So, I now assume, that when people say that something is "natural," "natural" is the way they found it when they checked into the picture, and this picture has been changing incredibly rapidly, and with the society in general going along all the old rules of cities and customs where you are seeing a whole lot of each other which is really irrelevant. And so that is one reason why then, the young people of our day, began to see things very, very differently from their parents; and to realize that the long traditions and customs were really no longer appropriate. It wasn't a matter of the unfriendliness of a young generation with an older generation; it was simply that the new generation was being born into a new "natural," which was absolutely "unnatural" to grown ups.

That's enough of what I'm saying to introduce the concept of there being very large pattern changes affecting the lives of human beings on board of our planet. They were not in anyway anticipated by any of the humans, yet they are overwhelming, and would have to be really read in the terms of being evolutionary; and that Universe apparently had it in "Universe." If this is the first time that you were ever a lily, you might assume that you were just going to be a seed, and not realize that you were going to then grow up with some green leaves. Then you don't know that all of a sudden you're going to sprout a white, beautiful bell shaped flower; and you don't know that you're going to have stamen. Each of these things are a surprise. So that I think that humanity as a whole is going thru a great transition which is superbly designed, as is the organization of the human, the human chemistries and associabilities of all those atoms of which we are comprised. And, my whole thinking out loud with you from now on is going to relate to seeking for more and more of these large patterns that are operative, that become deprecated by human beings very rapidly because they don't like to have seemed to have been caught by surprise, and because of that vanity factor it is not too easy to make humanity comprehend as possibly readable and significant and predict other such waves to come about.

Again, I find human beings, with the news that we now are sharing around the world, which all of the world finds disturbing, reporting everybody around the world is aware of the troubles of other peoples as they never were before. They had troubles before, but they were never so aware of the other people's troubles, so we have an awareness of the totality of great trouble. And, I think human beings' vanity factor make them really feel "I am solely responsible for how this is going to come out," and "I can then deputize my authority to one political leader, and it's up to him to really get us out or half a dozen that we elect and expect performance," as if human beings really can master and understand in a great way that I feel they do not. To me it has been clearly manifest that we have been very, very innocent and that we do respond, we have to respond to the environment, whatever the environment is doing. And we can only do, I say, I don't really have a word "artificial" ...I don't really have a word "unnatural." I say, "if nature permits it, it is natural if nature doesn't permit it, you can't do it." You may not be familiar with the fact that nature allows that, but the fact of your unfamiliarity doesn't make it unnatural. If it is unfamiliar to us we tend to say it is artificial or unnatural.

I'm going to review two or three ways in which I discipline myself to try to get myself thinking in a little more adequate manner concerning what we know of our Universe and what may be going on in a larger way, and to try to get things in a little better proportion. As for instance, I would like to have a picture of the Milky Way galaxy (may I have that picture please), and here we are looking at an array of stars, you can see the Milky Way running thru the stars. The number of stars you are looking at is about 18,000; they are approximately 1/6 millionths of all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. We now know of, we have been able to get our great telescopes trained on other galaxies and so forth, and we now have taken photographs and are aware of a billion such galaxies of a hundred billion stars each.

Next picture, please. This picture we are looking at a galaxy very far away (may I have that next picture); we are looking at an exploding phenomena. I spoke about those hundred million galaxies of a hundred million stars each 99.9% of them are invisible to our naked eye, but their sizes are of great, great magnitude. To get a little idea, our own star "Sun" is a our own earth is 8,000 miles in diameter, and the diameter of the sun is just a hundred times that, and so our little earth looks very tiny against that enormous big ball. But our star sun is a small star. Most of you are familiar with Orion's belt, and in Orion's belt, one of the two bright stars is reddish in color, and this is Betelgeuse, and Betelgeuse's diameter is greater than the diameter of the orbit of the earth around the Sun so that's a good sized star; so we are a little planet, of a rather inferior star, which is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and we know there are billions of galaxies, so we get an idea our little planet, and you and I are utterly invisible. We've taken pictures of our planet coming in from the moon; when you can see through the cloud cover, you can see the blue of the water and the brown of the land, but you can't make out any human being; you can't make out a mountain let alone a human being; there is absolutely no visibility of a mountain because the aberration of the deepest water five miles below sea level, and five miles above the mountain top, and eight thousand miles is so, so meager that a polished steel ball is probably rougher than that. So, we are absolutely invisible on a negligible, little tiny planet of a rather negligible star which is one of a hundred billion of a known billion galaxies, so multiply the billion times 100 billion and you get a little idea.

Now, as we look at things at a great distance the picture that I have this is of a bursting phenomena in the heavens. Which looks like a tiny little light, and it keeps remaining like a tiny light, but at such a distance. And the distances involved are so great this particular phenomena is expanding at a velocity of three million miles an hour, which with the distance between the earth and the Sun (92 million), so that in 30 hours just little over a day, this expands the complete distance between the earth and the Sun, and yet it remains for the thousands of years we may be looking at it, like a little tiny speck there in the sky. You get a little sense of the size and the deceptiveness to us in the magnitude of the information in which we are really dealing in today.

I am quite confident, and this is then just as far as you and I have been able to when I say you and I I mean all our fellows the human beings who have been born naked and helpless and finally have discovered the principles of refraction of light and have developed the telescope, and have been able to make a sweepout we are getting information, as tiny as we are, we have information of approximate spherical sweepout of observation of 11 1/2 billion light-year radius; and a light year is 6 1/2 trillion miles, so when you get to 11 1/2 billion times 6 1/2 trillion you get a little idea of the distance from which you and I are getting information reliable information. We get the rate at which this thing is expanding. And, thru the spectroscope we have learned about refraction of light, and thru the spectroscope we are able to take the light from all of those observations and each chemical element has its unique frequencies when incandescent; human beings on our planet, have been able to take inventories of the relative abundance of chemical elements in a sweep-out of 11 1/2 billion year observation. We have that kind of capability despite our absolutely negligible magnitude physically. That we can deal with our minds in such magnitudes and do so quite reliably, gives a hint that the human being must have some very great significance in the scheme, because we don't know of any other phenomena that has this mind the human mind. Because, what I talk about is discoverable only by virtue of the mind. There are a great many creatures that have brains, and all the creatures that have brains disclose that the brains are always and only synchronizing, integrating a plurality of informations from touchings and smellings and hearings and coordinating those into some composite information that tends to produce images. But brain is always and only as each of those senses are, dealing in each special case experience. This is the smell of that one. This is the height of that one. Touch whatever it may be. Finally, the human mind we find the human mind able to do something that the brain cannot do. So I differentiate between brain and mind completely.

What human mind is able to do is, from time to time, reviewing the special case experiences, because they are recallable, and the brain is very good about recalling them calling them up again, is to review a plurality of those special case experiences. From time to time mind has intuited that there is something going on, some relationship between the special case experiences that was not being predicted or suggested in any way by any of the special case experiences considered only by themselves.

Take the very extraordinary experience, while we're dealing in stars, of the fact well-recorded in the earliest annals of man that he became aware of there being five lights in the sky five little points of light quite bright ones, much smaller than the sun and the moon. And these five bright ones behaved in ways that all the other myriads of light did not. The other myriads of lights stayed in beautiful constant patterns, as far as human beings could see, but five of them moved around, and were a little brighter than the others and moved around in some strange kind of way and if you kept track of them they would reappear; and they had some regularities about them so that long-long ago in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, good recordings were made of these behaviors of what we began to call the planets. So there were five special case informations that have some relationship it seems, because they were behaving the way nothing else behaved, so they differentiated out by this unique behavior.

We have, then, the human beings gradually acquiring calculating capability. And I'd like to make great note of this. We will go back and talk about this in much more detail later on, but if you've ever tried to do any multiplication or division with roman numerals, you find you don't get anywhere. So supposing you were intrigued by some motions, or something like that, you couldn't make any calculations with roman numerals. So that, no matter how intrigued you might be by the fact that there is something going on there, and "I'd like to know something about it," there's really no way that you can calculate. The Arabic numerals came into the Mediterranean world and began to supplant the roman numerals about 700 A.D. But they were used at first entirely as shorthand for say, instead of three marks of the roman numerals, you just go like that '3', it was a little quicker. So they were sort of a shorthand for this larger scratching. But I want you to realize that the roman numerals were used entirely as scoring devices. And you could have a servant that was very ignorant, but you station him here and say "every time one of those sheep go by I want you to make a scratch," so he kept doing this faithfully just matching/scoring/matching the experiences. The Arabic numerals, I'm quite confident, were derived from the invention of the abacus as a calculating device; and if you are familiar with the abacus, having rods and beads that slide on them; and you can do it in fours or fives there are different module systems you can use. You would then have what we call decimally, or finger wires. With five, you fill up a column of five and then you knock them back again, empty it, and move one over into the next column. And, the convention is to move the incrementation leftward and when you then close out the five and put one over in the next column to take its place of those five, then you have an empty column. I'm quite certain that the navigators over the great deserts or the navigators of the sea, who did deal in the stars as the only way to give them information about where they are, probably developed the first trigonometry and the first important geometrical calculations; did then, from time to time, lose their abacus overboard on the ship, or it was lost in the sands, but being so familiar with it, they could draw a picture, they could see it in their mind's eye very nicely, and they could then manipulate the concept of filling up that column and then moving over one. I'm quite certain that the Arabic numerals represented a symbol for the content of the columns; and when they moved over and left an empty column, they had to have the cipher, so the Arabic numerals had the cipher. It is interesting then that the Arabic numerals were first taken over in the Mediterranean world as substitutes for roman numerals, the cipher had no significance whatsoever because you couldn't eat "no" sheep, so they didn't have a score for "no" sheep. They didn't have any need in the roman numerals, which was just a scoring system, for something called "nothing." So that, the cipher was recognized as being there but having no use, they just thought of it as kind of a decoration used like a period, just put at the end or something like that. It is a matter of the slowness of the information gain that there is 500 years between the Arabic numerals coming into the Mediterranean world and beginning to take the place of the roman numerals before the significance of the cipher was discovered, and published by a Latin in North Africa, in Latin, showing that if occasioned the positioning of new numbers, the moving of your multiplication over one column; and with it came the capability of anybody to calculate. Now, calculations had been very much monopolized by the navigators and the priests, who were unquestionably astronomer navigators, who came up on the land. And the temporal power had to come to them, and they found that the temporal power, while he was a strong man, just could not cope with the kind of information they could obtain by virtue of their calculating capabilities, so they guarded it very carefully.

We have the temporal powers if you think about it a little like in Italy where you see all those great castellos, valley after valley; hill after hill; castle commanding its particular valley; and you have all these little kingdoms all over these city-state-kingdoms, were everywhere all around the Mediterranean world. And the king, or the overlord, or whatever he wanted to call himself, would have the people bring in their sheep and their wheat, and/or whatever it may be their food, their produce and they would want to exchange it, so that they could go home with some of the other produce. All exchanging was calculated at the church the priests would do the calculating for them. And they probably used the abacus.

At any rate, the process of having the temporal power being vested in the church the calculating capability, required also then that the church then in effect, tax the people for making the calculation and so you would give so many sheep to him, and so many bags of wheat to him, but you left bags of wheat and sheep out in back of the church; so that there was a very large take on the part of the temporal power by virtue of controlling the calculations. As a consequence, the publication of this book explaining the way in which you position numbers, illiteracy was rampant, so not too many people could read it, but it became very much a threat that anybody could do their own calculation and not have to go to the authorities to do the calculations for them. So that, in many, many of those little kingdoms throughout the Mediterranean world, it became a death penalty for anybody caught using the cipher. The word cipher has secret connotations for this reason. Because people used it, they needed to use it, you understand "I've got to do my own calculations" but if I get caught so I must be very secretive. Gradually the significance of the cipher permeates society, particularly the young student world that was literate. So the students of Northern Italy and Southern Germany began to realize more and more the significance of the cipher, and the positioning of numbers to do their own calculations. Young peoples' faces are less familiar than the older peoples' faces, and so the young people could get away with what the older people couldn't, so approximately the year 1200, 500 years after the Arabic numerals came into the Mediterranean world, that the treatise was written, that's 1200, and 300 years later it was impossible to ever again enforce the prohibition against use of the cipher. And this is a wonderful date we're talking about 1500, five hundred years ago. And this is exactly when Copernicus comes in. Here was Copernicus, suddenly, with the capability to calculate; and calculating the positions and some of the interrelationships of these, what we call the planets, he came to the conclusion that our earth was also a planet, and behaving in relationship to the sun the way the other planets were.