Earth Element

Talk given
by Fritz Kunz

at Indralaya, August 1, 1957


We will talk about the question which was opened up this morning. The discussion was most useful from my point of view and now I want really to pursue it, that’s what I’m doing. I’ll tell you what I’m about so that there can’t be any mistake about it. I’m going to try to show that there lies under the immense diversity of national fate - storms, clouds, planets, moons, water, plants, animals, earthquakes, aerial storms and all the rest of this - there underlies a simply fantastic order, fantastic because its simple. That’s what I’m going to try to suggest -I can’t say “show” - suggest. And I’m particularly eager to show this material with certain people present - Donald amongst them who might be particularly interested in this, those of you that are in education, I mean experiencing education in a formal way and those who are involved in educational processes, and those of us who would like to see the theosophical philosophy presented in educational form rather than in propaganda and popularizing. In fact I have something here I may say for all, and certainly for the future. Now this involves a state of mind if it’s to be appreciated - in a way I hope it will be appreciated - and to be used as it should be used, correctly. And it’s necessary to try to describe what I mean by that state of mind before we use the material itself. That will take me a few minutes and I offer no apology for this - it’s interesting on its own account and its terrifically important for anybody who wants to live in the modern world and cope with the situation - the intellectual climate to which we’ve made many references already.


I shall put it like this: everybody is aware that the philosophy of science of the 19th century was utterly different from the philosophy of science which is now opening up. When I say philosophy of science I mean the attitude of scientists which came to a peak about 1850, 1860, and which seemed to be absolutely triumphant by the end of the century, but which already had had what would be death blows delivered to it as early as 1850, and which now is obsolete and indeed should be abandoned by everybody. And they would abandon it if they had the facts some of which I shall provide. That earlier philosophy we needn’t dwell upon particularly, but I’ll characterize it. It is usually called mechanism or materialism and in terms of man, a sort of fatalistic attitude towards life - fatalistic materialism, so to speak.


Now what do we mean by this.? Well, we mean the kind of thing which arose owing to the failure to work out the contribution of Isaac Newton - I won’t go into those things, they pile up, but I must say something about it. You know in the 19th century everybody was convinced that atoms were little round red balls - some were blue perhaps - little hard balls, and they bumped around in the forces that worked in the world, and they compacted into planets and suns, and on the surface of the earth they would go bumping around largely by accident, by chance - and what law there was was mechanical, sheer mechanical. And the physical world was real world, and in fact there was some doubt as to whether there was any other world of any other kind. Man’s arts and abilities in respect to mental things like mathematics and so on were present no doubt, they were used all the time, but they were means to an end; the end was the understanding of this cold heartless and perhaps in some people’s minds, quite senseless physical universe which was all there was.


Now this business traces from a mishap - I’ll explain it to you. It’s really very valuable to review this kind of thing if you, as I say, want to cope with our time - about 300 years before that there was liberated into European science a development which might have come to something different, but didn’t. You’ve all heard of Isaac Newton, a man who devised the thinking - and Kepler too was involved in this - the thinking which eventually became this mechanism, especially in respect to gravitation and celestial phenomena. But it needn’t have been like that had there been a more determined attack on the problem he left unsolved. He was able to describe the movements of the planets and so on in terms of mechanism, but he was never able to say WHY the sun and earth affect each other, or more especially HOW they affect each other through space. You know the earth is 90 millions of miles from the sun on a sort of mean average and the question is what is this gravitational force? How does it operate? This was never answered by him or anybody else in proper terms, and all kinds of devices were used to try to explain this. The sun and earth act as if they’re bound together by a rod or a slightly elastic chain - or something like that - and yet there’s nothing like that present. Why do they behave mechanically when there is no mechanical connection? The failure to pursue this and answer it in proper terms - we have proper terms for that now you know - led to calling the whole universe, the workings of the universe, celestial mechanics just as if the earth were attached to the sun by a bar or a chain. Now this failure led to a disaster which we should remind ourselves of. Mechanism had become very successful by 1845, 1850, and there was then flourishing our friend Charles Darwin. Now, Darwin’s business was with life, and not with matter and energy, but because the philosophy that he lived in was what it was, and because of the influence on him of one or two social writers incidentally, he read the social thinking of his time down into his biology, and as we all know he decided that everything in the living universe was by chance. Small variations confirmed by an environment produced new types and hence evolution by accident - inexplicable small things. I always say that Darwin said that everything’s produced by little mistakes, and organs got more and more complicated until you get the last and most terrible mistake - human beings! That literally was his state of mind, see? ‘Twas all little chancey things. Well, just like Isaac Newton, he didn’t think he had the last answers, but people went in behind him and they confirmed him. And from 1859, when he published that great book of his Origin of the Species, this mechanism, materialism, randomness, chance-ism, blindness, that became the dominant thought in all domains, including humanity. And idealism fought a rear guard action from then on, until the end of the century.


Now, the challenge to this began in 1850 - and I’m going to show it on the screen in a few minutes. It was tremendously strengthened in 1878, it finally became the dominant note in 1900. And when Einstein published his first paper in 1905, the rout of materialism was well on its way, and now we have that utterly different philosophy. We know WHY and HOW the earth and the sun are tied together. And it’s not mechanical as we all know. We know that the same point of view ties electrons and nuclei of atoms together. We know that living substance is not mechanically ordained or operated. We know that fields - this is the great word - fields - non-material fields with their properties, many of which are traceable to space itself, right?, those are the ways in which the universe is being built. This is an astonishing revolution and a fascinating thing. Anybody who hasn’t got this isn’t living in today’s plan. Anybody who believes that causality comes from eternal things to us and governs us is quite mistaken. There’s lying underneath a fabric, the properties and behaviour of which caused this external thing and ties together the behaviour of things in a kind of sublime ecology - a science of (?).


Now this has not yet affected some parts of thinking. Those forms of science which are not dependent upon the kind of technic that I have mentioned previously - those parts of science have not, of course, been so much influenced as physics and chemistry have been. One of these forms of science which has not yet been so influenced is geology - our geology and the life side of geology, paleontology, the science of ancient forms. But the data that is piling up - these are descriptive sciences you see, they are not structured like physics and chemistry are - the data that is piling up I am going to put on the screen in a few minutes. It begins to show that on the greatest possible scale the evolution of all things including matter itself on this globe has been highly systematic. That evidence when it’s brought forward and examined begins to create what I mentioned the other day, a kind of new science for which I’ve invented a name even before the science has been accepted - ortho-geology - that is, the geology of regular changes - and the paleontology - regular changes as against random, accidental, meaningless, senseless - sort of phantasmagoria, as far as man is concerned, a useless existence. That’s all growing now, and it’s growing fast.


I want to show you four slides which summarize all of this material which has been assembled from various quarters by various people and I published it some years ago. And I told you I’ve got Professor Mather at Harvard University to read it with one or two people up there to see if it was foolish. On the contrary he found it very interesting himself. I want to show you this material. Now I have a reason, in addition to my general argument. On Saturday night as you know, we’re going to see this film on protoplasm, and that is the first scientific demonstration of the doctrine that the psyche has invaded this world and organized material from its own nature. It’s a field organizing matter, and from that matter all living forms - psychosomatic forms - are thrown out. Am I clear? And that element is called water in the old literature. The psyche is called water, and it turns up as protoplasm, which is about 85% water anyhow, H20. Protoplasm is the stuff out of which all plants and animals without exception are made; and they are the creatures that have psyches, you see that Protoplasm is the response to the psyche, and all the forms that have developed are the response to the presence of the psyche as a field.


Question: Fritz, will you define what you mean by psyche?

Fritz: Yes, fine, alright, I take it for granted that all you people brought up on depth psychology know what the psyche is. Anybody’s vital and emotional and restless mental feelings are his psyche. I use the word exactly as Freud would use it - Now, this is only one element, water, you see? There are other elements, and in the sequence in which they appear on this globe, there are two preceding water, and we have had two that have appeared after the emergence of protoplasm. They came in almost at the same time but they got more successful as things went on. One of them is air, or organization; and the other is fire, which is Spirit really and is embodied in man and the warm bodied animals who are a kind of by-product of man’s presence. Now, we’ll go into these things if you’re interested, but I want, this evening, to show you some properties of the earth element before we get the water element, see? So that you’ll appreciate better what’s in front of you then.


[showing slide] The earth element - that’s the element that starts with a plastic layer about four thousand miles deep in the earth here, and comes up here as high as the sky goes. It’s a kind of matter we say, but maybe it’s more subtle than that - I want to show you some things about that. My purpose in showing you this material is very specific. I want to show you an element like this is absolutely governed by geometrical principles and what people call the Mind of God. This is a terrible phrase, as if God were a Professor in a University - what could be more dreadful! But it’s a fact. The entire material universe is governed ultimately by some very simple principles - fabulously simple principles. It’s because they are simple that they can be shown, and it’s because they are simple that they can be understood by anybody who wants to understand them. And this is what I want to say - there is no excuse for anybody except mere negligence and disinterest or whatever you like, there’s no excuse for anybody not having some ideas of these basic principles - none! And then the climate of the future which is going to change in this direction as sure as I am here will be a climate we’ll move on into agreeable. We wont resist it, we wont discard the value in it, and we’ll be of some use in the world. These are the facts, so to speak, of the future. I speak positively because I’ve been living with this a long time and am quite certain of myself.


That’s what I’m about - I want to show some of the properties of the earth element, the ideal and real properties of the earth element, and I shall end up with an example of the transition from the earth element to the water element. I will show a picture of the tobacco mosaic virus - enormously magnified - cheerful subject, viruses - and then I will show that these are not cystalizable. They’re so low in the scale of living evolution that they’re not protoplasm - they’re protein, not protoplasm, protein. They don’t really belong to water, they’re a kind of borderline creature. They’re all parasites, by the way. We know them through their parasitic character. Any beneficent virus - there probably are thousands of them - are unknown.


The tobacco mosaic virus is a creature that lives between the earth element and the water element indifferently according to circumstances. Very likely in the early history of the earth there was a great deal of that when protoplasm was slowly being prepared for and engendure.


Now these four slides cover the entire history of the life process on earth, I must say that this is going to be the quickest tour you ever had through time - just four slides! If nothing else, that ought to bring me a medal for condensation!


Starting at the time we cannot date, but before the rocks in the bottom of the Grand Canyon - the very bottom of the Grand Canyon - which represent what is called the Killareen or Grand Canyon Revolution - the great change from one period to another in evolution, before that there was a period when there was no supply of water, no vast supply of water on the earth. There were no living forms of the kind we know and the principal business of the earth was melting and solidifying, melting and solidifying rocks. That was the business of the surface of the earth. You can call this, if you like, the first Round in theosophical terms, but that’s a little misleading because the information here is not classified in any way. So I call this the great era of metalization. There were some algae probably, clump globular fossil remnants are to be found, but life in the ordinary sense - plants with stems and all that sort of thing didn’t exist, and any life that there was, including the life of crystals was central-symmetrical - that is to say, organized around a point in the middle - radiate crystalline and the like in form. And that was the era of the earth element par excellence. But I’ll come back to it with something of interest a little later.


Now came the Grand Canyon Revolution, a terrific business, immense and monstrous upheavals, the like of which have never been seen since - Grand Canyon meaning at the bottom of the Canyon. Now there appeared on the face of the earth water - for the first time, mountains were worn down by rain. And seas appeared. There’s a mystery - nobody knows exactly how this came about. And so from the Cambrian rocks to the Pennsylvanian was the great era of water. It was the water element, in fact, that turned up in H20, and was about to turn up in protoplasm. And in those seas from the very beginning there burst out in the Cambrian rocks all kinds of life - just burst out in the Cambrian! Probably all the different basic varieties of life turned up. It was a great era of plants - of plants in the sea - and of course many animals only in the sea. And then the seas parted from the land and the fresh water parted from the salt - it was a great era of watery events, and it was great plant times.


Very well. Then came the Appalachian Revolution, in other words the Revolution best represented in our Appalachian Mountains geologically. And then there opened up an era not of plants with their axiate stems, but more especially of animals. Of course there were lots of plants too. But now animals appeared - land animals - vast land animals like the giant saurians, and the time of an entirely new kind of geology and so on - I wont trouble you with that.


Then came the Laramede Revolution, that is to say, the Revolution seen very clearly in the mountains near Larabee, Wyoming. And the air element had stated itself and now there came two other events - one connected with thermal situations. Warm-blooded animals appeared you see, and also the descent of man from the theosophical point of view from above. And we are right here now, as I said the other day, all we have to do is look at Mt. Hood and Mt. Ranier and so on and you see what’s going on. The Cascadian, or contemporary disturbance because we’re living in a very disturbed time geologically as everybody who lives in California knows, that’s where we now are. That has taken about two to three thousand millions of years - 320 millions of years since the sediments began - or maybe more, probably more.


Alright. Now, I want to talk just a few minutes about the earth element. Now you’ll have to stand some geometry, I can’t help it. Some people hate geometry. I want to tell you something. The rocks which are the earth element especially are represented by a little band of geometry. All the geometry of the non-organic crystals, of the inorganic crystals, are summed up in this little figure that you see here. There are about 25,000 inorganic minerals known to exist in nature - maybe more now, since I first used that figure. Millions can be made in the laboratory and there isn’t one of them that doesn’t have its geometry traced back to that little group of two figures that you see there. I want that to soak in. No exceptions - you see that? An entire kingdom of nature is definitely established upon that little net of properties - variations on that theme. It’s an astonishing fact. I mean, if you like ideas it’s a very astonishing idea.


What’s all the rest of this? Well, I’ll explain to those who are interested in philosophy. Whitehead, a philosopher who worked in Harvard in his last years, enunciated a very interesting principle. He said that if there’s any system in the world that is completely reasonable and self-contained, and if one part of it applies to nature, the rest of it will be found applying to nature - sometimes called Whitehead’s Rule of Parsimony. Alright. This applies to nature. This little group applies to nature. It is the geometry of one whole kingdom of nature. The rest of this geometry belongs to the same system. We call it the regular (?) - don’t bother with that. If, therefore, this applies to nature, these will apply to nature if Whitehead was right. Well, this is an idea which I published in my magazine some time ago. I read it at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The President of the Association was present - this same Kirtley Mather. He was very excited about it and urged me to publish it, and I did. I am convinced from a study of all the evidence that is available to me, which maybe isn’t much but it’s some, that the plant geometries will be explained by this, the cold-blooded animals will be explained by that, the warm-blooded animals and man will be explained by that, and there are no other geometries of this kind available, and neither are there any other kingdoms in nature available but those. It may be one of the great ideas of the future - I’m sure it is. I have been preceded in this area by two gentlemen of some renown - Johannes Kepler and the late Mr Plato of Athens. (Laughter from audience)


Question: Fritz, will you say that again?


Fritz: Huh huh, yeah. Since this explains the geometry of one whole kingdom, and since these are the only remaining portions of this total constructive geometry called the regular polyhedra, they must therefore apply to nature. And my proposition is that this series deals with plant geometry - they are highly axiate forms, you see? Plants are always axiate. Then this series applies to cold-blooded animals - they are bi-laterally symmetrical, many of them. And this series applies to warm-blooded animals and man. And as there are no other kingdoms in nature, and no more geometry of this kind, this may be one of the great ideas of the future. That clear? Clear as mud - its tough. But if you’re used to purity of ideas, if you admire simple clarity in ideas, whether true or false, you see, is another question - then this will appeal to you like anything very exquisitely symmetrical and so on done. It’s an idea. And I’m dead certain it’s right. What I mean is this - the time will come when the seed capsules of plants, the number of their petals et cetera will be described in terms of this combined with that, and I have assembled the evidence for it in an unpublished book. There’s a great deal of evidence. Naturally this comes over to the plant kingdom. And I am declaring that cold-blooded animals will have their geometry explained by this, and this, and the additional properties from there. And finally the warm-blooded animals which are very complex and graceful in their movements and structures will sweep this all together and re-simplify and assemble it in terms of another geometry. Of this I am certain - absolutely certain. And one would like to see work done in this field - maybe we shall. Any other question?


Question: Maybe you’re going to discuss this in a minute, but does this theory apply only to physical matter - living physical creatures?


Fritz: (indistinct) - but I’m prepared to guess that it will turn out to be connected with the properties of the psychosomatic field. Necessarily, you see? because it’s the field that makes the organisms. And I might tell you that there will be published in England by Professor Wasserman of the University of Durham, I mentioned this the other day, a first mathematical book - he never heard of this and I haven’t told him yet - first mathematical treatment of biological processes and forms with an attempt to attribute it to a field of which the mathematical properties, he agrees, can be stated. So you see we’re not very far from a break-through on this thing - working from different directions. Any other points?


Question: Kepler’s language when he discovered some of these things was very wonderful - Kepler’s language

Fritz: Oh, marvelous!

Question: When he discovered those things, wasn’t it wonderful!

Fritz: Kepler, she’s speaking of Kepler; Kepler was a man who thought that the entire celestial harmony could be described in terms of those figures. He didn’t know all of them, you see. He only knew the three-dimensional ones, but on the outside of that diagram - I didn’t bother you with the four-dimensional ones - he didn’t know about those. And he tried his best but it broke down. But his language was simply magnificent. He wrote in Latin, you know, and he wrote almost as a poet about the harmonic order of the universe. That’s been translated in German, but never in English, oddly enough - Kosmischer Harmonie.


Now I want to tell you something that bears on what Austie and I were talking about this morning. And if I could only communicate my enthusiasm about it, the importance of it, I shall be much happier than I am right now. You know we were talking about the higher mind? Does a person have the ability with one part of his mind for absolutely true, pure thought that is impossible in the lower, craving, analytical, gossipy mind? That’s what we were talking about. Anyhow I am re-phrasing what we were talking about. The answer to this is on the screen in this slide and the next one. A proof - a proof. And I want to go through this again for the benefit especially of those of you who want to use this material or have never heard of it. I have mentioned 25 or 30 thousand minerals that are known - of course millions have been made in the laboratory, but those that are found in nature are those that don’t dissolve, you see, in water normally. These minerals were being classified years ago by a poor means - mainly external measurement - and there’s no science unless you have classification, no proper knowledge without classification. Well, they weren’t getting very far. Because the minerals they were turning up were so fine in their variation -their characteristic variations - sometimes only a few seconds of arc were involved, you see, and you just couldn’t measure that kind of stuff. Well, as I mentioned the other day, there lived in France at that time, early in the 19th century a man named Bravais. He was coming to the maturity of his mathematical powers and in those days, as I said earlier, everybody believed atoms were little round balls, you see? So, if you have little round balls packed together, then you can tell how they are packed by where their centers are. Each ball will have a center, right? And if sodium chloride, common table salt, is sodium and chlorine balls packed together in order to find out how they’re constructed, all you have to do is to find out how the points are distributed. Sodium chloride is just this - it is the solid mass, small translucent cubes when freshly made, can be made quite large, they can grow quite big, but anyway, small translucent cubes in which the sodium and chlorine atoms are packed absolutely faultlessly - or tend to be packed absolutely faultlessly. There are errors, of course, in everything in nature. Alright. The pattern can repeat until billions of sodium and chlorine atoms are organized and the pattern remains the same, a tiny cube. Bravais said: Why do we bother with these measurements? Since these things are packing in three-dimensional space, ordinary space, why don’t I figure out how many patterns you can have of points distributed in the space - any individual pattern being such that you just keep on repeating it and you can fill all space----He put that question to himself. Well, he calculated, and he published in 1850 - where’s Ed? I have Ed’s copy of the book - been translated in English at the 100th anniversary of Bravais - it’s now available. But I want to tell you an interesting thing - Mr Bravais, by pure thought - higher mind - came out with these patterns, and he not only found that there were 14 patterns and no more than 14, he found out that every one of these patterns tends to have a polar axis. Now mind you, there were no X-rays till 1895 or ‘96. Forty-five years before we had X-rays, he was forecasting what has since come true with the help of X-rays. We now know that when you send an X-ray beam through a crystal along its polar axis - and there will be a characteristic polar axis, you will get a scattering that will lead to the structure - the internal structure - revealed by the scattering of the X-ray beam. By pure thought I want you to know, he arrived at this - there were no X-rays! No way of testing this. But mathematically, he found out so many patterns and such and such properties. Am I clear? That’s the only way in which points can be distributed in space, in three-dimensional Euclidian space so that any one pattern can be repeated over and over again. There are no others possible - and if you had studied this you would admit it. By pure thought he arrived at that.


Now the next slide will show you a curious thing. Those are the same pictures that you looked at - they are now merely arranged to show the way in which they appear in the mineral kingdom. These are nothing but Bravais’ thoughts, now notice in the rocks themselves. And it is inevitable, if you are a logical person - I mean really logical, I don’t mean a logical positivist - if you are really a logical person you would say that there must be something in nature working the way something worked in Bravais’ mind. Those are the seven or possibly six or eight as you happen to feel about it - there’s some diversity of opinion there - seven ways in which those 14 space lattices - they’re called that by Bravais - are arrangeable, and the moment they are arranged like that, they immediately classify the entire kingdom or earth element. Have I been clear? No one should say there is no Divine Mind! And no one should say the mind of man is incapable of these abstractions. And what I maintain, and shall maintain until I’m dead, is that until this kind of truth is put in the school system so that every kid lives in the consciousness that the universe is exquisitely ordered, and organized, there is no hope for mankind really. Because until you know that you’re saturated with law, that law is absolutely everywhere, and until you know that your freedom is a function of order and not chaos, you can’t have a decent society of a complicated kind. And we have an awfully complicated society! And if we cannot locate in the minds of everybody these facts - nothing artificial about it, we aren’t doing anything wrong with anybody when you teach them these things - and until you have everybody soaked with these principles, he will not be individually responsible because he wont know how to be responsible. You cannot do it by moral aphorisms and mere object lessons although they are terribly important, I know that. You can’t get people to imitate goodness by mere imitation. There’s got to be the creative force in them released in terms of an assumption of our order. That’s why I say this kind of stuff is so terribly important.


An entire kingdom, you see, has now been put before you - the earth element if you want to call it that - the earth element in terms of its divine and its understandable geometry. It’s all practical matter of fact - you see that? The minerologists use this all the time. And now the crystalographers, the men that crystalize biological substances start here too - you know biological material is now being crystallized. They all start here also - they have to. Now any questions on this? Excuse my excitement about it, I’m very keen on this.


(Indistinct question - Fritz repeats it) The question she put: were the columns in the Greek system of architecture rested upon these ideas and properties? The answer is probably certainly not consciously. But we do know that the Greeks were studying geometry very extensively. They (?) - all kinds of incidental principles, big principles from the standpoint of the geometry they were brilliant, in that sense, yes, OK., but not in the sense of direct appreciation of this situation which they couldn’t possibly have known.


Question: I would just like to ask by what process you think these things appear in this man’s life. How did it happen?

Fritz: You mean Bravais?

Question: Yes, did these just appear out of the sky to him?

Fritz: Now let me tell you something. There are a very small number of people to whom this happens, see that? Einstein for example, right? Minkowsky, his mathematical tutor - great friends. And a few others. Not many - not many. They cannot explain what goes on in themselves. They say all of a sudden it clicked, you see that? And somehow or other a superior power took charge of all their fumblings - and it’s in a second - I’ll give you a case. There was a very remarkable mathematician, Blaise Pascal. He had puzzled over a problem in mathematics for months, and one day when he was in the street and was just about to set foot in a carriage, or go up a step, I don’t know - the whole solution came in his head, bang! He tells this story about himself. Nobody knows how it works - intuition.


Question: Don’t you often hear that it always came in the Silence?

Fritz: Now we’ve got something - now we’ve got something to attach that business to. This is a contemplative act. This is an invitation of a higher level, a higher order of your functioning to step in and do something you can’t do. I mean you, as a psyche, as a restless psyche. I am certain of this. And when you say the Voice of the Silence and all this, we are talking about - but the thing is, this is concrete stuff, this happens. And it is terribly important knowledge. But it happens to very few people. Now why to very few people? Because in our society the craving, analytical destructive kind of mind and emotions is very prevalent and strictly encouraged I regret to say, and the number of people who are encouraged to live a quiet life, I mean an intense quiet life, very few - very few. There are very few people who give their entire time, thought, and energy to the kind of general causes that encourage in them this type of striving, you see? striving for clarity. And you don’t get clarity by little piddling activities. You don’t. You get it by something heroic. I don’t mean artificial heroes, but long-sustained impersonal endeavour. I’m convinced of that. But honestly, Austie, nobody who has this happen to them can explain it to himself or anybody else.


Question: And that’s why I question in a way what you say about him picking this up - he didn’t do anything of the kind - it came to him!

Fritz: You wait till you read the book. He worked like a dog, you see that? Now, the dog didn’t do much, but at the conclusion of his discussion - he never performed an experiment in his life - he poured over it, he worked over it, he thought about it and he struggled , then all of a sudden it jelled. Now he was not idle; and nobody came in and told him; if it came at all it came from within him, didn’t it? Now if you want to say it’s not thinking I don’t care, see? - One of the curses that confronts those men is that they have all been brought up wrong, really. Nearly everybody has. They don’t expect anything like this, and they always have to go and hunt and work like demons to get it. Suppose you had a society where the expectancy was large, and all the cases that are known were put in front of people, that would be a good thing. That’s what I mean by education. Suppose you think that clarity's impossible - let’s call it clarity, huh? - suppose you think that clarity's impossible and you don’t know any cases of clarity, and anyhow you’re very busy earning a living, see? Oh, nothing much is going to happen, or nothing much happens to most people about this. Suppose on the other hand you know that clarity is possible, clarity does occur; when you are richly informed on the subject it is more likely to occur, and these are the conditions-psychological and otherwise - when there will be hundreds that get some kind of clarity. Maybe not this particular kind, right? Let’s call it intuition if you don’t want to call it thinking, but it turns out to be a form of thought, don’t you notice? When it’s jelled, it’s a kind of thought, isn’t it?


Question: There is no way of knowing whether a mathematician or anyone, when he’s stuck on a problem, whether it would make any difference whether he struggled or not. The question is not that he struggled, but what was the state of mind which brought this about, the problem is learning what was the state of mind that can bring about such a revelation and find out what it is, because you can’t, it isn’t possible to say that it was hard work because it wasn’t hard work because it came when he - (indistinct) But hard work preceded it, Helen. This is a corker. I want to get hold of this now! First I want to raise this question - how many people do you know who have achieved anything like that? Nobody? Oh you do!

Voice: Yeah. Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein and G.A. Moseley (laughter)


Fritz: Let me get into this point. Look. A number of people have achieved something like this in a hard science, in a demonstrable way you understand. Plenty of people think they have clarity, and they turn out to write junk. This pronounces on them later on in some art or something. But when you’ve got something that’s indisputable, the number of people who have had this experience is very small and I began this by telling you they can’t explain it to you. My opinion is that impersonal endeavour, I want you to notice that adjective, impersonal endeavour, - and he was highly impersonal, see that? - impersonal endeavour in any good cause, it may be a ball club or something like that, you see - if it’s really tough endeavour and you’re going to go on until you get there!, that finally engenders enough force so that whatever it is that is in the superior structure of a person’s being - and there are higher and lower levels of being after all - invades this confused scene almost in response to a cry if you like. And that it happens like lightening deceives people into thinking it is simple or easy. But not the man who does the work. That’s all one can say about it at this stage of learning. If you had Einstein and forty other fellows who had done this - and there aren’t very many in all history - if you had them all here and if you said “Now kindly explain it”, they would tell you in essence what I said. But if you said to them “Tell me how to do it easily and simply”, they would probably answer: “How do I know?” They don’t know that anymore than they know how their heart beats, but they know that a certain routine, namely, that a high impersonal cause - you understand that this has happened to people in the moral and political world too, see? High endeavor in an impersonal cause, and it’s really got to be the real thing you understand, uncolored by ambitions and all this junk - will produce on rare occasions this stroke of lightening. Now if you don’t want to call that thought, why it’s alright. But let us recognize that when it’s over, it’s an intelligible proposition. (inaudible discussion)


Well, let me show you these two slides, and then we can rally round the fire. The subject really is the earth element - that’s what we’re talking about - the Divine Mind and the earth element. Now when you leave the earth element, you enter the water element. That is to say, after the Cambrian begins water appears on the earth, plants come, protoplasm comes etc, and that development of protoplasm and all the rest of it has been going on for millions of years. The result is that what really went on in the old days is now unknown, and we’re not certain with regard to the evolution of things. But the viruses are either fresh recent developments, or very old remnants of something that actually are on the border. These are the tobacco mosaic virus directly photographed. I got them from (?) himself. He’s the man who has done the most work in this field. Those are tobacco mosaic viruses - they are only molecules - they are not made of protoplasm, they are made mainly of protein. Now, they are alive in this sense that if you were to take a few of these and drop them in the veins- the vascular system we call it - of a plant, of a tobacco plant, a healthy plant, it would right away get mottled leaves - mosaic leaves. In other words the sickness would appear in the plant caused by the stricture - that’s the way we first found out about its existence. There are thousands of these - maybe hundreds of thousands - and as I told you a while ago, only those that cause diseases in plants and animals have been traced because they make themselves known by disease. Alright. Now, he discovered that those things are so little alive that when you centrifuge them and treat them in a certain way, they crystalize. That is, thousands upon thousands of them crystalize - millions of them. And I will now show you the photograph, micro-photograph of hundreds of thousands of these crystallized as ordinary rocks. This is really an astonishing fact in science - these look like ordinary minerals of some kind - right? And you can have them in a bottle and they rattle just like little bits of salt or something, see? - and carry then around months, years, any length of time you like. Alright. Now if you drop one of those in the vascular body of a plant it will break up into the little bars and the plant will get the disease. Were these then dead? No. Life is a continuous process and came up through the minerals. These just happen to be some of the borderline creatures. And now I tell you that when they turn up as crystals they obey the geometry of the earth element, see? They obey the geometry of the earth element. They have to, because that’s the property of three-dimensional space. Now I’ve done my absolute utmost to explain the earth element with the few slides late in the evening. Thank you.

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