Nature 10

Let's come to Nature 10 and we're understanding as we're learning that the most important beginning is not to have a beginning but to have beginningness that occurs. If we begin with a beginning, we have already preset a trap and the trap eventually will be closed by the mind which, in its egotistical character, will look for laws of nature. By retrojecting from the mind's structure a symbolic system in a code, in doctrines, in theologies, in political economies, all of these structures projected back, retrojected, obviate nature from occurring. Because it does not occur, it is not either cognisable, nor recognisable. In this way, the mind creates an abstract disassociation from nature by this very process.
In tribal cultural ways this was always obviated because the culture had to flow with nature in order to survive. One of the ways in which it survived is that it structured the ritual year, of the activities that we do at the times and seasons that we do them, so that cultural following of nature allowed for the experience of beings like ourselves to be discernable when it was natural and to be noticeable when it had veered away and was becoming out of sync with nature. But as soon as the scale was tipped, that the symbolic mind became more powerful than the ritual comportment, because the symbolic mind is not just more powerful, it is more powerful because it integrates more powerfully, is a stronger integral, and in the natural cycle the thrust of the energy always goes to the emergence of an integral. This is a very difficult thing to appreciate from the standpoint of the mind by itself because the mind assumes that this then is the logical structure which underlies the way in which nature works and one can then look for the laws of nature, the principles of nature.
One of the most difficult qualities that came in the second third of the 20th century was the discovery, more and more, that there are no objective phenomena in nature whatsoever. That what we call objective phenomena are emergent from a natural field of process, a dynamic that has a kinetic energy to it but that the achievement of form was always something that had emerged into an integral and when it came into its integral then its objectivity was to further the integralling of expanded objectivities.
We have been trying to acclimate ourselves back, through Thoreau and the I Ching, through Mary Leakey's work with early palaeontology through the study of chimpanzees with Jane Goodall and now with James Watson's The Double Helix and the great new macroevolution theories that have come out in the last 30 years. We are trying to acclimate ourselves, progressively, layer by layer, of the process of nature being a dynamic, a kinetic, where the emergence, the understanding of emergence not as form but as a process, [6:03 laves] back increasingly back in time, as we are presenting the pairs of books, and at each presentation lasting one month we go back further and further in time. We go back from 200 or 5000 years to seven to 70 million years and now all the way back to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years. All the time this cone is not a cone of structure but a cone of learning, penetration into a field of inquiry. This field of inquiry, like any field, has the ability to have energy frequencies course through it and interchange through it. So the kinetic dynamics in the natural field of inquiry are not just like an ocean of change but it's like an ocean of energy waves. All of these energy waves have the natural quality of wanting to emerge into form, of wanting to come into objectivity and yet not to come into objectivity just once but to pulse into objectivity rapidly, not just thousands but millions of times per time unit. So there is a vibratory quality that emerges out of the natural dynamic and the appreciation of this is very difficult indeed.
300 years ago the search for the principles of nature, in a mental way, took a huge jump with Sir Isaac Newton and Newton's Principia Mathematica combined with the Cartesian geometry, which was incorporated into it, gave a false sense of knowing. Out of that false sense of knowing, especially in Europe where it was most early evident, it was called The Enlightenment. Progressively as The Enlightenment took hold there were fewer and fewer persons who were able to understand what the glory of the Enlightenment was and more and more people who were subject to the abstract tyrannies that occurred out of this. You find the upshot of the Enlightenment is the American and French revolutions, the romantic rebellion, the industrial revolution, the development of transcendentalism, the complete obviating of all of the standard Newtonian aspects of certainty.
Progressively through the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, the understanding that what was really powerful was not things but the fact that things on a very high level of complexity, like elements like radium and thorium and uranium, that they are radioactive, that their structure is constantly changing and modifying and that in doing so there are radiative energies being released, like mysterious rays called X rays. And that there are even more powerful things than x rays called gamma rays, and that the whole universe is bathed constantly in this kinetic field of high energy radiations that in the conception of a Newtonian, Cartesian universe would be antithetical to life so that life would almost never occur. Therefore life on earth must be a unique event and it may be the only place in the universe where there is life and so to search for life off the earth became this kind of Don Quixote-esque search.
What we are discovering, progressively, through this cone of expansion going back and back in time to reveal that the kinetic field of inquiry, which nature dynamically is, emerges life all the time, everywhere, that life is not only common in the universe, it is endemic in the very emergence of its process. For our experience, then, our mythic horizon of culture, to find a synergy with this expansion of nature, becomes more and more difficult for two antithetical reasons. One is that the tradition inculcated in education, in upbringing, in the heritage of the past going back not just to Newton and Descartes but going back several thousands of years, all of these layers imprison us in the conviction that we do not have to blend with nature anymore, we can dominate it.
Antithetical to that, working against our learning all the time in almost equal measure is the increasing complexity of the field of inquiry, of the process and the kinetic of nature, that it becomes more and more difficult to have a culture that would be able to have synergy with it, would be able to participate with that. One can participate with seasonal cycles on a planet, but if you go to another planet, like Mars, which has a year almost twice as long and different kinds of seasons or you go to a planet-like body like Titian, where, yes, there are seasons but they are not seasons of the kind of water cycle that you find on earth but it's a methane cycle and it happens so cold that volcanoes are cryovolcanoes and not hot at all.
As we note increasingly, through our ability to sense nature in more and more expansions, deeper and deeper back, we discover that the organic molecules occur not only on planets and moons in our star system but that they are qualities that emerge not only in other stars and star systems but that organic molecules are made in cold interstellar intergalactic clouds and gas. All of the elements of organic chemistry exist everywhere, including in between galaxies, in vast reaches of the universe, so that our ability to start with nature becomes expanded exponentially. And at the same time this pair of imprisoning difficulties both become exasperated to the point, now early in the 21st century, that there are so few persons who are current with what one really can observe of nature and that there is no cultural aspect which would allow for one to be natural on that depth and scale, that there is a double retreat from it, that double retreat taking the antithetical standpoints. One is that it doesn't really matter, we'll just pick some cultural time or style and stay with it, a kind of insistent fundamentalism, 'We will stay in this religion, we will stay in this political system, we will stay in this mentality and we are comfortable and safe there.' The difficulty of that is apparent everywhere, all the time.
Nature in its dynamic does not stay put and one of the qualities that we are now able to accentuate is that it evolves. Everything evolves, including the brain, including our lives and our bodies, including not just our cultures but a higher order of culture and that is civilisation, that even civilisations evolve and that the evolution is not just that something in nature evolves but that nature itself accepts into its dynamic, into its kinetic energy, the increased dimensions that come from such expansions. Not just expansions in space, not just expansions in time in the sense that one now has not just a time, not just time, but there are many kinds of time. Not just many kinds of time but increasing cycles within the different kinds of time so that time has become enormously complex, space has become enormously complex and that that complexity of that expanded kinds of space-time now include expanded kinds of conscious space-time.
This becomes an extremely slippery problem for those who would like to stay comfortable in a medieval religion, in an Enlightenment society, in some kind of past where it was idyllic and we would like to just be able to retire there or protect ourselves there. But the other antithetical dynamic suffers as much as well and that is the penetration into the actual natural field, has now pushed itself to one of those interesting liminalities. The earlier liminality was that of the atom, that there would be some kind of basic building block out of which everything would be made.
That kind of atomism was first broached by Democritus in Greece 2400 years ago already, and brought back into play several times, and finally obtained in the last 200 years. But that liminality of the atom was penetrated through and dissolved more than 100 years ago. The discovery of radiations, of X-rays, of gamma rays, of the fact that in these radiative energies, that they penetrate through forms, and when they penetrate through forms they change them. That if you take something out of an atom it now becomes an isotope of that element, or if you add energy to it, it now changes its form and becomes a heavier, larger atom. So the liminality that comes after the atom, which was a formal aspect, the next liminality was an energy, a dynamic aspect.
Now we are understanding the last 20 years, especially the last ten years, that there may be something so mysterious and so magical beyond atoms and beyond energy, that there may be a form of condensed vacuum itself. A vacuum that is able to undergo a condensation of itself and achieve the form of a Higgs boson and that this would be like a new liminality of form, just like energy as a wave was beyond the atomic form, there now may be forms that occur beyond energy. One begins to get into realms almost of mysticism.
Neils Bohr, in The Philosophic Writings of Neils Bohr 1932-1952, writes of the first time that he had an extended conversation with Albert Einstein:
When I had the great experience of meeting Einstein for the first time during a visit to Berlin in 1920, these fundamental questions formed the theme of our conversations. The discussions to which I have often reverted in my thoughts added to all my admiration for Einstein a deep impression of his detached attitude. Certainly his favourite use of such picturesque phrases as "ghost waves" (Gespensterfelder) guiding the photons, implied no tendency to mysticism, but illuminated, rather, a profound humour behind his piercing remarks. Yet with a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained sense with his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without abandoning continuity and causality. Einstein was perhaps more reluctant to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this respect appeared to be the only way open to precede with the immediate task of coordinating the multifarious evidence regarding atomic phenomena, which accumulated from day to day in exploration of this new field of knowledge.
But more profoundly than a field of knowledge, it became a field of inquiry that was natural, not a natural inquiry but the dynamic kinetic field of inquiry that was of the natural process, the natural dynamic. The more that this came out, the more it became apparent that there was a profound liminal difficulty blinding our conceptual ability to have a knowledge beyond the knowledge that we were looking to confirm. One of the most brilliant persons in this was a man named Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1926 discovered that there was a completely different way that one could look at reality and he developed a mathematic that was able to express this for the first time. It's called The Schrödinger Wave Equation. In his early use of it he chose a couple of objects which could be looked at as primordial, one of them was the hydrogen atom, the simplest element, the simplest atom. The other was a differential form called a harmonic oscillator. This oscillator will produce a harmonic, the hydrogen atom will produce an integral structure and both of them, integral and differential will be primordial, in that all of the other forms in integrals will occur in like analogous manner to the hydrogen atom and all of the differential forms will occur in a like analogous manner with the harmonic oscillator.
One of the clearest expositions of this, and this is getting us back to Watson and The Double Helix, because we are looking at an ecology here, a process of nature, which has a very deep resonance, not only forwards in our inquiry to learn further, but also retrospectively in reconsidering what we have already learned or thought we learned, and we are bringing both the past into a newness and the future into an emergence of a deepening of the present. The present deepening is not just getting deeper into a present but that present in a natural integral has another aspect to it, a complement to it, which in consciousness is presence. To presence the present is a very difficult thing to do for the first time because when one brings the consciousness of presence exactly to the point of present in a natural time sense, those two energies cancel each other out perfectly and you end up with exactly zero. Precisely a Zen moment of satori where nothing occurs in that split present presence at all. One would say of that, 'This is the Tao' or 'This is the Śūnyatā' or 'This is the zero point energy.' All of these would be apt phrases.
However, if one's natural integral has a rich enough past that can be renewed and be newer, constantly, and a future which can be expanded, that present zero will emerge spontaneously into its unity emergent predilection. But the unit's unity emergent predilection will include the dimensions of presence in consciousness and so you will get a different reality. For the first time what one, all over the planet whenever this has occurred with our kind is called a mystical moment of allness, of completeness, of fullness, which has no need to be limited or unlimited because it can be both simultaneously and therefore is a paradoxical fullness which can have limit and be unlimited at the same time, in the same space.
The book that I have here that has the clearest introduction to Schrodinger's wave equation is by Linus Pauling and was written in 1935, when Linus was at Caltech. The reason why it is so profound, it is Linus Pauling at Caltech, who 15 years later is the goad for the discovery of the double helix of DNA, was the figure that James Watson and everybody else working on this problem found that you had to deal with Linus Pauling and that he was the most favoured person in the world to find the structure of DNA and we'll get to what DNA presented and represented in just a moment.
This is the way in which Watson in The Double Helix described: 'Pauling's talk was made with his usual dramatic flair. The words came out as if he had been in show business all his life. A curtain kept his model hidden until near the end of the lecture' and The Double Helix includes Linus with his model of the alpha helix molecule on this lecture table at Caltech in front of the blackboards covered with all of, not just a structure of biology or chemistry, but of quantum chemistry and for the first time one of the first models ever made of molecular biology. It was a glimpse of the future but behind it, all of it, was the developments of quantum mechanics and relativity theory that had come when Pauling was a young man for the first time emerging at Caltech and had brought the accumulated layers of expansive penetration into nature to where, for the first time, he was able to present the emergence of a model structure that would be analogous to the very structure that embodied the emergence of the molecule controlling genes, which control life, which control all organic reality in the universe.
'A curtain' writes Watson, 'kept his model hidden until near the end of his lecture when he proudly unveiled his latest creation. Then, with his eyes twinkling, Linus explained the specific characteristics that made his model, the alpha helix, uniquely beautiful. This show, like all of his dazzling performances, delighted the younger students in attendance. There was no one like Linus in all the word. The combination of his prodigious mind and his infectious grin was unbeatable. Several fellow professors, however, watched this performance with mixed feelings. Seeing Linus jumping up and down on the demonstration table, waving his arms like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of his shoe made them feel inadequate. If only he had shown a little humility, it would have been so much easier to take. Even if he were to say nonsense his mesmerised students would never know because of his unquenchable self confidence. A number of his colleagues quietly waited for the day when he would fall flat on his face by botching something important.'
It was at that moment that the young James Dewey Watson (named for John Dewey, John Dewey was a great philosopher) James Dewey Watson, decided that he would outdo Linus Pauling and he would find the true structure of DNA in making the true model, and he would be flamboyant and his students would be the whole world. Not just the mesmerised Caltech students and faculty and scattered professors and students in chemistry and biology courses around various universities, but that James D. Watson would stun the world with the true model. But the difficulty was that he realised he didn't know anything about anything. He took it as an advantage because he had no preconceptions to unlearn. So he would take a cue from one of the favourite people at Caltech, Max Delbruck. Max Delbruck was one of these incredibly brilliant men in the 1920s and 1930s who originally, because of his absolute genius and almost outstripping all the capacities to be limited, finally found himself with one of the world's greatest teachers at a time when that greatest teacher was doing the most monumental activity, only Einstein comparable to him, and that was Neils Bohr and the development of quantum mechanics in Copenhagen in Denmark. Delbruck found himself there and found himself among the most brilliant handful of men on the planet. He became immersed in people like Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli and himself and Einstein.
Out of this came this conviction that somehow for Delbruck he realised that the reality of any kind of atomic structure down to waves and particles, that kind of fundamental emergence out of energy into form also would hold all the way into organic forms, into organic chemistry, into molecular structure, into the genes, into the structure of the proteins, and that somehow it would take an enormous transformation of the development of quantum mechanics and physics to carry it through into biology. But fortunately there was a Linus Pauling who had already carried it through into chemistry and one could just take the chemistry and expand that into biochemistry.
So Delbruck shifted from quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, into looking for a way to begin to look at molecular life from a quantum mechanical transform of matter and energy. He decided that the place to look was at the most primitive form of life that one could find there, that there are bacteria which become infected by viruses and produce bacteriophages known as phage for short. Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology is one of the standard books in the world of the way in which the double helix and all of the developments of the late 20th century and early 21st century had their beginnings. There is a section here, we'll come to it after the break, James D. Watson, Growing Up in the Phage Group. He found himself, fortuitously, exactly with the right group of people at the right time, like Delbruck had found himself. The difficulty for Watson is that people like Pauling and Delbruck paid no attention to some little university brat like James D. Watson and so he had to outdo them and outdo them he would.
Let's come back to the deepening in penetration. Whenever our experience is able to flow concurrently with nature, we know that because of a certain tone of mysteriousness. What we do bridges in the objective actions that we take and unites because of being between the flows of nature and of experience, that myth and nature flow together, it is the inside out obverse of a river that flows between two banks. The two banks, in their sinuous pairedness, are the way in which the river flows. But if the two flows are the banks inside out then the bank that will occur will be modulated by the tunedness of the flows. So the ritual objectivity of what we do in actual existence will have a certain quality of togetherness. Not that it is in a straight line, necessarily, or that it is in a curve, that is smooth, though the traditional ways of talking about that were 'Make straight the ways of the Lord' by purification, by bringing your experience in with nature, or the smoothness of the curve in that the well-rounded life occurs because one, in one's experience and nature, which are really synergetic together, in between one's existence and one's activities has that smoothness of curve or that straightness of purity. But one can have any quality of objectivity in its movement because of understanding that it isn't a stream of nature that flows and a stream of experience that flows but that they are fields. They are fields of dynamic and because they extend themselves without limit, the quality of existence is that it is not imprisoned by its forms but it is released into vitality and fertility in its forms.
So the actual objective fact of how existence really does emerge and emerges unified and emerges evolving and emerges vibrant in its iterative energy stability, all of this becomes apparent. The classic way to speak of it is it becomes beholdable. They used to use in the translation, in Elizabethan times, of the Bible they used to use the term 'Lo!' with an exclamation mark, 'Lo and behold, here it is.' It is that sudden surprising indelibility of beholding that this is the way existence really occurs, vibrantly and impressively and that that existence is not only vibrant and impressive here, now, but that it incorporates into its here-now vitality, ancient nature and ancient experience back without limit, into the full open fields of nature in its universality and experience in its voracity.
And so the truthfulness of unlimited open experience and the actualness that emerges out of a natural complete openness gives to the ritual quality an ability to not only be vibrant in its subjectivity but later when the mind, when the symbolic mind emerges, not only out of the mythic experience, but if the natural field is coextensive with the field of experience when the symbolic mind emerges by integrating experience, integrating the images, integrating the feelings, integrating especially the oral language into a written language, you will find that it carries with it the extra dynamic of nature. And so the mind will have not only the integral of one's images and one's feelings, one's language, one's experience but will also have that deeper mysterious quality of having the voracity, of having a natural mind. It shows up in that the way in which the unnatural mind achieves its sense of identification is that it matches the ideas of the mind through the images, through the language, through the feelings, with bits and pieces and parts of objective existence and then says this referent, this referentiality proves the identification, proves that this identification is right.
The integrator of that is one's conception of oneself, 'Ah, I am my body. When my body behaves and does this just the way that I believe it should be done then I am who I am.' This identification is like an artificial imposition, so that experience in between that artificial paired imposition only has a very narrowed way in which it can go. So the character of one's experience assumes an enforced, imposed, artificial quality called the ego. Someone in the Vajrayana once described the ego as a 'tempest in a teapot.' No matter how powerful your ego is, stand on the beach in front of the ocean some day. Look up into the starry sky some day. For those young enough, when you get up above the earth's atmosphere at the first Hilton space hotel and you stand outside of the hotel's lobby and face infinity, you will know that your ego, no matter how powerful, is infinitesimally welcomed by a sense that almost encourages you to let it go.
The first human being to ever experience that was Colonel Ed White who made the first EVA from a Gemini capsule. I use the first human being to ever step outside of his capsule above the earth in space and to be able to look down and eclipse the entire earth by his hand and look out away from the earth into the infinite openness of actual nature in its universal reality. His experience expanded instantly to that, and when he was given the commands to come back into the capsule he did not hear nor obey. Finally, after an embarrassed sequence which was edited severely in the transcripts, McDivitt in Gemini was ordered to pull him back in by the umbilical cord which was coated in gold, and White, reluctantly, was pulled back in by this gold umbilical cord back into his capsule where he would be canned and he would be left back into the mission control excursion. But there was a famous photo before he was pulled in by McDivitt of White undergoing this mystical elation because the umbilical cord was not straight out but it was curled around like a birth umbilical cord is when the baby is already delivered, the baby is already out, is already freed from the womb and the umbilical is not tied to the mother anymore but the placenta is freed and the birth has occurred. There was a cover of Life magazine back at the time in which it happened.
Part of what we are doing in our learning is so vast and so new that it takes an acclimation by incremental exposures to be able to begin to absorb what is going on. When we are having our Saturdays together and we are looking, not at pairs of books as texts which we are following but we are using them like in a creative play way and using them to generate a frequency, an energy wave of our learning, we have two ways in which that energy wave is fortified. One, by giving it a deeper actuality by accumulating that energy wave in such a way that it intensifies. That intensification makes of it then an ability for it to lead the way into new forms, into new emergences, into new intensities of the process. It's like if you take an atom, let's say an atom of oxygen and you pair it with two atoms of hydrogen, that molecule of H2O, of water, if that liquid is dropped in temperature below freezing, it will condense more from water into ice and the atoms actually will shrink. The electron shells of the hydrogen and the oxygen actually go closer to the nucleus and the atoms crowd closer together and so you get a solid, or, if you reverse that temperature and you heat that water molecule to above boiling, each of the atoms in that molecule will expand, about ten times. The electrons orbiting the nucleus of the hydrogen will go out about ten times from that, the oxygen in the same way, the molecule the same way, so that now you have a gas. Just as the temperature gradient allows for phases, not only of solid and liquid and gas but there is a very high powered phase called plasma, there is a whole physics of plasma, physics, there is a whole chemistry, there is a biochemistry, there is a learning plasma as well.
What we are doing, is we are learning to tune ourselves away from the standard solid kinds of learning to encompass all the different kinds of phases of learning that we are capable and which is possible now. The difficulty is that the acclimation to this is a bit of a surprise and also takes patience. It takes the continuity of patience and the ability to be open to surprise at the same time, so that it is both a yoga in its patience and concentration and it is also a creative play time in its surprises, so that you get a playful yoga, or a creative imaginative way of being focused and unfocused at the same time.
The way in which we get that pilot wave is that we look back to the previous phase, from Nature the previous phase was Science. If we look back to Science, not just to the tapes of Science, but back especially to the notes, because the notes are a written, symbolic intensification and background to whatever the presentation was. If you go back to the notes, and we are at Nature 10 now and we look at Science 10, Science 10 is the large scale structure of Feynman diagrams and you will have in there a series of notes on Science 10, which, if you read along with coming to the Nature 10, or listening to the tape of Nature 10, or watching the DVD, as many of you are, of Nature 10, this pair together make what is called a pilot wave. It is a kind of a vector that has not only a vector in a Cartesian space or in a Newtonian way but is able to be factored into a new quality of ratioability with a second vector, a second wave, which is established.
This pairing of the notes with the phase that is going on will make a pilot wave but the reference wave is made by the year-long readings and the year-long reading has four different tracks. You can use The Tale of Genji, you can use The Odyssey, you can use Moby Dick or you can use like the example today of Ovid's Metamorphoses. A year-long reading so that what you are looking at here has a referentiality out of its phase, out of its particular weekly presentation into the entire cycle: the entire integral cycle of a year, the entire differential ecology of the second year. Now if you are using Ovid's Metamorphoses as the track, you would look into our course chart and you would find that under week 10 it's page 65 in the world's classics and it's a short reading. This reading is all about Ovid giving us the Metamorphoses, dealing with Pentheus and Bacchus, with Dionysius and Pentheus, the ruler of Athens at one time. In fact, this part of the Metamorphoses, when put into Greek tragedy, was the last great Greek tragedy, The Bacchae by Euripides, so that when we look towards the next phase Ritual, we find in the third place, the third pair of Ritual, we will use Euripides' Bacchae and pair it with Bashō's Zen travel log, The Narrow Road to the Deep North so that constantly there is an inter-penetration.
It took a long time to get the right materials balanced in the right way so that the entire double cycle of 104 80 minute presentations would be able to be experienced on every conceivable level of organisation, either integral or differential. The creative aspect that comes out of this is that the more that you play with this and come into contact with others who are playing with this, the possibilities of variation rise asymptotically. If you have 100 people doing this, you already have enough complexity. I used to call it, years ago, the 13 ring circus. If you had a million people doing this, and interchanging, you would have more variety than all of the varieties of human nature total on the planet since it was first emergent to Homo sapiens 160,000 years ago. If you have a billion people dong this you would have more variety than anyone could have imagined at the same time of having this huge expansion of the variety of human beings and the varieties of the ways of being human. You would have nodes of pulses of synergy of similar resonanted people who would be whole communities of new ways of form, not based upon politics, not based upon religious sects, not based upon social class or positions but emerging naturally out of the iterative cycles, the concentrated pulses, the shareable nexes of our way of enquiring. It is extendable, not only off the planet and into the star system but out of the star system but into the universe as a whole, in general.
Let's come back for just a second, and we're going to close out a little early today, let's come back to Linus Pauling. Already by 1935 his introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry, he says on p.51 because the whole first 50 pages was like a prelude leading up to the use of the Schrodinger wave equation not to just displace or replace the Newtonian or Cartesian mathematics and equations of the way in which one is looking to nature, that looking to nature through those kinds of equations, through those kinds of principles, those kinds of laws produced a mechanical universe that could be mechanically, abstractly thought of in the mind to the extent that the mind would no longer need to access nature but only its development, logically, of the logical structure of its conceptions about nature. So one could become literally frozen and imprisoned in your mind without you knowing, which is exactly what happened.
One of the qualities that came out with the Schrödinger equations was that they were not based on the mind at all but on transforms of space itself and of time itself. Pauling says in this way, 'Schrödinger's system of dynamics differs from that of Newton and the French mathematician of the later time Le Grange, and of an English Mathematician Hamilton, differed from them in its aim as well as its method, both ways. Its objective forms and its dynamic processes were different.' Instead of attempting to find equations such as Newton's equations which enable a prediction to be made of exact positions and velocities of the particles of a system in a given state of motion, he devised a method of calculating a function of the coordinates of the system, the dimensions of space themselves, and of time, and not the momenta or the velocities, so that he took it out of the mechanical world view and put it into the open observable actuality of nature on the pre-atomic level, on the way in which pre-atomic sub-particles actually emerge out of energy waves in the first place and to carry the emergence from wave into particle as the measuring metronome of what you are working with.
The difficulty for the old mechanical mind was that it could not conceive of working in this way and so it did a blink thing with time and space. Out of this came a criticism that there was an uncertainty then about actuality because one could keep track of the spatial position but not of the time, so that space and time were split. But this is an artefact of a split personality called the individuality of the conceiver and the existential actuality of the emergent objectivity from nature. The filter that should have shown that, because the character of actual experience melding with nature would have shown that, it would have been like a window through which one could have seen clearly some errors have been made here. Errors in mental assumptions, errors in physical measuring but the window was opaqued and had become dirty and cloudy and we can even make a gross bug body splotched, because the ego is much like that. The ego, as Shakespeare called it, through a glass darkly.
One cannot see through the ego, one sees the splotches and must not pay attention to that. And so the mind assumes that it is looking through, assumes that what it is seeing is jibing, that the referents are all linking up together and the way it does this is that it posits an image of the character in the mind and looks through that image in the mind, that assumption in the mind. And so the ego is actually a false characterisation that is the, supposedly, frame of reference for the mental individual and the ritual figure, figuration, and that the configuration then is in this egotistical frame of self image. It is this self image that doesn't exist. It is an artefact of a way of not looking through to nature, through to the actual actuality of existence, those objectivities that really do exist. And so it took a long time to wake up and modify and refocus experience by experiment, until it finally, in the late 1920s, early 1930s, for a handful of people, wiped not only the glass darkly clean in the mind but disclosed that there was no frame, it was actually an openness, that the frame itself was an assumption and so what one came was the realisation that nature is an open world.
Here is The Challenge of an Open World: Essays Dedicated to Neils Bohr. One of the deepest qualities that Bohr constantly wanted to present and to teach and to host and finally to alert on the world scale, world class level, he personally came to the United States in terms of developing the atomic bomb and met with Roosevelt, FDR, and said to him, very explicitly, 'There is no possibility of any other way of human life now other than a completely open world that, given the situation that has obtained before, it is only a matter of time before there is oblivion by nuclear weapons. It is not something that can be avoided in any political way whatsoever. It cannot be avoided by any religious conviction, though the convictions themselves have their religious validity, they will have nothing to do with the actuality of what comes out of this.' Bertrand Russell, I remember hearing him in the early 1960s, he was nearing his 90s at the time, he said 'Man has never made a weapon that he hasn't used.'
The open world is a world of freedom, of variation and is the only possible expansion into the future now that we have come to this level of complexity. The key to it all is that out of the energies and dynamics of nature as a field of energy will come a distinguishing hallmark of all things that come into emergent existence. They all will have, Pauling's classic book is called The Nature of the Chemical Bond, everything will have a way in which its bonding will hold it together into unities, so that you can not only have a hydrogen atom or an oxygen atom but you can have a water molecule or you can have more complex molecules that are able to build. There will be, finally, a master molecule, very huge, that carries, through its special bonds, its chemical atomic bonds, in exactly the right ratios and proportions, and that this molecule will be the key to the carrier of the information and that the information will be carried by sequences that are able to be expanded indefinitely because nature has this ability to enlarge the field of the energy of creativeness indefinitely, it's unlimited, and that what will happen is that organic and inorganic manifestations on the level of atomic, molecular and cellular and so forth will always seek new varieties.
The constraints that will be there will be constraints on the possibilities of them actually coming into existence, so that it is not so much survival of the fittest that works in evolution, it is the emphasis on what is successfully emergeable and does emerge. It isn't a struggle for fitness, but rather it is a creative tension for emergence. The key to this, as we are seeing, is not to lead with the mind, but to let the play of nature occur first and let what can really emerge out of that field of nature actually achieve its emergence, come into existence. When that baby is born, that baby now has emerged, is, was a part of the mother, now has emerged, still has the resonance, still had the harmonic but now has a unity which is not different from the mother's but has a concomitant quality. The child will be a resonance, not only of the mother, but of the father, will carry also a resonance of the mother's mother and father, the father's mother and father, will carry a resonance of many different levels, many different cycles.
One can finally come to the species, Homo sapiens sapiens, and that will be a resonance, as we'll see, indeed, next week, deeper and deeper, that species and speceisation and phyla and all of the enlarging nests of cycles in context are a gift from nature, so that emergent existence can be on multiple levels, not just many, but of unbelievable complexity and they still will work in the sense of being unities. A ratio of 2:3 is not split between 2 and 3. It can be a unity of two thirds, it can be a unity of the proportion 2:3 or 3:4.
One finds, even on the level of star system, the whole Kuiper Belt, this world is because of a harmonic resonance proportion, because of Neptune. One can prorate this and find that all the planets of the star system are in these harmonic resonances and that stars themselves occupy this, galaxies occupy this, so that the ability for us to, not only emerge and become existentially real, so that our figuration is not only exact, but is free. Free to participate, then, in generating a quality of experience that can both flow with nature and be absorbed by nature but nature can also absorb us. In doing so the actual field of nature becomes mysterious. Each one of us have added a mysterious unique vibration to the field of universal nature and it is indelible. It registers.
Someone, Lord Kelvin, I think once, and Schrödinger used it as an example, said that if you took a glass of water and you poured it into all the oceans of the world and then you took a glass of water from any part of any depth of the oceans of the world, you would find in that glass of water more than 100 molecules of the original water already, on an average; that the immensity of the complexity does not obviate every aspect of, not just slowly modifying the whole, but of adding a facet to the whole. So if one was able to look at the jewel of reality, it would have more facets than one could count and still be unified and still be expandable into infinity. This is not only mysterious but is magical as well. More next week.