History 8
Presented on: Saturday, August 25, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to History 8 and we're working with, as usual, tuning pairs, tuning pairs of people, in this case Benjamin Franklin and one of the great Taoist masters of Ancient China, the prince of Huainan, an we're using his classic book, the Huananzi, like Lau Tzu or Chuang Tzu, to try to appreciate and understand that what we're tuning here is the entire heritage of a species, the entire heritage of a planet, because this species is morphing and this planet is expanding, the planet is no longer a globe but is a whole star system, and the new species variant of us, Homo sapiens stellaris, is a deeper wisdom version , it's a star wisdom version of what we have been for the last 40,000 years. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for 160,000 years but we underwent a Palaeolithic morphing when art was introduced in the caves about 40,000 years ago, and since then our species has been being wise about being wise. Homo sapiens sapiens. Now we're going to be star-wise about our human wisdom. And in doing so, we're tuning to recalibrate our heritage so that the entire past is going to be recalibrated, and in doing so it at the same time throws out a new resonance of harmonic that is possible for the future, so that there isn't just a future or an accepted realm of futures, but there are unlimited futures, because star wisdom humanity will need an unlimited array of futures, of possibilities, for two very good reasons: the first being you cannot live in a limited way in an infinite universe, and two, you cannot be limited to the principles of four dimensions when you are living in multiple dimensions way beyond four. And the first dimension beyond four is the realisation that consciousness is a fifth dimension. And when the fifth dimension of consciousness comes into play it really comes into play. It comes into play as a process field and that process field has characteristics, one of which is remembering. Another characteristic is creative imagining, and another characteristic by which we call it here, in our exploration, is visioning. Being able to vision means being able to see into the four-dimensional existentiality of things, literally to acquire an x-ray vision. There are healers on the planet now who are able to look into a physiological body and see that someone's heart has a perforation and it is visible to them as an imagery by deep visioning, or to look out in a telescopic way and to be able to see gestalts and patterns beyond the normal constellations that one would be able to usually identify. The constellations of stars in normal vision from this planet have a matrix of about 6,000 stars that were visible and out of it all the constellations have been made, not only the 12 of the zodiac but the 88 constellations for the entire globe, as a global horizon. More than 50 years ago Harvard University published a map of galaxies, not of stars but of galaxies containing billions of stars. Our galaxy is very large, the milky way, it has somewhere approaching a trillion stars. The Harvard galaxy map had a million galaxies in it and since then it has gone to the trillions. So that the cosmos is wildly elegant, and we're going to be at home on the interstellar frontier in our galaxy within the lifetime of our children. And so it is something for us to endeavour to do is to mature ourselves out of where we were for at least 40,000 years and compacted into civilisations for at least 6,000 years and that none of those civilisations were able to work because they cracked under the pressure of trying to pack everything in when a civilisation is not packable in, it is expandable out. What is packable in is a culture. It is the experience of human beings like ourselves in patterns that we all are able to follow and that we share, and that they integrate together and we have a good time with each other and have events of celebration because we're all very similar and belong together and we vibrate together; but when consciousness comes into play, that quintessential fifth dimension begins to open out a differential realm of possibility. Now what is a good time is the variation and the freedom of difference which is also shareable. So now the joy of communities is in the vast growing variety of ways of being human. That so-and-so is very interesting because they are a new ratio, their individuality is now like ours, but the harmonic of their possibilities of exploring is very affined to us and so resonant sets beyond four dimensions always have that kind of tone of scalars like music, and there are an infinite number of musical scales. We're using the Huananzi because when this first came out was a summation into a harmonic chord for the first time in Chinese civilisation, in Chinese history, of its root beginnings, pre-Dynastic China 3,000 BC, all the way up until the time when Prince Huainan, who was of the founders of the Han Dynasty family, his grandfather was the founder of the Han Dynasty, Gaozu, and the prince of Huainan was one of the grandsons of only two sons of Gaozu who were still alive because of the violence, because of the fighting, because of the court intrigues, because of the murders, because of especially families that were just on the outside wanting to get into the power structure and the most incredibly efficient of those families was the Lu family, run by one of the most vicious women in history, the Empress Lu, who took over Dynastic China at a time when anyone who was different from what she wanted it to be were horribly mutilated before they were killed and spread a terror throughout the entirety of China, when it was brought back into a resonant harmonic with the great Han Emperor, Han Wudi. For his coronation as Emperor, the Prince of Huainan wrote and collected together the Huananzi, that in his palace he had brought eight sages together to discuss the Tao and the way in which it permeates all of the Tê of the universe, and that the Tao and Tê together have a way of cupping a space of heart, of heart-centre humanness. The Chinese term for that is Jen, and that when Tao and Tê are able together to cup the human heartedness of Jen, it integrates to symbolic points of focus called ideas, and symbolic ideas in China were called Ee, so the symbols of the integral mind that hold together the human hearted Jen experience, because it is cupped in a balanced way of the Tao and Tê, it means that the Tê of the Jen has a yin-yang balance and that the yin-yang balance is not because the polarities are equalised, but because the play of the polarities is focussed on the unity of the Tê that emerges pristinely whole out of the Tao. And so that one has to have a whole energy cycle of Tao and Tê, Jen and Ee, and that the Ee is able to transform into what the Chinese call the 10,000 things. We understand in the 21st century that the 10,000 things is the energy resonance of everything that is possible of everything. And so the right word for it is the Chinese word that used to be pronounced Chi and now the better pronunciation is Ki. It is the energy flow of consciousness that allows for the multiplicity of things to return back to the freshness of the infinite field of the Tao and re-emerge spontaneously as the Tê, the unity of all things. And if that energy cycle is kept flowing every aspect of it, whatever the phase is, will be whole, will be pure, so that Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, Herbs, every aspect of its yoga is to keep the chi flowing pure so that it flows through and is able to return to the Tao and re-emerge spontaneously refreshed, and to do this not just once but to do this in a frequency of millions of times per time unit, and so the understanding in China was that it is a vibrational health by which we do not just exist but by which we go through an energy cycle, purely, millions of times per day, and it is this spontaneity and freshness that preserves the real. And our health is participating in reality, is an eternal health, so that Chapter 6 of the Huananzi is all about the principle of Con-ching. Con-ching means mutual resonance, because we do not exist alone individually in this energy cycle but that the fundamental unit is at least 2. A tuned mutual pairedness especially of complexities like human beings, are the working basis for it. Individuality is an integral of the mind but mutual sharedness, mutual resonance, is the conscious 5-dimensional visionary field out of which comes the spiritual person, and the spiritual person is never alone. They are always shared in pairing, because the pairing is an infinity array, the sharing can be extended, the mutuality can be extended, to any number of beings. And because the transform extends itself not only to human beings but to plants and animals and minerals, as one of the basic constituents of organic life, that the entire aspect of all existence participates in the possibilities of a mutual sharing of a mutual resonance, so that Con-Ching from Prince Hunan to Han Wu Di on his coronation, saying if you will appreciate the subtlety and the enormity, the complexity and simplicity of which you are one of the fulcrums, your participation as that fulcrum will extend to all of us and all of us together with you will extend that fulcrum so that it becomes a pivot. A pivot of the way in which human life now is resonantly organised, and not put into some kind of diagram that is static, not to some expectation which is static, and therefore you will engender something which is primordial in civilisation. This book is published in Scotland, Edinburgh University Press, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City, 1971. The Pivot of the Four Quarters is the quintessential conscious fifth dimension that is not a thing, which is a fulcrum, but it is a whole field which is a pivot that when it emerges forms the forms that come out are prismatic, not pragmatic but prismatic. They're not based on karma. They're based on dharma. It's a whole different basis. So that when the shared mutual resonance of a pivot extends itself in reality, it becomes a spindle, and that spindle is where the creative life actually happens and occurs. And when we get next to our science phase, the last phase of our learning, of our inquiry, our education, we'll see that the whole principle of the way in which cells divide has a spindle phase, by which the fertility of exchange is able to extend itself out. It's why the DNA is in a double-helical form but they don't go together, they go in opposites so that when they unfold they unfold in such a way that each one elicits a creation of its mutuality out of the spontaneousness of the Tao, and in just this way, reality characterises life. That life is not an epiphenomenon, it is the very quintessence of reality, so that the universe has never been dead, and the cosmos is most certainly fertiley alive, and by our participating with it what is evoked from us spontaneously, increasingly, is the vitality that our vibrotic coupling is between our sprit person and the cosmos. And that the linking of that is the kaleidoscopic flow that we call history. History is the kaleidoscopic flow of the differential field of consciousness, just like the mythic experience flow, the stream of experience, flows through the field of nature, through the field of Tao.
We're pairing with that Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, this little action figure is Franklin with his kite, to be able to find a way to do something which was impossible, and even today the term that is used for the impossible is that you cannot put lighting in a bottle. He did that 250 years ago. He put lightning not only in a bottle, but in a matrix, an array of bottles. They were called Leyden Jars because they were made in Leyden, Netherlands, and these jars were able to store lightning as electricity and because of the way in which the jars were made, you could apply the stored electricity and use it. One of the first uses that Franklin used stored electricity in a Leyden Jar, was to mercifully kill turkeys for Thanksgiving. One burst and they were ready for the oven.
Franklin is the person who set the spindle which electrified the world. All of the electricity that we use for modern civilisations stems from this particular experiment, which was produced again and again, and Franklin, in order to show how harmless and easy it was for man to tap the cosmic energy, had two little bells put next to his study desk in his house in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. One of the bells was hooked to a metal rod that went down through the house floorboards into the ground, and the other one went up through the roof to a spire, a spike, a lightning rod. Franklin is the first in the world to make a lightning rod, and in thunderstorms, every time the lightning struck it would send its energy down not in a gap of electricity sparking between the bells, but because the bells would ring together as a paired mmm, and in this way Franklin was able to understand that he had shown man a way to humanely, conveniently, pleasantly in their own home, tap the immense power of the cosmos and bring it down for use for whatever purposes, whatever inventions, whatever developments would come out of it. For instances one of the developments that came out of that was that Franklin was able to found the first great hospital in the world, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, because he was beginning to make so much money from all of the various aspects of his business, and his fertile imagination was able to say we need things for everyone that have not been there before and this is for the public, not for the court. This is not for the few of the rich, the few of the powerful, but for the whole of humanity whenever they get together, and share resonance together as a community of human beings, now that community should be served by not only a hospital, he's the first to make an urban fire company. Why let things burn down or wait for a bucket brigade to form? Let's have fire engines ready, on public pay, and let's do things like this. Let's make a library where people, ordinary people, can borrow books that they would never be able to afford. Let's have something together as a philosophic society where they can come and discuss aspects together, and today in 2007, you can send away and you can get a membership in something called the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and you can take your children and you can get on the net and you have access to the entire world of science through a prismatic pivot, that when you participate with millions of other people around the planet who do this, you make a spindle of a planetary culture that is able to transform into a star system civilisation. It works like that.
On the top level of the three big, huge levels of the Franklin Science Institute Museum is a full-size replica of the space station control area. So that the children from anywhere in the world can either physically or virtually, through the net, participate in being in orbit above the earth and participate in just what people are doing on the vanguard of the new start system humanity, and so they are growing up being at home in the cosmos, in a completely new way. There's never been a generation of human beings more advanced and the precursors of that were our generation who grew up with the first exploration of space. One of the aspects that comes out about Franklin, about history, is that it leads to a very deep religious revolution, to a revolution where one opens up so that the religio which means binding together as an integral, is opened up in such a way that it doesn't destroy any of the integrals, but it opens them in such a way that you learn that they were not joined together by knotting; they were joined together by bows that were tied beautifully, and that one can learn to tie and untie those bows and not destroy the values that were there, and that you can learn then to undo all of the bows of all of the religions and hold of the ribbons of them together and tie one kaleidoscopic rainbow bow of all of them together. This is the 21st century. It is a way of appreciating the mutual resonance of all traditions together and how in a differential harmonic that chord of differences is a prize and not a source of conflict. One of the great forerunners of this star system deep penetration was in India, and for the interval, at the end of every phase we do a thirteenth presentation called an interval, the interval for history is going to be the Bhagavad Gita. I'm going to use a special edition of the Gita. The Gita as it was translated by Mahatma Ghandi. One of the things that Ghandi prided himself on was of being arrested for doing non-violent protests against violence. And the biggest non-violent protest was launched at the beginning of World War II and he and all of his senior staff were thrown into prison for the duration of the Second World War, and while they were in prison they wrote a great deal of their books, and what Ghandi's secretary, Mahadev Desai, did, is he translated Ghandi's translation of the Gita into this book, The Gita According to Ghandi, and put a lot of commentary with it so that one could understand that the original Bhagavad Gita was written about a war at the very beginnings of civilisation, 3102 BC, more than 5,000 years ago, and that final battle was fought on a field where the two branches of a great family came into a huge conflict. The Kuru family, and so the field was always called Kurushetra, the field of the Kuru family. There are two branches of the family fought a great war, it's called the Mahabharata, Bharat is the ancient name for India, the Great India War, and it was fought on this field 5,000 years ago, and the tradition of those incredible events, because they involved the entire universe, they involved all of the yogas, all of the angels, all of the demons, every power came together, and so the work eventually became the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita is the sixth chapter of the Mahabharata, like the Can-Ching is the sixth chapter of the Huananzi, and in the Bhagavad Gita there's a penetration in a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, Arjuna the greatest warrior of his day, who is facing the fact that in order for him to win for his side, he must kill his own brethren, his own teacher, his own favourite dharma masters, and that the only way for him to win in this war is to kill those who were really closest and dearest to him. And he's afraid to participate in this and in the moment of that instant of fearfulness the author of the Gita, the author of the Mahabharata when it was written down, his name was Vyasa, about 300 BC, for the first time oral Sanskrit was able to be put into a written language and Vyasa was the one who put the Mahabhrata and the Gita into written language: Krishna suspends time and he stops space and in that split second the entire Bhagavad Gita of 18 paravans takes place. And in those 18, one runs through a complete triple cycle of the sixes, and that by going through it three times six, all 18, one comes out and re-emerges in the next split second, the next instant, not split second in world time, clock time, but the next split moment of thought. Because in ancient yoga thought was always resolvable into 16 steps and so the 18 is the first step before the 16 that make a thought instant, and the eighteenth is re-emerging in the next step, because the 16 in between the first and the last is this suspended universal time. One of the odd things though, is that in the high-powered yogas that were used to take a moment of thought and hold it in your meditational palm, was that only eight parts of that moment of thought were discreet, were able to be separated, named, and that the other eight always occurred as a trill, they could not be separated. And so you had eight discreet parts and eight that formed a trill. In our learning, the eight phases are the discreet parts of a moment of thought, and the eight intervals are the trill of the other eight that go together, so that our learning, our education, is a cosmic moment of thought suspended for just that instant out of the world of artificiality, out of the unnatural, unconscious, unreal assumptions, into being able to re-emerge fresh and whole, real, conscious and natural.
The peculiar thing about Benjamin Franklin, he always refused to be identified with any religion, he always was never seen in churches, but he was one of the most deeply religious human beings that ever lived. He was in fact very much in tune with an early Massachusetts religious leader, Cotton Mather, and Cotton Mather is a very, very famous in American history as being the greatest of the early preachers, but the really interesting figure is Jonathan Edwards, who is one of the most underrated of all of the early American religious leaders, because his works have largely, until our own time, been suppressed. 1948, Yale University Press, Images of Shadows of Divine Things, by Jonathan Edwards, put together by the great Perry Miller. Edwards became drummed out of his pulpit for speaking of things that people did not want to hear, they didn't like. They refused to attend his sermons and the exiled him to an Indian College on the outskirts, Stockbridge at the time of Massachusetts, but slowly the quality of Jonathan Edwards seeped back through and he became the very first President of Yale University, and so Yale University also is publishing, this is Volume 23 of The Collected Works of Jonathan Edwards. They're in all up to about 26 volumes. Franklin and Edwards are increasingly understood as being an early American pair, because of the fact that Edwards was getting deep into the philosophy of the application of something which Franklin was understanding also has its application in science and in government and in inventions, and Edwards saw that this was true of religion. Another great friend of Franklin's was the greatest religious genius of their day, George Whitefield. He was the Billy Graham of the 1700s, both in Europe and in America, and in Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin was the person who published all of the works of these individuals. He published the works of Whitefield, he published in fact almost everything. The book which chronicles Franklin's Philadelphia printing is 100s and 100s of pages. He published a treatise, he published the codes, he published the money, he published religious books of all kinds, he literally hand-set thousands of tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, so he not only read them, he read them letter by letter. I'm old enough to have learned typesetting in the seventh grade, way back when, and I learned to set type with lots of other little boys and it was interesting because you got used to the fact, almost like typing you get used to the fact that you put a little space between words, and hand-setting type you put a little spacer, a little blank thing in between the words, and you get used to the fact that you interval the alphabet in sets, in clusters that are constantly changing because this is the way in which language acquires words, words acquire the forms of the sentence, the paragraph, the book, and literally a book is half space of the articulation, of the Tao, that's in the very fact that we can read at all is that we are in reality very conscious of the Tao perforating the forms all the time, everywhere, but in resonances that are mutual, because we can pick the book up and read it to someone and as we pick out the Taoist, perforated written words, they hear our reading and they hear the language articulate. The fact that you can read to a child of two or three and you see the rapt attention of them is the greatest proof that there is that we come originally from cramp comprehensibility. We were never not ancient and wise.
More after the break.
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Let's come back. We're always pairing and our pairing is to create a tuning fork and to array the tuning forks into a set. If you're going to tune a piano you need a set of 11 tuning forks to array the instrument so that every note will be able to achieve a resonance in itself in the set of the octave and the array of the octaves for the complete instrument. And a fine piano needs to be specifically tuned every so often and a concert grand will be tuned usually for each performance. What we are doing in our learning is we are tuning our concert grand to be able to perform the music of the cosmos, no matter what size it is, no matter what range. And we have this capacity. Our capacity jumps in orders. It doesn't follow a karmic cardinality. That karmic cardinality will complete itself in periodicities, but the periodicities can take the entire set of developments and jump the entire set to a higher order.
If you count to ten, which are two hands, by the time you get to ten, the one through nine jumps at ten to a one and a zero. Then you can take that next set of ten, which is ten of the tens, so that when you get to 100, you jump to one and two zeros, which you can write 102, and you can jump powers of ten almost indefinitely and at every jump you will reach a horizon of the way in which the dynamic field of energy synchs itself into a form level, a horizon. And at very high levels one will come to the horizon where atomic structure is possible. About 1035. So that now atoms occur, and also jump in their sequence and their resonance, and when they reach 56, when they reach iron from hydrogen, that's about as far as you can go in the horizon of that particular set of materials that are normally, naturally made in stars. And all the elements beyond iron, 57 up to 92, up to uranium, are only made in super-natural configurations like supernova explosions. So that all of the elements, all of the atoms in the cosmos that occur there have come from exploded stars, starbursts. And there is a deepening of that particular super transform to a hyper-transform, where there are transuranic elements. We have now made from 93 to 114 and most of those elements, because they're like third level horizon, only occur very fleetingly in our timescale, but element 118, which will follow with the Noble Gasses, like Helium, Argon, Neon, Zeon, Radon, element 118 will be stable. It will be stable because all of the Noble gases all have a nucleus that has the protons and the neutrons packed so that it fulfils the entire, complete structure of a nucleus [radial 6:06]. And the electronic structure will be arranged in its sets. They don't keep growing but they follow a growth pattern that when you get so many electrons, suddenly it will jump, the next electron will have to be in a further shell, as they say a higher orbit, a more intense energy level, and that these go by clusters, and that once you reach 8 it begins to then tune itself in pairs so that you'll begin to have sets of 8, then you'll have sets of 16, then you'll have sets finally where you reach 32, like with Uranium, but the energy levels are all specific and exact, and if you move one electron from one energy level, you ionise the entire atomic structure of that atom. Atoms move in a timeframe called an attosecond, and an attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second. We can now have a kind of scientific photography on the attosecond level. Femtosecond level, which was one horizon above that, is the level of molecular interactions and it was an Arabic professor at Caltech, Ahmed Zewail, who perfected femtochemistry about ten years ago.
It's interesting that an Egyptian from Alexandria in the late 20th century should be the first to be able to show femtochemistry in live-action film and now we're going to have the latest issue of Science, one of the international journals of science, and the August 16th issue is all headlined on Attosecond Spectroscopy. This is a capacity of ours that is here and now and we're only at the beginning of the 21st century. The increments jump incredibly fast because they jump in ordinals. And you can look for ordinal jumps in your lifetime of maybe 5 or 6 times of what everything is right now, many times over, thousands of times over.
We're looking to tune and what stops us from tuning is very simply described. The brain as a brain is a neurophysical organ. It is contained within a cranium, within a skull, and it's as if that skull is a psychophysical screen, a domed screen, upon which then the activity of the brain can play itself. But what happens with the screen is that the two vectors that go into the actuality of what occurs, one of those vectors would be a time vector. It will be the direction movement and the other vector will be a space vector, which will be the volumetric way in which the imagery is played. A screen is a filter and only records one vector. It only records the space vector, not the time vector. So that in order to get the resolution so that the imagery now is alive and in actuality, you have to go beyond the screen and the way that you go beyond the screen is you go to the higher form of a lens. And a lens is able to focus the radiant directionality of the time vector and fold it back into the play of the space imagery, so that now with a lens, like the human eyes are a lens, you are able to see in living time, in living colour, as it happens. The lens is now an integral but is a differential form that's put into play at an ordinal beyond integration, into a differential form. All differential forms are prismatic. But there are some lenses that are able, because of their crystalline structure, able to be cut in such a way that they are not just lenses but that they are prismatic, and a prismatic crystal can be cut again in such a way that it becomes refined and becomes a jewel. And once you achieve a lens that has become a prism that is finally recut and becomes a jewel, the jewel will radiate scintillation. And that scintillation is kaleidoscopic. A prism will be able to show you a rainbow. Isaac Newton did that 300 years ago. But a jewel is like a matrix of millions of possible colours, all rainbows, and the kaleidoscopic consciousness that comes out of the jewelled spiritual person is really what history is. It is the seven-dimensional dynamic play of the kaleidoscopic, jewelled refinement of a six-dimensional spiritual person who is many orders above the individual mental self-styled self.
If you become limited to something that is only able to be projected onto a screen, you have very clear diagrams, you have a mentality that can be tightened so that it is precise, so that its referentiality goes back to the world of things in identification alignments that are precise and exact, and all of that are steps to completeness. But completeness, if left complete, stops you and what is interesting is that the play now becomes a devolution. That the screened projected imagery goes back and tries to rearrange everything according to its limitations, and so you get mental doctrines that constrict the physical world, constrict the body. And pretty soon sandwiched between a strictured mentality and a strict, regimen of movement and existence, experience becomes increasingly imprisoned and limited only to what it can experience, and in this way the natural tension of structure becomes anxiety and creates a condition that's very simple. If you confine a gas increasingly, eventually it will explode. If you confine experience between a strictured mind a constricted figuration of your existence, your human heartedness will be squeezed to death.
Fortunately it explodes before that. Says to us, 'Don't do this, don't go that way.' It is the perforation, it is the osmosis through, it is the radiant ability to go to higher dimensions than the dome screen of the limited mind, that brings the freshness of consciousness into play. On one early indication of experience, which is the flow in between the body and the mind, dreams are the first indication. It's the first realisation that there is more to this world than what are able to think or do; that there is also dreaming, and that the essence of dreams are that they are an imagery and a feeling that braid into a language, and a dream will always have its language, the dream language. And in order to understand that dream language, you cannot go to the mind or the body exclusively and even the two of them braided together, but one has to go to a visionary language now you have a dream vision language, now you can interpret the dreams. Now they can speak to us. It is the carrying of the experience of that language through the spoken into the written into the visionary, that allows then for us to foresee, to have insight into and to have foresight beyond, and it is the foresight that becomes prophetic, and one can become very refined, because that propheticness, that looking ahead, that foresight into the future, is able to have resonance now not only with experience but with the historical consciousness of experience possibilities. And the more that prophecy balances itself with knowing how human experience happens and how the historical experience of humanity has happened, one becomes more and more refined and the prophecy becomes not just a prophecy to foretell, but becomes prophetic in that it helps participate so that what is historically said in dream vision begins to occur. In this way we participate in the creation of the cosmos and we do this. We have this capacity.
One of the peculiarities is that the more that you understand the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history as a dynamic, as a 7-dimensional dynamic, the more you're able to notice and pick up the hidden resonances that were not seeable before, they were not even foreseeable before, but now one is gifted with insight, gifted with foresight. An example ... last year was the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin, and for the tercentennial, Yale University put out this big volume on Benjamin Franklin. One of the interesting little illustrations on page 75 is this little engraving made of a man on a horse riding and the caption here is, 'This is an unknown artist's cartoon of a post-rider from the newspaper Boston Post-Boy, 1750-1754 era. This woodcut may have been a caricature of Franklin.' The rider has a horn that he's announcing on his horse. It's interesting because everyone recognises the early American revolutionary image of 1775, of Paul Revere riding to warn and beginning of the revolutionary war, but what's even more interesting is that if one goes to the early 20th century, the interval that we used at the end of the art phase was Kandinsky's little book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1912. The cover of that was very interesting to us, but the cover of The Blue Rider which was the art exhibit, has the man on the horse, and it was published by the same publisher as Concerning the Spiritual in Art, at the same time, and it came out right at a time when Kandinsky was the first artist to be making abstract art. The first jump in art since the Palaeolithic era, 40,000 years ago, and one of the great paintings of Kandinsky is a rider on a horse going at jet speed. The next paintings of Kandinsky from this 1911 are abstractions, non-objective art, and right at the time where abstract art was beginning to develop a power of surrealistic hyper-abstract art, you had an artist like Max Ernst in 1954 doing this painting called The Polish Rider of a rider on a horse but done in surrealistic hyper-expansion of abstract art. The Polish rider in this is not only cognate with Kandinsky's rider and cognate with Paul Revere as a rider, and Benjamin Franklin with his millennial trumpet on the horse riding to awaken, to awaken, and all these resonances come into a kind of deep penetration. Ernst's Polish Rider is named after Rembrandt's great painting The Polish Rider. This elegant young nobleman on a horse at a time in the 1650s, 1660s, when where he was living in Amsterdam at the time, was the first time that you began to get a traction where the visionary capacities of history had collected into an order where they would jump capacities that had never been seen in the world before. The capacities would jump at exactly that time for the very first time, into the capacities to have a universal language of mathematics that we know todays as calculus. Two figures brought that in, a pair, Newton who was very close friends with a mystical philosopher, Jewish but drummed out of the Jewish community because they didn't like the way he talked about things. He talked about god as a geometric master whose language could be understood by men, not by limited commentaries but by unlimited analytics of possibilities of meaning. And his close friends, Leibniz, got together with him in Amsterdam, right at the time when some of Spinoza's friends, because he was drummed out of the Jewish community he was free to talk to everyone, he talked to some Jesuits who had come back from China, who had translated the I Ching into Latin for the first time and brought the first copy of the I Ching to the West, in Latin. And Spinoza had a copy of it and shared it with the young Leibniz and it's from Leibniz that he learned the way in which a calculus can be developed and written, and so Leibniz's notation of calculus is the one that we used today. Every high school in the world uses it. He also did a little essay on the natural philosophy of the Chinese, which the University of Hawaii Press translated into English and put out a few years ago. At the very same time that Leibniz was doing this, Isaac Newton in England was also coming to experiments with his little prisms, in darkened rooms with only one beam of light that was diffracted into a rainbow, and that he was this young mathematical genius who had a mathematics teacher at Cambridge who allowed this ingrown, shy, socially inept boy to play freely in the visionary capacity of mathematics which had become quite refined in England due to the development of such things as logarithms and so forth in the generation before, I cannot imagine a more magical moment. When the young Newton, understanding that colours form a harmonic, that the rainbow is a harmonic cord of energy that somehow works together with the apple that just fell off the apple tree and hit his head, that gravity and the harmonic energies of the colours of light are interrelated in such a way that they should be expressible like the sneeze of enlightenment, that one can understand, you could be able to speak god's language but in order to do so you would have to do it in a very special way. You would have to take the written language of nature and allow it to go into a jewel of a spiritual person to shine out, and it would shine out into a form which was the reality of the cosmos. That the cosmos would be the recording of the harmonics of this analytic historical high-energy hermeneutical expression of what it meant, through the prism of the person that came from the field of theoria. The field of theoria, in ancient Greek theoria meant contemplation. That the mind in its condensation, in its concentration, is capable of a meditation, but the differential array of the radiants of the lensed prismatic person is not limited to meditation but is capable of a contemplation, and that a meditation is an integral condensing dhyana in the sense that it means concentration, that's what meditation is. To concentrate it to a single-pointedness and increase that so that the single-pointedness vanishes and now you have a mind that has no content whatsoever for an instant. And because it has no content, it is really pure and the very next instant what occurs in that really pure mind has occurred out of a super-charged nature, out of a supernatural, 5-dimensional field and the first thought that comes out of that will be the thought that is enlightenment, and that by allowing it to expand, that Bodhicitta becomes enlightenment through the largess of its gift as you expand the capabilities of that. So that a moment of insight so fleeting before now becomes like in the Bhagavad Gita, a moment that is extendable in the world's time-space by pausing the karmic influences of the world's time-space from participating in its development, in its maturation, and its existence becomes hyper-karmic. Way beyond. And as it becomes refined it extends itself out without boundary, without perimeter, that its shape is a shape of an infinitely expandable harmonic. Now one is capable of something you could not even have dreamed of before, and certainly never have thought of before. You have a cosmic infinitude of capacity to appreciate and to analyse. To carry a hermeneutic to any analytical degree infinitely, or to carry an art appreciation to any quality of prismatic appreciation whatsoever. So the arts and sciences together actually form a higher ecology of learning. They utilise symbolic integration, they mature the experience of our cultural heritages, they transform the way in which existence and ritual comportment in its selected sequences, its karma, may have, but if they are emerged out of an interpenetration of the field of consciousness and the field of nature, what comes out now are existentials and actions that are not karmic.
If there was an original sin before in the existence, it is now permanently gone. So that the term in ancient Sanskrit for that gone-ness was gata. Gata. The term for something that has such-ness is tathata. So when the historical Buddha referred to himself, he referred to himself as a Tathata-Gata. And that Tathata-Gata is a spiritual person who is here non-karmically in an existence that's not conditioned by limitation. And the play of such a person is the play of the kaleidoscope of possibilities in infinity that bring an eternity into play in nature, so that nature now is fertile with the gone-ness carried to a higher level and the Sanskrit term for that is very similar to the ancient Greek term, Indo-European, and they're cognate with the ancient Avestic out of which comes the Old Persian and the Sanskrit and the original Greek, three levels back. It's called not Linear B but Linear A. It's a Greek spoken in the 3rd Millennium BC, spoken in what is today Lebanon and Syria, Phoenicia. The word there is Para and a Para-Gata is a goneness that is able to reoccur as an eternal. It does not die and lives eternally. So that the high dharma saviour chant at one time, which is the core of what is called the Hart Sutra, the Hridaya Sutra, was gate gate p?ragate p?rasa?gate bodhi sv?h?. Gone, gone, perfectedly gone, eternal, hail. It is this quality that was the core that every monk in Buddhism chanted every morning of the world in waking up. They re-chant as a resonance the Heart Sutra, showing that the Way, the path of the integral, has transformed twice over into the field of the differential, and that what comes out then is a cosmic sense of being at home. What is that home in any star system of any galaxy, or in between them for that matter, or before or after? What is at home eternally? It is this quality that we found in Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's favourite pastime when he was a member first of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he was thirty years old and for the first time in his life he had to sit with the boring arguments of people that had no insight, and what he played with were magic squares and magic circles. This is in a little monograph by I B Cohen on Benjamin Franklin. I B Cohen was the founder of history of science in the world. The first history of science department was at Harvard, and Cohen when he published this little monograph, on its cover Franklin sitting with his two little lightening bells in his study. Cohen points out in here that Franklin was magisterial at magic squares and magic circles. These are very complicated. These are on a level of high dharma, and one of the only books in the world that really shows magic squares and magic cubes was published in Chicago in 1917. Magic Squares and Cubes by W S Andrews. The Open Court Publishing Company was outside of Chicago, in LaSalle, Illinois, and was founded by a German emigre, Paul Carus, and the Open Court meant to publish materials that would lead people into the openness of their prismatic possibilities. Begun in Chicago in the 1880s and carried through until the 1930s when Carus passed on. A large portion of this book is on Benjamin Franklin. And in fact they're called the Franklin Squares. By putting numbers in a Pythagorean infinite matrix so that the numbers in any vector through the squares or the circles would always give you the same summation. And it works in this way in Newtonian understanding of the way that the planets in our star system are arranged in terms of the dynamics of many kinds of dimensions including gravity, including the orbital angular momentum and so forth, that if you put all of these numbers and factors together into a certain prismatic set, they will always total up to one, and every planet will occupy a time place in the star system so that it fits into the next one available. And so you have from the sun to the earth as one astronomical unit, Jupiter is five, Saturn is about ten, and so on, until you get out to Neptune, and at the eighth the harmonic chord of the eight, the octave of the eight planets is completed, but completed in such a way that there was a space in between Mars and Jupiter for an asteroid belt, so that in the periodic resonance beyond Neptune after four giant plants there should be a giant asteroid belt, which there is. It's called the Kuiper Belt now. And Pluto and Charon are but one of tens of thousands of items. The planet that was larger than Pluto that was found, called the tenth planet a few years ago, is now called Eris. The original founder named it after Zena, the comic strip heroine, because he said it's time to have a heroic woman beyond the limits of classic masculine gods planets. And there in the Kuiper belt dozens and dozens of Zenas - very large bodies.
Our star system is this [40:39 tape cuts out] of resolution that can be understood by the powers of one raised tens into infinity.
Next week we're going to go into the way in which in the late 19th century it was realised more and more that our time sense of understanding was vanishing away by making it less and less tenable, the static registry of thinking that things were real because we could pound them. And the more that the certainty of the world was vanishing, the more that in the early 20th century it became possible to prismatically extend it out again. And we're going to take a look at Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, where a late 19th century understanding was projected back 500 years to see how was it then that it becomes this now, and Karl Jaspers, who was born at about the time that Burckhardt was first translated into English, and lived up until 1969, The Origin of History, so that we're going to take about 500 years of history from a fulcrum pivot of Burckhardt that became a spindle of Jaspers, and bring in all kinds of interesting people. One of my favourite people, whose letters with Jaspers ran to about 700 pages, was the greatest woman philosopher since ancient times, Hannah Arendt. And we'll take a look next week at one of the most peculiar developments that humanity has ever had. We learned more and more to be at home and a cosmos that was less and less certain on the basis of pounding on it.
More next week.