History 7
Presented on: Saturday, August 18, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We emerge today to History Seven and in our cycle of learning in the first year, we tried to do a special yoga, recognising that however brilliant or not we may be, however worldly exposed or not we may be, our minds have a limit to what they are able to focus on. And that that focus traditionally is called a frame of reference, or we call it here, for a long time now, a square of attention. It has its bounds and it has its framing and it has its attentiveness and if we wish to see further, or more, we tend to maintain that frame of reference, that square of attention and let our attention rotate around inside of it. And we saw that one of the most primordial functions of primates in groups, is that the males tend to want to survey the boundaries, to look at the edges, to delineate the frame, to find out, 'How far does this square go?' And that female primates tend to want to occupy a central space within and in the beautiful development of Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees, we saw that females are very easy to penetrate through from one community's frame of reference, square of attention, to another and go and occupy the centre there as well, if they are welcome. But males, in competing primate groups, especially in Jane Goodall's chimpanzees, defend their territory from other males. 'These are our females, these are our foraging forests. This is ours, that's yours.' And to sometimes go on raiding parties that they want to enlarge theirs and diminish yours. And this goes back, because primates, like the chimpanzees, have been around for 70,000,000 years. What's new? What's new is that our species, Homo sapiens, became ultra-refined about 40,000 years ago and in order to convey that refinement we now double the species, Homo sapiens sapiens. Not only 'Wise man,' not only because of brain size, but because the ability to speak language. Previous Homo species could not speak like our species can speak the language. Homo Neanderthal had certainly some capacity for language, but not of speaking like we have, didn't have the neurological structure. Our species has a very special thorax increase in the spinal column area to allow for the brain and Homo sapiens' brain is not larger than Homo Neanderthal, in fact, somewhat smaller, but its organisation is built for language, for an ability to also neurologically control the breath, because in order to speak like I'm speaking to you and all of you speak with the same facility, we have to be able to alter our breath about 60 times a second in order to carry the rapid refinement of enunciation. Different languages will develop in different areas of the brain; Japanese is a little bit further back and down from English and so forth. So that learning a number of languages increases the capacity for the neural nets of our brain and the co-ordination of our psycho-physical presenting of ourselves becomes more complex. We found that in the second year it isn't a cycle of consciousness, like the cycle of nature that has a definite programme of evolution and development and refinement, leading to us, but that about 40,000 years ago, when our species became ultra-refined Homo sapiens sapiens, we became wise about wisdom, which meant that we were able to learn at an accelerated rate and to extend our maturity. That our physical maturity, which follows from conception, through all of the stages that life had...the embryo at one early part of its gestation is very much a marine creature from the oceans, becomes a land creature increasingly. Becomes a Homo creature, becomes a Homo sapiens, emerges and out of the extra care of the relationalities in the world, we slowly educate ourselves, which means extending our sphere of maturation into being wise about being Homo sapiens.
We live at a cusp now, which has been going on for about 200 years and will continue probably for another 200 years, where the refinement of our species is becoming a hyper acceleration. I've coined a name for this ultra, this hyper species, as 'Homo sapiens stellaris,' 'Star wisdom man.' Where our sense of home, our sense of environment, our sense of context, is an entire star system. We do not any longer limit ourselves to a landscape, a geography, a nationality, even an internationality, even a prorated, projected, globalism. The word 'Global' is a political economy designation from a limited mentality. Better to use the term planetary. That instead of being earthlings, we are terrestrial, soon to be extraterrestrials, to be stellar system beings. And in this refinement it requires a different scalar in education and learning and that's what we have been working on here, now for 44 years. One of the most difficult things is the History phase, the seventh of the eight, the third phase in the ecology of consciousness and in the refinement of that, I have made a mid-course correction to change some of the material that we're using. So that we're pairing with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, the Huainanzi, from classical China, from 139 BC. It was a period in Chinese experience of life where the Homo sapiens sapiens became aware of a rapid condensation of capacity that required a new harmonic set to express adequately. The set is one that we have reconstructed during the two years of our programme. The first resonance in that set is the I Ching, which in its origins goes back to about 3000 BC. Fuzhi and Nugwa, the trigrams in a set of eight, with the triads being arranged in complementary pairs, so that you have four pairs of three designated, symbolic structures, that have an interchange of complementarity, they have a structure of polarity and they have the ability to transform back and forth. The second resonance was the refinement 2,000 years later, about 1000 BC, of the I Ching from a heavenly template to an earthly template. That instead of following the pattern of the moon and the sun, the planets, the stars, in order to understand, in terms of heaven and earth, fire and water, now one understood in terms of mother and father, oldest brother, second, middle brother, youngest brother, oldest sister, middle sister, youngest sister. So that a family of eight now became the new paradigm and with that the I Ching developed itself as the founding of the Zhou Dynasty, about 1000 BC. And 500 years later one found, in a Cycle of the Phoenix, because we've been talking about how 500 year cycles pair and become a millennia, 1,000 years. Millennia pair and become an aeon, a 2,000 year period. And that these cycles, East and West, seem to have indications and though they're not the only cycles to be aware of...there are such things as 'Overtones.' In any kind of a tone structure there will always be overtones that are more complex part of what the tone is in its feeling toned resonances. Mechanically, one will hear a tone and in terms of emotion on a ritual level, the tone could be identified, but in experience, with feeling tones, with imagery, with a process of experienced sensibility, one not only hears the tone, but hears an overtone and one does not hear a second, not an overtone so much, but in music it's sometimes referred to as an 'Undertone.' It is there, it affects feeling, it contributes to the complexity, but the complexity is that of the larger gestalt, where the overtone will be a richness of the tone, not just, 'Do, re, mi,' but,
In the ancient Chinese Huainanzi, which was bringing together all of the qualities that had come into play all of this time, not only the I Ching of the original, celestial template, the I Ching of the human family template for the Zhou, with Lao Tzu and Confucius and then we refined that to Chuang Tzu and now we're adding the Huainanzi, which was the first time in which the entire harmonic of that 2,000 year aeon was presented in a very, very refined, new millennial fulcrum, not a fulcrum so much as a static, but the Chinese always refer to that as a 'Pivot.' And when one comes to a pivot of historical time forms, the pivot is able to employ transformation in a super, hypercharged way. Not only is there a pivot because it's the exact right time for this transform to happen, for this change to happen and sometimes the alignment of times for transform, times for change, will align themselves, but each one of them, or anyone of them, as a pivot, can in its chiral motion generate itself as a spindle. And it's the spindle now that is a creative, imagining, multi-dimensional capacity. We see it and we'll see it when we get to Science, with molecular biology, of the very way in which the various kinds of RNA will direct the double helix DNA in such a way that there will be stages and one of the transform stages that is consistent in there is the development of the capacity to have a spindle quality. And one of the qualities of the spindleness we'll see is that transposons, wild cards in the deck, are able to creatively reapportion themselves in such a way that one can now have giant improvements, giant refinements, that otherwise would not be able to come into play. And we'll see that with the work of Barbara McClintock and also the ability then of someone like a Vera Rubin, one of the world's great astronomers, at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, the first person to really be able to understand that all of the stars, all of the galaxies that we see, are a very small portion of what is real. She's the first one to discover dark matter, that more than three quarters of what is real is not visible in the electromagnetic spectrum of light, of the electromagnetic spectrum in the ordinary way in which we would be sensitive to it. And not only dark matter, but its emergent dynamic of dark energy as well and she was the first to really understand this. We're going to use her book, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter. We're gonna take two women at the middle of science, who transformed the way in which science is envisioned, is not practised so much, but is prismatically made.
We're taking the Huainanzi and we're pairing it with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. When we come back from the break we'll see that Benjamin Franklin's work, above all the major works on the planet, is the most tampered with, the least likely to have found a form which is more or less refined to the man and were imitations reduced back down to partialities and structures that were practical, but not prismatic. They seemed like good ideas of who the individual might be, of what the figures of his comportment and the figurations of his posture might have been, but no one knew who Benjamin Franklin as a spiritual person, as a work of art, could be. It isn't that the identity of Franklin is finally now able to be found, but that we're able to transcend the limited identities, pasted on as labels to that magnificent spirit. The first time that the autobiography achieved a form that was realistic, not only in the six dimensions of his spirit person, but the seven dimensions of his historical dynamic, his historical flow as a spirit person, flowing in the field of consciousness, of differential consciousness and able to flow as a kaleidoscopic, conscious streaming and the first time that that happened was 1981. The first edition of Franklin, his autobiography, was put out in a pre-emptive French edition in 1791, a German edition in 1792. The papers of Franklin - he died in 1790 - were entrusted to his son, who hoarded them and kept them and kept them and kept them for decades. And when they were released, many of them had been destroyed, many of them had been scrambled together and it took almost 200 years for there to be an edition that was truthful to the seven-dimensional, historical, kaleidoscopic reality of Benjamin Franklin. Today, the Benjamin Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is one of the most incredible places and its website, in all of its complexities, allied with his American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, gives one the sense of the potential for releasing the jewel of a person in, not a world, but in a star system humanity, that knows how to explore, with such guides as friends. Our learning, our education, our programme, has more than 200 of such spiritual gems, such kaleidoscopic, historical, conscious friends, so that by the end of a cycle, the enrichment is enough to carry any scale of transformations, any degree of openness and exploration that one would like to envision for oneself. There are no boundaries, there are no limits and the musics are beautiful to behold. Let's take a break.
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Let's come back to History Seven and notice that we keep a consistent yoga. The presentation is 40 minutes and 40 minutes is an ancient, classical form of the duration of a high level concentration. For instance, in Indian music, Raga Marwa is also known as 'The 40 minute raga' and Ali Akbar Khan has done just a magnificent couple of versions of it. And Raga Marwa is like the Bach Solo Partitas for Violin or for cello. They're especially meant to be a meditation that helps you train yourself to keep a high level, durational transparency, so that it is not just a meditation, but becomes what we know classically as a contemplation. A meditation is always an integral, a meditation is bringing the body in its asana into a direct alignment of referentiality with the symbolic structure of thought, so that those two objectivities are in alignment and the flow of experience between them, because they are aligned, tends to have a geometricity to its quality, so that the asanas of a hatha yoga will be able to also be the application of a karma yoga, which will then translate into an undertone of a bhakti yoga and that all of this will be able to be focused, be condensed together, concentrated together, integralled and one will then have a sense of completeness. When all of these yogas are brought together into that completeness, it's then called a raja yoga, 'The king's yoga,' because it is able to be brought together in such a precise, precision, concentration completion. The ultimate is to have a single pointedness of mind, which is the single pointedness of one's ritual comportment, one's karmic comportment, one's body, one's physicality, one's practicality, one's existence, so that the single pointedness of the structure of symbolic thought in the mind, that point, 'Ek?grat?,' is able to undergo a very interesting kind of furthering. Its completion to oneness, if completed exactly, will go further than the oneness, it will become zero. That point of vanishing in yoga is called 'Bindu.' It is the concentration of one's identity, of one's figurations, of one's karmic comportments, of one's existence in the geometricity, direct, pointing of the flow of experience to the one pointedness of the mind, which literally vanishes in upon itself. It doesn't vanish away, it doesn't collapse, it doesn't evaporate, it vanishes in upon itself and pops out again as a complex one, not a cardinal one, but a complex number one, which means that it has many transform capabilities and functions that a cardinal one did not have, but this oneness has. And the easiest way to talk about this is to say that one's oneness now is protean, capable of many further transforms. It's the difference between an arithmetic of rituality, indexed by a symbolic cardinality and even ordinality. Now is a mathematic of complex numbers and one can deal even with imaginary numbers because they are part of the exploration of reality. Even though they are imaginary, they work. They do not work practically, but they work prismatically. Now the capacity for expression of forms is no longer just integral, but they are also differential and differential forms are open-ended, they are infinite, they have no boundaries. They can have provisional boundaries, they can have provisional perimeters, they can be characterised, but they can also be experimented with, indefinitely and they achieve the ability to have proportions and ratios. So that the complex mind at one time, when it was first being discovered that this was a property of the geometricity of space itself, one of the earliest mathematicians, philosophers, to deal with this was Descartes, Cartesian geometry. But out of this came a refinement very quickly. The French mathematicians like Fourier, like Lagrange, understood that transformation itself now has very interesting possibilities and one has the Fourier series right away, spreading everywhere in Europe about 200 years ago. And Fourier himself decorated by Napoleon with a great, huge sunburst medal, because it was one of the great achievements of all time, showing that a transcendental, ratioing proportionality unto infinity, to any degree of specificity, is not only possible, but enjoyable. And one can now analyse processes, dynamics, relationalities, ratios, forms and tutor oneself to further developments, further transforms. One of the great transforms of the late twentieth century is called the Penrose transform and when we get to Science we'll be using Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking's great little lecture series, The Nature of the Universe and we'll be able to understand from their little book The Nature of the Universe, possibilities that are before us that are quite real, though many of them seem to us now but theoretical, they are visionable, they are prismatic capable, they are kaleidoscopically explorable and the science then becomes cosmic. Not the universe of the integral, but the cosmos of the differential and that those two fields together, opened out, completely and perfectly, constitute a pairing that ensures reality. And so Penrose's last great book of just two years ago, is called The Road to Reality, about 900 pages, but we'll take a look at the Penrose transform and some of Stephen Hawking's work on the universe, some of Penrose's work on the cosmos and we'll explore many things.
Right now, I have shifted the presentation of the pairs of History books - we're always working with books - so that the Huainanzi accompanies Benjamin Franklin, his autobiography and Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, I'm going to pair it with Karl Jaspers' The Origin and Goal of History, published originally in 1949 and translated into English in 1953, published by Yale University Press. Jaspers passed on in old age in 1969, but because of using Jaspers rather than Hegel, whom I have used for maybe ten years or more, I'll be able to bring Hannah Arendt's great historical critiques back into play in the education. I used her Human Condition for many years and I wanna bring her back in. And by using Jaspers, their letters to each other is collected in about 700 pages; they were friends for decades and decades. But Jaspers is very important, so we're going to pair him with Burckhardt, with the Renaissance.
In the Huainanzi there are 21 chapters and the chapters are like books that were meditations meant to go to a transparency of openness, to yield a contemplation and they were specifically addressed to the new emperor, perhaps the greatest of all the Han Dynasty emperors, Han Wu Ti. 'T-i' is pronounced 'Di' in Chinese. 'Han,' the Dynasty, 'Wu,' Han Wu Ti, reigned for 55 years. And under him China extended itself, almost over-extended itself, so that it reached out into the western deserts of Sanghiyang, all the way to the Stans, Turkestan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and put under the Chinese dynastic call, the ability for China for the first time to begin to survey itself as one of the world's great powers on the level of the Roman Empire. In fact, between Han China and the Roman Empire, they spanned everything from Japan to Ireland, 2200 years ago. Here's what one of the meditations, condensed, presented to the new Emperor - he'd only been on the throne for two years at this point - by a relative of his, Prince Liu An, who collected eight sages in his own villa and together they explored the resonances of the I Ching, of the Zhouyi human version of the I Ching, of Lao Tzu, of Confucius, of Chuang Tzu and they made a new classic called the Huainanzi, because the district which Liu An was the prince and eventually became the king. He was one of the grandsons of the founder of the Han Dynasty, Gaozu. This is 'Endeavour and Duty' and it is:
Today, people with ordinary talents and intelligence and of no distinction, without any definite calling and who cultivate no art, nor will and will not escape the finger of scorn and the contempt of the world, if they neglect education. Take the case of acrobats: they bend their bodies into a ring and turn and twist themselves into all sorts of strange and fantastic shapes, like genii. Their bodies are as flexible as are the autumn hairs to the winds. They can twist and twirl their bodies with lightning speed. Gymnasts again can lift heavy weights and bend tough sticks, they can mount trees like monkeys, play in the branches and do their dressing as they stand in the twig of a tree. They hurry and skip, jump and gambol, like a dragon in a way that stops the heart of the looker-on and makes the knees of the beholder tremble and shake, but they themselves are indifferent and smile nonchalantly. These however were not born thus with such nimble limbs, gymnasts have no special, supple joints, they attain this art by immersing themselves in it and by exercise they perfected themselves step by step. We sum up and say: anything that costs only small labour is of little worth, that which is difficult of attainment only is of value. A gentleman who cultivates the beautiful may reap no immediate gain, happiness is in the coming, such will be gathered only in posterity. Hence the ode says, 'The days come and go, learning takes time to gain brilliancy.'
It is the cutting patiently of the gem of the spiritual prism of person that we are after here. That gem, once cut, has the ability to carry and convey a harmonic of great complexity, so that its resonant, differential referality goes forward, goes forward into the future, goes forward not only into the future of time, but into the further reaches where space has not yet occurred, but will. Goes into further dimensions of consciousness, where the field is infinite and exceeds what has been known, but can be investigated and discovered. And in this way the cosmos opens itself up and becomes the field of nature and the field of consciousness in a very special, inside out way. The cosmos as a differential, infinite form will resonate in such a way that the field of nature will occur out of that. So that you have what is known in Taoism as 'The great return,' that rainbow infinity sign which we use and we use it so that it contains a resonance of eight rainbow infinity signs in a scalar of eight. And if you would turn that 90 degrees, you would have the first indication 5,000 years ago, of the royal cobras of the pharaohs of the First Dynasty of Egypt, where the figure eights made by the king cobras linked together, is like an accordion that expands out and the great Gurdjieff and medical doctor in London, Maurice Nicoll, wrote a book of it and described it in the title of the book, Living Time. A living time is eternal. It can go through any cycles of time space indefinitely and one can acclimate oneself, not to being in a time, in a time space, not just to be limited by a place, or by what time it is, or even in the, or a universe, but of being available now for exploring infinite time, infinite space. This is what is called salvation. Not that your individuality is saved, but something even more grand. Not that your physicality is in practical repose, the prismatic repose is permanently eternal. One of the difficulties is the ability for someone who pioneers a new exploration harmonic, it takes a while for that to obtain. Let's take the case of Benjamin Franklin. Though he was born in Boston, by the time he was 17, he made it to Philadelphia and here's a map out of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, of Franklin's Philadelphia. What's interesting is that it is eight blocks by eight blocks. It's 64 city blocks of Philadelphia, from the Delaware River to 8th Avenue. Eight by eight, the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. But it's interesting too because in this Philadelphia, in this particular checkerboard of eight by eight, one also has the ancient wisdom form of the checkerboard. And it is the checkerboard pattern, for instance, that 400 years ago was the basis of the whole Masonic symbolism. The black and white checkerboard floor goes all the way back to a distribution of light and dark in the original wisdom of about 1000 BC, that was used in Solomon's temple. The architect for it was Hiram, from Tyre, from Phoenicia, but the workmen that he used were from Egypt. Solomon's people could finance it and could oversee it, but they didn't have the architecture and they didn't have the construction techniques, so they used Egyptian construction techniques and labourers and Phoenician architects to build it. This is Franklin's Masonic apron and at the time of the young Franklin, the Masonic order had opened itself up so that by 1717, for the first time you had a Grand Lodge in London and within a couple of years you had a Grand Lodge in Ireland, a Grand Lodge in Scotland. And by the time Franklin was in Philadelphia, just for a short while and got a commission to go to London to buy equipment for a printing house that never showed up, but Franklin as a young man made his way in the London that was not only the blossoming, after over 120 years, of the Masonic order into something that was now becoming a European and Western Hemisphere brotherhood of men, largely, who created what is called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment of the 'Aufklärung' in German, the ability to understand that science and philosophy, life and art together, were explorable in a very large array. As Franklin himself says in one of his early letters, 'It isn't only that there's a music of the spheres, but that the universe itself opens up and blossoms and becomes something wondrous, which is available for us.'
When they projected the collected works, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, it was projected in the 1950's and the first volume was published in 1959. This is the prospectus from Yale:
This is the first volume to come from a great scholarly undertaking, the assembly and editing of Benjamin Franklin's complete writings and correspondence. Sponsored jointly by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, this new edition of 40 volumes will contain everything that Franklin wrote and can be found and for the first time in folio abstract, all letters addressed to him, the whole arranged in chronological order, to be published over a period of 15 years. It will supersede all previous editions, for thousands of letters by Franklin have been located since the last edition of 50 years ago.
47 years later, they're up to Volume 38. The volumes now have just four or five months at a time. If they keep to the publishing schedule the edition should be completed in 2047. It will have taken 118 years to publish what was lived through originally in 84 years, but it's even worse than that, because the first volume goes up to 1744 and the second volume takes...Volumes One and Two, therefore take 38 years off his life, so 46 years of life will be published in about three times that amount, to just put editions out. What is happening here? What is occurring is the same thing in Princeton University Press are publishing The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. They're only now up to 1800 and they've been publishing it for almost 50 years and that just gets Jefferson into the White House for the first time. He lived for 26 productive years after that, the greatest years of productivity probably of any single American. From 1800 to 1826 the United States changed enormously because of Jefferson, who was the furtherer of Benjamin Franklin. What has happened is something that has been noticed again and again in all of the editions of not only Franklin's Papers, but any of his works. We talked already about the editions of the autobiography, how the first editions of it were just pirated and put out and then changed, reprinted. The genetic text was published by the University of Tennessee Press in Knoxville and its published date here is 1981. It was a letter from the University of Delaware, the author, Leo Lemay, writes to a confrère, saying, 'Thanks, thank you very much for the copy of your volume on the Howells Letters, I am glad to have it, but here is the genetic text of Franklin's work.' What's interesting, we're using the Norton Critical edition, which came out in 1986 and you can get the paper version of the Norton Critical edition and you can find Franklin's photograph here on page 21 in the Roman numerals. We talked about how you will also find the diagrams on page 69 and 72, of the way in which Franklin kept track, day by day, week by week, of 14 different characteristics of character that he was hoping to refine and to recut, so that the spiritual jewel of himself would come out and in doing so, he followed an ancient technique of Pythagoras, called, 'Living the day through as freely and openly as you possibly can' and at the end of the day doing a retrospection back through the day, briefly, so that the ordering of your memory of that day would be from that point backwards. So that you will have lived each day twice, you will have lived it integrally through the actual day, in your integral experience and then you will use recollection to remember the day, going back, seemingly, back through it backwards, but what happens is that you don't go through it backwards, but you go back through it with a different spin on it, a different time element. It is a visionary time, it is a fifth-dimensional, quintessential time, so that each day now has a double helical spiral, where each one goes the opposite way, just like the double helix really does, because it allows then for an incredible alignment all the way along both the base of it, as in DNA the phosphates will carry a certain continuity all the way through, in pairedness and the ability to have a repeat structure that is literally refineable and improvable to almost infinity. The numbers of base pairs of a human being is a fantastically large number and that those can all be enfolded in such a way, telescoped microscopically in such a way that all of them will fit, curled up by the billions, in a gene. And those genes arranged by the tens of thousands of compacted complexity of proteins into a chromosome and a whole set of chromosomes will produce then the capacity to not only reproduce, but to reproduce creatively, indefinitely. And that once this is understood and mastered, there are certain elements, like the telomeres, the ends of the chromosomal process, if they can be renewed, life can continue indefinitely. The latest emails assure us that human beings can live at least 1,000 years, because we're renewable. Not only did the collected Papers go through this and not only did the autobiography go through this and the autobiography was attempted many, many, many times to be put right, to be researched. One of the most beautiful examples of it was Max Farrand doing Benjamin Franklin's memoirs at the Huntington Library in San Marino, outside of Pasadena. Farrand was director there at the Huntington. Franklin's parallel text, comprising the text of Franklin's original manuscript, the French translation, another French translation, the version edited by William Temple Franklin, his grandson and then re-edited, reintroduced, explanatory notes. And right away at the introduction, just a few lines. This was 1949:
Few, if any, documents of modern times has been subjected to such gross and persistent misrepresentation as has fallen to the lot of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. This has been due primarily to the different times of its composition and to the unparalleled confusion attending its publication. Franklin wrote his memoirs, as he always referred to them, at four distinct periods. There was a lapse of 13 years between the first and second parts and a lapse of four years before the third part was begun. The last part was added just before he died in 1790. After his death the publication of the autobiography was eagerly awaited.
He was the most famous person in the world when he died. He was the man who was able to grasp the energy of lightning as electricity and make it available for man. He literally electrified the planet. His original kite experience was given in his own newspaper, which he founded in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Gazette. 19th October 1752:
As frequent mention is made in the newspapers from Europe of the success of the Philadelphia experiment for drawing the electric fire from clouds by means of pointed rods of iron, erected on high buildings, etc. it may be agreeable to the curious to be informed that the same experiment has succeeded in Philadelphia. Though made in a different and more easy manner, which anyone may try as follows.
And then he gives you the details of how to make the experiment yourself. It was Franklin's way of dealing with creative imagining, not as an integrable, but as a differential, gifted. He refused for instance, to patent the Franklin stove which he perfected. And in the directions for it he went to great trouble to point out in his own account of it, that wood was becoming so scarce by his time, the late 1700's, that one had to go many, many miles, sometimes tens of miles, just to find enough wood and that this would only increase with the population and with time, so that he redesigned the way in which a stove worked, to replace the fireplace. That in a fireplace most of the heat goes up the flue and out and so he designed a special inside zigzag so that the heat would rise and go against a top plate, before it was reflected down and heat the entirety of the stove before it then had a chance to exit through a flue. So that once the fireplace was closed, with a single chunk of coal, anthracite, once it was ignited and you closed the Franklin stove, it would heat the stove and the stove would radiate out heat and you could heat a very decent sized couple of rooms for the entire night on one piece of coal. He refused to patent it, in fact, he encouraged people to set up factories all over the colonies, to make many of these. It's interesting. I.B. Cohen's great edition of Franklin's Experiments: A New Edition of Experiments and Observations with Electricity, Harvard University Press, 1941. I.B. Cohen is the one who set up the History of Science programme at Harvard and was one of the great scholars on Franklin and Newton.
The editions of Franklin's book, On Electricity, classified the editions of Franklin's book as a complicated problem and much confusion exists as to what actually constitutes the various editions. The first three English editions, for example, consist of three parts printed separately. One of these editions has only two parts, these parts have different titles, perhaps in order to tempt the public into buying of some of the parts for the second time. Furthermore, the French editions are not clearly marked, so that the third French edition is rarely referred to, or as an edition at all and a similar situation obtains for the Italian edition.
Then there are ghost editions, then there are German editions, Swedish editions, American editions, Latin editions. All of the books of Benjamin Franklin, all of the papers of Benjamin Franklin, went through centuries of confusion, of mangled, of false projections and it's only in our generation, spanning the twentieth to the early twenty first century, do we have anything at all that looks like Benjamin Franklin's own work. One can find editions of the autobiography everywhere and almost all of them have some kind of scholarly pedigree, but what we're looking for is the spiritual person, the differential gem of Franklin, in the context of a sophisticated, Taoist, cosmic classic that brings all of the wisdom of its harmonic into play with the works of the Tao Tê Ching as the central pivot. Not the I Ching, not Confucius, but Lao Tzu's Tao Tê Ching is the pivot that becomes the spindle for the Huainanzi. And the key to it is the Taoist term 'Con-Ching,' which means 'Mutual resonance.' Because once one has established a mutuality of resonance, the complexity of creativity becomes fertile. It is not only shareable, which it is, but it is transferable. It is able to be communicated instantly, in all of the resonances and aspects, once their harmonic is established. It's as if one were listening to Heifetz play a Bach Solo Partita. Every note of Jascha's playing of that Partita would be a Heifetz note, with all of its overtones and with all of the undertones of the piece and unmistakeably so. Possibly the greatest violinist of all time. More next week.