History 12

We're looking at a tarot card from the Renaissance and this is unfamiliar but it is a tonic key for us here at History 12. The title of this presentation is Our New Aion which was the title of my book of four presentations published in 2001. This tarot deck was painted by one of the Renaissance's great artists, Andrea Mantegna, and it was painted in 1465. And it is not at all the tarot deck that you are used to, the Tarrocchi that you're used to is a deck that was specifically made for the game of Tarocchi. And with the trumps and the four suits there are paintings extant of Renaissance elegant people playing the game of tarots. Because my learning of the tarot was from my spirit mother, Madame Valda about almost 40 years ago, and she was of a very rare gypsy lineage both from Russia and from Spain, I learned the background and the technique of tarot in a different way: not as a game. And the Mantegna tarot deck is not so much a game but is a mnemonic; it is 50 cards arranged in 5 sets of 10. The key set resembles 10 of the major Arcana of the Tarrocchi game but the indexing set of 10 is Apollo and the 9 muses, the 9 women whose Sophia, deep wisdom, is a calibration of all of the arts. And that these arts also expand into the sciences so that you have a set of 9 muses held together by a 10th, Apollo. And Apollo here is the Olympian god of art, not only is the sun his chariot but the apollonian aspect of it is that he is able to make a set of the arts and sciences.
And in the Renaissance, at this time in the 1460s, was very much like a time of the 1960s: everywhere in the world, but especially and particularly in San Francisco where the learning that you're going through had its origins in 1965 exactly 500 years later. And the first course that I designed and offered at San Francisco state was on the Florentine Renaissance. Followed up by a course on Job and Faust, two faces of evil, a course on the cosmology of Teilhard de Chardin. And, from the basis of those developments, was actually hired to go to a very rare opportunity. The only places in the United States in 1965 that offered an interdisciplinary programme degree were Columbia and New York, the University of Chicago and San Francisco State. Where I was hired to go in Canada, they were building a brand new kind of school, college educational building which was designed by Stan Legat and associates who built City College of Chicago and were specialising in the big idea at the time: a college without walls, that there should be a free commerce, concourse market, for ideas between people learning and between people teaching so the teaching and the learning, together, interpenetrate and create a very special synergetic dynamic.
I was hired to be the first person to design the first kind of new Renaissance course that was not only a college without walls but was a university without limits, without boundaries. And it was a 16 course programme and of course the kernel of it was a symbols course and a world mythology course, in a tandem, and a course based on the classic Parallel Lives of Plutarch. Pairs of lives; the first pair of lives was C G Jung and Bertrand Russell and went on from there. Plutarch's idea was if you took a noble Greek and a noble roman, and you put them in parallel, not only would you get the biographies of those individuals in their culture, in their civilisation, in their time but, by comparing them, you would get a special ratio that would hone your ability to see your life and someone else's life in a paired parallel lives way. And to be able to appreciate the complexity of the interface and, instead of being intimidated by a polarity because you don't agree, you're challenged by an ecology of exploration for the same reasons.
The quality of what was being offered then was the 1960s Renaissance, and as those of you who are old enough to realise and recognise, it was a Renaissance that was hijacked and the hijacking of it took place not only on the political level. One only has to review the campaign of 1968 to realise what a tremendous year it was: from the murder of Martin Luther King Junior in April to the murder of RFK in June to the National Conventions. And no one has done a better book on it than Norman Mailer, his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The Democratic Convention in Chicago, the chant was 'The whole world's watching America go down the tubes.'
We are now 40 years later from this and a great deal of what is about to be put, on a planetary scale, on the web is this program that's been in development all this time. One of the keys is to understand that form the 1460s to the 1960s is a 500 year cycle, it's a historical period and that that classic period was called the Cycle of the Phoenix. Now, the phoenix is not only a fabulous bird that renews itself every 500 years, comes from the wild southern reaches of the Arabian peninsula to Egypt, to Heliopolis, and there emulates its dead companion, forebear, on a sun altar in flames, and out of the purification of those flames, the new phoenix now is able to live for a 500 year cycle and go back into the mysterious desert wild area of southern Arabia. Just remember that southern Arabia, in the centre, is the empty quarter, the [09.53 Rubaiyat,] the place where no one lives and no rain has fallen for more than a million years.
I had a friend and student, David Williams, who worked for Aramco back in the 60s and for a special day he got the company to fly him by helicopter in and spent a few hours in the empty quarter where the sand is a deep dark burnt red and has piezoelectric qualities so that, from time to time, you get an electric static discharge through the vast hundreds of miles of the desert. You get the same sort of thing in parts of the Sahara and in parts of the Gobi desert. In fact, in the Gobi there's one mountain that's called the singing mountain because the sand, as it cascades slowly, sets up a deep thrum that one can not only hear for tens of miles but feel in the ribs and chest cavity the mysteriousness.
The phoenix was also associated with the way in which the Morning Star, Venus, would rise and the ancient Egyptian name for Venus, for that Morning Star, was Benu whereas the Egyptian name for the phoenix was the Bennu, the Bennu and the Benu. And that the phoenix was associated with a special star that would only clear the horizon once every 500 years and that one had to have a great historical record to be able to know not only does this happen but that it happens repeatedly and that the repetition of it is only available through a historical consciousness. And that this historical consciousness, as we will see, was very important to the two figures that we're taking: Karl Jaspers' The Origin and Goal of History and Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
Jaspers says that history needs to have a future consciousness in order to be able to look at the past in a fresh way. The phrase I have used for more than a decade is, 'The future and the new past are parenthetical parallels,' that are able to be a moveable harmonic of a set, not just Apollo and the nine muses but there are many kinds of harmonics that can be developed out of that, literally, musics that have never been heard are hearable and are infinite. The number of music scales is actually infinite. We use the ancient Egyptian octave because it formulated itself several times during a huge epic known as an aion, a two millennia, a pair of millennia, 2,000 year period. And because the Egyptian records went back far enough, and kept accurately, they could not only have Cycles of the Phoenix and millennia but they could have aions. And the development of the hermetic tradition, that reached its culmination in the late first century AD, dates itself back not only in millennia and in aions but in whole series of aions and millennia.
Plato in one of his dialogues the Criteas, has the great Athenian law giver Solon, who lived about 600 BC, go to Heliopolis, to go to the priests there, and Plato records that Solon is told by the priests 'You Greeks are never anything but children. For instance you only remember one flood 2,000 years before, where there had been many floods 2,000 years, 2,000 years, 2,000 years back into distant antiquity,' an antiquity so ancient that it's better to call it archaic rather than just older ancient. And that the archaicness of it goes back, definitely, to qualities that have emerged so imperceptible at times and, yet, over such a long time that they have accumulated. And what they accumulate is a kind of energy. And it's an energy that in yoga, in India, it's known as tapas, it's a spiritual energy. And the spiritual energy is able to have a penetration, instantly, of visionary insight so that the penetration now illuminates the entire assumed foregoing structure as a unity, all at once: one sees the allness instantly. And that this can be prismed through the seer so that the enlightenment, prismed through the seer, now creates a kaleidoscopic consciousness and it is the flow of the kaleidoscopic consciousness that is history.
History is not record of the past; history uses records of the past constantly in scintillating new ways and has a kaleidoscopic array and it is of the kaleidoscopic consciousness of true history that science is available and is possible. So that in the Renaissance the art of person making - because it is spiritual persons who are the works of art that prism the conscious field, differential field, of vision. When an artist creatively sees, in a remembering mode, at the same time the synergy of creative imagining and remembering, being prismed through their artistic person, produces the kaleidoscope of not only history as a multidimensional dynamic - it actually has seven dimensions; vision has five, it's a conscious time space, five, whereas history has the dimension also of the spirit person as a form but a prismatic form and it has its own kind of kaleidoscopic enlargement. So that the theoria of seeing, prismed through the seer, delivers a kaleidoscopic seven dimensional flow out of which now comes the ability to have forms of science that are not just symbolic but are real in terms of the cosmos, they are able to interface with the cosmos as an infinity and not have to reduce it down to an idea of a unity. The idea of a unity is a symbolic form of thought but the cosmos is not limited, is unlimited, and we have a deep ability to have a camplementarity between the symbolic unity of our minds and the infinite cosmos and that that ratioing of them in a complementarity, produces what we call reality.
In the Renaissance, about 1465, there was a tremendous penetration through that allowed for someone like Mantegna to paint his tarot deck of the five sets of ten of the capacities of man when he's not only universal but is artistically viable and in tune with the cosmos, so that the cosmic qualities of a human being came out. The phrase that used to used was 'Man is a microcosm' but it isn't that man is a microcosm, man is a prism by which the entire cosmos is participable, you can participate in it, including its zeroness which is being held up by a Renaissance angel. The clear sphere is an open sphere and it is the kind of sphere you used to get of a nimbus of saints, the saintly persons, both in Buddhist art, Christian art, a number of different kinds of art, that you would have this thought bubble which is an open space so that the mind is not limited to the brain and the experience of consciousness is not an inner experience but is permeable back out into the cosmos.
This is the 49th of the 50 cards, the 50th card is a sphere with innumerable stars in it and it is called the cosmos. The origins of that go back 5,000 years, the first image of a sphere of all the stars was the body of a woman, her name was Nut. And Nut is the body of the woman of the sky who was held up by her earth mate in such a way that she spans the horizon; she is a transcendental dome of the cosmos that is able to span any horizon. And one of the qualities of a horizon is that that is as far as you can see from any static point but as you move the horizon will move also so that one can enlarge your horizons to such an extent that the guide who ensures that this is real is called the lord of the horizon. And one of the earliest names for God was Lord of the Horizon: unlimited in supporting the reality of your expanding world.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Book of Coming Forth by Day, of the emergence of the lord of the horizon, again, including you in a rebirth life, the origin of that is the oldest part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, chapters 64. And chapter 64 of the Book of the Dead in Egypt begins: 'I am yesterday and tomorrow, I am an invisible spirit who will guide for you, trustworthy.' It is this quality, from about 2850 BC that is restated about 90 AD in the Hermetica, book 13 of the classic Hermetica is the rebirth and we, when we used the beginning of Vision, we used the first of the Hermetica, the Poimandres, the mind shepherd, and we used the 13th which is the rebirth, to show that both of them close with a hymn because the classic way in which spirit expresses itself is to close with a hymn. If one reads in the New testament, carefully, when Jesus and his disciples are finished eating they sing a hymn together. It is a quality of bringing the voices into the Apollo harmonic of all the possibilities of the arts and sciences together at that particular meeting and moment, so that one has shared nourishment for the body and nourishment for the companionability of the mind in an expansion of sharing community of the spirit. And opening that community to the cosmos which not only shares but presents an infinite harmonic that you are now free to enlarge not only your horizon but to enlarge the historical horizon as well, histories without limit. The number of star systems that have civilisations in our galaxy, by one Russian psychic estimate, is supposed to be a couple hundred thousand and there are more than a billion galaxies. There's companionship without end.
In the Renaissance the arts and sciences were put together as a new kind of university, not a university of just oneness but a university of multiple qualities. Before that there were colleges, collegium, 'We all think alike in this subject matter and therefore this is a college for this,' but if you put all the colleges together in one matrix, called a Renaissance university, now, everything is available. And, if you have a free core adventuring spirit, you can move from college to college to college and build up an acquaintance. So that, after a while, you now will have been not only exposed to but participatory in enough different colleges, different disciplines different subjects that you will transcend the limitation of whatever horizons those colleges or those disciplines would have and you enter into this quality: the 49th card of Mantegna's deck is called the Primo Mobile, the first movement. The first movement is the presentation from the real cosmos of your own sphere of openness, your own capacity to attain blessedness and to prism that blessed five dimensional conscious time space, that quintessential dimension, to prism that as a light, an enlightenment, through your own person.
In which case, you participate now in generating a completely original new history, so that now your life is unique in the sense that you generate a portrait that has an expansion quotient capable of dealing with infinite possibility and with unity to the point of complete zeroness, not just a zen void zeroness but a vanishing into the field of nature, which is primordial, which now is in deep complement to the field of differential consciousness, which is infinite, and that those two fields play together like Nut, with all of the stars in her body, is the universal wise woman who shelters the openness, so that time is not limited to just this world or this life but one can re-emerge again and again, lives without end. So that the lord of the horizon was also known as the lord of millions of years, not just millions of years but eternity because he can rise without limit, without end and we rise with him to her without end.
It is this quality that Jacob Burckhardt brought back into play in the 1860s when this was first published, so that the 1860s at the University of Basel in Switzerland - right on the border of France, Germany and Switzerland - it was at this particular time that it was like a forerunner of a hundred years of what happened in the 1960s, which was going back in resonance to a time n the 1460s, which had gone back, in its way, more than a thousand years to the 460s, all the way back for a full millennium. And what was found in Florence, at that time, was the last time that the great classic tradition of thousands of years, of aions, was still practiced in a living unbroken tradition. The unbroken tradition was broken, the last time before they closed the doors on Plato's academy in Athens was 529 AD and the reason why they closed the doors was that no one showed up, no one came, no one was able to understand what a wisdom tradition is for and what it does and who you might be that you could exemplify it in your own life, in your own person.
And this signalled what was called at one time the Dark Ages, a thousand years, a millennium where almost nothing happened for real except the cascading, rolling, repetition of the medieval centuries, with events that would happen and would quickly fall back into the same kind of dull roar. We live at a time where the challenge to the Renaissance, that first burst in the 1960s, is facing it's crisis moment just as in the 1460s it faced it's crisis moment in the late 1490s, right at the time where the new world was discovered in a way that was sustainable indefinitely. Columbus in 1492, making sure that everyone understood there's a whole half of the planet, 'Why are you fighting over territory here?' At the very same time in Florence a fanatical monk named Savonarola took over the city of Florence and there were book burnings and art burnings and castigations, especially of the Medici family because Lorenzo - who was very capable, Lorenzo de Medici il Magnifico - had died in 1492.
And it was exactly at that time and Burckhardt brings it out, that you find a regression that instantly tries to co-opt the new historical consciousness and to feed it back into a mythic horizon which can be dominated, then, by doctrines, by theologies, by political structures, by religious structures, by cultural limitations. And the collected essays of Jacob Burckhardt, translated as Force and Freedom. This book was published at the very darkest moment of World War 2, 1943. It was published in New York n 1943 because the city had a huge population of people who had fled the Nazi tyranny and saw that the material that Burckhardt had used in the 1860s, all the way to 1897 when he died, his last essays were all to try to bring history out of the idea that the Renaissance happened way back when, when it was still viable and still current, as a part of a historical conscious set, that was very, very powerful and was a challenge to those who would control it to keep human experience mythic so that it could be integrated by symbolic plans in the mind, by symbolic doctrines of thought, by psychological limitations that 'You belong to this culture, and you're Jewish, you're Islamic , you're feminine...'
And, so, the cultural limitations become referentially the ritual identification for your individuality and so that individuals are granulated to being very individual and identified because their referentiality is back to basic ritual existential things. And because we share this together that's how we make a basis of community, on the basis of granulated individuals who have shared referentialities, shared rituals - we do the same thing, we do it in the same way - and therefore our experience is malleable together and that's the basis upon which we now live. Burckhardt in Force and Freedom, the first section after the introduction, The Three Powers: The State, Religion and Culture and as a relief: On the Historical Consideration of Poetry. And then follows the reciprocal action of the three powers: culture dominated by the state, culture dominated by religion, the state determined by religion, the state determined by culture, religion determined by the state, religion determined by culture.
So that you get a round robin of three powers and this is extremely familiar, if one is planetary, because the original quality of these three is the predominant element at the centre of the wheel of life mandala from Tibet, which goes back to the earliest presentation of the historical Buddha. That at the centre are three creatures that chase each other for ever: lust anger and greed, a pig a serpent and a rooster. And they chase each other for ever and if you are incorporated into the magnetic quality of that net, now you do not live in reality, you live in what was called samsara. Maya is the dance of illusion by which one can learn to see through, but if you believe that the illusion is actually limitedly operative, now you fall into delusion. And when you share delusion you generate samsara: all the deluded people together, where do they all go? They go into samsara.
To come out of samsara one needs to be able to turn the entire mandala in such a way that it does not cease turning and so the Buddha, when he did it, said that he was turning the wheel of the law and as it gains it's angular momentum it generates a quality at the rim, at the edges, of the wheel of life - you'll be able to see it, I'll bring in a mandala next week that has it pretty graphically - a ghost world. And it's like the energy that was invisible and denied and curtailed when it first comes out tends to come out ghost-like. It's only when it's freed from the wheel that the ghost-like quality of it becomes spiritual splendour. We're going to take a little break and we'll come back to why it is that, at this particular juncture of 2007, we have an opportunity to emerge to the splendour. Let's take a break.
Let's come back and we're focusing constantly on something that achieved its form about 100 AD and the form was developed by Plutarch who was a master of wisdom. He lived from about 55 AD to about 120, 125 AD, he was a contemporary of Tacitus but he wrote in Greek. It is his technique of Parallel Lives that I used 40 years ago to step up from the Greeks and the Romans, from classical time, to using pairs of lives that were contemporary in our own time. When I first offered Parallel Lives in 1970, with Jung and Bertrand Russell, I would change them every semester and have a new pair. Developed over that time was a sense that the way to present a very large cycle and ecology of learning was to pair up not just lives but to make the pairs into a geometry that would allow for them to be made into larger and larger sets, that could be paired into pairs of sets, that could be paired and then to pair those pairs of pairs of sets. And what you get is a very special kind of shape, it is a philosophic shape of wisdom and it goes back to Pythagoras but is presented most pristinely in Plato's last great 9dialogue the Timaeus.
That is, if you have the Greek letter lambda Λ and you use that as a template where, on one of the vectors you square things, on the other vector you cube things, you get a very special relationship between the squares and the cubes of things. So that there is a way of coming out with the graduated resonances of unity, the determination of Bode's law of where planets around our star are likely to be collected and manifest are able to be determined by this law; that the ratio of squares, of distance space with cubes of time dimension. And all of this was initially worked out by Kepler and improved by Newton and finally brought to fruition in the early 19th century. And one of the ways in which it proved itself out was in the late 1770s, early 1780s, a man named William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus because he had figured out that the mathematics showed where it was, where it should be and found it.
And the mathematics again in 1846, 45-46, were used to determine that there must be another planet, Neptune, which was originally called Poseidon, and it was found. And the original form, and you will see it in any kind of good manuscript of Plato's Timaeus, you start with one then you double, you go to two, four, eight, and you start with the same one and you cube and you go to three, nine, twenty seven. The squares and cubes will have a dimensional ratioability that always delivers unity if you pace it and space it. Why would this be so? This design on this cover of one of Jasper's books, Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, the blue is not cycles but a spiral that is tight so that every ambit of the spiral will, at first, seem like a spiral but actually will belong to a unified structure: the spiral. The silver, here, is like a geometric labyrinth and it has its own way of being ratioed so that it is not a labyrinth that cannot be understood but is a labyrinth that will yield its understanding and its particular kind of unity.
Modern mathematics, in order to deal with randomness in infinities, will use methods, one of the methods used to calculate is the Monte Carlo Method, Monte Carlo for gambling: that any kind of randomness can be given algorithmic progressions that are not perimeters of boundaries but are probabilities of occurring within a continuousness. And if you run a randomness, in an infinity, enough times with enough variation in the methodology of adding and subtracting, multiplying, after several thousand or after a hundred thousand runs, one can come out with a very good probability of what is likely to be occurring and one could then test that out with experiment. So that, if you read modern astrophysical literature, you will find studies on the way in which the organic metallic gases on Uranus and Neptune form ices, super condensed liquid, whereas Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants, not ice giants, and they do not do this. And so the wind structures of Saturn and Jupiter will have a very peculiar kind of a motion, a retrograde motion at the equators, and it will have a prograde motion at the poles whereas, Uranus and Neptune, you'll find that it has a prograde motion and the poles will be different and that one can test this out.
The Renaissance was the first time for 1,000 years to be able to go back and understand that the deep wisdom delivers both a unity of a frame of reference in nature, a completeness which can be ascertained. But it also has a perfection quality which the proof is not that it becomes one but that it becomes infinite and that that infiniteness is very much, logically, the same as zeroness, as openness. On Mantegna's card of the first movement, the angel presenting the gift of open consciousness, the transcendent field of differential of not just awareness but of boundlessness, she stands on another larger sphere and she is the dance between the two spheres. And these spheres will have a relationality that's eternal and not based just on a time space junction: one doesn't have to work to have one's personal spirit join with the cosmos, the unity and the perfection of it is something that occurs both natural and conscious, instantly, is not something that is time dependant or space dependant.
In times of great advance, there are penetrative movements where history moves faster, the change that happens moves faster, the kaleidoscopic quality of it suddenly opens out into an enormous, almost instant ,in terms of time or space, jump. We're using Jaspers and we're using Burckhardt, together, as a pair. Jasper's last 20 some years of his life was at the University of Basel, where Burckhardt had taught, and he went there. Burckhardt was the one who brought into play, in the 1860s, the realisation that the humanism was of cosmic manhood and not of a limited political economy quality or a set doctrinal religious quality or a cultural imposed quality of man.
One of the beautiful little books that came out by Jaspers when he was allowed, finally to write and publish again, is called Existentialism and Humanism and the first essays on Solon - we talked about, the beginning of the presentation, the founder of the Athenian laws - then Our Future and Goethe which is the great civilisation that came out of the enlightenment and the romantic revolution and the final of the three Premises and Possibilities of a New Humanism published in 1952. Jaspers of course was under house arrest under the Nazi regime in Germany, he was not allowed to teach, he was not allowed to publish, he was not allowed to travel and he and his wife Gertrude lived in the same house, they had lived there since 1923, all the way through to the end of the Second World War when they were finally freed. When they were freed Jaspers wrote a very powerful volume, it was published first in 1958 and its English title is The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind .
One of the qualities that first came out, when this was translated n 1958 into English and published, at the same time in the same year was published a book by one of his former students and one of his life-long friends Hannah Arendt, it's called The Human Condition. And it's take is on the beginning of the space age, written right at the time when Sputnik went up in October of 1957, she quickly marshalled all of her material together and the sections, The Private and the Public Realm and then Labour, Work, Action: The Active Life in the Modern Age and then her whole quality in this matches that of Jaspers' in the Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind. Their collected letters runs to almost 800 pages. One of the reasons that it was so poignant is that the great philosopher who was a companion philosopher to Jaspers in the early days was martin Heidegger.
And Hannah Arendt was a star student of Heidegger and even though he was married and had sons he had an affair with his student, Hannah Arendt, who turned out to be a world class philosophic genius who felt betrayed by Heidegger and confided in jaspers and his wife Gertrude. All during the Nazi regime in Germany, Martin Heidegger became director of the university and did not visit his old friend Jaspers. In a letter between them, their correspondence is published, Heidegger says that he had not visited for all those decades because he was ashamed to show up, not just because [15.34 your] wife was Jewish. But, of course, anyone consorting with someone Jewish under the Nazi regime was trundled off and disposed of.
The important thing is the last great work that he was able to publish, in Germany, was his three volume Philosophy published in 1932. In 1935, two years after, he was incarcerated, he was allowed to go to Holland to the University of Groningen and to deliver a series of lectures there, five lectures. And so, in Holland in 1935, before the Nazis had taken over the freedom of the Netherlands, Jaspers delivered the five lectures and they were published in 1935 in Holland and the title is Reason and Existenze, with a z. It was translated in 1955 into English. You have to understand that at the time, in the early 1950s is a very rare time in human history for publishing, during the 1940s paperbacks like Pocket Books and Mentor Books and Signet Books were mass market selling hundreds of thousands of copies of books in cheap editions. And in the early 1950s many university presses began to publish and many intellectual publishers began to publish whole series of reprints of classic books, New Day Press republished, in 1955, Reason and Existenze. In those days book stores, especially in colleges, were arranged by publishers, all of the HarperTorch books would be in one section, all of the Anchor Paperbacks would be in another and you would have maybe 30 or 40 different bookcases through a university bookstore and you would have to browse through, indefinitely.
And you would get an education because the whole array of all of the possible topics were all arranged by numbers of the published volumes and not reduced down to false subject nets. So you had the experience in the universities of the 1950s it went on until about 1961 or 62 and then everything was mulched again by subject: 'Only philosophy books can be in this section, only economic books in this only literary books in this, poetry is off by itself,' and so you lost the scintillation if the possibilities. The lecture, the first lecture, the origin of contemporary philosophic situation, the historic meaning of two philosophers: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche the twin origins of existentialism. What's interesting is that Søren Kierkegaard was from Copenhagen, Denmark and Friedrich Nietzsche of course from southern Germany. And what's interesting is that later, almost a century later, these two areas produced a revolution in our whole sense of what our cosmos is: Kierkegaard's Copenhagen was the home and working site of Niels Bohr and southern Germany, where Nietzsche was from, is where Einstein was born and lived. And so you have, in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, two great philosophers of the mid 19th century being locuses where the great revolutions that happened in the early 20th century in cosmology and cosmology of course is the philosophy of the cosmos.
Getting these historical resonances into possible sets, sets that are not strictured but are open, like a horizon, of having their coherence moveable, one begins, now, to be able to see overlaps that would have been invisible before, proportions and ratios that were never seeable before. And, now, for the first time, even something like randomness in an infinity can be teased out so that one begins to have a sense of ratioability and proportionality and loses the onus on the fearfulness of randomness and infinity which terrorised the middle ages. The two things that most terrorised them, the true hells, were an oblivion of nothingness and the unknown terrors of infinity. A great thinker, Pierre Duhem did a huge book on this in France in the 1920s and 30s. One of the qualities that comes out in Reason and Existenze is the situation that occurs if you limit yourself to ideas and integrality, anything integral, always comes to its completion in an idea. Ideas are always a form in the mind and have a referentiality always because they are forms in the mind to the base of the body, to the existential base of what exists, to the ritual base of what is done so that it does exist and maintains itself. So that ideas will always have a tie, looking logically for equivalences and identifications, and if pone presses this, to its abstract ultimate, it discloses that it is a closed circuit called in philosophy a tautology.
The most certain thing one can say is that a = a, one and one make two, it's this kind of tautological closed circuitry that gives the illusion that one is thinking in the mind in a reflective way when it is not so much reflective, in the sense of contemplation, of theoria, but reflective in the sense of a mirror: it is only shown what has been shown to it and shows it back and therefore one has certainty that one has seen it and that that is what is true, that is what is real. In one of his last footnotes in Reason and Existenze Jaspers writes this, he spoke it in 1935 in Holland in times if great distress and republished it right after the Second World War, translated in 1955 into English,
One might wonder about reflection' 'and self reflection, whose unlimited intensification was one of the accomplishments of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche which led to our new situation [the existential crisis of the middle of the 20th century]. Reflection is nothing but those movements of thought which occur in the encompassing of consciousness, as such and in spirit, in forms, which a methodology of a philosophic logic would handle. Infinite reflection arises through an unlimited impulse of reason. In a human risk, without reservation, an impulse which can stop itself only by hitting upon the existenze which is supporting reason itself.' And then he goes on that 'self reflection, as a distinctive fact, is the object and source of psychology, as a medium for the selfhood of existenze it is itself the concrete philosophising which illuminates existence, an inner deed as the encompassing of reason which is conscious of itself it is actualised as logical self consciousness.
One of the most difficult penetrations of visioning is to understand that the mirror of the mind can be made transparent, that it does not, psychologically tie back into the frame of reference which has been which completed. And that the referentiality to the body, to ritual, to existence, is actually a pair, one of a pair of possibilities. The other possibility is that the referentiality, especially of the transparent mind, is to something further not back, not back to the body but further to the spirit. And that the spirit is able to be discerned through the transparency of the mind whereas the correlations in the body is seen by the mirror reflection of the mind. Now the mind has an ambidextrous quality to it and the ambidextrousness is permeable by a further dimension of seeing: one sees in a reflection way and one knows; one sees in the transparent way and one is the knower.
Next week when we have the interval of the Bhagavad Gita this is one of the most difficult of all of the pivots that Krishna must teach to Arjuna. And Arjuna can master it only because he is the greatest archer of his time, the archetype of the great archer in the world, the one who can shoot the penetrating arrow exactly into the centre of the pupil of the eye of the target, that one when one goes exactly precisely to the centre the centre has no movement whatsoever, it has no angular momentum whatsoever, it does not turn like everything else in the wheel of life but is the axis, the unmoving axel, that penetrates through the entirety of the illusion and its movement. In the Divine Comedy, at the end of the Paradiso the third book of the divine comedy, Dante who has sad Virgil as a guide for the first two thirds of the divine comedy, through the inferno and the purgatorial bit, Virgil cannot take him into the Paradiso. Instead, Beatrice becomes his guide all the way through the Paradiso until the final little few bits of Canto left where she cannot any further be a guide for him, he must guide himself to a vanishing point.
And what he sees is a great eye of the spirit bird and he learns to look to the centre of where the eye is looking and in this way he is revealed the great petals of all of the angels in heaven singing together and the celestial rose suddenly occurs as the cosmos. The whole axial beginning of that is at the end of the Inferno because the way out of hell is not by any if the rims, you cannot get out, you can only get out by going to the unmoving axial centre of it and you drop out, instantly, because it cannot hold you. There is no gravity at the centre because it is not real, it is a cultural maya and when one penetrates to the unmoving core the pivot, the unwobbling pivot is how Ezra Pound translated the phrase one time. When one is at the unwobbling pivot, now, you're in that core that axial core that allows you to go anywhere, instantly, in all of the orders that there are including orders that are future and are not yet and will be there because you participate in making them so.
This quality is where history generates the possibility for science because science must be able to deal with reality and not just with a cultural milieu. Experience has to be raised so that now experiment is a viable dimension to experience and experiment has its origins not in the mind in symbols, the origins for that are in theory. And theory is a part of the dimension of the field of visionary consciousness, is a differential field. It's at home with zeros and infinities, like the natural cycle is at home with zeros and ones. The binary of nature is truly zero and one and one can express, just like a computer program, infinitesimally great detail which will be integrable. But none of that is available for consciousness unless one has a transparency of mind to allow you to go into not a new cycle but an ecology: the ecology of consciousness, which steps itself up from vision through art, through history, to science. And in this ecology what is delivered is not completeness but perfection of eternal openness; not only worlds without end but eternity itself.
This is a quality that, when it is stopped up, it is like the chi, the qi, in the body which has been stopped up: a disease occurs. The cultural disease is fear, fear of the unknown; the social disease is anxiety and dread over what is known, and all of these are symptomatic of being stopped up. And the core of it is that the mind is only capable of a subjective referential refectiveness that mirrors to it, increasingly, that the situation is dreadful, is anxious. And the threat is not so much death, it is the oblivion which produces the anxiety, but it is the infinity that produces the dread that this may just go on and on, forever or that this may end everything completely. And, in that, the zeros and infinities become actually projected as antagonistic, antagonists to be dreaded and to be fearful about.
As we mentioned, Jaspers was the first to write a textbook of psychopathology and he did this in 1913, almost 100 years ago, it's still in print. The 1942 edition he was allowed to make a few corrections for its edition and one can read into it the realisation that the time of history was approaching something extraordinarily dire. Because 1942 is not only the time when the Nazi regime seemed almost poised to really be completely successful, to link up with fascist Italy, imperial Japan, so that the whole world seemed to be ready to just collapse into force, and freedom was going to be squeezed out. Exactly at that time is the confluence of Einstein and Bohr in the development of the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project.
The most poignant writing at the time, the late 40s, early 1950s, was done in 1945 by Teilhard de Chardin, Spiritual Repercussions of the Atomic Bomb. It's a short essay in the future of man. That the spiritual repercussions radiate out not only into the present angst and dread but radiate out into a future fearfulness which is only able to be averted by advertence: by not paying attention, by not acknowledging. But the future, also, now has, because of its symmetry with the past, the past is always alive and viable, now, non-acknowledgement and advertence of the past, as well, and so people don't want to know what has happened, they don't want to know what could happen. And, so, true maturation of learning, which is our reality, spiritually, is truncated and destroyed and it is evident that we live at a moment where it has reached almost absurd ends. What is successful, wildly, by billions, is a limited integral mirror-like reflection of a manufactured mentality, though complex its manufacturedness is provable almost by anyone: you can follow a meditation, which is a concentration, and with practice one can come to the still point of the mind. When you allow yourself to accept that still point of the mind, there is an absorption immediately and an emergence just as immediately. And what emerges now has the dimensional ecology of consciousness ready to be matured and developed.
It's the expansion of visionary fields that allows for the emergence of art forms and person forms, spirit forms, and it is they that prismatically generate the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history and out of that comes the science of the cosmos which is not only a trustable and testable but it is made with our participation of reality as well. Next week we'll take a look, as we always do, to make a transition, and articulation, between phases: we're going to use the Bhagavad Gita and there are several editions of it. I like in an academic way Radhakrishnan's translation of the Bhagavad Gita but I also suggest that there are many other translations and versions of it that are quite adequate. I did a nine part series of 90 minute tapes and presentations on an American reading of the Bhagavad Gita, word by word and line by line. And if any of you are interested I'll run off copies of that. There are nine tapes plus there's' the ... it's about a 25-30 page booklet, tracing it all the way through.
The Gita is something to be walked through, step by step, because its choreography is like a fine ballet where all of the movements are part of grand spiral pivot, so that one is constantly in a slow motion pirouette. And though it takes a while to read through the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavad Gita itself happens instantly, it happens in the transparency of mind of a sage, Sanjaya, who reports it to the blind king, Dhritaraashtra, of a conversation that Krishna and Arjuna hold in a split second. And the reading of the Gita in the right way delivers the spiral pivotness and gives you an experience of an eternal moment. It was the crème de la crème of a technique developed by the Upanishads which were called by Aldous Huxley Breath of the Eternal: all you need is one breath of eternal and what is there to die? Next week.