species in 1859 and someone remembered this paper by John Frere, but by this time the complication was not just that he did a bad thing of writing such an article back then and now it's revived again, but here comes someone like Darwin saying that this is the nature of man to have emerged through evolution from the great apes. So it seems peculiarly natural that when Mary Leakey grew up, to fall in love and marry the man she married, one of his first great books is called Adam's Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and his Culture - this is a first edition of it - and was published in May of 1934. And later on, in order to rub it in, L.S.B Leakey, Louis Leakey, published a volume of collected essays, Adam or Ape. Did man come out of a special creation of Adam, or did he not evolve through who knows how long? And it was peculiar, because in the Introduction, under 'Natural Selection,' Louis Leakey takes the trouble to say, 'Now, when a variety of such an animal occurs having increased power or capacity in any organ or sense, such increase is totally useless, is never called into action and even may exist without the animal ever becoming aware of it. In the wild animal, on the contrary, all its faculties...all its faculties and powers, being brought into full action, or the necessities of existence, any increase becomes immediately available, is strengthened by exercise and must even slightly modify the food they have, it's the whole economy of the race, it creates, as it were, anew animal, one with superior powers and which will necessarily increase in numbers and outlive those inferior to it.' The difference is, is that a domestic animal belongs to, not nature, but that deeper level of nature which we are understanding has a mysterious quality, but part of its mysteriousness is that if you tame animals, or you tame plants, you take them out of the natural dynamic and you put them into a special version of that dynamic, which has a mysteriousness, no doubt, but it is no longer a part of nature exclusively. It now has one foot in the culture. And we say of that, that that culture now - with one foot in nature and one foot in culture - maintains its balance because the two flows flow together and as long as they're together, one can stand, one can walk, one can move. But if the cultural foot moves in an anti-natural way, you will stumble, you will fall. We say, in terms of evolutionary development, that the natural man, the natural woman, lives in a Palaeolithic absorption in nature, but that the cultural variant of that is the Neolithic, where instead of following the animals, one tames the animals and raises only certain animals. Instead of gathering the plants, one excerpts those plants, works with larger varieties of them, until you begin to get something that originally in nature was just grass - a special goatgrass, that had four or five little grains at the top - that if you take that goatgrass and you work with it in a Neolithic taming way that was done about seven or 8,000 years ago, you can make a jump in that goatgrass to a special grain called emmer, that now has 16 grains at the head. And if you work with that emmer, you can now put it through a second transformation and you come up with bread wheat, that is so heavy at the head, with so many grains of grain, kernels of grain, that now harvesting bread wheat, you can very easily, on a plot of land, grow enough grain to make your bread for the whole year. The difficulty is that you have removed bread wheat from nature. And at the expense of the grass, instead of the energy of the natural plant going into just a few grains, but the grains were surrounded by these kinds of plant wings that allowed for natural goatgrass to seed itself. And even with emmer, there was enough left over, that occasionally in big wings, emmer could seed itself. But bread wheat could never seed itself, it didn't have any of the wings on the grains. All the energy, all the structure of the plant, went into the grains. And so when it was ripe, if it was not harvested, it would just fall where it was and would never move from the spot. So that now man, in order to propagate bread wheat had to sow the grains by hand and so it was a cultural advance, it was a Neolithic advance, but it took away from the ability of the plants to be in nature. Now they also had one foot into man's culture. So that man now developed a mysteriousness and had to co-operate. His culture and his nature were two flows, two processes, that could only work, his culture could only be sustained in the Neolithic if it flowed with nature and followed the seasons. Instead of following the animals, instead of following, gathering the plants in their special little wild harvests, one now followed the timeline of the seasons. The measurement by the moons, the measurement by the sun, the annual cycle and the ability to make one's culture and nature mysteriously together.
And yet a second transform comes when civilisation rises, because civilisation is not simply natural, nor is it Neolithically mysterious, so that culture and nature can just together flow, but the second transform, the third level, is the visionary, conscious magic of civilisation. Now you have something else. And consciousness in its vision process cannot flow with nature and culture; it's of a second transform, it's of a third order. It doesn't just flow with nature, but it comes around the other way and weaves with nature, both coming from different ways. Nature always comes from an integral way and if it's clockwise, consciousness will always be a differential way that is complementary to it, different from it, it will be counterclockwise. If you live in a star system where the natural cycle is counterclockwise, visionary consciousness, if it develops in that star system, will be clockwise because they always weave, so that now one has not only to have the flow of culture and nature together, but you have visionary consciousness that not only weaves with nature, it has to weave also with the culture. But when it weaves, it transforms, it always changes and its change is not in a natural fermentation transform, its change is in a distillation. It distils what has already been once transformed. The natural water has become transformed into the cultural wine, but the conscious Cognac has been distilled out of that wine and is of a different order, of a different mode and so one has to deal with it in a completely expanded, different way. Now it's not just enough to have something integrate, now you have to have a complementarity to that integration. The differential transform has to be rewoven and that reweaving calls for a recalibration. So that civilisation was like a double transform, that if it were not caught, it would end the ability for nature to sustain. Things will die out. If you take all of the energy from nature and you don't just put it into tamed plants and tamed animals, but you take all of the metals and all of the minerals from nature and you put them into manmade civilised constructs and you pay no attention to the natural flow, you will have a condition where even the oceans themselves will be unable to sustain life. Where the landforms anywhere on the planet will not be able to sustain life. Where all of a sudden, the quality of nature...we were just talking during the break about the fact that all of the glaciers in Mount Kilimanjaro are melting for the first time since geologic ages. All the mountains on Mount Kenya are almost all gone. The climate of the world has been beggared by extracting out without weaving back in. And so civilisation becomes an enemy of nature, but it also becomes a killer of the mysterious. And the mysterious is killed, not because of an enemy-type force fighting, but it becomes killed because the mind only abstracts from it and doesn't participate in the transform. And so it is the deadening abstraction of the mind that is the fulcrum of the problem; the knot is tied there. It's not in nature, it's not even just in the ritual levels, or in the mythic cultural levels, but it's in the symbolic mind gone abstract, hysterical, deadening, crazy. And in our time all educations on the planet, everywhere, all traditional learnings have ended up in abstracted, deadening, killer modes. Which is why this new education. Not just new in content, new in form, but transformed in the deeper ways of visionary consciousness from a mysterious transform, which is recognisable all over the planet, for all time.
Now, when we come back to looking at Mary Leakey and Louis Leakey - and we're spending four presentations on those two - one of the qualities that's interesting, is how women, especially, become the carriers of the mysterious. Very frequently, the carriers of visionary consciousness have a masculine gender quality, but the carriers of the mysterious have now a feminine gender quality. And so one doesn't speak just of nature, one speaks of mother nature. One doesn't just speak of the vitality of the world, but the vitality of the carrying world, who is a goddess. And Gaia, or the making of the whole shape of a mythological understanding of feminine goddesses that there will be a quality for the mother, there will be a quality, not just for the mother but the mother-daughter, there will be a quality for the lover, a quality for the huntress, a quality for at least six different vectors. And when we get to our learning and get into myth, we're going to take those six goddesses, female goddesses of Greek mythology, as one of the metronomes of how this spreads itself. And is recognisable once one sees the template of that process anywhere once, it is recognisable wherever you look, in whatever culture, whatever society, throughout the planet and throughout its history. The problem though, is with civilised persons like ourselves who are more and more jailed by the egotistical convictions of an abstract mind gone crazy. We cannot get back to nature and so there was a great movement in the 1920's and '30's of the 20th century, for men and women to find ways that they could take themselves out of society, out of the mind and go back into primordial nature and get back to it. And that one of the keys to it was the ability to get back to the animals and while Mary Leakey was, at 23, deciding that she was going to go to Africa with Louis Leakey and go on one of his expeditions to try to find stone tools in some of the areas of Kenya, some of the islands in Lake Victoria, she went with him. And as she was going with him in 1934, the other woman that we're taking as a pair, Jane Morris-Goodall, Jane Goodall, was being born, also in London.
But Jane Goodall, when she was born, she was born into a peculiar family just like Mary Leakey. But whereas Mary Leakey's father was a painter who painted all over the world in different places, her father - Jane Goodall's father - was one of the world's greatest race drivers. He's one of the few men ever to ten times participate in the Le Mans and was a victor many times. And Monty Morris-Goodall was one of these daredevil men who was absolutely fearless of pushing his machine in competition to every possible extreme. One great race driver in the 1940's cautioned a young race driver, he said, 'You do not drive with your eyes, or your hands. At that speed you drive by the seat of your pants. If your car is not a part of you and that car and you are part of that road, you will never think fast enough to keep control.' It's an advice that young jet pilots get when you train to be a jet pilot. They give you the rule of seven. That when you're at mark three, you will be in that accident before you even know, unless you have trained yourself to limit your frame to only keeping track of seven things in a gestalt at any one time. And if something else shows up on an instrument, you automatically let something else out of that frame because you cannot keep track of more than a constellation of seven things, instantly, at any one time. And so you train yourself to constantly revise your gestalt of operative reference to no more than seven at any particular time. Because of this rule that came up in the late 1940's at Edwards Air Force Base and one of the formulators of that was Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, October 14th 1947. The concentration is not to keep concentrated on a focus of oneness, but to spread the oneness out in a gestalt of seven. In math this is known as the Hamiltonian. That all of these points together constitute a ratio of attention that can be modified and shifted, but it can act as if it were one. Because the relationality of all of them together will be a oneness of your flight of the direction of your machine, of the car.
So when Jane Goodall was growing up, she was acclimated on one hand to the wildness of her father and his daredevilness and yet on the other side, her mother, Cecilia, came from a very particular kind of lineage, where largely it was the women sticking together, because Jane Goodall's mother was one of four daughters and she was the only one that ever married. So when World War Two came and she was like, five years old, the father joined the Royal Engineers and was sent all over the world because he knew a lot about machines and contact and was daring. And he exited from the family so that Jane took...went with her mother and her young sister, named Judy - Jeff she was called in the family - and her mum. Jane's name was always Valerie Jane and they called her V.J. And V.J., because she was the oldest, not only older than her sister, but that they had two other sisters that were friends of theirs that lived very close to the place in England that they went to, the four girls together grew up together as...like a little group and eventually would form a club called the Alligator Club, where they had to learn to identify ten plants by name, ten animals by name, various orders. And all this was dreamed up by 11 year old Jane Goodall. And that these girls learned to walk alligator-style, one in front of the other, keeping exactly in the pace of their steps and keeping the attentiveness that wherever they looked in nature, they could name what it was. Plant, animal, condition.
One time, Jane was missing for an entire day. They got the police out to look for her, they got the local military out to look for her and just as the sun was going down, she showed up with straw in her hair. And they asked her where she had been and she said, 'I got curious about where eggs come from, from the chickens, so I went into the hen house and I waited for about five or six hours watching until a hen laid an egg and I could see where it came from.' This is a little girl. She had this uncanny ability to both be daring and to be so patient that she would not move until the event occurred that she wanted to have occur. She lived not only with her sister and the other two girls, so that there were four young girls, but there were four aunts - her mother and three aunts - and the house was headed by the grandmother. She was given a name Danny as her nickname. And so here Jane Goodall grew up in a world that was all matriarchal and the only male presence was her mother's bother, Eric, who was a surgeon in Hampshire, a suburb of London and he would occasionally come down to where they were at Bournemouth in Dorset, England, down on the south English coast. And the house there was called The Birches, three storey brick house. And her number one companion all through her childhood was a little chimpanzee doll that her father had given her on her first birthday, April 3rd 1935. And she named the little chimp doll Jubilee. And in one of her earliest letters to her mother, we read...this is February 16th 1942, she is not quite seven years old. This is her first extant letter, 'Darling mummy, the day before yesterday Mr and Miss Benz bought a big dog called Jackie. He's going to live here until Uncle Marcel come back. I don't know how to spell that word. Yesterday Danny gave me two china dogs and I called them Trouble and Terry. And Jubilee has got a new dress.' So already at seven, one finds Jane Goodall immensely capable of both patience and daring at the same time. An attribute that Mary Leakey had as well, but Mary Leakey's daring was not just to go to odd places and then be patient there, she went to odd times as well. She could go back in time so that when she - as we will get to her in the next couple of presentations - when she was with Louis Leakey, out in Olduvai Gorge, sifting patiently, not only for years, but for decades - they began work in 1935, they did not find the first fossil trace until 1959. 24 years. But her companions out there, because Louis liked to stay in camp, she went out and did the looking because she was very good at recognising something that was out. And she took with her five Dalmatian dogs and her Dalmatian dogs were part of her protection from the wildness, the animals, the lions, the jackals, etc. But they were also her metronome of being into the animal world. So that she was looking not as a civilised person, not as a cultured human being, but she was looking being completely immersed in the animal nature of the place. Because she was looking for evidences of early man, when early man was an animal. Did not have any civilisation, had no culture, only lived completely absorbed in nature. And when they found the first traces, it caused a consternation, just like the Frere ancestor who caused the consternation of finding stone implements in the 1790's in a brick quarry in England. Only these were not stone tools, these were fragments of a skull that went back before there were tools, back several million years. And almost no one at the time wanted to give credence that, 'We've already been shocked, that maybe Adam was not the first man, maybe Adam had ancestors. Maybe man went back some thousands of years.' But it was almost too much for words to say that man must be millions of years old.
We know now just a couple of years ago, that in one of the depressions in northern Chad, near Emi Koussi, which is one of the highest mountains in the Sahara, over 11,000 feet, that the fragments of a skull of a hominid precursor, a relative of ours, goes back 7,000,000 years. We're looking in our learning, to acclimate ourselves to a nature which continuously expands back in time, takes level, after level, after level and opens it out, but in a special way. Not a mental expansion, which would be a game of parentheses: you say this and you put a parentheses and you add some expressions and that's like an exponential power, that expression. Or you put that parentheses within a larger parentheses, which takes in the different superscripts and subscripts and pretty soon you end up with a game. But reality is not a game, it has a curious quality to it. Emergence of form always emerges in iterative, vibrational way that includes time as well as space in its very motion. So that one never gets a circle in nature. What you get is the circle that tends to be going round in its circularity, but it goes forward in the dynamic of natural motion. And when you do this, what you get instead of a circle, is you get a spiral. Moving forward in time dynamically, the circle will always make a helical structure. But it has a peculiar quality, because there are levels of registry that are very definite and have staging way the helix will be constantly opening itself up as you go out. So instead of just getting a nice little geometrical, normal kind of circle become a helix, the helix constantly opens and opens and opens. And the image for that is the seashell called the chambered nautillus. That each segment of the chamber as it opens, it opens progressively more and more in an algorithmic progression. So that one begins to understand that there is an invisible structure to the forms that come out of nature and can only be there because the dynamic process of nature was not just natural, but also absorbed the mysteriousness as well. So that nature is now mysterious. But it absorbed the second transform, the magical, so that nature now for civilised men and women, is not only natural and mysterious, but also visionarily mysterious, magical as well. It always has a transform in it. This is a quality that has come out more and more and one can see it when we look at nature. Our helical expansion of it has opened more and more and more. The first time that there was such a thing as astrophysics was little more than 100 years ago. The first issue of Astrophysical Journal was published with the editor being George Ellery Hale. As a little boy in Chicago, his father built him a telescope in their backyard. Within a couple of years, the University of Chicago - that was very near their backyard - wanted to have someone who would organise an astronomy department for the University. They incorporated Hale because he had a nice telescope nearby. Within less than a generation, Hale got enough funds to build the Yerkes Observatory on Lake Geneva, in southern Wisconsin, that was a huge telescope complex. And within just less than a generation of that, he got enough money to build Mount Wilson's 100 inch telescope, up here just above Los Angeles. And within another generation of that, he got enough funding to build the Mount Palomar Observatory of 200 inch telescope, on Palomar Mountain in southern California. One man went from a backyard toy to a 200 inch telescope in less than 50 years. And now we have telescopes that are more than ten, 11 metres in diameter and four of them in Chile are organised so that together the four 10 metre telescopes can work as one gigantic telescope the size of almost a football field. All this in about 100 years.
The development of our civilisation has taken a visionary conscious jump so that the opening up of it is on such a scale that the very movement goes beyond the bounds that one could even dream of. Beyond the even invisible, wild suppositions that one could dream up, the actuality is going to go beyond that. And this very next move is in these next ten years. By 2015, by 2016, it will be opened to an expanse where the helix of the natural will literally be beyond any capacity for belief. It will not be beyond the capacity for wonder and for learning. And that's why our learning has this quality. Jane Goodall's favourite readings were Doctor Dolittle, who had all these animals that were his friends. And she read Tarzan. All the Tarzan tales - these are first editions - Tarzan of the Apes, The Beasts of Tarzan and especially this 1929 Illustrated Tarzan, book number one. And in the illustrations one finds little comic cartoons. One of the illustrations here reads, as Tarzan and Jane clinch, 'The veil of centuries of civilisation and culture were swept from Jane. It was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched arms, toward the primal man who had fought for her and won her. And Tarzan took his woman in his arms and smothered her upturned, panting lips with kisses.' More next week.