Nature 9
Presented on: Saturday, March 4, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We're coming to another turn in the way in which our learning has a movement every four presentations. There's another node and the end of three of these, there's an interval and then we go into a different phase. Phases are very important to us and this particular phase is the first, only it doesn't count as one. This phase counts as zero in a cardinal sequence, so that the first phase that will have a form will be the next phase rituals and there is definitely a quality in what we're doing, that shows that in nature there is no objectivity, no form. There is instead what we have come to characterise as an ocean of change. And the change registers in two different ways: one is in terms of time as a dynamic and the other is in terms of a space which is continuous. And the continuity of space and the dynamic of time together do produce space time, do produce nature, but that that nature has a very odd quality in that its change includes a change of spaces and a change of times. There isn't just one kind of time and there isn't just one kind of space and the more that we're involved in just participating in the process of nature, the more we're becoming aware that the different times mean that there are different cycles. And that the chronology of anything in nature has actually a very complex parfait of different time cycles that are nested into each other. And because they are time cycles nested into each other, there are moments where there is a very powerful alignment of the periodicities of the different cycles when their nests come into a kind of a consonance. Like when all the planets surrounding our sun come into a very rare alignment.
One of the things that we have discovered increasingly over the last two centuries, is that our ability to penetrate into nature has disclosed to us an enormous nesting, interlocking and it's not just that there's an ecology, but that there is then to any kind of a reality in the process of nature, a complexity that would yield to us a quality of deeper understanding than if we were just trying to go out and sniff fresh air, or just go to the ocean or to the forests. Just simply being, colloquially, in nature, or returning to nature, becomes for us a deeper and deeper quality. And in the last some 30 years there's been a huge sea change in the scale and complexity of the natural nesting cycles. One of the pioneers for this was a man named Nicholas Shackleton. And he just died in January of 2006 and in the latest issue the international journal of science, Nature, there is an obituary of Nicholas Shackleton. And Shackleton is famous for finding one of the largest correlation nests of cycles in nature that was completely unsuspected before him. He did work in the early 1960's, he was a graduate of the University of Cambridge in England and he became interested in little organisms, they're called foraminifera. And these are like the little plankton, or there's a very deep ocean kind which are like benthic plankton. These foraminifera leave fossils in the sediments of ocean bottoms. And he began to look at these and to discover that one could keep track of a certain ratio of the element oxygen. Because oxygen normally is oxygen-16, but it has an isotope of oxygen-18 and he found that by calibrating the ratio of these two oxygens, one could come to understand cycles of dating that were extraordinary. And he found, for instance, they managed to use oxygen isotope and other records to detect the anticipated changes, not just in isotopes of oxygen in deep sea beds on the planet, but that it was tied into the way in which the earth orbits the sun. That a planet orbiting a star will always have a certain quality of wobbles. One of the wobbles will be that the orbit will - because it's elliptical and not circular - there'll be differences in that aspect. Plus the plane of the orbit is not always the same, there are little bits of wobbles in that. And there is in addition to what is called eccentricity in the ellipse variations and the obliquity in the plane of the orbit, there's also the procession of these little nodes that go around the entire orbital system and from time to time each of these will describe cycles. And Shackleton was the first to realise that there are a pair of cycles tied to the procession of 19,000 years and of 23,000 years. That when this first came out there was a comment in the early 1970's, that this is almost like discovering the Platonic Great Year, which was an astrological determination that the zodiac of the 12 signs goes through a complete cycle of those signs in 26,000 years, 25,900 years and that what Shackleton had found is that there is an orbital precession of the actual nature of our planet with our star, that circumscribes not 25,900, but two different...19,000 and 23,000 year cycles. But that wasn't the end, in fact it was just the beginning, because when he was able then to plot out from these fossil records from deep sea bed, oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 ratios, he found that there was in fact a longer cycle and that longer cycle was 41,000 years. And when he got to the ability to be able to track these two kinds of sizes of natural cycles, he found that was then a third cycle which was 100,000 years and that of eccentricity. In being able to look at nature deep enough to see this overlay of these cycles and how changes on the earth with living creatures, the way in which nature changes, that there was in fact an ability to go back and prorate these cycles into the far past and found that there was indeed a correlation. That about 760,000 years ago the earth's magnetic poles reversed and that this reversal of the magnetic poles of the earth happens in a grand cycle going back. And finally, Shackleton was able to go back to having a look at nature over a 30,000,000 year cycle, of nested cycles within cycles. And that ability to look that deeply fit exactly into a development where other people, naturalists who were looking at the natural history of fossils - and those fossils going back not only millions of years, but hundreds of millions of years - found in Shackleton's work an ability to begin to plot out that what we had assumed was some kind of just natural nature, is in fact a very complex kind of a series of resonances, sets of resonance and that the change has a periodicity in such complexity that we began to read the fossil record in a completely new way, as if we had been looking at it only in terms of one kind of language and now we were able to read all the other kinds of language that could be read out from this.
One of the pair of books that we're taking for these four presentations is the Macroevolution: Essays in Honour of Steven Jay Gould, who had died a couple of years ago, he died in 2002. And before he died he was able to finish his magnum opus, it's about 1500 pages, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. And Gould was a character and he had met two other people to whom he dedicated The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. One of them was his good friend Niles Eldredge and the other was his good friend Elisabeth Vrba. And the dedication in this tome about a new synthesis of looking at nature: 'For Niles Eldredge and Elisabeth Vrba, may we always be the three musketeers, prevailing with panache. At our manic and scrappy inception in Dijon, to our non-satanic and happy reception at doomsday. All for one and one for all.' Now it's interesting because Elisabeth Vrba, originally from South Africa, one of her articles here from 1998, 'Multiphasic growth models and the evolution of prolonged growth exemplified by human brain evolution.' So that when we're looking at nature as a process, as nested cycles, every aspect that comes out of nature has these distinguishing, unique signatures of how the cycles that they are nested in help their emergence. And that what comes out of this will be an emergent character. Elisabeth Vrba is one of the first to really use that term of the 'emergent character' of things. So that when they occur they don't occur just as things, but they occur as very specific things and that their specificity is highly specified in fact. And so she has in here a very interesting little section. There are 14 of these little sections in this little, tiny Macroevolution volume, dedicated to the friend who had died, Stephen Jay Gould. 'Mass turnover' and a new word for us, 'heterochrony.' 'Chronological' means time, it means a time cycle. 'Hetero' means different, different time cycles. And heterochrony was developed by Vrba and Stephen Jay Gould in the early 1970's and it was a pair to another development that Gould had developed with Niles Eldredge, also in the early 1970's and that was called 'punctuated equilibrium.' And what they were looking at was a tremendous change in the way in which nature was able to be seen almost on kaleidoscopic depths that before was not seeable, was not detectable. And part of the turmoil that came out of the 1960's was the churning of an almost epical change in the way in which human beings had deepened, almost as if the planet had sat us down as a species and had us meditate long enough through the 1960's to be able to see beyond what was seen now as blinders of the earth. That the world had blinded us in such a way that we hadn't realised we could not see. That we could not participate in nature other than as like little, naive children who have only dipped their toes into the beachfront of the ocean and never realised that the ocean was quite real and was...nature then was like this new ocean that came out and almost at the time of the first moon landing, in July of 1969, the ability to experience nature underwent a huge jump. And that this huge jump led Gould and his friend Niles Eldredge, who was the Curator of Palaeontology for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And his camaraderie with Gould produced a completely new theory of evolution, based on the old theory of evolution, of Darwin, but jumped in its power and in its order and our ability to not only see nature, but to participate with it. And punctuated equilibrium has one of its statements is that over a very long time, you will find stable forms and the stability of the forms will register in the species. But there are moments in the nesting of the cycles where the species, not having just little, minute changes constantly over very, very long time periods, that all of a sudden in a very condensed time period, literally the snap of the fingers in geologic time, there will be a completely new quality of species that emerge. Not mutations, but new explorations for the way in which nature favours organic life to emerge out of the so-called inorganic elements of nature and continue to emerge and at moments of deep pulse, this punctuation of the equilibria that had been stable, sometimes for millions of years, changes literally almost overnight. That it isn't that a new species will come, minutely, with little bits of change, but that all of a sudden you will have emergent character of a new species. And one of the deep qualities of the early 21st century is that this occurs on every level of time, in every quality of space in reality. Which means that we also are not just subject to these kinds of cycles, but that we are, when we participate with them, our participation melds us as one of the driving forces of the way in which the cycles will happen. And when we not only participate with our tribal festivals and ceremonies in the calendar year, which already has affected the way in which nature works for us and works for the plants around us, the animals around us, but when we step that up even further to a conscious weaving, now one has a speeded up quality to the punctuated equilibria possibilities of evolution. And when you carry it to a third degree of transform, when you introduce historical consciousness, as well as visionary consciousness, as well as mythic ceremonial participation, nature now gains almost like a tsunami quality of being able to have new emergent species come out quickly. There is a very easy way for us here in southern California. One of the most common birds around is the little English sparrow, that in the Atlantic seaboard is brown. And when you look at English sparrows that have had maybe 100 years of living in southern California, they now begin to have red feathers, yellow feathers, they begin to have orange feathers. And the English sparrow undergoes a California evolution to it, they're becoming more and more colourful and who knows, in 100 years they might resemble kaleidoscopic parrots in colouring.
Darwin, when he was for five years on the HMS Beagle, 1831 to 1836, he was examining different plants and different animals to see in what part of the world what animals and what plants were there and to keep detailed notes. And when the Beagle got to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, the number of Galapagos Islands was a revelation to Darwin because he found that on some of those islands there were little birds, finches, that had a certain kind of a colouration, certain qualities of feather and on an other island they would be somewhat different and on other islands yet somewhat different. And that one could begin to measure back the time that it would have taken to have those variations that those finches had been limited to this island, or to that island. And it began to occur that there are possibilities now...even in 1859 when Darwin brought out his work, there was a huge press in the world to try to understand the deeper cycles of time, but it was limited because of the presuppositions and the presumptions that largely were cultural and not just one kind of culture. They were not just the blinders that a European Bible civilisation saying, 'Nothing could be older than 6,000 years.' It was a presupposition that was everywhere in the world and all the different variations and was suddenly challenged, not just by Darwin and not just by The Origin of Species, but at the same time there were a number of individuals clustered almost like one of those punctuated equilibria nodes. And two of the stars along with Darwin of that time period, from 1858 to 1863, five years, in that five year period, almost coinciding with the emergence of the American Civil War, almost as if it were an event like a civil war between science and religion, the other figure that came along in 1863, enthused by Darwin's book, was a man named Charles Lyell. And Lyell was one of the founders of geology. His big two volume Principles of Geology had come out originally in the 1830's and this is from the 11th edition, 1872, with complete maps and everything. But in 1863, in the middle of this, he came out with a book called The Antiquity of Man. And Lyell, because he was such a huge, famous individual, really the founder of the science of geology, in the actual working out of Darwin's great theory, it is impossible to overestimate the influence of Lyell, of Charles Lyell. This is made abundantly clear in Darwin's letters and it must never be forgotten that Darwin himself was a geologist. Cambridge University Press is publishing Darwin's letters and I think they're up to Volume 15. Eventually there'll be like 67 volumes. Because in those days there was no Internet, letters were the Internet. There were no phones yet, so everyone wrote letters to each other. In The Antiquity of Man, one of the most poignant paragraphs begins with this sentence. It's in a section called 'Progression and Transmutation.' 'So long as geology had not lifted up a part of the veil which formerly concealed from the naturalist the history of the changes which animate creation, had undergone in times immediately antecedent to the recent period, it was easy to treat these questions as being too transcendental, or lying too far beyond the domain of positive science to require serious discussion.' In other words, don't even talk about it. On one hand it's too mystical, on the other, no one knows, no one can know these things.
And all of a sudden, not only Lyell and Darwin, almost simultaneously, but a third figure we can mention, Alfred Russel Wallace. And Wallace was one of those peculiar individuals. He was very close in parallel to Darwin, yet they were antithetical persons. When the HMS Beagle went round the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, the savage appearance of the natives down there frightened Darwin and he almost never got over it again. It's not only that they were primitive, they were au sauvage in extreme; they looked scary, they lived scary. They were a terror, a terrific shock to him, which he almost never got over again and did not publish for a long time because he didn't want to - even for his own emotional quality, his own spiritual convictions - to realise that maybe there's something even more savage and more primitive than Tierra Del Fuego Indians. Maybe we're descended from apes, from gorillas, from monkeys and who knows then from what else? And are we carrying that around still in ourselves? Whereas when Alfred Russel Wallace went to Brazil, went to the Amazon, he revelled in the fact that he was out of his native European environment, where he could see boys and girls swimming naked in the little streams and just playing without any kind of artifice whatsoever. And he fell in love with the primordiality of human beings. That when left back into nature themselves, they had a health that permeated through all of the different cycles and qualities. One of the figures who was influential in this aspect of Alfred Russel Wallace, was his acquaintance with Benjamin Franklin, not with Franklin himself, but with the characteristic of Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin lived in England, on 36 Craven Street, for about 16, 18 years, just off Trafalgar Square, one of his health rituals was to have an air bath every morning. When he would get up, just before dawn, he would sit nude in - and his rooms were on the first floor of Craven Street - and he would sit by an open window to greet the sun completely naked, to give his body a chance to recalibrate back into the health of nature as it really was, without any artifice whatsoever.
Wallace lived to be almost 90 years old and one of the last books that he wrote is called The World of Life, 1916, right in the midst of World War One. So that he had lived all the way from a time when Thomas Jefferson was still alive and he lived until 1923. The subtitle of The World of Life, A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose. One of the deep qualities that affected him was not the storms of Tierra Del Fuego, but in his first book, Travels on the Amazon and the Rio Negro, he writes that they came for the first time to where this huge river - coming down from the Venezuelan highlands, the Rio Negro, having many other streams, come together with it - met the Amazon and these are the sentences that he recorded. Something that struck him and never left him, like the terrific shock of the primitive savages of Tierra del Fuego, this is what he recorded. 'On the 31st of December 1849, we arrived at the city of Barra on the Rio Negro. On the evening of the 30th, the sun had set on the yellow Amazon but we continued rowing till late at night, when we reached some rocks at the mouth of the Rio Negro and caught some fish in the shallows. In the morning, we looked with surprise at the wonderful change in the water around us. We might have fancied ourselves on the River Styx, for it was black as ink in every direction. Except where the white sands, seen at the depth of a few feet through its dusky wave, appeared to be of a golden hue, the water itself is a pale brown colour, the tinge being just perceptible in a glass, but in deep water it appears jet black and well deserves the name Rio Negro, Black River.' But where the Rio Negro flows into the Amazon, they do not mix right away. The water is miscible, the two rivers have their different dynamic energy. The Amazon has a stronger energy because it is a massively huge river. The Rio Negro, although it is a very huge river, is not nearly so massive and so instead of mixing, they flow for hundreds of miles along with each other, the Rio Negro flowing within the Amazon. And again, Alfred Russel Wallace was inspired by Benjamin Franklin, because Franklin was the first to discover that in the Atlantic Ocean there was a river called, after his designation, the Gulf Stream. And that this river flowed from the Gulf of Mexico, up the coast of America and out across the Atlantic and flowed up along the British Isles, all the way up. And this is why one can go very far north in countries like Norway and you can still have human civilisation and communities. If it weren't for the Gulf Stream, you would have had glaciers as far down as Scotland easily, or even into England. We know now that it isn't just the Gulf Stream has this, but that all the oceans of the planet are an ecology that have river systems in them everywhere and not just that they flow from one latitude and longitude to another, but that they dip and scoop up nutrients of different kinds and qualities. And so the whole planet is a veritable matrix of recycling by rivers in the oceans and here, Russel Wallace, towards the end of his life, in The World of Life, says, 'If it had been a law of nature that the effects of education should be inherited, then men would have been continually moulded to certain patterns. Originality would have been bred out by the widespread influences of mediocrity in power and that ever present variety in art and science and intellect and ethics and in the higher and purer aspirations of humanity would have certainly been diminished.' In other words, mediocrity, because it was so prevalent, would have taken over and everything would have become completely mediocre long since. 'And if it be said that the very bad would have been made better if educational influences had been inherited, even this may be doubted, for in times which permitted so much that was bad, education often tended to increase rather than diminish the evil. On the other hand, we are more and more coming to see that none were all bad and that their worst excesses were due in large part to the influence of their environment and the fierce temptations to which they were and still are, so unnecessarily exposed.' And one of the qualities that had begun to come out, was the realisation that climate, nested within the orbital eccentricities of our planet around our star and the influences of other planets within that star system and other stars in consonance with our star and all of hundreds of millions of stars in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which itself has its dynamic, that nature has this nesting on scales out into infinity. Down to the latest, last emergent characteristic detail and it isn't that everything is just related, it's that everything has a complex vectoring that accepts other cycles, other dynamics, other influences. And a consciousness which has become universal, will have one of the greatest effects of all, not just on the whole, but that certain parts will accelerate their punctuation of the equilibrium and emerge new and fresh. In other words, we live in a time where there are new species, not just a mass extinction of old species, but the emergence of especially new species, on the emergent puncturing of the old stability, which includes man. There are going to be very special people, as there are already and they will have more dimensions and access to more cycles, all at the same time, than people of even a generation ago. That's why we need a new kind of learning. More after the break.
Let's come back to part of the technique that we're pioneering and that is to put learning into an energy, rather than into a pre-emptive form. The mind is very powerful and in our time minds are tyrannical. And so we're putting our learning into a process before it comes into some kind of stability. Which means that it precludes us from saying, 'Here's the plan and this is how this works,' before you get an opportunity to just have it work. It isn't that one now avoids a pre-emptive presupposition, or a pre-emptive indoctrination, what we avoid is a false identification, because the mind does not think of itself as physical and so looks for its referential confirmation to the things of the world. And so its form of stability is to make sure that the things of the world are accurate referentials to its ideas, the way it conceives of things to be, the way things should be. And one of the classic books of the Roman Empire was by the greatest Roman physicist of the day - Lucretius - and his book De Rerum Natura, is best translated as The Way Things Are. And written about 50 BC, it was extraordinary for the advanced physics of the day, but also extraordinary to us because it reveals the Empire's state of mind that was too rarely, not only not criticised or understood, but was assumed to be the way things are. We live in a complexity of reality where things are never just what they are, they are always now morphing and kaleidoscopically so. So that instead of having a mind that seeks to have things statically identifiable and then making those bars of referential proof the structure of the way in which logical thought should go, we're completely doing an end run around that entire knot of problems that's goes back an extraordinary long period of time.
We're talking about the way in which several of the founders of a concern of evolution, which is now in the news again in 2006, of how about 150 years ago this was a time where there was a sudden penetration into a new quality of being able to see nature, to be a naturalist not simply in the way of Thoreau, those he's clearly like a forerunner of this. He is a naturalist who knew all the names of the trees, all the names of the berries, all the names of the animals. He had no way of knowing that the year after he died in 1862, that someone like a Sir Charles Lyell, writing on The Antiquity of Man, would suddenly show that there are geologic ages that stymie. It's not just that man is older than 6,000 years, but that he is more than 6,000,000 years old and more than 60,000,000 years of cognate primates. And one can go back like one of our authors, Niles Eldredge. His field of study were trilobites and trilobites are a group of extinct arthropods, like any shelled animal like crabs. A group of extinct arthropods that lived between 535,000,000 years ago and 245,000,000 years ago. So his whole life study was founded on creatures that had not seen for quarter of a billion years and yet existed for 300,000,000 years everywhere on the planet and that by looking at this kind of a timescale, especially looking at a timescale of not just a half billion years but what about the nesting of cycles with cycles within cycles? All of this nest within the earth in not just its fossil record for like trilobites, but is there in the bacteria and the viruses that have been around for three and a half billion years. But even deeper than that, the climate on this particular planet, in this particular star system is about 4.7,000,000,000 years in the development, in the making and has its cycles as well. And that this star system is barely a third as old as the observable universe itself. So when we're talking about a new learning, the way in which we get traction is to go into motion before we make any kind of a form that would register the traction. The simplest way is just to consider that in movement, if it is brought to a rest, the rest is not static but is vibrant. Though the hand may stop, it doesn't move, it is constantly alive and pulsing and radiating. And that on this level of complexity what we're doing is we're combing out an artificiality of a mind that was inculcated and referentialed to such an extent that almost everyone on the planet for thousands of years, has been acclimated to something which was temporary and is no longer there, has not been there for a very, very, very long time. We live more than 2,000 years after Lucretius and he was out of date in his own lifetime already.
The ability of our using phases also allows us to take a phase like the dynamic of nature and deepen it. And the first deepening of it is to come into participation with it so that our experience, nesting within nature as a phase in phase with that phase, nature itself now becomes mysterious. And that on the mythic horizon, in the mythic phase of process, whenever man has participated with nature in that kind of mysterious synergy, nature discloses now new forms of emergence that were not there before and have a very deep telltale signature of truthfulness, not just a referentiality of identity but an actuality. For instance, we're talking about Alfred Russel Wallace being in the Amazon and loving the natives, as opposed to Darwin who feared the wild, primitive natives. And the natives loved Alfred Russel Wallace. When he was ill with malaria one time they tended him and used native cures for this and brought him back out. He writes of a ceremony: 'Attached to the comb on the top of the head is a fine, broad plume of the tail coverts of the white egret, or more rarely of the under tail coverts of the great harpy eagle.' Harpy eagles are enormous, about five foot wingspan. 'These are large, snowy white, loose and downy and are almost equal in beauty to the plume of a white ostrich feather. The Indians keep these noble birds in great open houses or cages, feeding them with fowls, which they will consume two everyday, solely for the sake of these feathers, but as the birds are rare, the young are difficultly secured, the ornament is one that few possess.' Then he goes on to describe a ceremony and that while this ceremony was going on inside of one of these large dance houses, outside, a population of men divided themselves into two groups and he writes this: 'In the open space outside the house, a party of young men and boys who did not possess the full costume, were dancing in the same manner. They soon however began what we may be calling the snake dance. They had made two huge artificial snakes of twigs and bushes bound together with sipos, fibres, from 30 to 40 feet long and about a foot in diameter.' It's the size of any giant anaconda. 'With a head of a bundle of leaves of the Umbooba, painted with bright red colour, making altogether a very formidable looking reptile. They divided themselves into two parties of 12 or 15 each and lifting the snakes on their shoulders, began dancing. In the dance they imitated the undulations of the serpent,' the dynamic, vibrant energy of a pair of snakes, of a double helix.
You have to understand that reality presents itself in actuality on every level, not just on an advanced level, but every level, but is only accessible if one tunes one's own vibration to that frequency, to that cycle, to that level. And that it isn't just tuning one at a time, but there's a kind of multi-phasic tunability, where the entire resonant set can be tuned altogether, but when it is tuned altogether there will be a prominence of one of the cycles, of one of the parts in its cycle that will be the trigger for the new to emerge. And so we have a learning here that allows us to go back to every vibration that occurs and not just consciously and not just in the mind with an idea, but as full rainbow spirit beings, as real, complex actualities, not only in the universe but in the cosmos itself. Because the universe will always favour integrals, always favour unities, whereas the cosmos in complementarity to it, favours multiplicities, favours differentialities, loves infinities. And there is an incommensurate, but mysterious factorability of unity and infinity together. They make a set which when one would characterise it, the ancient name for it, in English that we would understand, is eternity. It isn't that one and infinity are incommensurate, it's that they share an interface of zero. And that that interface of zero is like a membrane through which can emerge either unity or infinity, like left- and right-handed chirality and they have a symmetry which allows for them to be understood paired. And that that pair, that pair, is like the pitch pipe of all tuning and that once one just not knows that and not just can do that through this or that aspect or technique, now a new quality of reality obtains on every level and every cycle. They're all now in tunability. The Ancient Sanskrit name for that, about 10,000 years ago, comes from the same Indo-European root that when large animals like bulls were first tamed, oxen, to pull things, to pull ploughs, to pull carts, they were held in teams of a 'yoke' and the root also is in 'yoga.' So that what we're doing here is a yoga of civilisation and our way of practising it, is we are not just learning to learn something intellectual, not just to confirm our identities and references by being able to identify and name and order and manipulate things in the world so that they fit and jibe then with our ideas, or doctrines, or codes, or beliefs. The actuality of reality is inexhaustible because it has an infinite symmetry with all integrals, so that there is not only one integral, there is an infinite...an infinity of integrals and there is also a unity of infinities. A paradox. For the mind to understand this paradox, it literally has to have the ability to turn itself inside out. And the only way it can turn itself inside out is not to stay within its form, but to share its ability, its facility, to turn inside out with someone else. So that together that pair now have a possibility of being real together in a way that the mind by itself, isolated, could not be, known as love. That ability is not limited to just two but is expandable as anything with an infinity would be expandable, so that there can be such a thing as a whole tribe in the middle of the Amazon jungle, who in their rituals of the celebration of the magic mysteriousness of life that they are a part of, come up with two great, big 30 foot bush versions of the anaconda, the double helix. 'And in the dance,' writes Alfred Russel Wallace 150 years ago, 'They imitated the undulations of the serpent, raising the head and twisting the tail. They kept advancing and retreating, keeping parallel to each other and every time coming nearer to the principal door of the house.' All the while they're doing their stepping so that their vibration is in the rhythm of the undulation of the whirled serpents that are paired, that are coming together at the door of the house within which the ceremony of life is being danced. 'And at length, they brought the heads of the snakes into the very door, but still retreated several times. Those within had now concluded their first dance and after several more approaches, in came the snakes with sudden rush.'
We're talking about the new refinement of evolution by one of the great discoveries about 30 years ago, punctuated equilibrium, that it happens almost instantly and it happens spontaneously. It does not happen because one has done all the little steps that lead up to this and this is the conclusion: the mind in its inculcation of identification logic, always now makes that assumption. It is not true. In fact it is only true of abstract mental manipulation. Everywhere else in reality, on every level of cycle, it's an ecological vitality. It is an emergent quality that has then the character of anything that emerges and exists, not just of ourselves, but of trilobites a half billion years ago, of bacteria three and a half billion years ago, of who knows what other kinds of life forms throughout the vast cosmos? Last year, when Cassini entered the Saturn system and the Huygens Probe went down to Titan for the first time and the pictures, the data from Titan showed it to be like an early Earth, except that the cycle there is not of water, but of methane. That there is a cryovolcanism, not only on Titan, but on Triton, the big moon around Neptune, as well. There are volcanoes in such cold that it's hundreds and hundreds of degrees below zero. The landscape takes a remarkable, earth-like parallel but it's of different elements operating and this kind of a resonant quality is all through nature. One finds that these patterns of nature not just reoccur exactly, but they reoccur in similarity and that the similarities are because of the nesting of cycles within cycles, so that nature is an ocean of change that has rivers of driving actuality that keep the concurrence together.
The other author, editor, besides Niles Eldredge who worked on trilobites, Elisabeth Vrba. She worked in South Africa on fossil antelopes for a long time, but she also was one of the finders and founders with Stephen Jay Gould, of this whole process of heterochrony. Heterochrony... 'Mass Turnover and Heterochrony,' that is multiple time cycles are being able to keep track of their inner penetrative nesting and workings. She says, 'Two topics in this category will be reviewed and discussed. The first expands punctuated equilibria and its relationship to speciation, to encompass large numbers of lineages of diverse taxonomic background.' That one has not just the evolution of some life form, some organism that comes into a species, but there are resonant consonants of whole waves of species together. One other resonant concomitance of our kind, of primates, of flowers and trees. We come into an evolutionary wave together. Flowers are extremely, primordially, actually real with us, so that for instance, one of the year long readings is The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, written 1,000 years ago in medieval Japan. Each title of each section of The Tale of Genji has a flower, a floral kind of a cue, a quality. The very first one, in Japanese pronounced 'Kiritsubo,' the 'Paulownia Pavilion,' the translator puts underneath Kiritsubo. And he writes, "'Kiri' means 'paulownia tree' and 'tsubo' means a small garden between the palace buildings. Kiritsubo is therefore the name for the palace pavilion that has a paulownia tree in its garden and the Emperor installs Genji's mother there" - Genji's his son - 'So that readers have always called her Kiritsubo no Koi, the Kiritsubo Intimate, although the text never mentions this,' but in Japan they always refer to her in this way. And The Tale of Genji begins with him 12 and if you're following The Tale of Genji now, you would be up to chapter nine. 'Aoi,' it's a heart shaped flower, not a leaf like this, but a heart shaped flower. The translator says, "The plant aoi, more precisely 'futaba aoi,' sacred to the Kamo Shrine, grows on the first floor and consists of a pair of broad heart shaped leaves that spring from a single stem." It's related...sometimes you will see in Los Angeles the Hong Kong orchid tree, which has paired leaves, that at night tend to close together and they will open up in a pair. At the Kamo Festival, people decorated their headdresses and carriages with it, as well as with laurel, 'katsura,' so that the Royal Palace in Japan, the Katsura Palace, has a complement in the Kamo Shrine of the futaba aoi plant. But in ancient Japan, when Lady Murasaki lived 1,000 years ago, in Heian Dynasty, shogunate Japan, the spelling of the word for that flower that comes out, 'afuhi,' the word in Japanese, could be read not only for that flower, but it can be read to mean 'day of lovers' meeting.' This wordplay and the plant's configuration suggests the translation of this chapter, chapter nine, should be 'heart-to-heart.' As the chapter title refers particularly to an exchange of poems at the festival, between two seeking to have that tuning together, between Genji and - he's now 23 - and the amorous Dame of Staff - that's what she's referred to as - seeing Genji in his carriage with someone else, she writes a sad little tanka poem. The first part of it would be a haiku, but it's 31 syllables instead of 17. She writes, 'Oh, it is too hard! Today when our heart-to-heart told me that the god blessed our meeting, I perceive that another sports those leaves.' And Genji replies with his own little...'Yours, so I would say, was a very naughty wish to sport heart-to-heart, when this meeting today gathers men from countless clans!' And then the chapter begins and she goes on, 'The change of reign made all things a burden for Genji and perhaps his rise in rank explains why he now renounced his lighter affairs so that for many, he multiplied the sorrows of neglect, even while he himself, as though in retribution, continually lamented his own love's cruelty.' He found that he could not help being cruel when he loved in the Royal Palace duty realm world, that he was supposed to be tuned to and yet he had been raised to be sensitive to being out of tune with that world and to be in tuned with the women's world, where it was love sharing interchange that was more real than the hierarchy of the Palace, the hierarchy of the power. One of the things that Elisabeth Vrba and Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge found increasingly, is that there were in the larger and larger and larger nested patterns and cycles of evolution, that there were hierarchies of structure, yes, but there were other aspects that came into play as well.
Darwin was concerned with how adaptation to conditions and environment was like the key for him, for evolution and very quickly added to that was then the phrase 'survival of the fittest.' But the new developments in evolution have shown that there are other aspects that occur. Elisabeth writes, "The term 'species' will be restricted to a sexually reproducing lineage, the members of which share a common fertility fertilisation system." They can have babies together. Plants can have babies, animals can have babies, they're now a species, they can reproduce themselves. But speciation refers to the divergence of the fertilisation system in a daughter population to reproductive isolation from the parent species. When the daughter leaves the parents, she has the actual real possibility of initiating a new, different speciation to her particular possibility of a lineage. Her children now could be special, diverse variation of what the parents were, but she must be taken out of their kin to have this possibility be actual. And this turns out one of Alfred Russel Wallace's great books, that you can find copies on the Internet for very large sums of money, was called Island Life or the Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas and Floras. It isn't only that little islands, or big islands, like Australia, will have their own variations on a theme. The marsupials have many of the same kinds of developments, which mammals who are not marsupials will have in other parts of the world. But it isn't just that, it's that all of the different nested cycles in nature have these kinds of, not just cognate, but of what we would use in better language, recognate harmonies. Which means that there is a recognition, not an identification, that is in the deeper energies that drive the cycles of reality and this is why one finds on every level of evolution, even on the evolution of elements, from hydrogen on up, through the...all the elements to uranium and even transuranium. That the elements will follow a pulse cycle and that one can then have an understanding that there are not just certain groups, like in the Periodic Table of elements, but in evolution theory it's called a 'clad.' It means that all of these, though there's a huge variety of them, come from a common ancestor and there are among common ancestors now certain kinds of similarities. She writes, "The products of speciation may range from being phenotypically indistinguishable, to strongly diverged. Physical change refers to the global and local effects from extraterrestrial sources, including astronomical climate cycles and from the dynamics of the earth's crust and deeper layers as manifested by topographic changes, such as rifting, uplift, sea level change, volcanism. All such physical change involves climatic change, at least locally and the term 'climate' will sometimes be used to subsume effects from both sources." She will eventually come to say that the pivot is the physical change itself in a special nesting, where the possibility of something new to occur, something that will have a penetration through the equilibrium into an emergent character that is new. But in order for that to actually occur in human beings, in our advanced complexity of our human beings, we need to bring all of our cycles into that hard, consonant, harmonic that is already everywhere in the universe, everywhere in the cosmos. And until we do so, we're going to be like static noise, rather than singing some tune which when hummed will vibrate and have reverberation. So this is a learning to bring us back so that we can sing again and not just be heard, but hear the songs of the planets and of the stars and of the animals and of the flora and fauna everywhere and of each other and of ourselves in that larger ecology, of infinity and of unity, of the differential and the integral brought together in a complementarity. But because it could be mistaken by the mind's usurpation, we have to position the mind at the end of the first year and then take a second year that goes completely into the transforms of, not just the mind, but of the whole natural, integral cycle, by which the mind came to be in the first place. So we're doing something strategic. We're maturing ourselves so that we have a mind that is natural, consonant with experienced participation into mystery and able to be transformed into visionary consciousness, which will have its own differential reverberation, in a historical consciousness that allows for the cosmos to be brought into pairedness with the universe. There is a universe, but there is also a cosmos. When they are paired and tunable and we are tunable within that, on several thousand levels, then whatever we name will not be named in an identification, but the name will come out and be a sound of something real.
More next week.