Background

Thursday, December 16, 2021

4:50 a.m. Yesterday’s ILC session went into the question of how countries can have souls. Clearly, a huge subject worth of extensive investigation. Is that something you’d like to pursue today?

Let’s pursue the process of investigation, for the moment. Your instinct yesterday was correct: You have stumbled upon a promising technique to accomplish two kinds of thing at the same time.

Joint investigation, you mean.

Think of it as a continuing seminar. It isn’t something you have to invent. People have been doing this for as long as there have been people. But this could be a new wrinkle.

Ah – the new wrinkle being an open society, an open investigation, rather than something shrouded in secrecy. I read somewhere that these things have cycles – natural cycles, I gather – and will go maybe 100 years in the open, then for 100 years may have to go underground, then rinse and repeat. True?

Not exactly 100 years, of course, but basically, yes. So think of your era as bringing back into the open things once hidden.

Parenthetically, “open” and “hidden” would be better understood as “closely held” and “widespread.” We aren’t talking about a cycle driven by social pressures such as persecution or even incomprehension. We refer to a natural cycle that, in pursuing its natural existence, often generates persecution or ridicule as a side-effect.

I see that isn’t clear and I see – ten minutes into this! – that I forgot to focus. Dammit! So, FRCP.

Just as a year proceeds in its rhythm of seasons, so does everything, only some cycles are long, some short; some are obvious, some aren’t. the cycle of overt and covert is one of those cycles, and manifests in many things, in many ways. In one subject it may been social, in another economic or political or philosophical (that is, abstract and seemingly divorced from the practical). There are many cycles, of varying lengths and intensities. All life is cyclical, and by life’s very complexity it should show you that it is many cycles, not one or a few.

So – to keep to the psychological, which becomes the sociological – there are eras in which certain kinds of ideas and perceptions are easy, and other eras where they are hard. Thus certain ideas are widespread and accepted in some times, and eccentric and unpopular in others. Same ideas, but different environments.

Yeats had that suspicion. In his Autobiographies, I think it was, he speculated that some thoughts can’t be widely accepted in some times. He wondered if there was an intelligent force determining the nature of the zeitgeist. (At least, that’s how I am remembering his thought. I could look it up but it would take a while to find, and probably I’d be seduced into reading it yet again and would be lost for several hours. Or days.) Again I wonder, do you suggest this because I read it, or do I suggest it because I read it?

It’s still a meaningless distinction, just as it was last time we talked about this, unless you are trying to decide if you are making us up.

I’ve never decided that either.

You have an exalted opinion of your own creativity.

Very funny. To continue –

Well, your lifetime has watched as the cycle moved into openness. The cycle is far longer than 100 years, obviously (though it has sub-cycles 100 years or less). But let’s move to bullet-points to make a couple of points:

• The Renaissance was a culture hinge-point for the West, or what would be the West, and hence eventually for the emerging global culture. [Asia, the Americas, peripheral Europe (that is, Europe beyond the maritime powers), and Africa would all be drawn into one culture, a process that is culminating in your time and just beyond.] The Renaissance moved from a magical world to a mechanical one. It didn’t intend to do it, it didn’t realize it was doing it, it wouldn’t even have approved of doing it. But it did it, thinking it was merely moving from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to wisdom.
• What are misperceived as religious wars could be better understood as political wars waged around banners of religion, and better yet understood as wars between viewpoints, the corporate v. the individual; that is, the universal body of authority v. the individual conscience, the individual response to the voice of God, so to speak.
• But (oddly enough still unsuspected), there was a natural compensating movement co-existing. The very mindset that rejected the universal pretensions of the church began saetting up and adhering to an alternative church with universal pretensions, that they thought of as “science.” This is rarely seen because the historical manifestation confuses it. The culture that exalted “science” as an alternative to “medieval superstition” tended to be Protestant (because it was only in Protestant states that the universal pretensions of the church had no political or economic or social power to oppose to them). The belief system told them that they were Protestant, hence believers in individual conscience, etc.; this masked or muffled the reality that they had not eliminated their belief in a universal authority but had displaced it.

I’m not sure that’s right.

Bear with us. We can examine it later for weak links or overstatements.

• You saw in The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler’s history of how medieval man began transitioning into “modern” man, how someone could be both scientist and astrologer (Kepler, Newton, etc.) and then gradually it became impossible to be both. A new cultural matrix emerged, and hardened, and what had been possible for a short time (during the changing of social paradigms) ceased to be possible.
• Your own era, beginning in the dark nineteenth century, has begun to emerge from this strait-jacket, so that you have lived your whole lives – certainly since 1916 or so, after a couple of years of war had begun to destroy the pillars of what had been – in a jumble of what was, and what would be, and what looked like it would be, but never would. This is creation and destruction; both, necessarily.
• A symptom of the change is that you – your civilization – no longer know what is superstition and what is knowledge. You don’t know what is real. There is nothing wrong with this, but of course it is uncomfortable. Those who say, “Everything is falling apart” are quite eight. Those who say, “We’re finally getting back on track” are also quite right.
• So see your own condition in this context. Your explorations are not random or in any way accidental. You are being guided, and sometimes you are aware of it. Trust that guidance. Test it, but trust it. This is how you explore with confidence.

Now, it may seem like we have gone on a long journey without much reference to what we propose to talk about, but context is important.

Because you are in the beginning phase of the establishment of a new worldview, you have opportunities that did not exist even a hundred years earlier. What were esoteric societies in the 1920s would be seen in your day as much closer to the mainstream. What were esoteric practices are less so. What can be accomplished in your day by a few people working closely together is far greater than could have been accomplished then, because so much of the inertia acting as drag has been attenuated.

There’s your hour. Next time we can talk about specifics. Call this one “Background,” maybe.

You made some fairly sweeping statements and I’m not sure they’d stand up to close scrutiny.

In this case the important thing was to give an overall sense of the dynamic, and we think we did that.

Well, our thanks as always, in any case.