Presentation 5

Let's come to the fifth presentation, where exploring a movement that comes cyclically in the history of man. And that movement colloquially is called the New Age. The sense that time has forms is rather universal, and what occurs in the last 5000 years is a focus that somehow the structure of time forms can be influenced by human endeavor, and the first really strong push for this was the culmination of a whole millennium of about a thousand years from what we would date, 4000 BC to 3000 BC. In that millennium was the steady rise of cities of communities that were no longer just villages. That is to say, peasantry, no longer just towns, that is to say, just craftspeople, but had become nascent cities where all the functions of cultural life were raised to the level of a social life. Villages and towns will always have a culture, but it's only originally in cities that you had the seeds and the beginnings of civilization. Thus, the word civilization comes from civitas in Latin, which means city. Uh, decades ago, a great hermetic American, Lewis Mumford, wrote a book about the place of the city in history. And I'll bring a copy next week, and we'll take a little wider look at what it is that we're inquiring about and what it is that we are, in the words of Arnold Toynbee, encountering. And for Toynbee, encountering meant a pair of processes. One is a challenge. The other is a response. In Toynbee, challenge and response are processes of a form called the encounter. And it's a crisis. It's a crisis, a period, a crisis in time, a crisis in space and that all civilizations display, he said. A lifetime of being born, of developing and having their extent to an apex and then a decline and then an end, and that the crisis always comes the ultimate encounter is at the end of a civilization. He looked upon civilizations as forms, then of a supra life of innumerable human beings, as many as hundreds of millions or in its origins, about 3000 B.C. cities had evolved to the extent to where they were able to align themselves with each other in a larger form. And we talked a little bit last week in presentation four that all across the world about 3000 BC, as if it were a time wave, as if it were a millennial threshold of energy passing through our world affected men and women all over the world at the same time. We talked last week about how in China, it's the beginnings of the I Ching with fushi and new guo, the discovery that there are symbols that make a set which allows us to tap the visionary field behind in deeper, hidden in nature, and bring it forth in such a way that we learn to read the through those symbols. In the case of Fucci, he developed the trigrams that became the root of the hexagrams that then became the the I Ching. For Fucci, XI. The trigrams were a symbol for something that is unified. The Chinese word for that was tae, and it was a straight line. Then, in a paired complementarity to that, there was an absence of that unity that nevertheless could be symbolically noted that it was not there. And that was a line then that was broken, so that the brokenness was the space that otherwise would not be symbolically noted, because there would be nothing there in the trigrams. Then the unbroken and the broken line together made an equilibrium, made a unity that was a complementarity of unity and nothingness. Uh, called in Chinese Tao or Dao in the Mandarin pronunciation. Tao and Tay, then were the beginnings of the Great ultimate, the Great ultimate being the Tai Chi symbol, the black tier with the white center, the white tier drop with the clear center so that you had something then that was not a polarity but was a complementarity because they were able to exchange centers, because their centers were already the other. And so you had this double exchange, you had the polarity of presence and absence, black and white, able to exchange and become a larger complementarity because their centers were each other in miniature, as it were, in essence, as it were, so that because they were essentially the other, they were able to exchange, and thus the complementarity established something which in the third place was not tau or t, but tau t, together creating a third quality that came into play, and that was gen. Gen in its original meaning is human heartedness. It created a heart felt awareness that the Tao and Tate together were not a polarity that was in opposition, but a complementarity that was in a cycle of transformation. And that cycle of transformation was expressed by taking a broken and an unbroken line and adding a third line to it, and that that third line would symbolically express that there was not just a resolution between the two, but there was a transformation beginning between the two. And so the first trigram shows that there has to be some way to read this symbol dynamically. And the way in which Fushi 5000 years ago saw it in China was that the unbroken line that is accompanied by two broken lines, but the movement of that unbroken line goes from the bottom to the middle to the top, and one can do a dosey doe and then take a broken line with two unbroken lines, one at the bottom, one in the middle, one at the top. Then one can abstract all three unbroken lines to be three unbroken lines at the top, and one can abstract the broken line in its three movements and have at the top three broken lines so that you had a set of eight now, instead of having two as a polarity, you had two as a pair. And that the pair, when it was cubed, gave you a set that was consistent with its root, but was large enough now to be able to jump the order of pairing. Um, higher. And because you could do it consistently in three levels, you could take the trigrams and you could pair them together. And now you had a movement of, say, an unbroken line with five broken lines above it, and you now had something even larger. You had the set of twos instead of just to the third power to cubed to eight. Now you had the eight which was able to be squared and you had 64 hexagrams now. And all of this took some 2000 years in China to develop from Fu XI to the I Ching, where the Hexagrams were the largest consideration was a period from 3000 BC to about 1000 BC. It took a very long time to develop that Something similar happened in India. In India you had about 3000 BC. The alignment of cities warring against another alignment of cities that were competitors. And so you had the Great Indian War, the Mahabharata staged about 3100 BC. And it was in India, some 2000 years later, about the time that the I Ching was shifting its focus to the hexagrams for an interpretive read of a much expanded way to understand symbolic forms, human participation in them, and the way in which human participation added a bridging consciousness that the orders of expansion were due to our participation, with the original symbols expanding themselves into ordinal lengths. Expansions. Developments. Complexifications in India. About 1000 BC you finally, after 2000 years after the Mahabharata, which was the introduction that there is a divine participation in schooling man to understand his responsibility and participating with the forms of time, with the forms of space, with the forms of symbolic expression. About 2000 years later in India, you had the development of very powerful yogas, and the yogas took the concentration expansion of consciousness and applied it in such a way that now you had a distillation of what, 2000 years before had been the beginnings of a civilized quality of life in ancient India, and you find about 1000 BC the beginnings of what eventually became the Upanishads and the Upanishads. Eventually, a thousand years later, about uh, 500 years later, the time of the Buddha became a complete distillation of what had been before. Just like in China, the distillation after the hexagram etching of 1000 BC, about 500 BC, you had the development, the distillation of Lao Tzu and of Confucius Kung Fu Tzu. Lao is showing that Tao has a generative capacity that extends Gen, so that Gen is not just the meeting of Tao and Tay, but that Gen itself is formative in the transformation and yields to further phases. Just as there are two phases, Tao and Tay. Before Jen, there are two phases after expanding the sense of equilibrium so that now it is a complete cycle, which is the unity, but it's a cycle of five phases. The first is Tau, the second of Tay, the third gen, but the fourth is called EA. It's Chinese for symbol. The symbols are a necessary phase for gen to receive the symbolic field of consciousness and express it in terms of Tao and to express it in the world. And because it is expressible in the world. The fifth phase was the translation of the phrase is always the 10,000 things. The multiplicity of things in the world, and that the multiplicity of things in the world flow back in this cycle, back into town without leaving anything, left over, without leaving a trace, so that Tao is constantly fresh. And if the energy cycle flows all the way through man, through his human hearted concern into his symbolic capacity, which is open, it's transparent. It doesn't stop the flow. Then the world of the 10,000 things is part of an ecology of health that has come under mitigated from nature itself and can flow back into nature, and thus the freshness of the world is preserved. The only thing that would hinder it is a hindrance of stopping the flow. And what is the flow? They Chinese word for it is chi. Chi in the original Chinese. In ancient Chinese is the steam that comes from cooked rice. It carries the fragrance. It. It carries the sensible. This is something that we can live by. The Japanese character for rice has in its uh uh uh character, uh 88, meaning each grain of rice has gone through 88 different human hands to get to you. Therefore, one holds the rice in a community of activity, and that literally it's the far Asian staff of life. Then it's not only that rice feeds you, but it feeds because it is the fruit of the cooperation of people that do not know each other, but sustain each other in a very real ecology, so that she, going through the five phase energy cycle is like that. The whole purpose of a high powered yoga was to make sure that all of the chakras in a body, not just a body, but a body that has a mind and not just a body that has a mind, but a body which has a spirit, and that the dynamic movement of that spirit through the body and its chakras, through the psychophysical body and its chakras, through the mind and its psychophysical symbolic dimensions, that the person who emerges from that is no longer an individual, which is an idea in the mind, is no longer just the character of someone in the experience of their life is no longer just a figure whose motions make a configuration that generates that experience, that is integrated in that individuality. But the field of consciousness itself adds a further dimensioning so that what emerges out, the ancient Sanskrit word for it was the Purusha, the spiritual person, and that that spiritual person now was able to go back through the field of consciousness via the symbols into transforming the way in which integrations of experience happened. Into the way in which the motions of ritual were prescribed. So that one became wise about this, and one didn't do the kind of rituals that stopped the flow of purity. Because when the flow of purity is stopped, it isn't just stopped, it has a repercussion and the repercussion. The Sanskrit word for it was karma. That if one can apply a yoga, especially a very refined yoga of say 1000 BC, one could then have actions without karma. One could have experienced that is integrable in such a way that the individuality of the idea in the mind is a transparency, and one beholds the spiritual person with the same conviction of clarity and certainty that the old egoic individuality was was viewed, and that the old egoic individuality is seen to be an appearance much like a very sophisticated mask, but a mask not of action, which would be like a ritual mask, but a mask of conception, which is not a person but is a personae, is a role, is a social role, and that the social role playing in closed symbolic systems takes the place of making a very dangerous, radioactive kind of karma, because it sees only in terms of polarization and of the conviction that all people are doing what you are doing. That is, they don't know what they're talking about. When they speak of spiritual person, they're speaking about the same kind of individuality that you're speaking about and your group who shares the conviction of these social roles wants to make sure that they're the dominant group. And so civilization comes with increasing peril as it develops. And by 500 BC, some 500 year time period, they used to be called in antiquity the cycles of the Phoenix. 500 years later, you had to have very special high powered yogas in order to be able to penetrate through the problems that had been raised. And so in India, you had the historical Buddha. In China you had the historical Lao Tzu and Confucius. In the ancient Egyptian influenced world by 1000 BC. The strongest thrust was not in Egypt anymore, but was in what became Classical Greece. And 500 years later, 500 years after the emergence of classical Greece as the strongest way of seeing in terms of the ancient Egyptian civilization was Homer. And so Homer, 500 years later, after him comes Pythagoras, and you get an incredible view because the Greek tradition had developed just before Pythagoras's death. He lived to be 99 years old. He lived from about 570 to about 471 BC, which is a huge stretch of time. And by the time Pythagoras was passing on in his very, very old age, it was apparent that developments that had come down through his influence and those around him, not just students, but confreres of his who had developed philosophy. But it was Pythagoras who first used the term of himself I am a philosopher. I am a lover of wisdom, and had translated it into a symbolic expression called mathematics. And it was Greek mathematics that allowed for the Pythagoreans to develop new expressive, symbolic forms that came into play right after Pythagoras, almost contiguous with his final passing. The forms were lyric poetry. Pindar was the first classical great Greek poet. There were poets before him, but Pindar all of a sudden bursts on the scene. And his Greek, his classical Greek, is like the greatest, world's greatest acrobat, doing pirouettes in mid-air with the symbolic, uh, ways of a very sophisticated language. There was a beautiful book on Pythagoras by the great, one of the great British classicists, by Canberra. I remember buying a copy in the in the early 60s. Um. Bowra said most books on Pindar before were written by people who tried to take an eagle on a short walk with a shorter leash. A poet like Pindar must be left to fly, and if you cannot fly with him, you're not reading him. The direct contemporary of Pindar was Aeschylus. So while Greek lyric poetry sprang literally into being by a first class genius, his contemporary and friend Aeschylus developed Greek tragedy at the very same time. And while they were doing that, a young boy named Socrates was learning that there is much more going on than anyone could have supposed, because one of the last of the original Pythagoreans, a woman named Diotima from Mantinea in the northern Peloponnese, instructed him in such a way that he learned that love is a spirit, and that without understanding the complementarity inherent in love, one will never be able to understand what wisdom is, because one will never be able to be companionable enough with another human being, so that the two of you together, in talking with each other, without impediments between the two of you will come to see that no matter what pro or con you adopt individually at the beginning, a process of going through the stages of going through the phases of dialectic of inquiry erases the illusion of division. The diuresis. And because the illusion of division clears itself up, there comes a point to where the two of you or more will understand each other perfectly. That moment is Alicia. Alicia. Truth. The truth was arrived at, despite the initial polarity. Because you were companions enough together to pursue the stages all the way through to the way in which it returned back into the purity of truth. And so the ancient classical Greeks had the same kind of ecology, that the Chinese had the same kind of ecology in India, of the yoga of the chakras. And you had this kind of a sharing where there was an ability, had there been contact all the way around. A student of Pythagoras would have been able to understand the Tao Te Ching. But there was a contact between India and the ancient classical Greeks because there was a contact between India and the ancient Egyptians. One of the largest increases in contact between ancient Egypt and India was under the fellowship of the woman, Pharaoh Hatshepsut, about 1500 B.C. she took what had been old trade routes for just a few adventuring sailors, and she pioneered making ports all along the trade route and discovered that there was the capacity to make whole fleets of ships. And so 1500 BC, while she was building a Dare El Bahari across the Nile River from Luxor and Thebes, which was to be her her kind of mausoleum. She was making fleets of 60 ships at a time to sail from a Red sea port all the way along the coasts of Africa and Arabia, along the southern coast of Arabia, uh, through across the Straits of Hormuz, along the shoreline of what is today Iran and Pakistan to the Indus civilization. Mohenjo daro and Harappa, which by the time of Queen Hatshepsut had been large civilized cities for more than a thousand years. Harappa and Mohenjo daro were two cities close to 400,000 people. 4500 years ago, they had pottery, sewage lines and aqueduct lines and spread agricultural tracts all along the Indus River so that you had metropolises in India, very large metropolises. The civilization had come to the point. By the time of Pythagoras and the historical Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius come to where they began to understand that there was an earlier quality not only a millennia before, but there was a quality a millennia before that millennia that the Greeks looked back beyond Homer finally, and began to understand that they had come from some kind of transform in very, very ancient times. And one finds, for instance, in Plato, in the dialogue of the Crito. Because Pythagoras had gone to study in Egypt, and when the young aristocrat Plato was trying to develop himself, he came upon an old Pythagorean in southern Italy, in the boot in Tarentum, who said, you, in order to understand philosophy, in order to understand Pythagoras, you really need to take yourself to Egypt and put yourself through the same learning paces that he did. And when Plato was writing the Crito towards the end of his life, Crito was an ancestor of his from the time of his grandfather. Crito says in Plato's language. That the Egyptians said, You Greeks are always children. You only remember one flood because your history only goes back that far. The flood was about 2700 BC, whereas Egyptians like ourselves have been keeping track of many floods. And you do not even know that your ancestors, 9000 years before, saved the cream of civilizations. At that time, about 9500 BC, when they were under attack by a perverse negative demonic civilization called Atlantis. And that Atlantis perished in a great flood in one night, but that the flood which perished Atlantis also perished. Most of the civilized cities, which were on coasts and waterways, and they were inundated, and only places in the high mountains survived. Only places like in Egypt, where the sands of the Sahara would absorb such flooding because we're used to floods with the Nile. We survived. And here is the way in which you may survive now. You must understand that there are symbolic forms not only to time and to space and to human life, but also to symbols, symbolic sets of expression, and that these are also cycles of the cosmos as a whole. That all that exists and its complement of what does not exist, yet all the actual and the potential together make a living cosmos, and that nature is the fertility of the cosmos and its wisdom coming into play and allowing for things to exist. And they exist temporarily, some for a very long time, but temporarily because they synch into polarity, and that polarization allows for forms to stay. And the highest level. The highest order of forms staying is when symbols integrate them. When symbols integrate them into ideas, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And it was discovered that there are lifetimes of ideas. It takes about 150 years for an idea to occur to one man or woman in a glimpse of intuition, and to go through its developments until it is common knowledge on the street by men and women, as if it were just a part of nature. We're going to take a break, and then we'll come back. Let's come back. We're taking a look at the way in which civilizations began about 6000 years ago, because of the rise of cities. And even though there were cities that predate that, they were not, in a sense, um, immensely viable. There was a great archaeologist, um, who? Kathleen Kenyon, rather largest largish woman, a very elegant culturally, who did the archaeology of Jericho. And She's the One over the years found that Jericho had been founded some 10,000 BC 12,000 years ago, and that the origin of it was that it was a collection of the farmers at the time who brought their grain to be threshed on a common threshing ground. And because this was a process that took some while. The origins of Jericho came as the group place where this was done, but that there were whole swaths of thousands of years where there was no one there. And it's only later in this time period that we're talking about about 4000 BC, that you begin to get the continuous non sputtering quality of cities that endured into historical times. The ancient Catalhoyuk and the Anatolian Highlands was a city 6500 BC, but did not have a continuity in a continuousness The easiest mnemonic way to understand this is that the archetypal symbolic figure of 4000 BC is Adam. That the Adam of the Book of Genesis. If you add up all of the generations, he lives at 4000 BC, so that the first man is not the first man in terms of just the species, but the first man to be able to understand that there is an ongoing continuity which he participates in and can pass this on. And of course, the son who is killed, Abel cannot have it passed on because Cain was guilty of the murder. He cannot pass it on. So there's a third son, Seth, who then begins the passing on of generations. And so later on, at the end of a time form at the time of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, about 100 years later, you begin to have a kind of sethian Gnosticism as the true, deeper meaning and expansion of what all this has been about. And a competing Gnosticism at the time was the Valentinian from Valentinus of Alexandria. From Adam at 4000 BC to 3000 BC is that first millennium of a civilized continuity, so that one establishes, with the sudden powering up of civilizations about 3000 BC. Also, the idea of a millennium of a millennial threshold of condensation of capacity, complexity of application. The energy now able to be translated through symbolic forms to increase its application, to increase its concentration. And so you have an India. The development of high powered yogas. You have in Chinese the sophistication of the itching and its trigram hexagram symbols. You have in Egypt the rise suddenly of a hieroglyphic symbolic expressiveness and the beginnings of dynastic Egypt, which a thousand years later now have attained a deeper complexity, so that by 2000 BC one end of a millennium of condensation, which goes with a millennium before that of preparation, so that you begin to have a conception for the first time, that time forms can come in very large pairs. That there can be pairs of millennia. And the ancient Greek word for that, Ioannes And that just as an Ian is a pair of millenniums, each millennium is a pair of the cycles of the Phoenix of 500 years. And not only that, but there are apparently at least two staggered time forms operating in a kind of a syncopation. That if one goes about 350 years before a millennial marker, one has another kind of millennial marker, which also has its ionic expansion, which also has its, um, a year of Phoenix expansion. The first realization of this comes with the who was born about 1300 1350 BC. And it's with Moses that one begins to get a kind of a deeper correlation that comes some thousand years after Moses, because the figure, who was born about 350 years before the millennium of Jesus is Alexander the Great. So that Alexander the Great goes back in one millennium to Moses and a millennium before Moses. One goes back to Sargon of Akkad, the first king of kings. So that one has. Then Sargon and Alexander the Great are ionic resonances, and Sargon and Moses and Alexander the Great are millennial resonances. If you go an eon after Alexander the Great, you come to about the 1650 AD mark. And this is the time of the young manhood of Sir Isaac Newton, and very soon after that the birth of Benjamin Franklin. And with Newton and Franklin, you have a mathematic symbolic quality raised to the level of differential and integral calculus. For the first time, you have with Franklin the development not only of the UN limited personal genius, but also the ability to, as the French Turgot once said, Franklin snatched a lightning and electricity from the skies and applied it to get rid of tyrants on the earth. What figure would be millennial before Newton and Franklin and millennial after Alexander the Great? You come to a time period of about 650 AD, and that millennial figure is Muhammad. In China, it's the founder of the Tang dynasty, Tong Tai Tsung. So that you have a planetary quality of visage, so that one can understand where these are in terms of the progression and phase movements of time forms. The classical Greeks with Plato refine Pythagoras to such an extent that there was the conception that the constellations of the zodiac, of the movement of our sun through the star fields for a year, that there are 12 constellations, and that each one of these constellations participates in one of these iconic themes, so that if you take 12 times 2000 years, about 24,000 years, you have a great year, you have a platonic great year. Actually, it worked out because it was not rounded off like this. It was 25,000, uh, many hundreds of years. It's usually expressed as 26,000 years. But that erases the clarity of time forms not only having a structure, but that they're predictable, not for what is coming out so much, except to pay attention on transforming what is ending it. The ancient phrase is the. The child is the father of the man, so that you learn. You teach the child so that he grows up to be that better man. And if so, then that is done at the cusps of time forms. That next group will have these transforms active in their dynamic. So that we find ourselves in 2009, having just passed through the threshold the last 18 years since 1991 of an ionic storm in terms of the dimensions on this planet, but that the generation or so before that, maybe two generations before that, there was an intensification of an awareness of a consciousness that this is coming and one needs to prepare. One needs to prepare in the sense of trying to express clearer and clearer what it is that we have achieved, what it is that we must change, transform, and that this is a process that takes a growing up period, and that the classic understanding is that it takes really three generations for it to reach an apex of intensity. And if it isn't carried through in a conscientious way by the fifth generation, it will begin to dissipate in such a way because it will not seem important. It will seem just ordinary. So if you take a generation at about 30 some years, it means you have about a century before you come to the apex of the capacity. But after 150 years, after a century and a half, that original insight that had matured to that intensity of capacity will have dissipated enough so that it no longer is seems important. It will no longer have the appeal. And so we're living already at a time. We are, um, about two thirds of that of fourth generation, and one can already sense that there are fewer and fewer people who really understand what we have achieved. What is at stake, and the necessary learning that must accompany so that the transforms are able to be fruitful in in what is coming. That what is coming is a future, but that the future is always also retroactive. In mathematics, the function is called recursive. The recursivity of the future means that the past has to be relearned. It it cannot remain the past. It has to be a new past. And the way in which the new past and civilization comes into play is through understanding history as a very high powered, dimensional dynamic. That history is not an objective archive of something dead. That is a fiction of a indoctrination of of false idea, of the role of history in the life of individuals who are using their symbolic thought structures as arbiters of what something is, so that it is labeling rather than understanding. It is planning by presuppositions rather than exploration by inquiry. The simplest way that used to be talked about 50 years ago is one needs to develop a critical mind, and that the more different kinds of people you know about, critically, that competitiveness allows for you to build a complexity which is not polarizing but is giving you a multidimensionality and that this is very important. We find. That after Alexander the Great. Who was born in 356 BC, died way too young 323 BC, could have lived on at least another 30 years easily, perhaps 35 if one carries that to about 300 BC. One comes to a point where there would have been an increased focus, a capacity to really understand what was happening in terms of the rhythms of civilization and the time forms of civilization. Alexander the Great, founded by his design the city of Alexandria, to be the first world city. It was meant to be, from the beginning, the central city of a world of all mankind. The Greek term for this is the Oikoumene. The ecumenical with the EU see is Latin o I k u o u in Greek ikm-manning. Him. The mankind as a single family. And the first step that Alexander the Great had in producing this was to marry his Greek generals to Persian women, so that their children would no longer have the polarization of the Persian and Greek ethos is that they would be included in the same family, and while there might be cases of internecine animosity and warfare, it would begin the process then of breeding out the old polarizing enmity, because those children then would be freer to marry other kinds of human beings from other parts of the expanding single world, so that one would have eventually a world humanity, a world person. And that it wasn't just marrying and having children, but the faster way, the more indelible way would be to compare symbolically to bring the symbolic systems into juxtaposition. So there would be a faster kind of a completeness. So if the central dynamic for Alexandria was not its Congress, not its political power, but its learning center, its great library, and is the great library of Alexandria. That was the melting pot of all the different kinds of humanity, and that melting pot extended in Alexander's time all the way to the ends of India. All the way to the beyond the British Isles. Into the Atlantic. One of Alexander's navigational geniuses was a a marine admiral named Pythias. Pythias and Pythias circumnavigated the British Isles, Ireland, and Britain and Scotland, and went far enough out in the Atlantic that he came to a place where there was 24 hour daylight, which would have been Iceland. And he did this before Alexander died and wrote a book about it. And this was in the three 20s BC. Ashoka, who was the great emperor of Buddhist India, sent emissaries to Alexandria. The ancient Pre-english, the ancient Celts and Brits had, uh, emissaries as well, because there had been contacts for several thousand years. If one looks at the way in which ancient and by ancient, I mean much more ancient than just classical era. The first great Celtic monument in Ireland is Newgrange and it was built 3200 BC. And Newgrange is a beautiful surviving mound that has a structure that allows, for one moment each year for the rising sun right at the horizon, to send a ray all the way through the entire structure and illuminate a hieroglyphic at the very center of the tumulus, so that the sun confirms that man has understood the cycles well enough to build a receiver of that gift of life, that ray of sun, and to place his spirals exactly where they are illuminated. Only one moment in one sunrise in an annual cycle. Later on, the development of that capacity was taken out of the underground and put on top of the ground in Stonehenge, on top of the ground in Avebury and Woodhenge. And one finds in the most ancient stones of Stonehenge an impressive a mycenaean Greek dagger from about uh 2100 BC. There is a great deal to be learned through archaeology and through anthropology. And what we're refreshing for ourselves. There's a great deal for us to appreciate now that we are living in a post-hurricane time storm, which was seen and foreseen and reseen throughout civilized history, but especially in those generations from about 100 years before 1991, about 18, the 1890s, that from that time period on, you get an intensification of men and women addressing something that has changed the very shape of the world and challenges by that encounter us to change the shape of our symbolic thought, the patterns of our lives, the sequences of our actions, the very material of our existential reality, that all of this will be challenged. And it is in the middle of the 1890s that you find the discovery of the electron for the first time, a subatomic particle, the discovery of x rays from seeming accidents that were being kept track of in a scientific way. That is to say, there his history of what these things were and how they got there and what they were for, allowed for one to understand something has happened here that we have never seen before. Now the x rays and the electron. But in 1895, H.G. Wells published The Time Machine is the colloquial phrase is a quantum jump in what science fiction might be. The first really great science fiction novel followed every year after that, because Wells woke up to understanding that he had a kind of a prophetic capacity that was not there because he was intellectual. It was there because he was relentlessly self-made. He was a poor boy from a poor family, and he had to make his own way. And he discovered that he could write so that people would read it. And you have in a row, as we talked about the time machine the very next year, The Island of Doctor Moreau. The very next year, the Invisible Man, the very next year, the War of the worlds. And finally, after about ten years, Welles wrote his beautiful little volume that I'll bring in again next week of the discovery of the future. The Time Machine is about not just the future, but about an incredibly far future in which mankind in its degradation, had polarized into the childlike Eloi, who just play on the surface but are being raised as food for the goblin demonic Morlocks that live underground, and that mankind has devolved into a species that feeds upon itself just to keep feeding upon itself an ultimate dead end. It is the quality, as we're looking at time forms, that one needs to go back and see that the two time cycles that we've identified so far work in a tandem kind of a way that while they're related together, they're related together in terms of a spiraling forth. And that if one can envision them in terms of the last half century, one sees that they form a double helix, much like the double helix of a DNA. But that there is a paradox between the two spirals that maintains an equilibrium all the time, so that these pairs are like symbolic alphabets of being able to be arranged in an expressive order so that one can understand what it translates to, not just what is being said, but what comes to be, because one speaks this way. And so the tandem, though it is of a very small pool of symbols, uh, DNA has four nucleic acids, but they're combinations of preparedness in ever longer sequences. They're called base pairs. Increases the ability for life to speak in this way and translate it into new existences. Into evolved existences, and that the transformations are not just because there is just a transformation point or a threshold, but that there are definitely qualities. They were coined by popular press at the time when they were found by Barbara McClintock examining maize. South Mexican corn. Uh, she, uh. The press said, had discovered jumping genes that they are able to move around within the sequence creatively, and that those that the creativity worked were able to make transformations instantly with the very next emergence into existence, because existence doesn't just emerge and then statically is there. It is vibronic like subatomic particles are always in a vibration. Atoms themselves are in a vibration. Molecules are in a vibration. Anything made of them, the proteins, the cells, the beings are all iterative in terms of a time frequency which is measurable as an energy, so that an energy, even though it cinches itself into polarity to be able to record it, cinches itself in at least three different ways, three different levels all the time. Not only is there an electron, but there's a higher energy of it, the muon, and there's a higher energy. And the third level of that in the tau particle. So that one moves almost like the trigrams of the I Ching, that one can understand at last that there are structures and ways by which we can understand those structures dynamically. And that we can participate in the way in which they engender, because we can tune the energy and our ability to tune the energy has a deep complement, because our tuning of the energy is because of our participation of a whole ecology, of the dimensions of consciousness, with the dimensions of space time better said to be time. Space because time is the originating dimension. There's a new physics of this kind of understanding coming out, and I'll bring in some of the material next week. It's at last being understood it if you take time, it isn't that time comes sequentially before the three dimensions of space. It's that the three dimensions of space blossom out of the dimension of time, so that one needs to understand. Nature is a field. A creative field, and whenever there is a movement of a dimension in that field, even though there is nothing that moves, the movement itself blossoms out into a quaternary of four dimensional space time. This is an ancient wisdom as well, even as it is a future wisdom. We're going to speak next week about two. Figures who were enormously important. One of them is Arnold Toynbee, who developed in a study of history what he thought was a roster of civilizations, a taxonomy of civilizations, and one of his most profound critics. Pitirim Sorokin as a preview. Pitirim Sorokin was born in 1889, in the far north of Russia. Vologda Province was originally the native people to that area, called the Komi people. Komi and the Komi people are Finnish of Finnish descent and have been there and those primal forests for time immemorial. Sorokin's mother was a Komi woman. His father was a Russian man. Who repaired icons and churches for the Russian Orthodox religion and constantly moved around. But when from town to town, from church to church, to do the repairs and earned his living that way like an itinerant gypsy craftsman. But his wife died, leaving three sons and the husband, when Pitirim Sorokin was only three years old. And because he was so young, he didn't understand what was happening. But he could sense because his mother was not moving and people were bending over. And in the candle light of the night, the shadows of the people bent over frightened him so much that he just sat down and began to cry as a little boy. It was one of the first times in a lifetime that was punctuated by incredible challenges of almost devastating quality. We'll see in more detail. As a young man, he became a genius at investigating kinds of people and eventually would become the founder of the sociology department at Harvard. But after the Russian Revolution in the teens during the First World War, he became an outspoken critic of the Bolshevik communists and became the secretary of one of the competitors of Kerensky, and was arrested and finally let go. Then re-arrested because he had begun to criticize Lenin and his toughies. Criticize the false revolution of communism. And finally a third time arrested a condemned to death. And so many people were being arrested and condemned to death. They couldn't kill them fast enough so they would spend weeks or months in prison. And it was so horrific, the stress and pressure that when somebody would contract a disease like typhus, they would rush to try and get fleas off the dying. Typhus person to infect themselves so that they would die faster, so that they would not have to go through the incredible stress. Two school mates of Sorokin convinced Lenin that he was a wishy washy intellectual, and it would be good PR for them to let him go, but banish him so that he could go out to the rest of the world, to the rest of Europe and say, there's no way that you can beat these people. And so he was personally exonerated by Lenin from death to be a stool pigeon, to go out into the world. And the first person that invited him to come and live with him was Tomas Masaryk, the president of Czechoslovakia. He said, you come and live in my house. And eventually made his way to the United States, made his way to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he began doing his great sociological works in English. He would be of world interest because Harvard came searching him in 1930 to found the Department of Sociology, and he became the first head of it. He lived until 1968, and we have a range of material. I will try to bring some. Here's a photo of the young Pitirim Sorokin. During the Russian Revolution, and towards the end of his life, he became one of the thoughtful elders of the new civilization coming. We'll take a look at him, and we'll take a look at Toynbee and do a reconnoiter of Sri Aurobindo and of Alfred Kroeber, because we're trying to bring different aspects together yoga, anthropology, sociology, history. And we'll keep adding so that you begin to get the scintillation of the whole chakra. And where we are now is that that chakra has been dismissed for at least the last 30 years, so that it has been fading. And right at the time where we are at the crisis that they all devoted their lives to, we are not interested in them. And it's a devastating way in which civilizations in the past have laid the seeds for tyranny. Let's come back next week.