Nature 7
Presented on: Saturday, February 18, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to Nature 7 and understand how utterly radical what we are doing is.
Our minds are inculcated to the point of being almost engraved by an addiction which cannot be broken by the mind. It must have a pair of activities that occur at the same time. This pair of activities is familiar to every single mystical tradition on the planet. One of the pair is that you must transcend the mind. The other part of the pair is that you must become more eminent than the mind, which means that that pair must occur together, which means that he expansion, the only way that it can be both transcendent and eminent, more transcendent than the mind or more eminent than the mind at the same time, is that that pair constitute a complete resonance of the mind, and the deep way of saying this in Asian wisdom is that the mind is like a bell, which you must ring.
And if you will ring a mind that is coherent, every resonance of that mind, which is a coherent bell, will be a bell-shaped resonance. In physics this is known as the Principle of [A Soliton 2:14]. The sun has light coming from it, not just in little rays of light, but that light as an energy wells up from the core of the son and percolates for about a million years before it reaches the surface of the sun by convection currents that are covering the entire sphere of the sun, and that those convection currents have a sound shape to them, so that the light from our star, or any star, comes out like solitons from a spherical bell. So that light always will have the characteristic of not only being a particle and a wave, but that the particles and the waves together will always be a solitons that keeps its complementarity at all times, so that if you have an instrumentation that can detect this, you can temporarily fractionate and separate the photon from the light wave and examine light as a wave or light as a particle. But the reality is that both of those characteristics occur together and while the particle is actual and while the wave is prismatic, the combination together is what we would call real.
It is a difficult thing to realise that learning now must come not only from an integrated mind, but to an integral mind that can resonate like a soliton, so that the reality of consciousness will keep together what is polarised in the integral. Keep it together but allow it to have its differential expression. This is an ancient technique of human wisdom. One of the earliest registries of it one can find in Louis B Leakey's White African, his autobiography, his earliest instalment on his autobiography; and he talks about, on page 165:
As a child, I learnt to play the Kikuyu form of the game which they call the name of Giuthi, and I learnt variations played by some other tribes. Several of the other anthropology students used to play them occasionally with me. This African game, which is variously spoken of in literature dealing with Africa as African Drafts, as African Chess, or simply as Holes in the Ground, is often regarded as being introduced to Africa from Arabia, where certain variations occur. I do not, however, think this explanation is correct, for I have found evidence which suggests that it was played in Africa towards the end of the Stone Age.
We'll go more into this game next week. But at the end of the Stone Age, a certain resonant quality of our species came into play, in such a way that it was no longer just an integral, but it became a differential, soliton like vibration, and the resonance of the completed mind in its integral became the spiritual individual, who fans out from that integral into infinity, is no longer bounded by form, no longer bounded by limit, but is expressible in unlimited, is expressible in forms which are at the same time transcendent to the mind and more eminent than the mind. Two things occur in this. The eminence is experienced physically in the body as a deep awareness; the transcendence is experienced in the mind as a great spirit wind. The Hebrew for it was ruch. The Navajos have a word for it, the Chinese, every people have a word for this spirit wind. This is why in fundamental yogas the breath cycle was always taken - that you breath in and if your awareness of your body, of breathing in, is a resonance of your coherentness, your psychophysical integral, the breathing in will not only be a poignant awareness in the body, but the breathing out will be a transcendent poignancy in your spirit. But in between breathing in and breathing out there is a slight micro-second pause and this pause is not a pause that is static, but it is a pivot, it is a turning. The Greek word in Pythagorean, Plato Ancient Greek for that turning was always metanoia. It is a turning of the entire mind so that instead of just being able to look in to a focus which is eminent and highly aware in the body, in the psychophysical body, that the metanoia allows you to turn almost instantaneously and look out. And when you look out you carry with you a paradox, because the eyes usually focus on the exterior world to look out, and when you carry that in the integral to look in, you will look in with the same kind of a focus to the unity, not of what you see but deeper than that, you will look upon the unity of the seer, someone who sees. And this is how the individual identity is mistaken by a carry-over of an exterior process into the interior focus. But the paradox is that the interior focus is not a focus on oneness, because the eminence of that awareness is always paired with the transcendence of the spirit, and so when you and your prana breath in and have the pivot and then breath out, that particular action looks back out with what was the actual, the actual interior looking was not a focus but was an all-ness, it was an everything-ness that was not in form. It was in a process, which was unending. And so when you look back out, you look back out to see the unending vibrational infinity, and only by habit do we correct ourselves by the brain immediately to look out to focus the two eyes, to be able to see.
This is a very deep mystery. Our learning is the first learning to be able to take this on a world-class planetary scale and take it into the future, because there is another pivot, there is another metanoia that happens, and that is in the infinity. Just as there is a turning within, after you've breathed in just so far and now you're breathing out, after you have breathed out just so far there's another turning and you start breathing in, so that when you look at it in a really in-depth way, there is a four-stage process to the piston-cylinder breathing cycle. The two modes of breathing in and breathing out are actually processes. The two pivots are actually the [13:25] of the seeds of form. So that form will always generate itself around a kind of pivotal emergence from a pair of processes into a pair of stabilities, and without going too much into it at this particular point, this is how matter is made. The atom, if it were the size of a football field, the nucleus of the atom would be a pea on the 50-yard line and the electron of hydrogen 1 would be at the goal post. All the rest of the atom is an open space. That open space carries a process which supports the form to emerge from it, and so what we are doing in our learning is we're beginning, like threading the needle, to get the thread of how form will emerge vibrantly from process, but that the process of nature has several depths to it, several energy layers. Just like the electron will have a higher energy registry as a muon and will have a third very high-energy registry as a tau particle, and that that holds for the mirror opposite of the electron, the positron also has two higher energy states and each of those, 3 and 3, have also a neutrino which accompanies paired to each of the three states of the electron of the positron, and so you have a set of 12. That is the true harmonic of what an electron is, and the electron as the carrier of the electromagnetic energy, must have its support in form from the polarity with the nucleus which carries the magnetism. NMRI, nuclear magnetic resonance imagining. If you go to an advanced hospital you can get this today.
The magnetic and the electric together always cooperate together, and they cooperate together especially in the interface with light. The electron and the photon, because of their interface, produce the whole way to carry electromagnetic energy and forms into the interplay with phenomena like light, which in and of themselves would be unapproachable if it were not for this ensemble in depth relationality. The mind, in all of its history, in all of its mystic genius, always knew that there is something beyond, but could never have a language to express it until recently, and the language to express it was the object of a concerted effort around the planet, and a concerted effort to find a universal language for about 500 years. And that concerted effort amounted, eventually, to finding that there is a very high mathematics that is a universal language, and that the first examples of it were from a pair of individuals, Newton and Leibnitz. It's called calculus. That in between a zero and a one is an infinitesimal infinity of states that one can compute, one can calculate and find at this particular moment which of those states is actually obtaining. And so one can have accuracy to any degree of specificity that you would like, not only of an integral calculus, but of a differential calculus. That was 300 years ago.
This is the first learning that takes that about three orders beyond what Newton and Leibnitz developed. The reason why it was able to be taken three orders beyond is that there were two orders of transform in the 300 years in between and the last transform was done in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s with the development of Einstein's relativity and with the development of quantum mechanics. In particular one can come to something like the great mathematical genius John Bell, J S Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. A collection of his extraordinary articles and essays over an incredibly creative lifetime and the most poignant in this appeared in 1976, and it's called Article 11, The Measurement Theory of Everett and de Broglie's Pilot Wave. Louis de Broglie was a count and one of the great maths geniuses, and one has to understand very deeply that a pilot wave is a controversial quality. In 1976 there was hardly anyone who could offer anything clear about it. In fact Bell ends by saying, 'Does this final synthesis, omitting de Broglie's trajectories and Everett's other branches, make a satisfactory formulation of fundamental physical theory, or would some variation of it based on a relativistic field theory... is it logically coherent and does not need to supplement mathematical equations with vague recipes? But I do not like it. Emotionally I would like to take more seriously the past of the world and of myself, because it involves the use of conscious memory in the transform of integral structure that always involves differentialling out into infinities.'
The technique developed at the time was called renormalisation, that you find a way to ignore the infinities by a conversion process that the mind is satisfied by because it likes to play games, and a level of games two such conversions together will make everything right. If the first conversion takes it into a form that now the mind can deal with, in its normal way, then you can re-normalise it and return it back to its original and the mind understanding will be such that you can at least estimate the statistical mechanics of the process and the probability of the form.
Bell says:
More professionally I am uneasy about the possibility of incorporating relativity in a profound way. No doubt it would be possible to ensure memory of a null result for the Michelson-Morley experiment of the speed of light, but could the basic reality be other than the state of the world, or at least a memory extended in space at a single time defining a preferred Lorentz frame? To try to elaborate on this would only be to try to share my confusion.
The greatest mathematical and physics geniuses in the world were unable to resolve this, though a man named Everett, Mitchell H Everett, in 1957, came almost as close as one could come, and it was termed at the time Science Fiction. It all involves reality. If the mind needs to step outside of itself in order to understand itself, you get into an infinite regression, logically, because all of the logical rules that operate in this integral cannot self-define. They must have a definition by an auxiliary set that is outside that set, and they in turn will have to have an auxiliary set outside of that, and you get into a game of parentheses. We used to call it that in the San Francisco Sixties. Whatever it is that you have, someone can come along and put a parenthesis and say, 'Well that's within this.' But that technique is infinite. It's boundless. You can continue to do that. What happens is that the mind carries its own limitation into the addiction of that game, because the game is a game of parentheses like the African game that Lewis Leakey was talking about, that there are so many variations. Every tribe in Africa has their own variation of [25:30 Gee Uthly], and this quality of the variation shows by the evolution of variation that this game has been played obviously so long that the variations have spread not only the whole continent of Africa but adjacent Arabia as well.
In fact there are versions of this that occur all over the world, in North America, in the northern latitudes, it's called by its Algonquin Indian name, the Dog-grape Game. It's a form of gambling with possibilities that are deeper than probabilities, and so the lure is not that of a game so much but that of seeking the real through this process; of not just gambling but of accessing the eminent and the transcendent together, not only at the same time, not only in the same space but in a higher dimensionality than space-time can convey. In classical western times this was always referred to as magic. And part of the working of magic is that it worked by transform, and what is transformed is not just the lead into gold, but the mind into consciousness. And that transform is mysterious. And the reason for it is this, and our learning conveys this: without being able to participate in nature, as a process, we have no way to emerge into a stable form. And so it's essential not to begin your learning by having a form dictate what it is that you're learning. The popular way to say this used to be you have to unlearn before you can begin to learn, but to wean yourself away from your identity, from your individuality, from its cognate ego, is always the difficult snags that are always attacked by the mind.
The classic resolve of this in Zen is the koan, that if one gives a riddled bone to the mind to chew on, which it cannot chew on, it eventually becomes completely frustrated to the point of chaos. And the chaos resolves itself not in terms of the mind but the classic statement is in terms of no mind. And that resolve is due to that metanoia, that change.
Now what is very difficult about this is that our planet currently is involved in hyper-gamesmanship and the hyper-gamesmanship was characterised by one of the great novels of the 20th century, it won the Nobel Prize for literature and was written by Herman Hesse in 1946, called Das Glasperlenspiel , The Glass Bead Game, where in a very sophisticated meta-matter monastic hyper-mental community one used music and mathematics to find a way to become the Magister Ludi, the genius of the world who is the best at playing the glass bead game. And of course this leads to an ultimate kind of koan conundrum: if one could be at the pinnacle of that, one would not be in any time, space or space-time to recognise that you have deceived yourself. Because to succeed at that is to ensure that you have failed to be real. And this was one of the points that Hesse was able to deliver. He used two aspects in Das Glasperlenspiel . One was a little novel called Siddhartha, the other was a little novel called Demian. And the way in which they were brought together and juxtaposed was expanded in The Glass Bead Game. Siddhartha is about the historical Buddha, who was able to bring the integral of his individuality, of his mind, to a vanishing point. In ancient Sanskrit the vanishing point was called Bindu, but what the Bindu vanished into was called the moksha, and what the moksha revealed eventually was nirvana. That was the classic Buddhism. The Demian was a very strange kind of forerunner for another novel called Steppenwolf and Steppenwolf took the Demean quest and put it into a dramatic, magical theatre and in fact the sign that Steppenwolf sees in the alleyway is that this is a magic theatre and not for everyone. In fact it is only for you at that particular moment that you see the sign. If you did not the sign then, it would not be there. And so one gets caught into the actuality that if you integrate your mind perfectly, if you bring your individuality, your identity, into exact perfect focus, it will vanish.
Let's get back to simple gesture.
That movement is also a dynamic which, because of its dynamis, has an energy wave which has peaks and troughs. It's a frequency, like all electromagnetic and even all magneto-electric energy, it has a frequency which has a mysterious quality. It can come into a stability where instead of being dynamic, it becomes an energy form and we call that matter. And we can take that matter out of the energy form stability and return it back into its dynamic energy. E equals mc2. The mc2, the speed of light, the frequency of light, why would it be squared? Because its periodicity has to have that kind of square in it, because the only way that the square of the periodicity relates to the cube (three dimensions of space), the cube of space and the square of time together make a ratio which holds the resonance of gravity. Otherwise it wouldn't hold. And so if you work with the square of time and the cube of space, you get a proportion, you get a ratio, and the ratio will always resolve itself in terms of unity - one-ness. In astrophysics this is called Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Physics, and Kepler, 400 years ago, which is why he called his book The New Astronomy, published in 1609, he found that if you take detailed observations of the periodicity of the planets and cube their distance, those ratios will always be one. And that this way one is able to understand that the structure of a whole star system has a unity which is able to be portioned out into different distances and periodicities in ratios. In our own time, an American astronomer, Vera Rubin, discovered that galaxies, when they spiral, will hold their shape in that spiralling and the only way they can do that is there must be more matter there than just what is visible, and she is the discoverer of dark matter. We paired her with Barbara McClintock, that we lift off at the middle of science, because Barbara McClintock found over 50 years that genes will jump around in the genome, and this is how life gets variations that are not just variations on a theme but they're differentials. And if one uses the science notes of Barbara McClintock and Vera Rubin, with, in retrospect, Jane Goodall and Mary Leakey, all of a sudden you get not just the dynamic of the sequence of these pairs of texts, of these pairs of people , and their stable forms as they come in for a month as a pair, a lunar cycle, which creates a wave, an energy dynamic, and one could call it a learning wave. Now you bring in a pilot wave in connection with that learning wave and now with two waves you have the ability to disclose a vector. And once you have the ability to disclose a vector you have all the appurtenances of vector analysis available, which is a very high mathematic which can be carried even further from that. Because we have not just a pilot wave, we have a reference wave as well, because we have with the pairs that change each month, each moon, we have a reading journey which is a solar year. These change every month, this changes every year. And there's not just one, there are four. It's always a set of four, so that you have a way to have a variation of what is possible that is little short of astronomical. One of the year-long possibilities is Moby Dick, this is the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Moby Dick. It has a Maori chiral magnetic mask face, Maori from New Zealand, which was what Queequeg was, and Melville says that Ishmael realised that he could see the entire cosmos tattooed on the phase of his friend Queequeg. This was one of his keys to being able to survive. It's not only Moby Dick, but you have a choice of something like The Odyssey, something like Ovid's Metamorphosis, something like Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. Four different reference waves and this makes a second vector. Now when you have two vectors, now you have the ability to have tensors. It's on tensor level of mathematics that Einstein was able to develop the general and specific theories of relativity, and all of relativity work is only expressible in those forms. But we go further from that.
That's early 20th century, this is early 21st century. We're going a big jump beyond that.
We're punctuating each of these rhythms and cycles by an interval, and the interval is a single work but it's a single work which has a universal, eternal quality to it, and in order to ensure that this works I spent over 40 years making my own translation of the Tao Te Ching, with the multiple introduction kaleidoscopic array, so that it would set the tone right and would set the calibration right, because like the pilot wave and like the reference wave, this sets a third quality which one might call an eternal wave. And the fact that there are, in our two-year cycle, four intervals each making eight, that set of eight constitutes something that bridges not just the lunar cycle, not just the solar cycle, but it bridges the complementarity of the double annual cycle. So that now instead of just having a cycle which is one year, you have a pair of years as a complementarity cycle, and oddly enough that complementarity cycle on earth is almost the Martian year. The Martian year is about twice the length, the duration, of an earth year. And so just as this education, this learning cycle, is coming out and beginning to have its disclosure, we're getting used to the fact that we are also keeping time on Mars for the first time and we don't call them days but we call them sols, S-O-L, so many sols. And the Martian sol is very much the first time that we're able to keep track of a calendar on another planet other than earth, to the extent that we're following Martian weather every day now, and have been for years, and we're getting very good at it.
We can understand now, how to live in a climatic, cyclic, calendar way, in terms of being citizens or being inhabitants of Mars, and this is just the beginning. There are about 40 bodies in our star system where we can actually live on the surface, and there are many variations now and this kind of a learning extends itself out differentially so that that complementarity can be used everywhere, no matter how disparate the situation is in terms of space or time or how infinite the conscious dimension becomes without getting trapped in gamesmanship.
The metronome of all of this are the weekly tapes, because there are four tapes, audio tapes, for each of the pairs of presentations, so that this is the weekly metronome, not of reading but of hearing. Because the oral voice is the primordial carrier of experience for our species. Sound is more primordial than geometry for logic to be sound. That's why the term sound is almost paradoxical. An argument is sound, not if one can figure it out geometrically, but if one can have the hearing, have the ears to hear that it flows dynamically.
You can hear to a much greater extent of refinement than you an geometrically conceive in your mind. You can hear when a sitar is in tune, and that the raga being played, though very complex with a very complex instrument, has its flow. You can hear when someone is individually playing a Mozart sonata for his 250th birthday and that he is playing this Mozart sonata with the most delicate kind of touch, or that it's a jazz pianist like somebody like Bill Evans, who is improvising My Funny Valentine in such a way in the sound that you hear My Funny Valentine in Bill Evan's inimitable way and it comes across as a flow; that experience is also like nature, a dynamic, and it does not have form, it has flow, and that the flow generates a field rather than a stability, and that that field is the venue wherein vectors are able to have an actuality without having to appear. That their form holds even though it's invisible. That if you pull on this line and you pull on this line, the result is going to be a proportioned ratio between the two pulls, and that's how you will have your direction; not because you have coordinated it or planned it, but that this is the resultant, and that one can modify this, if you would like to change direction, and this is exactly what happens in mid-course corrections when you send something out like we're sending New Horizons out to Pluto, three billion miles away. It is going to skim over the surface of Pluto, just a couple of hundred miles above the surface of something that wasn't even known about earlier than 75 years ago. The accuracy is almost uncanny unless one understands that if you do not begin with a process that is not commandeered by the mind, like nature, you can never step your energy of the dynamic deeper than just being able to be a part of nature and aware of it. Natural awareness is what nature is, being in that process. But we have looked for the last six weeks before this, that the process of nature, the dynamic of nature, has an ability to flow with experience and become mysterious.
Because experience can participate with nature to such an extent , the French anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl calld it about a hundred years ago participation mystique, and from that understanding he wrote a classic little book, How Natives Think. That natives do not think in terms of our structure and logic, they think by allowing their cultural experience to flow with nature's dynamic, so that they have absorbed each other into this deep, we would call it a synergy, but the synergy is an idea of what it is, rather it is indeed this tone, where the images that come up in experience do not refer to physical existentials. There's no reference to it but that they are then together, so the images of experience become a part of the actual existence of things. And this means then that mysterious existentials have natural and cultural emergences at the same time. A pine tree, a little pine tree, will be a natural thing, an existential little tree out of nature, but you can prune that little tree to be a bonsai; it will be at the same time as a natural existential, it will also be a cultural experiential variation and thus become mysterious. And once one is deep enough to participate not only in nature but in mysterious nature, now there's a third level, a very high level of nature, used to be called magic, magical nature; it's better in our time to call it visionary consciousness. And that visionary consciousness is not just another level of flow, but it's a weaving. So that you have the plats of nature, you can experience, take the strings out of a maguey cactus and make a thread, or you can take the cotton and card it and twine it into a thread and so one has now not just the plat, one has the threads and now you can weave and you can make a garment that carries not only nature into existence and mysterious nature into symbols, but it carries visionary conscious space-time into a five-dimensional field that yields works of art, that yields spiritual persons, and they emerge, we emerge, out of a complete complexity.
What we're doing now is we're building towards the appreciation of nature, and we're using Mary Leakey and Jane Goodall as a pair. One of the qualities that allowed Jane Goodall to be successful is recounted in one of her beautiful little statements here.
She watched patiently for over thirty years at the point she watched the chimpanzee communities on the Gambia River Preserve and Lake Tanganyika in Africa, she would often get up in the middle of the night, in the moonlight, just hearing the distant waves of Lake Tanganyika washing against the rocky shore way down below, and maybe hear a night bird or so, or occasionally some kind of an animal rustling, and she would sit on this what she called the peak, in between two big valleys, where this troupe of chimpanzees have lived for seventy million years. And it took her a long time to learn how to see, but she couldn't see until her experience merged with the nature of the site and the experience of the chimpanzees.
One time, as it happened many, many times, with a growing darkness in midday came the stillness, the hush that so often precedes hard rain, an African cloudburst. Only the rumbling of the thunder moving ever closer broke the stillness; the thunder and the rustling movement of the chimpanzees getting ready. When the rain began, Galahad [one of the chimps], who had been dangling and patting at his toes near his mother, quickly climbed into the shelter of her arms and the two orphans hurried to sit close together near Gigi, but Gimbal started leaping about in the treetops, swinging vigorously from one branch to the next, [This is an adult chimpanzee's rain dance] climbing up, then jumping down to catch himself in a bow below. As the rain got heavier, as more and more drops found their way through the dense canopy, so his leaps became wilder and even more daring, his swaying of the branches more vigorous. This behaviour would, when he was older, express itself in the magnificent rain display or rain dance of the adult male. Suddenly just after three o'clock, heralded by a blinding flash of lighting and a thunder clap that shook the mountains and growled on and on, bouncing from peak to peak, the grey-black clouds let loose such torrential rain that sky and earth seemed joined by moving water. Gimbal stopped playing then, and he, like the others, sat hunched and still, close to the trunk of the tree. I pressed myself against a palm, sheltering best as I could in its overhanging fronds as the rain poured down endlessly. I got colder and colder, soon turned in upon myself, I had lost all track of time, I was no longer recording, there was nothing to record except silent, patient, enduring, uncomplaining endurance.
Participation mystique. Out of mysterious nature our kind learns that all of these other beings are resonances ratioed to ourselves, and that our relationalities among ourselves are not like a prize ratio but they are a further transform from that mysteriousness. The animals and the plants, the minerals and the metals, the electrons and the photons, all participate in a quality of mysteriousness because wherever there is an organic chemistry nature accepts that as a mysterious [58:46] and the entire scale of galaxies includes organic material everywhere, even in between planets, even in interstellar, intergalactic clouds. That mysteriousness then is an endemic quality of the field out of which emergence happens. But it is only through the mind being able to emerge in its symbolic form, pristinely from the mysterious absorption of nature with experience, that the mind really, when it emerges, it does not emerge as a static game player but emerges as a vibrant quality of openness that allows for that third level of consciousness, of magic visionary dynamic to occur. And when it occurs, it doesn't occur in synergy; it occurs as a complement to it. It occurs coming back the other way. And that's where the weaving comes from.
It takes a long time to acclimate oneself to not letting the mind be the sole context and index and arbiter of reality. That's why in our learning our phase on symbols is only one eighth of the entire complementarity of our scope, and at least half of the whole scope is beyond what an integral is able to encompass and to present.
When we look at the connection between Lewis Leakey and Mary Leakey, we understand something very profound here. We've disclosed how Mary Leakey understood, even as a little girl travelling with her artist father to various places in the world, and her adventurous mother, the mother Cecilia, wasn't married till she was 37, and her father Erskine Nicol was 44, and they met in Egypt on the Nile River, where he was painting and Mary Leakey was going to be born on this houseboat on the Nile, but they decided that they'd better have her born in England for passport reasons and so they took her there and she was born in London. But she was always traipsing around with the father, who drew and painted watercolours and paintings and would sell them when the money would run out, and the mother was from this revolutionary family, the Freres, who were always involved in radical causes and movements, that there are in fact places in the world, in South Africa, in Kenya, in India, called Frere Towns, because the family was involved in making places that ex-slaves could go and be rehabilitated back into life. So Mary Leakey grew up in this unorthodox family and she was never used to schools and could never stand schools, and when they would put her into any kind of a special tutoring thing she would find ways to torture the tutors so that they would leave!
When they found a way to get her to a convent school she sabotaged it, and then they put her into another convent school and she learned enough chemistry to blow up the experiment and they threw her out and she was happy again.
But the big experience in her life was being able to go at age 12 into one of the first, most powerful Palaeolithic art caves, Pech Merle, and when she went in there with the old Abbe and her mother, it was the first time that she was able to experience the eminence and the transcendence at the same time of Palaeolithic art, because the animals there have these presence points in red largely, sometimes in black, but they also have the hand in two different versions; one, the hand as a printout of what it is, the other blown by the breath, leaving a silhouette of what it is when it is not. And it's the breath cycle of Palaeolithic yoga that one now has what it is and what it is not together, as the seal of the presenceing and of the transcending and that this applied to animals is not magic to allow you to hunt those animals, but to participate in the mysteriousness with those animals in the world in which one lives, and to bring this presence and your transcendence together into a spirit realm, and that man this way not only becomes a spirit being but the animals are transformed and become spirit beings as well. So that you can have a later childlike confidence that if you're sharing the adventures of Micky Mouse or Donald Duck, it isn't about something fictional, it's about the mysteriousness of animals that have become spiritual friends and companions, and all children all over the world not only sympathise with them, they grow up with them.
This quality begins with the ability to not just immerse ourselves into nature, but as we saw with Thoreau and the I Ching right away at the beginning, it's about being able to see that within and behind the existential happenings, the natural dynamic occurs seamlessly, and that someone who can not only see this but be with this adds the mysteriousness to nature and prepares the field so that it now can transform; but it transforms not just once, it transforms twice. That double-transform, that distillation, produces a forth energy, a forth dynamic called historical consciousness. Now one has the ability to have something that was not there ever before, one has the ability to have a natural history, and out of a natural history will come science. And the discovery of a natural history occurred for the first time on the planet at a school in Athens, and in Athens the school was called The Academy and the man who ran it was named Plato. And the start student who studied under Plato for twenty years was Aristotle, and when he finally opened his own school, The Lyceum, he was so radically new and presentational in his ability to show how if you take a visionary, philosophic conscious vision and step it up to a historical, natural history, now one has the ability to have scientific forms. One of the most aggressive men of the time, his name was Philip, he was the king of Macedon, he decided that he wanted his prize son Alexander to have the best teacher in the world and hired Aristotle to tutor the future Alexander the Great. And part of the tutoring was not to have just one student, but to have at least a few so that they could learn together; and the other older man, older boy, who studied with Alexander the Great, his name was Ptolemy, and after Alexander died early, it was Ptolemy who carried on the vision, turned into a historical consciousness, and made Alexandria even greater than Alexander himself would have been able to make it, and founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty that lasted for 30 Ptolemys and the last of those was Cleopatra, Cleopatra the Seventh. And it was that resonance of Ptolemaic Alexandria that allowed for the maturation of a meta kingdom that would eventually be a world empire that Augustus Caesar put together as he defeated Cleopatra and her last beau, Mark Anthony; her previous beau was Julius Caesar, the uncle of Augustus. And the Roman empire came into being about 30BC, exactly at the time that the resonances of Alexandria built to this threshold. We know that it was a poignant moment because Roman historians alive at the time pointed out that the body of Alexander the Great lay in a great glass sarcophagus in a building called the Soma, the body, in the centre of Alexandria, and that Augustus Caesar went in alone and forbade anyone else to be there, and he opened the glass sarcophagus and put him finger on the nose tip and broke it off of the 300-year-old mummified body of Alexander the Great, and took this as an omen that he was the one who was going to write the future of the world.
These are very large, huge issues. What is facing us in 2006 is that we have a threshold where empires are now all regressive, where individualities locked into gamesmanship of minds are poisonous, they're radioactive. We must learn to let them go. They served well, those people are dead. Only those who are able now to transform deeply by combing through the entire array of phases have a possibility of doing the two essential things. Pythagoras and 800 years later Monet split the populations. The first large population are those who can hear, Monet actually called them hearers. Pythagoras used the Greek term Acousmatici, those who can here. The second, Pythagoras called them Mathamatici but Monet called them the elect. It doesn't take many who are able not only to hear but to have out of their hearing come a new mind that is open, that is able to transform very easily; it is not difficult whatsoever. In fact the phrase for ever, wherever it happens on a high dharma level is that it's effortless. No one has to strain for enlightenment. It is like drinking fresh water or breathing clear air.
More next week.