Puntifex Maximus - The Bridge Builders of Humanity

[Bright Garlick]

I've been healing well these last few months but this week have fallen off the perch with a bad bout of Bronchitis - which has kept me up throughout the night. The upside of all this is that I started revisiting some writers that I read more than 20 years ago. Today I began re-reading Aldous Huxley's The Human Situation - which had a profound impact on me when I first read it in 1989. The mention of Huxley is enough to elicit all kinds of reactions from one end of the emotional continuum to the other. Now there are of course many who believe that Huxley was the father of MK Ultra and a close friend in the know believes that he was heavily involved in influencing what I have called the lower arms of The Architecture - particularly in regard to their population control policies. This may or may not be true but either way Huxley always struck me as a thinker with a heart, a man driven by ethics in the face of intellect. He spent much of his life trying to understand the human condition and he willingly grappled with the biggest problems facing our species. He was honest about the population problem and I agree with many of his conclusions and recommendations.

His ideas are very powerful and despite his strong personality, I believe he could have easily been convinced by those in power that the application of his ideas (or more precisely his predictive fears) were a way out of the worst of our human crisis.

Whatever the case I like Huxley and think his writings should be required reading for any wanting to be educated person !

The Human Situation was a compendium of a series of lectures that Huxley gave between February and December 1959 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It is a series of lectures in which we most clearly see how Huxley interpreted the external world and the inner world of the human condition.

At the beginning of The Human Situation Huxley speaks about the flaws of modern education and suggests that we need Bridge Builders who can communicate across disciplines with heart and mind. Here is his explanation of the Puntifex Maximus :

“We have an interesting word, pontifex, or bridge builder. It is the Latin name for a member of the college of priests in Rome, the head of which was called pontifex maximus. (Actually the accepted etymology of pontifex is probably a false etymology. I am almost certain that the original word was not pontifex but puntifax, which is an old pre-Latin language, the Oscan language, means the maker of propitiatory sacrifices. The Romans translated this into their own language as pontifex, the maker of bridges.) In a religious context pontifex means builder of a bridge between Earth and Heaven, between the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. The whole idea of pontifex, the bridge builder, is a very profitable one, and we can meditate upon and make use of it in a very productive way.

The function of the literary man in the present context, then, is precisely to build bridges between art and science, between objectively observed facts and immediate experience, between morals and scientific appraisals. There are all kinds of bridges to be built ...“

Huxley argues that the root problem of education is specialisation (which narrows our view of reality and separates the mind from the heart and body) but suggests that somehow we need to an integral education that blends deep specialisation with shallow generalisation - in much the same way as many of the ancients did. Huxley is however critical of many of the ancient Greeks, who spent too much time in their heads, ignorant of observable facts and inner experiences.

I think Huxley identified the only possible pathway out of the current crisis facing our species. And for this reason I think he ear marked by those in power as a kind of Pontifex Maximus himself – even though he suggested he was nothing of the sort.
After exploring the idea more I began thinking about all the cross disciplinary studies that have grown since I was a boy in the 70's and I wondered what these Puntifex Maximus kinds of characters and institutions might look like. My suspicion is that many of the worlds think tanks (including the infamous Tavistock Institute) represent the idea of bridge building but there are few if any leading lights of humanity who stand out as today's Puntifex Maximus.

If we are to take Huxley's idea one step further we could say that the Pontifex Maximus can be found at 3 different levels :

• Individuals
• Disciplines
• Institutions.

Bridge builders serve the role of communicating across or between domains -

• between the spiritual and material
• between the human and divine
• between Earth and the cosmos
• between the mind and the body
• between the individual and the species
• etc.

In thinking about who might be some good examples of Puntifex Maximus, I found it much harder. Such individuals are a rare breed. One's that came readily to mind included Buddha, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell/Eric Arthur Blair, Alfred North Whitehead, Buckminster Fuller, Ken Wilbur, Joan of Arc, Mark Twain/Sam Clemens, HG Wells, Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, Francis Bacon, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, JR Tolkein, Adolf Hitler, John Forbes Nash Jr, Alexander the Great, Alan Turing, Steven J Gould, Howard Gardner, Ramana Maharshi, WH Hudson, Laozi, Budica, Rudolph Steiner, Carl Jung, William Wordsworth, John Paul 2 and Fritz Perls. Of course there are many, many more and this is but a biased sampling.

Many of these bridge builders worked within narrow confines, while some worked as widely as possible. Most of them have been catalysts for the development of new ideas, relationships and systems (not all of them good !) and almost all of them have come up against the great wall of frustration that arises from the limited and myopic views of the majority and specialists who live mostly in the mind – beyond the reach of empirical data and the subjective and physical experience that is a real part of the human experience. Many of those on this list embraced a more holistic view of life and were for the most part tolerant of diversity. They acknowledged the light and dark, the best and worst of our species. While working and living in times that were sometimes oppressive and far from conducive to the enjoyment of free will.

Among them Ken Wilbur and Howard Gardner are contemporaries who have the potential to transform how we function as a species. Ken Wilbur's Integral Spirituality has the potential to transform our species – when it's time comes – from a deeply spiritual perspective. Ken Wilbur is not an entirely grounded thinker (grounded in the heart) but his ideas (like those of Huxley) have the potential to revolutionise how we see human life. Howard Gardner's ideas about multiple intelligences are rapidly expanding what we understand as human intelligence and human potential.
On a lesser level we might also add the likes of William Glassner (Choice Theory and Reality Therapy) and Victor Vernon Wolf (Holodynamics). We could also add many in the so called channelling field to the list of potential candidates – particularly Jane Robert's and Seth. Why one idea has the potential to revolutionise the species, while another falls by the wayside is largely beyond me. But I think every idea has a time when it's ready to be understood and every potential Puntifex Maximus has their own developmental stages during which they give birth to some form of magnum opus that may or may not be recognised by the masses or those that need to see.

I can think of none among them who truly represents a Puntifex Maximus who has utterly transformed humanity. All of them have however played extremely critical roles in the evolution of mankind.

It seems to me that the individual Puntifex Maximus's will be the ones who lead by example, the expansion of human consciousness. They will be equally represented by men and women and perhaps even children. Most important but hardly recognised will be those Puntifex Maximus's who build bridges between Earth and Space – in every sense of the word but above all those who build spiritual relationships between the human species and species from other worlds.

But what about the maker of propitiatory sacrifices in Huxley's original definition ? This designation of the Pontifex is but one of the duties of the role. Wikipedia explains the Pontifex Maximus additional duties in the following way :

"The immense authority of the sacred college of pontiffs was centered on the Pontifex Maximus, the other pontifices forming his consilium or advising body. His functions were partly sacrificial or ritualistic, but these were the least important. His real power lay in the administration of jus divinum or divine law; the information collected by the pontifices related to the Roman religious tradition was bound in a corpus which summarized dogma and other concepts. The chief departments of jus divinum may be described as follows:
1. The regulation of all expiatory ceremonials needed as a result of pestilence, lightning, etc.
2. The consecration of all temples and other sacred places and objects dedicated to the gods.
3. The regulation of the calendar; both astronomically and in detailed application to the public life of the state.
4. The administration of the law relating to burials and burying-places, and the worship of the Manes or dead ancestors.
5. The superintendence of all marriages by conferratio, i.e. originally of all legal patrician marriages.
6. The administration of the law of adoption and of testamentary succession.
7. The regulation of the public morals, and fining and punishing offending parties.

The pontifices had many relevant and prestigious functions such as being in charge of caring for the state archives, the keeping the official minutes of elected magistrates (see Fasti) and list of magistrates, and they kept the records of their own decisions (commentarii) and of the chief events of each year, the so-called "public diaries", the Annales maximi."

Expanding our definition of Puntifex Maximus outwards in this way, may help us to recognise the role that hybrid disciplines and wide spanning institutions have in guiding humanity to a place of minimal suffering and greatest consciousness. A place where humans live in harmony with Earth and the Kosmos. It also helps us to recognise the importance of wisdom that arises from the hybridisation of east and west, modern and traditional, the known and the sacred. I can think of no other institution that fulfils this role, other than the group of 90 I have mentioned in my big picture post (which I learnt about via the Creator Races in my many encounters with them). The group who has been chosen by the ET's to represent humanities best interests above and beyond the greed, stupidity and ignorance of the lower arms of The Architecture (powers that be) and the rest of the human race (myself included !). But of course this is a group who's identity will never be known.

I sometimes wonder if Huxley was one of the 90 and if his ideas created a template for their future activities ? We will never know !

You can learn more about some of these subjects via wikipedia (with discretion) or here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_Maximus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdisciplinarity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_tank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_Institute .

I am curious to know which individuals, disciplines and institutions others see as Puntifex Maximus at this point in human time ? And what is it that they offer – what bridges are they building and what impact might they have ?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3TQZ-2iMUR0

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=z9RiRfMYVlQ

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9JsHSiF7Kxg

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ivoeUybj8Hw

May you all be well !

Brighticus Maximus.

[chocolate]

Thank you, Bright Garlick! I think this could be one of the most important threads I have come across so far!

[mosquito]

..Indeed, and it's certainly the first one I've felt inclined to contribute to in a while.

I agree that Huxley should be required reading, though I have to confess that I've only read "Brave New World" along with the essay he wrote in 1958, "Brave New World Revisited". The latter is very eye opening indeed, where he lays out how shocked he is at how far we have already progressed towards the society he'd described. God knows what he'd say today !

Since becoming a, more or less, happy wanderer, I've read more classical English literature than I've ever done in the past, and am astonished at how much wisdom there is to be found, at how much the human condition remains basically unchanged, despite the prevailing view that we are now at the pinnacle of our evolution/development, that we are somehow different from our ancestors. Anyone who doubts what I say need only go and read Shakespeare or Chaucer. Plus ca change .....

As for the Puntifex Maximus, the role you describe sounds very much like that of the shaman. I can also pretty much see it in many of the world's traditional medicine systems as well as in some of the more bio-physics related research which is going on. Not so sure I can identify any one person who fits the role though !

But I think we can ALL do this, in our every day lives, with our children (especially) or with those we meet. I'm currently a tiny cog in a gigantic, idiotic "education" machine, and this thread has helped me see that I have a fantastic opportunity to instil a sense of awe and wonder into 2,000 young lives every year.

Thank you.

[chocolate]

Bright Garlick, this video found me today, and I think I am obliged to share it with you and everyone else here:

http://blip.tv/fractal-field/dan-win...forces-6129717

[Bright Garlick]

Thanks chocolate - great video - well worth contemplating !