Stellar Civilization

This is the fourth lecture and a commemoration for me. And the commemoration is for the death of my daughter. Last year at this time. The circumstances made it so that the day of death could not be determined. And so I've taken the whole month of September to make this commemoration. I have. Indicated before that I had not intended to lecture on some of these subjects for quite a long time, if ever. And tonight is the case in point. I have for 30 years looked at the background of mankind at the past. Looked at the origins and roots of things. But tonight, I'm going to talk about the future. In the spirit of this commemoration, I would like to invite my daughter to spirit to be here. And as I mentioned before, if any of you have beloved ones that you would like to. Remember and share and bring them forth. This would be a good occasion to do that. We have that capacity and we can do that. This is a time in which we can do that. Generally when people talk about the future, they talk about the distant future. Thousands of years, Star Wars, Star Trek. I'm going to talk about the next 200 years. About the 21st and the 22nd century. Those two centuries constitute. A new beginning for mankind. And though it will not begin exactly with the millennium. There will eventually come with that first generation who mature in the 21st century. A new sense. A new sense of what? Gestalt. Delineate in terms of dynamic meaning. New capacities. We already are. Seeing the developments. The convergences. Science, religion. Art. Humanity. Coming to a crossroads, coming to an interface. And the pace is accelerating. Every change of millennium has this pattern. A thousand years ago, the year 1000 produced millennial fever in many places of Europe in the Middle East. And when? Nothing. A special happened. The Crusades were thought up to make something millennial happen. 2000 years ago. There was no sense of a millennium. Zero B.C. or one ad was not a date that was marked on the calendar. And yet in that generation. There were apocalyptic writings, prophetic writings. Religious developments. And even the greatest. Poet of that age, Virgil. Working on the commissioned epic to. Solidify the Roman Empire for Augustus Caesar working on the Aeneid. Took time out to write. One of the most peculiar and most prophetic poems ever written. It's called a messianic blog. And it predicts the birth of a baby under a star who would create a new world religion. And Virgil wrote this. Somewhere about a. 20 B.C.. 3000 years ago, there was also a millennial change, a tremendous development. Most of. What we know as Europe was in the dark age at that time. But in places of the world. Where 1000 B.C. was observable in some kind of recorded way. Like India, tremendous developments happened. And 4000 years ago that millennial development was enormous. 2000 B.C. is one of the great changes in world history. And so there has been an intelligent remembering, a lineage assessment. Of human life and circumstances of time and development, of movements, of dynamics that happen over long durations of time and history has been understood to have its cycles. For instance, 2000 years ago. In the early first century of that new millennium. The greatest poet after Virgil. Ovid. Began his great epic, The Metamorphoses. Metamorphoses the changes the transformations which characterise a turn of time and he. Wrote at the very beginning of the metamorphoses that time has patterns which we can call ages, and that those ages, when human experience is wide enough to recognize. Form over hundreds of years. Often wrote that every 500 years there seems to be a new phase of humanity. And that every 2000 years, every four times 500 phases, some great new cycle comes freshly into play, as if the world were born again, as if time were renewed, and in fact, all the mythic cycles. Four cycles of myths are called mythologies, and all mythologies have as a central concern, as a purpose for their dynamic, as a direction for their meaning is the renewal of time. And the general consensus of intelligent on this planet among human beings is that time is a form. Perhaps eternity is quite extraordinarily different. But time is a form. The great assessment of the old Plato near the end of his life in the Thomas. He said that time is the moving image of eternity. That eternity has its absolute. Reality beyond our ability. But when its image moves, we discern that as time. As the ongoing course of events. And that our lives, our bodies, our psyches, our careers, our families, our heritages. Are woven into. The movement of the images of time. And so from Plato, from Virgil, from Ovid, from the whole classical world, the idea came. That every 2000 years was a new cycle, that a complete new mythology would have to come out of this. We use. A term in English now called Eon. Sometimes it spelled e0m. Sometimes a e on. But the Greek spelling was a i on. A on. In modern cosmology today, an iron is a billion years. Our moon and our planet were made about 4.6 billion years ago, about four and one half eons ago. But in. Time. Moving on the level at which we exist. We exist at a higher energy level. Then geomorphology processes. Those original chemical geomorphology processes may take a billion years, but for our speed of entity, 2000 years is an iron. And so we live at a very peculiar time. This whole year has been a peculiar year. Anyone that you would talk to on any level of life in any place. Has incurred. Surprise drama. Tragedy difficulty. Out of step feelings. And next year it will continue and the year after that. In his old age. Carl Jung carrying Tae Desjardins phenomenon of man under his arm and spark steaming from his pipe. And at 86, he was complaining that he was seeing that in 50 years the world was going to be exposed to an apocalyptic psychic catastrophe. This was 1961, and he saw that the year 2011. She was like a psychic wall, a brick wall against which man, if he does not transform, he will crash. If we do not change, we will run into that wall. And already. These manifestations are here. And the more sensitive men and women of our planet are already feeling that peculiar, eerie quality. That something enormous has changed. The way in which one apocalypse, one Hellenistic Jewish apocalypse placed it 2000 years ago. It's as if the gods who controlled the world had their power stolen from them. And instead of there being a kind of a divine order. There is only the sense. Of a waffling quality of instability. Which deepens and permeates. This lecture talks about. The kind of pattern which is possible over the next 200 years. And the language I'm going to use belongs in the year 2011. It belongs at a time when this kind of speaking this kind of envisioning. Will be necessary and needed, like air or food. There are times when human beings need vision. It's a little early. And that day has not yet dawned. And for many of us, we're content to. Continue to snooze. In the dark hours thinking it's still regular night, but indeed everything has changed. One of the qualities. That the new iron has in it is a shared quality. For the last 2000 years, the archetype of the deep self has been the person. The person in a kind of an odd, protean way. I've called it the mysterious person. The basic pattern is that. The person, the inner person. Is the integrative focus. Or that on a deeper, more mystical level that the integration of all meaning into our deep self. Comes to some vanishing point. Of mystery, and it resurges back out, unbidden, unqualified as a differential process of life giving vision. And that the person is the clearest shape. It's like a gravity lens and this differential energy that comes out of the mystery of the soul and that somehow the person in the soul are related together. Much like a hidden source of energy. And a lens which is able to focus in mid-air and carry that differential energy into a pattern. Personal way. And that the largest focus of that personal energy was what was called the cosmos. And for 2000 years, this archetypal model has worked, has sustained psyches. Has held together cultures, has even made a civilization that has several varieties that worked up until our own lifetimes, but no longer. One of the changes that is here is that the person is now understood not to be an ultimate expression of the differential possibilities of vision. But that human beings when it comes to the mysteries of expressing the person. Come in pairs. And we're not talking about couples necessarily. We're talking about preparedness in the sense of inter penetrative sharing. Perhaps the best way to envision this. Was to look at the old cosmology that saw the sun as the center around which everything revolved. All the planets in perfect circles. And when it was understood that this model was mathematically untenable. That observation experience experiment in its more careful, attentive modes showed that this was not the case. And the first mind to grasp. That fundamental quality of what this meant and expressed it. Was a man named Kepler who wrote a book called The New Astronomy and published it in 1609. Just a year before the first really powerful Rosicrucian manifestos changed the whole occult flavour of the 17th century and of the world. Kepler said. It's not that there is a single center, but that there are a pair of centers and that all the movements of planets are ellipses. Around a pair of centers. And it wasn't until the 20th century that. This insight was finely honed and understood that it isn't that there are two centers, but that there is a mysterious very center that does not exist at all. Nothing occupies it, but it is the interface median between two points and the two points are the sun and whatever planet you have. The Earth does not revolve around the sun. The Sun and the earth revolved together. And though the earth is much smaller in mass, it moves much farther. But the sun also moves in response to the Earth. There's a dough that goes on. There's a dance. And in the new icon, this will be understood. This would be understood that between two human beings is a possibility of sharing a very center. And so the new form of wisdom teaching will not be by the girl. That age is ended. And one way to tell the false teachers is that they will try to appear individually. Never again. Not on this planet. That age is gone. The only way that a single guru could handle. The labyrinthine complexity that's necessary would be to go into a super yoga state in which one does not speak. And so the future is one of shared presence teachers. Because human beings who from the get go learn to enter penetrate with at least some one else, learn the most fundamental dynamics, not to say mechanics of being human in a vastly wide differential universe. For we live now more and more not in an integration mode. Not in a mode where the tribe is important, not in a mode where experience has to be brought to some individual focus, but more and more in a differential way. In which there are mysteries and only by a shared presence. Q Will we be able to understand intelligently what there is that is real for us. And a whole different basis of community will come out of this. Instead of a community based upon the strong individual. Or they voting by these individuals against these individuals into factions based on party entirely new dynamics and Newcastle's will come out. But in order to lift this quality of vision, this differential movement, in order to lift it. Out of the realm of its seed quality. A new civilization is going to be necessary. For there is no culture, there is no civilization now that can do it. Because in a very peculiar way, staying on this planet alone. Was fortifying the archetype of the single person. Of the individual. The future belongs to an interplanetary a multiple planetary sense. Of where our backyard is. Of where it is that our home can be. And the. Only differential form that holds its shape in a multiple planetary venue is an entire star system. And so our sense of being will move from a planet to a star system. From a one place. To a broad gestalt. The form of the collection of all those places that share the same very center, that share that same presence within a form. And one of the qualities that will inhabit this new icon, this new stellar civilization. There will be an acceptance and a rejection at the same time of the way in which power is handled. The old way that power was handled was by punishment, by conflict, by massing power to control and to punish infractions of that control. The policeman. He was or the soldier. Was the fundamental enforcer of the individual sense of power. And that is on its way out rapidly. In a way, Gandhi was the first prophet of this new order. This new quality rather than punishment. Education, rather than. Having conflict as the ultimate drawing of the line. The getting real point. The modifying by learning will become the prototype. The correcting constantly, not only in mid-course, but all along the course. In 25 years if we do not have. 10% of the population of soldiers in this world dedicated to a helping reeducation program. We will have an apocalyptic war. It's as simple as the statement that William James delivered in 1910, already 100 years before our projected line at Stanford University, the old William James, in a beautiful lecture that we once reprinted in Berkeley and the beginnings of the Vietnam conflict in 1967. William James said, If we want peace, we will have to work for it and we will only have peace when we work as hard for peace as we do for war. Because what becomes real is what we work for. If we put our energies into it, if we organize ourselves and bring our dedication to bear, we will have that for we are free. Walt Whitman and his Democratic vistas after Lincoln had been assassinated and there was no new vision. Whitman wrote rewrote the American vision and published it as Democratic vistas. And he began it by saying, There are two. Principles which the universe seems to respect everywhere at all times. And that is. Variability and freedom. And so the new civilization will need to incorporate everywhere in its structure, in its directive. Its purposes and its intent, variability and freedom. The styling of certain principles as being right and punishing those who do not live up to those requirements. Is finished. It's gone. And to insist upon them. Is to bring ourselves to live within a fever. One of the deep qualities. Of a civilization is that it must transcend. Culture. A culture holds. It has its binding quality. By a traditional quality of experience, a lineage, a tradition, and a culture is a tradition. And all through human life, cultures have been nests for us which have been good traditions have been sustaining. But what they sustain essentially is experience which has learned from the past and shapes the present in terms of the past. And that goes directly against variability and freedom. If we are going to have a life which is real in a universe which is mysteriously loves variability and freedom, we must make a transformation. We must change out of a culture which is based on tradition, to a civilization which is able to have gestalt of many cultures living together. It doesn't call for stamping out any culture whatsoever. But of allowing each and every culture to understand that outside the confines of this city block, outside the confines of this geographic territory, outside the confines of this religious tradition. Is a larger vision which is inhabited by people who have also. Their same right to live, to exist. And so a civilization is always transcendent to a culture. But being transcendent to it. A civilization is always based on vision. It is not. To be taken in a. Reductive way, without vision, the people perish. There are many cultures, there are many tribes that have survived because in experience, vision is always inward. A religion is a binding religion in a tradition because it sustains a people to see inward. And the inward looking is always an integration. It's always an integral mode. But that integral mode is distinctly different in the way in which energy is handled and which form is engendered in which consciousness is able to proceed. It is radically different from a differential mode. A differential mode loves variability and freedom and openness. And there's nothing contradictory about it at all. The entire development some 300 years ago of mathematics took a tremendous jump, not just the leg up. But a pole vault over a stymying quality of mind that had kept. Man at a certain level. And 300 years ago, two individuals almost at the same time, pole, vaulted into a whole new realm. And they discovered that there is a universal language that characterizes all movement accurately, and that is the universal language of calculus of higher mathematics, which deals with movement and relationality. Infinitesimally small and infinitesimally large. One of those individuals, Sir Isaac Newton. Used a kind of a notation based on geometry that used dots on paper so that one could see what he called fluctuations. And his computation of calculus. He was very clumsy. And because it referred to geometry, it had a traditional security. And the English people took this for their new norm. And English mathematics all through the 1700s suffered from this. Whereas on the continent, the other pole vaulter was a man named Leibniz, and instead of taking geometry as his basis, he took trigonometry. He took a whole different dynamic. And his notation is the notation of calculus that we use today. And only when the English gave up on the dot makers, around 1800 did English mathematics again come. To the kind of eminence that it has in the world today. There are very few mathematical cosmologists who are of the level of Stephen Hawking and Roland Penrose. Roger Penrose. But that would never have happened had they have kept to Newton's notation of calculus so you can have the right thing. But it expressed in the wrong way. The right thing doesn't work. What is the right thing? The right thing is to see that a transformation. Has a fundamental quality. It comes out of integration and goes into a differential mode. It comes out of tradition. And makes a transformation into freedom and. Variability. William James last book was called The Pluralistic Universe. That, oddly enough. When one looks very deeply at the logic of this universe, one realm of reality doesn't work. Even today's newspaper today, September 29, 1994. Shows the latest cosmological computations. That the universe cannot be more than 7 to 14 billion years old. And yet there are stars 16 billion years old. And one has the mathematical conundrum for the first time today that there are objects older than the mathematics of the universe. How can anything be older than the universe? And when the mathematicians at Harvard and Indiana University were asked this, they said, it is a mystery to us, too. We don't understand it either. We know the mathematics, but what it means, we don't know. Except that the mysteriousness of the universe must be taken into consideration. And indeed, the universe is mysterious. We are of that essential reality. We are also mysterious. We cannot be corked and kept on a shelf. We must live. In a differential mode in order to be the quality of personal illness, which we recognize as a habitable dimension of our personality. And the cosmos in some odd way, welcomes us, sings our song when we're in that mode. As Joseph Campbell remarked once. There is a mysterious world beyond symbols. Where. All of a sudden a door will open where there was no door before, and that door will open only then and there, and only for you. And you must go through it or stay where you are. An Alice in Wonderland. A kind of looking glass quality. Whatever is real, whatever Mother Nature really is hashing up and serving, it includes variability and freedom, a pluralistic universe. Of at least ten dimensions. And many capacities, many vectors hardly glimpse. And so the new upon that new stellar civilization will have all the way through its operative quality. The transformative educational renewal qualities and processes everywhere along the way. Education is too important to stuff it in simply the young. To misquote Clemenceau. Education is a life long process when one lives as a multidimensional personal with others of that same quality and a cosmos that appreciates freedom and variability. And so that star civilization will need to be established in such a way that the population of people inhabiting it will be able to inhabit it expressively and wholeheartedly. If one looks at the science fiction movies of the last ten or 15 years, they all paint a depressive picture, a deconstructionist paradise. The grim qualities of a Darth Vader. Or Los Angeles of the Blade Runner, or many other examples. The capacity of a traditional mind facing this new aeon cannot see anything promising in it whatsoever. And sees only that the mirroring back indications are those of destruction, of defeat, of death. Of dismemberment. And the feelings that well up. In us, in our society, in our culture. Are feelings of this disenchantment, of this anger, of this disappointment. All of this. All of this is an artifact of a mis perception. The transformational quality that is there in the mystery of reality is indeed a very center around which all of us do together. Revolve. And part of the new ad will be pairs of teachers to help us get acquainted with ongoing education, life long transformation of building a quality of flexibility that leads us to be appreciative of the unknown. Instead of being threatened by what we do not know that we receive that as a call, as an invitation. And we are being invited. And that invitation needs a gracious exception. An acceptance. A gracious acceptance. Even the Freudian slips are old fashioned. You see. When we come back from a break. We'll take about a ten minute break. I want to talk about how this star civilization needs to be set up in the next 200 years. Because each new icon has a generative phase which must be taken, must be lived, must be developed, or that energy atrophies and pulls in a truly evolutionary way. Around the year 1000, no one progressed whatsoever. And if you look at the state of the apocalyptic European mind. When they did nothing in the year 1000. Over the next 200 years, they forced the Crusades upon another part of the world. We do not need atomic powered crusades in the 21st and 22nd century. That will be a very short crusade. One of the wise things that all Bertrand Russell when he was 97 said. He said, the only thing that bothers me is that man has never made a weapon he hasn't used. He will have to learn to be a different kind of man in order to survive now. It's not only the old adage that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But even deeper. Those who cannot envision the reality will never experience the future. Let's take a break here and we'll come back. The quality that we're talking about is one of transformation, one of changing. This is very difficult. When you're moving from an integral to a differential mode. The patient. Qualities that are indispensable earlier in integration and later in differentiation do not work. So that one of the perils of transformation is that the values and pacing. The process. The strategies. That worked before and will work again. Do not now. Work. So that transformation is peculiar. It's odd, it's difficult. It is perilous. It's like a logic where the middle is excluded all the time. So that there are many wisdom stories. About the humor. It's actually humorous. Men and women have lived with this. For thousands of years and all kinds of languages and ways. And I've come to understand there is a humorous element. Perilous? Yes. Difficult? Certainly. But also humorous. In this logic of the excluded middle. What's really important to keep a sense of is that you will not be able to know when the transformation happens. One of its. Requirements is that you be unknowing when it happens. It's like being a child in the America of several generations ago that Santa Claus is not going to come if you stay awake. You have to go to sleep. And if you go to sleep, there will be presence in the morning. So that there's a kind of a Chinese puzzle, there's a bind. The more serious you are, the less likely you are to relinquish any kind of quality of control. And if you're too nonchalant about it, you won't have the right energy level to make that transformation effective. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. And that that paradox increases and increases. And one of the qualities of a transforming consciousness is that one gets a sense of irony. The first thing that comes up is you begin to feel ironical, especially about yourself. Then, you know, it's time that the process is is begun. And one of the most. Perilous qualities is to know how to accept. Not to let it go. Not to be open to it. That takes almost a superhuman yogi to do that. But to accept. To realize that the final, final stage, the last step of an integration is acceptance. You have to accept it. Meaning is only true if it's accepted. If there's no acceptance, then that high powered integration becomes more and more problematical. And the irony deepens into paradox, and the paradox deepens into impossibility. And one sees more and more clearly that it's not going to work. The seeing that it's not going to work is an artifact of non acceptance. And so there are wisdom stories from every people on this planet in the past about how someone was tricked into becoming a better person. By. Being selfless in a crucial moment. To be self-possessed at a crucial moment of transformation makes a not out of what should be a bow. Because in the differential process, it's like opening presents. You want to untie all those bows. And so someone that is wise about this doesn't tie knots on things in the integration process, but ties, bows because you're going to reopen those. And so you integrate in such a way as to set it up so that the transformation will allow you then. To find those presents in the morning. Now, when it comes to a change of an alien, a whole civilization has to do this. A whole civilization has to be consciously humorous and wise and humane together that we're going to take the values we want. The purposes that we deem worthwhile. Whatever it is on whatever level. But tie them with bows. Because we're going to give them to our future selves. And then come to that transformational point together. Where we're no longer integrating. We're no longer tying bows. But we take the time out. To be with the unknown for a while. Sometimes it's an hour. Sometimes it's a year. Sometimes it's a while. There have in the past been communities of men and women who together have done this. But there's never been a civilization that has done this. No civilization has survived this. When AJ Toynbee was studying history as a phenomenon, he spent a whole life doing it. And he wrote a Big 12 volume study of history. He delineated 28 civilizations and 27 of them were dead. And the only one that was still alive was facing a crisis. And this was done about 25, 30 years ago. Try and vs. Try and be was a very tall, quiet British gentleman scholar with pale blue eyes, paler blue than Paul Newman's eyes. I used to have this wonderful quality of pausing and and asking anybody who was nearby. Whether they thought what he had just said was right or not. He used to chum around with his wife, who was just the most mediocre, ordinary dressed woman you could ever imagine, of print dress and the little purse and the little hat on. And he just adored her because she was always tuned in to sharing with him whatever was going on. And when one time in San Francisco, he was making a series for KQED. Even on camera. I looked over to her and he said, Do you think that's right? You said something very powerful about challenge and response and about how if this civilization cannot meet the challenge in the next two generations. The response will be failure. Not that we're going to limp through. We're not going to make it. The old Toynbee, like the old Bertrand Russell, understood a lot about larger structures and patterns. And anyone who has looked at this with any kind of care and concern has seen that there is no way out. We need together to learn. To really make presence of those values and qualities and purposes that we prize and then together set ourselves for a time of unknowing. And if we do, we'll come through that night. And we can reopen all of those qualities, those values and those purposes again in a new way, in a new day. One of the qualities of acceptance. He was classically. Shown about 600 years ago in a little Upanishad written in English. Most of the Upanishads were written in Sanskrit in India a long time ago. This was an English Upanishad written in the 14th century, written in the English Midlands. It's called The Cloud of Unknowing. And appropriately, it's by Anonymous. We don't know. And the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says that as one gets acquainted with entering into an knowingness. One of the most unsettling realizations is that not only is the future unknown, but when you enter into that unknowing, the past also suddenly becomes unknown that the cloud of unknowing is not only above you, but is now also below you. And you are suspended in a grey, unknowing knowingness. This is what is needed, what is necessary. It is dynamically the universal structure of transformation. There needs to be a fallow period where no one's pushing anymore. No one's pulling anymore. No one's shoving. No one's expecting. No one's not expecting. When the classic educator known to history as the Buddha was speaking after 45 years of speaking in public to tens of thousands of people, he was pretty smooth. And he used to hold up a hand. Turn it. Put it down and put it back, showing that there are four ways as a quaternary always to the mind's conception. There's always a square. There's always a forward and a reverse. And an obverse and a contra positive. All logic that works on a true false choice mode must exhibit this quality and property. The period of unknowing, logically, is to learn to live with diagonals and that the diagonals come in pairs. So that X literally marks the spot of a logical transformation. One of the few early logicians to really understand. This was American named Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote a book called Values and a Universe of Chance. It's this odd quality that a transformation requires. An extended vacation. From wanting. From kneading. From expecting. There needs to be an extended open ended vacation from those concerns. From all concerns. In individual transformation. Sometimes it. Passes in what seems to be such fleeting moments as to be almost out of time that picoseconds or nanoseconds would be too long to even measure. One can get very good at accepting. But the dimension of consciousness that comes with the act of acceptance is absorption. Absorption. And this stellar civilization. Is so monumentally, radically new and different that without this transformation, without the acceptance and the absorption and the vacation from wanting and needing and pushing and pulling. The reality of that new civilization is going to be like a stone wall. We will hit it. There is no way to stop that kind of movement. There's no place to veer off to. But it's like an old magician's tale. If you slow down and match your speed with the wall, you'll just brush it. You don't have to crash. And if you just brush it, a door will open where you didn't think there was one and you can go through. Before this generation is out. This will be their. This quality. Of differential, this quality of freedom and variation, this quality of inhabiting a whole star system. When we look at our star system, what are we talking about? Let's look at something in a. Practical. Almost a physical way. A quarter of a century ago when the first human beings went to the moon. 12 men stepped on the moon. If you look at the tapes, if you read the books about them, if you read their statements, almost none of them were really there. They were there physically, but mentally and psychologically and emotionally. They were with Mission Control and Houston. And those few instances where one of the astronauts on the moon would wake up from this programmed military control. Very peculiar events would happen. One of them had a dream that they were riding and the moon buggy and they had gone so far out from the ship. They were worried about whether they're going to get back. And way out there on the edge, they saw another moon buggy coming towards them. And when it got there to where they were, it was themselves. Driving to meet themselves. The universe is mysterious. She is gorgeous. But she loves the spirit of romance and she can't stand bores who will not change, who will not transform. And like Lent, sometimes she just picks and flicks and that's it. But for those that can go with her, she is a loving queen. An elegant lady, and she welcomes us to life. Not only the moon. But this quality of shrewdness makes it apparent that in the New Aeon, preparedness is going to be a quality of the structure. Preparedness. Instead of there being a moon base, there needs to be at least a pair. When we send. Some kind of a base to the inner planet Mercury. We need to send a pair. Not just want. We found out just this month that there is permanent ice on mercury. We thought it was so hot. I mean, lead melts and mercury. 900 degrees Fahrenheit is nothing on mercury. But because of its motion. Keeping one face and one position so constant over. At times there's frozen water on mercury at the poles could send a pair of bases to the poles of mercury. Study the sun, but also study the way in which we can become human beings on mercury. Venus, it's almost impossible to send anything to the surface. The longest lasting machine lasted two and one half minutes. Before the sulfuric acid rains and the pressure and the heat just simply collapsed and dissolve the machinery. So we'll probably need a pair of space stations around Venus. And so the presence of new varieties of men and women. In their paired shirt ness. Making the presence throughout the star system. Fortunately, Mars has two little moons. Phobos and Deimos. Five and ten miles in diameter. A pair of stations. Out of the 30 or 40,000 asteroids. There are a couple that really recommend themselves series. And Vesta. Both of them occupy very close to what is the plane of the ecliptic throughout the star system. If one looks at our star system from the outside, the planets and all the matter in it are flatter than a sheet of paper. And these asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, two of the most largest of the asteroids in between Mars and Jupiter, they straddle this plane of the ecliptic, would be a chance to be off a planet. And yet still have a ground base and to be able to experience the sheet of the star system. Not just to go there to mine for or for God's sake, but to experience the freedom and variety of being human. On the plane of the ecliptic. Off a planet. We need to know what we're like in those modes. We need to know what it's like for human beings to become so acclimated to living on some of the moons of Jupiter that they consider that home. That Ganymede and Europa would be wonderful adventures. Europa is an ocean of water sealed by a thin shell of rock. And it's quite possible there's life on Europa in that ocean of water. H. Two o. Because the rock shell for billions of years is prevented. Radiation. That would kill life. And so inside one of the moons of Jupiter, that could certainly be life. It would make a hell of a goldfish bowl. Ganymede is so large, it's larger than mercury. It would be an interesting place to be. There are pair of moons that recommend themselves at Saturn. Titan, which is the largest moon in the whole star system, is so large that it has an atmosphere. We cannot see underneath the haze. And there certainly will be forms of organic life on Titan. We need to encounter that. But more important, we need to encounter the freedom and variability of ourselves in the mode of encountering that. We need to know those dimensions of our humanity. If we don't go to Mercury at Venus. To the moon and Mars, the asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Charon and beyond. If we don't go, it's like closing off. The possibility of man's energy going in a differential mode. And if you close it off, the universal principle is that integration moves to an ultimate vanishing point and we will vanish. It's the universal process of integration. It's what happens. When gravity collapses and condenses. It eventually, beyond even a neutron star becomes a black hole. We cannot fear the psychological black hole that's there in transformation. It's an old story. One of the best versions of treating that fear of the inner black hole, that there's some dimensionless abyss within us into which we will surely fall. If we don't cling and hold on and keep control, we're going to fall in. The best story ever written about it was by the old Leo Tolstoy. Not the brash military Bond villain Tolstoy of War and Peace. Not the complicated, sociologically alerted Tolstoy of Anna Karenina, but the old Tolstoy, the man who had been crushed and broken. He was assigned as a census taker in the slums of Moscow. And seeing that horror of human life week after week, month after month, broke him. You said in his diaries he had to hide every gun and every sword in the house because he wanted to do away with himself. It was too despicable. But it came through it. And in 1896, he wrote a short story about it called The Death of Ivan Elledge. About the old, wealthy, powerful judge had always judged men who always been successful, well paid, social position. But now he was old and he was facing his death. And then the story, Ivan, begins to realize that he will never leave his house again. He's going to die there. And a little later, he'll never leave this bedroom again. He's going to die there. And when he's confined to his bed, he realizes he will never rise from that bed again. The specter of this black hole into which he is being forced to fall. How evil must life be to do this? And a little grandchild comes in. Now holds his hand. There's Grandpa. I love you. I'm going to always remember you and keep you in my memory. And Ivan in his acceptance. Absorbed by the love of that child. Sees the black hole vanish and a realm of light open. For. That's what happens. We don't have to perish. But we will be crushed if we don't transform. One of the eerie requirements probably late in the 22nd century, is that inhabiting the star system means the entire star system. And our star system, like all planetary star systems, evolved out of a peculiar kind of whirling, gaseous, dynamic quality, out of which gravity condense the various bodies. And when. Certain bodies reached an incandescent level. In the early solar system, there were two suns. Jupiter was a very low key sun. Its surface was about 10 million degrees. But when it cooled, it became planetary again. But those stars, when they burst into they kick into high gear. When they stop just burning hydrogen, they start to burn in a fusion way. Helium, they kick into high gear and the solar wind blows the hell out of all the dust and the systems like a vacuum that cleans it out. But that dust and debris does not escape the gravity of the star. And it coagulate. It lumps together. And at the farthest edges of the star's gravity, there collects a shell 360 degrees. A shell of debris. The first mathematician to understand this was a Dutchman named ert o. R t. And he named it the Oort Cloud. And that about one light year from our star. Is this tremendous shell of debris, the Oort Cloud. The place where Halley's Comet goes out to and many other cometary bodies. And to inhabit the entire star system. We're going to need not only men and women and communities on every planet and all the moon systems, but they're going to have to be some very rarified men and women a couple of hundred years from now. Who will go and station themselves and pivot their lives out there on the bleak vastness of the Oort cloud. To hold human waystation places at the very edge of the star system. Because that experience being free and of that variety is the necessary step to going to other stars. Because there is a quality of energy. Of life consciousness that will not release a child until they're grown. And our humanity will have to inhabit the entire star system. And then we will be free to go further. Into a vast universe, an incredible universe. The nearest star system. 300 years from now that our descendants will go to has three sons. That revolve in a very complicated way the Centurion Star system. And so their first trait, their first package that they'll open will be a star system with multiple suns. Strange qualities of life. Wild kinds of freedom. Unbelievable variabilities. What Mother Nature requires of us is that we be real. She's very practical. And if we are not. Ready to live in reality than we will perish in fantasy. And the neurotic fantasies. Of a planet bound humanity. With nuclear and genetic. Controls that are now available. Well, very rapidly being uninhabitable place. Even now, many of the values that we would sustain and wish to see kept are being leached in eroded even as we set. The reverse is not more control, more punishment, more soldiers, more weapons. But to undergo that community of acceptance that always is a prelude to life. This was the way the great teaching of Hellenistic Judaism, the last time this millennium changed. It's the teaching today. It's a quality that the community, those men and women who together understand that their gestalt is of a wholeness of life, transcendent of any particular culture, any particular tradition. Saving all those by letting an umbrella of a larger quality happen. That was the vision of the United States. That was the vision of a hermetic America. Thomas Jefferson, musing one time to his daughter, Patsy. They were riding out near the Natural Arch Rock Bridge. The man who was traveling with them overheard him say to her. In the past, there have been men and women who gained freedom in their lives. But what I would like to see is, Jefferson said. As a whole government dedicated and committed to freeing millions of men and women and turning them loose in a world that has no restrictions on them other than their own integrity. And within a year of that, Jefferson made it possible. He simply took two thirds of the continent away from the most powerful military man in the world at that time, Napoleon. The Louisiana Purchase was made from Napoleon against his will. Jefferson, being a practical man, sent James Monroe over. With a few facts. Jefferson said to Napoleon, I've taken a liberty of a survey. You have about 15,000 French men able to bear arms on the North American continent. I am sending 25,000 arms, very capable men, through the Cumberland Gap every month. I'm sure we can come to terms. Napoleon thought that he would use the French garrisons on Hague. To crowbar Jefferson, but Jefferson had already prepared for that. A man named Jesselyn took care of the Napoleonic vision that it was going to be easy. To use Haiti as some kind of a club, some kind of a crowbar to change Jefferson's mind. Jefferson had learned that quality which made the America that was the wonder of the world, the umbrella, a civilization devoted to the freedom and variability of men and women. That this is a place where they can be. Little wonder is it that the only human beings who have ever been to a body other than this planet have been Americans. In this quality. Of the future of that stellar civilization. One of the most important places on Earth is Los Angeles. This is the last place on the surface of this planet. That that vision of that America can be. But it cannot remain here. It cannot stay here. And we can't. Important to the Philippines or to China or some other place? Well, what's left is there to be no more. It's like a quality that when it has reached its fullness, it takes off. It goes up. It's almost little short of miraculous that the military place for sending satellites into orbit is Vandenberg Air Force Base, one of the most Western points on the United States. It is a quality of the transformation. Part of the irony of the times. That when there is a transformation of Vandenberg into a humane launching site for men and women to begin to inhabit the planets and moons. And terminal moraine of this star system will know that we're on our way. Now, this is the last of four lectures that I began. And I began it with Jesus of Alexandria, because that 2000 years ago was the pivot upon which a new civilization was spinning itself out. And we saw in that first lecture that almost immediately the compromises on that new civilization were almost terminal. Because the existing over arching. Power was the Roman Empire at the time. And the Roman Empire sought to put a kind of a covering like Europa's rock covering over its inner ocean. But when it began to crack, the Roman Empire made. A little variation, not a transformation, but a little variation. It decided to co-opt that. Power. For. They saw the development as a power, something that one could work into one's plans and infect men and women with the desire to control and have power. Have authority. So that's the last 2000 years. We only listen to those men and women who have power and authority because they control what's real. Money and armies and power and all of that is an illusion. It's a misconception. That is paper thin. It's brittle. Any child. Understanding. The transformational acceptance and absorption of love can put their hand through that any day. And when we hold that child's hand and put ours through, we lose that fear, which is the ultimate stick and crowbar at the back of all that authority and power and weapons. That we're going to vanish and not be here. Oblivion. Because truly the only oblivion that there is the only dust there is. Is not to transform and grow. And be real with Mother Nature and her wild skirts of freedom and variability. There's much that could be said, but I think that I would like to leave it there and thank you for helping me to commemorate the death of my daughter and the remembrance that she will come again. Thank you very much.