NEC Dinner 04.08.07

(Small talk in the beginning as people were "food"-ing it up.)

Lyn: What was interesting was the reaction of the participants there. They played into it nicely.

Sha: What do you mean they played into it?

Lyn: Their response to what I presented in the opening remarks is they responded. They got it and they kept getting it, working into it and kept getting it.

Sha: Oyang said that the more you went after the British the looser they got.

Lyn: You see it when you get in a discussion like that when you pose it in such a way that you get it. You see, people say the world is like this, the United States does this, this does this and you keep coming back - and you say "NO, it's the British." No, it's the British and it comes back on the military and the question of war. The British Empire was created by getting other people to fight wars against each other and sometimes the British would join in in order to get the fight going. I mean after all you have a couple fellow Brits killed in the process, but so what, they can breed more of them. It's no effort, you just rub two Brits together and they breed. They don't even stop to consider what the sex is.

Jeff: Lyn, in case it wasn't obvious, Cliff has been getting quite a picture of the concern about Turkey being a target and it only made sense in the context of what you said about the un-govern-ability spreading from Europe. And you create an ungovernable situation in Turkey and that whole part of the world blows.

Lyn: Sure! You got it. I got it too; I've been getting it. This is the problem. That's the problem in writing and doing intelligence, you get into the literality of some description of something and you fail to realize the ironies. It's the ironies are important like Cheney going on this trip to South West Asia and the guy's not even edible. Case of fraud! They wouldn't let him into Israel because he's not kosher. You realize of course that the Crawford Ranch was bought cheap by Bush because it was an available pig farm and this way he could occupy the ranch without changing his character.

Stein: Animal farm.

Randy: I know some Boomers would take offense to that.

Lyn: They take offense to that, well if it keeps the pigs in that's good.

Sha: Lyn, can I ask you a different question? One thing that came up was, in looking at the reflection of the literature distribution, it's very clear despite all the excitement that there's obviously a lack of orientation around mass effect and I was thinking about how, in the briefings, how to bring forward or remind people of mass effect because you can get caught up in your intellectual works and ...

Lyn: The problem is that you have to look at your own generation and understand what the problems are of your own generation. You're free of the characteristic problems of the Baby Boomers - but, you have different problems. The Baby Boomer is dominated by this cult of the middle-class, and it's a white collar cult. And it's powerful in the sense that people who are in mostly in the lower 80% of family income brackets are not white collar, and that includes Baby Boomers. Some people who are in that generation will try to imitate Baby Boomers and then it becomes/looks ridiculous.

But the Baby Boomer is a real Sophist. Now the Baby Boomer is also the parent or grandparent of people of a youth generation age. That's obvious. Now that has an effect on the people in the adult youth age. First of all they didn't have any parents. They had something that was quite not a parent; they were off having sex with somebody else at the time, or something.

Delante: That was apparent.

Lyn: So therefore you have a generation which was a neglected generation; is neglected in a sense by being over managed. Typical middle class Baby Boomer tends to rather dominate without actually earning the right to lead. Now what you get in effect upon people who are born in that generation, you say, what's the defect? There must be a defect. What happened to the victims of this process was the defect. The defect is a lack of - is running away from responsibility in a certain way because they will come back and say, "Well I don't understand, what's our mission?" That's the effect of being born under the domination of the Baby Boomer, "What's our mission?" For example, people who are looking for other things. The Baby Boomer wants them out of the way. They are looking for other things, other entertainment, other things to be occupied with. They are trying to get fascination and entertainment with other things.

So the problem with your generation is focus. Now if you don't have a task-oriented focus, which puts the jigsaw puzzle pieces together of what must be done, then you'll get that kind of stuff with literature. People will say, "What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to do this? I think I like this better, no I don't know if I like that better, don't know if I like that better," and so forth; a certain kind of indecision. Whereas, you know, if you're thinking clearly, you say, "Well look, we've got this bunch of literature here, how are we going to use this?" And you think creatively how you're going to use it. Look, for example, at the humor stunts that are being pulled in Europe and here, especially in Germany, in Berlin for example. Think of the stunts we're pulling, where we use humor where a straightforward approach doesn't work in organizing - we use humor. We use these 'Shelley' clown operations that we pull off which don't seem to have any direct effect - they have an effect: they shake up! It's the use of irony.

You want me to be this? I'll come in and be this. I'll be exactly what you want and you're not going to like it.

Gerry: That was hilarious, what's-his-name saying, "You're all fertilizer, you're all fertilizer. That's all we are, we're all fertilizer." And then they had to keep him out because he was so over the top. They had to keep him out because he was too much. This was up in Canada. This was hilarious.

Lyn: That's exactly it. What are you doing? You're doing Rabelais; that's what you're doing, you're doing Rabelais. That is Cervantes is a tame version of Rabelais. Rabelais is much more explicit. No what happened is, this woman, Panurge and this woman in Paris and he used to step in it, all the dogs in Paris pissed on her and that was the new branch of the river.

Gerry: Or how he built a wall, you know, out of whores ... organs ...

Lyn: That's exactly it.

Gerry: Because they are so cheap.

Lyn: And you had the typical thing, the sheep of Panurge. And that's what we're doing. You see that's what some of our people are doing, they're doing the thing Rabelais did; they're not doing exactly what was done in terms of the Decameron by Boccaccio, but they're doing what was done in a very mild, subtle form, in terms of the Don Quixote. The Don Quixote is that. But it's much softer. It doesn't have that real lusty thrust. And you have to realize that Rabelais was what? Rabelais was in several religious orders he was running for in France. He was a physician. He was a scientist, a very serious one, a leader in several religious orders. He's a man of my own liking. He understood, he had no, like the modern dictory, "You can't use that word! You can't say that in public, you can't say that." Rabelais said, "Enough of that shit!" He got to the reality of the gut. And thus he expressed, he actually had the best French (they haven't had good French ever since then). The point is the French of that period prior to the middle to the later part of the 19^th century, French was essentially a variety of Italian. It was spoken as in the sense of Italian.

Latin is a fraud. Latin was not the language of the Roman Empire. Latin was the administrative language of a small cult inside the Roman Empire but it became the ruling administrative cult, it became in Latin, which is if doing our own organization in Latin and the speakers would be running the organization but a different language would be spoken by the members, and they would on certain occasions borrow this Latin language which was not their language. So therefore it was the administrative language. You would go into court, you don't speak Italian even though you are Italian, you don't speak it. Italian is a language and the Jesuits at the beginning of the 19^th century made a law that Italian was a byproduct of Latin, which it was not. If you look at Italian, it's not Latin; it has no relationship to Latin, that there are [loan?] words back and forth between the two languages, as well as other languages, but mostly that between. The Italian language was an independent language, it existed prior to Latin, it was spoken by people who spoke Italian, but then when the Romans took over the Italians were working for the Romans and the courts and the administrative procedures involved were done in Latin. Now you look at France and Spain. In France and Spain the population were not Latin speakers; the ywere Roman soldiers who after being retired and after having matured and reached the age of retirement, they would be settle to get them out of Italy, they would settle them in the colonies. So in the colonies, as in Spain and in France, especially in the southern France, the Roman soldiers who were retired, spoke Italian but they spoke Italian with use of Latin words which were the administrative words. Foe example: 'Cabalo' is from the Italian as opposed to 'equestrian' which comes from the Latin. 'Cavalier' comes from the Italian but 'equestrian' comes from the Latin. So they are two different languages. What are the articles in Latin? There are none. What's the function of the article in Italian? This question was raised by the famous brother von Humboldt when Wilhelm was an ambassador in Rome (because you have an ambassador in Rome), and he made this observation and the Jesuit order made an official decree at the beginning at the 19^th century that Italian was a dialect of Latin. Typical Jesuit. We had a friend who was a Jesuit priest and he would say to me and say to others, "I am a Sicilian Jesuit," to distinguish himself from the other varieties which he thought were inferior species of Jesuits.

Gerry: Well Sicily had a very high culture.

Lyn. It also has a 'high' culture now, but that's of a different time period.

Gerry: But it wasn't until I read Rabelais that I understood the Crusades with all these monks killing everybody; the most blood-thirsty people around Rabelais which of course were the Crusading orders.

Lyn: Well they were still doing that in the 15^th, 16^th century, they were still doing that. This was revived by Tomas de Torquemada and so forth.

Jeff: That's what the Inquisition essentially was.

Lyn: Yeah right, the Inquisition has a long history. The Inquisition was essentially Roman, for example the martyrdom of the Christians in particular was an inquisition.that you had, if you had the religious order of the Roman Empire and you were either a - your beliefs were either organized by the cult or you were not allowed, and you could be killed for not being a member of the cult, if you're religious belief was not a part of the official cult of the Roman Empire.

Gerry: Well Constantine was clear on that.

Lyn: Constantine was the same thing. You know we had this guy Fernando Quixano, he was given a choice by the Jesuits- have your testicles cut out or have your brains cut out. He chose to defend his testicles. That's how he became a convert.

Wertz: But you know on the Leibniz, it's amazing how with a dead language that somebody like Cusa force the rise of Latin ...

Lyn: But the Latin was different, the Latin was actually, in various periods of European culture, Latin was civilized.

Wertz: That's what I am saying, many people say that his Latin was awkward and inelegant because he was transforming it to get across the conceptions.

Lyn: You have to look at the ideas which is the same thing as the coma question. Look at Irony and translations of Cusa by various people. The question of Irony, which is crucial, is missing. They take it out. In Latin they swooped it out.

Look at for example the absence of the use of the Ciceronian period in Latin. The Ciceronian period, it comes in threes, to make a point you identify three points of reference which is something that Cicero adopted as a stylistic device in oratory from the Classical Greek. So languages are subject to the people that use them, and sometimes people are subject to the language they use, that's where the problem comes in of the NY Times Stylebook. You want to become an idiot? Master the secrets of the NY Times Stylebook. You will be considered correct but you won't be able to think.

Jeff: Well now it's computerized because you've got programs that will do punctuation and spell checks based on exactly those kinds of crazy rules , and anytime you use a sentence that's longer than either a simple declarative sentence, you get these green underlines basically saying this is wrong because it's developing a complex relationship among ideas. I mean it's really ...

Dennis: But it changes on you, that's the part that's .... Kreingold will turn it off three times to make it go off.

Randy: That's your problem: that he probably has it on for you.

Jeff: That's an ironic joke.

Lyn: The best way to learn language is with Bach choral work. Bach, Beethoven, and to some degree Hayden, but mostly Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden. Choral work, that is the best way to understand how to use a language. And you can get it from all the things in Classical music choral work and so forth, you can get it. That's how you use language. The best thing, you know, if people would understand the basic rule of counterpoint and reference if we had this program to do that and reference the two collections of the books of the preludes and fugues of Bach, the Well Tempered Klavier. All the basic principles of speech are there in principle because what you have to do is very simple, you have to recognize, what you should recognize from choral work, that there're different choral voices singing; it's not the notes, it's voices and voices are singing. So you identify an opening statement by one voice, you have to identify the voice; now you take a counter statement, the first counter statement which was either an imitation in a different voice or the same thing, or a counter voice also in a different voice. And the entire work is based on that principle. That's Bach.

Now you have three part and four part composition and fugues. So how do you do that? You work within these three or four voices usually. You can take two part inventions for example, to understand this take two part inventions, look at two part inventions, it's the same thing. So now you see how the human voice uses the chorus of voices which are different singing voices and uses them in their interaction to define the development of an idea, the unity of effect of a single idea, single composition. We should do this. We don't do that. That would give you the idea of how to think. We've got the program, John's doing it, we're doing it here and what's being done here once a week is a paradigm which is to be spread otherwise and get this concept: what are the two basic types of voice and response to an initial statement of a voice in a fugue? How does this work? How does it work for - you designate the voice, it has to be a specific voice, you have to think of a Soprano voice, now you can identify that with keyboard you can identify what the voice is. You've got a first Soprano, you can identify a Second Soprano, an Alto, a Tenor, a Baritone, and a Bass, you can identify that. Now look at a fugue or a contrapuntal composition in terms of these voices and their interaction. Now state a statement in one voice, the one part of the voice; now echo that in a second statement in another voice; now echo that either in the same statement but in a different tonality in a different voice, or give a response which is a counter statement in answer to the statement and you go on from there. You've got it all accessibly, that's what they're working on here, once a week, exactly that. And he's here, Adam's here recording it all ...

Adam: I just want to say that the recording of the Misa Solemnis at the Frauenkirsche church is very very good, especially the performances of the fugues.

Lyn: Well hw should listen to it (pointing to Phil Ulenowski). We should listen to it except the copy I got from John, toward the end, is screwed up, just because of the mechanical screw up of the disc. It's excellent, it's magnificent. The Frauenkirsche did the Misa Solemnis to commemorate the establishment of rebuilding the church. It's magnificent.

Ulenowski: It's wonderful, you just sit on the edge of your seat. It's really breath-taking.

Grose: He wasn't afraid of the change in tempo.

Lyn: The thing is absolutely beautiful. It's not perfect but it's beautiful. Now actually that's why music is so important, the contrapuntal music, the choral music of this type is absolutely essential for scientific work. You have to learn to think like that.

Gerry: And write like that.

Lyn: It comes from that. In my generation, people who - thought like that and what they tried to do to us was destroy that in the post-war period, it was being destroyed before hand but some of us liked it and held out, but it destroyed the post-war period.

Jeff: Schiff, in these lectures, posted on the Guardian website, talks about Beethoven using all of the instructions, very, very precisely, leaving very little to the imagination in a sense punctuation in the written word is a much more limited ...

Lyn: The best things that I've heard in his things so far, number one, he's done the fourth movement of the Hammer Klavier. Alright now, in the early part of that he gets the essential key, he doesn't give an explacation, he gives a key to counterpoint. Now if you go through that and he does there and you look at some of the recordings he did of Bach, of the Well Tempered Klavier, and see exactly what he's talking about, as he did then when he was not quite as well developed, but he's did recordings of these, you compare that and you get a sense of how it works. How you compose a fugue? How does the composition of the fugue works. That shows you, once you go again through all these kinds of works, for example to appreciate the genius of the Mozart Ave Verum Coprus which is a real work of genius, you have to know what this series of Lydian intervals is but when you understand that you begin to learn what a brilliant work that is and how the unity of effect of this particular piece is achieved. Then people who are trying to sing it in chorus can appreciate what their objectives are.

Once you understand how to think, you have to provide this research that we do on the principles of physical science, you have to combine that with the relationship to this kind of music and then you see how the mind has to work to think scientifically. And that's what's missing. We're doing fairly well, what we're doing in the basement is excellent, you've seen how it works, and that's the way to work. But you have to compliment it by this musical work otherwise you don't get it. You don't get the point.

Chris: Lyn, you know how Kepler defined the seven harmonic intervals as primary in music, in musical development and all the intervals that you can develop from there become secondary where they're all incommensurable, so you have all these seven intervals and their incomensurabilities, you don't have any smallest part, really what they call the coma is just what all the notes have, as they say, have in common, but there's no common measure among all these intervals, so ...

Lyn: There's only a difference.

Chris: Yes, right, so what is the difference, then, between what Kepler develops and what Bach picks up on?

Lyn: There's no difference at all. Because you look at what you are trying, you are trying to perform a Bach work, and you think about what vowel you use, what consonant you use, what vowel you use, to make the thing work, same thing. We've got it all. Adam has it all being recorded on his immortal collection. And this is what you're getting. You're getting a demonstration of how this works.

(Pointing to Phil Ulenowski) We can get him to do that; he can actually do something, if he wants to.

Phil: What am I going to do now?

Lyn: You can plunge yourself into the field of struggle which you have not abandoned but you have distances yourself from for a bit.

Phil: Yes. Why lie?

Chris: But the coma in music seems to have everything to do with the human creative mind. It like saying you can recite a Shakespeare play just by reading the words but if you don't understand the ironies then it's the same thing in the Universe.

Lyn: Exactly

Jeff: Of course if you're not human you're going to have a hard time reading the words.

Chris: Yeah, well you get this in the musical conservatory with the pure intervals and these types of things.

Lyn: What he's trying to say is that David was not human.

Anyway, I've got to go on a mission of three plus weeks in about four countries.

Oyang: Hey Lyn, I've got a question. It has to do with the sort of intergenerational split amongst the youth because I've noticed that the people that are 18 and 19, right now, that were kids when September 11 happened, or the Iraq War (it's just been a part of their experience) versus people who were developing an adult identity when these sorts of things were shaping how they look at the world - because there is a different sense, because this is now a new layer that we're going to have to recruit in the youth movement, 19, 20 year olds, and I've noticed just empirically that a lot of them seem to - they're excited about the ideas but they have a different almost disassociated sense of political urgency as opposed to people who are a little bit older.

Lyn: Because they belong to a generation which has given them no orientation to reality, which is characteristic of the youth generation in general: no real orientation to reality. You have to create an orientation to reality which means that you have to take that responsibility on. They need guidance, they need help. You have to give it to them, that's the essence. What do you expect? I mean people are going through high school, through the university, and so forth, age, they need help. They don't want told what to believe, told what to think; they want to have some sense of orientation ...

(Lyn spotted cake, dove for it, and exclaimed "Toys!")

Lyn: What we need to do, we're doing down in the basement. What you need to do is understand that young people are in a crazy society, they need to have some kind of [mooring?] in reality in which they know this is true. So therefore you have to engage them in a programmatic approach to exploring reality to get some sense of what reality is. Once they get that they have the ability to stand on their own feet, at least to some degree, but you have to help them. They don't know anything about reality. Nobody ever told them about reality.

Jeff: Well the other disadvantage they have is that they came up during a period of faster, higher speed computers, better graphics. I mean this whole idea of this military entertainment complex replacing the military industrial complex because we don't have industry anymore. It's really, I think, very, very telling that that's what they call it now because it's all centered around this computer video game.

Lyn: But the way that the computer game thing works: you're bored! Number one, you're bored. You have to get through the day; everything you're surrounded by bores the hell out of you. So you want to do something that gets your mind un-bored, so you get yourself obsessed with something that doesn't bore you because it obsesses you and eases the pain by getting you un-bored. The remedy is not to address the disease, the drug. The remedy is to look at what they're not getting: a sense of reality.

The problem is what the Baby Boomer generation neglected. They neglected this: reality! The Baby Boomer generation was stuck with this white collar conception, stuck with a non-industrial society, the ideal of a non-industrial society and therefore you are thinking of arbitrary rules of behavior, not the process of physical scientific discovery. You find the problem of the Baby Boomer generation is expressed in terms of their lack of comprehension of physical science. And then you find the compensation is that even when they pretend to be involved in physical science, it's purely mechanistic, it has no idea content whatsoever. It has a form; it has a logic; but no ideas. And the Baby Boomer generation has no attachment, no emotional attachment to actual universal physical principles. They find a substitute for physical principles in digital thinking. You want to be a good computer specialist? Think digitally. Think of a digital paradigm. That's what it is: digital paradigm; there's no ideas there: digital paradigm.

Now when you use the computer, if you're smart, you don't believe in the computer. You never let a computer tell you what to do. What you realize is is that the computer is simply a collection of dots and splotches, and so forth. That's what it produces. You want to convey an idea, the computer technology is digital medium on which you impose your will. Psychosis has led to the digital medium impose its will upon you. "Make it stand up and dance. Whip it. Dance you stupid bastard, dance." You count digital intervals in lashes of the ankles. You whip up a program.

I tell everybody, the secret of everything is fun.

Jeff: Our open conspiracy.

Lyn: It's a conspiracy to create fun.

Gerry: At John Train's expense.

Lyn: Especially! He's what you call a Train wretch.

Gabi: Lyn, in trying to - grappling in this idea to communicate the world view, how do you - because this whole thing about the understanding the implications of a collapse of entire government right now, being ungovernable, how do you actually think about that in terms of what the principles acting on that are?

Lyn: I really don't have a problem with that. I understand that other people do. That's the first thing to say. Be assured that it is not incomprehensible; it's perfectly comprehensible. I understand it very well. Now the whole game is, first of all, somebody is trying to control you. How are they controlling you? They make what you must know incomprehensible. So therefore you know if you feel it's being incomprehensible, you're being swindled. It is comprehensible. Now what's comprehensible is the fact that the human being is different from a non-human being, as I have emphasized today in my remarks, that you could have chimpanzees and gorillas have a certain population density two million years ago and they have the same population density or less today. Human Beings have increased their potential relative population density to over six and a half billion people. When you're talking in terms of apes, you're talking in terms of millions. What's the difference? Therefore, instead of trying to figure out from the standpoint of monkey-business how the human mind works, you start from that: we have six and a half billion people on this planet, how did we get there? How does a species like an ape, or of any kind, a species of maximum is in the order of millions of potential population under the most .... conditions. We have human beings who people try to monkey with, over six and a half billion. What's the difference?

And when you start from that, then you realize any idea which is contradictory to that is absurd. And the problem that most people have is they try to say, "Well you have to explain it in terms that these people will understand." These people don't understand anything. So how are you going to get them to understand? The best thing that you can say to these people is, "The problem is that you guys are stupid, but we will try to amuse you, so that life will not be entirely boring for you." The key thing is don't try to work from the older population down- they already have decided to die or decided to die and now know they're dying. Therefore what you do is you concentrate on the generation which are not committed to dying and you move society with that generation. And that's that's the way to approach it. And the way to approach it is the way we're doing it in the cellar here, the way we're doing it with the music, the way we're doing with the intelligence work. They're using the mind in a way which the Baby Boomer does not.

And the problem is that people try to get an educational program in science. And we have some people that are fairly good at that, in a sense. Jonathan Tannenbaum was competent in what he tried to do but he was not competent for running a program of education of a youth movement because he was getting - acting like a lecturer, an academic lecturer. He was lecturing an audience and sometimes brilliantly and sometimes no so brilliantly on a subject matter, and essentially his idea was - the idea of the typical university professor was not a complete fraud - is to impress the audience with how bright he is, how intelligent he is, how knowledgeable he is because he is trying to control the student audience by impressing on them how bright he is and thus establishing by that mechanism a sense of personal authority by which he controls the student class.

Have you ever seen that? Ok. Now what do I do? I say, "Bullshit!" What does any young intelligent young person say? "Bullshit." So therefore what you do is to say, "No, I'll give you the parameters. I'll set you up in a trap. I'll give you a problem. You solve the problem. I'll help you here and there but I will not tell you how to solve the problem. You will solve the problem. Therefore you will come out knowing how you discovered the solution to the problem. Then it's yours. It's not something you copied faithfully from somebody else." That is good education, the type I insist upon and the type I've been using in the basement. I do very little intervention in what goes on down there, very little. I do just what I think is probably enough to keep the process stimulated and they do the rest. Then what they produce is theirs! They don't come to me to explain what they did, they explain to me what they did. It's what they did, didn't they? That's the way it works. That's the way you educate. You don't educate by teaching people obedience training, how to stand up and beg. You educate people by getting them to make discoveries which are mastery of the problem their studying. And doing that is what makes them powerful, they did it themselves. "I made the discovery." Were you the individual who made the discovery? "No, I was forced to make the discovery independently." And my program is to force people to make the discovery independently, of me! That's the way you should educate people, you force them to discover and solve the problem themselves rather than teach them what to say, what to do.

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