Symbol 6

Let's come to Symbols 6 and we're taking a look, at this juncture, the middle of the Symbols phase, which is the culmination of the whole integral cycle, to appreciate the strategic architecture and the historical importance of this work. The right beginning of this is to point out that Symbols 6 today takes place on Veteran's Day and that Veteran's Day, originally, was Armistice Day. November 11th 1918, the official end of World War I. World War I, from 1914 to 1918, literally tore up the social contract of Europe permanently, that it could never be put back together again in the terms of the historical development that went all the way back to provinces of the Roman Empire.
On that particular day, Armistice Day, in Cambridge, England, one of the outstanding bookstores in Cambridge, right off the main university road, was pillaged by rioting medical students, who were trashing the store, throwing paintings and books out through the plate glass window onto the street. Next door, watching, was the owner of this store and his name was C.K. Ogden, one of the co-authors of The Meaning of Meaning. Standing next to him was a young friend, who had been an undergraduate about three years after Ogden but about the same time at Cambridge, was his co-author of The Meaning of Meaning, I.A. Richards. The two of them together watched the trashing of this store, of this bookstore.
Later they would have an archetypal meeting around midnight but the reason for the trashing of that store by Ogden was a book that he wrote with a man named R.H. Best, who was an international English businessman, who had great contacts in Germany. In 1913 they wrote this little book called The Problem of the Continuation School and Its Successful Solution in Germany; A Consecutive Policy, by R.H. Best, C.K. Ogden, published in London, Westminster, 1914; right at the beginning of the first World War but it was written in 1913 to point out the great success, especially in a city like Munich, in Bavaria, of their education programme, especially for young men.
The continuation school was a continuation of the grade school. The first eight grades of the grade school were continued for four more years, so that young men who were 14 - 18 would be given a continuation of their grade school education, a higher grade school, a high school but that the high school programme was specifically to give them a complex education training where they would have training, job skill training, they would have artistic training, they were all taught to draw because it increased their ability to have perception, which increased their ability to have conception, which increased the educative quality of these young men.
The continuation school booklet has many photos in it and praises that after the eighth year classes in Munich, they found when they instituted the continuation school initially in 1894 it was voluntary and by 1898 everything was poorly attended. So in that year 1000 scholars went to blind occupations or to none, went blind to occupations in the sense that they really hadn't paid attention, they didn't know, and so the continuation school in Munich was made compulsory. All young men, the city was at that time about 600,000 people, quite a large city for that time. It's today about three to four million.
By 1900, practical work was introduced into the curriculum along with everything else and by 1907 the entire programme was so successful that it was being mirrored in other cities in Germany. And so they wrote this book so that the English-speaking audience in the world would have some idea of the way in which an education that could prepare people for an increasingly complex modern world could take place.
The reason of putting it into English is that while there were tens of millions of people who spoke German, at that time probably tops in the world you would have had 50 million people who would have spoken German. But English at the time was spoken by 500 million people around the world: all of India; all of North America; all of England; Australia; South Africa; New Zealand; educated Europeans; educated South American people; educated Far Eastern people. The realisation was that English as a language was ripe to become a world second language for everyone and there needed to be a focus, then, on developing the capacity of people to absorb a further deeper expanded learning; that the old education had been fit in to a cultural prototype, a historical model that was severely limited and crimped.
For one thing, in the old Roman empire, only the sons of powerful and wealthy people were given an education, it was largely a Greek education based on something like Aristotle, a little bit of the Stoics like Posidonius, and a couple of Pedants in the Roman tradition. All of it was to support the Empire. To give imperial regimen the worldwide support from the capable young men and to keep from everyone else any kind of participation in that imperial empire order. And of course in the Middle Ages that order was transferred to the church. Only the priests or the monks, and the monks were kept in the monastery, they were not really encouraged to go out at all. The priests were kept in the imperial church order so that you found there was almost no education available for what we would today call the ordinary person.
That entire world order was first cracked in the developments that came in the late 12th century/the early 13th century. The Latin language had been the world imperium language in the West all that time and the first person to write a monumental different language style was Dante. Dante, not just with the Divine Comedy, but two of his books, one of them called The New Life and the other called On World Government. It was Dante who made Italian the first viable language capable of an extraordinary refinement to run competition with scholastic Latin, with imperial Latin. One of the reasons Dante was exiled and banished from Florence in his lifetime, in the early 1300s, was because he was a viable threat to the authority in the system, in the power.
The English writer who benefitted most from the followers of Dante's, his confreres like Petrarch, a follower like Boccaccio, the English writer was Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer changed, not only the usage of Latin, but completely transformed the usage of English. English, Old English, had a great Germanic word stock, a great Latin word stock, but when Chaucer brought in, English became what is today called Middle English. Not Old English, not the transforms, but Middle English, that was specifically expended and deepened to express human character and its transformation through a wider mind into the prism of the a person. It is the conscious person prismed by an open mind founded on a deep humane character. Chaucer's phrase of himself, 'I write of a fair field full of folk.' I write about human nature, which all of us have, and not just in our individuality according to how we've been inculcated and indoctrinated and habituated but that we all have our own individual characters that course through our experience. If we can have a mind that's open to the varieties of human character, yes, they are of many identifiable types.
In The Canterbury Tales there are 28 different human types, to give a wide enough array to show that there is someone called a knight, A Knight's Tale, A Monk's Tale, a Merchant's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale, the Yeoman's Tale; all of these are the types of human character through which their experience of life is brought together in a mutual journey and that mutual journey in the exchange among them as they hear each other's stories. Canterbury Tales is based on Boccaccio, where ten people flee the plague and they hole up in a villa. They decide, since they are either going to die or survive, the ten of them will tell three stories each, however long it takes. It's like a Scheherazade Arabian Nights thing; to fend off death by the plague and to keep ourselves entertained, we will all share these stories of the varieties of life. Chaucer raises the varieties of the way in which character, interpenetration, does not produce conflict but it vectors into enrichment, so that what you get, then, is a mind that is not only appreciative of other kinds of people, but appreciative that all of the kinds of people are facets of a jewel-like mind transform, so that the mind, instead of being a receptacle for indoctrination and instruction, becomes the mediator of the varieties of human character that expand into the incredible cosmological arrays of spiritual personality.
Chaucer's Middle English, 200 years later, received a second great transform by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's English takes the fermented transform of Chaucer. Chaucer, by the way, and this is appropriate, was the wine merchant of the King of England. He went to France and went to Italy to buy wine, so he was literally familiar with the fermentation transform of things, water into wine. Shakespeare is a distiller of that wine into the fine alchemical liqueurs, the cognacs, the brandies, the scotch, the quality of distilling into a spirit. The spirits, the liqueurs, are a second transform and so Shakespeare becomes a distillation of the Chaucerian humanity transformed into the varieties of personality, distilled in Shakespeare's English to incredible refinement of all the kinds of cognacs and liquors and scotches and brandies that there are.
At that time, Shakespeare's language was the most sophisticated transform of language that the world had seen since the refinement of classical Greek in the time of the Greek tragedians and Plato in the 400s BC. It became the most refined possibility of language and exactly at that time the refinement of communication, not just in language, but in symbols, because a written language that can be read, can be declaimed and played on the stage, one can learn one's part, it is an oral language. Chaucer always wrote his material but always read it out loud to men and women alike, ladies and men of the court, ladies and men of the families that he was dealing with. Shakespeare always wrote so that men and women could hear the play, could read the play.
His language at the time was completely followed by a distillation possibility that was just there in the nascent fermenting of it and that was by the great Johannes Kepler. In 1609 Johannes Kepler published one of the most revolutionary books in world history, it's called The New Astronomy. We talked a little bit last week, Kepler showed in The New Astronomy that the mathematics of man is an art of language equal to the Shakespearian language and able to show in mathematical language that one can understand. The archetypal example was that the orbit of Mars was not a circle around the sun, that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse, a perfect mathematical ellipse. When Mars is at one curve of the ellipse, it will go faster in its orbit than it does when it's in an elongated part of the curve. In this way the planet not only goes in an ellipse but speeds up or slows down according to the perfection of the ratioing of the gravitation of that ellipse, and that the centre of the ellipse is not the sun, it isn't that the Earth is at the centre or that the sun is at the centre, but the ellipse showed mathematically that the centre is slightly off from the sun and we today would call that a barycentre. It's in pure space and holds. He says, in very elegant, beautiful covering language, 'Why should man limit God, that He can only make perfect circles? He can make perfect ellipses just as well.'
The person who took the new astronomy wine of Johannes Kepler, he wrote this about the same time that Shakespeare was putting together Cymbeline, Winter's Tale and beginning to think about The Tempest. The man who distilled the liqueur of Kepler was Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac, his Principia Mathematica, when it came out in 1887, it came out just 77 years later. It's quite an extraordinary thing to see the distillation that Newton put into this. By 1687, there was a sense that math was outstripping the ability of language, especially the English language, but all literary language, because by that time the French were getting into the act of raising French up to the level of a Shakespearian distillate capacity, and very soon, in the 1700s, a whole new poetry was required. And because it was so difficult, that poetry did not surface until the end of the 1700s, the beginning of the 1800s. It took about a hundred year for the poetic, literary language to catch up with the fabulous cognac of the expressiveness of Newton's mathematics.
One of the great men who studied the problem was Voltaire, who studied Newton's language to try and understand, 'If this is the math and this is the kind of mind expansion that we have and the kind of personal depth and arrays that we have, how may we then write in such a way so as to fully express all of that?' The generation of poets who rose to that were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and you find that in that constellation a great many of them were either English or German. You had this tremendous flowering of like a third deepening of the English language. Old English to Chaucer, Chaucer to Shakespeare, Shakespeare, then, to ... and the figure that we use in our learning here to make a point for us is Shelley, but the figure that I.A Richards chose was Coleridge. Had Shelley have lived beyond the early 30s, if you add another 40 or 50 years, he would clearly have been the greatest writer of his age.
What is important is that in 1904, almost 300 years after Kepler, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published Principia Mathematica, which was a furthering of the transform, a deepening. It brought mathematics and logic together on a level that for the very first time exceeded the capacity of poetic literary language of a Wordsworth, of Coleridge, a Shelley, a Goethe, a Schiller. Now mathematics and logic exceeded it in such a way that all of art, all of poetry had to be reconsidered and redone. One finds at the time that the first indication, even like a presage before this third transform happened, the French and the Russians were making transforms in art, especially the French, like Monet or Cezanne or later on the developments that came with Cubism or the abstractionists that came with the Kandinsky. You found that there was this tremendous movement, all of which was crunched by the First World War.
So when Ogden's book on the continuation school which had come out just at the beginning of the First World War, at the end of the First World War on Armistice Day, one of his bookstores in Cambridge was completely trashed. The paintings were paintings by the Bloomsbury Group: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and the books were some of the great new books that were coming out at the time, in 1918, 1919, because there was a fermentation, and a distillation, and a third transform happening. In the English of that era you found writers like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, etc etc. In the German you found writers surfacing like Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke. You began to find that, especially in the German and English, also there were writers like Yates and Joyce and Shaw who were Irish but really included in English literature. You began to find in various national languages like French or Spanish, also in Italian, you began to find these kinds of transforms happening at the same time.
When Ogden and Richards left the scene of the trashing of Ogden's bookstore and went back to his digs, which was called The Top hole, it was an attic apartment that he'd been in for years and years that was filled with books, books everywhere, he used his chain of bookstores to be able to keep track of everything that was published and came out. He was one of these super polymaths who could go through books and just in minutes could decide whether this book was worth putting in the library or whether it should just be put out for sale on the shelves and then he would collect the books that he felt were extraordinary, not just that they went together in a set but they went together in these kind of kaleidoscopic, Cubist-like new sets of relationalities. He would make displays in his window showing people, 'If you read all of these together it will evoke from you a new kind of mind.'
What did not happen was that ... there were not many people who had new kinds of minds at all. And so Ogden and Richards talked it over around midnight in an archetypal situation. They were midway on a spiral staircase, and I have put a classic work of art that expresses this in the notes so that when you get your set of Symbols notes you'll have it, it's a painting by Rembrandt, The Old Scholar In His Study. Here's the spiral, the helical spiral of the staircase. On one side is the old alchemical scholar and on the other side is the old female companion. She's tending the refining fire, he's contemplating in front of the new window of lights and the spiral staircase going from dark to light and back and forth. This is the archetypal situation, that the book The Meaning of Meaning was made in less than two hours.
The two of them talking together realised that there had to be a way to convey to anyone who took the time to be educated that symbolic thought had undergone enormous transforms through time, through history, and that we were now in a third transform, greatly more sophisticated than what anyone was able to actually countenance. Even the transform of Shakespeare was hard for people to follow. Even the transform of Chaucer was hard to follow. Most people, in their normal, ordinary, traditional education cannot even read someone like a Chaucer, much less a Shakespeare, much less a James Joyce, much less someone like myself speaking in the 21st century that takes it an order beyond what they did a hundred years ago.
Two things came out of that two hour midnight Armistice Day conversation; one was The Meaning of Meaning, the other was the development of Basic English. Ogden, especially, devoted almost the rest of life to trying to find a way to make a basis for people around the world to understand why it is that a Basic English as a universal language, like contemporary mathematics. Richards also went into Basic English but he went into about 50 years of developing the depths of himself to try to appreciate why it is that Ogden's spread of it for systematic reasons can be complemented by a penetration into the rarefied depths, and Richards was completely available for this. Not only was he a genius, one of the stars of Cambridge University but he also had a lot of experience, he spent almost five years, off and on, over the late 20s and early 30s in China.
When he was in China, the difficulty that came to him was that he had to be able to understand the Chinese wisdom, the Chinese language. One of the things that was brought out was that the Yenching University in Beijing and the Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts formed the Harvard-Yenching Institution and they put out the basic materials to teach Chinese to Westerners; the basic book was called Fen's 5000 [?? 34.00]. With Fen's 5000 [?? 34.03] characters one could learn enough Chinese to be able to read newspapers and books and converse with anybody, though you couldn't read medieval Chinese or ancient Chinese - almost nobody in China could at any rate.
When I delivered once a series of lectures at the Philosophic Research Society here, I had to bring in a special scholar, Dr Orient Lee to be able to read an intone T'ang poetry because most Chinese don't know how to intone, like most people today would not know how to speak Chaucer's Middle English but you can learn it. And almost no one knows how to read Old English correctly, although some do, the same in Greek. To read Homer's Greek is different from Plato's Greek, is different from Plotinus's Greek, is different from modern, demotic Greek. English, especially, has all of these levels of transform.
The difficulty for both of them was that the educational pattern was inappropriate. And so one of the last books that Richards wrote is called Design for Escape: World Education Through Modern Media: 'In response to alarming statistics that show world population outstripping productivity, I.A. Richards here presents nine points that offer urgent counteraction through world education. Things are getting worse, argues Professor Richards, largely because we lack effectively capable people. We can produce effectively capable people only through education; education must use language. The best available language for the purpose is some form of English. Following an introductory essay, three of his points are further amplified. Basic English, the forerunner, presents a simplified auxiliary English.' It teaches very quickly, through pictures, 850 words - this little pocketbook of Basic English has the core 500 words - that you could, as an adult or as a youngster, go through this very simple little book and just in going through it you would pick up enough so that the second time you went through it you would have a pretty good comprehension and about the third time you went through on your own, you would have the facility to have a vocabulary of 500-850 words.
'Professor Richards further explores depiction in learning and looking about language as an instrument of teaching, especially in conjunction with the resources of films, televisions and computers', (this is 1968). 'Professor Richards believes we are prisoners of a world situation, that through planlessnesses, we have allowed to entrap us. This is his manifesto for escape.' This is where I come into the picture, by this time I was teaching in San Francisco at San Francisco State, I was already teaching for three years by this time. Following the difficulties that were surfacing more and more and that there was several orders of lack in the population, that they could not develop to meet the actual complexity that was already, in the late 1960s, available and operative. By 2006, 40 years later, it is beyond belief, the nightmare difficulties that are coming like a storm front. The only way to survive this is to undergo a radical recalibration that brings our full character into play, that opens our mind to its complete capacities and brings consciousness in all of its ecology of transformations, into successive, humane and spontaneous service and application. On one level this is a powerful yoga, on the other it is a very simple utilitarian way of learning how to live and be real in a kaleidoscopically complex cosmos where we already are. Let's take a little break.
Let's come back and deepen our consideration of why what we are doing is of extraordinary importance. How human beings learn is the index of how they are able to mature. When there are new challenges, new dimensions, that are necessary for life, one has to be able to extend your learning farther, deeper; change the quality of it. If not, it's an evolutionary certainty that species will fail, they will die off. It is not just the Toynbee challenge and response in the study of history. His famous thesis was that all civilisations have evolved a complexity that exceeded the ability of the glomerates of cultures that went to make them up; that the engendered new situation was too complex for them as a challenge, to formulate a response, and those civilisations all failed.
When Toynbee was doing a study of history from the 1930s through, I think the final volume of Reconsiderations was in the early 1960s, it was apparent to him that the only surviving civilisation, Western Christendom, was on its last legs, not because its foundations were not good, its development was not good, its structure was not sound, but because it was sound, because all the others were good. It developed a more complex historical flow than it was able, in its original response, and in subsequent responses, was able to keep up with the increased challenge. The contemporary challenge, by the middle of the 20th century, exceeded the ability; that old wine was good wine, it couldn't be put into the new skins - it will burst the skins.
All of the attempts that we have seen, especially in the last couple of hundred years, in particular the last 50 years, to engender metaphysical techniques or systems to meet the modern complexities are totally inadequate. One of the currently pushed new age ways of maturing is styled the integral way, which hardly goes up to 2500 years ago. Pythagoras already went through transforms that took us completely out of a purely integral cycling of adequacy. The Buddha took us out of that, Lao Tzu took us out of that. By 500BC human life was already way too complicated for simply an integral approach. About ten years ago I turned down a professorship at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. The President and his wife came to recruit me; it's inadequate. It was inadequate as long ago as the 1930s.
By the 1960s it was apparent that none of this is going to work, there has to be some way to plan a new way of learning, not just an education, but a maturing, which prepares us to have a dimensionality complex enough to handle the challenges, because not only are the challenges that have been developed through theory and kaleidoscopic historical complexity of our own kind, but we are already being contacted by civilisations that span star systems and need to treat us with either dismissal or kid gloves because that scale of new wine and challenge is not able to be handled currently.
In one of the deepest crises 350 years ago, in the middle of the 17th century, a crisis that came to a head eventually with Newton's Principia Mathematica accepting the challenge and being able to make some kind of a response but it took almost a hundred years for that response to be distributed well enough, that it became a part of at least enough of a trace of humanity to be able to begin to deal with. And then already we saw from the earlier part of today's presentation that that was swept away again very soon after that.
The mention last week of John Amos Comenius: Comenius developed the world's first textbook that used pictures very much like the way in which Basic English uses pictures, to convey, very quickly, not only a vocabulary and grammar and syntax of a language but its sidesteps; the necessity to have a mental conception before you do this. The mental integral is the last stage of the cycle. Not the first. And to misunderstand that involves a whole handful of crucial errors, of flaws, that sabotage any attempt that doesn't take them into consideration; to lead off with the mind means that you already have abstracted yourself away from the natural, from nature as a process.
Now you can see how our phases are very simple ways of recalibrating what it is that we are doing and what it is that we are not doing, if we are not doing it. If you lead off with symbolic thought you have abstracted yourself from the occurrence of nature and also it gives you an artificial confidence along with a delusional belief that if you lead off with your mind you can actually rearrange the things of existence, the things of this world; the world is your toy to rearrange, in the way that your mind wants it to be. It is subject to the use of mentality, especially a strong mentality that has developed doctrines.
One of the strongest doctrines developed 200 years ago was the idea of using a political economy as a structure for organising the larger reach of an empire. One of the prime individuals who developed political economy was Jeremy Bentham, in England. C.K. Ogden, one of our authors, did a number of books on Jeremy Bentham. Now, Bentham died in 1832, so this was brought out in 1932, and its subtitle is Jeremy Bentham 1832 - 2032. So Ogden positions this biography in the centre, this is a hundred years after Bentham died and this book is a hundred years before the implications of another hundred years are going to go by and one of the prime books by C.K. Ogden after this was called Jeremy Bentham's Theory of Fictions because at the origin of political economies, the arbitrary fictiveness of events, processes, relations and situations was assumed into having efficacy, if one could bend everything to your structure. A political economy by 2006 is a world order of, not just supply and demand, but of a whole financial web of tuning and complexities, the money supply, the interest rates, etc, all of it brought together and all of it brought together in this way is fictive.
Its theory is game theory, not consciousness. Not the theoria of contemplation but the artificial theory of a mentality parading itself and congratulating itself that it is what controls thought, what controls, then, the world and what is really conscious, whereas the fact is that that form of mentality is not conscious but is self-ishly self-absorbed in a reflectiveness of its own bubble, does not see outside the bubble. Its world purview is in the mind as thought and thought certainly has a form but the mind is not at all a form like the structure of a brain that has neurons and a brain structure and really is an integral form of the highest order.
A mind is a scintillating differential conscious kind of lens which has the ability to share its focusing with others so that minds are shareable. Minds are able to interpenetrate and a community that is engendered in this way is truly conscious, not conscious as a cultural unity, not conscious as sharers of belief in a doctrinal world, but as participants in the creative imaginative engendering of possibilities and to make an experimental selection of the most interesting and advantageous of those possibilities and constantly keeping them in creative ratios of exploration and possibilities. I call these ratios of the real.
The perfect example of this, in the 1960s, were the Apollo missions to the moon. Mathematically, you could not figure out how to go from Cape Canaveral to the moon and land there, was not mathematically possible to do. So the math was worked out so that as you went on that all of your frames of reference and ordinals were constantly changing and they were self-organising according to refining algorithms, so that you were constantly re-plaiting where you were going and how you were going as you were going and we were able successfully to soft land six times on the moon. It is only possible to send a complex machine organism like Cassini a billion miles out to Saturn and have the Huygens Capsule parachute down and soft land on Titan, all of that had to be constantly refined as one was going out. Not just mid-course corrections, corrections all the time, on every aspect, so that what you have is you have a differential conscious instrumentation and you have to have designers of that, operators of that, who are able to use their sophisticated instruments as tools.
Now when it comes to computers, contemporary computers are such complex instruments that most people have relented as if they were like modern appliances: 'Who knows how they work, you buy them, you plug them in, if they go wrong, you phone for service.' The entire planet, now, is a super complex hyper computer. Human civilisation is so complex by 2006 and it's going to increase at least tenfold over the next decade. There is no one now able to repair this civilisation, much less ten times its complexity. It is the old myth told by the pueblo Indians of the ants and the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers didn't want to sacrifice, they were busy just chomping and eating, having a good time being grasshoppers, singing, playing. The ants understood that you have to lay stuff away, that it's not always good, there may come tough times and when the tough times came the grasshoppers died off. It was difficult for the ants, they had to keep tightening and tightening their belts until their waist was very, very tiny but they survived and made it. We have a culture of grasshoppers who are busy eating up everything and everything is disappearing, not into scarcity so much, although that is happening, and not into contamination, although that its happening, it is vanishing into a tidal wave, a tsunami of complexity that is not able to be handled.
This education, this learning, recalibrates and gets us off the death conveyor belt mentalities that have failed long ago. They were not serviceable, even in 1932. By the time the neutron was discovered in 1932 it become apparent that we are not just dealing with positive and negatives in the atom, protons and electrons, that once you have a neutron, now you have a nuclear force which has a magnetic quality, MRI, magnetic resonance. The magnetic resonance of the nucleus of the atom is able to build up in a very specific way because the protons and the neutrons are able to work together in such a way that the protons, if you had two of them together that are both positive they would repel each other. There would be no stability. It is only with the neutrons that you get a stability. And you get a relationality, they call the gluons on the quark level but its nuclear magnetic resonance on the nucleus level and without that you can't build anything up beyond hydrogen.
Helium is such a mysterious element because for the first time you see the utility of having a neutral particle participate in what would have just been an electric quality of balance and attraction and now you have the electric with another access of the magnetic and with that electromagnetic foursome a pair of poles each, a pair of pairs, making a kind of square, or if you like a diamond, or if you like a triad triangle with an apex, a pyramid. Now you have structures that are able to be expanded in complexity many, many orders beyond what was possible before. The discovery of zeroness in terms of the mind was an extraordinary event in human maturity and complexity. That zeroness, when it came into play, about 1900 years ago, enabled the complexity of human consciousness to exceed the limitations that had been there before because the mind now was able to be opened to the extent to where its thusness was able to be put into a neutral form of itself, and that that open mind now was able to engender something. In our time it has been called by the best mathematicians, by the best physicists, by the most mature individuals, in the world, it's the open mind in the open world.
The great Bohr, Niels Bohr symposium on the open world, it says here, 'With common sense and a bit of luck, the nations, East and West, can now put an end to three things: the Cold War; the horrifying prospect of World War III and the great European schism of 1917.' Faulkner once, in his Nobel Prize speech said, 'There's only been one war in three acts so far.' That there was no peace made at the end of the First World War, it was only put into intermission and came back more virulent in the Second World War which also did not end, came back more virulent in a series of distributed wars. When he was speaking in 1954 the Korean War already had gone through its course and went on hold, it's still on hold, there has been no victory, there has been no peace and it has proliferated, not just Vietnam or Iraq, but the entire globe is perforated now by intractable conflict considerations.
Bohr put together atomic physics and human knowledge in `958 and when he passed on in 1962 there was a second appendix, Essays 1958 - 1962, one of the qualities that's here in Bohr is a series of essays by him, the most profound came out in 1932 (the same time that Ogden's little monograph, this was for his magazine Psyche, on Jeremy Bentham ); 1932, it's called Light and Life. When we get deeper into Symbols we'll take a look at Light and Life by Niels Bohr. Some of the background of this, for the open world, and it takes its title from a book by one of the world's great mathematicians, Hermann Weyl and it's called The Open World published by Yale university Press, published in 1932.
I hope that you are understanding that there are watersheds, there are historical thresholds beyond which if you mature they become thresholds which you are able to cross, to go through, osmotically. If you cannot those thresholds are no longer membranes, they are walls and some of these are not just steel walls, some of them are weather fronts like storm fronts, there are historical tsunami. We face, about 2012-2015 an intractable storm front of a historical threshold that we can meet, we can penetrate, we can transform, we can deal with it.
The Open World by Hermann Weyl, professor of mathematics at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Göttingen was the greatest math university until the Nazis took over Germany the very next year, 1933. Hitler came into power exactly the same time that FDR came into The White House, the very same time, March of 1933. So what we are looking at here, we are looking at a visionary presage, three lectures on the metaphysical implications of science. Not only this, The Open World, but we mentioned last week the great little volume by J. Robert Oppenheimer called The Open Mind published in 1955. 1955 was another one of these watershed years because in 1954 instead of just having atomic bombs one now had hydrogen bombs, thermo-nuclear weapons.
The atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima or Nagasaki was a tiny little thing, just a few tenths of thousands of tons of TNT. The first hydrogen bomb was more than a million, not a couple of tens of thousands, a million, and now one gets up to 50-100 million. It will not just erase a city, it will erase a country. It is an unacceptable and an intolerable situation but figures like Bohr and Weyl and Oppenheimer are not content simply to point this out and to stress this; Weyl has Mind and Nature. He was by this time not any longer at the University of Göttingen in Germany but he was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. All of a sudden you find Mind and Nature, publications of the William J Cooper Foundation, The Essentials of Democracy by A.D. Lindsay and Mind and Nature by Hermann Weyl. Here you find right away subjective elements in sense perception, world and consciousness, constructive character of scientific concepts and theories, relativity, subject and object in quantum physics. This was completed early, published in 1934, it was written in late '33.
Oppenheimer's follow up to The Open Mind is The Whidden Lectures for 1962. With Bohr dying, Oppenheimer, again, went on the world's stage like a conscientious, mature, conscious person. The Whidden Lectures for 1962, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists. He's the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, by this time and The Whidden Lectures were in Toronto , Canada, because it was very difficult for somebody like an Oppenhemier who had been racked by Cold War strategists for his criticism, not just of developing the hydrogen bomb but developing a hydrogen bomb culture that was slowly displacing all of the advances of civilisation at that time. By 1962 it was apparent to all of us who were mature enough to understand that we were facing something that was truly horrendous, absolutely horrendous.
In 1962 with the Cuba missile crisis in October, I think I have mentioned this, I, with five other friends at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which not only had the University in the state capital but had a strategic airman base, Truax field was a sack base. After the announcement we drove out to the sack base, to Truax field. In the evening, in the night, all of the B52s were lined up with their engines running, all of them loaded up with enough nuclear weaponry, bombs, to obliterate the Soviet Union. Just that one airbase, there are about 15 B52s, each with enough fire power to take out whole sections of the country and just that strike force itself could have wrecked it permanently. This actually happened, folks.
So this presentation comes because of 40 years of working at trying to understand all of these developments; that the crème de la crème of human beings for millennia had been working towards, how to continue to live and be real. Comenius, writing 350 years ago, wrote on the method of the sciences specifically and wrote, 'We must now collect together the scattered observations that we had made on the proper teachings of the sciences of the arts of languages, of morality and of piety. By proper teaching I mean teaching that combines ease, thoroughness and rapidity. Science or the knowledge of nature consists of an internal perception and needs the same essentials as the external perception, namely the eye, an object, and light.'
Remember Rembrandt's 1632 painting of The Scholar In His Study. Comenius' great educational development The World in Pictures was published in 1657. He immediately received accolades everywhere, not only in Europe but in the American continent. He was issued an invitation by John Winthrop of Harvard University, just starting up, because it started in 1632 - notice these dates. Comenius, at the same time, as he was contemplating coming to the United States to be, coming it America, not only to run his new education at Harvard ,but to extend it out so that the education would include the American Indian tribes. He wrote a whole monograph on the necessity for including American Indian natives in an expanded education for a new world, that they were absolutely essential, because they were a dimension of naturality, of objectivity, and of the participation in whatever light would be real to have an education and maturation that would develop spirit beings in their kaleidoscopic capability 350 years ago.
That's why UNESCO put this commemorative volume out, to commemorate, the selections had an introduction by Jean Piaget. Most of Piaget's work that is available is available in a series edited by C.K. Ogden, the International Library of Science, Philosophy and Psychology, nine volumes of Piaget's work appears in translation in the series he edited. Ogden not only did Basic English and the International Library of Science, Philosophy and Psychology, he did another series at the same time called The History of Civilisation. Trying, all of these individuals, to make forms and processes of maturation that are absolutely essential to continue to live and expansive to meet the challenge of the complexification that has come, not out of a failure so much of anything, but out of its success.
We have developed to this extent, to this depth. We must not just meet this or just stay ahead of the game, we have a chance here to open the mind permanently and open the world permanently, so there's no longer globe, but as a planet and a whole star system, and as that star system belongs in a starry realm called the galaxy, it's that spiral spirit that invites us now. It's not some idea of kingship, it's a spiral spirit of a interstellar frontier and challenge. Nowhere do you find anything on this level of penetration and complexity. Look around, look deeper, and as you do this, as you go through the phases, the phases will acquire the same kind of voracity that human sounds acquire when you use a phonetic alphabet. Now, though, it might have been initially a forming of sets of phonemes, phonetically into sets: a, e, i, o, u, Om, and the consonantal variants of those, you can have any number of alphabets based on that, you can have Sanskrit, Greek, English, Latin, whatever, Italian. But once you have an alphabet set up like that, the language will have the ability to refine itself so that you can achieve a Chaucer-like humanity, a Shakespeare-like cosmic-ness, a Shelley-like grandeur of something extraordinary and what we are working with today.
The presentation here usually is in a 21st century poetic, cadenced in such a way that it still has the earmarks of the old myth teller, of the tribe. It has the cadence of a Chaucer reading out loud, of a Shakespeare being performed, of a Shelley being lifted off the page in such a way that one could talk about. At the end of Prometheus Unbound he says, 'When we suffer wars darker than death or night, we hope til hope creates out of its own wreck the thing it contemplates, that this is life, joy, empire and victory.' It subsumes all of those desiderata into a complete transformation recalibration. That's the little chant that Prometheus gives to man. More next week.