Science 2
Presented on: Saturday, October 13, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We're here at Science 02 and we're going to try in the next three weeks to set an appreciation for something so complex and arcane that it has for the last 100 years both enchanted the dreams of mankind and haunted the nightmares of mankind at the same time, for very good reasons.
We're taking constantly pairs of people through their exemplary works to give ourselves literally the experience of a tuning fork rather than a text. The use of a book as a text has had debilitating effects upon our species. The use of pairs of books is a consistent transform of what was wrong in the text as an authority. One of the most devastating aspects of the last 2,000 years is the use of a book to stylise the beliefs and the life of most of humanity. Whether it's the Torah or the Bible with the New Testament or the Koran or the Confucian classics, the use of books as texts that dominate thought, which then dominates life, is no longer tenable. But the book is so archetypally important that we are using pairs of books as tuning forks in an array of tuning forks with periodicities that allow for sets to be made and for those sets to develop their own pairedness and larger tuning and for those pairs in the larger tuning to pair up and to provide a further very large tertiary, thrice-greatest quality of tuning and in this way to consistently transform what has been wrong with our minds, our civilisations, our lives, our species and to give it a chance to breath not only deeply but harmonically as well. So what we are doing here in the beginnings of science, and we have to recall that science is the eighth phase of eight, and the first pair that we're taking are Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. And as we presented last week, the difference is not a difference of argument, in terms of their ideas, but that difference can best be and perhaps only finally be appreciated by our phase form maturity and education. We showed last week that Einstein is one of the greatest artists of planetary history, but his art was an art of mathematics and of personal ability to see further into a diamond of insight that transcends a certain threshold and emerges into further mystery. The complement, the pair to him, is Niels Bohr, and as you can see there are DVDs featuring Einstein the person, Neils Bohr is more likely represented by a library that's a repository of hundreds if not thousands of individuals who have been working together for a century to build a larger physics, a physics of complementarity. The difference is apparent when we look at them in phases. Einstein begins his frame of reference with art. Bohr begins his frame of reference with vision. So that vision carries all the way through vision, through art, through history to science. And it is the perfection of the ecology of consciousness in the cosmos scientifically that Bohr achieves and reaches. But Einstein does not start with theory. He starts with himself as an artist, and so his four phases extend from art through history, through science, all the way to nature again. So that Einstein extends all the way through to the mysterious filed of nature, whereas Bohr extends all the way through to the perfection of the analytic enquiry of cosmic science. They're not so much different as they are overlapped and it is only through our phases, our presentation, that we can really understand what has happened here.
The first four phases for us were nature, ritual, myth and symbol, and nature was a process phase but a process field phase, and myth is a process phase but it's a process flow phase. So that mythic experience is like a stream of feeling, images and language that flows freely and naturally in the field of nature, and in between they are sandwiching the ritual phase of existentials, both existential things, things that exist, particles, beings, cells, molecules, but they exist in an iterative way, in a vibrational way, and so their existence is always within the actuality of an energy frequency which is the iteration. That energy frequency is originally a dynamic, the Greek term is literally dynamos, force of nature, as a field, but when it comes into existentiality, when it comes into the vibrational frequency where the dynamic is now synched in a polarity, energy is synched into matter, and the matter is not just statically there in its polarity, but that the polarities are vibrantly through a frequency alive with their actuality. They are in ever word based upon a pragmatos, a pragmatic action of frequency occurrence so that one can in fact investigate existentiality through analysing their frequency. And in the 20th century the analytic especially leapt forward with the development that light fractionates from the different elements, from the different molecular actions, so that the polarisation will be minutely different for each element, for each combination, so that one can use a quality of visioned light called a spectrum in order to go deeper into what actually constitutes existence, so that spectroscopy is like a larger expanded version of the rainbow, and to have rainbowed sight is the ancient way of describing that you see more than just the appearance of things. You see into literally the nature of things through a vision of its structural possibilities.
What does the seeing is the symbolic thought form. The structure of symbolic thought, the symbols, are the way in which the integral of nature, ritual existence, vibrational action, is brought into the flow of experience and images and feeling tones and language, and then integrated together completely tied together in the mind through symbols, so that symbolic thought as an order is the arrangement of the symbols that have done the integrating, and this forms, as it were, an actual objectivity, which is very, very much akin to an objective indexing of the things of existence, of the polarised, synched energy frequencies of matter and of the iterative action of their sustainability in vibronic coupling and pairing.
When the mind reflects, it has two distinct modes in which that reflection can take place. The first reflection is in terms of a polarity, and the polarity there is that reflection is polarised to absorption. Instead of it just being absorbed, the energy, the frequency, the light, the spectroscopy of whatever it is that you're looking at, instead of it just being absorbed in the objective particle, the objective surface, it is reflected by the mind and in the mind's reflection of it what happens is that you reverse the absorption into the reflection, and so you get a polarised quality of thought. And that polarised quality of thought is satisfying to an integral. The whole integral cycle is completed in that satisfaction, in that feeling of certainty, in that understanding of language meaning that this has been established that the reflection of this mind ordered in this way, on the basis of those existential things, those actual sequential actions, that all of this is aligned, corresponds and therefore is true.
If this were all there were, this would be all that one could say. But there is a different mode to reflection. If the symbols instead of being mirror-like, to be accurately reflective on the world, which both absorbs and then reflects in that polarised way, if those symbols are transparent, one looks through those symbols, not at them as in a mirror. The normal way to talk is to say that the mind is now open. Instead of it being a certainty of accuracy, of a completed cycle, it is now open to possibilities of looking through its transparent symbols and discovering that there is a different field. There is a visionary field. And that that visionary field is the field of consciousness, but it is not consciousness that is any way contained in nature, in rituals, in myth or in symbols, or in their completed cycle. That that fifth phase is a quintessential transcendent, transformative field, and that consciousness is in fact, instead of being integral it is a differential, a differential field in vision. And yet in a very deep way the differential field, like the integral field of nature, the differential field of consciousness can also emerge forms, and the forms that it emerges are the forms of a higher dimensional form, not of forms that could be aligned by the reflective mind being certain in its identification through direct correlation to existential things of the world, to existential ritual actions that can be repeated, but that the forms that emerge from the field of differential consciousness are not pragmatic forms, they are prismatic forms. Instead of them being there existentially, they are like crystals, they are like jewels, they show more facets the more that we are able to take in the rotational aspect of their complexity, the chiral aspects of their manoeuvrability, and so instead of there being something like a piece of ore, now you have something like a crystal of quartz or of salt or a deeper complexity, a crystal of carbon. When it was existential, carbon was soot. Now, it is a diamond.
So the soot of carbon is no longer the limitation of the actuality. Its pragmatos is no longer the completed summation, there's something beyond, and what is beyond completion is the approach to perfection. So that the diamond of insight moves towards an appreciation of possibilities that become kaleidoscopic and yield finally an infinite form that has facets without end, without limitation, and that this is what the cosmos then is as a form. It is the largest differential form possible and is related not through alignment with the person, with art-forms, but through harmonics, through resonances. And so one says now, the alignment through myth is through a language that is discursive, has rhetorical structure, symbolically, and is able to be correlately precise and accurate to identify for us, to convey the certainty, to confirm the correlations, whereas now the spoken language of myth becomes the sung language of music. Someone who is singing is no longer just speaking, and the flow of mythic experience and its whole ethos changes and transforms. One is no longer interested in just simply the rituals. One is now interested in the art. One is interested in the refinement. One is interested in exploring possibilities not of narrowing down to exactnesses but of differentiating and opening up further the ranges of possibility. There is an enormous difference between someone who is a myth-teller and someone who can sing a lieder from Brahms or an aria from a Mozart opera. There's all the difference in the world. And as part of the difference we take in our learning, in our education, for the music of sections there is a time when we take Mozart's The Magic Flute as an exemplar, as the music for the way in which we are bringing ourselves into play to try to appreciate and understand the deepening qualities of ourselves, and in order to do this we understand that the arts and the sciences are related but they're not related in an integral way but in a differential expansion. And literally one of the great figures who is able to not establish this but to teach this in a very highly conscious way, was Pythagoras about 2500 years ago. That his background was complex enough and wide enough and deep enough to give him the nourishment and the opportunity to expand, and to come through with a new threshold of capacity. We live at a time where we are expanding now again on the level of Pythagoras, going beyond what there were limitations of and it is through Einstein and Bohr as the initial tuning fork in the phase of Science that we're striking this first tuning note.
The second tuning fork will be two women, one of them Barbara McClintock, who literally was like an ancient corn mother but in a scientific way, and we'll see that her work with the genetic structure of corn, especially Indian Maize, she took the ancient primordial food of Indian Americas and worked with maize in such a way that she opened up the genetic structure patiently like a good corn mother looking over her children and found that the gene sequences contain genes that move around and do not stay where they were put in the structure. They are today called transposons - jumping genes is how they were originally described. And we're pairing with Barbara McClintock the scientific corn mother of the late 20th century, with Vera Rubin, who was the astronomer working out of Washington DC, working out of the Carnegie Institute there, who discovered dark matter. The whole structure of galactic spinning holds its shape because three-quarters of what is really existential, what really exists, does not reflect light be absorbs all the light and therefore is dark matter, yet is gravitationally able to be the dominant mass in the universe. And we're going to pair those two women together as a second tuning pair. And then the third tuning pair will be a pair plus a third, we'll take Richard Feynman and we'll take the pair of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, and by doing this we will have run through eight phases where we take three pairs, making as you would say a total of six, punctuated by a seventh, which will be the interval, so that our learning is not only eight phases like a square and a diamond, which when you put them together are a mandala, but they are punctuated, they are articulated by eight intervals and the easiest way to understand the interval is that if you have a square, the space that the two sides, the two phases, makes, will be the space within the form of the frame and with a little subtlety will be the space also outside of the angle of the frame. And that with a great deal of refinement one can learn to see that that space within and the space without is a field that is not split by the phases. That the phases are suspended within a field that includes the interior and the exterior, and that that is in fact the field of nature, and that the field of nature then has this ability to suspend the frames of reference within a moveability. One can move a frame of reference which will be the horizon of what you're able to understand, which will be the frame around what you're certain of, but that that certainty is mobile, because the frame of reference will be moveable and because it is moveable within a horizon of nature as a field. We can then perform a very interesting kind of experiment. We can take the frame of reference from where we are, and we can move it, like moving a whole horizon, in such a graduated way that we cover a complete circle. We take that frame of reference and we move it incrementally, understanding that a circle is 360 degrees, let's take a snapshot of this angle and move it one degree either way and take a snapshot, and in this way we can build up a circular completeness of moving our frame of reference and coming back around to where we began. However it is.
In this way we give ourselves a cineramic motion of that frame of reference and the mind learns now something which was very rare in mankind up until about 10,000 years ago. Most human beings up to about 10,000 years ago lived and grew up in very small areas geographically of the world. Whole generations might have been spent in a valley. Whole populations of people may never have moved very far from say within a hundred miles of where they were born, but about 10,000 years ago, emerging out of the Palaeolithic into the Neolithic, it became possible to extract oneself out of the ritual cycle of the animals, the ritual cycle of the plants, and to begin taming them so that they could be taken along with you to where you wanted to live, wherever it was, and raise the animals there, raise the crops there. You're not limited to picking berries at a certain time of year in a certain forest, but you could have them with you, and that civilisation then became possible to be like a moveable feast. The development of science is an extraordinary aspect that surfaced first about 20,000 years ago, some 10,000 years before the great mobility of people, and the first place that science showed itself was the ability to make very complex paints to paint the inside of caves with very complex chemical formulas. Lascaux is about 20,000 years ago and a scientific analysis of the paints showed that the constituent elements were collected from vast areas, hundreds of miles apart, and brought together and put through complex staged processes in order to make sure that the colours would adhere to the rock and remain true, remain there and remain true to the colours that were made. And it isn't just that you would have the blacks from magnesium oxide, or the whites from a certain clay. All of them, through complex analysis, showed that they had been processed chemically, refined, over great technology and the ability to apply them through a kind of combination of breath and brush and daubing was enormously revealing, that art had given a resonant birth to science and that the correlation of that was coming out of the caves, the art of star gazing, of handling the cycle for the planting, the cycle for the animals, the cycle which now became the ritual cycle of a Neolithic humanity, gave rise to astronomy, to astrology, to cosmology. And eventually led some 6,000 years ago to the beginnings of great sites that showed a correlation and a planning, whereby the symbolic completeness of the cycle at a certain juncture would open up to a vision of transcendence, would clear itself through... and one of the greatest early exemplars of this is in Ireland, the site is called Newgrange, and Newgrange was built and completed about 3200 BC, about 500 years before the Great Pyramid. And Newgrange is made so that it is a dome of rock and earth that is like a cave that is brought from beneath the earth and placed on top of it, so that one is able now for the Midwinter Solstice, to have a shaft, a ray, of sunrise, at the Midwinter Solstice, when the day is the shortest of all the days of the year, the night the longest, that turning point where light now expands its time during the day and night shrinks its time during its half of the day, that shaft of light would penetrate all the way through an aperture placed above the doorway, as if it were like a key slot that the sun in its first ray of dawn would send a light ray key, with the top of it going through this aperture and the rest of the key being the man-sized entryway that one could walk in a radius all the way through the entire structure to the centre, and there at the centre would be an early sun-wheel that would be lighted only once during the year, on the first ray of the dawn of the Midwinter Solstice; showing that the form now was complete as man could make it in terms of an integral, but had access to a wider world. The sun is not limited to this world, the sun is not destroyed by the night; in fact it is the cycling of the polarity of day and night that now has a moment of equanimity in the solstices divided by the equinoxes, where day and night are equal, twice a year. And in that equanimity what is established is that the polarity of integral completeness is complemented by the symmetry of differential perfection. And this allowed for the great establishment of the four quarters of the frame of reference, being transformable by the angles, and that while if the angles are 90 degrees one gets that square, one gets that rectangle, one gets that frame of reference. But you can modify that and you can now have angles, a pair of angles, that have tilted the square into a diamond, and that this diamond can be expanded to a parallelogram. And now one has the ability to have a pair of modes of coordination: one an integral completeness; the other a differential perfection. And one aims at a completeness which does not close off, but which allows exactly at a strategic point the openness to come into play, exactly there. And it comes into play from the centre of the frame, not from the angles, but from the centre that is found by tracing where they meet, where they overlap, that centrality. And that centrality will also be the centre of the diamond as well as the square. It will be the centre of the mandala. It carries a 4-by-4 eight phase with an eight for a 4-by-4 making eight angles together, and that all of this when put into a rotation, surprisingly, does not just make a circularity like a pinwheel, but the appearance of such a motion can go one way or the other and what comes out of that is increasingly the bar of the equanimity in its symmetry will extend itself enough so that the whole look of it will be that of a spiral, and elliptical spiral, and that shape of course is like an egg. It has that egg-like quality where yes, there is a yoke at the centre but that the integrity of it is not just complete but perfect. One says the egg is a perfect food, a complete food, and in this colloquial way, we speak of that kind of form as being not only complete as the egg, but that it can hatch and it can be a hen which can lay many eggs or a rooster who can fertilise many eggs, ad so the quality of this was that the infinity sign was a linking together between the mind which had learned to theorise and the artist who had learned to take the theory further from its perfection back into the origins of its natural beginning. And so Einstein was completely as an artist interested in how nature works as if god were creating it. How does he do that? Whereas Bohr was interested in how do we perfect theory into a science of the cosmos, and was not concerned so much about the further emergence of a divine creator, of a god, who then makes all this happen again. But for Einstein and Bohr, both of them, the understanding was this doesn't just re-happen, it's an eternal quality of the real. Einstein was interested how does the eternal really occur, and Bohr was interested how does the real eternally be there? Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's immediately come back to something like our music, since we're at Science and we're coming through to not only the completion but the perfection, ecology. This is a time to take an overview and understand that the intervals are the angular spaces within a form being made and the context that emerges the form in the first place.
In order to expand a frame of reference, one has to make a transformation where that frame is now open and the opening can be any place along its perimeter, along its boundary, and the difference between a perimeter and a boundary is this: in the ancient tradition a boundary was the limits that were able to be walked off. If you owned a piece of property you would determine its boundaries by walking the limits of that property and then you knew its bounds. A perimeter is a gemometricising to geometric coordinates of the shape of that particular boundedness, so that there is a geographical ritual comportment to boundaries and there is a geomoetricising of shapes to perimeters. If you are going to transform a frame of reference, if you're going to transform it so that it does not complete itself by closing off, you must introduce all the time along its boundedness with every step that you take, you must introduce before the axiomatic laws of its geometricity are laid down, you must introduce into this an openness. Otherwise it is not possible to introduce it as a conclusion, as an element that is brought in later. The classic geometric wisdom of this, which is thoroughly Pythagorean by the way, is developed and expressed already 300 BC by Euclid in Alexandria. Euclidian geometry, which tenth graders around the planet take and understand because of its accuracy, the first statement in Euclid is that a point is a locus of no dimensions, and that when this locus of no dimensions moves, it describes a line. Only after that is delivered, does the geometry of a point, and of a line between two points, come into play. Only then does the plane that is generated by a line in two dimensional quality come into play; only then do you get angles and the development of geometry. The locus of no dimension is the zeroness out of which a point can emerge, but its emergence is not out of the zeroness but out of the zeroness moving which is a momentum, and the primordial momentum here is time, so that time is the first dimension and out of time instantaneously blossoms a spatial coordinate. And so we refer to it as space/time when actually when you're accurate about it, it's a time-space within a context of timelessness unbounded spaciality. This is very powerful, and it needs to be appreciated. What comes existentially out of integrals is a polarising but what comes transformatively out of consciousness are symmetries. And so pairs, pairedness, is both a polarity and a symmetry at the same time in a complementarity. The easiest way to understand this, and the classic way that has been used for several thousand years in wisdom traditions.
If you close off the mind, tis reflective quality will be mirror-like and it is the polishing of the mirror then that is the activity that increases the accuracy of its alignment, of its identifications, of its correlations, so that symbols and rituals then are synched together the more that you polish the mind, and so education will be a mirror polishing activity. This has a ceiling. The ceiling is the completeness of the polished mirror so that it is 100% accurately identifiable with the ritual existence of things and their pragmatic sequence of what they are, and in this the closer that one appreciates that you have arrived, that you have done this, that is the limitation, and that limitation are the specs of arrogance, egotism, and a kind of abstract madness. Because ritual existence emerges out of nature, not out of the mind. The vibronic coupling of the energies of synching positive and negative and all other polarities is not a function of the mind at all; it's a function emergent from the field of nature. So the mind becomes an enemy of nature in its completeness, and this is a very Faustian, demonic quality. And because existentiality, because ritual comportment will not stay put where it should be, whereas our mind stays put and we abstractly have the correct structure, we have to now not only tame but we have to make sure that the existential things and the ritual actions do not vary from what they should be. And so the insanity is that man's mind now seeks to replace the field of nature as the source, as the origin, out of which all existence will come, all actions will sum up and produce what they're expected to produce, and this is a tyranny. That tyranny is both individuals over themselves, mothers or fathers over their children, children over their mothers or fathers, people over their pets, man over plant life, animal life, the planet, the planet should behave like we have planned it out; we know this is how it should be. How dare there be earthquakes? How dare there be storms that we can't tame? We'll find a way to do this. How dare there be anyone who goes outside of this? And this is where someone like an Einstein comes into play magnificently, because he refused to be tamed by a closed mind and became increasingly that kind of an outlaw artist who saw that if we can raise our art to a science, we will understand how nature works and because we will have understood how nature works as artists and as scientists, we will now be able to pull the plug on tyrannies of all sorts, because the freedom will not come from changing minds. The freedom will come from freeing nature to be natural. From a cosmos that is real, from artists that are prismatic via a historical, kaleidoscopic process that is untameable by the closed mind. Now here's the quality that is a saving grace. The very mind that can close off an be a mirror reflection can open itself up to transparency by founding the source of reflection not in experience, not in mythic experience that correlates to existential things, but the mind can have a reflection that is sourced in vision in visionary differential consciousness, in theory, and if the mind is sourced in theory, its practice will not be mythic but will be historical. Because the reflection will not be mirror-like looking at the rituals. The reflectiveness will be a retrospection, visionarily, that's looking at the world as works of art, it's looking at human beings as spiritual persons who are prismatic. Each one is prismatic. Each one is a jewel. And all together make necklaces of grandure. They are not to be manipulated, they are to be appreciated in the facets of their scintillation, each one magnificent in themselves. And so a Pythagorean retrospection was essential to de-habitualize the habitaulized mind. That at the end of the day one goes back through the day and by going back through the day, by starting where you are at the end of the day, working your way back to morning, working your way back to the dawn. Now before you go to sleep, before you have your night, you have the retrospection of the day that has rewound the clue of the time sequence which has blossomed out into the events of the space of the day , and by working one's way back it's like having rewound the clue of space-time and emerged back out into the freedom of the beginning of the dawn. And that if one does this day after day, the days do not just add up, but the days collect resonantly into sets, and one of the most natural sets there is the seven-day week. There are other sets possible but the seven-day week is almost a universal set. And that those sevens also then collect in a pair of sevens, the old English word for it was fortnight, fourteen days, and that that fortnight collects into a pair of fortnights which is four weeks which is 28 days which happens to be exactly the lunar cycle. And that if one is wise about being wise, the 28 day lunar cycle also includes the dark of the moon before it began to reappear and the dark of the moon after it reappeared, it went to the half-moon, it went to the full moon, it went to the old crescent and now it's back again at the dark so that a 30-day month cycle is a wise extension of the four sevens, 28 day actual cycle to include within the calculation, within the calibration, the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of what has been presented, so that the intervalling is a part of the phasing now, though it does not appear as a phase, nevertheless it's calculated as being constituent with it. And that the next cycle, the next lunar cycle, will include the end of that 28-day dark of the moon as the beginning of the next 28-day dark of the moon and so the intervals, as well as giving articulation, give an overlap that is not existential. The calculated phases do not touch but they approach, and because the approach but do not touch, there is an interstice at each cycle of the moon, 12 times during a year, where there are openings through which one can understand and appreciate that these openings extend the inner spaces of boundaries and boundedness. The inter-spaces of geometricities and liminalities to participation in an unlimited, eternal field, so that the celebrant, festival qualities at those junctures are accentuated as opening out and as a complement to it the energies of opening within come at the peaks, instead of being the darks of the moon it will be the full moon, which will be the apex of the existentiality of the appearance, and so one will do a very special thing in Buddhism at the full moon: the tradition in the sangha was always that the monks sit together and chant together as they usually do, but at the full moon they will hold lightly in their thumb and middle finger a thread. It used to be traditionally in ancient times a thread of gold. And all of the monks seated together in their circle will hold that common thread of gold and the chanting that will be there is the pratimoksha, which is the basic context out of which all of the sutras, all of the possibilities of the words of each of the sutras are emerged out of an undifferentiated silence that allows for the words not only to come out and be articulate, the syllables to come out and be articulate, but that they relate to each other, not by touching but because they're arranged resonantly. That words are not syllables that are forced together, but words are syllables that are paced together with spacing between the words so that an articulation of language in itself is the beginnings of an ethos that leads to the wisdom of the art of singing it, of chanting it.
Ancient Hebrew is particularly beautiful when it is intoned rhythmically in its way and is noticeably garbled or scrambled when it is not done precisely. It's like a very fine quality of language that the slightest mistake in will change the rhythm of how one is saying it, so that something is scriptural and true because someone is reciting it in such a way that it comes out with the fluid energy motion of the actuality of the words in its meaning. And so one is speaking truthfully. This is not someone speaking. This is god's language speaking through them. It's not that god is writing that, but that the saying of it with the resonance in its deep harmonic art flow, one is speaking truthfully. The same is true in Sanskrit, ancient Sanskrit. Ancient Greek as well. All ancient wisdom languages were made so that if one spoke them exactly in the cadence of the way in which the spaces and the sounds came together, one could step up the energy of the pacing to chanting, and from chanting it's just one more flourish to singing. And so what happens is that the language of a myth becomes the sacred chant, that can be stepped up one more order to the hymns of the divine. In this way it is possible to appreciate primordially by hearing someone speak truthfully, because the cadence of the presentation will have its own energy of voracity once one learns to hear it, and one becomes insightful because your ear has been tuned, because your mind has been opened to the array not only of five-dimensional conscious time-space but the six dimensions of an artist who is speaking the poetic, spontaneously, at the time in this space, in this conscious field, with this person. And that what is being generated out of it in us is the shared tuning of the historical kaleidoscopic consciousness. It is the sharing of the kaleidoscopic consciousness that is historical. It is generated by us being smart together, being truthful together. No one person makes history. It's always two or more gathered together, speaking in this way, and it is out of that kaleidoscopic seven dimensions that the eight dimensional cosmos for the very first time comes into play for real. It's really there. And that eight-dimensional cosmos has a wondrous surprising quality. It reveals a ninth.
One of the great lost hermetic treatises, The Eighth Reveals the Ninth was found with the Nag Hermetic Material in 1945. There is a beautiful translation made in Southern California by Lewis Keiser of the The Eighth Reveals the Ninth. It is the quality that once you have an eight-fold path of the phases, you at the same time have the eight-fold interval interstices of it as well. And when you have those eight plus eight, that's sixteen, you're in position for the first time of actually beholding a moment of thought. A citta, called a Bodhicitta because to be conscious of it, that Bodhicitta, that moment of thought, discloses accurately that only eight parts, only eight beets of those sixteen, can be enumerated, and they can be, you can be refined enough to pick a moment of thought and to see each of the eight distinctly in that circle, in that array. They're like the spokes of the wheel. But the wheel does not run on the spokes. And there is no rim. But there is the action of a rim because the spaces between the spokes, the angles of the frames of reference and the diamond of vision, hold as if they were things, and so the eight spokes and the eight spaces in between, constitute the wheel. Such a wheel is not a wheel as an existential thing in the world, but is called a chakra. That chakra is a wheel where the energy frequency is spatially and temporarily solid. Every atom is such a chakra. In an atom of hydrogen blown up to the size of a football field, the nucleus, the proton, of that hydrogen atom, would be a pea on the 50-yard line in centre-field. The electron is circulating at the goalpost radius from that, and all the space of the football field constitutes the hydrogen atom as well, although there's nothing there except the fact that reality includes the spaces, the intervals with the structures. Integration looks at the structures; differentiation looks at the spaces, looks at the harmonics, looks at the relationalities, looks at the ratioings. Gravity is not existential and yet has one of the largest holds in actuality and when one has a complex system like our star system, our solar system, the major planets and many of the minor planets, the moons and comets and so forth, will always arrange themselves eventually into ratios of resonance. There are very special ratios that are favoured and I've put a lot of these in the notes so that you can appreciate and understand that these ratios are like 1:2 or 2:3, 3:5, 3:4. They are fundamental ratios and relationalities and our learning, the phases are articulated in such a way that those ratios will be meaningful, that you can put them not only by themselves in their sequence of how they generate a complete form, or how further they transform and generate an insight diamond form, and that together then that is a mandala, but that all of the phases are able to be creatively ratioed to each other so that one can learn things one would never have been able to learn before. It's like being given the octave of sound arranged and now you can make music, you can make a fantastic array of musics. And having learned that octave, one now learns that you can do like Schoenberg a hundred years ago, you can do and make a music out of that. And one of Schoenberg's great statements in his theory of harmony, which is a new harmonic, he said, 'I no longer hear dissonance'. Dissonance is simply a further extended harmonic that we were not able to hear before. And by doing this the scale and the creative range of our kind was raised to almost enormous levels, and very quickly, within a generation or so after that, you get the beginnings of electronic music. And one hears, especially with computers now, one can range infinite scales and have musics in all of them. It is possible to do.
One of the earliest successful electronic music scores was that for Forbidden Planet and Louis Barron and his wife, they didn't call it notes, they said these are electronic tonalities. Which one hears it in Forbidden Planet was scored more than 50 years ago, one is able to hear that feeling tones are so expandable, flexible, pliable, creatively able to enjoy now something which we had not realised before, that we can be inspired by sounds never heard in nature, to musical appreciation. And of course one of the great sayings in antiquity by Pythagoras is that each planet, because it moves in a ratioed resonance, within a harmonic set, each planet will have its own sound in orbit, and that those sounds can be arranged so that one can hear the music of the spheres and hear the chord of the star system, and this was done at NASA about 20 years ago. We were able, through the Pioneer and Voyager instrumentations, to get the sound, electronically, as a signature, of all the planets. They made a little whistle for the sound of the earth in its orbit around our star. So that all of the sounds of the planets, the music of the spheres, could be put together and the chord of the star system for the first time could be heard. And exactly at that point Voyager was able to take a retrospective photograph from beyond Pluto, beyond Neptune, back through the star system so that in one single photograph you had every planet plus our sun in one composition. It was the family portrait. About the same time that one could hear the harmonic chord of the star system, actually with ones hears. This is learning to bring us out of the caves, to bring us out of the dark ages of the closed minds that will no longer tyrannise. Individuals will no longer tyrannise themselves or others. Social worlds will not be closed off to simply mirror what has been directed must be. Along with Robert F Kennedy we will not be satisfied to stop because someone says it can't be. He said, 'Some people see the world the way it is and say it has to be that way. I see the world with possibility and ask "Why can't we change it?"' And have it many ways. We're able now to do this.
The reason it took so long to refine is this is massively ... consumable, of effort. And though the outlines of it were there forty years ago, they were outlines forty years ago. Now it's a consistency of ten two-year presentations in a row without any external manipulation whatsoever. The music for the whole series, there's a selection of music for each phase and for each interval. Nature's music is Hovhaness, it's called And God Created Great Whales where he took the songs of the hump-backed whales in Puget's Sound and turned them into a symphonic piece. The interval music is Stravinsky's The Right of Spring 1910, which then takes the sounds symphonically of whale songs and brings it into the early Palaeolithic shamanic sounds of the dance of the equinox of the spring opening, and then the ritual music is Mozart's The Magic Flute and the interval is Modern Jazz Quartet's cut called Pyramid, from their album Pyramid. And that leads into Myth where that music was Scheherazade by Rimsky Korsakov, who was by the way a spirit father to Stravinsky, they lived on the same street in St Petersburg. The interval for Myth after Scheherazade is Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World. The heartfelt exuberance not of happiness but of the humanity of love, that creates a wondrous world and leads them into the symbol music, which is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, one of the greatest extended pieces of music every composed, and the interval then is Sibelius' The Swan of Tuoenla. Sibelius being Finnish, took a lot of the episodes of the national epic of Finland, the Kalevala, and The Swan of Tuonela is the swan that swims there on the surface of the lake in the netherworld, and the beauty of that is not that this is a terminal demonic but that through the beauty of the art of that appreciation in music, one opens to a new world, that will come beyond death.
Vision begins with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Journeys. For ten years the great Chinese cellist has had a group of people from central Asia and they tour the world together, they released a couple of CDs, the Silk Road linking China with the west, not only the China of the Marco Pollo's in the 1300s, but the Silk Road was there between China and Rome, 1800 years ago. And the Jade Road of course, which is on the lower part of the Gobi desert, as I have done in my work on Zarathustra, was there between Zarathustra's Iranian plateau, central Asia, and the western part of China as early as the founding of dynastic China, 2200 BC. So these are ancient ways celebrated in music, and then the interval of Vision is Sarah Vaughan and Quincy Jones together on a cut called Misty, one of the most sophisticated presentations, but a personal quality of spiritual spectrum is not limited by anyone's individuality, but it is invited by the character of one's experience to mature into the art of this song. 'I get misty 'cause I'm so much in love' with someone other than me!
Art, we take Beethoven's 9th Symphony as being one of the all-time great artistic expanded compositions, and for the interval we take Brahms' Violin Concerto. One of the most sophisticated of all of the concert pieces that brings the art of the prismatic instrument to play so that the entire orchestral composition is a concerto that plays with the resonances in a harmonic of that instrument doing the art. History, we took Vaughan Williams, Ralph Vaughn Williams' 7th Symphony, The Symphonia Antarctica, where he took the most bleak part of the planet, and one of the bleakest courage stories of all time, the Scott Expedition to the South Pole where they all died, none of them made it back. But when they found their frozen bodies the next spring, the final four men in their tent had each kept a diary, and in each one of those diaries was increasingly recorded that it wasn't just the four of them trudging but there was someone else, a fifth who was trudging with them, helping them man, pull that sled back from the South Pole, back to life, and that the confidence was even though they couldn't make it, this fifth person would make it and that their diaries would be read, and the testimony is not that men lost courage, but that sometimes we're out-distanced by circumstance, but that in no way fractures our courage and our capability.
The interval then was Vangelis, the Mythodea, the great 2001 Mars odyssey spectacle that he produced. He wrote everything , choreographed everything and produced it at night outside in Athens to celebrate the Mars Odyssey reach of man at the Athenian birth of the democratic origins that a community that is free together is free indeed. And then for Science we're taking Schoenberg's second string quartet, and for the interval for Science we're having Ali Akbar Khan Raag Marwa. It's a forty-minute raga. Our presentations are all forty minutes. They're in the time signature of a forty-minute raga. And because I pair them, we have a pair of forty-minute ragas every presentation. It takes a great raja yoga to do this, to do this even once, much less I've done it more than 1,000 times in a row without missing, because it's a maharaja yoga, and then for the if you decide to go out of the double chiral, out of that complementary infinity cycle, there's a ninth phase that you do yourself and the music for it is the Six Partitas for Cello by Bach, and the interval for yourself is Caesaria Evora, one of the planets greatest folk singer artists, she's from Brazil and her Portuguese singing is similar to the Fado in Portugal but with a Brazilian black intonation that like Louis Armstrong is full of the warmth of a new kind of a world, a world that's not only round, spherical, but is resonant with the entire star system. There'll be people singing these songs on worlds beyond Neptune, our great grandchildren. There are plenty of bodies out there, more than 50 miles in diameter, and whole families will have their own worlds and just think of the internet possibilities of having a million inhabited worlds. More next week.