No, this isn’t a joke. The dining room is the real spiritual center of Trinity College.

Trinity also has a chapel. You can find dozens of pictures of the chapel on the web – including a few pictures of its beautiful inside. The chapel also has real spiritual energy. It has a statue of Isaac Newton which lingers in my mind, in part because of how I focused on it when I visited there. But in the end, nothing can compete with the dining room for lightness of spirit, energy, intelligence and history.

As a kind of instructive example, maybe I should say a bit more about the statue of Newton. I owe great thanks to Andrew Barto for inviting me to visit him at Cambridge University in February 1989, in connection with some neural network meetings. At that time, while advancing the field of neural network research, I was still deeply driven, inside myself, by wondering “how does reality really work?”, in the spirit of physics. I felt a very deep emotional displeasure with my own confusion about basic physics, and the confusion of everyone else on earth as well. (This was before the new “Q hypothesis” on the physics part of this web page.) To satisfy my driving curiosity, I would have been happy to “cheat” by picking up clues from anyone or anything on earth -- though I would have felt a deep obligation to give proper credit as much as possible to anyone or anything who would help me out of the confusion. But no one on earth knew the way out, at that time. As I looked at the statue of Newton, I realized full well that here was a man who had penetrated through a swirl of equally great mental chaos. He had a slogan “order out of chaos.” Naturally, I would never be so silly as to worship St. Newton, or to imagine any kind of power in a statue! However… looking at a postcard of the US Congress can be helpful in stimulating the mind to try to remember its experiences with the real thing; in a similar way, I wondered if I could somehow search in my own meditation, to try to imagine as vividly as possible how Isaac Newton would have looked at these new problems. Could I at all commune with the spirit, invoke the collective memory, access the subroutine? If only I had someone like that to discuss these new dilemmas with!! And so, I did do a bit of meditation in that chapel, but nothing amazing happened there. The energy which I felt there was not so much different in scale from that German church I mentioned elsewhere. I believe that this meditation was in fact effective in its way, but please, folks, don’t start kowtowing in reverence to postcards of the US Congress!! My goal was to understand, not to worship.

I regret that I did not bring a camera with me when last I visited Trinity College in the year 2000. I owe great thanks to Brian Josephson and to Horace Barlow for arranging an invitation, at the expense of the Perrot Warwick Foundation, which organized a workshop to evaluate the investments of that Foundation, administered by the College. When we were there, the dining room did not have so much up-to-date laughter and conversation of students. The room was almost empty. But under those conditions, it was easier to feel the aura of history in the room. The big portraits of Francis Bacon (an early Master of the College) and of Isaac Newton linger in my memory. Perhaps someday I will post my slides from that workshop.

Here are just a few thoughts about the long and interesting history of this place.

Isaac Newton was certainly the most famous person to eat here. NSF once funded a research project to study Newton’s life, which resulted in the biography Never at Rest by Westfall. I never had patience enough to read the whole book – but when I scanned the abridged version in the little bookstore at NASA Goddard, I was amazed at something I never knew. Before that time, I had already formed an understanding of how the Emperor Constantine had taken over Christianity, in about the same way that Lenin did, when he declared that he had nationalized the Church and was the new head of it. When Lenin obtained a unanimous vote from the politburo, no one called it a miracle – but to this day, the unanimous vote of Constantine’s politburo is called a “great Christian miracle.” I had spoken to Aramaic-speaking friends from the Middle East, ordained in the ancient anti-Melkite Church, who told me more about that same history. I was startled to learn that Newton had pieced together the exact same story and conclusions, based on a totally different set of evidence. The movie The Da Vinci Code also has a brief cameo about the role of Constantine, very similar to Newton’s conclusions, based on a different strain of scholarship. The book Misquoting Jesus makes it clear that Constantine was not the only villain here, in distorting and suppressing the views of Jesus – but even so, one such villain is already enough.

Newton is also famous for the dispute about who invented calculus – him or Leibnitz. In discussing backpropagation, some people have sometimes told me, “Don’t worry. In time, historians will sort out the real truth. They always do.” Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the whole story of who invented calculus has not yet been fully told to the world, because Newton was not in a position to tell the entire story back at that time. Newton and Leibnitz were both very deeply involved in “spiritual alchemy” and in the secret societies which helped protect such mystics and free thinkers from the harsh and murderous “Holy Inquisition” supported by the Catholic Church at that time. One of the major histories covering that period (by Crane Brinton? I forget) explains how Leibnitz was Secretary of a chapter of the Rosicrucian Order of that period – and loudly resigned, saying how he would break the grip of secrecy and bring the whole truth (to the extent that he understood it) to the entire world. Modern Catholics may wonder whether I am exaggerating a bit about the harshness of the Holy Inquisition in those days – just as some Germans try hard not to believe what our cousins did to the Jews in World War II. But, for all its flaws, the English children’s classic textbook An Island Story, does portray that story accurately. It is a story which should be remembered, in all nations. As George Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” Now, in the third millennium, we need to work ever harder to remember the lesson of liberation from Holy Inquisitions. The liberation of the mind and the liberation of the spirit cannot be separated – and we will need both, to meet the great challenges ahead of us.

Francis Bacon, like Newton, also had a major impact on later human history. The fuzzy (unreliable) part of my memory says that Thomas Jefferson once recommended the works of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke as the three most essential parts of the curriculum in universal public education, to create a proper foundation for stable democracy and freedom. When I took the freshman course in philosophy at Harvard, one of the main textbooks was “the English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill,” edited by Burtt. Yet they skipped over the Bacon chapter! Bacon is most famous for two things: (1) formulating what we now call “the scientific method;” and (2) his book “the New Atlantis,” a kind of rough blueprint for a new kind of society, which many people took as a kind of first draft for what to create in the English settlements in North America.

Finally, I owe you all a few words about the Freemasons. Many lurid and crazy things have been written about the Freemasons and their associates, both by enemies and by enthusiasts. Even in recent years, there has also been some very clever but grossly dishonest propaganda by more intelligent people who feel threatened by the spirit of freedom. Even though I am not a Freemason (and none of my blood relatives has ever been a Freemason that I know of), I have had access to enough information to get past the main misconceptions here.

One of the curious recent misconceptions in the US is the idea that Freemasonry has not had a major impact on history at all – that it is all just a kind of old legend like legends about ghosts and vampires. A quick visit to the George Washington Masonic Memorial here in Arlington Virginia can dispel that very quickly. In other Western nations, the surface level of history is usually better known. I will not bore you here with the many, many accounts which are easily found on the web.

In the year 2000, Horace Barlow, a neuroscientist and the Master of Trinity College, was somewhat embarrassed both by the Perrot-Warwick Foundation and by the long strong connection between Trinity College and the Freemasons of that college. They were just then breaking off the formal ties.

The Freemasons themselves have, of course, attempted at times to understand their own history. Possibly the most authoritative history they have is The History of Freemasonry, by Mackey. That book is full of the spirit of truth – confined by the white walls of clerical scholarship within just one tradition. Reading between the lines, and drawing on other sources, I have a different image or theory about the history of the Freemasons.

Imagine, centuries ago, in Trinity College and similar places, a circle of intensely intelligent free-thinking people, deeply schooled in many streams of thought from all over the world, going back to the mystery schools of the Greeks. (As an example, they may have read the passage in Plutarch’s Lives, where Alexander and Aristotle discuss the school they belonged to. Newton certainly knew about Pythagoras!)  Imagine them fully understanding the role of experience or empirical data, along with rationality and mathematics focused on empirical reality, as a tool for creating enlightenment. Imagine their great frustration in trying to create progress of mind and spirit, in the face of a power-seeking empire based at the time in Rome. (Though unscrupulous power-seekers can be found all over the world!)

Imagine them posing the problem as follows: “Here we are, having learned so much, at such great cost. Yet we are grossly outnumbered. People adhere to the path of lies and corruption for so many reasons. They like to play dress-up in fancy robes as grand pooh-bahs. They are deluded by their pride, their ego, which blocks them from the honesty and humility they need to change. We and people like us have tried for centuries to put people on a better path, by teaching more of the truth… but it is an uphill battle. What can we do?

“There are many things we can do. But one of them is – we can create a kind of front group. While we here in this place continue to cultivate the real pursuit of truth, and spread it as far as we can, we can create a kind of support organization, to fight more effectively for the kind of freedom of mind and of spirit that is essential for the spirit of truth to really grow. We can create the breathing space we need. The organization must contain the essential pointers to cultivation and understanding of the soul, to serve as an entryway to anyone who is truly serious and constructive and interested in learning more. But the main focus with the front group must be on creating and defining a mass organization, which appeals to human nature enough to neutralize the attacks and oppression of our enemies. We need to use a kind of cell group organization, to begin with, because of course they will be trying to kill us, especially when we start to oppose tyranny all over Europe.”

But of course, no one can control the later flow of history. Many strands of Freemasonry emerged from that point, some more enlightened, some less.  Some were corrupted to some degree in their own way, but some may have advanced beyond their origins. And, as some of the French have observed, some may have become battlegrounds in the twentieth century for competing visions, some continuing the tradition of progress and others infiltrating and opposing it. On the whole, the Freemasons have become less popular in recent years in the US and even in England – just as true Sufi Orders became weaker and less pure in the years preceding the decline of Ottoman power. The question is: can we preserve the valid initial driving spirit behind this organization, with or without the organization itself?

One very minor note. During graduate school in Harvard, I picked up a strange paperback science fiction called “Voyage to Arcturus” by Lindsay. When I finished it, I felt a bit as if my head had been put through a meat-wringer. “I know he is saying something important,” I concluded, “But I don’t really know what it is, what the truth of it is.” Later, some simple-minded literalist Gnostics put out their own version of the book, which was clearly proof of how easy it is to totally misconstrue it. Colin Wilson wrote a book on Lindsay, which explained how the original publisher, Methuen, had deleted many chapters which would perhaps have explained it all more clearly; however, Methuen felt it would reveal too much. The allusions to Scottish Rite Freemasonry are rather blunt and clear at some points. But again – it is poetic and experiential truth, not disciplined or integrated scientific truth. (See my discussion of Buddhism for some further comments on Freemasonic thought, and references to other streams of poetic truth besides Lindsay.)