Hermetic America

So let's pretend it's the 21st century and that we have capacities. And one of the capacities which we will have in the 21st century is to invite the spirits of those departed loved ones to be with us. Man has always had that capacity. The earliest evidence that we have of a respect for the transcendent qualities. Relating life to death is from about 200,000 years ago. Archaeologists discovered. In Israel. On the upper slopes of Mount Carmel, a tomb of a Neanderthal who lived in that area not far from modern Haifa. 200,000 years ago. And surrounding the body, which had become just a fossilised skeleton. Where the pollen seeds from flowers that had been put in an outline around the entire human form of that person, that being. And so at least 200,000 years ago, there was a respect. For the fact that the division between life and death is a membrane. And there's an osmosis going both ways. About 30,000 years ago. This particular membrane between life and death was the concern. Of a whole civilization. The civilization that. Largely centered itself in northern Spain and southern France. And in the 20th century, about the time of the Second World War, the first caves were discovered that had Paleolithic art in them. In these areas, Lascaux, the greatest of all those caves discovered in 1940. In those caves. Our images of the animal populations. That were essential for the life sustenance of those people at that time. But here and there. Among the animals. Our geometric angles are indications of certain straight lines and rarely, occasionally a semi human figure. In one cave in southern France. There's a stick figure. Whose eyes are just bulging out. Whose hands are splayed. And he has male and his penis is erect. In fear of the unknown. There was a Frenchman who died not long ago. Who took all of these scattered abstract images. Thinking that they related to man, and he arranged them together painstakingly and found that they are all elements of what he called a form which he named the Paleolithic star. In basic form. It is a dot surrounded by a number of straight lines. This Palaeolithic star. Was an abstraction from the art of 30, 35,000 years ago. And what is peculiar about that Palaeolithic star is that it resurfaces in Hellenistic Judaism. In the catacombs, in the Tombs. Of Alexandria. Of Dura Europa's. And of Rome. One finds not just hints, but the entire Palaeolithic star. And it is usually over the head of the teacher. Or it is beside the one who is facing death. Undergoing that transformation, going through the membrane to the other side. In the first two lectures we established. The sensitivity. That great movements of history had come into closely packed integration. And because of. Many of the deep, interwoven patterns of history of that time, one of which was the founding of the Roman Empire by Augustus Caesar. The world seemed to condense itself into a single presence, a single moment. And in that time the great teachers. We're from Alexandria. And we talked in the first lecture of how an eyewitness, Philo of Alexandria, somewhere around 25 A.D. 25, the Common Era, reported a community just outside of Alexandria, which had been there for several hundred years and was the. Place where all the great contemplative leaves of the age collected themselves. It was like the major leagues of meditation. And that the president of that particular community was able to speak in such a way that his words, his language. Made an immediate engraved impress upon the psyches of those listening. And that without the intermediary of the air or the ear. His language became forms in the minds of the hearers. And Philo writes as an eye witness to this and says. There was in the room a silence within a silence, if that is possible. Meaning that there was a silence in the room, but also a silence within each person. And in that silence. Within a silence. In that doubled quality. Language that was pure had a way of reaching into the living core of the other person. And out of this a great movement. Not so much in philosophy, but a great movement in human aspiration came. It's called and later philosophic designation neoplatonism. Which is a misnomer for it was really neo Pythagorean ism. It was the rediscovery of the kind of communities, contemplative communities pioneered. 500 years before by Pythagoras. And he said when someone comes initially to hear wisdom, they cannot hear anything. Their ears are tuned to common life. Their language in reference is to common things. And that it takes about five years. To hear. To keep silent and to learn to hear that language has a nother quality to it. Not only a referential quality to things, but a dynamic presentational quality in and of itself. That words are real. They do not just imitate things. But language can be tightened and focused like incandescent light becoming a laser. And a laser language creates an immediacy of reality. Pythagoras said of those men and women who learned to open the space of their minds. To resonate to the reality. Of that spiritual language, he said of them that they are now mathematically. As opposed to those who could simply hear they were called a cosmetic. Like acoustic and English comes from the Greek acoustic. So that in between being able to have a mind of reality and the common mind of the street. Is a gap, a patient waiting space. A period of learning to listen. And so the great. Development of aspiration around the turn of the millennium 2000 years ago was the increased capacity to hear in a living language. Symbolized by the phrase the living word. To be able to hear in a living language. The reality of one's life. So that the mind was able to give a symbolic understanding of what that life could be a vision of the future. And so quickly surrounding that movement, that community, that Alexandrian beginning. It was a quality of envisioning. Not only on a personal scale. Envisioning how one's life could be better. How one's life could be directed to something worthwhile. But envisioning the future of man as a whole. And so this apocalyptic visionary. Envelope surrounded that experience, that aspiration, that community. And very quickly to those not having had that experience, not having gone through that silence, not having had that mathematical quality of mind to see symbolic structure as real, those outside looking in said that these were fanatics, these were heretics, these were people who were against life. Because they didn't live like everyone else. They lived for an aspiration of something beyond life. And they were. Given. Many trials as people. And many devastations. But the resonance of something real. Permeates. And in that time, for the next 300 years, the ripples and resonance of those kinds of communities, of men and women were very real in the human psyche. And then the context of that entire development, which had been the order of the Roman Empire, collapsed. Five 410 ad when Alaric sacked Rome, there was nothing but shards and charades left to the Roman Empire. And that whole wisdom tradition. Went into Eclipse. There were no living traditions left. But there was a record of it in the culture of the high Greco-Roman Hellenistic era, especially in the Alexandrian version. And there was a record, a kind of a memory. Within the mind, within the psyche of individuals. And from time to time there would be small groups of people who would recognize and revive. But because there was no civilization as a context to sustain them, they would die out. And there were groups for about 1000 years. There were individuals for about 1000 years that would come and go. One individual was John Scott's original. Bertrand Russell and his history of Western philosophy says that in the dull, gray, mediocre plain. Of abject, boring thought of the dark ages. There's one silver spire of a single genius, John Scott, a surgeon who singlehandedly made the Carolingian Renaissance. Long enough for Charlemagne to come into power and dream of resurrecting Rome again, and then all faded again into the background. The ninth century was as dark as the eighth had ever been. In the 10th century, darker than ever. The nine hundreds in terms of the Western world are one of almost abject, boring nothingness. And slowly. Out of need. Out of development. There came the stirrings of a medieval quality of life, but it had none of the concentrated fire of the ancient world. And there finally came a time and we talked about it last week. Where the last trace of the old world. The city of. Byzantium of Constantinople fell to the thundering cannons of Mehmed the Conqueror, who laid siege to the city's supposedly impregnable walls month after month after month. For almost a year. And finally, the supposedly impregnable walls were breached. And the last trace of the ancient world. The Roman Empire fell in 1453. And we talked last week about how. The small handful of wise people fleeing about 10 to 20 years before that event. Tried to find places in Greece to set up monasteries again. Places on the Mount Athos Peninsula. Meteora various places. But those who still had a remembrance that there needs to be a civilization as a context for the inner life to become real in the lives of men and women. They went to northern Italy where the money was, where they Ilan was. And the young Cosimo Dominici. Staying out a little exile in Venice invited the best of these to come back to his city, Florence, and to hold a conference on world religion, on inner penetrative humanity. And so in Florence of 1439, a new quality of vision was reborn again. And it became apparent to Cosmo and to dozens of other Italians of that time that they knew nothing at all about the ancient world, that the medieval heritage was a truncated, crabbed, cribbed, crippled version of what had been real. And the only way. To come into contact with the glorious reality of the ancients and bring that golden age back. Was to learn to read again, to bring the books back in into translation, most of them only surviving an exquisite, very difficult Greek. And so a whole generation of Italians were set to the task to learn to read Greek well enough to translate them into the languages of the Europe of that day, into Latin and eventually into Italian, eventually into French and German. Spanish. English. And out of this came the Renaissance. And the Renaissance was the rediscovery of the intensity of the inner fire that powered the ancient world for the texts that had survived. Were not the everyday texts. We have only one or two engineering books, one of them Vitruvius book on architecture. But there are dozens of books. All of Plato's dialogues. All of plotinus survived. And so in the 1400s, after the mid part of the century, from about 1450 on until about 1492, in that 40 years, all of the great classics of the ancient world, the intensity of the fierce vision of reality that men and women had once prized and held were brought back into play in living human beings. And the greatest of the Renaissance revivals was a man named Ficino Marsilio Ficino. He was the son of Cosimo Domenici's personal doctor. And Cosimo took him when he was a teenager, and he said, If you will learn Greek well enough to translate Plato for me, I will provide you with a via carriage up on the hills outside of Florence, up in the direction of Fiesole. And so the via carriage, which is still there with its yellow stucco and its white trim, was the place that ficino for about 40 years worked diligently to bring back into play all the ancient wisdom. And it was there at the vicarage that the adolescent Michelangelo first learned about the power of symbols and ideas. Pico della rem Randhawa. Botticelli. Leonardo, a whole host of geniuses came out of this. And right at the. Apex of the discovery of the ancient world came the realization that somehow there had been quintessential teachers. Not only Plato and Pythagoras. But later on in Roman times, teachers like Plotinus. Teachers like Jesus. And the whole. Press of the next century of the 1500s. Was an attempt on one hand to crack the atom of individual teachers to find out how they worked. To break open the mystery. Of a plotinus of a Jesus. And out of this came a new phase of the Renaissance called the Reformation. And at the same time one finds in the 1500s staggeringly individual giants of people, someone like a Cortez, who individually would take on an entire civilization in Mesoamerica. Who burned his ships so his men would not be tempted to lose heart and flee from the difficulties. Men like Pizarro, who single handedly took on the Inca civilization. Larger than life individuals and not only on the battlefields of world exploration and adventure, but also in human endeavors like medicine. An individual like Paracelsus, who took on the whole medical establishment of his time. Who said? Health is not a matter of simply matching up corresponding images. Like some astrological image with some metal, with some herb, with some condition in someone. Not just to line up correspondences. But that the human body. Was biochemical in nature. He called it electrochemical and that the chemical medicine worked by changing the structure of the chemicals in the body. And the whole development of chemistry came out of this, the whole development of a structural pharmacology. Was to slowly emerge out of these beginnings. In. The 1500s. One of the great realizations early on by about 15, five, 15, ten. One of the great realizations was that we will have a different kind of life when there is a different kind of humanity. And to have a different kind of humanity, we need to educate. The men and women out of the ordinary, mediocre world in which they have been swimming for 1000 years. Just treading water. And teach them how to bring together. How to integrate. How to condense. How to concentrate. Their thought, their feeling, their vision, their capacities to do. And one of the great teachers of that time, the teacher of Paracelsus, was a man named Fatima's. And Fresenius brought together one of the first great libraries. Cosmo Domenici had bought some of the rarest books available, and if you go into the Laurentian library, you'll find several hundred books, all collector's items, all chained to their tables because books were very valuable. Themis brought together a library of about 10,000 volumes. And a little tiny abbey called Spawn Time. And began to work on a way in which someone, individuals could read all of these volumes and to integrate all of the information together. But it required a new kind of language, a language that would encode symbolically meaning. And so Thrasymachus worked on a symbolic language. Which would be the master key to all the information in all of the languages of antiquity. A symbolic handle which an individual could operate and access the entire spectrum of wisdom. One person knowing everything. And out of this came the phrase Renaissance man. But Tresemmé is working alone. Occasionally he would write letters to various people, but largely working alone was limited. Then when he died. The monks disassembled the collection. They scarred up the books. They broke up the shells. They resented the discipline that had been forced as they saw it upon them. And spawn time. Today is a nowhere place and there's no trace of truthiness other than the commemoration that one would find there in one's own remembrance. But the ideal had been posited. And it was picked up by the English. The English came into the picture in a very odd way. A very wealthy young man who was dean of St Paul's, John Cullen. Went to study under Ficino for just a few months. Got the idea of the Renaissance. Got the taste that something could be done. He heard of the example of themis through one of themis students. An alchemist named Agrippa. Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa, whose work on magic is still considered one of the great works of that era. But what struck call it was the possibility of a man mastering. A universal language which could master all of the knowledge of the world and call it pass this on to some of his younger students, some of his younger friends. One of them was Sir Thomas Moore. And so Thomas Bower and his very good friend Rasmus. Realized in a complimentary way that two things were needed. Even if a man mastered a universal language, the universal language, he would need a community, especially a city of like minded individuals, to be able to project that upon the world that an individual alone can only do so much. But an entire city of many tens of thousands of people patterned and organized together, powered by a single vision. This would be something. And so Sir Thomas Moore wrote one of the great books of the world Utopia, about that kind of an ideal community, that kind of ideal city. And there were many others, mostly Italians at that time. Tomaso Campanella, City of the Sun, many other utopias that were written. And so the idea of a utopia. A community of men and women that could affect the entire world by powering a vision of the future, coupled with a universal language that would allow access to the symbolic structural code of all wisdom, linked again to the tradition that would plug contemporary people back into the wisdom. Tradition not only of antiquity that was known about. But of antiquities that were unknown about what? About an Atlantis or about some kind of community of the Chaldeans or the Persians or the Egyptians or the Indians or the Chinese. Who knew? And so three major strands came together in the 16th century. The Utopian city, the universal language and the tradition of wisdom. And those three strands were braided together assiduously by an Englishman named John D, who was the astrologer for Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the first. They was an odd character. When we see films about Arthurian things and we think we're seeing Merlin the magician on the screen, we're actually seeing John Day. He wore a little cap, almost like a skull cap. And he wore long flowing robes. And he was the greatest mathematician of his day. He was one of the few people of his day who could actually cast a mathematical horoscope accurately. John De. Found what he thought was the key. That A the universal language that would bridge the tradition and the utopia, that the universal language had something to do with the archetypal levels of the human psyche, what he called angel language. That the angels in between God and man were masters of that language. And if we could contact angel intelligences, we could then learn that language. And he sold this idea to Queen Elizabeth. And Queen Elizabeth's Saint John D and his young wife. And an apprentice named Edward Kelly and his wife sent them to. First to Poland on the continent, and then to a place that is in the Czech Republic today to study assiduously with various. Wise men and women that were collecting their Rudolph. The second had brought many of these kinds of people together under his court, and John Dee was sent as the mathematical genius to bring this language forth. The experiment ended in tragedy. The metaphysical science level. Overwhelmed the contemplative investigative level. And spiritual presences that were hoped for became psychological projections. And the whole thing ended into a mishmash, a mirage which quickly Elizabeth distance herself from. And when she was brought back to England in disgrace, she would have nothing more to do with them. And he died in disgrace about ten years later. But one of the individuals in England believe that he was on the right track but had been misled by Edward Kelly and by those around the court of Rudolph the second. And that individual was Sir Francis Bacon. And Bacon believed and wrote in a book called The New Atlantis that a utopian community was eminently possible if it was founded in the new world, in the Western Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere was psychically uncontaminated by the kinds of developments that had ruined the European psyche. Incidentally, it was a sentiment that was echoed by the old Gerda. Wrote a warning to those of the new world. He said, Do not let yourselves become haunted by the ghosts of Europe. For, then you will not be able to see as we do not. Bacon. Sold the idea to several individuals. Swashbucklers intellectuals, con men, people like Sir Walter Raleigh. Individuals who were founding colonies and communities under the aegis of corporations in the new world. And so British corporations bringing in Dutch money and sometimes French money and sometimes German money. We send expeditions to the new world to set up. Communities to set up colonies. And a few of these attempts were to set up the utopia of Sir Thomas Moore, the New Atlantis of Sir Francis Bacon, that somehow the key that DD had missed was that the structure of the community should be scientific. Because science was the natural application of the mathematical forms. And if the community were devoted to a scientific future. Then the universal language would have an application and the long tradition of wisdom would live again. It's a theme that has been touched upon many times. H.g. Wells and things to come. The film made with Ralph Bellamy is a very good example in cinema of the same kind of idea that 400 years ago powered the expeditions to the new world. In all of this. The Europeans that went to the new world were decimated. Worse. Only about 10% of them survived for more than five years. When you look at the populations of people that are sent over to these communities and then you look at the populations left after five or ten years, you realize that the mortality rate was greater than 90%. Because they carried European habits with them to a geography, to a climate, to a psychic environment. Where they were not applicable, and the first communities that began to actually hold their own were communities that began to listen to the natives of the place, to the Indians. And those communities that found a way to contact and communicate and live with the Indian populations were the first communities that began to be able to survive. And the great archetypal image of this are the pilgrims. Thanksgiving is a particular American holiday, which commemorates the transition from the old world to the new that we eat foods that are grown in the new world. We don't eat foods that were brought from the old world, that have become rotten in the long sea voyages that don't survive, that you can't live on these kinds of dead foods, but you need living foods. Thanksgiving can be symbolized in that instead of eating dead salt pork, one eats the fresh pumpkins and squashes that one has grown there on that soil. One gives thanks for having gone through a membrane. Into a new reality. And all through the later 1600s, we find again and again this interpenetration with the new world. The development again and again of the possibilities for these three strands to come into play. And towards the end of the 1600s, the great discovery by two geniuses at the same time that there was in fact, a universal language. Sir Isaac Newton. And a German thinker named Lev Nets simultaneously at the same time came up with calculus, with the development of symbolic calculus, with a mathematical, powerful language which was able to characterize the infinitely large, the infinitely small, and all integrations and differentiations in between. We use today leibniz's notation. Any high school student studying calculus uses the same notation that Leibniz developed. We don't use Newton's fluctuations because they were a little cumbersome. Even by the 1700s, they were cumbersome. One of the great developments then. For both Newton and live nets. They found that they had cracked the central most difficult problem of the three. And surely the other two problems. The other two strands a utopian community and a. Contact with the lineage of wisdom all the way back to antiquity could not be far behind. Leibniz was at the court of the Hanover Kings in Germany, and when they hand over, kings were made surrogate kings of Britain. He saw his opportunity because it was the British German combine that was running the new world, especially the colonies on the Atlantic seaboard and limits envisioned himself as the sage who would go to that new world and be there. But he was favored by. George's wife, Sophia and George, in a fit of impecunious jealousy, left Leibovitz alone with the Grand Ducal Library that he had been given to work out of, and lightness was left in Europe. And most of his books were never published. Indeed. And even today, in our own time, about three fourths of the works of live nuts lie on shelves in a library in Hanover, Germany. Never published, never read. And his dreams were brought to a close. Sir Isaac Newton felt that somehow the key to the ancient lineage was wrapped up in two apocalyptic visions the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, and that somehow these two books made a sphere around the central core, which could be characterized by the universal language of mathematics. And he worked for 30 years, the last 30 years of his life, assiduously trying to crack the symbolic, prophetic language of Daniel and Revelation and never did. And his dreams ended. But by that time, the New World had gained a capacity to have a renaissance individual of its own. And the first great human being of the Western Hemisphere was Benjamin Franklin. And by the time Newton died in 1727, Franklin already had made his way. From humble beginnings in Boston to impoverished. Years in Philadelphia, two years of hope in London. And when we come back after the break, we'll take a look at Benjamin Franklin, because he is the first home grown sage in the hermetic tradition. He's the first Renaissance individual who comes out of the native soil of the Western Hemisphere. And he's the one. Who finally sees how to bring those three strands together, something which for 400 years, by that time had eluded. The genius of man. Franklin would come to say how it could be done, but it would take almost all of his life. Before finally at the age of 70, he lived long enough to see the opportunity and seized it. Out of that came the Declaration of Independence that founded the United States. Let's take a break. Benjamin Franklin's family were from from England. They were from Northamptonshire. From the little village called Acton. That's in between Wallingford and Northampton. In that triangle made by Oxford and Cambridge and Stratford on Avon, Shakespeare's hometown. And that triangle. In the middle of England comes some of the most interesting people in recent history. One of Franklin's family traditions was that. The elder male and the family would read the Bible out loud to the collected family, and the Bible was taped to the bottom of a stool. Because these were times of religious intolerance and you are not supposed to read the Bible out loud yourself to your family. If you want to hear about the word, you had to go to a church of a specified denomination, specified kind. You could go to the synagogue, you could go to the church, but you could not in the home. You yourself. Read that Bible. And so it was always taped to the bottom of the stool. And when it was time to read, they would turn the stool up in and read and keep one of the younger people at the window to make sure. This tradition. It was a particular strength of England. The attempts early on in the 1500s to. To make translations. To take the books of the Torah, to take the books of the prophets, to take the books of the wisdom, tradition, the books of the New Testament to translate them from the original languages. To learn Hebrew well enough to be able to read the originals. To learn Greek well enough to read the originals. And for a while in England it was common practice. On educated levels to raise children. Trilingual English, Hebrew and Greek. It was normal Tudor, England practice. In Elizabeth's time, it was expected that you would be able to talk to converse with others in Hebrew, Greek and English that you would be trilingual. And out of that came a tradition of independence in terms of religious assessment, religious judgment, religious ideas. And Franklin's family was one of the typical Midland English families that took great pride in the fact that they could think about God for themselves. They didn't have to queue up to someone else. By the time that Benjamin Franklin was 12 years old. He had already become well known in the family as the reader. If you read all the books that were available. He read in particular. Plutarch's Parallel lives. Plutarch being an old sage and the great wisdom tradition, realized that. A human life is very complicated. And if you're going to understand a complicated form, you have to have a background which highlights that form, at least as complicated as the form itself. And the only form complicated enough to be a comparative to a human life was another human life. And so he wrote parallel lives. And so the understanding of paired lines in Plutarch began to give Franklin a perspective on his own life, on his own autobiographical qualities, even by the age of 12. His favorite book up until that age was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. And years later. When he would save a man from drowning on one of the voyages that he took to England. Franklin was a champion swimmer. He was one of the few men of the day who practiced swimming every day. And when he saved this man, the man when he got conscious again said, Will you please dry out my book? And Franklin pulled out a little copy of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. And he was so happy to have saved a man who read the same things that he liked. By the time Franklin was 12, he was known as the reader. And so his father realized that he was going to have another printer in the family. Usually young men, boys were apprenticed to certain trades. And one of his sons, James, was already a printer, but there was no way of getting around it. So Benjamin also was going to be a printer. And so he was apprentice to his older brother, James, at 12. And they did printing jobs. And they also ran a newspaper called the New England Courant. There was the second newspaper in the Colonies. This was 17, 18. Newton was still alive. Franklin. I realized after a couple of years. That he couldn't write as well as he could think, that he could think well enough and read well enough, but that he couldn't write. And so he decided that he would take a model to learn how to write. And there was a special kind of a literary newspaper that came out of London called The Spectator, Addison and Steele Spectator. It was the epitome of beautiful, erudite, refined English. And so Franklin trained himself. He would analyze sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, until he learned the technique of how to write English language exceedingly well, very refined and elegant. And then he began to experiment with styles and variations. And while he was doing this. He began to compose some interesting letters that were rather risqué for the time, and he would sign them silent, do good, and just as a prank, as a teenage prank, because he was still an adolescent. He left one of these letters under the doorstep of the newspaper, and his brother read it and enjoyed it and print it in the newspaper. And it was the talk of Boston. And so Franklin, being an adolescent and being Benjamin Franklin wrote a whole series of these silent do good letters. And everyone in Boston was talking about them and about who this could be. It must be somebody very erudite and someone who knows a lot. And are they going to write about us? And is this allegorically us in these letters and. Then the authorities clamped down on James Franklin. They locked him up for a month. And 16 year old Benjamin Franklin ran the newspaper for a month and never did admit, except finally to his father, that he was the author. And there were arguments with the older brother. And then they finally realized that they were not going to be able to print under James's name anymore. And so they said, Well, we'll use Benjamin's name. But Benjamin had signed papers of indenture. That he was for ten years indentured and unable to be a free man. And so they signed special papers, releasing him from his indenture. And as soon as it was released, Franklin took off. It took off from New York City. He was 17 years old. It was 17, 23. And he got to New York City and he didn't know anybody. And he went into a print shop and he asked for work. The man's name was Bradford, William Bradford. And he said, you know, I don't have any work for you, but my son just lost his top printer and he has a shop in Philadelphia. If you go to Philadelphia, you'll get a job. So Franklin hitched his way to Philadelphia, some 400 miles from Boston. He was 17 years old. He got to Philadelphia. He had enough money to buy two buns, two large bread buns. And he says in his autobiography, he put one under each arm to feel secure. And he never really looked at another city. He didn't spend much time in New York. And so he walked around what was then downtown Philadelphia, which was most of Philadelphia. And came back to the wharf. And on the way he spied a very pretty girl looking out of a window at him. Curiously enough, she would be his future wife, Deborah Reed. And when he got back to the wharf, he saw a woman with a little child and the child was hungry and the woman was poor. And Franklin said he gave half of his worldly goods to the woman, and while he was munching on the other bun and wondering what he was going to do because he was broke, he spotted a print shop. And when. And applied. And got a job. And Franklin from that humble beginning. Became one of the most prosperous citizens of the new world. In his brief. Time, he set himself to almost impossible tasks. He had a conviction. That if he could consult his own individual mind on a deep enough level. That some idea, some plan of action would come forth. Now. He didn't go to church for this. He didn't go to temple for this. He went to his own insides for this. He relied upon himself. And the personality of Benjamin Franklin sets a style which is known universally today as American. He never asked anyone else permission to be. He just simply imagined what he wanted to do. And then worked on himself to try and be ready for that and then put himself ready for that into play and let the world respond to him. And this kind of a self made man became a quality which would be imitated in Europe later on after they had seen Benjamin Franklin. Franklin founded the first of so many things that we find it hard to believe. He founded the first insurance company. He founded the first fire department, the first library, the first hospital. He was protean about starting institutions and events and societies that would better the life of people because his conviction, because he had seen it in his own life again and again. That people could better their lives always. That man is infinitely definable. In his printing job, Franklin got the jobs of printing all of the religious texts of the day, and so he began to read them. In fact, one of the first jobs that he got. When he was 22 years old, he got into a deal with the governor of Pennsylvania at that time, a man named Keith, which turned out to be an untrustworthy individual. And Keith had said, if you go to London and learn some printing techniques there and bring them back, I have friends in London that'll take care of you. And then you can come back with all these new techniques and we'll clean up. We'll get all these jobs. And Franklin went to London and he found that the letters of introduction were no good at all. But he was able to get a job at a printing place. You printed up a book on religious philosophy, which he found was so reprehensible to him that he wrote his own little pamphlet at age 22. On liberty of spirit. And published it in 100 copies. And it became the talk of the town in London. When he finally came back after 18 months in London. Franklin came back to the printing house and found that Deborah Reid had married another man, a no gooder, a man who within the year took off for the West Indies. He had a big taste for rum and he thought if he worked the place where they made the rum, he could get the first pick on the. Drinking. And finally, Franklin married Deborah Reid. At his printing house. Began to print all of the books, the esoteric books, the excellent books, the political tracks of the day. He printed the paper money for Philadelphia, for Pennsylvania, for the colony. And he got to know everybody. It became a colonel in the militia. Because he studied, fought building and warfare and strategic placement. And as early as 1747. Franklin, as every schoolchild knows. Flew a kite in a thunderstorm with his house key attached to a wire at one end and the other wire to a sharp, pointed rod on the kite. And when lightning from the thunderstorm struck, the sharp pointed stick and the metal and the kite came all the way down and illuminated the key. It knocked Franklin out. But he began to experiment with electricity and there was a certain kind of a jar from the Dutch had invented called a latent jar, which would store electrical charge. You could store electricity. And Franklin began experimenting with electricity. He thought of it as a universal fluid, as the universal energy. And just as calculus was the mathematical language of the universe, Franklin felt that electricity was the universal energy. And if you could match electricity with mathematics, you could change the entire world. And he wrote up his experiments and sent his letters off to a man in England named Peter Collinson. And after four years, Collinson had enough of these letters of Franklin. He put them together, and he published a book. A Franklin's experiments with electricity 1751 and it's the first time in world history. That a book of pure science on this universal level. Was ever published. It is a model of scientific publication, even to this day. Franklin. Was. In receipt of the book on electricity about the same time, the same month, March 1751. That he was on his way to Albany, New York. Whenever there was an interplay between the Indians and the Europeans, they met at Albany, New York, mainly because the six civilized tribes, the Iroquois Nation and six tribes, the Seneca and the Onondaga and the various tribes the six nations met. With the representatives of the colonies in Albany to try and work out a mutual defense. Against the incursion of the French were encouraging other Indians inimical to the six nations, and who also hated the English. And the beginnings of the French. And Indian Wars started about that time. But on the way to Albany, Franklin, for the very first time had the idea of uniting the colonies together. And his model for that was the uniting of the six tribes together to form one Indian nation. And he saw that it could not be done in the ordinary way. Of having parliaments put together a structure of unity, but rather it had to come from the people up. And that the seeds in the population of the people were those individuals who could envision the future. Who could bake the mantle space of creativity. Who could allow for the forms of the patterns to occur to them. And to be able to communicate it to each other. And that these talented groups, small groups of men and women, would be able then to seed the idea among the people and the people then would make these new forms he envisioned. It's called the Albany Plan for the Union, that there would be a head, a sort of an executive, and there would be a legislative body, the Grand Council. And that somehow these two bodies. Would be representative of a new form of political action. The Albany plan for the Union was unanimously adopted in Albany. But when the plan was taken back to the various colonies, it was rejected by everyone. In the colonies. It was rejected because it was too preemptive of the authority that people and pressure groups already had. And the Crown rejected it because it was too democratic and would encourage people too much to think on their own. And so the Albany Plan for the Union unanimous, unanimously adopted by the Indians and the representatives in the city of Albany, was scrapped. It would be 25 years before Franklin would have a chance to bring it out again. And the next time he would bring it out would be during the second Continental Congress in 1776. And it was at that time that he realized that there was enough of a population of people who were able to talk to each other in such a direct way that they could hear each other and envision the structure of each other's ideas. And that there was miraculously a young man present who was able to write the most beautiful, accurate legal language, describing almost like a top computer programmer who can write exactly the program instructions to make it work. A young man who could write legal English with the precision of classical Greek to be able to express how step by step and stage by stage the ideas could be put into practice. The young man was Thomas Jefferson. And so the old man, Benjamin Franklin, and the young man, Thomas Jefferson, came together for the first time 25 years after the Albany plant. And in between and those 25 years Franklin had become. The Lion of the world. He had been sent to England in 1757 by the people of Pennsylvania. To argue a case before English courts. To get themselves out of the clutches of the proprietorship. This colonial structure that was set up originally set up by William Penn out of a religious vision. And when one reads the writings of William Penn, you realize how beautiful and pure his vision was. But William Penn's son, Thomas Penn, that Franklin had to deal with. Just laughed with derision at the expectations that people would have some ability to control their own destinies. Franklin writes in his autobiography that for the first time in his life, he felt real anger and disgust at another human being. That someone could be this low, this cunning, this cheap. And began in the late 1750s to see that this was not. An extraordinary man, but this was the kind of wealthy English personality that was becoming the norm in English society of that time. Then Franklin slowly began to change. Instead of envisioning himself as someone who was an Englishman in colonies of the New World, he began to envision himself as a New World man who was just visiting England. There's a monumental sea change in his personality. And by the time he left England in 1762, it took five years to argue this case. Franklin came back for a couple of years. But he was sent back to England because he was the only figure who understood. The language of the day, the personalities of the day, the issues of the day, and his had his own interior structure well enough. To carry the case for other colonies. And so he was sent back in 1764. And he was there until 1772. He was there for another long period, eight years. And just came back in time for the Continental Congresses. While Franklin was there in England. His whole outlook, his whole vision of the dignity of man was condensed, suffered an alchemical change in one scorching event. He was brought in. Literally dragged in by the psychic ear by the authority of the English Privy Council. And 40 or 50 powerful men seated around. In easy chairs and Franklin in a kind of a red velour suit with his natural hair, no wig stood leaning against the mantle of the fireplace in the room. And these men for hour after hour berated Franklin on the basis of the New World impudence of thinking that they knew better than the moneyed people who were sustaining them, who had sent them there. How dare they even raise their voices to those in authority, to those who were paying their way? And Franklin saying nothing during the entire harangue, leaning improbably against the fireplace when they were finished. Thank them for the lesson and walked out. And when he walked out, he realized to himself that this was the end of an era, the end of a whole history and the beginning of something new. Franklin was the first person that had the American Revolution happen in his psyche. And when he came back. In the early 1770s, he carried with him this Promethean secret flame. He knew from experience he was the only man in the world at that time who knew that there was a complete break between two styles of being human. And that the New World man was simply radically a different kind of person. A person who experimented with openness. I was able to make friends with Savage Wilderness if need be, in order to find from scratch from working out a new relationship of individual dignity. Not having to rely upon any codification from the past whatsoever. That one could improve and revise oneself indefinitely. And as one added, new capacities drop old capacities that were no longer needed. And in this way, Franklin had simply pioneered the way into becoming a kind of a man that had never been seen before. The kind of universal man. That dwarfed even the so called Renaissance man. The man who had by that time dealt with a quarter of a century with universal fluids, energies like electricity. Had mastered almost all of the knowledge of the time, one of Franklin's pastimes. He sailed to and fro from England to New York about eight times, and on each voyage he would take samples of seawater and temperatures. And Franklin is the one who found there's a Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. He was that kind of a genius. When he came back. And he saw the second Continental Congress. He saw the fruition. Of the minds and hearts there. But in particular, when he saw the Flint that was the character of Thomas Jefferson, he knew that a spark that could light the fire of a new kind of society was there. But Franklin was never the leader. He was never. Like Augustus Caesar, the principal person. He was always like in our time, Joe and lie always second, always behind the scenes, always helping others to believe that they could do this. And so Franklin. Talk to Livingston and Adams and the others who were supposed to help writing the Declaration of Independence, and Franklin simply handed the paper to Jefferson. He said, See what you can do with this. And in the morning, we'll take a look at what you've done. Because he had read some of Jefferson's writings. His declaration about the rights of British America. And he saw a capacity in this man he recognized because he himself had it in a mature fashion that here was somebody who could improve himself indefinitely. And of course, when Jefferson brought the Declaration of Independence back, a few things were changed here and there, but it was submitted almost as he had written it. Very shortly after that, within a month or so, Franklin was sent back. To England, but sent this time not as the emissary of the colony of Pennsylvania or as the emissary of a couple of colonies. But as the minister plenipotentiary of the entire American. See all 13 colonies. He represented the new world in himself. He was the spokesman. He was the voice. He was the mind. That confronted the European power struggle. And that whole establishment individually. Franklin when he went back this time saw that the key to the American Revolution was gaining France as an ally. That the French participation in the War of Independence, which was inevitable. Colonel Franklin could see that as not only could Colonel Franklin see it, but Dr. Franklin could see it. Dr. Franklin, because he'd been given a doctor of letters by Oxford University and by St Andrews University in Scotland. Franklin, who had in the years in London, had had to dinner for several months on end. Adam Smith, when he was writing The Wealth of Nations and a lot of the Wealth of Nations is Benjamin Franklin, not Adam Smith. The Benjamin Franklin, who was a closest friend to David HUME, whose treatise on human understanding bears a lot of Franklin's ingenuity. Franklin was the kind of individual, a universal man that everyone that he talked to and touched in a direct way seemed to lunge forward with their creativity, aflame and intact. And Jefferson had felt the touch of Dr. Franklin. And so when Franklin went to France, he prepared the ground patiently. He knew it would take time. He was there. For almost eight years preparing the ground of the French American participation. And every time Franklin saw from a distance that the strategy was moving in a way that was going to lose some steam, Franklin would send someone over. One of the young men that he sent over was Lafayette, a young military genius who was indispensable at the siege of Yorktown when Jefferson was governor of Virginia during the American War of Independence in Richmond. The British troops with Cornwallis and so forth laid siege and took Richmond. And Jefferson took the indispensable state papers and and hid out in a culvert on the outskirts of Richmond in the mud. And later on, hold up. At his house in Monticello, which he had designed and built himself over a period of about 20 years at that time. Franklin stayed, even though he was almost 80 years of age. He stayed on the job in Paris because he could see that it was an indispensable job and he could not leave until someone would relieve him, someone of quality who could keep up the level that he had set. And he was used to writing his favorite sister, Jane Maycomb. The Franklins letters to Jane Mitchum are one of the world's greatest books. Jane Maycomb was as literate as Franklin, and their letters are just a. Eye on the events of the day. And he wrote to Jane Meacham, I can come home at last because Mr. Jefferson is coming to Paris. And when Jefferson got to Paris, the French asked him if he were there to replace Dr. Franklin. And Jefferson characteristically said, No one can replace Dr. Franklin. I'm here to support his work with continuance. And Jefferson did. Jefferson made use of all the contacts that Franklin had set up. Of all the individuals that Franklin had cultivated and educated and brought along. And Jefferson finished their education. And the last evening that Franklin was in Paris, he had to dinner a series of seven or eight men. Lafayette Was there a number of others who are very famous in world history? And then he, with his daughters, boarded a coach for Calais. And as the coach left in the morning for Calais, the French Revolution started that morning. The leaders of it were the individuals who were there at dinner with Jefferson that night. They had been brought up to reject the kings of Europe, the authority of the Middle Ages, the power structure that was entrenched. And to consider that we draw a line here and this is the year one, and we're going to have a new kind of mankind, a new kind of humanity based upon the radical ability to envision the future within ourselves, rather than linking ourselves to some chain of the past. Jefferson's favorite phrase was The Earth belongs to the living. It does not matter. How powerful those guys were in the past. They're dead. And they have no right to encumber us here in our future if we wish to make use of anything of theirs. It's our choice. It's our decision. It's our judgment and not theirs. And so Jefferson instituted in Letters to Madison the idea of a permanent revolution that every 19 years, every generation that those men and women had the right to review entirely the entire spectrum in scope of how their lives were run, on what basis, and to institute whatever changes need be to satisfy them and to pass on this capacity to the next generation, to their children, that when their time has come, they will have the right also to make whatever changes needed to be. When Franklin was dying. 17. 90. Jefferson went to visit the old man. Franklin had already written his epitaph. He characterized his life as a book, and he said that he hoped that he would come back and a second edition much improved by the author, and it would have a wide audience of being read. In 1790, Jefferson. Had to make a decision whether to carry on the development in. The American scene that Franklin had started just as he had carried on Franklin's development in Paris. What he was up against. Was the encroachment of a European idea of royalty upon the new country. The Federalist Party, headed by George Washington. Fueled by ideas of Alexander Hamilton, supported by the ambition of John Adams, was all for slowly phasing out democracy and bringing a monarchy back into play. And that the key to this would be money. Hamilton's scheme was that if we put all valuation eventually upon money, we can use wealth as a factor of bringing power back to the few, and the few can elect the monarch. And we can run this pyramid structure just as man always has run it. And Jefferson was. The natural enemy to in fact, one of his suggested epitaphs was that he was the eternal enemy of tyrants. He had it engraved on a little stamp, and he would, from time to time, stamp his letters with this. That individual liberty is the eternal enemy of tyranny. And so Jefferson in the 1790s, he was chosen by Washington to be a secretary of State. He was runner up to John Adams in the election of 1796. He was vice president. And slowly, during all the 1790s democracy, the vision of America as a new world leached away. And it came down to the election of 1800. And Jefferson ran a very powerful visionary campaign in 1800. He campaigned that we should have a United States as planned in the Declaration of Independence. That the constitutional bases. The Federalist Party bases. The pinning of valuation upon money basis was all leading towards a future where there would be. A monarchy and elite running things from the top. And when Jefferson won the election of 1800 by just a few votes, one of the closest elections in American history, he inaugurated what I have called in my book, Hermetic America Jefferson's six presidencies, because he was elected to the presidency, ostensibly six times in a row. He was elected twice on his own because by 1804, Jefferson's America was working so well that he won almost in a landslide. And it was working so well that his number one pick, Madison, was elected and re-elected. And because of the self-imposed limitation of two terms, their friend James Monroe was elected and re-elected. And after 24 years of Jeffersonian democracy, the United States was one of the most powerful countries in the world. By the mid 1820s, the United States was a phenomenon. Now I'm running out of time for the lecture today and there is so much to talk about. But I'd like to end with Jefferson and not go on into the crisis that was met by Lincoln or the crisis that was met by FDR. There've been a couple of times when the United States has stood on the brink of extinction. The Civil War and the Depression brought the United States very close to extinction. And each time there was someone to bring it back. Lincoln and his great vision learned from Jefferson how to do this contemplative, spiritual act of envisioning the unity so clearly in the individual soul. And using a language which impresses it upon the minds of the hearers that it literally brings it into being. And the United States was brought back from the brink of nothing by the personality of Abraham Lincoln, very much like Jefferson had done originally in 1800. During the early depression in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt wrote a little article, a review of a book. It was called Jefferson and Hamilton by a man named Claude Bowers. And Franklin Roosevelt wrote a review of this book, and he said, The same problems of the spirit are in this country today, as in Jefferson's time. There are plenty of Hamiltons out there. Is there a Thomas Jefferson? And one of his close friends, Louis Howe, read this article and he said, Franklin, you're the only man who can see it and do it. You have to be the Jefferson this time. And FDR was elected four times in a row. And managed us not only out of the Depression, but through the Second World War. Each time there has been a realigning of this capacity for vision. And now the United States by 1994 stands on the brink of extinction. It's almost gone. There are only dreams and shreds and shards left of the country that was once there. It's almost like a ghost of itself. But there's still that opportunity. There is still that possibility. Only this time, instead of there being a Jefferson or a Lincoln or an FDR, it's going to take an envisioning of the people themselves, of us together, ourselves. Because the only way out of this particular impasse is to do it as a population, as a people. And not following any leader because the costs are too complex for a single leader to take charge. That single leader who could handle all the costs today would be a super yogi. And he wouldn't talk to us. He wouldn't have any need to talk to us. And so we're all going to be orphans. Until. Together we make a new home. And that's what the lecture is about next week. About making that new home. A home whose dimensions are the entire star system as a foundation, as a base, the place that we call home is going to be our star system. I hope so. If you can come next week. Thank you.