Nature 12
Presented on: Saturday, March 25, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to the twelfth in our sequence of nature and we're taking a phase of nature to have not a beginning but to have a process that begins. The first word in the Torah is 'bereishit' and it doesn't mean 'in the beginning' or 'while the beginning' but just means 'beginning' in the gerund. It's a verb that means that it is an ongoing process and that in that ongoing process something emerges, namely the creation of the universe.
I want to make one little correction for those of you who are reading, we have four year-long tracks that are based on a long reading journey to acclimate ourselves to the experience of reading every week, in little portions, throughout a whole year to give us some kind of a distributed attention, to a journey of written language, of some kind of masterpiece of world literature and there are four for each of the two years.
One of the choices for the first year is Ovid's Metamorphoses and I notice that in the course navigational outline that, for some reason, week eleven was displaced on the computer and doesn't appear on the print-out. So if you're using Ovid's Metamorphoses as your track, your year-long track, the reading should be on page 66 over to page 69, just those four pages. It's a very interesting part of the Metamorphoses, it is about Pantheus and Bacchus and it was the theme that was used for the last great Greek tragedy by Euripides, The Bacchae, and it's about the breaking point of the classical Greek mind. Of breaking because it refused to live life and wanted to live life on intellectual terms, on mental terms, and that Dionysus ,or Bacchus in Latin in the Roman Empire, Dionysus specialising in breaking through mind-bound human beings and the first resonance of that are women who become maenads. They go into the wildness of nature and imbibe the resonance of Dionysus and they bring an energy wave back into the city, back into Athens, which shatters anyone who tries to stand up to it and that the only way that you can continue to live, especially men, is to have a mind that is permeable so that you can let that Dionysian force go through the mind's membrane and not crash into it and destroy it. So of the other tracks we'll talk about, of course, in different presentations. If you're watching the DVD, the photograph that was put there is a signed photograph of Linus Pauling and we're going to get to him a little bit later in the presentation.
But I would like to start off with a story, a personal story, that focuses for us a whole ecology of concern and, in a childhood gestalt, the sense of what it is that we are doing in the nature phase. Having been born as a premature bronchial baby, I was always literate rather than athletic. And at age eleven when I had recovered some measure of health, even though still small, it was decided that I should sent to a camp, to a YMCA summer camp for a week. And the culmination of that summer camp was to have an overnight camp-out in the woods of northern Michigan. And each boy was supposed to pack a half tent so that you would cooperate together and you would have two to a full tent. Only our camp counsellor miscounted because he didn't count himself and so instead of packing a full tent for himself he only packed half a tent so when we got out into the forest, into the woods, came time to set up the camp there were seven and a half tents. And because I was the smallest boy, the smallest being, it was decided that I should be in the half tent.
And of course I had never been outdoors overnight in my life and, wouldn't you know, as soon as the fire died down, as soon as the camp quieted down, and everyone was asleep and I was drifting off I heard something coming out of the forest and of course it was a bear. Being a very a very small eleven year old boy I had no idea of what was going to happen except I had read plenty of stories about people being eaten by all kinds of things. So I lay very quietly and the heavy thud of the padded paws came closer and closer until I could smell the dank briny odour of the bear right next to my open half tent and I finally realised that I had to just let go. As soon as I did that there was a different quality, like the raising of a shade, and, instead of being afraid of the bear, I was hoping that he would be OK and find something to eat that he would like.
In the morning, just as before dawn, just that greying, I got up and for the first time in my life I built a camp fire, everyone else was still asleep. I made cocoa myself for the first time in my life; I mixed up a little mix and made a pancake so I cooked for myself for the first time in my life. As I sat there having my cocoa and pancake and seeing the beginnings of light come into the world in the forest, I knew that I was at home in the forest, like that bear had initiated me.
Nature has an ability to bring us into a solution and the solution is not a thing, the solution is a dynamic flow, it is a process that has a very interesting quality in that it can be deepened and what deepens the flow of nature is the flow of experience. In our learning, that phase where experience deepens the process of nature is the process of myth, of language, of oral language and of oral language where feelings come into the play of the process and in the play of the process images become like the rollers that allow for a spin, a rotation, on it. And whereas the feelings are radiant the images are rotational and the experience gains a kind of angular momentum and also a direction which is forward, forward in the sense that the term mythos in Greek actually doesn't mean stories about things it means the plot of the stories; that they have a beginning, they have a middle and they have an end.
At least that was the Aristotelian understanding in classical Greek but the true deep understanding in classical Greek was not Aristotelian but was from the mystery schools. It was from the kind of places like the Delphic oracle or the Eleusinian Mysteries and what the plot was, was like the beginnings of Genesis: it was an ongoingness which you now just tuned into. What allows your experience as a flow, as a phase flow, to tune in to nature as a phase flow is the ritual comportment of your actions. What you do tunes the flow of nature to the flow of experience so that there is a possibility of them flowing together, not just of a synergy but of a dynamic where the dynamis of nature is deepened. It's not two flows but is a deeper, it is a more 'umph' current of nature. Just as nature by itself was wondrous, nature when it is stepped up into its intensity of its flow becomes mysterious so that when our experience flows with the flow of nature, now nature is mysterious. It is stepped up not just augmented and intensified but it gains a new capacity, it's like a higher energy level allows for a higher energy form to come out of it.
And this is how the mind comes out of experience, just like our existence comes out of nature. When nature is deepened to a mysterious energy, now the mind deepens existence into a symbolic thought as a structure. And just as existence is existentially phenomenal, the symbolic mind is phenomenal as well, it is a phenomenon and one can talk about it and learn about it just as we could examine phenomena in nature, or rather what has emerged from nature, into its ritual actions, its sequences.
We're taking a look, because we're always pairing books to help us get a tuning fork, we're pairing The Double Helix by James Watson with a recent tribute called Macroevolution by Elizabeth Werber and Niles Eldredge in homage to their dead companion who just died before, Steven J Gould, who was the greatest theorist of evolution in the 20th century. He raised Darwin's theory of evolution several steps beyond what it had already been raised to by over 150 years of refinement and we have something now which is extraordinary. Gould and Niles Eldredge, about 35 years ago, came to understand through a whole lifetime of examining not just fossils and bones from the past but fossils from hundreds of millions, almost half a billion years back and to realise that in these kinds of scales what one sees is that evolution is not just a little flow of constant improvements but that there are pulses of creativity, there are bursts where new forms, new species suddenly buckshot out and are all there and the ecology of the world is changed, is different.
And that there are cognate species that come into play at the same time in these bursts and the higher mammals, like the great apes, came in about 70 million years ago in a burst that included flowering plants, so that flowers and our kind of mammals are cognate together in something that Eldredge and Gould called punctuated equilibrium. That when you look at say the fossil record of creatures that haven't lived on the earth for over 200 million years, trilobites, they were here for 300 million years and over 200 million years ago they were replaced by all kinds of new species but in looking one found that they were almost unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Then all of a sudden one had a complete burst and a punctuation of the equilibrium which nature had had because a pulse of emergence had occurred and happened.
And finally they were able to trace back and find that there was something called, geologically speaking 500 million years ago, it's called the Precambrian Cambrian explosion where life forms all of a sudden that had been, for almost a billion years, in an equilibrium: the bacteria, the viruses, a new kingdom called the archaea. All of a sudden you began to have new kinds of existential organic forms and they had a very interesting way of going on, they began to have more than one cell and they began to have an elongation of their body and a cephalisation of having a head. And that the head became the integral, the integrator, of that elongated body that eventually had a nervous system, like our spinal cord and our brain, and you had the development of a whole new class and quality of vertebrate bodies. And life, nature, nature letting life emerge all of a sudden into these new forms has come into our form, our homo sapiens form, about 160,000 years ago in Africa.
And the first place that homo sapiens left Africa, crossed out of Africa, the first place they went to is the site that is today Israel and Palestine. And that when homo sapiens arrived there about 49,000 years ago, it was like an equilibria that had been there for almost 100,000 years in Africa that homo sapiens took a huge puncturing of the equilibria again and you had this huge multi-pronged migration out from that middle east, that eastern Mediterranean, and went not only east and west but the western way went in two distinct paths, two different tracks. One track was to cross over Eurasia around where Istanbul is today and to go up the major river systems into central Europe. The other was to follow the northern Mediterranean coast all the way and they arrived almost at the same time in what is south western France and north western Spain round the Pyrenees.
And they arrived there about 44,000 years ago and right away you find a completely different quality of homo sapiens begins to emerge: the development of Palaeolithic cave art. And for the first time the species begins to transcend the limitations of integral nature and to be able to show that there is a third process that is happening, not just the flow of nature, not just the flow of experience, but the flow of a visionary consciousness and that the visionary consciousness does not see naturally, it sees supernaturally. So that what it sees emerges as forms that are not phenomenal but the Greek word cognate with phenomenal is noumenal , they are not phenomena but they're noumena and it is art forms that are numinous and the creator of the art forms is numinous. The artist, the phenomenal individuality of the mind and the phenomenal figuration of our existence are completely transcended by the noumenal artist person who now comes into play and they come into play in a very special way when they interphase.
When a noumenal process interphases with integral processes, they now have a differential capacity that comes into play and when a noumenal form interphases with phenomenal forms, it transforms them, they change. And so the forms of existence now become modified and radically change and the forms of the mind become modified and radically change. They are no longer just integral phenomena but they have a complementarity quality of being woven with some kind of spirit, who really lives, not just in the mind and not just in the body, but lives in the personal form. And part of our education, part of our learning is to bring ourselves through, patiently, phase by phase so that we can not only live that and have the experience and then have the ability to think it, but also to have the capacity to go into a phase of vision and finally a phase of art where our own person comes into play, where we will make sculpture, we will make a painting. And out of that will come a fourth process which is a stepped up intensification of visionary consciousness, and that is called historical consciousness, and out of that will come the noumenal forms of the cosmos.
The sciences, which are not intellectual structures but they're blossomed out of the intensification of theoretical and theoria in Greek doesn't mean think, it means contemplation. So that the flow of visionary consciousness will be intensified so that historical consciousness will be able to emerge an even more comprehensive differential form than the spiritual person and that is the cosmos itself. And we will see that when the cosmos itself radiates and rotates it generates the flow that is nature. And so one has this grand concourse of a cycle that comes full round and, just as it would complete itself, it transforms and it goes into an even larger not cycle but what we would call an ecology. And when that ecology reaches not a completion but a perfection, it generates again a new burst of the process of nature. So that its flow will take not only a deepening mysteriously in experience but a third deepening mystically in consciousness and a fourth phase, where it deepens into a heavenly quality of being able to participate actually in the heavens, in the reality and be a part of the plasma out of which it comes. So that we have two different qualities of learning, one is learning through phenomena where we learn to integrate naturally, the other is the ecology of learning to play creatively, consciously, and that those two go into a deep complementarity.
One of the aspects in The Double Helix, that was a sticking point for a long time, for at least a whole generation and finally in Watson and Crick themselves, is that they did not understand that the structure they were trying to think out and make in their models was defective because it stayed in the mind, in a kind of geometricity of the mind, which the mind, being an integral structure was completely happy with and had proved itself out but did not work until it was Crick who finally realised that the double helix doesn't go doubly but it goes in a complementarity: one goes one way, one goes the other. And that the way in which the double helix works is that two different helical structures work together in a very special way that their intertwining is not like a paralleling, it's not like a mirror symmetry, but it is a complete complementarity. And that this is a very difficult thing to initially understand and to appreciate.
One of the qualities that comes out of this is that later developments, this is a book on Protein Folds, A Distance Based Approach, and one of the authors is Henrik Bohr who is one of the sons of the great Niels Bohr the great physicist. One of the sections in here, because now the development is so differentially open there are no longer chapters, but, like in Macroevolution, one will find that it's almost like little papers that give you some kind of an aspect and it's precise not about the truth, it's precise about this being an aspect which, if you have enough of these aspects, you will have two things that happen at the same time. One you will have an implosion of integration that will make sense, here in the mind and that it will, in its angular momentum and its radiance, it will create a new theoretical field of visionary insight out of which will come new ways to not just experience but to take an aspect of experience and experiment with it.
So, in protein folds one finds all of a sudden, in the 21st century understanding of nature, just the title, because we're not into science yet, that's next year, the title is Resonator Driven Protein Folding, The Implication Of Topology For Protein Structure Enfolding, that what does the folding is a kind of super dynamic origami and the folding has a self-organization quality, not by a plan that one could think out but by a resonance interpenetration that literally organic matter dances out. And this is part of the attention that we're bringing into play. I learned from that encounter with the bear, at eleven, that both of us belonged in the forest and that that forest belonged in the world and I began looking at the stars in a completely different way, that the world belongs among the stars. The resonances of that have continued to this day.
But like any good evolution, in a personal life, there is a punctuated equilibria, there are certain thresholds that when they are crossed they are crossed all of a sudden, sometimes in a moment, sometimes in an accumulated condensation of resonances that suddenly develops a harmonic and sings forth. One of the singing forths came when I was 19 and was the head porter for Giant Forest Lodge in Sequoia National Park and every other day I had to work until midnight. I would get off work and be ravenously hungry after carrying suitcases and carrying for the whole lodge about 600 people in various little cabins. There would only be a few people awake: the night watchman, myself, some of the cook staff getting the kitchen ready to receive the two in the morning group. I would go from the last check of the last cabins and go through the forest of giant sequoia trees, in those days the cabins were right in the middle of 250 foot of 30 foot diameter trees. I would go to the back of the dining hall and get something to eat from the shafts, they all knew me.
One day, one night, it was not very much moonlight and to walk through the forest off the trails in starlight takes a little bit of knack to do and I ran right into a bear. When bears are mad they do not growl, they hiss and the hiss is meant like the hiss of a snake, to send a paralysing fear through you. I immediately, instead of feeling fear, dropped into being in the world, in the forest with that bear and moved back in a special little resonant way that I had learned to walk since I was eleven. That bear stayed where she was and stopped hissing and I flicked on my flashlight and shined it and I could see her appraising me instead of chasing me. Later on when I told the head ranger, over some sandwiches about 25 minutes later, Jack Hickey was his name, he told me, he said, 'You know, you are very fortunate.' I said, 'No, I am resonant, I belong in the forest.' [Laughter]
He told me about his almost fateful encounter with a bear, that rangers share a cabin with a fellow ranger, and Jack had come off work one night and he heard this rustling in his room mate's bed and he thought, 'Son of a gun, he's brought a girl home.' So he snuck in the cabin and he got the broom and he whacked the lump on the bed to serve them right. Immediately a bear growled and lunged. He said he was so shocked that he fell backwards through the door and the bear was so startled that it careened over him without touching him and went off into the forest. He said he lay there, shaking, and realised that there is a limit to prudery [laughter].
The quality that we are looking to generate is all here in twelve presentations, that not only sequence themselves in a ritual timeline in this shared space of presentation, but that they have also a spin, they have an angular momentum, so that the sequence tends to be curved. In its curving it will continue to curve, it's almost like something in orbit and when something continues to curve in time, it no longer looks like a circle but the circle curving in time makes a helical structure. So that proteins will have an alpha helical structure, DNA will have a double helical structure, RNA will have a helical structure. When you see proteins now, in 21st century diagrams, you see that they are all these kind of squirreling, squiring, squiggling, ribbons that interpenetrate in such a way that you would think it is a chaos except that they make themselves into forms that are specific and exact. And the first time that someone understood exactly the structure of a complex protein molecule was in the early 1950s at Cambridge in England, Fred Sanger and he found the structure of insulin.
It was the first organic molecule to be understood and it was extraordinary because it had only been a few years where the understanding was that what makes the ability for a protein to come out is the stranding together of amino acids with a bond. And this bond that links a whole sequence of amino acids, Sanger's insulin molecule was 52 amino acids, long and the links are all called peptide bonds so that you have in a strand, of all these peptide bonds and amino acids, you have a polypeptide and insulin has two polypeptides, an A and a B. And the way that they stay together is that one of the nucleic acids, there are only four that go to make up amino acids in different combinations, one of them is cytosine. In cytosine, in that nucleic acid, there are sulphur atoms that are able to have a special bond with another sulphur atom, from the same polypeptide chain or another polypeptide chain. The A polypeptide bonds with a cytosine in the B form through sulphur twice but there are two more cytosine amino acids in the A chain and so they bond with each other in order to complete the structure so that one has an interesting insight into nature.
Nature always in an integral will go for the balance but in the balance will have an alphabet, not only an alphabet of numeracy or literacy, but an alphabet of geometry, of proportioning, of ratioing, and that nature loves to play with this. In the play, all of the possibilities that could be are explored but the possibilities are in probabilities of the structure which aims to integrate so that something really does happen. My old friend, the science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, once said, it's called one of Sturgeon's Laws, 'Out of the 10,000 things that can happen, only one will' and if you can follow what really is happening, that gives you the practical edge to cooperate and let the next juncture of happening happen with you participating with it. And out of this comes the sense that the theory and practice together is nature and consciousness that do work together because nature not only deepens into the mysterious nature of experience and deepens again into the mystical process of consciousness but it deepens a third time into the great transforms of history, historical consciousness.
So what we are doing is acclimating ourselves, by phases, so we can keep track, not of subjects, but keep track of phases of morphing and of metamorphing so that we can follow and make those polypeptides chains of nature and those great huge punctuated equilibria new creative forms that will emerge out of a sudden, out of our own visionary capacities. One thing that nature shows us is that all can participate in this. Out of the trillions of galaxies that have trillions of stars, in the universe, they all cooperate in the emergent resonance of the similar field of not the beginning but of beginningness, so that the emergence is constantly fresh and each fresh emergence is a vibration. There are hundreds of millions per any time unit so one has a vibrant world and one has a participatory reality. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to the sense of wonder. The reason why this is different is because the learning patterns of the past were formulated especially to fit into plans and to reflect conceptions based on a sense of individuality that was severely limited. We have already crossed the cusp where our backyard is now more than three billion miles in radius and our sense of the cosmos, just in the last five or six, seven years, has not only burgeoned but has jumped in one of these punctuated equilibria. Just this past week the International Journal of Science: Nature, has been in business for over 110 years, published a photograph that was taken with the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope and was looking to our milky way galactic centre. Only about 100 parsecs off galactic centre, perpendicular to the galactic plain is double helix nebula. It was as if we were being shown an omen that we are looking in the right way finally to not just the centre but we are looking to the signature, is the way they used to talk in ancient wisdom traditions, we are looking at the signature of our own maturity that the cosmos is showing us, not back as in a mirror, but invitationally as in a complement. There is a complementarity that happens.
Consciousness is like a fifth dimension: it adds, like the mobility of the thumb, to what the hand can do and the four dimensions of space-time with the fifth quintessential dimension of consciousness now has a new way to show the hand not to say 'Halt' but to say 'Hello'. The ancient mudra in Buddhism was that the hand held like this was fearlessness and with the middle finger slightly pushed forward was the teaching mudra. One is able to teach from that openness. The openness, not just of fearlessness, but the openness of radiant and rotational excellence and language has that capacity and quality when it is raised to a certain threshold of expression.
One of the earliest ways in which this was said in the Gathas of Zarathustra in about 1800-2000BC was in translation, 'Thought, word and deed' that if thought, word and deed are aligned there is like a making the way straight in the wilderness. The deeds are the rituals. The ritual comportment's what we do. What we really do, the words are the mythic phase of what we are able to say in oral speech and thought is the symbolic phase of the written, what we are able symbolically to cognise.
So our first year, our four phases that are anciently wisdom, nature emerging ritual, generating myth, integrating to symbols. In that cycle, if we go through it in that kind of an order, we make available for ourselves something that only wisdom traditions used to have, in ancient times, and that is the ability to comb through, like a yoga, the entire natural cycle within which we, in our bodies and in our experience and in our thoughts, our symbolic mind, are able to bring the action figure and the experience character and the symbolic individuality into an alignment. When they are aligned in that way a new quality in visionary consciousness blooms, bursts, in a pulse from that. It's as if one finally has learned to sit quietly long enough, with the spinal column exactly arranged, so that the symmetry of the hemispheres of the brain are positioned to have the, in ancient Buddhism it was called bodhicitta, the thought of enlightenment, and that once that's there it begins to have its own play as like a seed of the dimension of consciousness, that can play.
In the early written traces in India, the Rigveda, about 3,500 years ago, right at the end of the tenth book of the Rigveda, you have the origins of the way in which Brihaspati, the lord of speech, makes our ability to talk and talk in such a way that our talking is real in the flow of nature so that our words have a fertility to be able to birth our integral. In the translation by Wendy Donigar O'Flaherty, Rigveda 10, verse 71, it translates: 'Brihaspati, when they set in motion the first beginnings of speech giving names, their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love.' That is that there is an interpenetration in not just the energy of visionary consciousness but visionary consciousness when it emerges into the noumenal form of the person. Instead of just being a thing, phenomenally, or instead of just being a mind, phenomenally, one now is prismatic. The entire rainbow, the entire spectrograph, the entire electromagnetic spectrum is suddenly possible expressively.
I have, in the past, used this example, which was one of the most astounding things on film when it was first filmed, the great scientific mathematician-historian Jacob Bronowski made a series called The Ascent of Man and in that series he arranged for the first time instruments so that you could record on camera the entire electro-magnetic spectrum and then he positioned a man and showed what that man looks like across the entire spectrum. The only place that you could see his face, to see who he was, was in the narrow range of visible light, focused by a pair of eyes that are able to come together, and a seeingness that deepened so that character came through and finally the recognition that this was a very famous man.
In the Rigveda, the thought, word and deed is put into the poetic charm of the voice that is able to orally speak, not just truth, but speak reality. The way in which the Rigveda records it, in the very next verse, is they use a word, which is the same root in the words that mean listen, heard and heeded, so that the deeds, the rituals, are a way of heeding. The word, the myth, is what we are able to listen and the symbols are what we are able to have heard. 'Those who have ears to hear, let them hear', one of the great logoi of Jesus, is the ability to deliver, in an oral poetic, not just information and not just training but an education raised to the dynamic of a cascade of presentation that is seamless like a waterfall of scintillating sparkles. That it is the waterfall with the rainbow glint of all the stars in its unimpeded, unedited, flow that delivers a special kind of articulation; an articulation not of meaning in the mind but of reality in the spirit.
One of the works that we use to begin the second year, the year of the conscious ecology, in complement to the year that we're in now of the natural integral, one of the works that we're going to use is a work, the title of it was The Poimandres, sometimes translated as The Mind Shepherd, translates better because the Greek term poiesis means to creatively make, so this is the creative mind making. That guide, who does that, is named Hermes Trismegistus and he talks to a young man who he calls his son, not his student. Like a father would talk to his son to convey to him 'This is where we come from, this is how we live' and at a certain point, the punctuated equilibria of The Poimandres, Hermes says to Tat, his son, 'Now we must both let go of our roles in the dialogue and let the cascade of the language sweep us both away, not into chaos but into the splendour of unlimited meaning.' Because just as one can use a binary of zero and one, in graduated sets, to express almost anything and computers work this way but consciousness has a different binary, it has a zero and infinity binary and when those binaries are brought into play, the pair of pairs makes a different kind of equality, not a square, like a frame of reference, but a diamond as in the jewel of beholding.
One of the most esoteric of the ancient High Dharma Texts was called The Diamond Cutter Sutra, The Vajracchedik? Sutra. In it the sutra's very short, just a few pages, and it perfectly balanced so that what is said at the beginning is re-said at the end but as you move forward to the centre of it you can also read it backwards, at the same pace, and right at the very centre of it is only one aspect that is unpaired. It is the phrase, 'Awaken the mind by not letting it fix on anything.' Once that is awakened, the resonances of what was a mirror symmetry of the meaning, now becomes the gestalt of a composition that is seamless. One is able, for the first time, to understand that wisdom is limitless, seamless, penetrating, even through the most dense of all qualities in the universe and that is self-ignorance and false pride and of unrelenting doubt. All of that can be permeated.
We are looking at James D. Watson because he was a very interesting character; he was the bad boy, aggressively, when he was young, he just simply couldn't stand the fact that he was not world famous for something and he wanted especially to get the best of Linus Pauling. Linus was not only one of the greatest intellects of all time, he was the star showman at Caltech and by star showman I am including a Caltech that included Richard Feynman, among others. But it was Linus Pauling who was the incredible genius. He was the one who was able to take, and we looked at last week his book on the translation of the early quantum mechanics into chemistry and then he wrote a classic book, it's still in print and still read, this is a third edition from Cornell University, it came out in 1939, The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and you can see it's been well indexed here.
What happened is that The Nature of the Chemical bond was the first and classic statement of how it is that things interpenetrate chemically in all of their resonances in all of their orders, both integrally and harmonically. It was The Nature of the Chemical Bond that Watson and Crick had never read and rushed off to Blackwells bookstore to go and buy a copy and to pour through. Just a few years ago a new book by Watson just called DNA had on page 227 these very interesting sentences, he is now 75 years old, all of this was over half a century ago, and here is the contemporary James Watson allowing himself, because he can now, being world famous, having achieved everything, gives us these sentences: 'Now that we are in the new era of comprehensiveness in biology, ushered in by the once unthinkable feat of the Human Genome Project.'
And Watson was the great instigator and initial director, not only of the discovery of the structure of DNA, he had moved on to writing a classic, Molecular Biology of the Gene, and you can see his big grin as a young man. It is now in a fifth edition, this is the fourth edition of Molecular Biology of the Gene. He had also done The Molecular Biology of the Cell, with five of his co-authors and now in the third edition, but he wanted to have that fourth level, the human genome, the entire readout of the DNA of all organic life as we have come to understand it in the universe. And that once that has been accomplished, there is the fifth level, that's now being worked on, and that is to be able to index the entire proteome, all the many, many thousands, ten thousands of proteins so that their structure will all be there. But here's what Watson has to say at 75:
It may seem curious that we should find ourselves following the cutting edge of one of the next frontiers, that of developmental genetics, back into the realm of the fruit fly, drosophila, but there is nowhere for us to go but back to the future, for even with the entire human genome in hand, the programme and cues according to which its instructions are carried out remain a colossal mystery. Eventually we shall know the screenplay of human life as well as we know that of the fly. A comprehensive description of the patterns of the human gene expression, then transcriptome will be developed. A full inventory of the actions of all our proteins, the proteome, will be produced and we will have a full and spectacularly complex picture of how each one of us is put together and how each one of the multitudinous molecules we are made of figures in the functioning of you and me.
But as we do this, nature, as a dynamic field, is deepening the mysteriousness of itself so that our experience is becoming more and more mysterious and the conscious magical transform of it is becoming more and more, in its complementarity of bringing new possibilities of possibilities of possibilities into the realm of actuality. It is as if, from the Big Bang on, even the expansion of not just the visible universe, but before that, the expansion of resonant preparation of space, is also expanding and the capacity for time not just to move forward but to recursively create new pasts that never were possible before, and now are possible, and that the cosmos is not only expanding in size but deepening mysteriously and transforming magically as we are going along.
One can imagine, in a great vision, our life form has only been doing this for 160,000 years tops, on a planet that has had organic life forms for three and a half billion years in a star system that is only 4.7 billion years old and that there are whole galaxies of star systems that were in business ten billion years before we even consolidated out of stellar dust. How many uncounted conscious participates are there? The applause, if there would be one, would be so echoing, we would experience it as the calm silence that astronauts have experienced stepping outside on their spacesuits to behold, not the Earth below, but to behold this indefinite, the quality that was used most frequently is that it is not a blankness, it is a deep velvety mysteriousness, palpable, and calls to us personally, recognising not only who are but who we are in the array of who we will be, kaleidoscopically.
The first population of people who do not need to come back to the planet to live, who will be at home on the Moon, at home on Mars, or at home on Europa, at home on Titan, at home on Triton, who knows in the Kuiper Belt, of how many worlds there are that one could be at home in. Our species will break a punctuated equilibria on a scale that has perhaps not been seen since we, not emerged as homo sapiens, but since the hominid clad emerged from the great primates that preceded us. That happened about seven million years ago. So we are an energy threshold now, on a scale that has not been seen on this planet for at least seven million years and it will happen in our lifetimes, immediately, irrevocably.
There is no scale of education in the past, including the mystery schools, including the wisdom schools, that are able to allow us the creative play and the personal freedom and the historical voracity of possibility to encompass what is actually occurring, what is actually happening. That's why this is being created and designed and made from the origins, in San Francisco in the 1960s until today, it has been worked on for more than 40 years, of refinement. One of the ancient modes to keep a shapedness was to keep a set of complete variables within a certain matrix and the standard has been fortified because there are only 20 amino acids that go to make up all the proteins that there are, all the polypeptides there are and so the ancient standard was try to never have more than 20 people at a time, a cohort, as someone pointed out. That with a group of just 20 in any one presentational setting there is already enough variety to stagger the imagination and to create, I once used to call it the 13 ring Fellini circus, because, as all of you are able to bring your own maturation through, the interplay between any 20 of you will be kaleidoscopic beyond belief. Someone once said in classical Athens, 'It's a good thing we only have one Socrates because a room full of Socrateses would make it impossible for political forms to ever occur again and nobody would be in power.'
[Laughter]
We're going to stop there and carry on again next week. Next week will be, not a continuation of the Nature phase, but will be an interval to allow for this phase to have its articulation so that the next phase of rituals that comes into play will have its own articulation. Like the different amino acids in a peptide chain, the interval week is like a peptide bond that holds them together in such a way that they are not crimped into articulation by jamming them together and they are not separated far enough so that the structuring doesn't hold and doesn't limit them so that the helical curving and squiggling can also happen. So that instead of having a measurement rod of educational sequence punctuated by exams and degrees, we have an ongoing interchange of polypeptide spiralling curves that are able to come into play in new ways. Our new consciousness is being responded to, in love, by a freshening of the universe already. Mother Nature is expanding the dimensionality so that we have room to play because she loves us indeed. Thank you.