Nature 6
Presented on: Saturday, February 11, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Nature Six, which means that we're midway in our phase, our first phase of our learning. And so it is appropriate to just review what a phase is and how it works. Energy always is a frequency and it will always have crests and troughs and that energy frequency when it is continuous, is a dynamic. The Greek word 'dynamis' meant just that. It's ongoing and it registers exactly because of the peaks and troughs, in such a way that you can tune to that energy like a tuning fork. Not that it has a bifurcation, but that it has a pairedness that ongoes. So we take our cue from that and it's a cue that's as deep as the alternation of day and night, of breathing in and breathing out, of being bipedal (of walking with two feet). All of this is an extraordinary way to create what the philosopher Henri Bergson called, 'Duree.' It's a duration. It is a dynamic that has a pair of possibilities: it can continue, or it can cinch into form. And when a dynamis becomes cinched into form it is now an 'energeia.' So that form is always an energy that has brought a temporary polarity into the thusness of the form. And so a form has a particular pair of possibilities. One is the presencing of the form, the other is the duree of the dynamic. And we find in the earliest traces of art, in Palaeolithic art, we find this pair operating right away 40,000 years ago. This is a monograph on one of the great French cave temples. It's en français, 1929, the Abbe Lemozi of Pech Merle. In it we find red dots and a human hand in silhouette in the red. We also find in the same cave, we find tracings by fingers in the wet clay of the time and you can see that the forms are in resonances, not outlines and that even when there is an outline of a form, like on the right of a bison, it is in an energy dynamis wave that is not yet fully cinched into the form and yet already suggests the form. The hands occur in two distinct moieties: one is the hand which is silhouetted by the colour and because of the fineness of the colour of the original emulsion, it is most certainly because it has been mulched in the mouth and blown onto the hand to leave the silhouette impress and almost always it's the left hand. So that Palaeolithic left hand symbols are because one has exhaled one's breath. The right hand is dabbed in the colour and put directly so that you get a colour handprint on the rock. This is the way in which you bring the form into being. This is the way in which you, exhaling, return back to the energy, to its dynamic. Those two together, matching, when they are together, when they're sealed, they create together in that pair, a presence. A presence which now can be given as points, the red dots. Our presence points. And the collection of them is like an exclamation mark in Palaeolithic form. This happens not just once, but continues to happen. It's a way of expressing the iteration of energy forms in reality.
At Pech Merle one finds for the first time, when it was discovered in September of 1920, this overwhelming sense of complete mysteriousness. When the first Palaeolithic cave paintings were found in Spain, Altamira, 1860, almost no attention was paid to it. About 19 years later, in 1879, this Spanish man with his daughter were in the cave of Altamira with some torches and this little girl looked up instead of looking down at the interesting things in the cave and she's the first one to see the great bulls of Altamira. Like the ceiling of the Paris opera, like the Sistine Chapel. And there were these great bulls collected together in colour and no one would believe that they had not been placed there recently and so no attention was paid to them for another generation. Finally, towards the end of the 1890's there was a great argument and a Professor Cartailhac, who was one of the world's great experts on primitive art, had come out completely against all of these things and a young new abbe named Henri Breuil, with a couple of other friends of his - not in Spain, but nearby in France - found a couple of other caves that also had art. Only in these caves, the art was covered partially by deposits that are geologic in age. And finally in 1906, in a great Mea Culpa dans Sceptic, Professor Cartailhac changed his mind and he said, 'They are older than any of us can possibly know or imagine.'
And it was very soon after that, that more and more caves were found and the finding of Pech Merle in 1920, late 1920, was extraordinary because there for the really first time...and it was the Abbe Lemozi who really...he was like a peasant who had become the parish priest because of love for the people of the area. And the time, it was right after the First World War and he wanted to just ride his bicycle and comfort people and in the meantime he'd become a self-taught Palaeolithic art expert and somewhat of an amateur archaeologist. And within a couple of years of finding this, when it was still only known to a handful of people like the abbes and a few locals, Mary Leakey's father, who was a painter, Erskine Nicol, who had painted all over the world, had decided that they were going to take a vacation in the south west of France and they were in the little village that is right next to the cave temple of Pech Merle. And though Erskine Nicol was kind of a large man and he couldn't fit in the torturous narrow passages, Mary Leakey, aged 12 and her mother crawled into this mysterious place and the mother cut her head and she started bleeding, but said, 'We have to go on.' The mother was a...before she met and married Erskine Nicol, her maiden name was Frere and the Freres in England are very famous for their courage through centuries. And especially they were instrumental for instance in helping stop the slave trade. So that their wealth was out to great use and there were Frere towns in Africa and Kenya and in South Africa, in Australia, places where ex-slaves could and go be rehabilitated back into society and life. So her ancestry was one of great courage and as they went in and the Abbe Lemozi struck up the little torches that he had learned you can't have the big torches because it will smoke, it will smudge, it will consume the air. So you have the little ancient ways of having light. And these little cups that are filled with oil can be lit in such a way that they make a little light that can be used in the caves and they knew that this would work, because the Palaeolithic artists 40,000 years ago used oil lamps in exactly this way and they've been found by the thousands in the caves. When Mary Leakey looked and saw the great murals in Pech Merle...on one wall in-between some rock outcroppings, is the great frieze of the mammoths - enormous. And in the great frieze of the mammoths, maybe 20 or 30 mammoths placed in such a way that they really opened up the mystery of Pech Merle, you found a curious kind of a quality. There was in the midst of all the mammoths, a cluster of red presence points that started to smear and blur downwards, right in the centre of the composition. And one learned finally that this was the cue that the presencing of it was beginning to move in a turn and that the mammoths were not just there in a herd, but it was a herd that was beginning to turn right at the focus, at the centre and that the herd was not turning as if to feed, but as if to flee, because it was a sign that the hunters had zeroed in on them. And they zeroed in not just with their weapons, but because their weapons carried the magic of the art that had already been put down in the cave temple. And the animals had no way not to become food, not only food for them to survive, to live in life, but to presence the supernatural power of man in art to be with his spirit. And so one was not only fed in life, one was nourished in spirit also and both grew strong together. And that as the presence of the animals in the art was returned back to the energy of life, because man had mysteriously now aligned himself in exchange with them, he was returned also back to the dynamis of nature, naturally, but carried with it was his spirit. And so it was like the finding of the way in which, well, nature has a dynamis, it also has a deeper registry as a dynamis, as a mysterious dynamis. And it has a third, deeper registry as a magical dynamis. The mysterious dynamic allows our experience to flow unhindered with the natural flow. So that when nature makes energy forms, it includes our experienced dynamis with those very forms. And that those animals are not just born in nature, they're born out of mysterious nature and they carry a part of our dynamic with them in their very form. And that on the third level, when art has emerged as a magical form out of the visionary supernatural, the forms that now are made, are not only natural forms and mysterious forms, but they are transform capable. And now for the first time you have the ability for man to participate actually in the creation of reality.
This was 40,000 years ago and a 12 year old Mary Leakey could hardly believe that she not only saw this, but like her father who was a professional artist, she had learned to draw, so that she could draw these forms. And some of the forms that she would draw would get her into a magical life and towards the end of that life, her Africa's Vanishing Art, the Palaeolithic drawings of Africa are all by Mary Leakey. That she had become extraordinarily proficient. One of the odd things is that she was terrible as a student in school. They tried to put her in schools only occasionally and as long as her father was alive, they would just travel around the world and she would be put for a few places, maybe for a month or so some place. But oddly enough, as things will happen, within a year of being taken to that mysterious Pech Merle cave grotto, her father suddenly died of cancer - she was only 13 - and brought to an end that whole quality of life. And she had to return with her mother back to England, back to Kensington, back to the places where the mother's mother and the three sisters who were unmarried, lived together on 17 Lincoln. And there Mary Leakey was tried to be put into several convent schools, which increasingly she sabotaged. She could not stand the artificiality of the situation of the students, of the nuns, of herself trying to squeeze into it. And finally in the second convent school she learnt enough chemistry to blow up her experiment and cause consternation and she was thrown out by the mother superior. Never again to be forced to go to any kind of schools, nor to be a good little Catholic girl, when she has experienced something that penetrated beyond all of the artificial confirmations that are demanded by life as a game in a world that is seen as a pie that can be cut up and had. That nature cannot be cut up and had. It has us, we can participate with it and become mysterious together and we can transform that mysteriousness into a conscious transform of great magical art, but we cannot have it. As the great Bhagavad Gita points out, 'You can have what you like, but you can't want what you like.' You can participate in such a way that it occurs, but you cannot get it, you cannot hold it, you cannot manipulate it. That the only thing that happens is that you distort yourself into wanting to have, to hold, to get, to protect from others getting it. And Mary Leakey, by the time she was 15, the mother realised that there were only two avenues for her, to be married to a nice man who would take care of things - preferably rich - or that she had to do some other thing in life. And she could draw; why wouldn't she start to use her talent? And she was taken on a very interesting little expedition down to the Wiltshire Plain and for the first time saw Stonehenge. And when she saw Stonehenge she said it was like the Palaeolithic cave paintings. Something emerged out of the greenish blue, yellowish flower, Wiltshire rolling plain. There was Stonehenge, not just as it was, but that surrounding it was this resonance of ancient burial mounds. And she says in her book Disclosing the Past, 'It was as if all of these mounds turned their backs on the world and faced this great transforming temple, that was taken not as a cave in the rock, but that the rocks were raised above the earth.' Because this was not the mysteriousness of the magic down there coming up to the earth. This was the transform of that mysteriousness to the high magic of taking the earth as the beginning and pointing to the stars. The stones and the stars are an alchemy, whereas the caves and the paintings are a chemistry. And underlying all is the flow of nature, of the unending dynamic of change, of time, of space, of relationalities, of all the great invisible. She was taken after Stonehenge for the short drive up to another complementarity to Stonehenge, Avebury. And Avebury is another great circle, but it is the feminine Palaeolithic, Neolithic, become now the ancient stone culture of about 5,000 years ago. Stonehenge begins about the time the great pyramids are built, it's that old. Avebury was the feminine form to the masculine Stonehenge. And at Avebury, instead of having the great stones raised up, there was the declivities that were arranged in such a way that they accepted entrance. And there of course at the centre of the mystery of Avebury, is Silbury Hill. And Silbury Hill is a mound within a dugout circularity that has a little bank ridge and no one ever understood it until about 35 years ago. A young British visionary archaeologist, palaeontologist, named Michael Dames, was caught in a thunderstorm and he refused to leave the top of Silbury Hill. And in the deluge, slowly the water washed down the hill and collected around the base in a circular pool whose centre was the hill. And when the rain stopped and the sky cleared and became blue, he saw that the sky was reflected in the surface of the water and that Silbury Hill floated in the reflection of the sky and that he was standing on a breast of mother earth in the middle of the sky. And he understood that now that Avebury was the great feminine of the way in which forms come out of the dynamic mysteriousness of nature. And that this was a complement to Stonehenge.
Nearby, Windmill Hill was having some excavations and it was financed by the marmalade king - K-e-i-l-l-e-r - Keiller Marmalade from Scotland and he used his money to have these little archaeologic expeditions. But one of the young women, Dorothy Liddell, took a hand in the career of the young Mary Leakey and asked her if she wouldn't make a few drawings for one of her monographs, which she did. And then another woman, Gertrude Caton Thompson, saw these drawings published in this monograph and she said that she had just returned from Egypt and she was doing a monograph, would Mary do the drawings for that? And she did and Gertrude Caton Thompson, by the time Mary Leakey was writing Disclosing the Past - the woman was 95 years old - she decided to take a hand and she introduced the monograph to a man who was writing a monograph. His name was Louis Leakey. And the monograph he was writing - this is a first edition, this is the paper reprint - Adam's Ancestors by Louis Leakey. Gertrude Caton Thompson, because she was so famous, she got an invite to a special conference on ancient anthropology, Palaeographic researches and at this conference she got a seat of Mary Douglas Frere next to Louis Leakey. And got him interested enough for her to do drawings of Adam's Ancestors and she was taken aside by an older archaeologist who said, 'You have to watch out for Louis Leakey, he's a womaniser.' That genius-like this is close to madness, that he cannot be confined and though he's married and has a child and has another child on the way, he has several girlfriends and yet there was something that was happening in the dynamic between the two of them, that was extraordinarily mysterious. And some while later, age of 20, she went independently to a conference. At the end of archaeological seasons in England, there used to be all of these confabs and conferences and this one was being held in Leicester, England. And she went there and there was Louis Leakey and they were increasingly experiencing the presence points of moments that they were sharing together and that they were contouring their dynamic of their lives and their interests and the way in which they were looking deeper and deeper into nature to find what are the earliest energy forms having to do with us. That if one can go back all of a sudden it was realised, 50,000 years for art, how long then has man been around? Because obviously there must be a great distance between other primates like apes and the first human beings. How great was that distance? And then if one could go back 50,000 years and find kinship almost exactly like we are, how far back do you have to go to find the transition in form from the primates of apes, to the primates of our kind? Where is the missing link? How far back is that? And the two of them together began to experience a deep mysteriousness that they not only belonged together in a form - marriage - but they belonged together in the contours of the mysterious process that they could share together and that by sharing together, that they would get a natural tuning energy.
Finally Louis confided in Mary and she says in her book, "In one embarrassing moment, he said, 'We must always now live together. I'm going to divorce Frida and I want to marry you. And in order for us to proof this, I want to bring you with me back to Africa for a little expedition, so that you can see me in my natural way. Because I am not a Cambridge professor as you see me. You only see the Cambridge professor. The lecturer who can go to Oxford and London and is becoming extremely well-known in the world as an expert, I am not that man. Because I was born and I grew up in Kenya and my playmates were the Kikuyus, the Kikuyu boys. I grew up speaking Kikuyu, I dream in Kikuyu. And when I was first married, they made me an elder of the tribe, so that I am literally a white African, I am a primeval man.'" And one of the qualities of that primeval Louis Leakey was that he was like a curious intellectual replay of a primal man who had come out exactly at the time that Mary Leakey went into the cave at Pech Merle in 1912. Because it was in 1912 that was first published in a magazine the story of Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And it was this story of Tarzan of the Apes in 1912 that set the tone that there is a deep mysteriousness on the planet at that time. That even though there is an impending crisis, that eventually became the First World War, in 1912 was a peak of the psychic energy on the planet to an extent that almost no one had ever seen before. The last time that there was psychic energy of that level was 2,000 years before at the formation of the Roman Empire by Augustus Caesar. When he tried to bring all the power of everything together in one place in Rome and have it all there, so that in this one place would be the pivot of everything that was formally real in the world. All roads lead to Rome and it leads exactly to this post in the Foro Romano - the Roman Forum - which is mile post zero for all the roads in the world. They're all measured from that point and above that point on the Capitoline was the royal imperial palace grounds of Augustus Caesar, the first Caesar to really make it stick, more so than his uncle Julius Caesar.
We saw last week that reading Tarzan books was the key to Jane Goodall's awakening that Africa was her mysterious reality, that she must get to Africa. And we read the little quotation in this cartoon version of the magazine story of the book Tarzan of the Apes, Tarzan of the Apes picturised. And we closed last week's presentation with the fact that Tarzan, who had grown up with apes, but in a mysterious way had learned to read and write because of books left by his father, but had never learned to speak any language other than with the apes or the animals, had for the first time found a human woman, Jane Porter. And he fell in love with her and didn't know what to do, other than that the primality of the experience came. And Jane, '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 primeval 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.' It sold tens of millions of copies. 'Suddenly her face suffused' - this is new this week - 'Suddenly her face suffused with scarlet blushes. She thrust Tarzan of the Apes from her, buried her face in her hands. He came close again and took hold of her. She turned like a tigress, striking his great breast with her tiny hands. Tarzan could not understand it.' Coming back to the primeval once it has become mysterious, the primeval quality of nature as a process becomes instead of just primeval, it becomes primordial, in that now its ability to flow has a double flow in it all the time. There's a deeper mysterious flow and that this deeper mysterious flow seeks, because of its mysteriousness, to become mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Or as Alice in Wonderland learned, 'Curiouser and curiouser.' The mysterious tends to become more and more mysterious and nature accepts the deepening of the mysterious and doesn't diminish itself but seems to nourish that, so that the dynamic now has a doubling quality to it. And because nature has a doubling quality to it, not only can one relate to the forms, one can relate to the reflections of the forms as well. And the reflections of the forms have as much reality as the forms. So that while the forms are there in natural, physical reality, the forms now have a reflective reality and this is how the mind is created in the first place. And that the reflective images in the mind are just as real, but they're mysteriously real as the things in nature and without knowing the energy differentials, one will never know that they're not identical. They don't form an identity. Things in the world are not referents of the things in the mind; they are the seeds out of which the things in the mind grow, are nourished by. And so instead of there being an identity, there is a growth of actuality. Let's take a break and come back.
Let's come back and look at something that is very powerful. It's as strong as anything has ever been made on this planet. The process of nature is the fundamental dynamic of reality and it takes the mysterious flow of experience with it and they can flow together. The magical, visionary consciousness is not an integral flow, but is differential and so it weaves. It weaves with nature and it weaves with experience. And as it weaves, it transforms. The energies that come out of nature make natural forms which have an action, ritual cinching in their formation. The mental symbol forms come out of the mysterious natural flow and have reflective, integral capacities. Ideas are real. Art forms come out of the visionary conscious differential flow, so that one does indeed have a parfait of three kinds of nature. Nature, mysterious nature, magical nature, but there's a fourth kind and that is historical. The historical consciousness is also a fourth state of deepening but that fourth state of deepening is again, not an integral, nor a deepening of the integral, it is a deepening of the differential. So this learning is made on the basis of a full, four dynamic flow process. Watch what happens. We set the first energy tone by using pairs of books in lunar cycles. Each three lunar cycles, kept by a 13th week interval is a phase, is a season and four of these will make a year and two years will make the education. The pairs of books that we use set the energy wave, but if we add to it, the year long readings, like Ovid's Metamorhphoses, like Melville's Moby Dick, like Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, like Homer's Odyssey, we get what is known as a reference wave, but it doesn't change by the moon, it changes by the sun, by the whole annual. So it is a reference wave for the entire four waves of a year. Now, by adding a reference wave to an energy, one now creates a vector different. A vector is a dynamic in historical consciousness and instead of just having nature, one is looking at natural history and the vector will be a differential prism form equal to the quality of the integral of the mind and will be just as real. But watch this: not only do we add a year long reading to the pairs of books that change every month throughout the year, adding a reference wave to the dynamic and creating a vector, but we add a second quality, a second vector because we have the course presentation notes. And if you assiduously use the course presentation notes, you will use the presentation notes from the previous phase, but you didn't have those notes in that phase, you have them later in the next phase, so that they are a retrospective, not a reflective, but a retrospective. So involves a conscious remembering that is now historical. And by adding this Science presentation notes...and you can review them all at once, or you can portion them out and each time there's a presentation in Nature, review the matching Science notes for that lecture. Nature Six, review Science Six's notes along with it. Now you have a second vector and when you have two vectors, you have the possibility of a mathematical form called the tensor. Once you have a mathematic capable of a tensor, you can develop the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. You can get really far-flung, accurate, to any degree of specificity that you want. But to enrich this, to give it a great deal of substance, we have for each phase also a work of music. For Nature it's Hovhaness' musical piece on the songs of the humpback whale, 'And God Created Great Whales'. And you can augment - there are two different recordings of this - you can augment it by actual songs of the humpback whales recorded on various media and deepen the musical experience for each phase. And that each phase also has a musical selection for the interval. In Nature it is Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring,' 'Le sacre du printemps.' So now that you have a pair of musical keys, musical compositions, that have not only a natural occurrence, they have an experience occurrence, they have a visionary occurrence and they have an artistically historical occurrence, all at the same time. So that the music selections add something that goes through not just the full cycle of the phase, not through just the full cycle of the year, but the full cycle of the complete education that paired ears. But we're not stopping there. We're nourishing each phase by four films, the films for Nature in 2006, John Cocteau's 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Forbidden Planet,' 'Iceman,' made by the great Australian director Fred Schepisi and 'Quatermass and the Pit.' All of these are about the deepening primordiality of our kind in nature. 'Iceman' is about a man 40,000 years ago preserved in ice and brought back to life. 'Quatermass and the Pit' is about 5,000,000 years ago, of Martians experimenting with primordial primate human types. 'Forbidden Planet' goes back over 2,000,000 years in another star system, on another planet, but they're still able to brought back into play by living human beings whose psyche can still magically intertwine. 'Beauty and the Beast' is about a timeless, eternal, magical quality to our lives. Who knows how many billions of years of historical consciousness exist in reality? There are stars more than 13,000,000,000 years old who could have had species like ourselves, 10,000,000,000 years before we were even formed as a star system. So we're looking at something that has a profound depth. The films for each phase mount up and they accumulate and they become at the end of the two years, the eight phases, you will have a series of 32 films that are brought together in an increasing quality of nourishing what the books are delivering, what the music is helping with, what the year long readings are doing and what the presentation notes are doing. And all the time, there's another quality that is working in here and that is the audio cassettes. Each presentation will have its own...each of these pairs of text will have four, four, four, one, so that will you eventually have in a year, 52 audio tapes, one for each week. And in the two years, 104 audio tapes. The audio is meant to tune the ear. If you have ears to hear, you can hear something that you couldn't hear by looking first to see. There are many studies of children raised on radio in the 1930's and early 1940's, who had special creative imaginations. Children raised in the '50's and '60's on television got dulled down. And in the '80's and '90's, on even more complex visualities, the creativity keeps going down. Why? Because forms made out of forms deaden. Forms have to come out of a process to have their energy of vitality. If you try to have a form come out of a form, it's like the mind dictating what form that's going to be. That form out of form is known as causality. It doesn't have any resonance other than force; this did that and so this does that. Causality is a deception. Not only is causality a deception in terms of force, it is a deception in terms of space as well as time. The entanglement in reality is that resonant electrons, for instance, are resonant no matter what the distances between them. They can be 30 microns, they can be 30 feet, they can be 30,000,000 light years, they can be 10,000,000,000 light years. If they are resonant, they will vibrate together in that particular way that an energy form has with its resonance. So that once a harmonic is achieved, on level of cosmos, it is eternal. It is always recoverable. A personal spirit form, once cinched with the cosmos, never dies, never can be deceived, is always there. So one can say that this is a traditional ancient wisdom spiritual yoga, brought into the 21st century on a completely different level of learning.
Let's come back to today's presentation, to Mary Leakey and to Jane Goodall. When Mary Leakey found that with Louis all of the qualities that had been developing in her experience, all of the ritual actions which she had become slowly, fairly good at and was to become one of the world's greatest at and her sense of immersion into nature, especially with the sensitivity of a woman who grew up with animals, especially dogs. So that when one reads the dedication of Discovering the Past, it is dedicated - beautifully - to her Dalmatians. 'To the Dalmatians past and present who have so greatly enriched my life with their companionship, intelligence and loyalty.' She owned Dalmatians for close to 67 years of her life; they were her constant companions. They were to her what the chimpanzees of Jane Goodall were to her. They were a tuning of her to, not just nature, but to the mysterious interplay where nature included her. We showed last week Jane Goodall's first chimpanzee was a doll given to her by her father when she was one year old. And in Mary Leakey's book, there's a famous photo that she includes, with her first little doll, [56:55 Pimpy], it's a teddy bear, who she says was, more than just a companion, was someone with whom she matured into who she was. So that we have this quality of not just nature and then mysterious nature, not just existential forms and then the reflections of ideas symbolically, of symbol forms, but higher in the transform of the second order in the distillation, we have the art forms and in the triple distillation we have the cosmos itself, which is a form of forms, of all forms. Because it comes out of all those processes together and includes all the forms together. Africa, by 1890's, was characteristically called 'The dark continent.' It was the last least known major landmass and so one found from the 1890's until the First World War, in that generation, Africa was a mystical, magical, primeval place. And for instance, when one of Europe's greatest intellectual geniuses...he was one of the greatest doctors of that era, he was one of the greatest musicians of that era, he was one of the greatest philosophers of civilisation of that era. His name was Albert Schweitzer. And he put all of his talent and energy and researches together to try to find out who was Jesus and in 1910 he published a classic book, Quest for the Historical Jesus. And he found there that Jesus was not findable because man had grown so abstracted away from the primordiality of reality, of nature, that it was not possible for him to find. And so he quit Europe, he quit the hospitals there, his great books on Bach were still read and published as the great monograph on the greatest musician, he forewent any public performances ever again and he moved to Africa. And at Lambarene he established a hospital for the Africans and put a sign up, 'Respect for all life observed here. Do not kill anything.' And he wrote a book about it called On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. That he'd gone on a Thoreau-type vision quest. His Walden was the Lambarene Hospital on the edge of the Congo, which is where Tarzan grew up. And Tarzan of the Apes was published just about the time that Schweitzer got to the primeval forest, just about the time that Mary Leakey first went with her mother down into the Pech Merle caves, just about the time that at the pinnacle of occult Edwardian London, Henry James was writing The Golden Bowl and Daisy Miller and some of the most mystical novels that any European writer has ever written about paranormal experiences. And the great Psychic Research Society of London was suffering the loss of its president, William James and having to have a new president. And all of a sudden you had the confluence of a psychic threshold passing through the world having to do something with man trying to get back to primordiality and that Africa had a great deal to do with this. It had everything to do with this. That somehow if we were to find, not just 50,000 years ago, not just 100,000 years ago, but millions of years ago, we must go to Africa to find it. And we must be able to go there not with the mind that we're carrying, but with a different mind, an open mind and the only way to do that is to return our experience back to openness. And the only way to do that is to immerse ourselves into nature without any kind of presuppositions, without any kind of inculcations and simply let ourselves mature back through the primordiality of nature into whoever it is we are then existentially and let that figure generate the configurations resonantly of our experience and out of that experience will emerge the new mind. The mind which will be clear and scintillating and capable of being looked through to see the supernatural processes and their emergent forms beyond. And so you have at this time the development of an enormous range of things.
When Jane Goodall first went to Africa, she went as a beautiful young woman who was much in demand. She was here described, 1957, when she arrived in Kenya colony, "Jane was socially active. She flirted regularly, was courted frequently, pestered often, proposed to at least once and fell in love, or into a serious relationship once. She also met her life's mentor Louis S.B. Leakey. And without fully noticing it herself, moved from one social circle to a second. Her first two or three months were spent within the privileged orbit of the white Highland set, Nairobi. The currency of this group was horses, the breeding, racing and riding of them and Jane quickly shone as a superb horsewoman. Soon after meeting Louis Leakey though, her attention shifted. She found some excellent and loyal friends among the museum staff there in Nairobi. And then Leakey said to her, 'If you're really interested in animals and you really have this deep affinity with them, we have been here living for more than 30 years in Olduvai Gorge with only the animals that we are sharing the landscape with and looking for the origins of ourselves beyond our species, beyond Homo sapiens. Beyond the clad of Homo.'" By that time it was apparent there were going to be several kinds of Homo and beyond that clad, was a clad of Australopithecus, different stages going back who knew how far? But it was in the millions of years. But what was not known was how those millions of years of precursors of us and ourselves came out of the great apes, because no one knew really what they were like. There needed to be someone who could go and live with a primate group, like the chimpanzees at Gombe River and stay there for as many years or decades as it took to become a white chimpanzee and to understand them thoroughly. And Jane Goodall stopped going to the horse races and the white Highland set and she took herself, with just a few camp things, like a little cabin that was built for her, extremely reminiscent of Tarzan's cabin that his father and his mother had built before they two died and the little baby was left alone to be reared by the apes. And that Tarzan was the first human being ever to be primordial in the sense that he was an ape more than a man, before he became a man. So Jane Goodall went to experience what it was like to be a chimpanzee before she would become a woman again. And so she dissolved herself into the chimpanzee life and it took an enormously long, patient duration. It was many years before there was any sense of movement. It was decades before there was any really deeper, mysterious kind of contact and the first time it happened, an old chimpanzee that she named David Greybeard, reached out to touch her because David Greybeard realised he was with one of his own kind who didn't look like him. And this is exactly the way that Tarzan found himself vis-à-vis the first time he met a human being. That he could not understand why that being was so ugly it didn't have any hair, it had this ridiculously pinched nose instead of the beautiful wide nostrils, was not very strong and didn't know how to be in the jungle and live there and didn't know how to talk and didn't know even what fruits were ripe. She - as we will see next week - immersed herself and became Jane Goodall of the chimpanzees. And as she did so, at the very same time, Mary Leakey's researches deepened and deepened because she found, just the next year after Jane Goodall finally went to Gombe Stream Reserve, she found the first real, strong evidence that man was millions of years old. And when the evidence was presented to the National Geographic magazine, they began to sponsor the Leakeys and instead of them just having tins of beans, now they had a camp with helpers and good food and plenty of equipment and a forum by which they could reach out and touch the world. And from then on, it was as if the different drummer in the mysterious nature made a whole new kind of transform of conditions. And discovery mounted upon discovery and almost every year it quickened its pace and extended itself and we'll see next week that Mary Leakey, more than anyone else, was able to pass this on, not like Louis Leakey to other women, like Jane Goodall, or some of the others that were sent out to study the other great apes, but that Mary Leakey could pass it on to her sons, especially her son Richard, who got from her what she got from her grandmother. In Scotland and in Ireland it's always been called second sight; you know what you're seeing before your mind knows what it is. And one day he didn't like palaeontology, he didn't like anthropology, he didn't like any of these things. But he could fly his own airplane and he was flying over Lake Turkana - used to be called Lake Rudolph in colonial days - and he looked down on the sandy shoreline of the east coast of Lake Turkana and he spied a stretch of beach promontory out into the lake and he knew that that was a site. He came back after some while, investigated and it was from that site that the whole blossoming of the finding of man for millions of years took on its energy and its form. And one of the most complete skeletons ever found was found by Richard Leakey and his friend Roger Lewin. A complete skeleton of a young man who was about 17. He was almost six feet tall, he was obviously a superior hunter like Tarzan and he was 1.8,000,000 years old. We'll come back next week for some more. Thank you.