Vision 9
Presented on: Saturday, March 3, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to the ninth presentation in a series of 12, in a phase that we designate as Vision. And vision is about consciousness, but it's not about consciousness in a mentality, but about the super space that's generated from the integral of an entire cycle of nature and radiates out another dimension. And that consciousness is like a fifth dimension, it's like an alchemical quintessential added to the four dimensions of space time and brings transformation into play everywhere that it can and so vision is not only a conscious fifth dimension, but instead of being an integral, is a differential dimension and begins a complementarity to the four phases of nature that go to make up its frame, its frame of reference, its picture, its integral. And consciousness begins, not so much a cycle, but an ecology and in that ecology the various expansion phases of differential consciousness come into play in a kind of a syncopation that we have come to recognise in our presentations. The syncopation is that a phase of process generates a phase of form and that phase of form in its turn generates another phase of process. But whereas the first phase of process was like a field, the second phase of process is like a river. And we use the analogy of the Gulf Stream river in the Atlantic Ocean and just extend the Atlantic Ocean to the entire planet, all of the oceans being a field. The Gulf Stream also circulates, not only from the Gulf of Mexico up to the northern latitudes of Europe, but continues all the way around the planet in a various convoluted flow, so that there's a planetary river within the planetary ocean and that river of that second process is our experience within the field of nature. And in-between, the forms of existence emerge out of nature and generate experience and then all of that is integrated and brought together in what we call the mind. The structure of symbols, in particular the structure of symbolic thought and is like an ultimate integral, in that all four phases come together and present a completeness, but that completeness is not the end, but only the middle. Because the completeness in itself as a form generates the third process of differential consciousness, of vision. And we'll see, as we're seeing now, that vision is such an expansion that was unexpected because it has two particular qualities that are universal. One, because it itself is a field it can operate in the place of the field of nature, so that instead of just getting existential phenomena that come out of nature, now one gets magical phenomena that come out of a visionary nature. The usual way of speaking of this is that there's something supernatural going on, not supernatural just in the sense of ghosts, or angels, but supranatural in the sense that now vision has come to place as a field within the field of nature and so we get a very complex, mysterious field, where nature and consciousness together engender completely new possibilities.
We live in a time, not just the early twenty first century, but in particular the last 60 years, since 1947, of an extraordinary challenge to us. The Roswell incident of UFO's and their crash and their passengers and their retrieval, set a tone 60 years ago, of making it clear on the highest levels of those responsible for holding the structures of humanity in our world, for the very first time it was apparent beyond any doubt whatsoever that decades of previous encounters, centuries of previous encounters, millennia of previous encounters, added up to a threshold focus of a challenge that requires a response. And because the challenge is complex the response must be complex enough to address the multilayered, multifaceted challenge. The whole emphasis is not just that there are other kinds of beings in the universe who have come to visit us, but the overwhelming realisation that the visitations were piling up and stacking up, especially through the early 1940's, from 1940 to 1947 and that Roswell was just the culmination of a whole series which could be put into a set of 12 major incidents, the twelfth being the Roswell incident. What is important for us as human beings, as Homo sapiens, is to understand that our species as Homo sapiens has been around for about 160,000 years and that for that time period, for 110,000 years, our species lived in Africa. Did not occur anywhere else on the planet, but moved out of Africa about 50,000 years ago and moved out of Africa in a completely new way from other species of hominids that had moved out of Africa time immemorial before them. We know for instance, that one of the species that predates us by a great long expanse of time was Homo erectus. And Homo erectus was already viable on the planet 2,000,000 years ago. In the previous presentations in Nature we talked about the discovery in parts of Ethiopia, around Lake Turkana, of a skeleton of a young Homo erectus man, about 17 years old, who was almost six feet tall, and was an athlete from his bone structure and probably could outrun a great deal of the game on the vast Sahel that was there at the time. We know that Homo erectus spread throughout the world and one of the local varieties of Homo erectus was where Beijing, China is today and Beijing Man, a variant local kind of Homo erectus used fire 400,000 years ago. But 50,000 years ago our species, Homo sapiens, left Africa, not the way that Homo erectus left through the strait of the Red Sea between what is today Ethiopia and Yemen, southern Arabia in that Horn of Africa, but left Africa up along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the first place that Homo sapiens outside of Africa settled was what is today Israel, what was classically Palestine. What was, even 50,000 years ago, already a new promised land. The first time that one finds an interface between Homo sapiens leaving Africa and the Homo Neanderthals, who still lived in that area of the world...we have Neanderthal burials from the top of Mount Carmel from 200,000 years before. A skeleton surrounded by the pollen of hundreds and hundreds of flowers, that the Neanderthal death was so revered for a future life, in had been outlined in flowers and the pollen still existed when discovered early in the twentieth century, outlining the body. But when Homo sapiens left Africa a great change came about, in the sense that a varietal, like aging man was a varietal of Homo erectus, still Homo erectus, but a special intensification of it, Homo sapiens became especially intensified over the next 10,000 years as they spread out in two different kinds of waves, from what is today Israel. One wave went along the north Mediterranean, or south Mediterranean coasts, meeting up in what is today southern Spain and the other went north into the Black Sea area and along the great Danube River into the centre of the...what became Europe, at that time of course, 45,000 years ago, was just a completely open land, populated sparsely by Neanderthals. Homo sapiens acquired a variant refinement so that one repeats the word, 'Sapiens.' It isn't just, 'Wise man,' but Homo sapiens sapiens, is wise about being wise. And that wise about being wise generated a new form that was only there in nascent seed qualities in the African experience and now, not only in Africa and everywhere else that Homo sapiens sapiens went to, the beginnings of rock art appear. And that rock art very, very quickly goes into special niches, special overhangs and very quickly within about four or 5,000 years, goes underground into caves, into cave complexes and that the art becomes arrayed and arranged in such a way that one can now follow a dramatic path of initiation from cluster to cluster. And when one comes through, holding in the darkness little lights, one comes back and is ready to re-emerge into the world completely changed, completely transformed. And Homo sapiens sapiens learned that a spirit person form emerges out of the visionary magic of a journey to another world, to a netherworld, to a beyond world, to an above world. So that the species, our species, 40,000 years ago, understood by going to other realms of reality, to other worlds, we will mature ourselves further. We live at a cusp where Homo sapiens sapiens, our special, refined species, is now refining once again. I have called the new species Homo sapiens stellaris, 'Star wisdom Man,' where we are able to leave this world, to inhabit all the worlds of our star system, all the moons, all the asteroids, all the Kuiper belt objects. The entirety of the star system is the base of our new geography for a new civilisation. And on that level our species as Homo sapiens stellaris will have acquired the capacity to interface as equals on the interstellar frontier with star system civilisations beyond number. We will do this progressively through the twenty first century and a great deal of the twenty second century will be the honing and refining of the array. All of this seems peculiar to many people and yet for someone like myself it has been a common intelligence since I was a little boy. In my library the oldest book I have is Flash Gordon and the Red Sword Invaders, from 1945, which has my four year old signature in it. And reading included Buck Rogers, as well as Flash Gordon and by the age of 11 I was able to read things like Mission Interplanetary, the original title was Voyage of the Space Beagle to Other Star Systems and Robert Heinlein's The Green Hills of Earth, which were fondly a beautiful backyard which we now have gone on adventures and can look back fondly, but keep going out. My earliest publication is a letter in The Original Science Fiction Stories, May 1957, a letter written in December 1956, half a century ago and it appears along with a letter by Isaac Asimov to the same magazine. And what I am saying to you is: 'I have done this all my life. You can have the confidence that what is being presented here is not something recent, but is freshly new as a whole array of response to a complex challenge.'
We have looked especially in our Vision phases at a tremendous jumping of capacity in the art of using language in a special poetic and that that special poetic has a number of art forms, poetry being the centre of it, but at the centre of the centre is a special kind of poetry, sometimes called a hymn, most accurately called a song and later on when it became refined in a different kind of refinement, it was called an ode. And these odes, these poems, these hymns, have about a 4400 year cycle, largely dominated by great women poets. And we saw how the first major literary figure in the world was a woman, her name was Enheduanna and she lived in Mesopotamia and her father, Sargon the Great created the first international civilisation, the Fertile Crescent, that stretched not only from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, but the trade routes stretched down along south Arabia, into Africa, into Ethiopia and all the way along the coasts of what is today Iran and Pakistan, into India, to the great Indus civilisation that some 2400 BC predates the Aryans coming into India by more than 1,000 years. And that Dravidian civilisation of the Indus Valley, with its two great cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, both about a half million persons, 2700 BC, had through trade routes already established a great contact with Ethiopia, with the Horn of Africa. And one can see the physiology of the Ethiopic quality and the ancient India qualities being very similar and having a similar sensibility. And in fact the next great woman poet of all time was from Ethiopia. Her name is always used as a phrase, 'The Queen of Sheba.' When Jesus referred to her he referred to her as the, 'Queen of the South,' because she ruled not just Sheba, but Saba on the Arabian Peninsula and many, many avenues and kingdoms, like the inheritance of the ancient Nubian kingdoms that were Egyptian back 3000 BC already and down into tropical Africa. Her name was Makeda and she was the wisest woman of her time and sought to have a series of dialogues with the wisest man of the time, Solomon. And when she met Solomon, the interchange was such a complexity that the 42 Temple Hymns of Enheduanna, some 1400 years before, were condensed into a third, into 14 hymns that linked together in a poetic cycle of initiation of the two of them into each other together, that produced a meeting, a courtship, a spiritual marriage and resulted in a son. And that cycle of 14 together is known as the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, the Song of Solomon, written by Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, out of Ethiopia, about 970 BC. That entire lineage, from Enheduanna, jumping to the Queen of Sheba, jumped again in the early part of the First Century AD to one of the most brilliant poetesses of all time, Mary Magdalene. And her 42 Odes of Solomon are like the 42 Temple Hymns of Enheduanna, a bringing together, a massive cycle, that presents a new transformation. Enheduanna's 42 Temple Hymns brought a civilisation into being where the central, synthesising quality was a divine king. Makeda, in the Song of Songs, brought in the fact that a divine king needs to have a spiritual marriage with the special, celestial woman and then they may produce a child that is extraordinary. The son of Solomon and Sheba was named Menelik and into our own time in the twentieth century, the 235th generation of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon was Haile Selassie, who was the Emperor of Ethiopia. The Odes of Solomon as spiritual hymns, ushered in a new civilisation where it wasn't so much the divine king, or even the divine king needing to have the spiritual marriage, but a new quality of civilised time, that the emphasis was on the mysteriousness of the person to transform together in what I call, 'Shared presence.' And that this is extendable as a communion indefinitely into infinity, so that one is not limited to any particular lineage, any particular royalty, but anyone who comes into play with it, who comes into acceptance with it, is a part of that spirit family. And in this we looked at the Psalms of David, translated in the Elizabethan Renaissance in the late 1500's, which resulted in the commitment to do a complete transform of the Bible into what we have today as a literary classic, the King James Version of the Bible. But the prelude of it was not the scholars that made this, or the special scholars that made the prototypes, like the Tyndale Bible, or the Bishops' Bible beforehand, but was the special genius of a new poetic of the English language raised to the sophistication of a level that Classical Greek, or Classical Hebrew, or Classical Sanskrit had obtained. And Elizabethan English rose to be one of the greatest languages that the planet has ever had. And Sir Philip Sidney, dying at 31, having translated only the first 44 hymns, his sister, Mary Sidney, who became...she was married at 15, 15 years old, to the Second Earl of Pembroke, so she became the Countess of Pembroke. But they didn't live at Pembroke, which is out at Wales, across the sea from Ireland, but his estate home was Wilton, on the Salisbury plain, within view of Stonehenge. So she spent almost all of her life looking out across the yard at Stonehenge. And she completed the translations of the Psalms, the next 107 Psalms, but they were never published, they were special spirit guides and they were circulated privately in manuscripts, never printed, always by hand. So that one found the legitimacy of the spiritual vision in the fact that they were written by hand and passed on that way. Secret, person to person, but open, in that you as a receiver would choose the next to whom you would give it and in this way a special, differential conscious spirit resonance occurred.
One of the great documents that Sir Philip Sidney left was A Defence of Poesy, of poetic English as a language of poetry and you can find it in the Oxford World's Classics, The Major Works of Sir Philip Sidney. But his Defence of Poesy was revisited by Percy Shelley in his Defence of Poetry almost 200 years later. And it's a curious aspect because two of the most powerful hymnal poems of Shelley, just published in little magazines, or newspapers for a few in his lifetime...he also died at the early age of 30 and his special hymns...the first time that he visited the Alps in Europe with his 15 year old lady, Mary, who became Mary Shelley and in 1816, when they were visiting together in that area, he wrote two great hymnal poem songs, one called a 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and the other called 'Mont Blanc,' the highest jagged peak in Europe and the only peak that has this awful mysteriousness which the Himalayas have. That these are mysterious mountains, that they belong not to the era of kings and kingdoms, but they belong to the new secret era of the mysterious person and that these are collecting points for a cosmic energy to come to man. And so beholding them, one beholds the beyond in the setting at which almost anything can happen, anything would be possible.
One learns, if one has been in that area of New Mexico, east of Roswell, when you are approaching the civilised highway that comes down from Albuquerque, from Sirocco, down, that area is the White Sands testing ground and is the place where the world's first atomic bomb was put out and exploded just two years, less than two years, before the Roswell incident. And that area of New Mexico has a peculiar quality to it, an eerie quality that is only paralleled by the eerie quality of the inner parts of Nevada, from Area 51, on up to the great swathe of Nevada that goes east of Reno and sparks all the way to Wells. And that area of Nevada south, that area of New Mexico, has a quality of the ancientness of the desert and its appeal to the future that is now coming and bringing with it the reoriginating into a new history, which...what I call now the, 'Parallel set,' the future and the new past. And part of our presentation sequence is a yoga of the new civilisation, to recut the past into a new set of jewels to make a new necklace to wear on the thresholds of the new infinite future of worlds without end.
We have in this presentation sequence the need not only to have phases of 12, but to punctuate them with an interval, a thirteenth that does not count as a part of the set, but is the space in-between sets and that intervalling is a placing of infinity in a zero mode, as the punctuation for the existence of phenomena. So that the connection is not phenomenal between phenomena, but the connection is an infinite numinousness, a spiritual infinity, a spirit visioned, prefect zeroness, an emptiness that allows for quanta to be what they are and for in-between the quanta for there to be an openness that is not a thing. It is completely, perfectly free forever. And in this way the zero and one of phenomenal binary is punctuated by the zero and infinity of a spiritual perfection. One of the great challenges - and you can get a $1,000,000 prize if you answer it - is to find a way to mathematically prove a mathematical challenge that was put out at the beginning of the twentieth century. 'How is it that numbers, whole numbers, are able to exist as they are and yet make a sequence that has evidently a zero point spacing between them?' One of the great mathematicians, a teacher, Hermann Minkowski, asked, he said, 'If I come back after 1,000 years, I would like to know if anyone has solved this particular challenge.' It is solvable in the sense that the zeroness and the infinity logically occupy nothingness as if it were fullness, that the perfect zeroness of a ??nyat? - to use the phrase from Mah?y?na in Vajrayana Buddhism - that the perfectness of ??nyat? is exactly resonant with the fullness of an infinite Tathata. 'Tathata' being the Sanskrit matching, '??nyat?.' 'Tathata' means, 'Suchness,' '??nyat?,' means, 'Void,' but when asked to describe himself, the historical Buddha said that he was a, 'Tath?gata.' 'Gata' in Sanskrit means, 'Gone.' And so the great hymn, the spiritual mantra of the Mah?y?na, refining it to the Vajrayana, was always the Heart Sutra, that at the centre is chanted, 'Gata gata p?ragata p?rasa?gata bodhi sv?h?.' 'Gone, gone, completely, perfectly gone, enlightenment hail.' Let's take a break and we'll come back.
Let's come back. You were looking at a triangle of civilisation that has its point at the very basis of a civilisation that is no longer operative in the world. It was founded on the basis of Homer, who's at the centre of this. The last throes of that Homeric based civilisation was in the era of the Romantic revolution and one of the great figures of that revolutionary era of course was Thomas Jefferson and another was Friedrich Schiller. And we're taking Schiller and a complement, because we'll always working with pairs to give ourselves proportions and ratios, rather than texts and subjects. We want to have a mobile quality of rearranging, of reproportioning, of what I call a, 'Recalibration of learning' for a new civilisation, a star civilisation, a stellar civilisation and a new refinement for Homo sapiens, 'Star wisdom Man.' So that we can be active on the interstellar frontier for real, not just on a par with others, but we have in this star system an extraordinarily special quality that is rare among star system civilisations. Just two examples: the historical Buddha, about 500 BC, 500 before the Common Era, 500 years before Jesus, brought his completeness to a precise zero and referred to himself as the, 'Tath?gata,' one whose, 'Suchness' is gone. It's not missing, it's not not there, but its phenomenality as a limitation no longer holds, the bound is infinite. And many of the classic Sutras remembered - and there are more than 17,000 of them - many of the Sutras talk about beings from everywhere in the universe coming to hear the classical Buddha. That anywhere in the universe, to have a Buddha born is extraordinarily rare, but to have a second follow-up like the perfection of the integral of the Buddha, the perfection of Jesus was to open it up into infinity. To be able to have the resonances that could go out in such a way that it deserves the attention of all species, all star civilisations, completely.
Now, we're pairing, as we do, here with Schiller and Shelley, because they present the highest quality of poetic language at the time, to be able to give us a sense of how incredibly awesome and terrific - to use those words in the correct meaning - the awful beauty, the terrific visionary energy, that occurred in a condensed threshold of time. The convenient, earliest way to look at it is 1776, not only the Declaration of Independence of Jefferson, but 1776 was the first time that Schiller wrote a poem, called, 'The Conquerors' in translation. And it's the beginning of a compression of events that extended for the next 50 years, all the way to 1826. And in that 50 year period, 1776 to 1826, one finds dozens of geniuses beyond belief, not only on the world scale of politics, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, etc. but of artists and poets, like William Blake and Shelley and Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, just to name some of the English writers. And in this, the easiest way to focus ourselves is to look at the two poems of Shelley, the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and 'Mont Blanc,' as a just a few indications that it was those two poems that set, like goalposts, like gateposts, the gateway threshold through which his greatest work was to emerge over the next three years. And that greatest work is the one that we're taking, the Prometheus Unbound, one of the most incredible works of literature in world history. The Prometheus Unbound is written exactly at the same time that his wife, Mary Shelley, was writing Frankenstein. And if you take a look at the subtitle of Frankenstein one reads, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Now, there are two versions of Frankenstein, one is the 1818 original text and then another text that came out years later, 1831. But the 1818 text is written exactly in the centre of the Prometheus Unbound by Shelley. What's significant here is that the Prometheus Bound is the greatest Greek tragedy from the origins of that Greco-Roman based civilisation that unravelled and perished about 200 years ago. The Romantic revolution at the time was a reaching out that progressively through the nineteenth century reached out in such a comprehensive, questioning way, that the very solidity of phenomena faded away and evaporated, till at the end of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth century, it was apparent that there was nothing that was solid in the universe that you could pound and say it was stuff that was gonna stay there. The discovery of X-rays, the discovery of the electron, the discovery of radioactivity in several varieties, the realisation that atoms had structures that were peculiar and finally by 1920's, early 1920's, it was recognised that most of the atom is empty space. If your atom of hydrogen is the size of a football field, the proton at the nucleus is a pea in midfield of the football field and the electron is spinning like a microscopic gyroscope, way out beyond the goalposts. Most of what we consider atomic reality is open space that is brought into unified, integral solidity by a relationship of energy that is cinched and now becomes dimensional as space phenomenon, time-indexed. But when atoms join together to become molecules, the atomic basis of inorganic matter becomes the molecular basis of ratioed organic matter. So if one is to understand organic life, one looks to the molecular ratios and proportions. If one wants to understand the basis of that, one looks to the atomic structure. But if one wants to understand the multi-dimensional field of which that occurs, now one has to look with great consciousness into the zeros and into the infinities and the new kinds of ratioing that occur there. We are not only of such stuff that dreams are made of, we are the dreams that really emerged that stuff. This is a learning which is different from any that has been used before and yet cognate with all of the great wisdom traditions, east and west, for all time on the planet.
In 1976, 200 years after 1776, as if one were on a cosmic time clock, a man probing in one of the deep vaults of Barclays Bank in London, in the Pall Mall Station, found a sealed trunk, steel-studded, that had been there for 150 years unclaimed. When it was opened a lost Shelley notebook was found. It had been leant to his friend Lord Byron, who wanted to return it to Shelley and gave it to a friend of his going to London, but the friend was a gambler and when he got to London the creditors were after him, so he deposited all of his goods in the trunk in Barclays Bank and beat it back to the Continent, was never heard from again. The trunk was never claimed and two of the poems in that trunk were the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' in the original manuscript hand of Shelley and the 'Mont Blanc.' I want to give you just a couple of lines, just so that you get the tone. These are two poems written the first time that Shelley got the incredible realisation that something huge was taking place in the very life that they had, in the very world that they had now entered into, into the companionship and the friends, that they were now realising that their life truth was going to be tied into beautiful bows. And this is how the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,' the original one reads, the one that was published in a little newspaper: 'The awful shadow of some unseen power floats through unseen among us, visiting this various world with a inconstant wing as summer winds that creep from flower to flower, like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, it visits with inconstant glance.' And the version that was found is a little different. Barclays Bank published it in early 1978...all of us were stunned:
The lovely shadow of some awful power walks, though unseen among us, visiting, walking power. This peopled world with an inconstant wind as summer wings that creep from flower to flower, of moonbeams behind a piny mountain shower, visits with a wavering glance each human heart and countenance, like hues and harmonies of evening, like clouds in starlight widely spread, like memory of music fled, like aught that for its grace might be dear and yet dearer in its mystery.
This quality was followed a couple of months later when on the far side of France, just before you get into Italy, just down from the border of Switzerland, just north of it, Mont Blanc is the tallest, awesomest mountain in that whole part of the world. This is the way in which Shelley began...'Mont Blanc' has the subtitle to the poem, 'Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.' Based on an earlier poem of about 15 years before, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also called 'Hymns Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni.' Some of the most famous lines of English Romantic poetry ever used and later when we get to the History phase of our learning, we have music examples that are always setting the pitch pipe tone for each phase. And the music for the History phase will be Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony Number Seven, the Sinfonia Antartica. About how water can become ice, can glaciers and gouge out new worlds. Comes from light, fluffy snow, comes from the forgotten ends of the earth. And in the Sinfonia Antartica there are extracts of Romantic revolution poetry put in. One of them is from Coleridge, another is from Shelley. This beginning of Coleridge: 'Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star in his steep course? So long he seems to pause on the bald awful head, of sovereign Blanc.' Mont Blanc is mount zero, a white-out of universal capacities to erase phenomenality and yet preserve the invisible presence. So Coleridge writes of the two rivers:
The Arve and the Arveiron at thy base rave ceaselessly, but thou, most awful form, risest from forth the silent sea of pines, how silently! Around thee and above deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, an ebon mass. Methinks thou piercest it, as with a wedge, but when I look again, it is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, thy habitation from eternity. Oh dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, till thou, still present to the bodily sense, did vanish from my thought. Entranced in prayer, I worshipped the invisible alone.
Exclusively, the presence is divine. Shelley's begins:
The everlasting universe of things flows through the mind and rolls its rapid waves, now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom, now lending splendour, where from secret springs the source of human thought its tribute brings of waters with a sound but half its own, such as a feeble brook will oft assume in the wild woods, among the mountains lone, where waterfalls keep it locked forever, where woods and winds contend and a vast river over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
With these kinds of poetic preludes, Shelley sat down to write Prometheus Unbound and his wife to write Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus. Ten years before, Schiller had died at age 46. An extraordinary kind of an individual, he was born on a very wealthy duke's estate, his father was a doctor. He finally was raised in Duke Karl Eugen's Karls School and when he was ready for further studies, he was sent off to study first law and then medicine. And his very first medical dissertation was rejected by the examiners. It was called The Philosophy of Physiology. And the next year it was accepted, the third one after two rejections: On the Connection Between the Animal and Spiritual Natures of Man. And he went off to be a regimental doctor, but he had already seen through the limiting schooling, the limiting profession, the limiting family, the limiting social qualities and he had emerged born fresh into he didn't know what, except to call it freedom. And so he began writing plays as well as poems and a couple of years later one of the most incredible poems written was brought into being and this poem is called 'Hymn to Joy,' or sometimes it's called 'Hymn to Freedom' and the poem, even though written by a young man still in his twenties, was so powerful. About the time that Shelley was writing Prometheus Unbound, about the time that Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, Beethoven was writing his Ninth Symphony and took this poem as the hymn for the fourth movement of it. It reads in beginning:
Spark from the fire that gods have fed. Joy, thou Elysian child divine, fire-drunk, our airy footsteps tread, oh Holy One, thy holy shrine. Strong custom leads us from each other, thy magic all together brings and man in man but hails a brother, wherever rest thy gentle wings. Embrace ye millions, let this kiss, brothers embrace the earth below. You starry worlds that shine on this, one common father know.
And so we find this incredible raising of a quality in Schiller that comes finally, after a decade of living in little rooms, broke, alone, he finally met the other great master of poetic of his time, Goethe. And Goethe at the time was running the Weimar Republic because he was capable in every conceivable human field, of poetry, of drama, of history and he was put in charge as minister, running the Republic of Weimar. He read Schiller's works up to that point and in 1788 recommended that he be given a professorship at the University of Jena, not far from Weimar, where a great many geniuses of the time were teaching. A kind of miniature Harvard of its time. There the work that we're taking from Schiller got its gestation and it's called in English, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. It is powerful because it rejects the political basis of human sociality, that we are forced into political forms, whereas an aesthetic form is one that we share in and creatively remake by our constant lives together endorsement. So in The Aesthetic Education of Man, a series of letters to a younger man, the young Schiller, writes:
And so gradually individual, concrete life is extinguished in order that the abstract life of the whole may prolong its sorry existence. And the state remains eternally alien to its citizens because nowhere does feeling discover it. Compelled to disburden itself of the diversity of its citizens by means of classification and to receive humanity only at second hand by representation, the governing section finally loses sight of it completely, confounding it with the mere patchwork of the intellect. And the governed cannot help receiving coldly the laws which are addressed so little towards themselves. Finally, weary of maintaining a bond which is so little alleviated for it by the state, positive society disintegrates, as has long been the fate of the majority of European states, into a moral state of nature, where open force is only one more party, hated and eluded by those who make it necessary and respected only by those who can dispense with it.
Fighting words. The Romantic revolution. It is a peculiar quality that Thomas Jefferson in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, begins, like a first shot in this struggle to find a wider and wider expansive, conscious reality and that its closing would come in the summer of 1826, when Jefferson died, just after he had a reunion with one of the other great revolutionary heroes of the time, the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette, who was responsible for the great military victory of the Battle of Yorktown, that ended the Revolutionary War. He'd been sent over as a teenager by Benjamin Franklin - he was only 17 years old - but Benjamin Franklin was a wise man who recognised talent in people and constantly made room for them wherever he could in the new relationalities of an emerging world. But Lafayette had survived not only, victoriously the American Revolution, but he survived the French Revolution as well and before the French Revolution there was a Napoleon and a Lafayette and after the Revolution there was a Napoleon with Lafayette in exile and after Napoleon was defeated and imprisoned and exiled, Lafayette came back and at his country estate of La Grange, maintained for the rest of his life, long life, the qualities of freedom and came as an old man to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Now, when they met it was a very short, heartfelt greeting: 'Ah, Jefferson!' 'Ah, Lafayette!' And with that, the world had changed. From 1775 to 1827 is a monumental threshold of change, that the world could never go back to what it had been, but had not yet discovered the sustaining quality to maintain the new. And as the nineteenth century went on and the primness of the world dissolved into radioactivity, into subatomic particles and waves, into energies that who knew where anything really was, it was an age where ghosts and psychic experiment were on everyone's lips. The greatest original psychologist of the day, William James, was the President of the Psychical Research Society, based in London and also had branches in the United States. It was in this ghostly, radioactive, sub-transcendent phenomenal, numinal realm of the early twentieth century, that one found like the second threshold of what the Romantic revolution had been, but this second wave was one of art and science generating itself at an incredible rate. So that from the discovery of the electron and of X-rays, around 1896, if one goes just 50 years, you come up to 1946, you come up to the threshold before Roswell. The third act of this we are living in, in the early twenty first century. In the first act we couldn't go back to an old world that was shattered forever because it deserved to have no respect. In the second the quest to find what was real expanded into realms of mystery and beyond. And in this third act, this threshold now, for the next five or ten years to complete what had begun 60 years before, we're learning that our refinement and maturity is up to our own endeavour, to accomplish a yoga of a new kind of civilisation, not based on territory, not based on clumps of this against that, but of a harmonic whose sets of resonance are open to possibilities worlds without end. More next week.