Science 6
Presented on: Saturday, November 10, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We're here at the middle of our phase on the cosmos, Science, presentation 6, and we're continuing to tune our sense of the cosmos by pairs of persons who have made an extraordinary difference in our lifetimes to the way in which the cosmos is real. The first pair were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr; the founder of the theory of relativity and the founder of the theory of quantum mechanics. The second pair are two women, Vera Rubin, Vera Cooper Rubin, and Barbara McClintock. They are developers of the very, very large and the very, very small. Vera Rubin is the discoverer of dark matter in the universe and the book that we're using by her is a collection of her papers: bright galaxies and dark matters, Bright Galaxies Dark Matters. And she is at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington DC but she came out of a generation where women were not encouraged to go into science, especially astronomy. But Barbara McClintock comes from a generation before her and it was almost unheard of for women to be allowed into science and both of them experienced the severe constraints of irrationality in regards of the study of science and the study of the cosmos.
By not having a tuneability of human sensitivity, science was severely truncated except for very rare geniuses. And very quickly the work of very rare geniuses was mulched into and folded back into a masculine, flatted-out, perspective that eventually lodged itself in doctrine and doctrinaire outlooks upon the universe, upon human beings, and upon the whole process by which control and authority is portioned out by a mentality which bases itself on the control of what people do, of what things are supposed to be and how they interact. So that the whole ritual basis of existence was commandeered by a mental authoritarian tyranny and in between them, human experience was constantly being shoved together until one could make nice little snowballs out of experience and out of this one could then say 'This is what man looks like when you stack the snowballs,' and you got a fake snowman instead of a human being.
Now, when Barbara McClintock was born in 1902 was right at the cusp where, for the first time, the science of genetics got traction. And it's extraordinary because the science of genetics had had its genius almost a half a century before: his name was Gregor Mendel, and he was from what is today the Czech Republic. And the Czech Republic was an extraordinary place in history, especially because one of the greatest innovators in planetary education came from the Czech Republic, came from in fact the Moravian section of the Czech Republic that Gregor Mendel came from as well, his name was John Amos Comenius. And his educational programme in the early 1600s, he was born about 1571, his educational programme, by the 1630s, was the most revolutionary education programme in planetary history since the hay days of Plato and Pythagoras. He is the one who made it very clear that we must educate boys and girls together, that all children must be educated together and pursuant to this Comenius made the world's first pictorial textbook for boys and girls to learn. It was called the Orbis Pictus and it started off with very basic things: this is a hand, these are fingers, this is one, two, three, four, five, ten; by tens one can begin to count, very, very, very, simple.
The technique of Comenius was revivified three hundred years later in the early 1930s by two great geniuses that we looked at in our education previously, in the symbols section: I. A. Richards and his friend C. K. Ogden who developed in England because England by 1930 was still the empire that spanned the world and English as a language was becoming, instead of French, the lingua franca of the world. And to teach English to all kinds of people, boys and girls of every conceivable type, world round, they devised Basic English and the picture book that went with Basic English is a harmonic resonance of Comenius's first Orbis Pictus. And we showed that and you can review the DVDs from the symbols lectures on them. And, eventually, a very simple vocabulary of English was teachable so that someone could learn the language from scratch, whatever age, wherever you were, but especially easily when you were a child. So that English was alongside of whatever languages you used in your home town, in your home, in your home country. And so it would become the auxiliary language of the world and has since become so.
In that section of what is today the Czech Republic, they were always in between power groups like the German power groups, the Russian power groups, the Italian power groups, the eastern Slav power groups and so that whole quality of temperament of those people, one part of the Czech Republic, it's called bohemia, out of which we get bohemians and the bohemian's lifestyle is free and easy. The Moravians are free and easy with a spiritual maturity that is calm and takes its maturation in a natural, easy way, rising into the blossom of consciousness whereas the bohemians have the vivacity of the dynamic of life and all the maturation is nourished from the continuing development of the freedom of the dynamic. So that the two kinds of energy are exemplified, there, in the historic Czech Republic: the bohemian emphasis on the freedom of the dynamic and the Moravian emphasis on the blossoming of the energy forms.
Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, published his first book on the principles of hybridisation in 1866 and it was almost unattended by anyone until the early 1900s. And so Barbara McClintock was born right at the time where it was beginning to be an area of interest and as she grew up as a youngster both loving the dynamic of being with people and being with animals and being with the plants but at the same time having an inner sense, as we talked about last week in the presentation, she discovered an inner quietness of her own which was extraordinary. Her home life was often contentious with a mother that was insisting that she be a girl and do girl things so she could get married in the right way and Barbara did not want to do that. She wanted to explore both the dynamic and then when she discovered her inner calm she wanted to explore how that fits in to the world. And used to ,as a girl, run on the beaches of Long Island, out near the tip of it, and, in running in her own way, she discovered that if she held her posture in a yogic very straight way that she could run extremely fast without having to bend over, without having to get into a bipedal kind of a lope, that she could literally glide. And it wasn't until later in life that she discovered that there is a Tibetan Vajrayana yoga for running in this way and that lamas practiced it all through the developments that came out of Milarepa and the kagyupa tradition and into Tsong Kapa later on.
That one can run in this way almost indefinitely because you do not use energy, you flow in a universal dynamic, you have your physicality in eternity and not in the world of polarity and Barbara McClintock discovered this. And one of the quiet things that she was able to do - here's a children's book - Barbara McClintock alone in her field, she raised corn, she spent 50 years raising a special kind of corn, American Indian corn called maize. And she is the one who discovered that genes jump around, they do not stay put where they're supposed to be and that they can move within the chromosome and carry different creative DNA strands to places they were not there before and perhaps never were and that they can jump, in fact, between chromosomes. She discovered that life has a true freedom in its dynamic and her collected works, here, is called The Dynamic Genome. And in The Dynamic Genome, published by the Cold Spring Harbour Press, and Cold Spring Harbour is in a section of Long Island on Long Island Sound, it is up until a week ago the emeritus director of it was James D. Watson the discoverer of the structure of the double helix of DNA back in 1953.
He made a comment before an English tour about racial capacities and it was overblown and he had to cancel his European book tour of his new book that has come out. He is now 80 years old. It's interesting because Cold Spring Harbour as a laboratory was originally founded and was a part of the Carnegie Institution. And here in this history of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, Houses of Science by Mrs James D. Watson, by Elizabeth Watson, and it's interesting because the Carnegie Institution, when it gave over to the cold spring harbour laboratory that our other woman that we're taking, Vera c Rubin, is at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC and has been there in the Department Of Terrestrial Magnetism now for almost 40 years. The patience of a woman, whether it is in 50 years of watching how corn grows in the ever increasing analytic down to the genes or watching the movement of stars that accrue into galaxies and that galaxies accrue into clusters and that clusters of galaxies accrue into super clusters that sometimes there are spaces in the universe where there are no galaxies, there are no stars.
And those voids - the largest one found so far is 400 million light years across - that the cosmos is large enough to have a little incidental space like this and yet it was someone like Vera Rubin who patiently worked on the edges, on the fringes, on the margins, like Barbara McClintock with the very, very small, she worked with the very, very large. And one finds in her century of galaxy spectroscopy, collected here in Bright Galaxies Dark Matters, she writes,
100 years ago no one knew what a galaxy was [this is in 1995] but 96 years ago china reported the first successful spectrum of a galaxy in a two page paper in volume nine of the Astrophysical Journal on the spectrum of the great nebula in Andromeda.
Andromeda is one of the few galactic structures that the human eye can see, it is about 2.2 million light years away but is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and so is quite a bright blur to many people but visible as a nebula, as a cloud, to sharp eyed people. Edwin Hubble's great 1930s book was called in The Realm of the Nebula, one of the earliest excursions out into galactic terrain. And one of the first great astronomers along with Hubble to recognise that it is the galactic structures that are the scalar by which the universe can be understood and that other fellow was named Harlow Shapley who was the director of the Harvard Observatory and whose works we looked at last week, some of them, early, like Star Clusters, publication number two of the Harvard Observatory in 1930 and his first textbook on galaxies 1943, which was a breakthrough. But his earliest work was a series of addresses on radio on astronomy to the population at large to alert them that something huge was happening and that they have every right to know. Because Shapley was very much a humanist in the ancient democratic tradition: 'Everyone has a right to know, this is their universe as well.'
That collection of radio addresses was published in 1926 and included two women astronomers live on the radio. One of the women who benefited from Harlow Shapley was his daughter Mildred, Mildred Shapley Matthews, and she was born in 1915 and she is one of the great figures of women in planetary astronomy and she is the editor of at least 13 or 15 big huge volumes on modern astronomy of the cosmos published by the University of Arizona Press in Tucson. Her Mars book published in 1992 is about 1500 pages, she's the editor of that; she's still, as far as I can determine, alive and working in her 90s, Barbara McClintock lived to be 90. These are long lived women whose patience is not only to see down to the very, very small and up to the very, very large but that it has a reflexive conscious quality that steps up the order of insight and that science is not a ritual practice, it is a prismatic array of insight that is arrayed through the prism of the person. Without the prismatic person there is no science. What you get is a regression back to a mental dogma, a symbolic order that you assume is right, procedures that you assume have been ironed out for centuries and millennia and all men agree to this and so it must be so. And all of this is not only suspect but phony, it is an illusion and it is a delusion.
The most beautiful way in which this was brought into question was brought into question by Niels Bohr, who we paired with Einstein, and we took a look at the way in which Bohr found that causality got in the way of actuality in terms of both theory and experiment by the late 1920s and by early 1930 it was apparent that this was the case. One of the qualities that came out of this for Bohr was the insistence that there be such a thing as an open world and not only an open world but an open mind. That human beings with an open mind in an open world are available for the insight, for the visionary consciousness that is necessary for a prismatic person and it is the community of prismatic persons who, really, generate history and without a historical sense of kaleidoscopic possibility you cannot have the forms of science. Science comes out of the kaleidoscopic prismatic possibilities and, instead of having a universe determined by mentality, you have a cosmos that is infinite in its own right.
It is the scientific appreciation of the harmonic of the infinite cosmos that gives a resonance to the prism of the spiritual person who is really free because their field of consciousness is coextensive with the field of nature. This quality of bringing two hands together, the field of nature and the field of consciousness, so that they tune and they tune un such a way that they interplay and they interpenetrate and, like all intercourse, they have an exchange of centres. The centre that exchanges from the field of nature that has matured itself to the integral of the mind, its centre that exchanges is the imagination, based on imagery of experience, based on traction in existence, based on the actions that one pragmatically does. And so the imagination exchanges with the field of consciousness and becomes creative imagining.
The indispensible trigger for art, for the spiritual person, to come forth and emerge, not integrally but differentially, and become prismatic rather than just pragmatic but what comes out of the field of consciousness is the function of remembering. And it exchanges places with the imagination and, becomes in the symbolic order the memory, the process of remembering becomes the memory. And now the mind that has the ability to utilise integrally a memory begins to recognise and understand the need to, yes, to have experience in a cultural way but to also let it blossom so that experience becomes kaleidoscopic not in a cultural way but in a whole civilisation of many possible cultures working together becoming a tapestry.
The mind left to a cultural basis will envision a universe that is unified, it will become the one place, the one right thing but, in recognition of a kaleidoscope of possibilities, a civilisation is not a culture of a universe but is a harmonic of a cosmos, its range is infinite. While you can index integrals by a binary of zero and one, computers are based on this, you cannot index consciousness and its ecology by zero and one, its binary is zero and infinity. And the human capacity to deal with infinity, as easily as one deals with unity, is the hallmark of the prismatic person, of the spiritual person. To become free in face of infinity so that it is the creative play that is operative and not the constrained rules. And it is only by playing that the universe opens up into the cosmos; then we have science instead of authority.
One of the essays in Volume 4 of the collected papers of Niels Bohr, The Philosophic Writings Of Bohr, his collected works are ten volumes published in Copenhagen. But four volumes of excerpts of his Philosophic Writings, Volume 4 the Oxbow Press out of Connecticut 1998, they include the 1948 little essay On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity. This was written in 1948 at the end of World War 2 because Bohr had become involved by this for more than ten years with the struggle to alert the world that a sea change had happened in human beings. That like a genie that has been released from its bottle, you cannot stuff it back in and the genie was that man had developed the capacity to have atomic power and also had developed the capacity to leave the planet. In early 1949 at White Sands, New Mexico, a two stage WAC Corporal rocket went 250 miles into space, that's farther than the international space station orbits, its orbit is under 220 miles. That programme was called the MX programme and one could have put a satellite into orbit by 1949.
The reason why it was not is that a causal, mental, authoritarian, tyrannical, mentality stopped it, cancelled the programme, 'You boys can play with captured V2 rockets and experiment but you may not develop the capacity to go into earth orbit.' And the decision was made by 12 men headed by the American secretary of defence James S. Forrestal and the reason for it was that Forrestal was a number, with eleven others, of the Majestic 12 who took over, who commandeered, the crashed UFOs from the Roswell incident. And if you take a look at the movie Roswell with Kyle McLachlan and Martin Sheen you'll see a very accurate portrayal that Forrestal was the first one who got scared because of the telepathy of a dying alien and within a year of cancelling the MX programme. So that human beings could not go into this new world of space because 'There are things out there to be afraid of. Who knows what they will do?' Ran screaming into the streets and committed suicide shouting 'They're here, they're here.'
By almost 2008 it is time to wake up to many aspects and this learning is a time-honoured wisdom tradition, graduated and scaled so that you can free yourself permanently o any scale from one to the planet and beyond. To consider earth as an earth is naive; it is a planet among trillions. It has a nice name Terra, we're terrestrials, not earthlings and it isn't a globe, the global village, the global economy, is an authoritarian term for control. It's a planet and so the correct term is planetary and there is such a thing as a planetary culture. Of all the cultures that are able, in the tapestry of the planet, to add to its blossoming, to its bouquet whereas the civilisation larger than the planetary culture is the star system and that stellar civilisation is exactly what is being developed now. And this is an education like John Amos Comenius, 400 years ago, almost, to deliver a population of people who will be able to improve it indefinitely. And generations of children raised with this kind of freedom will be able to inhabit not only the star system but explore the interstellar frontier with wild elegance and spiritual freedom. If there are aliens not enjoying that then they need to go to school as well, and they're welcome as long as they pay. Let's take a break.
Let's come back and we're trying to understand something that is actually very esoteric and very few people have understood it, much less understood it well. This is Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and this biography of him written by Vitezslav Orel who was the, at the time that this was published about then years ago by Oxford, he was the emeritus head of the Mendelian in Brno Czech Republic and the monastery there in Brno is right next to the cathedral. And on page 45 comes this very interesting material; his has to do with the way in which science actually occurs, mysteriously, in history. 'The monastery in Brno next to the church of St Thomas was founded in 1350 by the margrave of Moravia.' His real name was Johann Heinrich and he was the brother of Charles IV who was the emperor and Charles IV had just a couple of years before in 1348, founded the university in Prague, one of the earliest universities in the world. The University of Paris, Oxford, Prague University, all of these coming into play; Oxford and the University of Paris in the early 1200s and then by the middle of the 1300s you began to have, again, institutions that call themselves universities because it was universal learning in a great, grand, tradition.
'The margrave and his descendents were buried in the monastery and the monks were obliged to pray for their souls. The monetary needs of the monastery were provided for by a number of villages, allotted to it as a source of feudal income.' And so very quickly in order to support themselves the monks of monasteries, all over the world, go into raising their own produce, farming, raising their own animals. And one of the specialities here was the raising of sheep, a special quality and kind of sheep whose wool was very much in demand and, also, experimenting with crop rotation, one of the first places in the world that did this, and with ecology of recycling material into the land. And also of experimenting by having orchards of various fruit trees staggered in such a way that the background for Mendel's genetic experiments in the 1800s was laid 500 years before by a characteristic of this particular monastery, because they had a lot of lands and it was famous for doing investigations of how to improve animals and plants.
But one of the most secret pivots in the cathedral and thus the monastery at Brno is that the portrait of the black Madonna was on the altar. And the black Madonna is one of the most magisterial and magically wonderful icons in all of Christianity. It is purported to have been based on sketches of Luke, the apostle, and the portrait of the black Madonna, for centuries and now for almost a millennium, has been a talisman of healing of miraculous energies. And the original gift of the portrait of the black Madonna was by the medieval, high medieval, emperor Frederick II known also as Frederick Barbarossa. And Frederick II is one of the very powerful figures in world history, who was literally thrust into greatness, not only because his family was royal but he was thrust into cosmic orders of greatness. Shakespeare in twelfth night has Malvolio say 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.' Frederic II was this way.
His guardian was Pope Innocent III and he was the Prince of Palermo, in Sicily, so that when he would come of age he would be the king of Sicily. And later Frederick II became, of course, the greatest of all the emperors: he harkened back to Charlemagne, he became the emperor of Germany, the emperor of all of the lands, he's the one that got the portrait of the Madonna some time in the early 1200s. He was born in 1195 and by the time he was 14 it was decided, because of royal lineages and for imperial politics, that he should marry at 14. And he was married to a woman who was ten years older than him, who was a widow already, whose husband had been the king of Hungary, she was a Spanish woman, the daughter of the king of Aragón. And so they were married in 1209 and, at the time, not only was innocent the third his guardian but his tutor was a man about 30 years older than him whose name was Michael Scot.
And Michael Scot is one of the all time great transformation figures. He was born in Scotland and his birthplace we are not sure what time, I would imagine it was 1165. He was born in Balwearie Castle and he is buried nearby at the end of his long adventurous life, and it was adventurous. He's buried in Melrose Abbey, that's very near Balwearie Castle in Scotland. Michael Scot was the greatest magus of his age, he was an ancient hermetic wisdom master and he was the tutor for Frederick II. And Michael Scot was the first one to introduce alchemy, reintroduce alchemy, to the Christian West, to the Latin West, they had lost track of it. And because he was a master of many things, a real magus, he's the one that brought alchemy back into the western tradition about 1200. He also brought astrology back in and he brought them both along with a higher mathematics; alchemy, astronomy and mathematics from the Arabs. And reinfused the whole Western tradition so that you had a swelling not of the feudal medieval period but of the beginning of a deep, questing, royal, imperial, high medieval to try to find a way to culminate man in a very, very special way. And Michael Scot was instrumental in this. And he's the one who secured for Frederick II the portrait of the black Madonna from Arabic lands from which it had been lost to the West for millennia.
In the biography, one of the great biographies of Michael Scot is by Lynn Thorndike whose big eight volume History of Experimental Science [A History of Magic and Experimental Science] published by Columbia University is still one of the great standard scholarly sets of learning in the world. He writes in here,
Michael believed further that demons could not endure the sound of harmony and fled from music whether vocal or instrumental or from the songs of birds. He thought that the ninth sphere was silent as well as starless but that the eighth sphere of the fixed stars revolved melodiously with smoothest sound and sweetest voice because outside itself it had an essence, the ninth sphere, by which this sound was reflected.
This is a hermetic insight of dark matter and dark energy. And also, in the Renaissance, in the high Renaissance, the high medieval had a high Renaissance right next to it. And the way that you can tell the difference of the figures is that the high medieval era culminated in Dante and the high Renaissance era began with Chaucer, they're very close, they're extremely different. Dante writes of the inferno, the purgatorial in between and the paradisio; Chaucer writes about human beings in their full array. Dante is the high medieval poet of a symbolic order that can be interpreted in four different ways, anagogical and so forth, allegorical, whereas Chaucer said of his own writings 'I write of a fair field full of folk.' The array of human nature had infinite possibilities but that there were character types that one could follow and, indeed, not only character types but there are periodicities and the periodicities come from Michael Scott bringing them back.
Here is Thorndike now, not only are there passages in Scot's writings which seem reminiscent of his own student days but there are other features which suggest he may have taught grammar, that is the Latin language in literature, before going to Toledo, Spain, as a translator or making astrology his speciality. For example, having stated that the zodiac is divided into 360 degrees, the twelve signs of the zodiac, that the whole circle of the ecliptic is 360 degrees and that 36 days of the solar year make a tenth part of it. He adds that the heaven as a whole barely makes one revolution in 36,000 years so that it takes 3,000 years to move the length of a single sign of the zodiac, this is 800 years ago. 9,000 years to cover one quarter of the celestial circle or one triplicity of the signs and 18,000 years to complete one half of that circle.
So that for the very first time in the West, for maybe 600 years, maybe 700 years, you had someone capable and competent to understand that a mathematic is not divinatory on a mythic level, that's called matises but mathesis is the ability to calculate on the basis of an analytic and to understand that you can prove it out by experiment and investigation by a scientific outlook. And Michael Scot is one of the founders of the rebirth of science in the West. His influence was so pervasive that two of his influenced descendants in England were Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. Robert Grosseteste the bishop of Lincolnshire in England was also the great professor at Oxford and his prize student was Roger Bacon and between them they brought science back into play at Oxford where it had been lacking, England had not had science since the last years of the fifth century, the 400s.
Because Frederick I/II Barbarossa was tutored for years by Michael Scot and a lot of his emphasis was to make sure that there were places of learning that were protected: the monastery at Brno which was originally the queen's monastery, meaning the queen, the wife of Frederick II. It had this tradition for centuries that someone really special in the field of learning should be not only protected but given free rein without overseeing. And in order to ensure this the monastery of Brno was directly responsible to the Director General of the Augustinian Order in Rome or his delegate. So that there was no middle man, there was no middle authoritarian ladder, there was just simply the guarantee that learning should be protected and men of learning should be nourished in whatever they're doing and Gregor Mendel took advantage of this.
By the way, the beautiful thing about the eighth sphere of the fixed stars and the night sphere being silent, you find that in the high Renaissance in the tarot deck of Mantegna, which we have looked at before. The 48th card in that 50 card deck, because it's Pythagorean it is not Rosicrucian, it is not occult, the Pythagorean hermetic tradition is scientific not metaphysical. There's a world of difference. The 48th card is the sphere of the fixed stars and the 49th card is the sphere of the open infinite silent super space through which the stars can move. It's like we know now, and the 50th card of course was the undiscovered country of the real cosmos. The universe has, in one way, the fixed stars but they have their movement, notice the hermetic tradition even when it comes back 800 years ago, that there's a movement through the zodiac.
There is not only a movement through the zodiac, that is the scalar of the movement of the sphere of the heavens and that the movement of the sphere of the heavens, each star has its own resonance and it is the harmonic of all the stars' resonance together that gives the harmony of the cosmos. And of one only knew the movement of the whole one could hear the symphony of the universe and from there have a direct intuition of the open infinity of God's realm within which field the universe has its movement, indexed by its music and that while demons flee music, hell shrinks to oblivion in the face of the universal harmony heard by man. And so the purpose was to hear the music of the cosmos.
It wasn't until the late 20th century that science was developed enough in the new hermetica to be able to compute, mathematically, not just the movement of stars or even the movement of all the stars, some 2 trillion of the galaxy, but the movement of galaxies in their clusters, in their super clusters, in their cosmic spread. And Vera C. Rubin was instrumental in that and her first excursions into astronomy were at Cornell University where Barbara McClintock had studied. They were both initially educated at Cornell, both eventually sheltered and protected by the Carnegie Institution because Andrew Carnegie from Scotland understood the old Michael Scot tradition that learning should be not only respected but protected and given freedom to mature itself. And that the freedom is not based on a mental authority but is based on the prismatic exploration of the spiritual person free to do so, is a totally different outlook. The previous outlook is a feudal medieval outlook, however high, the other is a Renaissance looking out and not an outlook at all but a looking out not only to see what one could see but to allow the seer to see the seer in whatever new ways there are going to be.
Our educational, inculcated, systems around the globe are medieval, they are feudal, they are full of authoritarian illusion and they are full of demonic delusion and they flee and shy away from anything that brings the music of spiritual harmonics back into play on a planetary scale. It is not only the challenge of the open world, exemplified by Niels Bohr, beautifully, but the open world brought into play here in the beautiful Terry Lectures at Yale University, The Open World: Three Lectures on the Metaphysical Implications of Science by the great Herman Weyl who's the founder of set theory and a number of mathematical developments. He writes in here, God and the Universe,
It was natural for man to attribute the cause for the lawfulness of the world to the reign of souls endowed with reason. I may remind you of the words of Plato quoted at the beginning of this lecture. Kepler finds it hard to understand the obedience of the planets to his second law, which sets the velocity of the planet in functional dependence on its distance from the sun, except by assuming a planetary soul which receives within itself the image of the sun in its changing magnitude. Much more tenaciously than such a psychical interpretation has a mechanical and mechanistic interpretation of the laws of nature tried to assert and maintain itself in physics.
Which it could not do because someone like a Kepler and eventually even esoterically Newton, and then incredibly energised by Einstein and by Niels Bohr and the gates of wonder were thrown open in the 1920s and in the 1930s. And part of the demonic recoil from that was the emphasis to try and co-opt and commandeer this scientific breakthrough for authoritarian power and the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War and the ensuing War on Terror are all an extension of this trying to commandeer the powers that had been developed for authoritarian structures. They kill you for speaking like this, often their assassination is by non-acknowledgement. Nevertheless, reality occurs real and the spirit is free and learning like this, again, is accomplished.
One of the most peculiar qualities is that when Mendel was doing his experiments with sweet peas in a little garden plot that wasn't large enough to interfere with the income farms but he became interested in following exactly how sweet peas - an innocuous crop, of red and white - could be brought together. And that after a while one began to notice certain ratios and of course the grand hermetic ratio that was his favourite was three to one. Unity and its three orders do not fold into an integral but they make a ratio, a proportion which then generates resonant sets that have a harmonic that is extendable indefinitely.
It isn't three in one, like the oil to make doors less squeaky, it's the three, two, one ratioability proportionality and the old hermetic saying is this, and Carl Jung used to quote it a number of times in his older age, 'The wisdom tradition is to give you three corners and it's up to you to find the fourth corner.' And when you find the fourth quarter you realise that that angle of vision is original with you, that it is you in your consciousness that now not only have completed the square of attention, the frame of reference, but because it is you that have done this originally you are able to expand your angle of vision indefinitely and therefore the frame of reference tilts and becomes a diamond of insight because you are refineable indefinitely. This is a Renaissance outlook, this is a hermetic outlook, not a metaphysical or a medieval looking just to look in.
Here is Niels Bohr 1948 On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity, 'The causal mode of description has deep roots in the conscious endeavours to utilise experience for the practical adjustment to our environments and is in this way inherently incorporated in common language.' Finally the whole issue will be 'You must have a poetic language in order to speak real about zero and infinity. If not you are constrained by the rhetoric that has been approved for you to use.' One of the greatest rhetorical constraints was the idea that causality is self evident and it's stupid to think it's not the case. It is not the case, ever. 'By the guidance which analysis in terms of cause and effect has offered in many fields of human knowledge the principle of causality has even come to stand as the ideal for scientific explanation.' And by explanation one should read explication: 'his is how it is these are the laws, these are the principles, and you must obey, your obedience is your only choice for rationality.' But ratioing is a harmonic and not a code of laws.
DNA in its double helix is an interpenetrative multidimensional field not only of nature and existence but of consciousness and person. And, just like the integral of the field of nature and existence in existential actions will generate experience, the field of consciousness and the prismatic person will generate history and history is radically differential, different from the highly integrable mythic horizon. A mythic language will always have a plot line of beginning middle and end; a historical development is a kaleidoscopic possibility of interpretations and understanding which one can refine indefinitely. The one emerges the integral mind, the other emerges the differential cosmos. But if there's a complementarity between the integral mind and the differential cosmos, that complenemtarity will be real and the mind will open to freedom and the cosmos will accept suggestions of conscious purpose. And in this way they work together and those vectors together, in recognisably mathematically proportionate ways, actually occur. Bohr, 1948,
In physics, causal description, originally adapted to the problems of mechanics, rests in the assumption that the knowledge of the state of a material system at a given time permits a prediction of its state at any subsequent time. However, already here the definition of state requires special consideration and it need hardly be recalled that an adequate analysis of mechanical phenomena was only possible after the recognition that, in the account of a state of a system of bodies, not merely their location at a given moment but also their velocities have to be included.
In classical mechanics, the forces between bodies were assumed to depend simply on the instantaneous positions and velocities; but the discovery of the retardation of electromagnetic effects made it necessary to consider force fields as an essential part of a physical system, and to include in the description of the state of a system at a given time the specification of those fields in every point of space. Yet, as is well known, the establishment of the differential equations connecting the rate of variation of electromagnetic intensities in space and time is made possible, a description of electromagnetic phenomena in complete analogy to causal analysis in mechanics.
And then he goes on the say that all of this seems very reasonable to the symbolic ordering structure of the mind; it is not real, it is a mirroring to the mind of its own limitations and confirms then that its order must be right because the correlations to the world and what happens in the world are exactly right according to specification, according to plan. Einstein and Bohr, especially, disclosed the ancient hermetic wisdom: nothing is planned for reality, it will be what it will be and changes instantly into impossibilities previously because it's creatively imagining as it goes along and is free to play. A human being who is free to play in real will shy away from the constraints and those constraints will try to shy away from them.
One of Comenius's great books, 350 years ago, was The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. In ancient India the Mantra of Ganesha was 'ga' meaning heart energy pivot but if it was paired, 'ga, ga' now you have a high dharma heart harmonic that goes out indefinitely from the heart so that the heart sutra in the Prajnaparamita literature has the repetition. The Sanskrit word there is a literation on 'ga' but is pronounced 'gate' which means gone and the heart sutra begins 'gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha', enlightenment hail gone, gone, completely gone reality. The limitations of the mind can be put to use as an instrument but make a terrible task master and the first shying away is that the wise heart will not be imprisoned and will do everything it can to sabotage the body and the mind to let it know that you are delusional and you are following illusion and are not real. And when the harmonic is re-musiced, the sabotage of the body and the sabotage of the mind peel away. On one level its health and in the high dharma it's salvation. More next week.