Science 8
Presented on: Saturday, November 24, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We're coming here to Science 8, and in the architecture of our presentations this is two-thirds through a sequence of 12 which is a set of complexity that has a pair repeated three times every four presentations so that you have a ratioing, constantly available as an ordinal complexity to index in many different ways what you are experiencing, what you are seeing, what you are hearing, which includes a retrospective, seeing again, and a perspective, insight into seeing forward. And those who have acclimated themselves through the entire long durational presentation of two years, you're able now to have a kaleidoscopic, historical possibility and your visionary field will be fertile and co-extensive with the field of nature itself.
One of the aspects is that every lunar cycle we shift pairs and the pairs should be understood in this way: we have books that have been the genes of civilisation for 2000 years. Before that the genes of civilisation began with little clay palm-sized tablets and those palm-sized tablets were incised with a stylus that produced wedge-shaped characters, cuneiform, so that literally 4,000 years ago the origins of writing were able to be held in the palm of the hand so that the popular movement that you grasp something goes back two sets of aeons; an aeon is 2000 years. And in that 4,000 years writing has established itself, both in the early cuneiform clay tablets, later as pottery became discursive for pictorial imagery, they developed what was called the tablet, not out of clay but out of wax, so that you would have hinged wax tablets and you would, in your stylus, instead of impressing on the clay, you would impress on the blank wax. This is the phrase the tabula rasa, the blank tablet, is that level of the book. The ancient Ciceronian memory system was to consider the mind as a wax tablet and that you would engrave upon it the mnemonic/memnonic orders that you were that you wished to have and then you would remember the memnoic orders and the memories would play out from that. From the clay tablets of cuneiform to the wax tablets of developments that took a phonetic as well as a pictographic presentation, came the first alphabet, and the first alphabet surfaced about 1800 BC in an area that we would know today as Lebanon, ancient Phoenicia, more ancient than that it was called Canaan, and more ancient than that it was called Ugarit. The alphabet was initially 30 symbols as compared to several thousand cuneiform symbols, and hieroglyphics were likewise too numerous for most people to be able to learn to read or write. You had professional scribes who spent their whole life preparing themselves to learn to read and write but with an alphabet, for the first time, there was able to be a discursive sharing of information, the first information was business. But very quickly the business, because it was the economic base of the kingdom, became a record of royal archiving, king lists, also the ability to have a chronology of major events and out of that, because the kingdom, though it had an economic base, had a mythological dome, and so mythologies and economic transactions and royal archives together blossomed with the introduction of an alphabet, and so the move was to use inks on papyrus scrolls. And so from the tablet of clay to the tablet of wax to the scroll, for 2,000 years this was the gene of the earliest civilisations. Everything changed 2,000 years ago with the introduction of the codex, the book. And what we are doing is we are taking the book as a pivot, as a fulcrum of the earliest 2,000 years of civilisation and the last 2,000 years of civilisation, and we're pairing it with our particular time, which is the deepest transform on the planet since the development of art some 40,000 years ago. We are transcending the book. We are transcending the book by much more than the book transcended the scroll or the scroll transcended the cuneiform clay tablet. But in going beyond it, we have to transform the book first. And so we take not books as texts but we pare books together so that they become now proportional, they become ratioable, they become parallel, they become disjunct and we use this pliable tuning fork in a graduated methodology of pairing three pairs an then taking a single volume as a seventh to give us a coda, to give us an interval, but that the intervals themselves, in the eight phases, will constitute a set of eight intervals, and it will have its own octave dimension, which complements the three pairs of books eight times. Now we're looking forward next week to begin the last pair for science - science 9 through 12 and we're using Stephen Hawking's and Roger Penrose's The Nature of Space and Time, and it is a book, it's available in paperback, it also is a series of three very expensive video cassettes published by Princeton University Press, conducted at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, England, Cambridge University. We're taking Hawking and Penrose together as a pair, but we're pairing with them a third, Richard Feynman. His QED: [quantum Electrodynamics]The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, and so with Feynman and Hawking and Penrose we're closing out our education with a very powerful insight, that sometimes a pair of pairs is a three and a one. If you pair pairs together, you will get a squared frame of reference, a squared symbolic structure that will be able to extend itself. In three dimensions a square will become a cube. If you take a three and one, a unity and a trinity, a triad and a monad, and you pair them together, you do not get a square, you get rather a diamond shape. And a diamond, three-dimensionally, will give you actually a double pyramid, which is one of the beginning crystal structures for jewels, for jewellery. And so the cosmos will occur to us that it is a jewel of infinite complexity and that our conscious ecology of person prepares us to be a light within the scintillation of that jewel, and so the spiritual person is related to the cosmos as a source of light to an infinitely complex jewel. That jewel lit up by the enormous number of conscious beings in the universe, generates the field of nature, and so nature is a field, a process field, which has indeed sprung out of a generation from a cosmos that has already established itself consciously.
Now we're taking a look at the way in which something like crystals, which we ordinarily think of as a shape like is presented in little monographs like this, that they generate a science of crystallography, of being able to understand crystallography, and we saw right away in nature that when it was realised that DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, can be crystallised, the crystallography of that, by Rosalind Franklin, was the key to unlocking the structure, but crystallography is all about crystals and light, and further that there are variants of crystals like there are liquid crystals, there are quasi-crystals, there are molecular crystals, and that within molecular crystals there are magnetic ions in crystals and there are studies of magnetism and optics of molecular crystals, and all of this leads then finally to the realisation that there are molecular vibrations and there are nuclear magnetic resonances, and that the molecular vibrations can be investigated from an integral existential object through the mind, but that the nuclear magnetic resonance, the NMR, can only be investigated by an extended consciousness through spectroscopy, which is not looking at the existential form, but at the prismatic array of light that is able to be generated from the ritual existential form aligned with the symbolic mind, able to broadcast itself out in differential consciousness, and the study of this keeping in tune with the crystals here, vibronic coupling, the interaction between the electronic and nuclear motions, and out of this of course comes progressively a history that builds and the science comes out of the history, just as the scientist initially is the artistic person who comes out of their vision, the vision as a theoretical field, that opens from the transparency of the frame of reference of the mind. And so symbolic structure that are opaque, because they have a referentiality back to things, back to sequences of process, will be opaqued in such a way that they will be able to mirror, to reflect upon, those things, those processes, and that that reflection will then generate the experience between the things and processes and the ordered mind looking at them. But if the mind is transparent, the frame of reference will be able to take itself out of the mirror, out of the reflection, mode, and be into a peering through the frame of reference into possibilities, into arrays, and this is what spectroscopy illustrates as an exemplar.
Our learning has taken us into the 21st century, where we recognise now that one of the mysterious powers in the universe has to do with magnetic monopoles. The classic beginning book on this, published by Princeton, The Porter Lectures, published in 1988, The Geometry and Dynamics of Magnetic Monopoles, and the author is an Egyptian, Arab, Michael Atiyah, who is at, Sir Michael is actually at Cambridge, he's a British Lebanese mathematician, and it is Sir Michael Atiyah who is the moderator for Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking in the presentations on the nature of space and time. All of this is to disclose to you, as briefly as possible, of a complexity that has an ecology, and that that ecology has a difficult threshold and the threshold is being able to vision. The sophisticated symbolic structures of thought do not naturally vision, they naturally mirror. They naturally tend to reflect according to this wonderful order that symbolic thought has managed to have as an integral structure. To be able to look through the structure is like learning to read between the lines, and this is where the book comes in. As long as you dealt with clay tablets or wax tablets or hieroglyphics or papyrus scrolls, you had a limited population of people who were able to read. When you introduced the codex, all of a sudden you had the ability to have a very large audience comparatively; books were copied all the time, whereas scrolls were very, very rare and very precious, and you had a jump in the population of about 100 times of literacy. It meant that in order to read a codex without pictographs, with phonetic items built in, in an alphabet that was severely concentrated, you had to be able to read between the lines and make pictures in your mind while you read, so that it was the visionary transparency of the symbolic structure that was able to read. When codexes first came out, were first put into process in the early Roman Empire of the 1st century AD, it was impossible for someone to read silently. They would read out loud. They would have to read the words out loud in order to have the phonetic sound as well as the shape of the letters to be able to have this visualisation of what it was all about. One of the deepest transforms came about 100 common era, 100 AD, where it was possible for the first time for self-selected persons to be able to read silently, so that reading became an individualised, prismatic meditation of exercising the yoga of visioning through the mind, not having the mind do its integral with things and sequences, and relying on the experience that was generated. Now you had a transcendental experience and this transcendental experience was before vision, a visionary quest, prophets, mystics. Now you had a population of men and women, especially young men and women, who were able to have the depth of experience that only sages had had before, so now you had something new in the world. You had a community of people who were not professional scribes, they were not exceptional prophets, they were not peculiar geniuses, they were human beings like most of us are, men and women, in a world that was tangled. We're taking two women, Barbara McClintock and Vera Cooper Rubin, as our pair for the last four presentations, because they dealt with the very, very small and the very, very large. Vera Rubin dealt with the dynamic structure of the cosmos in terms of clusters of galaxies and super-clusters of galaxies. Barbara McClintock dealt with chromosomes and genes and was the first person ever to understand that there is such a thing, the popular phrase, as jumping genes. That the genetic order that had been patiently worked out by the mind, into a symbolic structure that was marvellously seemingly complete, was in fact a moveable feast. That genes frequently move around, and the name that she finally gave to them is transposons, and that transposons are now, after her work, so completely important, we talked about 'jumping genes may aid in brain diversity,' an article June 18th 2005. 'About 20% of the human genome is made up of L1 retro-transposons although most are damaged and cannot move around. Scientists considered them to be largely junk [junk DNA]. ' And now it's understood that the repetitions are not extraneous; that the intervalling between them and the variation from genes that move from place to place within a chromosome and can jump also from chromosome to chromosome, are characteristic of the scintillation of creativity of life. All life forms have a creative genome. And so to decode the genome is a misnomer. One must come to appreciate the developing variety of possibility. And in doing so, we add to the two words that characterised reality before. One was existential, that things are practical, and the other was experiential, that they are pragmatic, and adding to practicality and pragmatic, we now add prismatic. The array of possibility of variation includes within it a freedom; a freedom of practicality, a freedom of pragmatism, a freedom that is exemplified in the transforming qualities of prisms, of prismatic arrays, and that the cosmos is actually, the Vajrayana Buddhists, after Milarepa, characterised it as a jewel matrix. One of the early books on Barbara McClintock was called The Tangled Field, and The Tangled Field shows corn stalks. She spent more than 50 years raising crops of corn every year, and then harvesting them, raising and harvesting and then analysing and researching, but in such a deep, quiet accumulated experience, accumulated research field, that her history of familiarity with the corn was that each plant was individual, each cob was individual, each tassel was individual, and finally each chromosome was individual and each within it was individual, and that she was the first to refine, by this accumulated penetration, the ability to see that they move about with a two-step process. One is that a dissociator comes in to play that splits the gene's unity, and then there is an actuator that pushes the dissociator out of the gene into some other gene, and that this actuation and this dissociation are actually two steps of transform that occur classically in primordial wisdom patterns. And of course as soon as we identify Barbara McClintock as a 20th century corn mother, we begin to understand that she is an ancient sage, working science. She understood something which is characterised beautifully. This is an anthropological sample. It's a book published by Stanford University Press about 1956, it's dedicated to the memory of Toni Wolff. Toni Wolff was the woman who was closest to Carl Jung during his whole life. Emma Jung was married to Carl Jung, but it was Toni Wolff who was his companion through most of his life and the book is by, A Collection of Navajo Myths Retold by Margaret Schevill Link, and with a psychological commentary by Joseph L Henderson who was a San Franciscan of some repute. In this, and I have put a copy into the notes, there is an illustration at the beginning of the book, of the ancient pollen path, which Barbara McClintock was able to follow, and the initial spiritual hymn that came out in a Navajo chant called The Night Chant, the first edition of The Night Chant was published in a very large tome of anthropological work in 1902, just the very year that Barbara McClintock was born. The little poem:
In the house of life I wander, on the pollan path,
With a god of cloud I wander, to a holy Place.
With a god ahead I wander,
And a god behind.
In the house of life I wander on the pollen path.
And those of you who have gone through the learning for some time recognise this. An ancient, mystical, visionary dimension. We ran across it when we took a look at the Cloud of Unknowing. That the Cloud of Unknowing is not only that one does not know the above clearly, and one does not know the below or the behind. That you're surrounded by unknowing and therefore you are immersed and you do not know the knower. You do not know the centre. Whether it is the centre, what is the centre of unknowing, and so the unknowing becomes distributed throughout the entire volume of the unknowing, and in this way the expansion of the knower expands to the entirety of the unknowing, and a very deep transform comes into play. It's a universal quality that in equilibrium will be the horizon of a solution. And that solution is the first transform. The second transform is that that solution now allows for the world that was there before to come into that solution and a second transform process initiates itself universally, and that second transform is fermentation. And the fermentation has a third transform that is able to be applied to it by the transformer bringing the solution back into play again, into the fermentation, and that third transform is called distillation. The first quality of the solution is that if you take grain, and you mulch it into water and let it set, that solution will ferment and naturally it will make beer. You can also take berries, fruits, like grapes, or like the earliest wine was made out of hackberries some 8,000 years ago in Anatolia, you can take the fermented wine and you can distil it alchemically and out of that distillation process then you can make your liqueur, your cognac. Our learning, our education, brings the whole frame of reference, of four phases in the first year, to a solution at the beginning of the second year, and carries it into a fermentation in the second phase and in the third phase it is a distillation, that then reveals to us in a super-natural way the actual reality in which we are participating. The most recent book by Roger Penrose, a thousand-page book called The Road to Reality, and the previous book by him, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind.
With Barbara McClintock and Vera Rubin together, paired, as a pliable tuning fork, we're able to see into the very, very, very small, into the sub-gene level of play, and into the supra-galactic, super-cluster, the entire universe is a galactic system and what Vera Rubin found is that there is not enough matter in the visible universe by far to account for the structures of galaxies, to account for the clusters of galaxies, much less the super-clusters of galaxies that are not evenly distributed but have great bubbles and, as one of the great mathematician philosopher physicists, John A Wheeler, who was the teacher of Richard Feynman, said, 'Voids, bumps and bubbles,' that the cosmos is actually like a foam, and the foam surface of the bubbles are great clusters of galaxies that sometimes have spaces where there are no galaxies for 400 million light years, and out of this Vera Rubin was the first to understand that there must be a matter which is not visible, it's not optical, it's not light indexable, it's not spectrographic and it is now known as dark matter. And that dark matter by far is about three-quarters of what is real. Beyond that is a dark energy that is also real, also not visible, but also is not matter. And so our learning that emphasised that in addition to forms there are processes, the forms are energy structures that are synched by polarity, they are also synched by spin, so that you can have not only in electronics but you can have spintronics, but paired to them, paired to energy that is synched by polarities, you have a dynamic that is not synched at all, it is a process flow, but that it has its own pair. It occurs as a field and it occurs as a river, a stream, and rather than a stream of consciousness, there is a stream of conscious experience through the field of nature. The pollen path has this sand painting, and when you see the blow-up in the notes it reads, 'This is a sand painting from the Blessing Chant of the Navajo. The initiate enters on the path of the rainbow at the lower right.' The rainbow of course is a natural prism. The first prism that is available for human beings like ourselves, which is why the original covenant in the old testament is with Noah, the covenant of the rainbow. 'The initiate enters on the path of the rainbow' and we'll see with Richard Feynman that path integrals are the threads by which the mind can understand what things are from existence through experience into the mind, but then must move through that to the real. 'Enters on the path of the rainbow at the lower right, passes onto the yellow pollen path between the two mysterious [efkenasyia 36:51], the spirit bringers, and comes into the white field of ritual ceremony through the Navajo Tree of Life, the great corn plant.; So that the orn plant as the tree of life, we'll come back to this after a short break.
Taking a look at the way in which the mystery of early Neolithic revolution foods that began to occur about 11,000 years ago had two nexes, one in the old world and one in the new world. In the old world, the most powerful grains that were always grown together were wheat and barley, and they began about 9,000 BC. In the new world, the grain was maize, Indian corn, which began again about the same time, about 9,000 BC. Those two grains, those two sets of grains, were the driving force for bringing us out of the Palaeolithic and setting up the foundation for a third phase of human community. From the 150,000 years of the Palaeolithic, about 10,000 years ago came the Neolithic, and after about 7,000 years of that came the temple on top of those two [38:39], and that was civilisation. But every civilisation that has been made has not had an expansion and retrospection that has gone back through all of the previous levels, all the previous layers, and so to escape the fractures an failures of the person, of the civilisation, of the society, of the mind, one tries to flee either back into nature or one tries to flee into some kind of metahphysical system or one tries to look into the nature of things and processes with a development methodology to find out, to discover.
We are faced with an unfortunate, fortunate fall. There is not a single civilisation that is left working on this planet. We are all orphans. Our only choices are to flee into fantacisation of metaphysics, try to go back to some level that was stable, or to hone our penetrative, creative, prismatic insight and so help to bring a new civilisation into being. One that is not limited to geography, is not limited to previous histories, though it consults them, to find out a great deal of what not to do and some of what to do, but to make a star system civilisation, by expanding to that dimension a star system humanity will have a truer ability to index what the cosmos is really about. The interstellar frontier will give us the opportunity, for the first time, to understand something like what Vera Rubin in her Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter collection of essays, and we'll start with it when we come back. Our galaxy is very large, the Milky Way, it's about 60,000 light years in diameter, the largest galaxy found so far is a million light years in diameter.
Let's take a break.
Let's come back to our Science 8, our two-thirds of the way through. In ancient hunting you would hold your spear two-thirds of the way back from the point, in order to be able to throw it to hunt, and so the two-thirds point is a threshold. We're going to start next week with The Nature of Space and Time, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, paired with Richard Feynman and his quantum electrodynamics, and the host for Penrose and Hawking to have their little tete-à-tete, their debate, as we mentioned, is Michael Atiyah, who is a British Lebanese mathematician, born in 1929, and his really great book that came out in 1988, the geometry and dynamics of magnetic monopoles, is extremely important for the 21st century future. The stronger force in the universe is magnetism. And for a magnetic cycle to happen there must be a north and south pole. If you have a magnetic monopole it means that the other pole that completes that circuit is somewhere else and that the field has to be enlarged in order to come to the dimension where it is. On this planet, on terra as we will call it, not earth, there are certain forms, crystalline forms of metals, that have a natural affinity to magnetic monopoles and provide the alternate pole to a magnetic monopole generated power, and one of those elements is magnetite, which is an oxide of magnesium
But that same ratioing of creativity, creative imagination, imagining and remembering, if it is shifted to the other foot, the process shifts from a field of differential conscious visioning to a flow, a giant, complex river of remembering with an emphasis and creative imagining as its base, and this is the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. It is out of the kaleidoscopic conscious river of history. Not a historical, dead, not a chronology, but a kaleidoscopic gigantic river of many deltas, that has as its source the visionary field of infinite consciousness. When it flows, it flows in such a way that one can now move along it and begin to explore the cosmos and science is the exploration of what one finds along the gigantic river deltas of kaleidoscopic history.
When science comes out of this, it emerges as a form that is super in every dimension to the forms of existence or the forms of the mind. The most that the mind in its ordering can do are four-dimensional forms, space-time forms. In the electromagnetic spectrum, indexed by visible light, this is as much as they can do. There is more consciousness beyond that than is able to be put into that box. If the form of the mind is made more integral and more powerful, it simply becomes tyrannical, and this is what we see. When books are the genes of civilisation, cities are like the nexes of genetic beings, and civilisation is the expansive, kaleidoscopic process of history, harmonic to vision. Learning is the neural circuit that this genome generates. And by putting powerful selected genes in new relationalities and then putting them into sequences that open into more dimensions, the mind learns not to fear its expansion into infinity, and this is a very difficult thing to do, because the limited mind, in its mirror reflection, considers infinity as an oblivion. Not simply as a death, but as an oblivion. This is not the case, it is not real. But it is an actual, a projection that happens. So one of the difficult qualities that comes out is to find special people who are artists in their science, like Barbara McClintock or Vera Cooper Rubin, the discoverer, to all intents and purposes, of dark matter and dark energy.
She was interviewed by WNET-FM radio in Arlington, Virginia in 1992, Juliette Weinstein did the interviewing, and she said, 'Will the universe go on expanding, or will it collapse in a big crunch?' And you can see the projection is that if it continues to expand, what will we do? Who are we? Where is the stability? And does it come back again and will it then collapse? 'No one knows, but for the collapse to occur there must be more matter in the universe than we can currently observe. Today's guest, Dr. Vera Rubin, contributed some of the crucial data that established the existence of this so-called dark matter. Join us now for an hour's conversation and musical choices.'
One of the reasons for putting musical choices in is that as an astronomer, before the development of very, very powerful computer graphics an systems, the astronomer's technique was to be awake all night at the telescopes, and very often the telescopes were located in the most desolate areas on the planet, and by viewing from those telescopes one had to be in the dark. You could not have a source of light around you outside or inside, so that your whole visual attention was focussed on the telescope's focus, the crosshairs, and the ability to have a technical movement slightly of the telescope to follow and the astronomer would make sure that it was always in the cross-hairs, and this yoga, in complete darkness, usually alone, all night, almost every night, for years or decades or a lifetime on end. The quality of keeping their perception tuned and primed was to listen to music. So Juliette Weinstein asked her well, what was your favourite piece of music? And she said it was Marian Anderson's He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. And she said why would this be her favourite piece of music? She said, 'Well, my mother's maiden name was Applebaum, and so when she went to school, the girl who sat next to her was Marian Anderson. And my mother was,' she said, 'an amateur singer, and even though Marian Anderson became very, very famous, my mother would have these amateur contests and competitions and performances and Marian Anderson would always come, so that I grew up understanding that there is a great synergy between women, regardless of the social disparity, they can remain throughout their whole lifetime very, very close friends. And so that's it.' She was asked about some of her other favourite music and one of them was Sibelius' Violin Concerto in F and another was Mahler's Fifth Symphony. She said, 'I love Mahler's symphonies because they're so long, they get you through the whole night.' Then she was asked, Juliette Weinstein, 'I can imagine. Tell me now about the rotation of galaxies and your confirmation of the dark matter in the universe?' And Vera said, 'Well, in the case of astronomers, I think it's a fair statement that probably it is the toughest decision you have to make is what you're going to work on. I've always been interested in galaxies. Many years ago I decided I would take a fairly systematic study of galaxies of different types, in order to understand why some of them had large spiral arms and some of them had little spiral arms, and in doing so I started by attempting to study the way stars orbit about the galaxy.' Now she goes into this but one of the qualities that comes out is that she points out that this is a very strange aspect that most of us do not understand. That the earth speeds around our sun at about 2,500 miles an hour, and our star system moves in this arm of our galaxy at about 25,000 miles and an hour, and that the entire spiral arm of this galaxy is rotating around the centre of our galaxy, and because it is so huge and far flung it takes 200 million years for it to be able to come around once and make an orbit. And that our star system has been in existence, she says, in her interview, 'It's made about 50 orbits since it was convened' Actually the truer figure is our star system has orbited the galactic centre about 24 times since it was first emerged.
But our galaxy itself is moving at an enormous speed in a vastness almost unbelievable. And its' doing a dosado with the other large galaxy in our cluster of galaxies, about 30 or 40 galaxies, most of them very, very small, like the Large Magellanic Cloud or the Small Magellanic Cloud, but the other large galaxy in our group is the Andromeda, M31, which is about 2.2 million light years away, and that galaxy and ours are doing a dosado where they will in the far distant future do an exchange of places in that dynamic, like a very, very huge, large infinity sign, with a moment of coming together, and that this entire cluster of galaxies is moving in its own immense speed in an even more immense dimension of space-time, that includes a whole cluster of clusters of galaxies and that we are moving towards the largest cluster of clusters of galaxies, the Virgo group, which has maybe several thousand times the dynamic of our whole cluster of galaxies, and that this is only a very small portion of the cosmos. It hardly adds up to a slight movement of one arc of one cycle of a spiral of a field of spirals that extends beyond the horizon. That the cosmos is enormously complex, in such a way that we will never run out of freedom and variety and creative imagining and remembering. That our being is a light of life set within this plenitude. The appreciation of that takes an artistic sense that comes out of a five-dimensional conscious space-time field. Because it's only the solution of visionary differential consciousness that allows for the transparency of the symbols of the mind. This is a particular beautiful aspect and she speaks in this way. The question was, 'Is there enough dark matter to close the universe?' from Juliette Weinstein. The answer:
That is a question we absolutely cannot answer. Theorists will tell you the universe is closed because their theories are neater that way. Observationally, even with the dark matter that is implied by the rotation curves, we have not detected enough matter to close the universe. In fact we have only seen 10-20% of the matter that would be required to close the universe. And when I say seen, I mean even by its gravitational attraction. Observational evidence to date is that we live in a low-density universe which will expand for ever.
Part of the puzzle that came into play about 50 years ago now, 60 years ago, about the middle of the 20th century, was the problem of entropy. That all energy systems will run down, will use its energy and eventually use it up. And one of the brilliant geniuses to be able to penetrate through that zen-koen riddle of entropy, was Marie-Louise von Franz, who was the greatest analytical psychologist in Carl Jung's circle, outside of Jung himself. When he was doing his magnum opus, Mysterium Coniunctionis, in German, it's in three volumes, and the English translation, the Collected Works from Princeton, it's in two volumes because the third volume was split off because it was largely done by Marie-Louise von Franz. Her work was to take a deathbed vision of St Thomas Aquinas, and to do a Jungian alchemical, visionary opening up of that vision of Thomas Aquinas, and she published it. The book in English is entitled Aurora Consurgens. And what she drew out of that was that while the physical universe that we seem to look on in terms of existence and in terms of a mentality of integralling that existence through our experience, through our symbolic mental forms, though there is an entropy there, there is a complementary invisible neg-entropy that while the physical universe may be losing energy, the non-physical universe increases in energy, and that this spiritual dimensioning has such an enormous expansive potency, potential and potency, that it is able with great generosity to reach back through and penetrate impossibility and to seed the universe that we see so that it is the centre that reconnects and re-emerges and re-expands the universe that were it only created once, would have a static form that would run down in energy, but since it is iteratively, vibrationally, resonantly, harmonically re-engendered at every split second of space-time into the sub-ato(atomic) seconds, that it re-emerges real, constantly, not just all the time, and not just through all time, but in a super-complementarity of eternity. This is very Sufi, very mystical. Not only Thomas Aquinas, he got it from Albertus Magnus, who got it from the ethos of the early 13th century; we talked about Roger Bacon, we talked about Robert Grosseteste and we talked about the beginnings of Western alchemy coming back into play after 1,000 years by Michael Scott, from Scotland, who was the archetypal magician. He was the first magus in the west to wear a conical hat that had the moon and the stars on it, because all of the Arabian maguses wore conical hats that had the stars and the moon on it, and this was the sign of the astronomer familiar with the mystery of the very, very large, and also familiar with the very, very small, so that one could perform the change of forms. And that the alchemy was based upon the three transforms that we talked about in the first part of today's presentation. The first transform is solution. Any equanimity that is reached in any polarised situation will engender a solution horizon. If that solution horizon is put into a recurrent cycling in terms of time, re-timing it, and if it is put in such a way that the space is also re-convoluted into its iterative blossoming, what you will get is a change of form that in alchemy was called fermentation, and we always have called it fermentation. The first transform of solution becomes then the second transform of fermentation. The water will become wine. Because one has put the grapes, the berries, into that solution. Or if you put the grains into that solution it will become beer. And the difference between bread and beer is a simple alchemical transform. The difference between water and wine, the pairing of bread and wine in the Mass is no accident. It is the primordial transformative pair that comes with fermentation. But if you have a further third transformation, the transformation of distillation, you can now distil what was fermented and bring it, the alchemical term was always a liqueur, coming from the ancient Arabic. It becomes the cognac. This now is medicinal. The first liqueur to be made in the high middle ages was in France, and the place where it was made gave the name to the drink. It was called Chartreus. There's a Green Chartreus, which was the original, and a variant of it which is Yellow Chartreus. Green Chartreus is plenty potent. You can still buy it today. I recommend a very small thimble full! It's very powerful. It's to cognac like cognac is to merlot. This distillation is the way in which grains themselves in the Neolithic were developed. The original wild wheat, called einkorn, was able to be first harvested in the high pockets of the Zagros mountains of Iran and in the high pockets of the Anatolian mountains, which is today Turkey. That einkorn is a brittle stalk and as soon as you touch it, most of the heads will crumble and the seeds will fall to the ground in their hulls, so only a few of the stalks could be actually harvested by hand and collected. Otherwise you have to pick the little grains out of the ground. It's called the diploid, the two sets, of the seven chromosomes of wheat. So that Einkorn has a pair of seven chromosome sets that make that. If you double that you get a tetra-diploid, emmer wheat, which now has much larger grains. They stay with the stalk and you can actually harvest that pretty well and make very good bread and very good beer out of that, but if you bring the previous diploid einkorn into hybridisation with the emmer, so you bring the two, which is two sets of seven chromosomes with the four, which is four sets of seven chromosomes, and you bring them together, you get a six, you get a hexaploid. Now you get bread wheat. But all of the vitality and energy of the plant goes into the grains, and they lose the hull wings that in nature would have allowed it to be self-seeding, so that bread wheat has to be sown by hand. It must have a conscious, historical understanding of the art of planting, of the art of harvesting, that goes along with the alchemy of baking and of brewing and of fermenting, and now of distilling. In the new world, maize had the same development. Primordial corns were very small cobs, just a couple of kernels. As they were put back into a process, as hybridisation was achieved, and remember all this happened about 11,000 years ago, by about 3,000 BC there were areas, Barbara McClintock investigated this, she found four or five separate areas where maize was brought into such a refined place but could only be sown by hand where the cobs now were quite large. But the tassels, which are the male aspect of the corn plant, are very far from the silk on the cobs which is the female organ of the corn plant, that it took human beings to make the fertilisation between them, so that man became the spirit marrying the complementarity, gender of the corn stalk, and bringing it so that it would be fertile and would have a continued life, and would nourish the spirit beings who provided this service, this function. All of this is repeated over and over again, grain after grain, staple after staple. The whole process was applied to lagoons, to animal husbandry, to many different aspects, to minerals, and out of that the spirit of man marrying minerals in a visionary way led to medicines, the first beginnings of medicines, the understanding that this herb and this herb together will make a different kind of a solution, a different kind of a presentation of the transform and the fermentation will not be in the medicine but in the being who takes that medicine and the fermentation will be in them. And just in that way, a more expansive kaleidoscopic understanding of this will make a distillation in those beings and they will become not only consciously in space-time but they will become kaleidoscopically available for harmonic of the cosmos. In this way, the arts and sciences are the advanced degrees of our ability to live.
More next week.