History 10
Presented on: Saturday, September 8, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to History Ten today and we're progressing, as usual, to fill out a series of resonances that will have for their underlying synthesis, a chord, a chord which will then be a musical scale. And that scale of the music, while it will have an integral chord, it will also have an overlay that rises and creates a harmonic. And the harmonic is a differential extension into openness, into infinity, whereas the underlying chord will be a synthesis to unity. In this way, the establishment of a set of resonances, like the set of eight notes to make an octave, will have the ability to have the chord that sounds all of the notes in the set, as a set, but it will also have an harmonic that is infinitely establishable in its variety, in its differentiality. And the visioning of this will be a theoria, it will be a contemplation and its differential conscious vision, that allows for the contemplative theoria of it, to extend itself into a kaleidoscopic infinity. And it's that kaleidoscopic infinity that we're understanding, is the dynamos, the dynamic, of history. History is not a record of something done, that would be a ritual registry, a listing. And even if it's in a time sequence, it would simply be a chronology. History is not a form, it is a process and is not an underlying process, but is an overarcing expansion process, that expands vision. So history is an exponential expansion of differential conscious visioning. This is extremely difficult to appreciate and the first history in the world that was able to appreciate this, we took as our beginning for History and History One, Two, Three and Four, those four presentations. We always do a square, we do a quaternary of presentations and we do that three times to make the set of 12 and then we take a thirteenth as a break, as an interval. And the first four presentations began with Thucydides in Classical Greece. And that beginning was a quality that allowed for us to place a note, an initial note, for the chord, for the underlying synthesis and also to give us a pitch pipe for the way in which the infinite harmonic would begin to expand. At the time, we did not make a great deal out of music and today we have to begin to take a look and the CD which I have brought is a selection of 21 songs by the great Renaissance man of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, called 'The Magnificent Lorenzo,' 'Il Magnifico.' These are Canzone de Ballo, they are 'Songs for dancing,' but they are also 'Chants de Carnaval,' because the dancing was held on May Day, every spring, in Florence. And the knack for it was to compose songs, originally on the basis of folk songs that belong to the people forever, that would be sung in the harvests, in the planting, by the ordinary people of Italy. And in Tuscany one would have wine and many other olives and many other plantings and harvestings. These are the songs that ordinary people would sing, but they would be stepped up into a composition by master poets, master songwriters and Lorenzo de' Medici was one of the master songwriters of the Renaissance. And his closest friend in song-writing, in the Canzone de Ballo, the chants of the Carnival, was a man named Angelo Poliziano, sometimes called Politan by the academics. And Angelo was one of these poor boys from northern Italy, whose father died when he was young, but who was one of the great geniuses of the Renaissance. And in trying to find a way to live in this world, he went to Florence and began composing special poems for famous people in Florence and one of the people who really took to him, who decided that Poliziano was indeed a genius, was Lorenzo the Magnificent. And Poliziano was invited into the Medici home. Now, the buildings in Florence at the time included at the base fortress like protection and only at the top was there the flowering of Renaissance architecture, where you would have the light qualities of the buildings and one of the exquisite buildings that came at this time was the Palazzo Medici in the Via Cavour, now the Via Larga, in Florence. And you can see the most sumptuous palazzo of the most famous family in Florence, that their palace in town was very much a fortress, with the very top being the beginnings of the kind of architecture that was developed early on by the Medici family. The architect who began this beautiful flowering quality was Brunelleschi and the architect who mastered the fortification quality was named Leon Battista Alberti. And the Florentine Renaissance is a combination of the solid, engineered Alberti fortress, built to withstand anything that other men may throw at you, topped by the effervescence of the most delicate proportions and ratios, that was like a music of the spheres in architecture. Brunelleschi, for instance, was the architect who took the foundations of the cathedral in Florence, the foundations that had been laid by Giotto in Dante's time and that no one could build a dome on because it was so enormous and huge. And Brunelleschi was the one, who in going to Rome with his pal, the great sculptor Donatello, went to Rome, which was still at that time, 500 years ago, covered with the ruins of Ancient Rome. The ruins were so huge and monstrously large, cavernous, so overgrown with vegetation and literally trees growing out, that many of the people in the Middle Ages did not believe that these were ever buildings made my men, that they were natural hills. But Brunelleschi and Donatello went, not to be awed by the ancients, but to learn their secrets from them and the two of them measured every building they could come across, every ruin and worked out the architectural proportions that went with the engineering foundation and with the architectural proportions and ratios, they were able to make the music of the spheres appear in the architectural language of the music of cosmic buildings. There is a great study of this level of Renaissance architecture, called Pythagorean Palaces. That once you know the set, once you know what the resonances are, how many there are and the scalar for it and you have the scales, like the octave in music, the eight, one knows that in this eight, the eighth is a repeat of the first, but on one set higher. So that the scale is not a linear scale on one level, but that the true scale is, in terms of the octave, the seven notes on one ascending level, with an eighth note that actually begins the next octave as well. So that the Renaissance understanding of the ancient wisdom was that you have an overlay where the last is first and the first was also the last of something previous. So that you have in this sense the overlay makes a stepped continuum of orders and that if you put the stepped continuum of orders into a larger set, a set of sets, now you have the ability to have an instrument whereby man can approach the cosmic harmony of the divine. For instance, the piano that we have from the Enlightenment is a series of 11 octaves put together on one instrument. And once you had a piano, which was a hill leap beyond the harpsichord, which was a leap beyond medieval instruments, now you had an ability to have composers, musicians, who could envision a completely new style of music, a new expansion of music. While you could have a Bach with a harpsichord, with a piano comes in a Mozart. A different expressive quality. Instead of the Baroque quality of Bach, which is rather mathematical, now, with a Mozart, or a Beethoven, you have a lyrical harmonic that is capable of expressing feelings that were never had before. So that original qualities of our lives, of our persons, are now expressible in an openness that extends itself into infinity and in this way man learns to mature himself to the cosmos and in doing so, he learns that he must leap from the original, experienced possibilities of the surface of the earth and that that surface of the earth experience is the horizon of myth, the horizon of the methos. And in order to lift, to dance, to leap off the mythic horizon of the earth, from the methos into the cosmos, man needs a visionary field, within which he can make new qualities of instruments, of expressions and these are works of art. And it's the works of art that allow us to take from the field of vision a translation into the kaleidoscopic flows of history, out of which then we are able to approach the cosmos. We're doing the same thing now at the beginning of the twenty first century because we need something that is a Renaissance of Renaissances, a revolution of revolutions. And the best way to express it is a 'Recalibration,' a new scalar of how resonances make sets and the sets make sets, but that the harmonic is our mastery that is capable of being shared. And like with the chants of the Carnival...this collection together is called 'Trionfo Di Bacco.' It means that for this May Day, spring festival, the songs are composed so that there are three parts, so that three persons could sing together and in the ratioing of those three people, the song, while it uses peasant themes and melodies, they're grouped together in a very sophisticated, highly poetic composed way, that includes an openness for improvisation. So that the harmonics between the three parts can suddenly discover, spontaneously, new ways in order to sing this song and that the songs were not sung inside buildings, they were sung outside in the streets, in the streets of Florence and they were sung in such a way that you had masks and costumes. And so you would see people grouped in threes, with masks and costumes, in the streets of Florence on the 1st of May, singing these beautiful Canzone de Ballo, dancing. And the whole notion was that when you went into the buildings, into the homes, into the palaces, into the palazzos, now one could disclose one's true face to each other and who knows what kinds of friendships, romances, intrigues, would come out of this?
The Renaissance in this way was something that Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy for the very first time put into a new set. And when he did so, when he finished his book and published the first edition in 1860, almost no one read it, almost no copies were sold. It was nine years before they needed a second edition, which he then stepped up, put together a whole series of notes, they ran to over 1100 notes that he put into it, to encourage everyone that this is something not to be ignored or unacknowledged, but something to be appreciated, has the ability to bring back...it's a Renaissance of the Renaissance, because the Renaissance really dates from about 1439, is the best beginning and so the 1860 first edition is 430 years after. What's interesting is that 500 years, a Cycle of the Phoenix, as we have been talking about, makes it 1939. And in 1939 one found one of the deepest jeopardies that civilisation has ever run across: the powering up of the Nazis in the Germany, the National Socialist Party, to re-establish a new imperial power over the entirety of mankind. And September 1st, 1939, with the invasion of Poland, the Second World War began. At that time, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, Karl Jaspers, whose book, The Origin and Goal of History we're pairing with Burckhardt, was faced with a peculiarity. The scapegoat for the Nazis were the Jews, especially in Germany for the Jews and Jaspers' wife was Jewish. Almost all of the Jews in Germany either fled, or were put into concentration camps. Jaspers, holding a magnificent quality of excellence for many decades in the public eye, refused to leave Germany and became one of the few people to preserve the life of a Jew in Germany, publicly. At the same time, the other great philosopher in Germany, Martin Heidegger, who was the person that is almost paired to Jaspers, but in an opposite way, he was the prize philosopher for the Nazis and in 1937 delivered a series of lectures on Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Jaspers later wrote a huge volume on. And one of the peculiarities is the completely different takes on the importance and significance of Nietzsche. And one of the ties here is that Nietzsche was a friend of Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt, who was born in 1818 and by the time he was 40 he was invited back to his native Swiss city, Basel, to become a professor of history and he was quite famous at the time and became more so as the years went on. The 24 year old Friedrich Nietzsche, who had been schooled by a very famous classics and history professor, named Ritschl...Professor Ritschl had schooled the young genius Nietzsche so well that he was appointed, at the age of 24, to be a professor of philology at the University of Basel. And so here is Burckhardt, 26 years older than the young genius Nietzsche and they became friends. And for the first three years, from 1869, when Nietzsche got there, to 1872, Nietzsche rose in the estimation of people. And one of Nietzsche's great friends from his university days, named Erwin Rohde...and Rohde's great volume was translated, called Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality Among the Greeks. Rohde was Nietzsche's closest friend of his own age, but he confided in the older Burckhardt that they had a special little ceremony that they saluted each other with a glass of wine and that they went to the windows and they poured half of the glass of wine out to the spirits of the world and then drank to each other that they were related to the spirits of the world in their friendship and fellowship. And that this small group of prized young men welcomed the older Burckhardt into their group and Burckhardt of course was glad to participate in this way. But in 1872, Nietzsche published his first great book and it is called The Birth of Tragedy. Now, there are two editions of it: the Oxford World's Classics, which is a very good translation and the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy is a good translation as well. In The Birth of Tragedy it's the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music and Nietzsche goes back to the Classical Greeks. Where Burckhardt had gone back to the Renaissance and that the Renaissance had taken its cue from the Classical Greeks, Nietzsche leaped over the Renaissance, leaped over the Middle Ages, leaped over the Roman Empire and went directly back to the Greek origins. And said that we must re-envision, that the Classical Greeks faced a polarity and that the polarity are in two mythological gods. One is Apollo, the god of the harmonic unity of things, the other is the god Dionysus, who's the god of the revolutionary explosion into the unknown, into the new. That one leaps forth into an experiment of future possibilities and unknown, the other orders the resonances of the arts, each art headed by a muse, by a spirit person woman, like the muse of epic poetry was Calliope. And that these muses, including astronomy and history and dance, these muses are ordered by a tenth, who is Apollo, who makes the nine muse women into a set that is capable of an infinite harmonic. And that if a man is able to gain the favour of the muse, he has the ability then to begin to acquaint himself with more of the muses and should someone be able to acquaint himself with all nine of the muses, he would become then a Renaissance Man, capable of being in himself a son of Apollo, capable of expressing to all other people the entire harmonic of all of the arts available to man and in this way he would become a cosmic hero. He would be able to lift those whom he could contact, to come with him through the entire array of the arts into the kaleidoscopic dynamic by which we can approach the cosmos itself. And that the cosmos recognises us then and welcomes us and that man now belongs in the heavens. One of the great philosophers of the Renaissance, as we'll see, was a man named Marsilio Ficino. And one of the great studies of Ficino is called The Planets Within. It isn't so much the astrology of the planets out there, but it is the ratioing and proportions of the music of that harmonic within, the planets within, that give us then the freedom. The astrology without characterises what we can do and what we are in terms of a methos, but the planets within is our ability to create originally the contact with the cosmos. And by this way man learns through the arts to achieve a heavenly adoption and a reality.
One of the qualities that was there for Ficino, his father was the personal physician for one of the most powerful men of all time. His name was Cosimo, Cosimo de' Medici, who was born in 1389 - which seems like a long time back - and lived until 1464. Now, Cosimo's father was the founder of a whole series of international banks. They eventually had 11 banks. They had a branch in London, they had a branch on the border between the Netherlands and what became Belgium later on, in Bruges. They had branches in Italy, like Naples and Rome, in Florence and Pisa. They had branches in Avignon, in Lyon, in France, in Geneva. And the Medici Bank, with these branches, invented the capacity to do something that no one had ever done in the world before. The capacity to loan money, huge amounts of money, on credit. On the promise of utilising the money lent, to make so much more money, that you could not only repay the loan, but could pay interest on top of it. One of the difficulties is that from classical antiquity, through the Middle Ages, up to that moment, charging interest for money was a sin called usury. And so Cosimo's father, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, invented the way in which this was an extension of a gifting of capacity to people and their offering of a return gift of repaying it, with a little baksheesh, is a gifting and is not usury whatsoever. And so the Medici invented the political economy of credit buying on a massive scale and of course they became wealthy beyond belief. Cosimo inherited from his father the banking empire, but Cosimo also was an extraordinary man. He invited the jealousy of many other families in Florence, in particular the Albizzi, who did not like this young man who was so promising, who had all of this wealth and all of these contacts. So they tried to drum up a situation where he could be accused now of having taken over the family banking and is actually guilty of usury and should be punished by death. Knowing that he could not succeed exactly in immediately countering this, Cosimo had his people, like a good Italian boss, shunted over so that he wouldn't be killed, but maybe he would be exiled. And so Cosimo was exiled to Venice and by the time he got to Venice, new opportunities came up for him. He realised that the city of Constantinople, of ancient Byzantium was falling to the Turks and indeed in 1453 it did. It was surrounded by one of the great, determined emperor generals of all time, Mahmud the Conqueror. Now, Constantinople had triple, huge walls, the biggest walls ever built around a city, but Mahmud had the new cannon and the patience and he would line up hundreds of cannons and year after year he would pulverise, stone by stone, brick by brick, until he finally penetrated through...his Muslim armies took over Constantinople. It took a while for this to happen and all the time the learning of the classical world that could be saved, in books, in art and so forth, were being smuggled out around Mahmud's surrounding siege and that these treasures were coming to Venice and having to be sold so that you could make enough money to send in supplies and have the city hold up. Cosimo began committing the family fortunes; they said that he spent more on books than he did on building his entire family palazzo. And he would buy these and in the meantime he would talk to all of these people and he finally realised, with Constantinople in ruins and Rome in ruins, the Roman Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, branches of Christianity, needed to come together and that there would be this huge, ecumenical conclave. It was supposed to be held in Venice. He got the idea, 'Let's hold it in my city, in Florence. And not only will I invite everyone here, but we will go back and invite the spirits of antiquity to come and participate in this.' And so Cosimo got his people to engineer the Albizzi out of power and when he rode back, on a white horse, into Florence, at the head of a large, colourful entourage of people singing songs, the Canzone de Ballo type of songs, he stood up in his saddle as he rode by the empty Albizzi palazzo and signalled to everyone that not only was he back in Florence, but he was back in control. And in a book by the great Eugenio Garin, translated from Italian, Portraits from the Quattrocento, Portraits from the Fifteenth Century, the 1400's, one sentence: 'The centre of Florentine politics had shifted from the Palace of the Signori, to the House of the Medici.' The ancient congressional place, where the elders and power brokers and guild masters met to govern Florence, now the centre of power went to the home of Cosimo de' Medici. And in order to float this enormous, powerful entourage of people, he built the Palazzo de' Medici, three big storeys, at more than a block long. And he invited the most talented people he could find, especially the young men, to come and live with his family, to be adopted by him. And one of the people that he singled out, he needed someone who could teach these young, talented men the highest levels of what antiquity held in its nobility and what the current Medici revival of that learning really meant and to open everything up to a cosmos. So he chose the young son of his personal physician, who was only a teenager at the time and he made him a deal and a promise, which he kept. 'Whatever books you need, I will buy. I will get you trained so that you read Greek like a Greek in ancient times, to be a master of all of the muses. And I will gift you with one of our favourite villas, up on the rim of the hills that surround Florence, the Via Careggi,' a big, yellow, couple storey building. And Ficino opened up the Florentine Academy there. We're gonna come back from the break...just one little personal note: in our time, the Via Careggi was owned by Laurance S. Rockefeller, who was my patron for ten years, until he was too old to carry on. The Via Careggi is still used as a school, more than 500 years later. Let's take a break.
File 2 starts
Let's come back and reposition ourselves. What's being presented here is a very high-powered, new harmonic. It's never been seen before and takes all of the harmonic sets that have occurred on this planet and brings them into a new extension, the proof of which is that it has a base which is capable of unity and a dome of resonance that extends to infinity. The fulcrum, the pivot, the spindle of proving that out is that it is able to operate with a pair of binaries. One is the familiar zero and one, out of which every computer system in the world utilises, but the other binary is zero and infinity, which becomes extremely difficult to work with and appreciate. And modern computations of physics, especially in the quantum realm, quantum electrodynamics, or quantum chromodynamics, has to put a filter to get rid of the infinities that are constantly really there in the math. And then to take that filtered solution and run it back through a special kind of counter-filter, called renormalisation. That way you can use a very high, cosmic mathematic, quantum realm and still have applicability in the unified world. The difficulty is that ones and infinities do not modulate unless they are overlapped by zero. So that the fulcrum, the true pivot, is zero, zeroness. The current reflection of a mentality on the avant-garde to understand that is termed 'Zero point energy.' But there is no zero point energy. The zeroness, like the emptiness of Zen, does not occur as an existential, ever. It occurs as a field of Tao, as a field of nature, out of which emerges, naturally, unities. All emergences are unities; they're existentially actual, in that they not only emerge and thus are, but that they are resonantly in a vibration, so that all existentiality is actually a calibratable, vibrational coupling, whose origin of polarity that stabilises their emergent resonance, that emergent resonance is stabilised by a polarity which is a right angle rotation of what the original one and zero were as a mysterious complementarity. And if you rotate the zero and one 90 degrees, now you have a polarity that has the qualities of oneness, in that they're able to integral, bring together, make a union of two into one, but they also have a relational vibration with being able to emerge out of zeroness. In this way, something that is existential is both actual, polarised and real, in terms of zero and one. If one masters the ability to concentrate, to meditate, to bring together any pattern that actually exists, or rather, exists in its actuality of resonant emergence, it can always be brought to a power integral of oneness, of unity. Such that the oneness of that unity is able to be folded one step further into vanishing. And when oneness is able to be concentrated to its vanishment, this is a return cycle that immediately, spontaneously, without any time whatsoever and without any spatial boundary whatsoever, to re-emerge unified. But with a very marked quality: it will have five dimensions, rather than four. Instead of just having space time four dimensions, it will have a quintessential fifth dimension, which is consciousness. Now whatever vibration, whatever dynamic existence has, its dynamic is conscious time space, rather than just space time. And when it is conscious time space as a five-dimensional, vibronic emergence, it has the ability to be stepped up in dimensions. And the classic way in which it is stepped up into further dimensions, is that it moves from five to eight. Now, the earliest writing that we have on this planet as to this higher mathematic, are the Pyramid Texts of Ancient Egypt, that go back to the Fifth Dynasty. The Pyramid Texts are the writings in hieroglyphic that were placed inside of the pyramid. The first pyramid to have Pyramid Texts like this, completely surviving and translated, is the Pyramid of Unus, about 2350 BC. That symbolic language now is an interface of the pyramid which exists as a polarised unity of the most basic three-dimensional form, the triangle put into a spherical metric. And so the pyramid is the first form that occurs in the three-dimensional sphericality of space, but with the fourth dimension of time also operative in it architecturally, as one would move through that pyramid. But the putting of the hieroglyphic symbol language on the inside puts a conscious membrane dimension into the pyramid. Now whoever walks through that five-dimensional pyramid will be able to integrate the entire five-dimensional journey through the pyramid and emerge out of the pyramid capable of higher dimensions. The proviso in the ancient wisdom was discovered about 40 years ago in string theory. That the vibronic, mathematical origin of primordial emergence is 11 dimensions. And the 11 dimensions are that the eight produce a ninth, which has three dimensions in itself. Those three dimensions are a spiritual space. And so the eighth not only reveals the ninth, the ninth reveals that it is a three-dimensional, spirit space. That three-dimensional spirit space, dimensions nine, ten and 11, are the emergent field of the cosmos out of which the energy of nature occurs as a field, as an integral field, so that nature is generated by the cosmos. And the fulcrum, midway between the cosmos generating nature and being able to have nature return to the cosmos, is exactly at the zero of the human being, not just in their mind, but the zeroness that is able to be vanished in their life and re-emerge spontaneously in their life. So that man holds a key. Man holds a key as a microcosm, because he, in doing so, seeds the return of nature being able to go back to its cycling in the cosmos. This is a basic Renaissance discovery. And that discovery was such that if you hold the two qualities of human polarity together in a paired, chiral complementarity, you have the sceptre by which to understand symbolically how and why this happens. And the when it happens is whenever there is comprehension in someone holding that up. The symbol that was used in most ancient writings was the wand of Hermes, the caduceus. It is so universal that the Hermetic caduceus exists here in this little bit of tapestry. This bit of tapestry was woven 1,000 years ago in Central Asia. It was found at the middle of the Gobi Desert, not in the ruins of the place, because the place had gone back completely to desert. The only way that one could tell that it was a great world city, is that the main, huge boulevards of the city...its name was Loulan - the main boulevards of Loulan were planted with the crown of the desert trees. In the Middle East it's the date palm, but in the Gobi Desert it's the tamarisk. And tamarisks, when they grow to magnificent, urban, planted trees, their root structure is so huge that it balls above the ground enough so that the tamarisk mounds survive even after 1,000 years and one can see the tamarisk-lined ways in which the major boulevards of this royal, impeccable city were laid out in the middle of the Gobi Desert. One of the difficulties of the middle of the Gobi Desert where it is, is that a huge lake that is there, called Lop Nur - it's on the interface of Tibet with Central Gobi China - Lop Nur has a cycle of vibration, the whole lake migrates over centuries. And when Loulan was established, it was not understood that the lake migrates and after several hundred years, instead of being on the shore of Lop Nur, Lop Nur had moved away, further towards Tibet. And it was only in the late twentieth century that the cycle of the migration of Lop Nur was understood geophysically. So Loulan died out about 1,000 years ago and this was discovered by an intrepid little British explorer, named Sir Aurel Stein and his companion was his little dog that he took with him everywhere and five or six porters of Asian descent, like Nepalese Sherpas. He could speak their language, they liked him because he was a little intrepid guy, who liked his little dog with him. And he would smoke his pipe in the evenings and he treated them as if they were fellow human beings. And they discovered Loulan in 1901. And discovered so many manuscripts and shards of fabric and so forth, that they brought them back in a huge caravan of loaded beasts and all of it was given to the British Museum in London, where most of it was unpublished and unread, until the Japanese, about 15 years ago, put up a huge amount of money...Kodansha Publishing. I'll bring one of the volumes next week. Huge, elephant folio, boxed, three volumes of the Sir Aurel Stein collection at the British Museum. Another thing that was in Loulan is the Chinese version of the Hermetic caduceus. This is Fuzhi and Nugwa as the two dragon people who, intertwining, make the Hermetic caduceus in the ancient Taoist way of expressing itself. And at the top one sees the cosmos as a sphere with all of the stars arranged as a circle around them. If you take the cosmos and vanish it, this pattern of these stars - there are 13 of them - is the original pattern of the American flag. The 13 stars in a circle, a cosmic circle. Because there are people who understood this sort of thing even before discovering the actuality of it at Loulan 200 years later, but esoteric people, like Benjamin Franklin, understood this is the way in which a cosmic pattern is delivered. It is a circle of stars and it is by the circling of the stars together that one is able to navigate into the reaches of the earth with a celestial compass. And the first people to be able to do this, to navigate by the patterns of the stars freely on the earth, were from Central Asia, but from the other end of Central Asia, that is today in Uzbekistan and the city there was Samarkand. And the first masterful person to understand the way in which you use a celestial navigation matrix to generate the free movement on the surface of the earth so that man is free to come and go, however long his journey might be, was Zarathustra. Zarathustra lived about 100 years after the first Pyramid Texts were written; he lived about 2250 BC. And the Gathas of Zarathustra are the songs of the high wisdom of how we learn on the surface of the earth to recalibrate ourselves to the celestial proportions and patterns, so that now we are freed from the methos to participate in the cosmos. And that when human beings are free to participate in the cosmos, they are at home in heaven and they look upon the earth as the footstool of comfort, but that the throne, the chair, which one sits is the seat of learning. And so this education is a return of the ancient wisdom of the entire planet to its next civilisation that is being seeded now. The quality of all of this was first understood about 500 years ago in the Renaissance in Florence. Jacob Burckhardt, in 1860, was the first person to be able to express in such a way that people of his time could begin to understand what had happened, what was possible. There's five parts...you have to learn that there are always patterns of numbers, like we began with Lorenzo the Magnifico, his May Day songs in the streets of Florence every year. The selection is 21 songs arranged like the major arcana of the tarot deck and that particular tarot deck is one that was generated for the Sforza family in Milan. And one of the Medici 11 banks was in Milano. They took the Sforza tarot deck and were able to rearrange it in Florence in terms of its music, its spontaneous, new harmonic that could be sung every year on the 1st of May, the spring festival. Not just a festival for the planting of the vines, the pruning of them, the olives and so on, but the planting of the remembrance that we renew that cycle, because we in our community together form the complex pitch pipe by which the entire harmonic of this can be sounded again on earth, so it is heard in heaven. And heaven returns the resonance by bestowing the vibration of eternal life to those who will sing together in this way.
Here's what Burckhardt wrote, the second of the five parts. The Taoist energy cycle of five is Tao, Tê, Jen, I, Ch'i. And the Ch'i recycles back into the Tao and it's an eternal, not a cycle at this point, but when it circulates back in, it comes out as a five-dimensional, rather than a four-dimensional actuality, so that instead of having just a circle that is a cycle, you write it so that it's a circle, two circles, that meet at a vanishing point, an infinity sign. And if you look at the farthest mural in the back of the Pyramid of Unas, where all the hieroglyphs lead, there you find arranged the royal king cobras. And they are swallowing their tail, but in such a way that they make huge figure eights standing up, like an accordion of time cycles, of aeonic, double millennial cycles and that is an accordion of the unfolding of eternal time. That eternal return is not a circle that's a rut, but it is an infinity cycle that opens out. And you'll see, if you get DVD's of the presentations, that the symbol that we use is a rainbow infinity sign, arranged in a series of eight. So that one can go through this and re-establish for oneself the quality that is here, that Burckhardt writes at the very beginning. Part Two is called 'The Development of the Individual.'
In the Middle Ages, both sides of human consciousness, that which was turned within, is that which was turned without, lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession. Although the world and history were seen clad in strange hues, man, conscious of himself only as a member of a race, a people, a party, a family, or a corporation, only through some general category, in Italy this veil first melted into air.
A part of zeroness is openness. 'An objective treatment in consideration of the state and of all the things of the world became possible.' Instead of a mythic integral, held together by symbolic doctrines, one saw for what they are, things like states, things like religions, things like races. And what they are in each and every case are integrals, capable of being integralled together into unity. That all mankind itself is a unity. The Ancient Greek word for this, that Alexander the Great used, was 'Oikoumene.' There is such a thing as a family of man. We are all related in a family so complex that it seems to be diversely different and yet when we come to our capacities as spirit persons, we find not only the common denominator, but we find the domed numerator arranged in harmonic sets. We not only work together on the basis of a unity, but we differentiate into infinity together because of the kaleidoscopic array of the gorgeousness. The one establishes truth, the other generates beauty. And so the understanding was that if one could reach back, one also reaches within at the same time and touches something in us so primordial, that anyone else who has ever touched themselves that way, will recognise each other spontaneously and immediately.
One of the other great philosophers of the Renaissance was Pico della Mirandola. He didn't live very long, he lived to be 31, account of Mirandola. But in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he says we discover within that we have the quintessential dimension of all things that are created and that while all the things are given specific unities in existence to participate in the world, man is given the quintessential seed of all of those unities, so that he is a spirit core corridor for the entirety of creation, which comes alive not in the single individual, but comes alive in the harmonic of the shareable spirit personage. So literally the truth is, 'In beauty, whenever two or more are gathered together in my name, I will be there.' Here's how Picco wrote it 500 years ago in Florence:
To return, however, to our review of the chief points of my disputation, I have also adduced my conception of the manner in which the poems of Orpheus and Zoroaster ought to be interpreted. Orpheus is read by the Greeks in a text which is practically complete, Zoroaster is known to them in a corrupt text, while in Chaldea, he is read in a form more nearly complete. Both are considered as the authors and fathers of ancient wisdom. I shall say nothing about Zoroaster, who is mentioned frequently by the Platonists and always with the greatest respect. Of Pythagoras, however, Yanblinkus the Chaldean writes that 'He took the Orphic theology as his model on which he shaped and formed his own philosophy.' For this precise reason the sayings of Pythagoras are called sacred because and to the degree that they derive from the Orphic teachings. This source is the occult doctrine of numbers and everything else that is great and sublime flows to us.
Now, we saw in the previous four presentations, where we took the Huainanzi from classical, ancient China, at the pinnacle of the Han Dynasty, especially the chapter six, called the Cung-Ching, which means 'Mutual resonance.' That if you not only feel and think back and have a conscious interpenetration, mutual resonance will establish for you the scale, the scalar, where heaven and earth are interfaced. And that man, that woman, becomes not only the bridge between heaven and earth, but becomes a living membrane by which that is shareable. This quality was paired with Benjamin Franklin and we saw that in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography he had that page, that diagram, of 14 different qualities of his temperament. That he made a record of how he did each day, on all 14 and then kept track of the way in which he would improve, or forget and that in doing he said that he found that the ancient Pythagorean way was that at the end of each day, if you do a retrospection back through the time of the day to its beginning when you awoken, beginning just before you go to sleep, back through, that your capacity for remembrance becomes, the mathematical term is 'Asymptotic.' It goes off the scale. You begin to not only remember, but you begin to participate in your visioning, so that the visioning is not just a vision, but is a vision with remembering. And as you vision with remembering, whatever you look at, you remember what it is, what it's for, what the relationalities are. And at the same time it is that remembering occurs, the creative imagining pairs with it synergistically and it's as if you were able to raise a hand and the remembering were things of the fingers and the creative imagining are the spaces in-between. And in this way the artists can utilise that which is creative and remembering at the same time and braid them together on the basis of the prismatic jewel of their spirit person. So that now the work of art has the resonances packed into the unity of it and as soon as someone is able to appreciate that work of art completely through, walk through that symbol-inscribed, pyramid of presentation, they will emerge and the work of art will restore to them and prove out to them that they are spiritually rebirthed. So that the rebirthing happens every time a work of art is worked, appreciatively, by someone who is spiritually real. And this way art recreates the world of existence into eternity. This is what they mean by Renaissance, not an academic subject, a spiritual endeavour, like this. More next week.