Hermetic America
Presented on: Thursday, September 22, 1994
Presented by: Roger Weir
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.