Science 3
Presented on: Saturday, October 20, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Science 3 and we're looking at the way in which Einstein and Bohr give us a gateway at the beginning of the 20th century through which we have walked and most of humanity that is alive now has not walked through that gateway. So that the early 21st century is a throwback to 19th century imperialism, to 19th century mentality, and it was the carryover of that 19th century mentality that led to the 20th century being the most vicious century of wars in the history of the planet. The roots of that condition have not atrophied, they were not eradicated, and so the 21st century so far has been a nightmare replay of the 20th century that led specifically to World War 1, World War 2 and the Cold War. So it is rather important, if not imperative to grow up, to mature.
And what we're looking at in Science 3 is the gateway that Einstein and Bohr present, not just in terms of the ordinary kinds of assessments, like Einstein and Bohr and the quantum dilemma, 'Is it relativity or is it quantum physics? Quantum mechanics?' And in this the glibness of the sophists of our time who do not understand, who do not have a classic traditional wisdom depth, mispresent and project a mentality which is characteristic of the 19th century and is based upon an 18th century prejudice and this simply did not work in the 20th century and will be catastrophic should it continue very much longer in the 21st century.
One of the most formative images is this image of an x-ray of a human hand. This is the hand of a helper of Ronkin who developed the first theory of x-rays, who was the discoverer of x-rays and this skeletal hand is a presentation of what radiation can do on the highest levels of electromagnetic energy. It also carries back because it is the earliest sign that we had of human comprehension: in the Palaeolithic cave drawings and paintings of 30,000 years ago. The hand also has been the symbol, characteristically through the ages, of the comprehension that in a pair of modes delivers the synergy that is necessary in order to mature: one is fearlessness, the other, with just a slight forward of the middle finger, is the Mudra for teaching. The hand indicates to us an ancient quality that resurfaced early in the 20th century of figures around Einstein and Bohr and especially around Bohr. Bohr used for his family crest the T'ai chi symbol from Taoism, the T'ai chi symbol on his family crest is not a yin yang symbol it is a Tao Tê symbol which he understood was giving the deep complementarity of Tao as a zero field and Tê as a unified emergence.
Bohr's family crest, including the Tao symbol, was deeply influencing on his major teacher lord Rutherford. When Ernest Rutherford was made a Peer of the Realm in England in 1931 for his royal crest he chose to put a Maori because he was born in new Zealand, on the south island near Nelson - the terrain that was used in Peter Jackson's lord of the rings film. Ernest Rutherford grew up there, his father had a farm for growing flax and foodstuffs like potatoes and so he was a farm boy and he grew up to be one of the world's greatest scientists and was made Lord Rutherford in 1931. And next to the Maori on the other side is Hermes Trismegistus, the great hermetic teacher of the around 90 to120 AD in Alexandria. And the key for the renaissance revival of learning, the influence went from the renaissance all the way through the 16th century, the 1500s and found its crest in Kepler. And it was Kepler's work in astronomy and mathematics that Newton used to make his principia mathematic and his optics and consider himself in the hermetic tradition and so did lord Rutherford. At the top of the crest is the kiwi bird.
It is interesting because the quality of lord Rutherford impressed Niels Bohr immensely as a young man and he became acquainted with Rutherford at the end of 1911. And 1911 is outstanding as the beginning of a series of dates that bring together, in a resonant set, discoveries that began to take hold as of the mid 1890s. And, at the same time, the first really powerful scientific research facilities in the world were being developed at the same time. Rutherford at the time when Bohr went to see him and arrived in March of 1912, Rutherford was in Manchester, England. And he had gotten to Manchester coming from Mcgill University in Montreal, where he had been for a number of years. And it was the position in Canada that was developed because he was a prize student at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, which was headed by J. J. Thomson who became a life-long friend. And conveyed to Bohr the necessity of having theory and research practice in the laboratory wedded together, and not necessarily in a single individual, but in the population distribution.
One of the qualities of John Joseph, J. J., Thomson was that he was clumsy in the laboratory: he broke things all the time. And so, on his own recognisance, he didn't touch instruments, he didn't make equipment, he didn't use it; he theorised and thought it through. And one of the great discoveries of J. J. Thomson was the first subatomic particle: the electron. This was in 1897 and Cambridge University Press put out a centenary volume on the discovery of the electron. It was earth shattering in the sense that no one had ever suspected that the atom, the ultimate dependable unity, was fractionable; it could not only be split but what came out of it was mystery upon mystery upon mystery that led to magic. Rutherford not only put Hermes Trismegistus on his royal Peer of the Realm crest but his last book, published in 1937, was called The Newer Alchemy: that we are all hermetic we trace ourselves back in a wisdom tradition that goes back thousands of years. And the work that I have been doing over the last 40 years shows it goes back to Palaeolithic times of at least 40,000 years ago.
The understanding is simple: there are three horizons that occur and each horizon is a higher energy than the previous one and that the third horizon disappears instantly and reappears instantly as the first horizon. The first horizon is nature, the naturality of nature. The second horizon is that of experience which is mysterious because the horizon of experience can flow but it flows through the field of the first horizon so that nature is a field and experience like a river, like a stream. The third quality of horizons is that of conscious vision, conscious visioning, and it flows as a field in experience, giving the flow of experience a double referential. The first referential, back to nature as a field, is the practical integral but if experience flows through visionary consciousness, through theory, it now has the characteristic of experiment rather than just experience.
And so the provisionality of experience is an essential quality that is realistic in terms of the flow of the horizon of mythic experience through the field of visionary consciousness. The greatest expression of that in the 20th century was Niels Bohr's complementarity and quantum theory, as distinct from quantum mechanics, is the presentation in modern cosmology nuclear physics of the way in which the field of visionary consciousness is a differential field and allows for experience to be experiment. And this leads to a very interesting quality of mind, not only of mind but of the social realm, the open world, the open mind and it works like this: the mind must integrate experience in the natural ecology, in its natural cycle, but it moves exactly the other way when the mind is trying to apply integration to a flow of experiment in the field of visionary consciousness. This shows up, particularly, in the way in which there is a prismatic emergence out of the field of consciousness that is not the integral individual in the mind. The traditional way to say is that the spirit has come into its own jewel like form and, instead of being unified, it is a spectrum of possibilities.
The ancient classical way of saying it is that man becomes a carrier of a rainbow covenant when his spirit person has emerged. The covenant of the rainbow in genesis is first established with Noah, a new world has emerged and the covenant is God sets his bow in the sky to confirm that this is so. And so the rainbow covenant of Noah becomes one of the earliest, this is about 3,200 years ago that Moses used that metaphor. The rainbow mind is the spectrum of light that is now put through a prism. We find the same kind of rainbow when Newton developed his optics in the 1670s, early 1680s. The experiment of a darkened room with just a shaft of sunlight that is able to come through and the prism will fractionate sunlight into all the colours of the rainbow and cast it against the wall. This is an ancient Palaeolithic technique of the Sun Dagger that is allowed to penetrate through a very small opening that is positioned so that the only time that that Sun Dagger will occur in the cave, in the structure, is at dawn on the summer solstice or at dawn on the winter solstice.
In North America here in the Los Angeles Santa Barbara area the Chumash Indians had a spiral sun wheel painted on a cave wall and the Sun Dagger would come only at dawn and on the summer solstice and put a dagger of light on to the centre of that spiral. The winter solstice is of course from Newgrange and its earliest presentation about 3200 BC that's 5,200 years ago and it was the shaft of the sunrise mid winter solstice that sent a beam of sunlight, almost a couple of hundred feet, into the centre of the Newgrange mound. And it would illumine there the target in such a way that when Newton understood that he was participating in something primordial he was able to sink himself in the primordiality so that he was absorbed by it. He was no longer an observer of something that was happening existentially but he became a participant of an event that occurs eternally. And one finds a change in the whole demeanour of Newton: that he became less and less interested in making experiments and more and more interested in the experimenter.
This was exactly what happened to Einstein. Einstein was never somebody to tinker with equipment, to go into the lab to make experiments; he sank himself into a spirit participation like an artist would with the creative imagining action of vision working through the prism of the artist in such a way that the artist made a correlation of himself in a harmonic with the cosmos. And being able to sink into a participation, with the cosmos as his referent, the horizon that came out of that was the horizon of nature itself.
Our phases allow us to understand that the diamond of insight, the square of attention turned 90 degrees, for Einstein was art, history, science, nature, whereas the diamond of insight for Bohr began with vision extended to art, extended to history, but found its perfection in science. And so for Bohr the cosmos that science reveals was the perfect, perfected, insightful understanding whereas for Einstein there was yet another further phase: that out of that cosmos comes the reality of nature as a creative field of the whole integral cycle that begins again. In consequence to that, Einstein was an artistic outlaw who specifically excerpted himself from any authority condition that he could possibly do, and he did this as a young child, he did this as a young man, he did this as a student, even on the higher levels of education he never went to lectures. He depended on a friend called Marcel Grossman to bring him notes while Einstein sat in coffee shops smoking a pipe and looking at the girls. And all the time immersing himself in the way in which he became a prism, which consciousness now made a spectrum through him, that the light than shone through him was not the light of the sun but was light itself.
And it is Einstein who, in 1905, posited that there is another subatomic particle than the electron and that that subatomic particle is the photon, the carrier of electromagnetic energy as light. And that Einstein constantly cut and reshaped, like a diamond cuter, cutting himself as a jewel so that the theoretical consciousness of light would shine through him and play itself, in the process of his historical development, on the cosmos and allow him to participate in the birthing of nature from the cosmos. So, when he talked about, seemingly mystically, that he was interested in how God thought about creating the universe, it was not a metaphor; it was his way of being specifically truthful about what he really was doing: he was an artist in terms of reality, he wanted to see how does it really happen.
For Bohr, on the other hand, what was of interest to him was to make sure that he was not carrying over any mental prejudices whatsoever, so that he was able to operate in the field of pure theory, differential consciousness, so that the whole ecology of what his phases of insight would be, would be the actual reality of the complementarity, which is the cosmos itself. What is peculiar for Bohr is that he was able to discern that the mysteriousness that occurs, by deepening nature, becomes magical when you deepen the mysteriousness to a higher level. It worked out like this: the electron is about 0.511 megaelectron-volts and by 1897 it was not able to be measured that accurately but it was discovered it's about 1/1800th of what eventually would be discovered as the proton and it would be Rutherford who would discover the proton. But the electron steps its energy up and in 1937 it was discovered that a higher order of energy, a more heavy electron, is the muon. And the muon is 105.6, almost 212 times heavier than an electron, it is an electron but it is a very powerful electron that has its constituency not in the usual atomic structure, which electron will have a radiation pattern which is called beta radiation and the nucleus of the atom, the protons, will have a radiation called alpha radiation, but the muon participates in a gamma radiation which is cosmic rays. It doesn't come from the electrons of the atom, it doesn't come from the nucleus of the atom, it comes from the cosmos itself.
And the muon was a big surprise in 1937: that you could step up a particle - by that time it had been over 40 established - and some 37-38 years later in 1975 in Stanford California - in behind Stanford University, just leading right like a dagger, like a Sun Dagger, into the hills behind Stanford is the Stanford linear accelerator centre, it is not a particle accelerator that's in a circle but one that is in a straight line. And that powerful dagger of atomic light, in 1975, was able to establish that there is a third level of electron that is so much more powerful than a muon that one has to write it in different language: the tau particle is 1.77 gigaelectroin-volts, billion. It steps up one, two, three so that the quality of revelation that came out of quantum theory by 1975 was spurring a tremendous drive to use new methods, more power, to find more particles. And of course from 1975 through 1985 more particles were discovered in that time period, in that ten years, than had been discovered previously and led where we are now, coming up to 2008, when the most powerful accelerator in the world at CERNoutside of Geneva comes on line early next year. It will be looking for the Higgs boson which is enormously powerful but not because of its power but because it is the theoretical basis upon which particality can occur in the first place; it is the carrier, like the photon is the carrier of electromagnetic energy, the Higgs boson is the carrier of mass in reality, in existence.
The ancient use of Hermes Trismegistus on the royal crest of Lord Rutherford in 1931 is interesting because Hermes Trismegistus is the third level, the magic level, the shout of enormous energy in Alexandria, Egypt, of about 100 AD. And it is the third level of Hermes and so one has to go back and understand that the first Hermes was Thoth who makes his appearance in the Pyramid Texts of Egypt 3000 BC. And that that first Hermes, that first Thoth, is the developer of the way in which calibration holds for man to move beyond the limits of existence and the limits of the mind. The first thing that one sees in the Psychostasia in the Pyramid Texts illustrations, not in the hieroglyphics but in an illustration, is Thoth is keeping the calibration of how the balance the weighing of the human heart of the deceased against a plume, an ostrich plume, of the goddess of truth and order. In Egypt named Maat, in ancient Irani Zarathustrian language her name was Asha and she is not only order she is the order, it is not order's name it is the way in which order occurs, femininely, because it balances the heart. And if the heart is not balanceable one cannot move beyond the confines of existence, one cannot transcend the range of experience, and the mind will be closed off and never know because it will reflect to itself its own referential correlations that, 'The world is quite real in the way in which I see it, experience is quite limited in the way in which I feel it, therefore the mind is exactly this way because I'm certain of it.'
All of this is obviated by the second Hermes, which one hardly ever runs across because the second Hermes is black, the second Hermes was from what is today Ethiopia - in ancient Egypt it was called Nubia - and the second Hermes is African. The name of the second Hermes in Greek is Agathodaimon which means good spirit. In ancient Irani in Zarathustra the name is pronounced vohuman which means good mind. Good mind balances with Asha or Maat so the second Hermes is not keeping tabulations of the balance of Maat's feather with the heart but is the balancer of the heart with Maat. And so the observer, who calibrates, becomes transformed into the calibration itself of the balance.
And the third Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus, becomes the recalibration which extends it through the cosmos back into nature in reality. This quality means that the specificity of existence is never mechanically static, it is always dynamically specifically individual. Here, from a book published in England Nucleus: A Trip into the Heart of Matter, this edition is from Johns Hopkins University Press and it records this on page 39, just a few sentence,
Since 1925, physicists have come to accept that the world of atoms and nuclei is utterly different from the familiar world of objects measured in meters and centimetres. One of the pioneers of quantum theory, Niels Bohr, once said: 'If you're not shocked by quantum mechanics you don't understand it.' Another legendary physicist, Richard Feynman, went further, claiming that no one understands quantum mechanics. Certainly, physicists who use quantum physics every day still find it deeply puzzling.
The reason is this: in order to participate in what is actually occurring consciously one has to have a dimension of consciousness, now, that is not just a part of space time but has calibrated it into conscious time space and, in order to tune itself with the cosmos, it needs to recalibrate itself through the horizon of history. The ancient Egyptian phrase 5,000 years ago was that Ra is the lord of history but Ra is the movement, the first movement, in a field which has no name. The reference to that was Atum or Amun and, so, when it came time for the good spirit, for the second Hermes, for Agathodaimon, about 1800 BC to talk about it, he talked about it in a deep African wisdom way of saying Amun-Ra is not a god but is a threshold through which we become nobly divine in participation. We become divine through participation in that prism. Amun by the way 2,000 years later was shortened in the Greek and adopted in the Latin and became amen. And amen is the way in which all Christian prayers end. Let's take a break.
Let's come back and understand in the 1830s a push of enormous power began called the Industrial Revolution. And decade by decade, in the 19th century, it grew. And in the early 1860s the American Civil War showed that the North won because it had a military industrial complex that was stronger than the South. The European country that noted this was Germany. In 1871 there were 3,000 officers in the German army; by 1890 there were 22,500 officers. There were 27,000 men who were veterans of the German army in the 1870s and by 1900 there were 1,000,000 veterans of the German army and they were all supported by pensions from the state. And at the same time the German state developed big science by funding universities like Berlin University so that the military might, the industrial explosion, were tied to the cultivating of science, bigger and bigger and more powerful science, and this was more than a century ago.
One of the great hermetic American scientists Arthur Compton, this is from The Cosmos of Arthur Holly Compton, he was one of the developers of the atomic bomb, he was with Fermi, they were not at Los Alamos, they were at the University of Chicago. And they're the ones who handled a great deal of the liaison to try to keep science from being swallowed by the military industrial complex and at the same time of trying to understand how it was that education was increasingly being co-opted by this cartel.
The gap between research and application, one of the unprecedented features of the atomic programme was the large scale cooperation of academic scientists, industrialists and military men. The original ideas and the reduction to laboratory practice were primarily the contribution of men from the universities. The huge production programme called for the strength of our best organised industries, the transfer of academic knowledge to industrial production and military use could be coordinated in war time only through the military.
So when the Second World War was over in 1945 and there was a movement to return home, the return home was crimped in 1946 in such a way that it was not apparent, immediately, what was happening and what happened: the industrial revolution had become a technical empowered industrial revolution. The 1930s saw the stepping up that the 1930s could never have dreamed of and was not even dreamed of in the 1890s. The cold war was a permanent war in such a way that a writer like William Faulkner receiving the Nobel prize for literature in 1954 said there has only been one war since 1914, it has never been over, it is only in waves and the waves keep getting larger and larger.
American education has never solved the problem of preparing men for research on new developments required by industry. The traditional training received by an engineer has been in familiarising himself with the accepted methods of performing important industrial processes. He is rarely introduced to the search for new methods of doing the old tasks, much less for methods of doing tasks such as have never been done before.
Now, the atrophying of creative imagination is a symptom that every doctor of civilisation recognises. It is not a sign of illness; it is a confirmation of death. The death is the death of the closed mind, the closed mentality, that functions on an identification shortcut which then becomes the criteria supposedly for logic, for the order of thought itself. And, by having a constrained ritual sequence of activities and a closed mind, eventually experience becomes encapsulated and, as that correlation, that identification, becomes tightened, the range of experience becomes more and more compressed and it is the compression of experience that produces neuroses. It is the belief that this is necessary to do this that is psychosis. Anyone who has ever meditated understands that the mind is a self saboteur, and that the truncation of experience means that it does not flow but it goose-steps in the paces that the rituals, that are commandeered, establish for you and so you do not walk in the good red road, you walk to the march of the indoctrination that has been presented to you.
We have seen, at the beginning of the 21st century, the commandeering of education, now, since the First World War. In 1919 the University of Chicago Press, stimulated by an enormous number of talented people in Chicago - Frank Lloyd Wright, John Dewey ... it goes on and on - the book was by Robert S Callahan [Raymond E], it was called the Cult of Efficiency, the introduction of industrial criteria into American higher education. And by the 1940s this was increasingly being extended and, now, by the 21st century it goes down to the kindergartens. This is an intolerable insanity, what [?9.32?] our learning presents is a classic wisdom solution for all of this at once. It cannot be solved piecemeal, it cannot be solved by the mind because the clearer the mind is the more it conforms to the dead, death-leading fracture.
Civilisations have always faced, at certain junctures, this particular challenge. The most conspicuous example of the failure to do this was in the late 200s AD: the Roman Empire closed off creativity and you had the beginning of what used to be called the Dark Ages, the medieval feudal mentality where the vying of power was between king and pope. This is a situation that has been challenging us since 1914. The reason why it came at that point is that, by 1913, the world was split in the most powerful new scientific industrial military application processes: half of the world's capability in pharmaceuticals, in electronics, in engineering development belonged to Germany. Almost the other half of the world, in those capacities, belonged to the United States and Britain with France and Italy having a little share of it.
The German hegemony was something that had bothered Einstein when he was a boy, had bothered him as a young man and was, increasingly, a cause for him outlawing himself from any kind of authority structures, from aligning himself from any kind of person who would use authority. And, increasingly, he was self tutored with conversations with just a few friends, and it occurred to him that the challenge before him was to understand how a Newtonian mechanistic universe, that was challenged by the new electromagnetic theories of light and of energy, could be brought together in such a way as to not stress the mechanics of it.
The mechanisation of the world order is one description of the 18th century, the 1700s. Everything became increasingly arranged mechanically and because the mechanics now were industrialised and production was put into steam and then electricity and, now, into computers. It is a quality of a pace in which mechanical time outdistances the ability for any kind of a traditional time space to respond to, it's not possible. So that the response must be a creative response that undercuts time, that is not obviated by the dimensions of space, is able to function literally outside of the confines of space and time. Consciousness can do this, the mind cannot. When consciousness comes into play as a dimension, consciousness makes a do-si-do so that space time now, realistically, is understood in its actuality that space blossoms out of time, time is not the fourth dimension but the first dimension. And its dimension occurs spontaneously from the field of nature that has as a characteristic of its field, change. And that the change does not happen just willy-nilly but happens specifically in calibrateable plateaus that arrange themselves in sets of order, and that those sets of order are amenable to transformation twice over.
On the ritual existential level actuality will always cinch itself, the dynamic of the field of nature, the ocean of change, will cinch itself by polarity: it polarises so that there is a positive and minus, so that there is a light and dark. The polarisation, if it can be brought to an equanimity so that they flow as a horizon, it's still a polarity but it is a balanced polarity, now, the nature of polarisation can be deepened by conscious differentiation so that what you have, now, is not form by polarity but you have form by symmetry. So that with a five dimensional conscious space time with symmetry, now you have a resonance that is capable of achieving not only a higher order but of looking forward to a yet third higher order. The third higher order, from polarity to symmetry, is through tuning because if you are able to have pairedness ,that is polarity that is balanced, and symmetry that is creative, you can tune the symmetricality so that the sets will be resonant sets that approach a harmonic. Now you have something that the mind, in its natural space time, could not do twice over.
The first transformation is from polarisation to symmetry, the second transformation is from symmetry to tuneable harmonics. But to conceive of this in the mind as an idea reduces it, immediately, to a mentality which is a mirroring of the fracture that it obtains. And so one has to do an end-run around this impossibility and the end-run is to make the membrane of the mind a permeable membrane rather than a closed one. Rather than a mirror it is, now, literally a domed window that leads to openness, that one can learn to see that the dome is not a dome allowing you to see the openness but is itself open so that one can live in the openness.
The first transformation is one of fermentation; the second is one so distillation. Why would it take two years to do this? Because it requires a recalibration that patiently builds up, emerges from nature, originally, develops experience flowing in that nature and integrates itself in such a way that it doesn't close off so that conscious creative imagination and remembering are not only natural but they are conscious nature of our lives and of our beings, our persons. And for such a person they live free, they do not live freely, they live free, there's no adverbial descriptiveness, there is instead a permanent quality which in ancient wisdom was called eternal.
This eternal quality is not the least bit mechanical and shows up in nuclear physics all the time. 'Radioactivity [the phenomenon of radioactivity itself] provides a clear example of the concept of indeterminacy' which means a polarity that cannot be cinched, it's indeterminate immediately in terms of the polarity but, if one understands that it's indeterminate, in terms of polarisation itself, so that all choices have a symmetricality to them, they can be tuned to a real cosmos.
Radioactivity provides a clear example of the concept of indeterminacy' and one has to watch out for 'concept' - the first person to point this out was Ernst Cassirer in a book on indeterminacy in the 1930s - 'that is identical initial situations lead to different outcomes. Consider a million identical uranium nuclei, identical in a way which goes beyond the everyday meaning; they are not just identical in the sense that toothbrushes coming off a production line are the same, the nuclei are indistinguishable by any conceivable measurement. These nuclei are also unstable and undergo radioactive decay but they do not decay in identical time. All that can be said is that they have an equal likelihood of decaying in a given interval of time.
Every single individual actuality has its own path of emergence and iteration and career of development. For Einstein he said, of us, each one of us has our own world line, the deeper mysterious quality of that, become magic, is that every single actuality, every existential in the universe, has its own world line in the cosmos: its reality is not only phenomenally individual, it is noumenally true which means that any actual arrangement needs to be proportional, it can't be mechanical. The reality is that it cannot happen mechanically, it must happen in a ratioable proportion and for that I used to use the phrase 'ratios of the real.' But it's deeper than that, it's more mysterious than that and it takes not only a powerful meditation or a powerful prayer to be able to get calm and clear about this, but it takes a contemplation, which is purer than purity to be able to participate and thus understand: the emergence is not just one time statically but is iteratively occurring all the time, gauged by the pace of the frequency of the energy frequency. The higher the energy the quicker the frequency so that the iterations, now, become so overlaid that it seems that there is no way to distinguish between them and what happens here is that a balance establishes itself in a very peculiar way, recognisable for all time.
If you have a leaky faucet dripping water randomly and you increase that by hundreds of thousands of leaky faucets dripping randomly, the random drippings, as it becomes more and more numerously complex, approaching an infinity of complexity, the more and more the sequence will come to have the double butterfly effect. The infinity sign if that kind of balance of polarity, that kind of symmetry of higher dimensions, and, if tuneable, the infinity will emerge pristinely in such a way that it will also be zero, not a zero point but a zero field, at the same time an infinite field. So that the cosmos is an infinity, really, and nature is a zero, really, and we are in between, balanced and symmetrical. If you put this into a kind of a design, in terms of the size of things, you will find that we are at the fulcrum of the size of things in terms of the energy level of the cosmos. It isn't that man is a microcosm, but is rather the pivot of the way in which reality is spontaneously true. Our presentation is not a presentation of individuality but is a tuneable recalibration of actuality. This is profound. This has an enormous implication. When someone like Krishnamurti was talking with David Bohm, who was an aficionados of Einstein's supposed side in the dispute with quantum mechanics. This is a little bit of their conversation, published in 1980. 'Are you saying that when this is done it opens the door to something broader, deeper? Krishnamurti: Yes. Otherwise life has no meaning. It is just repeating this pattern. What exactly did you mean when you said that the universe is in meditation? I feel that way [said Krishnamurti] yes. The universe is in meditation but the cosmos is in contemplation.'
We balance symmetrically, tenably, that.
'"Could we say first of all," asked Bohm to Krishnamurti, "could we say first of all that the universe is not actually governed by its past? You see the universe creates certain forms which are relatively constant so that people who look at it superficially only see that and it seems to be determined from the past."
"Yes, it is not governed by the past. It is creative, moving" says Krishnamurti.
"And then this movement is order?"
And Krishnamurti says to Bohm, "Would you, as a scientist, accept such a thing?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, I would."
Krishnamurti: "Are we both crazy? Let's put the question another way. Is it really possible for time to end? The whole idea of time as the past, chronologically, so that there is no tomorrow at all, there is the feeling, the actual reality, psychologically of having no tomorrow. I think this is the healthiest way of living, which doesn't mean that I become irresponsible. That would be too childish."
"Is it merely a question of physical time, which is a certain part of natural order?"
Krishnamurti: "Of course, that is understood."
Then Bohm says, "The question is whether we have a sense of experiencing past and future or whether we are free of that sense."
Krishnamurti: "I am asking you, as a scientist, is the universe based on time?"
"I would say no, but ... "
"You see the general weight, that is all I want. You say no and can the brain, which has evolved in time ..."
Bohm interrupts, "Er, it has evolved in time? Rather it has become entangled in time because the brain is part of the universe, which we say is not based on time."
Krishnamurti: "I agree."
Bohm: "Thought has entangled the brain in time."
Krishnamurti: "Alright. Can that entanglement be unravelled, freed so that the universe is the mind? You follow? If the universe is not of time, can the mind which has been entangled in time unravel itself and so be the universe? You follow what I'm trying to say?"
"Yes. That is order."
That is it.
I would call that meditation, not in the ordinary dictionary sense of pondering and all that, but a stated meditation where there is no element of the past.
What happens here is that the movement that the mind conceives as a movement in time is characteristic of the universe emerging iteratively, existentially, from the integral field of nature. But that integral field of nature itself is generated by a differential infinite cosmos that is not integral at all. But the field of nature that emerges from it, is generated by it, has its integral quality that traces all the way through like a thread, so that there's such a thing as a fabric of the integral universe, it has a fabric. But the cut of the fabric, the weave, the clothing, the fashion, the style, the grandeur, belongs to the cosmos.
More next week.