Nature 11

Let's come to nature 11. And make a complementarity clearer. Traditional education assumes that everything integrates around the mind. And this is natural because the mind is natural. But wisdom learning recognises that possibilities differentiate from conscious transforms and this is reality.
So that our learning is both natural and real. And takes an integral - as well as a differential. And this is traditionally something that is not done and in wisdom heritages, it was always shunned. Because to try to mix the traditional natural with the wisdom conscious proved in large scales to be incommensurate - oil and water. They did not mix.
The unfortunate quality of our time is that this still carries over and the real wisdom traditions that are tremendously powerful are selective to the point of almost rejecting everyone else. You have to go through initiations, you have to apprentice yourself for a lifetime etc. Whereas the tradition education limits itself to what can be grasped by the mind. And so a mental structure is certainly the integral of nature. But view anything beyond it as either fictitious, irrational or unproven. And so the problem for ordinary cognitive studies is consciousness. And the problem for consciousness is how to reach the cognitive integral.
In the twentieth century, the ability to penetrate through to levels of nature that were truly mysterious and then truly magical have flushed again the possibility that a wisdom tradition can be brought into a complementarity with a traditional education. And that is what has been essayed here in the process that I have developed for the last forty years or more.
We are taking nature first and trying to understand that we are not understanding nature with our minds pre-emptively. And so to make it clear as a structure of what we are doing would be to sabotage the very learning that is going to develop. Nature has a very peculiar quality to it and the best summing up in a sentence was from a Max Delbruck at Caltech in 1949 and it's collected here in a volume 'Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology'. The quotation is this - 'A mature physicist acquainting himself for the first time with the problems of biology is puzzled by the circumstance that there are no absolute phenomena in biology. Everything is time bound and space bound. The animal or plant or micro-organisms is but a link in an evolutionary chain of changing forms none of which has any permanent validity.'
This is a scientist writing. Max Delbruck was early on one of those genius physicists. He went to study with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen right at the very beginnings of quantum mechanics. But he found increasingly that the problems that really attracted him were in biology and not in physics. And that the development of quantum mechanics was the development of a peculiar complementarity that was discovered not at the foundation of nature but in the actual reality of nature. That there were no phenomenon that really were real. Yet they definitely exactly existed.
And so one had this puzzle, which is a classic wisdom puzzle - how can anything exist though it is not real? What then is reality? And the wisdom inside is that reality is always an ecology of transformations that are able to flow within the dynamic of nature before anything emerges into existence. So that consciousness itself is a visionary dynamic and not a form. And that the visionary dynamic gives rise eventually to peculiar kind of forms that are not integral. And there are two sets... two kinds of these forms that are not integral. They are differential forms, differential conscious forms. And they are the forms of art, and the forms of science.
And this was very difficult when it was first broached in a classic way by Pythagoras about 2500 years ago, that the arts and sciences are not in the mind - they are numina from conscious vision.
And so if we look at existential things in the world as phenomena, and the integral in the mind as phenomena, they are phenomenal forms and natural but they do not include initially the conscious ecology. There has to be a peculiar kind of double transform that happens. The first transform is that conscious vision must flow within the dynamic of nature. The other - which is a compliment to it at the other end of the cycle of nature, is that the mind must give up its exclusive integral self conception and open itself up to an infinite non-integral, non-self person. The tried and true way to express this in an antiquity was a transform of the very ancient 4000 year old integral way of speaking that our life consisted of thought, word and deed. Thought as a symbol, word as spoken language - the myth. And deed as the rituals, the things we do.
And the first person to say thought, word and deed in that order with that triplet was Zartosht about 2000 BC. But the Pythagorean transform of that came right at the very same time that a similar transform was being made in India by the historical Buddha and in China by Lao Tse.
And so we had three exemplary teaching individuals about 2500 hundred years ago that made a further development and evolution from thought, word and deed, that it was now body, mind and spirit. That thought, word and deed was subsumable in the integral structure of the mind but that the spirit was something other than and beyond the mind. Something other than and beyond the body and that the spirit inherited a quality from its immergence - not from nature and not from nethi, but its immergence from vision, in that as vision could operate within nature, spirit could operate within the body, and also operate within the mind.
And so one had 2500 years ago a startling realisation that once you have vision flowing within nature you now have the ability to have a spirit body and a spiritual mind. And this was a huge evolutionary jump, almost a jump too big to be able to communicate anything other than very small groups. Mostly either one to one or very small communities or by trying to spread out and distribute the long quality of attention that it needed to affect this transform of committing oneself to a whole lifetime of development.
Like in India, the Sangha were the monks who devoted their entire lives then to discovering what this would amount to and what this would be.
In China it was always the rare odd hermit individual, the poet gardener, extracting themselves out from society and living out in the streams and mountains without end, among the pines and the fog.
In the Pythagorean Greek world it was always special, small communities of people - not tiny communities, but composed of at the most several hundreds of persons at the centre and a thousand or two or three surrounding them and then benefiting larger populations of people. The Pythagorean communities had a centre of those who could consciously see spirit forms - and they were called mathematiquee, not arithmetic. Not arithmetiquee! But mathematiquee. Because they could see proportionate harmonic forms not in their mind but in the transformed mind which had now a creative imagination quality to it that the natural mind does not have. And the traditional way of speaking was that this was supernatural or this was transcendent, when actually those terms are mythic and the correct term for it is that is was differential.
It was able not to focus on existential objects, nor on mental representations of those objects in a symbolic structure but it was able to broaden so that its focus was on the array. It was on the rainbow rather than the thing. And so one of the earliest transparent symbols was that of the rainbow - the spectrograph, the array, the colours. And it's interesting because at the beginnings of the development of molecular biology and it's great, huge transform of quantum mechanics physics through the mediation of quantum chemistry, its immediate development came because of colour.
When the microscope was invented in the 19th century and it was seen that one could make little glass slides and take little smidgens of things and out them on the glass slide that you could see finer and finer with more and more powerful microscopes. And finally you got to such a complexity in order to look at very, very tiny things, it was discovered that you could make certain dyes and that these dyes would stain the sample and through a stained sample one could pick out minute structure more and more and that's how the name chromosome came around. They were the smallest coloured forms that one could see under a microscope. That it wasn't just in the cell and it wasn't just in the nucleus but somehow in the cell, in the nucleus on some deep mysterious third ultimate level were coloured little squiggles called chromosomes because they were coloured in the slides.
This is from the DNA story: James D Watson and his buddy John Tooze. Here is the nucleus of the cell and here are the chromosomes. And what's interesting about the chromosomes is that they always appear in pairs. And in order for them to develop to be fertile, their pairedness must also be paired and so you also have four. And that allows for the two pairs to split into two new cells that are exactly like the cell before and this is called mitosis.
And so one always finds evenness, pairedness, symmetry in the development of life on the chromosomal level, except for a peculiarity in man. In man we do not have just 22 chromosomes but we have 23. and the twenty third chromosome is slightly out of symmetry. It is slightly out of balance. And it is the sexual gender chromosome. And what is interesting is that one of the twenty-third chromosomes is completely in balance - called the X chromosome. And all females have this X chromosome balance, whereas males have a Y chromosome that is out of balance and can only re-establish balance by some kind of higher order of coming together, by a complementarity that then achieves the ability to have a symmetry even though one has something that actually... if one were a stickler for mental form, one would have to think that men were an irrational, degradation of the symmetry of nature. Whereas this is not the case at all. It is that there is a mysteriousness involved in this that has a huge development later on in the magical transforms of the third level of nature - not just nature or mysterious nature but magical nature.
Within the chromosome there are long squiggles of DNA and the DNA is a special version of a nucleic acid that was really ribonucleic acid that had a very interesting structure. That was carbon atoms mixed in with oxygen atoms in a very precise structure. But that that nucleic acid came in a pair of varieties - one of them had all the oxygen and the carbon atoms nicely balanced in the molecule, ribonucleic acid - RNA, whereas the DNA was missing an oxygen atom, and so DNA is very much like the Y chromosome that gives rise the male. DNA gives rise to a potential imbalance, a breaking of symmetry which needs to be re-established later on through higher orders of its ability, not only to integrate but to differentiate enough to achieve higher orders. It's called ordinal. Ordinal.
So the DNA has a peculiar quality to it. It cannot only work with evens, it can also work with odds. Now we are talking in Pythagorean terms. It can not only work with twos and fours but it can also work with one unity and with threes, a triad, a triplet. And one found that with the double helix with the two, its double helical co path spiralling held four nucleic acids - cetirizine, guanine, adenine and thiamine, and only four. But that as the two with the four did its helical structuring, the actual working grammar of that process was a three part triplet that together then allowed for a unity, a one to emerge. And then if you took a number ... a huge number, sometimes millions, of these triplet codons, they would write out in a transcription the recipe for proteins to be made and for those proteins then to allow for life on increasingly evolutionary complicated structures right up until our time where there are literally tens of thousands of proteins. You have all heard of the genome of the genetic code of the entire life possibilities on our planet being catalogued. The next big thing is the proteome where every single protein of every single life form of our planet will be given a place in a dictionary encyclopaedia. And that is coming within the next 10 years.
What is interesting is that if you take a codon that is a triplet, it's a triplet of three pairs. Because the adenine always pairs itself with the thiamine and the guanine always pairs itself with cetirizine and so they are always paired so when you have a triplet you actually have three pairs or you have a six. And that that six quality makes one sensitive to the fact that we began our nature phase of our learning with the I Ching. And that the operative quality in the I Ching were a pair of trigrams that made up a hexagram and now we have three pairs that make up a six and it turns out that any three codons when spelt out together will make a unit that one can count integrally, that goes to make up a structure. And finally all of the genetic code turns out to have a 64 codon - just like the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching possibility. And the cover here has the DNA codon set arranged just like the hexagrams of the echang.
The man who discovered this was Sydney Brenner. And My Life in Science shows him to have been a very ordinary looking young man which turned out to be one of the geniuses in world history to figure how exactly how does this double helix which was one of the great all time discoveries- how it work? How does it speak in the code? And what then is the code? Because if one can figure out that this is a code and these are the elements in it, then one can learn to learn the recipes of life, of all life, all life forms. And this turned out to be the case.
But it took a number of years for this to happen. The double helix which we are using along with the macro evolution of the new developments that are here now in evolutionary theory. The double helix was published in 1958 but the initial articles in nature were published in 1953, April 1953. it took 8 years for Brenner to find this is what is going on. That triplet codons will be able to in different arrangements to express something that is fundamental on the level of the 20 amino acids. And that all 20 can be specified by recipes of these triplet codons. And one of the sweetest little presentations of this is in a comic, an intellectual comic book introducing genetics. And they do like I do with the presentation notes - they scribble and write and draw and make cute little statements that are almost like the opposite of codons. You understand right away what they mean. And here are all the 20 amino acids in their little jars with the recipes on them of the various codons. How ... just how does it get from the double helix DNA and those triplet codons that are there - how does it get to make those proteins. And the answer is that there is at ripple function of the ribonucleic acid - the RNA. And it took a long time. It took almost six or seven years for RNA to be finally understood. And longer to understand just the complexity of how this works and part of how it works is that a single strand of RNA can anneal itself to a DNA strand and can read out from half of the DNA one strand of it and replicate what would be the compliment to it in the nucleus of the cell, only the RNA being on the outside and not being made in the same double helical parallel but being on the outside allows for the RNA to go outside the nucleus of the cell. And go into the cytoplasm of the cell itself.
And this initial RNA is called messenger RNA or just MRNA. But it had to have - because it carried the message, the transcription, it had to have some other aspect of itself that could do the translation. So the messenger RNA carries out the transcription outside the nucleus into the cytoplasm where all the elements of the amino acids and many other things are available, the transfer RNA comes out into the cytoplasm and collects the different amino acids and begins to want to arrange them, but it can't by itself arrange them. So between the transcription and the translation there had to be a middle kind of RNA that came out from the nucleus and made a structure that would allow for the transcription to be read in translation and that structure is called a rivasone .
And so RNA had again like a thrice greatest quality, where one part of it was able to do the transcription, the second part was able to take the transcription and put it into a translation and the third was to make the translation real. These amino acids, sometimes very long strands, went together and curled and one then had exactly that protein. And those proteins by the ten of thousands in evolution are available to do an incredible array of life processes.
Now we are not at science, we are at nature, so we are trying to understand that from a nature quality what is really going on here, is that there is a dynamic in nature that is capable of deepening twice over. And as it deepens in between each of the three levels of its deepening dynamic there is an interface in which forms come together and exist, stably. So that in between nature and mysterious nature one has the forms of existence. And they are not real, they are phenomenal. And in between the dynamic of mysterious nature and magical nature there are likewise forms, symbolic mental forms, ideas, mind structure. And they are not real either but they are also phenomenal. And because they are not yet real, but phenomenal and because they have both immerged form integral processes and the flow of nature itself and the flow of mysterious nature is what we call culture, is what we call the mythic horizon. What we call language, feelings, images. So that when a third level, magical nature, the visionary consciousness comes to flow within the flow of nature you now have bodies that have a transformability which allows for them to have an increasing differential variety, not just a variety leading to a further integral. But a differentiation that helps those variations to become truly a basis upon which one could then have a truly magical quality of consciousness eventually, bit one would have definitely now the ability to generate - not just an integral mystic culture, but a mysterious mythic culture.
And so one has consciousness coming to flow in nature so that the rituals enrich enough so that the cultural experience, the language that comes out of it, the images that comes out of that, now have a scintillating quality that was not there before: they have a mysteriousness. And because our experience, our culture has a mysteriousness, it also then is a kind of a matrix out of which is easier for a mind to emerge that is not closed but is open to mystery, open not only to its natural origins but to its mysterious origins as well.
And in doing so the mind instead of being a closed structure becomes an open integral structure. And the best way... the classic was of talking about it was that the mind becomes transparent, invisible. So that the transparent mind to the perception of someone who is limited to phenomena sees someone with a transparent mind as not there. Or to be polite... not all there. There is something missing in them, they are weird. It's that they are largely transparent. And out of that transparency the dynamic of visionary consciousness now gains in amperage. Instead of being just a very small little bit of insight that one has - maybe in the flash of a moment or maybe in the juxtaposition of something in space... now instead of just being little insight flashes, it has an enduring quality of continuing. But its continuation is in a different kind of time and in a different kind of space. It is in a transform space and in a transform time. And now consciousness gains an incredible voracity not to make another form like existence... existential things, or mental symbolic things, but to make artistically spiritual prisms, prismatic forms. And that those prismatic forms are able to inhabit the place in which pragmatic forms had previously been dominant. And now prismatic forms become dominant. That is they take the lead and the lead goes to the spirit rather than the body. The body is still there but the body is still cared for in a spiritual way. And it's up to the mind to do a turnaround that it can no longer just identify with the body but it must weave with the spirit and bring the body along with it.
Twenty years after the initial papers on DNA - the double helix, it was found and realised that the genetic code structure operative in bacteria ware also in plasmids and they make rings, the make circles. And that with a certain kind of RNA incision, one could snip a break in the plasmid circle and another break and then take that section of the plasmid DNA in the bacteria out and replicate a sequence of DNA which would then be inserted and joined to that and you would recombinant DNA and this produced a crisis in 1973. All of a sudden everything in genetics became a huge question mark, because not only was it possible to do this on a little scale but one could do it in thousand litre vats on an industrial scale and all of a sudden you had a dangerous outcry everywhere in the world and they held a conference in New Hampton, New Hampshire. And several of the people there at the Gordon Conference, fromYale University sent a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, July 17th 1973.
'We are writing to you on behalf of a number of scientists to communicate a matter of deep concern. Several of the scientific reports presented at this years Gordon Research Conference on nucleic Acids, June 15th 1973, indicated that we presently have the technical ability to join together covalently DNA molecules from diverse sources. Scientific developments over the past two years make it both reasonable and convenient to generate overlapping sequence homologies at the termini of the different DNA molecules, the sequence homologies can then be used to combine the molecules by Watson Crick hydrogen bonding....'
And then it goes on to say:
'In this was new kinds or hybrid plasmids of viruses with biological activity of unpredictable nature may eventually be created. These experiments offer exciting and interesting potential both for advancing knowledge of fundamental biological processes and for the alleviation of health problems'.
One of the first recombinant triumphs was the way to make insulin on vast quantities cheaper. And then there was a concerted effort to work with pneumonia viruses. And several successes came out of this but with it was an increasing realisation that the potential hazard was almost more than anyone could possibly imagine and so one began to have documents like this statement from the International Journal of Science, November 9th 1973. The headline 'Micro Biology Hazardous: Profession faces new uncertainties' and it went on ...The New Scientist - 'Benefits and hazards of manipulating DNA.' And dozens and dozens and dozens of these documents were collected together in the DNA story by Watson and his friend John Tooze because their work at the Cold Spring harbour laboratory on Long Island was increasingly at the centre of the controversy and the development. One of the expansions of the double helix was for Watson to write - and this was the first edition, the molecular biology of the gene. The later editions of the molecular biology of the gene are huge two volumes tomes -and we are on the fifth edition and it is much more than a thousand pages of highly detailed work.
But even beyond this, because Watson is a very interesting character. Challenged as being somewhat of an amateur, somewhat of a trickster in the film 'The Race for the Double Helix' he is played by Jeff Goldblum, who is constantly wiggling his eyes and chewing gum and very sneaky, and cleverly trying to pull the rabbit out of the hat and beat everyone at the finding of the structure of DNA, especially the arch intellectual genius rival Linus Pauling.
Recently Cold Spring Harbour Laboratories put out a video film Discovering the Double Helix, filming speech by the old James D Watson - he is now in late seventies. And when one sees the difference between the caricature of Jeff Goldblum in Race for the Double Helix and the old sage like James D Watson, you begin to get that what has occurred here is not just a deepening and an expansion but the mysteriousness of all of this was centred on the molecular biology of the gene. That genes were indeed now on a level of mysterious nature while the double helix form of DNA was definitely in the flow of nature, the gene is definitely in the higher, more complex integral flow of where our experience in mythic culture, in language - oral language especially, in our characters as feeling beings.
And there was a third level which was in the first edition - I will bring it next week - The Molecular Biology of the Cell, and already in the first edition it was about 1300 pages and went into this huge expansion that now we are able not only to have the structure of DNA and the molecule biology of the gene but the molecular biology of the cell. And it's on the level of the cell like on the level of atomic structure that one gains an ability to have a differential consciousness about forms - not only in the universe but in the cosmos which has more dimensions than just universal nature. Universal nature has only four dimensions. And they split themselves not 2:2 but they split themselves 1:3. The dimension of time is definitely factorable separate from the three dimensions of space. In fact one of the most powerful of all the equations in the twentieth century aside for E=MC2 by Einstein or z=z2 + c by Mandelbrot for the fractural equation.... It is the Erwin Schrödinger wave equation of quantum mechanics. And it was Schrödinger's genius to show that if you bring the time element and the space element into a multiple between them they are able to characterise to any extent the accuracy and the exactness of all nature in its processes and in its forms. In its energy forms and its dynamical processes.
Schrödinger who was extremely disliked by the Nazis, went to Ireland to Dublin and there in 1943, at the end of '42, just the beginning of '43 when the world was very much under the possible dark shadow of not only a Europe taken over by the Nazis but that they might very well prevail in the second world war since they were being aided and abetted on the other side of the world bye the Japanese empire and by the Italian fascists of Mussolini and that that is huge axis of tyrannical empire seemed to be spanning all of the Eurasian continent and reaching across the pacific threatening America on the west coast from Japan and threatening America from the east coast from Germany.
And in the midst of this Schrödinger wrote a little book called 'what is Life'. and he took his cue from Max Delbruck who had shifted from quantum mechanics and physics to biology in trying to understand - and especially in trying to understand we have to have some kind of a frame of reference which allows us to get to the nitty gritty of what is going on in he process and what structures are involved, and what he chose was a viral form, a bacteriophage, called phage, which is able to infect bacteria. And the infection of the bacteria is that the phage little needle is like a hollow pump that pumps its DNA into the bacteria and replicates itself many times over and uses the bacteria very much like man wanted later to use recombinant DNA on large scales, and many diseases come from this viral ability to infect bacteria which then broadcast and enlarge the effect on life on living organisms in just this way. All viral infections and bacterial infections in fact have origin in this very process.
In 'What is Life?' Erwin Schrödinger has a big chapter 5 - Delbruck's model discussed and tested. And the model was that at this time 1942, 1943, the book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1944, right at that time, Delbruck's model was that there must be a definite hereditary substance that can be found an analysed and discussed and that everything was leading to the fact that this was imminent. That what got in the way was we knew by that time that it had something to do with DNA.
But the structure of DNA was not known. And that there had to be someway in which nucleic acids were able to be ordered and arranged, so that instead of being random they were an information. And Schrödinger cleared the air for the first air. By the time he reaches page 59 of What is Life? '' he headlines it 'Different States of Matter'. Now I would not go so far as to say that all these statements and distinctions previously are quite wrong. For practical purposes they are sometimes useful. But in the true aspect of the structure of matter the limits must be drawn in an entirely new way. It's like this education... is recalibrating in which learning takes place in our species. It is not just a revolution, it is deeper. It is a recalibration. Schrödinger did this, at this stage of his little book 'What is Life?' in the midst of the Second World War. And he writes, 'The fundamental distinction is between the two lines of the following scheme of equations. The first line is a molecule is definitely a solid and definitely has a crystal form, whereas a gas can definitely be liquefied but whose form is amorphous.' Now we can see in retrospect that he is talking about integrals and differentials. That these are two modes that are deeper than the forms that the mind would have posited naturally and is only by someone who had a mathematical, spiritual, genius of consciousness to be able to penetrate through and see the limitations of the previous sachem .was just a scheme. It was a mental plan which was satisfying as long as one lived in mental planville. But as soon as consciousness in its spiritual, differential, genius came in to play, those metal structures were not only old and fragile, but that they were misleading, they were deceptive. And that to continue to work with them as if they were the way things should be was to invite a chaotic tyranny that ends with a devolvement - not an evolvement into life but a devolvement into dead ends. And so it was recognised in a broad swath of people about this time, in the midst of the second world war that we were dealing with a massive transform of humanity through a weaving of a more powerful, spiritual, conscious form of person than had been seen before except in rare individuals like the historical Buddha or bye the historical Jesus, or the historical Pythagoras. Now the incumbency on the human race was that it had to become a recalibration of not only many people but ... as many hundreds and millions of people was one could do so as quickly as one could do so. It was a race against time.
The difficulty Schrödinger points out - page 85 of What is Life? , in a section headlined 'The pendulum clock is virtually at zero temperature':
What about a pendulum clock? For a pendulum clock, room temperature is practically equivalent to zero. That is the reason why it works dynamically. It will continue to work as it does if you cool it, provided that you have removed all traces of oil, but it doesn't not continue to work if you heat it above room temperature, for it will eventually melt.
Then the relation between clockwork and organism. Now what is deep in this is that the clockwork universe was the hallmark of the wording of Cartesian geometry of the 17th century, about 1650s, 60s, with the Newtonian, Calculus mathematic of about the 1680s into a clockwork mechanistic universe.
What developed out of that was a predilection to look at all forms of dynamics as mechanical and all forms of energy forms as being specifically limited to the characterisations of their space and time.
This generation of human beings, fresh from the realisations of Einstein, of relativity of the Niels Bohr Copenhagen school of complementarity, of the huge transforms brought in the 1930s, late '20s, early '30s like Schrödinger and Dirac and many others - all of a sudden the question was 'Are we on a road to doom without having anyway to get off it?' Schrödinger wrote, ' That seems very trivial,' the relationship between clockwork and organism. 'That seems very trivial but it does, I think, hit the cardinal point - clockworks are capable of functioning dynamical because they are built of solids, which are kept in shape by certain forces strong enough to elude the disorderly tendency of heat motion at ordinary temperature.' Not just entropy but inference of the heat waves.
'Now I think few words more are needed to disclose the point of resemblance between a clockwork and an organism. It is simply and solely that the later' - the organism, 'also hinges upon a solid, the a-periodic crystal forming the hereditary substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of say heat motion.' So for the first time it was shown that the place where the finger will tie the bow and undo the knot is the structure that is disclosed in the crystal and form of DNA.
One of the most powerful of all of the books that came out from this is max Delbruck's Mind from Matter. If the mind is seen as purely natural it will be an integral of the natural cycle. And that's all there is to it. But if the mind is capable of having operating formally within it, a differential form of the spirit person, then it is not limited to the limitations of time and space or of integrals or of so called mechanical nature but is capable of exploring, indeed of adventuring, far beyond it. In fact the traditional saying - there was a saying of the arcane Jesus, he tells Mary Magdalene in the Pistis Sophia that when the spirit is really mature the realm of god's heaven opens so vast and far that the whole world looks like but a speck in the midst of the glory. A view from outside the galaxy looking in to just the star-system as a point of light. Pistis Sophia, the wisdom, the faith in the wisdom of Mary Magdalene.
One of the great crunches came in 1975 where the recombinant DNA which had been teased out over that whole generation from when the double helix was first presented, thirty years after Schrödinger's What is Life? was published and influenced almost everyone, was the Asilomar Conference. Asilomar is a suburb of Monterey, California. In the DNA story - a whole section on the Asilomar Conference. It reads, ' It would be extremely difficult ...' this is Watson writing, 'It would be extremely difficult to improve upon Michael Rogers' masterly description of the atmosphere at the Asilomar conference in February 1975 and we shall not try. Rogers' book, Biohazard, 1977, describing the early part of the recombinant DNA debate is also enjoyable reading and one can find Biohazard on the net. Michael Rogers.
The significant events at the conference took place during the last morning which was a confused some would say chaotic affair. After a crowded three day programme, members of the organising committee spent the final night drafting guidelines that included a scale of special laboratory safety procedures to match a scale of conjectural hazards imagined to be associated with specific classes of recommidant DNA experiments. So they brought these two mental lists together, under huge pressure. Not just world wide pressure, but world deep public fear.
Paul Berg, Chairman of the organising committee, was clearly set upon ensuring that a majority of the participants voted in favour of his committee's draft before the conference dispersed. Repeatedly however, precisely what was being put to the vote as the guidelines were discussed item by item, became totally obscure as suggestions and amendments from the floor threatened to overwhelm the chair. Moreover a small minority, namely, notably Stanley Cohen from Stanford, Joshua Lederberg from Stanford, James Watson, Cold Spring Harbour, expressed their opposition to the whole proceeding.
Watson, for example, had proposed that the moratorium be lifted and no special precautions or guidelines be self-imposed. With a different audience and in a different atmosphere this might very well have found more favour, but the majority of the Asilomar Conference either declared or failed vocally to deny that special guidelines were necessary. That at least they agreed that there were valid reasons for concern, there might be significant hazards.
One of the difficulties that Watson and his Stanford friends had pointed out - it's like a genie that has been let out of a bottle. You cannot put it back .because if you put it back it becomes a time bomb. That differential energy has more amperage than natural forms are able to contain. You will create a bio hazard explosion that is certain to come. It's the principle that if you keep repressing and keep repressing you will eventually have to have all of your energy put into the repression and it will not be enough. Boom! So that the big boom would be assured if this kind of attitude was enforced and taken. Because one is not gauging just mental forms of experience or existential forms of nature one is dealing with a multi dimensional cosmic dynamic now that does not stay in those forms and in fact it transforms those forms. That's what it does. So that consciousness cannot be stuck in a body existentially. It cannot be stuck in mind mentally. Because when it is in either, especially in both, it constantly does its transforms and they will change. Because nature accepts the change for existential and experience accepts the change for symbolic structures and ideas.
It was a complex issue that was not resolved for many years. One finds in here a whole guideline of the events that came out of it. And there was a whole move not to award any Nobel Prizes for recombinant DNA work. And yet, in 1980 the Nobel in Chemistry was awarded dually for the cloning of the first recombinant DNA molecule and the development of powerful methods for sequencing DNA. The following year, the first offering of general public stock in the first recombinant DNA company, Genentech, which capitalised at an initial $200 million in 1981.
What has happened in the quarter century since is that the complexity of the expansion has jumped many orders beyond what it was in 1975 or 1981, even in 1999. 2006 is already further expanded from that than it would have been from scratch, six or seven years ago. In other words the differentiation has taken a new quality to it where it is not only a visionary conscious differentiation but it has the extra amperage of historical consciousness now. And the historical consciousness produces science forms. And especially science forms that are facets of the largest differential form and that is the cosmos itself.
And one has to understand a very peculiar thing. For integrals that pull is always to come back into unity, into oneness, into a this-ness, a that-ness. Whereas differential forms differentiate increasingly into infinity. If someone has a prejudice against openness, they will become and enemy of antigen that seeks to open up. And the two forms that suffer - the forms of art and the forms of science. The forms of the person and the form of the cosmos. But those are conscious dimension forms. They call out with larger dimensional voices than voices of repression could ever even imagine. And we are being called to come and adventure, to come and explore. One of the greatest developments, just as a case in point - the great American astronomer Vera Ruben, after thirty years of very quiet work for the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC put together with her friend Kent Ford, the first proof that the visible universe that we see is only 4% of what is real. And that three-quarters of what is real is invisible, called 'Dark Matter'. And another almost quarter is invisible and is called Dark Energy. And that all of the stars and all of the galaxies that we see is but a frosting on the surface of what is real.
This development - and the development of the ability to go into expansions now that are so differentiated that one is able only with difficulty to remember some fundamentals. And one of the fundamentals is that the back bone of the double helix structure is a sequence of alternating sugars and phosphates. There will be a sugar molecule, there will be a phosphate molecule ... a sugar molecule, a phosphate molecule that the backings of the double helix in all life forms... sugar molecule, phosphate molecule, sugar molecule, phosphate molecule. If you look at the phosphate molecule it has a five point star shape. There are four oxygen atoms with potassium in the middle. Not potassium, but the phosphorous. The phosphorous atom in the middle has not only its atomic structure of the electrons going around the nucleus but as it goes around the nucleus like the earth going around the sun, also spins .
So you have charge, and you have spin, you have angular momentum and you have a gravitational attraction. You have all of these forces that are not separate forces like in a mechanical thing but they are like a choreographed dance . They are the vibrational dance. And however that phosphorous atom is tilted - if it's tilted about 45 degrees in the middle of the four oxygen atoms you will get a definite register in the way in which reality now existentially happens out of nature. It also will effect the way in which the minds integral reality will come out of the experience, largely the language experience. Largely the oral language experience. And oral language experience conveys what we call senescence, feeling, toned, understanding. And it's the base for the integration of intelligence. If the senescence is enriched enough and free enough to dance its language orally in singing, the integral of that in the mind will be an intelligence that understands song cognitively and recognises the genius of certain lyrics in songs consciously. And then one has the ability for poetic art. And if we have a poetic art, it will have a harmonic with a cosmos that tunes itself to the spirit of poetic art. Without our having beings that do this, the cosmos would not have that possibility.
So we are all very important because what is real calls out to us to participate in this. This recalibration takes education out of its dead end, which it inhabited now since the time of Descartes - the first person to recognise that was John Amos Comenius who tried valiantly in several major forums of education at the time, 350 years ago - to convey the indisputable actuality you must begin to educate children as soon as they reach the age of being able to talk to each other in an oral language way. About 4 years of age. And you have to have a universal education where all boys and girls together are educated in such a way that they have a common sharable basis out of which to have their education founded on a communicable, shareable way. The world's first picture learning textbook was made by Comenius called the 'Orbis Pictus', the world in Pictures. And it began with just simple little pictures. This is a hand, this is a finger, we all have them, and we can count and you move on from there. We are doing something 350 years later that is very similar, only it's expanded about a thousand times from where it was.
More next week.