Whitley says, I've been waiting ever since the day I opened his first book for William Henry to reach this point in his development. What he has done with his new presentation Morph is to demonstrate just what the ancients did to achieve enlightenment. In this interview, he tells us what enlightenment meant to them, the powers it gave them, the dangers that they faced on the enlightenment journey, and how WE can get on that road ourselves. The past has left numerous monuments that are beyond the ability of modern engineers to duplicate, such as the Great Pyramid, the gigantic platform at Baalbek in Lebanon and the Fortress of Sacsayhuaman in Peru. There was a knowledge involved that we have lost, an energy used that we can no longer access. The next phase in William journey involves using enlightenment to regain that knowledge, and therefore also the energy that comes with it. The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in the late 17th- and 18th-century Europe emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition. Its purpose was to reform society using reason, challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual interchange. It opposed superstition and intolerance, with the Catholic Church as a favorite target. Some Enlightenment philosophes collaborated with Enlightened despots, who were absolute rulers who tried out some of the new governmental ideas in practice. The ideas of the Enlightenment have had a long-term major impact on the culture, politics, and governments of the Western world. Originating about 1650 to 1700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632--1677), John Locke (1632--1704), Pierre Bayle (1647--1706), Voltaire (1694--1778) and physicist Isaac Newton (1643--1727). Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered these figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government in what was known as enlightened absolutism. The Scientific Revolution is closely tied to the Enlightenment, as its discoveries overturned many traditional concepts and introduced new perspectives on nature and man's place within it. The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790--1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism's emphasis on emotion, and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force. The Romantics complained that the Enlightenment had neglected the force of imagination, mystery, sentiment could not handle the emergence of new phenomenon. In France, Enlightenment was based in the salons and culminated in the great Encyclopédie (1751--72) edited by Denis Diderot (1713--1784) and (until 1759) Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717--1783) with contributions by hundreds of leading intellectuals who were called philosophes, notably Voltaire (1694--1778), Rousseau (1712--1778) and Montesquieu (1689--1755). Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume encyclopedia were sold, half of them outside France. The new intellectual forces spread to urban centres across Europe, notably England, Scotland, the German states, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Spain, then jumped the Atlantic into the European colonies, where it influenced Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, and played a major role in the American Revolution. The political ideals of the Enlightenment influenced the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish--Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791.

• published: 12 Jan 2014
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