Thomas Jefferson's Six Presidencies

In this lecture about Thomas Jefferson, part 4 of 4, Roger Weir discusses the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. The original lecture was entitled "Jefferson's Six Presidencies".
 
Episode transcript - https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/transcripts/379
 
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Image credit: detail from Pastoral Landscape (1861) by Asher Brown Durand.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is the most difficult of all the lectures. It's
difficult to convey why this means so much. It's difficult
because we have a blind spot exactly where the significance
of this period of our experience occurs. It's a blind

(00:30):
spot in terms of world history, and it's particularly dark
in terms of American history. It's not visible, it's invisible.
It's controlling shape, which would make it intellectually apprehendible, is
open ended and refuses to yield a discrete image. And

(00:56):
for this reason it is esoteric. This aperture in history,
which is actually what it is, occurs by design, and
it is the first time in human history that there
is such an aperture, and it was engineered and created

(01:17):
through the efforts of ingenious individuals. I know the current
talk about ascended masters seems to be startling to us,
but the fact of live human beings two hundred years
ago producing such an occurrence through their diligence and excellence

(01:39):
and hard work is almost taxing to our sensiblie. The times,
as we have noted, and if we just reflect for
a moment, we're catastrophic. They were catastrophic for the reasons
which we assume that our our times are catastrophic, but

(02:02):
while we live in a world of appearances. For them
it was real. The crowning of himself as emperor in
seventeen ninety nine November produced a precipitation of power. We
know now because we have a vocabulary in the late

(02:25):
twentieth century, we can talk about the psychological dimensions of
unconscious forces coming to bear, constellating out of the collective
psyche of man, so that the controlling energies are not

(02:45):
in human control, but that humans are in its control,
being seized by the times. The experience was duplicated again
and again after that event by others. It even reached Mexico.

(03:06):
By eighteen twenty three, E. Tribdi crowned himself Augustine, the
first Emperor of all Mexico, having first one month fought
for the independence of Mexico, in the next month putting
it under his own ages. It happened again and again
all over the world, and is still happening to this day.

(03:32):
Variations on the theme this man is emperor, this committee,
this politiburo, this judiciary, this or that body control, and
by controlling, assume that they, by having the power, have

(03:53):
the right to limit access to that power. Jefferson almost
alone carried on the Franklin tradition of creating an open
mind to deal with whatever natural events were actually occurring.

(04:13):
No one was more esoteric than Benjamin Franklin in his time.
Franklin was the grand Master, if you want to talk
about esoteric traditions. He was the key Masonic figure in
that whole age, if he wished to talk that way.

(04:33):
But more important to him than those threads of transhistorical
meaning were the actual experience of freeing the spirit of
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of human beings to
see what would come out, creating a natural man. Jefferson,

(04:57):
in bringing this concern into a tactical technological phase, was
concerned with the precipitate forms that were coming out of history,
coming out of the mind of man, coming out of
the spirit of the ages, and his attention was to

(05:23):
those occurrences. The phenomenal occurrences, The newspaper level occurrences were
secondary to him at all times. While certain factions, the
Federalists especially, were attempting to found a nation, Jefferson was

(05:45):
attempting to keep open a universal experience, and that's the
difference limited groups who had a historical perspective had a
personal perspective, were trying to create a power structure, and
he was involved in an ongoing experiment to see what

(06:07):
happens when millions of human beings do not lean on
power structures as a crutch. Will they not grow internally
and come up to a par with the natural powers?
What would a natural man be like? What would a

(06:30):
so called quote nation be like that does not have
a national power structure for its ultimate design, but has
the experience of liberating man cosmically universally bringing the electricity
down out of the clouds and putting it into the hand,

(06:51):
the constructive hand of an intelligent, self conscious natural being.
What would that be like? Jefferson, towards the very end
of his life, transferred in several ways the symbols of

(07:18):
the magical threshold of efficacy. In a way, when man
moves from nature into his ritual disposition, selecting from nature
a limited series of forms put into cycles, it gives

(07:40):
him a self presencing mode, which eventually creates the language,
creates a mythic presence, which in turn invites the interiorization
of meaning and eventually creates symbolic vision, and the most

(08:00):
difficult of all transformations is the transformation from symbolic vision
into magical activity, being able to manipulate the symbols and
apply them to nature. This is where the alchemy comes in,
and if that's handled right, the art of living bursts

(08:27):
out of that magical realm and leads through the esthetics
of experience to a deepening intensity where the ethics of
realization are possible, and at that phase man is capable

(08:50):
for the first time in his existence of a cosmology.
Jefferson's activities are constantly leading towards a cosmological potential for
the new age, for the new people, constantly directing his concerns,

(09:12):
almost like a classic administering angel, making sure that all
of the flows are open, that there is no preconceived plan,
and yet there must be forms. There must be some plans,
but they must grow out of the natural experience, the

(09:37):
bridging between the person on a charal and the conditions
that actually obtain in the enlightened view of nature per se. This,
of course is precarious. Example of a form which Jefferson

(10:03):
used to great extent was the dome, the architectural dome.
There have been many studies on the dome. The best
one available is The Dome the Study in the History
of Ideas by E. Baldwin Smith, published by Princeton number
of years ago, a sequel to his book on Imperial

(10:25):
Architecture in Rome. The Dome Room the sky room was
the central apex of Monticello. Just as Monticello was the
apex of the natural mountain, the sky room was the
apex of the house. So it was the thrice greatest.

(10:49):
It was the epitome of the epitome. It was the
play within the play that dome experience. He called it
a sky room. It was largely left empty. When Jefferson
was in control of the situation. He always had to
put up relatives, and occasionally he had to put up

(11:13):
his daughter's grandchildren in the sky room, but usually he
left it vacant and bare, empty, barewood floors, with the
experience of the dome and its light coming in from
all sources. This was a room without walls. This was

(11:35):
architecture of the circle, architecture of liberty. And it was
this dome that Jefferson placed central in his design for
the University of Virginia. In the buildings of the University
of Virginia, which I've sketched up here on the wall.

(11:58):
There were two colonnades of buildings with a quad in
between them, and they were linked at the top with
the great Rotunda. I have an interior picture. This rotunda
was restored and reinstated in nineteen seventy six for the

(12:22):
Bison Tenna. The reason why it was put back exactly
as Jefferson had designed it was by that time that
the significance of it had been realized. This is why
Monticello Skyroom is being reinstated, and why the rotunda of
the University of Virginia has been reinstated. And this was

(12:45):
why during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln reinstated the Dome
of the Capitol because the central building in American history
is the Capitol. It is the symbol of the Union.
Its dome over its rotunda, is a symbol of the

(13:07):
open mindedness of these citizens who collect here to control
their own destiny, not with a plan, but with a
matrix of possibilities. And with this matrix of possibilities and
the natural tone of vision that they have, they are

(13:31):
ready to meet the unknown. One thing that a social
plan does not meet is the unknown. There is no
design in any of the isms for the unknown about
the only ism there is. Gilbert Chennard called it Americanism

(13:53):
in his book Thomas Jefferson The Apostle of Americanism. It's
an ism without an ism. One has one's toolbox of potential,
one has one's artistic instruments of possibility, one has one's
scientific outlook to be able to see exactly what nature

(14:15):
is presenting, and one then has the liberty to experiment
with these tools. Was with these artistic instruments, with these experiments,
and you can see that science, real science, is all
bound up with the open mindedness that Franklin and Jefferson

(14:41):
gave to us. It's interesting to.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Look at the floor car of the University of Regina,
built about eighteen twenty five, and notice that one enlarges the.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Dome, puts it on side, and puts these to rows
of buildings on its side. It looks very much like
the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, whose mission is to
explore the universe to find the unknown. This is just

(15:18):
a simple example of the way in which archetypal images
occur not as memnonic forms, but as integrating patterns. And
it's only by living in reality a flow plot process
long enough direct enough for that cycle to manifest itself

(15:40):
that it becomes visible at all. And it becomes visible
not in things, but in the qualities of human beings,
in the character of human beings. Between seventeen ninety and eighteen,

(16:00):
the American character was forged. It was formed and needed
in that time period, a time in childhood, not so
much in the cradle, but in the backyard. It needed
time to play to get acquimated. We needed what Moses said,

(16:23):
the exiles needed. We need a little time in the
wilderness to come too, to wake up from the all
the habitual images that are left over from bondage, from
ideas of slavery, from past fulliness, from delusions that were

(16:45):
our only heritage. We needed time to come too in
the wilderness. And this is what Jefferson was the architect of,
of the protection of the American spirit, long enough for
it to get acclimated to the wilderness. You know. He

(17:07):
built a second house called Poplar Forest, about ninety three
miles from Monticello. He had one of the first of
doometers in the New World. He put on his carriage
wheels to measure it, and he would go there with
his granddaughters. He had a bunch of granddaughters he liked.
He liked the spryness of them. And in eighteen seventeen

(17:28):
he took a couple of his granddaughters to visit Natural Bridge,
a natural rock bridge over this gorgeous canyon. And while
they were there, a bunch of backwoodsmen came up and
paid their respects to mister Jefferson and his granddaughters were
appalled by the rough and readiness of the American frontier's men.

(17:52):
They were extremely direct. They took it as being a
threat to them, until Jefferson assured them that this is
how backwoodsmen are. They don't mince words. If they see
a pretty gal, they'll come up and tell her. There's
none of the courtly manners. And what Jefferson was enjoying

(18:12):
in this was the tremendous elam that the Americans were
claiming for themselves beyond the appellationians. Jefferson himself loved the
idea that the back woodsmen were going to take over,
that the idea men were going to not only hand

(18:35):
it over to them, but quietly get it out of
the way so that they feel when they come into
power that they've taken it. It's going to be a
revolution of little people who come and take over the
government because they say the government is ours to take.
It's our turn to use it, to develop it, to

(18:58):
take care of it until that next generation comes and
learned that they have the properative of taking it in
their time. It was for this event, for this massive
glacial happening that Jefferson Council. Do not get involved in
European affairs, do not get involved with England, do not

(19:22):
get involved with France, because they are living out nightmarors
of history. In his old age, Jefferson loved to read
Tacitus and Thucydidies more than any other authors. Homer always
but Tacitus and Thucididies because they describe in their works

(19:44):
the quality of human character that it takes to survive
inundations of day dreams and delusions of power that occur
in eventful junctures of history when time is changing. One
of the symbols that Jefferson used was the dome. In architecture.

(20:07):
He was the one that hired, not the architect. The
original designer of the Capital Dome was a doctor from
the West Indies. He not only had no architectural experience,
he had to have somebody hired to do the drafting
for him. This was in seventeen ninety two because there
was Jefferson behind the scenes. He was under attack publicly

(20:30):
by the Federalists, and he didn't want them to know
that he was doing some designing. When the Capitol Building
was burnt in the War of eighteen twelve, actually burnt
in eighteen fourteen, it was rebuilt, and not only rebuilt

(20:52):
by Jefferson. Madison was president, but Jefferson was still behind
the scenes. In the Civil War period, Lincoln rebuilt the
dome in iron all during the Civil War, quietly making
the point that the unity of this country is not

(21:15):
any superiority on a battlefield. It's not in the economic
capacity and power. It's in the vision of the people
that they belonged together as an organic form. And all
during the Civil War Lincoln rebuilt the Capitol Dome, had

(21:37):
the old one torn down, had the new one made
as broad as a football field two hundred and eighty
seven feet and constructed during the whole war of cast iron.
It was his way of saying, this is why this
union is here that this sky room upon the universe

(21:58):
belongs to us because we have earned it. We have
gone through our wilderness, and we have come home to
this open ended quality where the horizon is a home
for us. We're not intimidated by the unknown. It's simply

(22:19):
an invitation to grow, to experience and this manifest destiny,
this westward whole tone came into the American psyche at
this time, in this period, and Jefferson, more than anyone else,

(22:41):
was the guardian, almost one could say the gardener who
made sure that this happened. When he left the White House, Madison,
who had been his Secretary of State, was his chosen successor.
There was one talk that Monroe or Governor Clinton of

(23:04):
New York or Madison might be chosen. They were all
Democratic Republicans with Jefferson, and Jefferson chose Madison and told
Monroe that his term would come later. And Clinton stayed
in New York, and Jefferson made sure that he had
a project that would satisfy his visionary capacity. It was

(23:26):
under Governor Clinton that the Erie Canal was dug three
hundred and sixty three miles. You know, Lake Michigan and
Lake Huron are about five hundred and eighty feet above
sea level, and Lake Saint Clair is about five seventy
five where Detroit is and Lake Erie is about five

(23:49):
seventy two. But Lake Ontario was three hundred and thirty
feet below. That's what Niagara Falls is. You can't use
the Great Lakes because of Niagara Falls. So the American
vision said, but we can go up the Hudson as
far as Albany and we'll just dig a trench all

(24:13):
the way to Lake Erie. It was unheard of, It
was crazy. This was eighteen seventeen. Everyone in the state
of New York said, We're going to have to go
into debt forever to pay for it. I would cost
more money than anyone could conceive of. It paid for

(24:33):
itself in nine years. It was finished in eighteen twenty five,
and by eighteen thirty four it was turning profit, so
much of a profit that they doubled the depth and
doubled the width. You know, they still use the Erie
Canal today. In nineteen eighty five, that's the kind of
construction that was being done at this time. This was

(24:54):
the kind of opening up of creating capacities. The most
dangerous element in Jefferson's view was the infection that Europe
was suffering from. They were suffering from the inflated delusions
of power seeking, and Napoleon was the perfect mad man,

(25:15):
the perfect monster. Why is Europe Napoleon's because I want
it and because I can have it? And his favorite
kicking dogs were the ideologues, those who think too much.
He said, they're vermin on my clothes. They're always thinking.

(25:41):
The ideologues were all friends of Jefferson's. One of them,
in fact, a man named Distute de Tracy, who did
a commentary on Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, which Jefferson helped
do the translation into English. He writes in eighteen eleven

(26:05):
from Monticello to de Tracy, one of its doctrines, indeed,
the preference of a plural over a singular executive will
probably not be assented to here. When our present government
was first established, we had many doubts on this question,
and many leanings toward a supreme executive council. Instead of

(26:27):
one man, there should be a council. Perhaps they'd mooted this.
It happened that at that time the experiment of such
a one was commenced in France while the single executive
was under trial. Here notice the tone. This is eighteen eleven.
He's talking about events that we're going back now thirty years.
These are all scientific experiments. These are not power plays

(26:51):
to put a group into power. They are done with
a scientific view in mind. Let's conduct this experiment. The
laboratory is nature, the subjects are ourselves. We watched the
motions and effects of these two rival plans with an

(27:12):
interest and anxiety proportionate to the importance of a choice
between them. The experiment in France failed after a short course,
and not from any circumstance peculiar to the times or nation.
And they looked at that very closely. Was it because
they were French? Was it because they didn't have the

(27:36):
background which we have had? Why was it? It took
very clear minds. It took rationally enlightened individuals to discern
and distinguish why it had failed, not from any circumstance
peculiar to the times or nation, but from those internal
jealousies and dissensions in the direction which will ever rise

(28:02):
among men equal in power without a principle to decide
and control their differences. He says, we tried a similar
experiment in seventeen eighty four by establishing a Committee of
the States, composed of a member from every state, so
there were thirteen executives. And he goes on to say

(28:22):
that it ended in a limbo, and that committee finally
dissolved itself until there could be of a new meeting
the following year. The failure of the French directory and
the failure of our attempt is ascribed to the nature

(28:44):
of man, that in our nature there are qualities which
will always en evor come to the fore given those
exact conditions. It's a scientific principle that they had discovered
that we're not blank inside. We have a psyche, we

(29:08):
have a spirit. We have a collection of images. He
turn out, and these images come up bidden or unbidden,
whenever circumstances occur that eke them out, call them out,
evoked them. And so Jefferson extremely apt at legal structures,

(29:36):
knowing the history of Western law exceedingly well. He read
Greek perfectly. He even criticized the pronunciation of Greek in
American school saying that it was not right because you
couldn't recite Homer out loud given that meter, or that

(29:56):
the translations of facilities were wrong because they put too
many extra words in, and that the power of Thucydides
and Tacitus is because they transgress the rules of grammar
intentionally in order to telescope words to create nuances and
meanings that are not exoteric but esoteric. That they verge

(30:17):
upon a philosophic kind of a poetry, and that the
cadences of poetic language structures are not founded upon quantities
in measure, but upon the accent of meaning. These are
tremendous insights in terms of literary criticism. But for Jefferson,

(30:39):
what he is saying, we have tried all these experiments,
and we know what we're doing. We are conscious because
we have gotten the science of man in hand, and
we have to protect ourselves from the infectious delusions of
power which Europe is in a nightmare quality. In order

(31:05):
to keep the United States out of the Napoleonic Wars,
Jefferson chose an unheard of tact. He put a self
imposed bargo embargo on American ships. No American ships could
leave American ports were anywhere. He views the first large

(31:27):
scale satia graha in world history. All right, you can
fight and continue, but American goods are not going to
participate in this war. American people are not going to
participate in this world. We're going to sit out until
you come to The difficulty was is that it would

(31:51):
have had to be complete to have worked. And there
were always the smugglers. There were always those individuals who
felt that the government had no right to tell them
what to do. When Jefferson left office and Madison came in,
Madison's whole first term in office was consumed by this

(32:15):
problem of the embargo. For four years. Madison tried he
diplomatic best. You know, Madison was a very small man.
He was five feet four and weigh one hundred pounds.
He was even smaller because Dolly, his wife, was very

(32:37):
buxom and very outgoing. She wore turbans with jewels and feathers.
This is eighteen oh nine. She loved to dance and
throw beautiful parties. And Madison loved her dearly and let her.
All of the visitors said, you know what a fantastic

(32:58):
gal is Dolly Man would have drabbed little old man
as James, but good, good hearted, but he wouldn't let
go of the tiller. He would not compromise on the embargo,
and he took all of the thrusts, and finally, with

(33:18):
Jefferson's design, he decided to declare war. He decided that
the way to use this energy, instead of leaning so
far one way, that he would go completely the other.
But the problem was who to declare war against. And
right up to the last minute they thought they would

(33:40):
declare war against France, but they didn't. They changed their
mind about two weeks and declared war against England. Napoleon
was happily astonished. He set a copy of an agreement
he had signed a year before to and saying, good,

(34:01):
You're making the English pay for their stubbornness in this world.
And Americans were extraordinarily happy that finally something had been done.
And then as the months went on, nothing happened. For
eighteen months, Madison did nothing. He was so cajoled that

(34:26):
they held a convention in Hartford, Connecticut, all of the
representatives from the New England states. They were going to
pull out of the Union. They were going to succeed
from the Union. In eighteen fourteen. The Hartford convention is
covered best, I think by Henry Adams. The Massachusetts legislature

(34:51):
issued October seventeenth its invitation to the New England States
for a conference, and on the same day the newspapers
published the dispatches from Ghent containing British conditions of peace
against Sint Holland. It's a city which required, among greater sacrifices,
a session of Massachusetts territory. That means part of their

(35:15):
territory was going to be given away at the conference
at Ghent, the Treaty conference. This was after Waterloom. Two
counties of the state beyond the Panofskat were then in
British military possession, and the third, Nantucket, was a British
naval station they had taken him in the War of

(35:37):
eighteen twelve. Yet even under these circumstances, the British demands
did not shock the Federalist leaders. Governor Strong, after reading
the Ghent documents October seventeenth, wrote to Pickering at Washington.
If Great Britain had discovered a Haughtier grasping spirit, it
might naturally have excited irritation. But I am persuaded that

(35:57):
in the present case there is not a member of
Congress who, if he were a member of Parliament, would
have thought that more moderate terms ought in the first
instance to have been offered. But they were not willing
to give up a part of anything, and so at
the Hartford Convention they decided to withdraw from the Union.

(36:20):
They were sending their messenger to Washington to tell Adams,
and the peace terms of Ghent came in and there
was no cause. Nothing was going to be given away.
But the country was on the edge. The British had

(36:43):
come up the Potomac and had burned Washington, d c.
They burned the White House, they burned the Capitol. Madison
and his people had to flee to the Georgetown Heights.
Miraculous there was a heavy rainstorm, or the whole city
of Washington would have been burnt to the ground. The

(37:04):
rainstorm put out the fire. A couple of days later,
a British force tried to come into Baltimore, and they
were repulsed finally at the last moment, just outside the
city limits of Baltimore. But Madison was a genius, and
he had a great guiding spirit behind him. And even

(37:28):
after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, the British
still were probing, and they sent a huge force against
the Port of New Orleans and by this time, the
American policy of drawing them in sprung the trap, and
Andrew Jackson, the Tennessee and Kentucky sharpshooters obliterated the British forces.

(37:54):
The Americans lost eight killed and seventeen wounded. The British
lost seven hundred kills fourteen hundred wounded, and all the
rest were taken prisoners. The entire British army that had
been sent against New Orleans was completely gobbled up in
one afternoon. It was a change in tone that the

(38:19):
United States was not keeping out of the embroilment with
European affairs through weakness, but through the sacred trust of
letting these generations grow up uninfected by the delusions that
were grabbing European history. It was not a question of strength,

(38:40):
It was a question of the priority being keeping Americans
out of the European nightmare. Let them get tuned to nature,
let them find the qualities that are therein themselves that
will respond to nature. Then all of the alchemy will work.

(39:02):
All of the latent esoteric capacities in man will naturally
come forth. You don't have to put them in man,
they're there. You don't have to teach someone of that.
Just create the conditions where they can be themselves in nature,

(39:22):
and they will come out. This was the concern with Jefferson.
Gilbert Schnard beautifully states towards the end of his book
on Jefferson that for thirty years or more, Jefferson had
lived constantly under the scrutiny of the public. He was

(39:45):
in the public's i from seventeen ninety one on through
until he retired from office, constantly being looked at. His
utterances had been often pounced upon by eager enemies in
the cannibal press. Letters intended solely for friends had been
printed several times in garbled forms, and during his presidency

(40:09):
had been unable to communicate freely with European friends for
fear of having his letters intercepted. And now he was free.
He was a citizen again, Citizen Jefferson. He liked to
be called TJ. Not even mister Jefferson. He said, there's

(40:30):
too much inflation, mister Jefferson, TJ. But his mind was unimpaired.
In the last fifteen years of Jefferson's life, he opened
up and in his correspondence, in his letters, we find
again and again Jefferson having his say at long last,

(40:53):
and we'll see after the break, and one of the
most famous letters in American history to John Adams, Jefferson
will say, it doesn't matter now whatever happens in the
history of the world, freedom is loose in the world.
Liberty has her children, and they're there in the millions

(41:15):
in the backwoods of this continent. And no matter what happens,
they will never give up. Until liberty is a worldwide phenomenon.
It may take them a while, but they will never
give up because they have learned how to be themselves
outside of history. They're at home in the unknown. They're

(41:40):
free in the wilderness. They can live off the land
and live off their own talents. Well, we'll take a
break and then we'll come and see somebodys as. I
don't know how well you remember the flow. I'll try

(42:07):
and bring it back for you. They The Treaty of
Ghent in eighteen fourteen led directly to World War One.
It took exactly one hundred years, and it produced a

(42:29):
landslide effect. And the concerns that Jefferson and Madison and
Monroe and their generation had in eighteen fourteen would all
come back like a bad nightmare for Woodrow Wilson. And
we'll see that, because we're going to go on with this,

(42:51):
and we'll eventually get to where we understand them. Jefferson's
correspondence with John Adams as the best source for some
of his statements where he opens up. Then, after the

(43:11):
War of eighteen twelve, after the Tree of Ghant, after
the eighteen fifteen fiasco, and January of eighteen fifteen in
New Orleans, after all it had been over, Jefferson wrote
to Adams that summer, the summer of eighteen fifteen, he said,
it's been a long time since we have exchanged a letter,

(43:32):
and yet what volumes might have been written on the
occurrences even of the last three months. In the first place, peace,
God bless it has returned to put us all again
into a course of lawful and laudable pursuits. A new
trial of the Bourbons has proved to the world their
incompetence to the functions of the station they have occupied,

(43:56):
and the recall of the usurper has clothed him with
the semblance of a legitimate autocrat. You see, they recalled
Napoleon from album briefly, and then it all collapsed again,
and Louis the eighteenth came back in again and set
up the cycle that eventually would produce revolution after revolution

(44:21):
in European politics eighteen forty eight, eighteen seventy one, et cetera, etc.
But Jefferson is writing just before that would happen, just
a few months before that, And he's writing of Napoleon. Now.
He never calls him Napoleon, he never calls him Bonaparte,
always refers to him with such a poignant indirectness that

(44:46):
everybody knows who he is talking about. If adversity should
have taught him wisdom of which I have little confidence,
he may yet render some service to mankind by teaching
the ancient dynasties that they can be changed and charged
for misrule, and by wearing down the maritime power of

(45:08):
England to limitable and safe dimensions. But it is not
possible he should love us, and of that our commerce
had sufficient proofs during his power. Our military achievements, indeed,
which he is capable of estimating, may in some degree
moderate the effect of his aversions. And even perhaps fancy

(45:32):
that we are to become the natural enemies of England,
as England herself has so steadily endeavored to make us
and as some of our over zealous patriots would be
willing to proclaim, and in this view he may admit
a cold toleration of some intercourse and commerce between the
two nations. He has certainly had time to see the

(45:53):
folly of turning the industry of France from the cultures
which nature is so highly undist her towards war. And
he goes on to talk in this way enumerate, but
he says that he believes that the ravenous need for

(46:15):
human blood has infected them too deeply that they will
not learn. That Europe will not be able to learn,
and the beginning of his council then is to withdraw
from participation. This will lead directly to the Monroe doctrine

(46:39):
in just eight years from that letter, in between the
end of the war of eighteen twelve eighteen fifteen and
Jefferson's assessment that Europe is not going to be able
to learn, they're not going to be able to step
into the new world literally that can't make it, and

(47:05):
in between the point of finally cutting them off saying
the Americas are off limits for European nightmares in between them.
Jefferson and his people had an extreme alarm. It was
over an issue which is called in American history the
Missouri Compromise. But the essential nature of it was to

(47:30):
introduce human slavery into the wilderness, into new lands, new
states of the Union. And for Jefferson this was the
worst of all possible nightmares. Yet a letter of eighteen
twenty to John Holmes, who was a congressman from Maine,

(47:55):
he thanks him for the copy of all of the
proceedings in Congress and the Missouri Compromise. Missouri was said
to be entered as a slave state west of the Mississippi.
Yet what did it show. It showed that the infection
slavery was not just a degradation of the power system

(48:21):
foisted upon human beings, but was a degradation of the
human spirit. He says, But this momentous question, like a
fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.
I considered it at once as the knell of the Union,
the death knell of the Union. He's just speaking this year.

(48:43):
He's saying that inevitably, if there is slavery, that the
Union will be lost, because the conception of the open
ended humanity which is being taught and inculcated, does not
allow for the experience of human slavery. I considered it

(49:06):
at once as the knell of the union. It is hushed,
indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only,
not a final sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a
marked principle moral and political, once conceived and held up
to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated,

(49:29):
and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.
That is to say, this is an occurrence which is marking,
in scoring and scarring the open experience of man, and
that any irritation pro or calm will just make it

(49:50):
go deeper and deeper. That there is this quality in
human experience that you is suffering from, that they cannot obliterate.
The connection of geographical lines with certain principles, and historical

(50:14):
backing up of this identification has made it almost impossible
for them. So he says, rites, I can with conscious
truth say that there is not a man on earth
who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us
from this heavy reproach in any practicable way. The cessation

(50:35):
of that kind of property. Remember last time we talked
about property, we talked about that the code of empire
is founded upon power being based on property. Property is
a geographical phenomenon. I have power because I own this.

(51:00):
You do not own, therefore you do not have power.
We control the ownership possibilities. Therefore we have more power
than those who own. And so the hierarchy builds. So
the way of empire builds, and might becomes the structural

(51:23):
connection for this whole delusion. It's a power gain. But
Jeffersonian democracy was based upon right. But the only thing
that men can really share is right. We share the
rights through a spiritual rapport, and whatever we manifest out

(51:50):
of that comes into being from the ethical structures of
transcendental experience. In order for there to be ethical structures
and transcendental experience, there have to be natural experiences first.
That there are no transcendental structures coming out of nothingness.

(52:15):
They have to come out of natural man. That's why
the key is to return men to being at home
in the wilderness. He has to be returned to zero,
as it were, in terms of his day dreams, in
order for him to wake up. It's like there's a
magical key, and that magical key can only turn when

(52:36):
he stops dreaming these dreams, and before he starts dreaming
the polarities of those dreams. At some equanimity of mind,
he is able to pass through this threshold and be real.
There's a massive yoga. It's a yoga civilization. Bagavad Gita says.
Equanimity of mind is yoga. It is only that, and

(53:03):
he who steps through that that is real. So he's
saying here people are trying to bind up principles of power,
hierarchy based on property, and the Missouri compromise is the

(53:24):
epitome of this. It's right in the center of the continent.
It's the first state on the other side of the Mississippi.
The whole dream of Western energy that we've been encouraging
for two generations now is going to go down this drain.

(53:45):
This is going to sour the whole thing, because this
energy is for real. It's coming along, so he writes.
But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears,
and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.
Justice is on one scale and self preservation on the
other of one thing. I am certain that as the

(54:07):
passage of slaves from one state to another would not
make a slave of a single human being who would
not be so without it. So their diffusion over a
greater surface would make them individually happier and proportionately facilitate
the accomplishment of emancipation by dividing the burden on a
greater number of co educators. An abstinence, too, from this

(54:30):
act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the
undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different
descriptions of men composing a state. This certainly is the
exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the Constitution
has taken from them and given to the central government.
Could Congress, for example, say that the non freemen of

(54:53):
Connecticut shall be free men, or that they shall not
emigrate into any other state. I regret that I am
now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice
of themselves by the generation of seventeen seventy six to
acquire self government and happiness to their country is to
be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of

(55:15):
their sons, and that my only consolation is to be
that I live not to weep over it. And so
the issue became a paramount issue, and for Jefferson, the
source of the problem, as usual, was traced back that

(55:40):
American power groups were envious to emulate the European models.
But that was the whole source behind this development. That
when you sift through the material, the evidence, when you
go over the experiments and you check your data, and

(56:02):
you look at your resonce and your tally sheets, and
you consult this experienced rationally intelligently, it's being fed from
the outside. It became a paramount issue because after the

(56:23):
administrations of Madison, with the embargo in the War of
eighteen twelve, with the peace that came after, the United
States bounded forward in an unprecedented belief. The eighteen twenties
were called the era of good Feeling. The two administrations

(56:43):
of Monroe were so efficient. People were doing so well
that in the second election of Monroe, his opposition received
one electoral vote. Is almost unanimous. The country. This country
in the eighteen twenties exploded into prosperity. There was a

(57:05):
tremendous jump between eighteen nineteen and eighteen thirty. The United
States simply outstripped most of the European competition. By eighteen
thirty the United States was one of the major powers already.

(57:27):
It doesn't seem like it would be possible, and yet
it was. And in the eighteen forties it spread until
everyone felt like this proverbial citizen in the Renaissance in
Florence saying, well, if I had time, I would do
just what Nicelangel was doing, but I just don't have

(57:48):
time to do it. This kind of pride of purpose
that one could carve out any kind of life one wish.
The era of good Feelings led directly to this explosion
of prosperity, and it was all tied up with the
Western movement, And in this Western movement the development of

(58:10):
this vast continent seemed paramount. In the midst of that,
Jefferson received a letter from Monroe, and Monroe asked him

(58:30):
specifically what he should do in the case of Spain.
It was possible now to purchase the Floridas. This would
give the United States a complete sweep of the Gulf.
The northern tier of the Gulf. The Erie Canal made
it possible to sweep up through the Great Lakes, and

(58:52):
so Ohio in Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin were all
being developed in eighteen nineteen, they were still territories in wilderness,
and by the eighteen twenties they were developing so fast
that it was just a matter of one generation and
they would be farmland. It went from wilderness to farmland

(59:14):
in one generation. I gave a lecture here one time,
a couple of years ago on the sacred traditions of
de Couda, the last shaman seer of the Fox Indians
from Wisconsin. And this book was written in the eighteen forties,

(59:35):
and the information was delivered to American surveyor named Walter
Pigeon in the eighteen thirties, and almost all of the
land mass of Ohio and Indiana, southern Illinois, eastern Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa,
and up into Dakotas. Almost the entire land mass was

(59:59):
tattooed with Indian mounds. There were mounds everywhere every couple
of miles. There were tens of thousands of Indian mounds,
most of them in ceremonial shapes, animal shapes, geometric shapes,
and so forth. And day Kuda at eighty five or
ninety was still able to tell Pigeon the meanings of

(01:00:22):
all these and the ancient histories the thousands of years
that Indians had occupied this land, the tens of thousands
of years had took to build all these In one generation,
they were effaced from the land and made into farms.
The Midwest literally grew up in the eighteen twenties and

(01:00:45):
to face the wilderness and the Indians. The important trigger
in all of this was the security that they were
not going to be stopped by European and involvement moments,
and the key to the whole thing was the Monroe Doctrine.

(01:01:06):
In eighteen twenty three, Jefferson wrote to the President of
the United States from Monticello October twenty fourth, Dear Sir,
the question presented by the letters you have sent me
as the most momentous which has ever been offered to
my contemplation since that of independence that made us a nation.

(01:01:29):
This sets our compass and points the course which we
are to steer through the ocean of time opening on us.
This is how Jefferson talked when he was not having
be circumspect. We're going to have to navigate through an
ocean of time. We're going to have to reach new
qualities of navigation. Human beings have never done this before.

(01:01:55):
It looks on the outside as if we're making another
imp higher. The experience and the insight is that we
are manifesting some new quality of the spirit that never
has been able to be brought in before, and never
could we embark on it under circumstances more auspicious. Our

(01:02:16):
first and fundamental maxims should be never to engage and
entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never
to suffer Europe to intermeddle with Transatlantic affairs. America, north
and south has a set of interest distinct from those

(01:02:36):
of Europe and peculiarly her own. She should therefore have
a system of her own, separate and apart from that
of Europe. While the last is laboring to become the
domicile of despotism. Our endeavor should surely be how to
make our hemisphere that of freedom. This is the key

(01:02:57):
in home Docum here the whole move. If we can
convince the American people that they are free from interference
and show them that all the doors are open and
we're not going to interfere, they will make whatever new
world they will, and whatever it is, it'll be all right.

(01:03:18):
Again and again, Jefferson showed after he was through with
his presidency. The willingness to turn the whole nation and
everything over to others, to the new generation. You have
to be willing to turn it over to the sun,
all of it, not with your death, but while you

(01:03:40):
are still viable. That that's the essential act in a
free cycle, is that one can give the reins away.
This is the test. You know how hard it was
to work for it, to dificult to protect it and

(01:04:01):
maintain it. Given that value and that significance, are you
ready to turn it over to others? And that was
the quality that Jefferson looked for in terms of the
transition in the presidencies. You know, he lived to see
John Quincy Adams become president, and he wrote to Quincy

(01:04:28):
has pronounced Quincy Adams. He wrote to Quincy's father, John Adams,
and he said, I know that you've been upset because
of the recent political turmoils. That your son came into
power with a very strange circumstance. The election was split

(01:04:52):
four ways. Andrew Jackson I think got ninety nine electoral votes,
John Quincy Adams got eighty something. Governor Clinton and Webster
each got forty something, and Henry Clay, it was, and
Clay through his electoral votes to John Quincy Adams, and

(01:05:17):
Jackson was livid because he had gotten far more popular
votes than anybody, and yet he lost the election. And
John Adams wondered whether this was going to be a
source of new bickering, and Jefferson assured him that by now,
by eighteen twenty five, that the qualities of freedom were

(01:05:38):
so deep in the American psyche that they would just
be assumed that we'll have our turn next time. We'll
go along with it, because we're all pulling together, and
though we're not in the driver's seat, we're all in
the same wagon. And it was this quality that Jefferson
had managed to pursue pate out of a circumstance that

(01:06:05):
can only be called transhistorical. Europe's fatal mistake, in Jefferson's eyes,
was that they still danced to the same old tunes.
They still were in this historical flow, and that the
Americans had withdrawn themselves, had leaped outside of the normal

(01:06:30):
flow of circumstance, and in this discontinuous mode, had taken
a new tack and reality they were no longer condemned
to wear these forms and connections and threads of meaning

(01:06:52):
which Europe was unable to break. These were the chains
that bound. It was not the laws, It wasn't the soldiers,
it wasn't the military. It was the tyranny of historical
mental habits that could not be seen. And this is
why they were so tyrannical, because they were invisible to

(01:07:17):
the naive. I and the Americans had been taken out
of that. They had found some aperture, some discontinuity in
the energy flow of time, and they had gone in
a different way, in a different mode. So he writes
to Adams Monticello February fifteenth, eighteen twenty five, the people

(01:07:48):
of Europe still seemed to think that America is a
mere garden plot, and that whatever is sent to one
place is at home as every other. I sincerely congratulate
you on the high gratification in which the issue of
the late election must have afforded you. It must excite

(01:08:08):
ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have
lived to see a son whose education and happiness his
life have been devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice
of this country. Nor do I see any reason to
suppose the next administration will be in so difficult a
jam as your letter of January twenty second you seem

(01:08:30):
to expect. So deeply are the principles of order and
of obedience to law impressed in the minds of our
citizens generally, that I am persuaded that there be an
immediate acquiescence in the will of the majority if mister
Adams has been the choice, just as if he had
been the choice of every man. The scribblers and newspapers

(01:08:52):
may for a while express their disappointment in angry quibs,
but these will evaporate without influence seeing the public functionaries,
nor will they prevent their harmonizing with their associates and
the transaction of public affairs. Nights of restue you and
days of tranquility are which, as I tender you with
affectionate respects. TJ. Jefferson died the next year. He and

(01:09:18):
Adams both died on the fourth of July. As you
must know, Monroe died on the fourth of July. John
James Madison died on the twenty eighth of June. He
was a week short. It's difficult to trace the connection
between the Hermitic tradition in Europe and Benjamin Franklin. But

(01:09:42):
we've done that. It's very difficult to show how Franklin
passed on this enormous openness of approach of mind, of
scientific endeavor to discover nature and its lash. We've done that.

(01:10:04):
The most difficult remaining task is to show how after Jefferson,
that the baton of this new kind of civilization was
in fact passed on, but not to those in power.
When you look at the president's after Jackson, it's an

(01:10:24):
incredible array of average people. The only time anyone extraordinary
comes along is when the events call out for someone extraordinary.
From Jackson to Woodrow Wilson, the only really outstanding president
was Lincoln because he was called forth by the events.

(01:10:48):
It looks in retrospect as an energy reserve, a spiritual
guardian in reserve that when you need that guardian, he
will be there. But he is there only to ensure
the safety, not to run the show. That the average

(01:11:10):
man is going to have to learn how to run
the show. And this was the most difficult and bitter
lesson of the nineteenth century. It was a lesson that
drove most thinking Europeans up the wall. How can they
do so well when they don't have any philosophy, they
don't have any political doctrine, they don't have any outstanding leaders.

(01:11:33):
Yet they continued to prosper beyond all hope and expectation.
How can this happen? The millennial dreams seem to be
coming true for the Americans like magic. The basis of
that whole regard was that the common man, every man

(01:11:56):
was free to be natural on the life land. This
was the key, This was the central realization. The family
farm was the burner that went on with the pilot
light of Jeffersonian democracy. It's horrifying in nineteen eighty five

(01:12:18):
to see the demise of the family farm, to see
government officials in Washington saying, well, there might be seven
to ten percent of the American family farms that go
out this year. That seventy thousand families in one year.
The key to it was that the family farm occurred

(01:12:43):
as a transformation of the wilderness. That the American person
was at home in the wilderness, and he was at
home in the wilderness transformed into the family farm. He
was ambidextrously at home. He could be either way. And

(01:13:04):
the core of this was an esoteric passing on of
this capacity and in searching for someone to exemplify this.
I originally, several years ago, when I first mooted this course,
thought I would use Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But using

(01:13:28):
this technique which i've i'm teaching on Saturdays, I was
able to discern that Theureau is by far the better choice,
because in Thureau we have someone who hearkens to the
land rather than the European tradition. You know, Emerson's library,

(01:13:55):
like most of the libraries of these great individuals, have
all been cataloged. The largest proportion of books in Emerson's
library were German German idealist Romantic philosophy. He had one
hundred and thirty volumes of Gerreta translations and commentaries in
his library. Thereau had a couple of basic books, a dictionary,

(01:14:22):
a Bible, some Shakespeare, and somebody rather esoteric family. The
Chermandelas sent him fifty volumes of the Upanishads and the Vedas,
and that's what Thereau read. That's the difference between Thereau
and Emerson. Thereau was able to take a quality of
living experience and put it into play in the universe.

(01:14:46):
And he is the one that we have to look
to to see where Jefferson, that magician of civilization, slipped
the mickey. And it's in Thereau in his journals, especially
as we'll see that he occurs. Much has been made

(01:15:08):
in literary criticism that Walt Whitman is leaves of Grass,
But as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass occurs as an
integrated work of a certain scope and quality, Thereau's journals
tail off into the ineffable in every sentence, on every page,

(01:15:30):
and it's almost an optical illusion after a while, as
we will see reading Thereau's journals, to see whether it's
a man in nature or whether it's nature taking the
mask of a man so ambidextrious, so ambivalent becomes the
American spirit with Thereaux that it is almost impossible for

(01:15:54):
people not in that tradition to discern it. And for
a very long time throw was thought of as just
an adjunct to Emerson. He actually was seen by the
Gandhian freedom fighters in India as the stage of North America,
and many books were dedicated to him. And we'll see

(01:16:17):
in Theureau how this tremendous Elan that was, and we
have to call an elam rather than an idea was
passed from Franklin to Jefferson, and Jefferson threw it into
the air, rather like the quality of electricity that Tesla envisioned.
There's no plug, you just put the machine in the

(01:16:37):
field and it turns on. Jefferson's America was like that.
It was an energy of comprehension that was in the air.
And somebody like Thureau, when he became coherent to himself,
shown with all the significance. And so the last four

(01:17:01):
lectures of this particular series will take up Thureau, and
it'll be interesting for you to see how close Thereaux
comes from time to time to being just like one
of the old Chinese Taoists, and on the other hand,
very much like the old gentleman with his natural hair

(01:17:23):
in the French courts Franklin and other times. He seems
to be a contemporary of ours, ahead of us in time,
beckoning us on saying the wilderness is over here. It's
not there at all in these conceptions. It's over here
in this experience, and that this experience, when natural of

(01:17:45):
its own alchemy, becomes transcendental. Emerson talked about transcendentalism. Thureau
was transcendental as such well. I hope some of you
can make it next week. Let's see it.