History 11

We come to History 11 and for those of you, almost all of you, who are learning by the DVD's, our enquiry proceeds with resonances that form a set and we call that set a phase. And the phases succeed one another by a very delicate, subtle process, they do not touch. Like the axons and dendroids of a neural system, they do not touch, so that there is a synapse gap, across which leaps the neural electric energy. Now, the neural cells are kept in a matrix and that matrix has a neural fluid that keeps it going and neural fluid in the spine is just a slight trace different from normal water. It is that slight difference that allows for it to be a conductor of neural impulses. And what it is important here is that as these presentations occur, they occur as a pair of 40 minute meditations for the first year. And that pair of 40 minute meditations becomes in the second year a pair of 40 minute contemplations. The difference is this: a meditation is a yoga to focus, to bring a square of attention into its geometry of centredness and to condense that, to concentrate that and the Ancient Sanskrit word of that practice is 'Dhyana, dhyana.' So that a meditation is an asana of a posture, like a hatha yoga. It is also an asana for a bhakti yoga, an attentiveness to gently receive and give in that reciprocity of kindredness. It is also an asana of a karma yoga, of the action of doing this, the gestures, the sound, the voice, the relationalities. And it is also...has the dimensions of the asanas of a jnana yoga, an intellectual, a thinking yoga. When the hatha, bhakti, karma, jnana yogas are ensembled altogether, that is traditionally called a Raja yoga. Because of the new capacities for attention and condensation, for the new intensity of the dhyana, this is a maharaja yoga that you are engaged in. But in the second year, instead of a meditation to condense, we have a complementarity operating. Instead of the condensation for an integral, we have the prismatic opening of a differential and where the integral will have a cycle that one can go through a four, quaternary phase cycle that eventually comes to a pointedness, a concentration, it's a concentration that when thought, when symbolic thought, is successful, we say that 'We have made a point. Now you understand what we are getting at.' And everything leading up to that is a graduated concentration of expression, of images, of feeling tones that increase the meaning and eventually one can arrange the points in an argument and that this argument then is what persuades you and convinces you. The language used for that is called a 'Rhetoric' and in the yoga of integral concentration, the rhetoric includes posture, it includes the bhakti feeling tones, it includes the karma actions, it includes the jnana thought processes and in a Raja yoga all of them are orchestrated together. It need not be expansive like a symphony, but it's very much like a string quartet, where all four of the yogas are playing together and they play chamber music of understanding to the points. But those points all can be clustered together and they can be arranged instead of being in the sequences of their argument, instead of in the syllogistic, Aristotelian way of making something logically coherent so that one now follows the argument to its point and is either convinced or not convinced. The accomplishment of all of that is flat if it is not lifted out of the frame of reference and so the second year is an ecology of consciousness, rather than a cycle of integral nature and the shape of the second year is rather like a diamond of insight, rather than a square of attention. Rather than having a frame that has referentiality in terms of points and an argument, it will have instead a diffractive quality of showing the arrays, the possibilities and arranging them in sets of resonances that are capable not of being ordered in some kind of rhetorical way, but of having a prismatic, poetic language and gesture and transform, so that now you have a diamond of insight that allows for something extraordinary to occur. The integral starts from a field of nature, nature is a field. The flow of experience is like a river that flows in that field, a stream of experience. But in the ecology of consciousness, consciousness is a field, but it's a differential field and so it's a complementarity to the field of nature. But the flow through the field of consciousness is the flow of history, not the flow of a methos. It's not a myth horizon stream flow, which has its beginning, its middle, its end. It follows that one could tell the stories along with the rituals being performed and have it all mean in the mind exactly what it's supposed to add up to, what it's supposed to come to. Whereas in consciousness, there is no goal of coming to anything, rather it's to continue to open and so infinity becomes the actuality of a differential ecology that has been successful. And the time dimension of infinity is eternity. One prismatic form fulfils the differential ecology to its boundlessness and that is the cosmos itself. And so the fourth phase of the ecology of consciousness, of the second year of our learning will be Science and we will get to Science in about three weeks. We'll have next week History 12, which will conclude the phase of History. Then we will have an interval, because in-between each of the phases we always have an interval, so the phases do not touch, but they are all membraned by an interval that is able to be both retrospective and look back, at the same time as being prospective and looking forward, so that the sense of a present is a presence. Rather than being a point of the present, the present moment, it is a presence that is of an eternal occurrence. Not a return, but something that the mathematical term that would be used is that in eternity, the continuity is a 'Cascade.' My old friend Karma Thinley Rinpoche, who I brought to Los Angeles in 1976 from Toronto, he was at, at the time, came to deliver ten days of instruction. Coming down from Canada after five years of teaching on the university level in Canada, I found that in LA no one understood the Vajrayana very well at all and so Karma Thinley brought ten days of teaching on the history of the Karmapas, what is a lineage, how does reincarnation work. It isn't that 'This Karmapa reincarnates as that Karmapa,' that the continuity is on the order of a cascade. The difference being, if you take a candle and you light another candle from that candle, you can say that the flame has passed onto the other one. But if you look at a waterfall, it isn't that this drop falling, causes this drop to fall, causes that, it is rather a cascade, that all of the drops are falling together and one says than that in an integral there are candles that are passed on, point by point, but in a poetic of consciousness meaning is a cascade in eternity. And in this mode it is not cognition that is the working factor, but recognition, which is instantaneous, has no time and is boundless, can be not associated point by point, but is realisation all at once in time and without bound in space. And so the time is eternal and the space is a different kind of space from phenomenal space. It is, to use the Greek term, a 'Noumenal' space. The cosmos has a noumenal space as well as a phenomenal space. The phenomenal space will show us the amphitheatre where time is the first dimension, generates in the three dimensions of space a four-dimensional square of attention, actually it's a cube of attention, or a sphere of attentiveness. But in consciousness, the diamond, the jewel can be cut and re-cut and be very refined and almost indefinitely have facets almost without end. And when you have a matrix of jewels, in the Vajrayana that's called the 'Jewel matrix,' 'Trichiliocosm,' of the way in which the scintillating quality of reality is that it is infinitely scintillating, not at all limited.
What we're preparing ourselves with today in the presentation...its title is 'Recalibration of Civilization to Science.' In a myth, in a methos, that is integralled by symbolic thought, you have a culture, but history generates a civilisation, distinctly different from a culture. A civilisation, in fact, is not a culture, or any number of cultures just put together, like points, like candles, but is instead a cascade of prismatic individuals become persons. In the mind we will have an individuality, we will have an idea of 'Myself,' the 'I.' That 'I' will be an identity, where the correlate, the referent is from my idea of myself to what I do, the ritual comportment, the experience that is generated out of what I do, integralled by how I think about it. The tautology generally expressed in ancient times, was the question of Moses to the burning bush: 'Who shall I say sent me?' And the reply was, 'I am that I am.' And it's the 'I am-ness' then that is the identity referentiality that carries through the integral, but the actual Ancient Hebrew does not just read, 'I am that I am,' it has a different quality that in the pronunciation, the aspiration can mean 'I will be who I will be.' It's an open-ended array of possibilities, without end. 'Who sent you?' 'I will be whoever I will be.' 'Worlds without end.' This has a different resonance to it. Instead of then following laws and codes of an 'I am,' one explores the possibilities, the proportions, the ratios of 'Perhaps,' of insight ideas and this is in science called 'Theory, theory.' The Greek term for it though is 'Theoria' and 'Theoria' does not mean just 'Theory.' That would be reducing it to an argument, rhetorical use of language. The Greek 'Theoria' actually means 'Contemplation.' So that while all of the integral cycles are meditations on concentration of an integral, all of the presentations in the second year are contemplations of opening up differential consciousness and allowing the field of differential consciousness to play through the jewel of the spirit person, prismatically. And so history as a flow is actually a kaleidoscopic flow. It is a kaleidoscope of rainbows without end and not just rainbows of visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum, but the rainbowness of the entire electromagnetic spectrum and the magnetoelectric spectrum as well. And so one has an enormous range, in fact, a range without end.
What we have been looking at in History, is the way in which by pairs of books, pairs of individuals, pairs of spirit persons who prismatically had produced a new scale of this kind of differential, conscious field, shining through the jewel of their spirit persons, prismatically and creating a new kaleidoscope of historical process, which is what civilisation is. Civilisation is the play of the kaleidoscopic consciousness of all the persons participating in engendering that. And we saw that, in particular, by taking Thucydides as the first great Greek historian and Tacitus as one of the great Roman historians, we're pairing in a way which was characteristic of the late First Century AD. The characteristic was made world-famous as a historical viability by a classic writer named Plutarch. Plutarch's Parallel Lives. He would take a Greek life and a Roman life. He would take Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and by pairing them together, would tune the reader, not only to what a person would be coming out of the Greek ethos, compared to a Roman person coming out of the Roman ethos, but that you would have now a stereoptic insight into what a spirit person you are, by having run into both the Greek historical realm and the Roman historical realm, together with a new synergy, because Plutarch was a carrier of a very rare third dimension, third strain music. He was, though he wrote in Greek in Roman times, he was actually a carrier of one of the most sophisticated of all the great civilised, prismatic origins, he was a carrier of the Pythagorean development of historical civilisation. One of the qualities that is very difficult for us to immediately appreciate, we think of Pythagoras as a Greek, but Pythagoras' father was a Phoenician, he was from Tyre, which is on the coast, very close to what is today Israel, on the coast of Lebanon, not very far. In fact, if you go inland from Tyre, just 40 miles or so, you will come to the Sea of Galilee. In the New Testament, in one poignant part, you will find in Matthew that after hearing of the beheading of John the Baptist and Jesus goes into the wilderness, into a mountain alone and all the people follow and then he has the people fed, the 5,000, with the fish and the loaves. After he finishes that little segment, he also goes to the coast, to Tyre, because Tyre is the place in which all of the great trade routes run, over the Mediterranean Sea, out into the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. Pythagoras' father, Mnesarchus, was the owner of the greatest Phoenician trading fleet of the time and he married a woman who was Greek, from Samos, but they spent their honeymoon at Delphi and the conception of Pythagoras was at Delphi, under the Pythian Apollo oracle aegis. And so he was named 'Pytha-goras' because of the Pythagorean connection with the python of Apollo. So he is Phoenician and that part of Phoenicia when he was born, about 571 BC, had been connected with Egypt for over 2500 years. Very often, Phoenicia, what passes Phoenicia, or in ancient times, is called Coele-Syria, was a part of Egypt, but it also was the farthest reach of the Fertile Crescent of the original civilisation in Mesopotamia...Sargon of Akkad...which stretched from the Persian Gulf and included all of the Persian Gulf areas and states, all the way over, arcing and connecting with the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians founded for instance, the city of Marseille and they rounded through Gibraltar and went up and down the coasts, Morocco and what is today Spain and Portugal. So that Tyre, the Phoenicians, had trade routes that spanned by caravan all the way over to the Persian Gulf, down the Persian Gulf, all the way to India and through the Mediterranean, all the way to the British Isles, in Ireland. So that by the time of Pythagoras, from Ireland to India, was one great marketplace and had been so for more than 2,000 years. Pythagoras was an inheritor of all the traditions on this huge swathe of material, of not just methos and cultures and different kinds of tribes, but on a...civilisation that was, to put it mildly, international almost to the scale of being planetary. The Pythagorean tradition was passed on in a special poetic called 'Mathematics.' Mathematics is not at all an exclusively integral, rhetorical arrangement of points in symbolic thought, but one learns to read through the rhetorical arrangement of the symbols, to the play of the theoria in the language of the mathematic, which when it really gets going, has qualities of theorems, like the Pythagorean theorem, 'A2 plus B2 = C2.' But there are not only theorems that arrange themselves by the thousands by now, but there are transforms. When we get to Science and we go into Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, one of the great transforms is the Penrose transform. One of the first great transforms is the Fourier transform, of how to express mathematically, the infinite, minute changes in relationalities in a set that can be harmonic and expanded indefinitely. One can apply a Fourier analysis to almost anything and there are many analytics, many transforms, many theorems; by the twenty first century there are tens of thousands. So that the scintillation of the prismatic, conscious capacity of the person exceeds imagination.
We're looking, in a very special, Plutarchan way, not only at parallel lives, but at pairs of parallel lives that arrange in an eight phase infinity, cycle ecology. And right now, we're looking at the way in which Jacob Burckhardt, one of the great historians of the nineteenth century, his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy and Karl Jaspers' The Origin and Goal of History, one of the great books in twentieth century historiography. Jaspers is extremely famous for doing a set. These are the first two of four books called The Great Philosophers. Going through the whole array of original thinkers, of the follow-up that made a huge difference. He calls it the 'Axial age,' where the originating insights and theoria were carried further and given extra differentiation. And it is a quality that in our learning we're exposing ourselves, initially, to how nature occurs as a field, how ritual comportment of existence comes iteratively into being, into vibrant, constantly iterating forms, who have an activity sequence that establishes and keeps maintaining them. So that rituals are not just done once, but they're constantly performed and there is a ritual of a hydrogen atom coming into play out of the natural field and when it comes into play, it sets up a whole sequence of points that occur as different elements and one of the elements further down the sequence is oxygen and when hydrogen pairs up with oxygen, H2O, you have water. And now on a molecular level one begins to see that the points create further points and the molecule of water is itself quite stable, the hydrogen atom itself is quite stable. The proton is the most stable existential point in the universe. It is of almost indefinite...but nevertheless has a finite lifetime, exceeding many times what the universe's age is. The unities that occur ritually in existence have a tenacity of being an existential ground and base, but when it comes to understanding that ground, that existence, the understanding now has a meaningful, integral, thought structured, symbolic understanding, which Jaspers is extremely famous for it and that is now one has a philosophy of existentialism, of existence. Not just 'Existence,' with a 'C-e,' but 'Existenz' with a 'Z.' Now, Existenz is the complete cycle of the integral, that includes the mind and of symbolic thought, it includes the body, it includes everything that it does and its experience and if one could extend it into the ground, the ground of existence is the actuality of how it emerges and its becomingness is actually now a 'Being, hyphen, in, hyphen, the, hyphen, world,' a 'Being-in-the-world,' or a being in itself, which will have that integral unity. Jaspers is one of the great thinkers of all time because he was able to look into and see that this opens up into the wild, elegant possible field of consciousness. His great, three volume Philosophy, that was published in 1932, took Europe by storm and by surprise. One of the qualities of Jaspers is that he was born in north Germany, near the North Sea, not very far, maybe less than 30 miles, from the Netherlands, so it's a Germany that is more like Holland than Germany. And his family had lived in that area for centuries. He had a kind of a disability that wasn't actually diagnosed until he was about 20 years of age, so he was a very frail boy, he couldn't participate in sports like other boys, but he developed the sense of the adventure of finding out things. The joy of discovering of what things are about and how they work and all of his life he had that. When he finally began to be a very famous professor, he was a professor of medicine, who had gone into finding out why medicine works in a person and it must be because of the psychology of the person, as well as the medicine of the body, so that one has a psychotherapy quality and he wrote a classic textbook, the first general textbook on psychopathology in the world. And in this he was like a further resonance of William James. The first textbook on psychology in the entire world was 1890, by William James, two big volumes. And Jaspers, following about 30 years later, with General Psychopathology...it's still in print. The great refined edition, fourth edition, was 1942, but not published until after the Second World War. The reason for this is that Jaspers was married to a Jewish woman - they were married for over 60 years - who was a very special friend to him. And he refused to have the Nazis take her away and refused to divorce her, though it was labelled by the state as a 'Mixed marriage' and they were constantly watched. But he was so famous and so well respected, that they were allowed to stay in their house in Heidelberg, though he could not teach any longer at the University of Heidelberg. When Philosophy came out in 1932, he had not published but one book in the previous ten years and it was called The Making of Modern Man, but the three volume Philosophy when it came out was astounding to everyone. They realised finally that this was not just a good doctor, a great psychologist, a good psychotherapist, but that he was one of the masterful voices in philosophy of all time. When we come back from a break, we'll take a look at the way in which consciousness, when it develops the kaleidoscopic flow of history, creates a special, new kind of time, that will generate that special space of the cosmos. And in that special space of the cosmos, with an eternal time, nature itself will be generated as a field, not as a cycle of return, but as an infinity of complementarity, so that reality is ongoing in such a way that it is a cascade without beginning or end. The phrase is 'Worlds without end' and it is meant. Let's take a break.
File 2 starts
Let's come back to our presentation. We're using a poetic to prismatically do a presentation that has the ability to have a simultaneous retrospection and simultaneous to that, an insight looking forward, a retrospection and a prospection at the same time, that radiate as a coherent pair. So that at the presence that is shareable, as it occurs, the context is not just the time and the space, or what is actually happening, or what we're experiencing, feeling, is happening, or what we think is happening, but that there are more dimensions than that in the presencing and in the sharing. And that the past is constantly occurring fresh and that the future is also having its possibility fresh, so that the radiance of this is that we have a future and a new past that are constantly freshened and capable of transforms, capable of being understood, both by a theorem of a geometry, or even of a relational trigonometry, but also understandable in increasing subtlety of a mathematic of analytic and an art that is capable of critiques and refinement, literally, indefinitely. If you recall, in the Nature presentations, when we used as our pair Mary Leakey's Discovering the Past and Jane Goodall's book of experience, Through the Window, with chimpanzees. Mary Leakey's husband, Louis Leakey, who was one of the few modern persons to ever learn how to make Palaeolithic stone tools from scratch. He could, in less than a minute, make a perfect arrowhead, or perfect spearhead out of stone, he taught himself how to do this. And his comment one time, about Homo erectus, who lived for over 2,000,000 years as a species on this planet and made beautiful spear point tools, he said, 'They're marvellous, but in 2,000,000 years, Homo erectus never improved them.' There was no differential consciousness capable of taking a vision of what one is doing, of what one has and seeing that you can do it differently, better and refine it. We live in the twenty first century, where it is possible for us to refine atoms and molecules and cells and genes and so it behoves us to take great care with how we mature ourselves. Traditional education does not do this, in fact, it truncates us, but it truncates us in an insidious way. It creates dead ends that proliferate and take us into a regression. Part of the reason for the current state of affairs of the planet, as of September 15th 2007, is that it is a mess that cannot be cleared up. It is a tangled web that increasingly entangles itself and instead of having entanglement as a resonant quality, it's like a plate of spaghetti that you're constantly adding more spaghetti and so the mess keeps getting bigger and bigger. The current estimate of everything running out by 2012 - that's in four years, or five years - is optimistic. There is no traction for the mess that is there, without transforms. And this learning is a learning to convey, in the short space of a double year cycle, the qualities that have got us here with capacities and the way in which we have constantly transformed ourselves out of what would have been dead ends.
We mentioned Pythagoras, that Pythagoras was the first person to refer to himself as a philosopher, a 'Philo-sophia,' 'I'm a lover of wisdom.' But 2,000 years before him, Sargon of Akkad recorded of himself that even as a young man he was favoured by the goddess, Inanna, sometimes showing up as Ishtar, sometimes later showing up as Aphrodite. Showing up as Sofia, [7:17 Hokhmah], wisdom. Showing up later on as the lady Prajñāpāramitā, the lady of perfect wisdom, the perfection of wisdom lady, who later becomes Kuan Yin. Sargon of Akkad, born very early in the 2300's BC, about 2370, says that he was favoured by the goddess and he always endeavoured to live as a man conscious of her blessing and her gifting and he ruled as the king of kings for more than 55 years and set in motion a Dynasty that lasted five generations, that knit together everything from India to Greece, everything from Ethiopia, to Scythian Central Asia, in a vast trade empire, where the caravans and the ship routes had crews and managers and people who constantly dealt with all of the various kinds of people that there were. They learned to be international 4400 years ago. Part of the way in which this commerce, this marketplace, was sustained, was that there was always customs fees that were paid and the custom fees came of two different kinds. One was a physical, technological custom fee, because at that time the new metal that was coming into play was the transform of copper into bronze. Before then there was no metallurgic technology to be able to transform metals into non-natural ratios like bronze. And the way that you make bronze out of copper is that you add a very small percentage of tin, so that now while copper is fairly easy to find, tin is very rare and can only be found in a couple of places. One of the places is in Iran, southern Iran and so the caravan routes would sashay up and bring goods and take tin back and they would always use as their customs baksheesh, a little bit of tin every place, so that now all of the stops on the caravan would have the capacity to develop bronze tools and bronze weapons as well. But bronze helmets to protect, bronze shields. So that the international distribution of technology was an outcome of this and one of the things that was seeded from Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers, from Sargon of Akkad's Fertile Crescent, was engineered by his daughter, Enheduanna, who found that spread in all the different cities of Sumeria, of Mesopotamia, of Akkad, each one had their own gods and goddesses, had their own temples. And so she would write a special hymn for each of the 42 different sets of temples, gods and goddesses and then she would bring them into a grand symphony altogether and the 42 Temple Hymns, complement her great epic of Inanna, she was the first known author in the world, 2300 BC. But they were able to posit, along with the tin making bronze and other goods that would be traded, they would bring the insight of civilisation that were ways in which to harmonise any scale of cultures without destroying the gods and goddesses, without mulching together the different temples, the different worships, but allowing for there to be a substrate that was shareable in common with all of them, if it were paired also with an overview. So that this learning has a pedigree of almost 4500 years, of providing a substrate of a planetary culture and an overview of a star system civilisation. Because the overview that was brought into play was one not based upon just the planet, the earth surface, the geography of where you are born, live, love, fight and die, not just the surface of the earth that was only a membrane between the common substrate of a culture that was able to come back into life after death, but there was an overview of the stars, the starry cosmos, the realm of the planets, the sun, the moon. And all of it orchestrated in a new way: they were not mythological gods and goddesses anymore, no one worships the planet Neptune as Neptune. We don't think of him as a 'Him,' Poseidon, it's a planet. In just this way - though not including Uranus and Neptune at that time, they weren't found until just a couple of hundred years ago - they stopped being mythological gods and they became carriers of cycles that meshed together. And it took a very long time to understand that those cycles nest within each other and when they nest within each other, what comes out is the capacity for man to theorise, wider and deeper, to go into a deep substrate of retrospect and to go into a visionary overview. And coming out of this, one of the most incredible qualities came to focus, from carriers of the Pythagorean confidence in mathematics, in a new kind of geometry. The first textbook in the world on geometry was Euclid, about 300 BC, in Alexandria. And the next generation from Euclid was Eratosthenes, who was the head of the great library in Alexandria. He's the first to understand the angles of shadows from lengths of stone or wood, they were called 'gnomons.' And from the angles, based upon a fulcrum of no shadow at noon, at a certain place in the world, in [Aegean 15:32] and then getting reports from all the caravan travellers, who would measure the shadows and the angles for Eratosthenes. He came out understanding that the earth has a surface area as a sphere of about 25,000 miles. This is 2300 years ago. A Pythagorean understanding that one can refine and come into a context where one can envision the entire earth as a sphere for the first time, but it took a long time. Though men learned to sail, to navigate and go very far coastal distances, they were not able to go on the open oceans. And the person who mastered that, how you navigate on the oceans of the world freely, using the entire globe of the earth as your caravan route, was John Dee. And his Principles of Navigation came out in 1575, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and Dee was a Pythagorean mathematician par excellence of his day. Also became one of the great astrologers of the day, he was Queen Elizabeth's astrologer. But he's the one that figured out how you navigate, by certain instruments, like a sextant and so forth and a captain can now plot his navigation on the entire globe of the earth. And because it was such an enormous quality of advancement, the English navy, Britain, 'Britannia rules the waves,' can go anywhere in the globe that they want to go. And one of the first captains to utilise this was Sir Walter Raleigh and Raleigh finally, running up against the problem of recalcitrant, empirical, imperium powers, was put into the Tower of London and to pass his time he wrote a 1200 page Historie of the World. This is a history of the whole globe. For the first time it's not just a history of this group of people, or that group, but of the globe and as he was writing this, the idea occurred to him...because there was a theatre that was built in London, right across the Thames of where the Tower of London is, he could see them building it. They tore down the old theatre that was on the outskirts of then London and that was just called 'The theatre' and owned by old man Burbage and his son Richard. And they employed a young man to handle the horses for a while, Will Shakespeare. And when they found that out he could write they began giving him assignments and he began writing successful plays. And they were so successful, they were so filthy rich at the time, that they tore the Theatre down in its kind of horsey, rural setting and they took all the lumber across the Thames and then bankside they built The Globe Theatre. And The Globe was masterful because it was a world, planetary culture building, able to carry a one mankind civilisation. And in The Globe everyone sat in tiers, like a Pythagorean memory theatre, so that one could not only see what was happening, but remember how the happening got to this point and who these people were and the portraits of them all put into a kind of an interesting broadcast of possibilities, 'What will happen next?' And insight and retrospection were trained by the hundreds and thousands that came to see it. And over the stage of The Globe, in the ceiling, hidden away from everyone except the actors who are on stage, was the zodiac. This is the path of the ecliptic, this is the path that the sun takes through the stars every year, but is always interesting and new when there are people like us ready to have a free play of person.
And right at the time when The Globe was at its pinnacle of success, a new kind of celestial capability came into play, Johannes Kepler published The New Astronomy, 1609. Dedicated to Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague. And Kepler found: 'Based upon causes or celestial physics, treated by means of commentaries on the motions of the star Mars, from the observations of Tycho Brahe.' And Tycho Brahe, a Danish, tough guy, genius. He lost the tip of his nose in a bar fight with knives and swords, so it was metal. And he was such a careful observer, he had a special observatory built in Uranienborg, an island, given to him and devoted to his observations and he kept detailed observations of the position of Mars vis-à-vis the heavens and many other bodies. And Kepler was able to take the retrospection of those careful Brahe measurements and he found that the orbit of Mars is not a circle, it's an ellipse. And it's the first time ever in the world that a human being was able to understand it isn't that things are nested symmetrically in circles, like targets, but that they have a dynamic, angular momenta free play and in this free play there are times in their elliptic orbit where they go faster to cover the same amount of ground and then there are times when they go slower to cover the distributed amount of ground and that human beings in their lives, have certain moments where they really do speed up. It's the same number of hours in the day, but 'This is a special day, you can really get a lot done today. Every hour of this day may be worth several days of some other aspect of the same kind of time that just drags.' And then the realisation that one can go into a freedom play where you can raise, exponentially, the capacity of what you can do in a day. You might do 100 years of work in one kind of very eventful day if you prepare for it, prepare by having a retrospect that is tuned to the prospect possibilities and you learn that the theatre of the globe is very minute compared to the theatre of the star system. And that the whole star system now gives you a new scale of play. When Voyager II was sending its signals from Neptune, over here in Los Angeles to the JPL receivers, it took four hours and six minutes for the telemetry from Neptune to get here. It's 3,000,000,000 miles away. We now are looking at the Kuiper belt, which is three or four times as far as Neptune. We have the capacity to inhabit about a light year diameter of a star system. What kinds of theatre are possible on such a stage? They're unimagined and unimaginable, except that for the last <Break in recording> years or so, science fiction has tried to imagine, because now on a star system scale humanity, the frontier is interstellar. Many other star systems. How many? In this galactic structure we have about 200,000,000,000 stars, there are more than 100,000,000,000 galaxies. When they say 'Worlds without end,' it is meant because new ones are being created all the time. So that the star system civilisation is the first scalar that is true to the real dimensions, not only of time space, but of the fifth dimension, the quintessential, transformational, the alchemical dimension of visionary, differential consciousness, which opens up a whole ecology of further dimensions and further transforms. Not just a six-dimensional art of person, spirit form, or a seven-dimensional dynamic, like history, or an eight-dimensional cosmos, like science, but that that eighth dimension, when it is filled and is fulfilled, it jumps immediately and engenders a new kind of a space, having three dimensions quite distinct from the three dimensions of integral space. You now have a spiritual space that gives you an 11-dimensional, like in string theory, capability to generate something as primordial as nature itself. This scale is truncated if one stops at symbolic thought in the integral in the mind. To stop there, as all other educations stop there now, is to ignore the primordiality of the transforms of High Dharma wisdom, that we have enjoyed for at least 5,000 years, from time to time. The Pythagorean quality that comes into play is due to both the understanding that ratioing proportions introduce you to resonant sets and harmonics, that interplay and complement all of the integral structures that there are. In a geometry, in a geometric, even put to a trigonometric, functional expansion, one is just begun to tutor oneself into what is called Higher Mathematics. There is...there are more mathematics possible than have been achieved already and one can look forward to the rest of the millennia, of the twenty first, through the thirtieth centuries, as being almost asymptotically developable.
In Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, part four is entitled, 'The Discovery of the World and of Man.' The discovery of the enormity of the world and of the profundity of man all over again. He writes: 'Freed from the countless bonds which everywhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe and to the representation of it in speech and in form.' One of the realisations to carry in here is that after Pythagoras was raised to about the age of 18 and travelled widely, both in the Greek Aegean, Asia Minor coast, Ionic coast, what is today Turkey and also into Phoenicia and his family's businesses, he spent 22 years in Egypt, studying with the great Heliopolin recension of Egyptian wisdom. The Heliopolin recension is a particular version, different from the Theban, different from the Saite. It has a solar influence on it, 'City of the sun' and Heliopolis was the way in which Pythagoras learned to root himself into the ancient wisdom that not only goes back to the Pyramid Texts, in its first written expression, but goes back into a pre-dynastic, African wisdom as well. And that pre-dynastic African wisdom is from the Sahara and the Sahara Desert was...had great civilisations, back even before 4000 BC, back into the first emergence out of the Palaeolithic, of prototypical civilisations. In the centre of Africa you will find the Tassili n'Ajjer mountain range and there are murals there and traces that show the same kind of capability that one finds in the Palaeolithic cave art in France and in Spain. That already as the Sahara dried out and desiccated, those people moved to where the water was, where crops could be and the last cliff that was fertile was the Nile River Valley. By about 4000, 3500 BC, the Nile Valley had shrunk so that the Saharan Desert reaches were no longer habitable by physical, natural people, but had the spirits of eternity that were able to be there in the Western Paradise. We see the same thing in the Sahara as we saw in the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert had a very high civilisation more than 1,000 years ago and as it dried out even further, became almost impassable, it turned into sandy wastes. The Hermetic caduceus on this piece of fabric was found in the Loulan ceremony, as we talked about last week. If you review the DVD of it you'll see. And along with it is this Fuzhi, Nugwa, almost like the double helix, not the double helix of our time, but the double helix of the Hermetic caduceus, the two serpents being the generation together of two energy beings that entwining together, make a capacity to have a sphere with a star constellation around it and the overview and to have the similar reflection of it at the base. So that the planetary culture and the celestial civilisation have a direct relationship through the paired synergy of those who participate together in doing it. So that the community is not a political structure, it's not an economic unit, it is a generating energy, vibrancy and the frequency that it produces are the dimensions of conscious transform that are realisable. The entire natural integral welcomes transforms all the time, if they are brought in in a complementarity. And the way that that happens is the defence against false transforms, is that they will try to force a polarity to change and if you try to force a polarity to change, you get the response 'No.' But the transform, if brought in with a complementation, the polarity itself integrates in a new synthesis, by incorporating whatever has been brought into play as a transform. If one carries this, like a caduceus, as a magic wand, all the way through, tuning the entire range, now the entire range has been combed out so that it is able not only to flow together, in a beautiful, natural way, but to transform together indefinitely in a conscious cosmos. Now the universe has a cosmos within which it can be and become whatever it will become. Freedom.
The capacity in the Renaissance of the limitations of a political economy were set for all time by Niccolò Machiavelli. Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince is a very small manual. In translation it runs about 87 pages. Machiavelli also, one of his major works though are Discourses on the Roman Historian Livy, to try to show that this particular style has limitations that if brought into play with this kind of a background, no matter how wonderful it seems at the time, it heads towards a fall. It heads towards its own oblivion by the limits within its structure that give it a time-dated lifeline. Will only last so long, it will inevitably, because it was born and lives, will die. So that every civilisation that is possible has come to a dead end and in order to manifest this - the World's Classics hasn't put out an edition yet - Machiavelli also wrote a History of Florence. So that his own time could see, 'If you work in this way, if you act in this role, this history will play itself out and we're very much in that kind of scheme. We will end up the same way.' The solution to it is - we talked about last week and you can review this on the DVD - Pico della Mirandola's great oration On the Dignity of Man says that the true human person is like a musical harmonic, taking the transform quintessence of every single creature, every single level and that when he tunes himself to his Renaissance cosmos person, he now can participate on every level that there is in the world and bring his insight of transform into play and not only beautify, but power up what he is doing. And exactly when this reached its apex, when the Florentine civilisation reached its culmination with a rather mad monk named Savonarola, who took over the city of Florence and said, 'We're going to have a return back to religious fundamentalism and we're going to burn things in the centre of Florence and everybody's got to get back and get pure and get to where we were.' Just at that time, the Renaissance opened itself again, the discovery of the New World. The world is a globe and that men have been inhabiting, with great pomp and circumstance, a Mediterranean world that is so small it looks like a small lake on a global map. Our earth, even if it were one, single, tyrannical, successful empire, is hardly visible as a very dim, bluish star from the edge of our star system. And if you go to other star systems not that very far away, 50 light years, our star, our sun, our whole star system, is like a speck of dust. The first time that that was observed is in the Pistis Sophia. Jesus is talking to Mary Magdalene in a series of dialogues, with other people around, who are using the songs, the Odes of Solomon and the Psalms of David, to...and the Psalms of Solomon, to open up consciousness. He says: 'The entire earth is but a vanishing speck in the vast reaches of God's home.' And we should be able to open our spirits to inhabit reality and not be imprisoned in false icons of limitations. That is the imprisonment.
Next week we'll take a look at the way in which Jaspers brought his diagram of a one world into play at the end of the Nazi takeover. In Germany when it had fallen, the Third Reich had lasted, instead of 1,000 years, it lasted 12 years. We're going to look at the way in which Jaspers delved into the possibility that a flatted out individuality is the natural assumption of a limited mind and thinks that anything else is completely irrational daydreaming. Well, we're going to do some very large star daydreaming next week.