Presentation Q2-2
Presented on: Saturday, April 11, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 15 of 52
Presentation 2-2
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Transcript:
We come to the 15th presentation of this year of preparation. And in the ancient wisdom tradition preparation was always an immersion in the lesser mysteries and involve a closing like a closing of the eyes. The closing of the activity. A closing of the karma. Which was all an initiation, a preparation. The Greek word for it was myesis, m-y-e-s-i-s. Myesis. And that closing was a preparation for an opening. And the opening was the greater mysteries. The Greek word for it, uh, propylaea, a seeing. An opening of the eyes. So that the wide-open eyes gave you one of the most ancient registries of being able to vision.
There was a big volume published by Oxford University Press a couple of three decades ago or so. An Irish savant scholar, her name was Elizabeth Twohig, and it was about the Paleolithic Goddess and her communities of males and females. And she not only had the very large eyes, but her breasts were also brought together in a tuned pair so that the circles of spiraling of the breasts intertwined and became an infinity sign in a cursive ongoing energy interchange. For the males their open eyes did not have that. It had a paired-ness always. Whereas the feminine was always in a flow.
In Greece, ancient Greece, the lesser mysteries were celebrated some ways outside of Athens to the North, along a small stream there, the Ilissos. I-l-i-s-s-o-s. At a small place was called Agrai. A-g-r-a-i. And in Plato and his Dialogues being not only genius in himself but having inherited by about the fourth generation from Pythagoras, the, uh, ancient, uh, mysteries. He was first cued to the fact that he had Greek learning, but he didn't understand where the Greek learning came from and thus, he hadn't fully appreciated Pythagoras. And that was learned by Plato in southern Italy.
Italy is shaped like a boat and down at the sole of the boat and the heel of the boot. That area, plus Sicily, was called Magna Graecia, Greater Greece, because a lot of the Greeks use that as they're far west and developed it. Following suit of the Phoenicians who on the Mediterranean coast, uh, where Lebanon and Israel are now, the Phoenicians were able to master long distance sailing very early on and founded Carthage, 800 B.C. and founded Marseilles 600 B.C., And went through the pillars of Hercules all the way down the coast of Africa as far as Cameroon. And went north along what is the Portugal Spanish Coast. And all of this Phoenician quality was imitated by the Greeks, who became very good sailors. Uh, even better than the, um, Phoenicians. Maritime, navigation and shipbuilding and everything proceeded apace.
At any rate, Plato followed the footsteps of Pythagoras to Egypt and went to Heliopolis. And there I began to learn that there is a great deal to the wisdom tradition that goes back much farther than the Greeks. The great Athenian lawgiver Solon. Kind of a Moses for the classical Greeks. Solon, about 600 B.C., went to Egypt and he was told by the old Egyptian priest, You Greeks are nothing but children. For instance, you only remember one flood. When our history goes back and there were many floods. There were many episodes of the world. You don't even remember that one of the greatest episodes in your ancient, distant, archaic history 9000 years ago, the Greeks did a great service to mankind by taking out of commission an empire of pretenders that was threatening to be all powerful, whos center was Atlantis, etc., etc.
So, Plato, in his Dialogues, has episodes like oases, not in a desert, but in a fertile land, super oases where one can find orchards and beauties of deep wisdom. Some of Plato's dialogues shine with a special ancient light. One of them is The Phaedrus, which in the Learning Civilization program we use. And to give the setting for The Phaedrus Socrates has his friend Phaedrus leave Athens, leave the scene of all the other dialogues up until then, and go out from Athens. And they walked some distance, and they found a beautiful spot alongside the river Ilissos, within a short distance of Agrai, where the lesser mysteries were celebrated. Where the preparation was given. And there Phaedrus is enhanced by understanding the origins of written language. Many thousands of years before. And that there are cycles of time in written reading wisdom. And that a new one is about to come to great fruition.
In Athens, there was a sacred road not to Agrai. Not along the Ilissos. One had to find one's own way there and know that that's where you begin. That's how you go to get prepared. The main sacred road went to Eleusis. Long way. Long way to walk. Nevertheless, when you came there, there was a great arch, a propylaia in Greek. And one was stopped there. That's where the sacred road stopped. And that's where if you were not prepared, you were not given entry. The greater mysteries were about the two Goddesses, about the mother daughter. About Demeter and her daughter. We use her name as Persephone. The ancient Greek term for her was Kora. K-o-r-a.
The archetypal symbols and images of Eleusis are best presented by Carl Kerényi. This is in the Bollingen volume, um, which was a part of the archetypal images of, uh, the ancient Greek Wisdom. And its Bollinger series. LXV, uh, 65. And this is the Volume Four Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Uh, the German first appeared in 1960 and the, um, translation came out in 1967. Other volumes that were scheduled only four others were published, making a set of five. There was Prometheus and Asclepius, Zeus, Dionysus. But the one on Hermes Psychopompos only exists in German, not in, uh, English translation even now.
It's interesting to see. That the eye opening, the **inaudible word**, were in charge as a clan at Eleusis and only they and their descendants were able to do the preparation, the conduction of the, uh, pilgrims accepted and what went on. They were the staff of the place. Those large eyes figure very prominently at one of the crests of the whole civilization beginnings in Sumer. And in ancient Sumer you find still from archaeological digs and museums throughout the world, priests in flowing robes that have floral clusters of designs amid a whole canopy of celestial spread and their large eyes as if the pupils had enlarged so that there was no iris to the eyes. And at really larger it was the entire eye, both eyes seeing.
Oddly enough, in the early 1950s when all of these archetypes were being not just thrown up but vomited out of crisis, there was a film made with Ray Milland. Its title is The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Who learns to see through people to their skeleton, to their glands. It becomes a healer, a great not a psychic healer, but a seeing healer. What is wrong and what to do, and so forth. Except that the accident that had happened to him did not increase his wisdom, only his penetration reach. And towards the end of the film, he has those eyes. For the pupils are the entire eyes. And he has seen through the universe to a vast openness beyond and cannot handle it.
The opening is a greater mystery because it's not handleable. The initiation in the lesser mysteries is difficult enough because it's still difficult. But the greater mystery mysteries are, in fact, impossible. Which is why humility becomes real. It is not possible yet occurs. That's the mystery.
The ancient thing was that there was a bridge over one of the little rivers that runs through the village. Even today, Eleusis is just a village. And there was a bridge across it, and everybody was stopped there. Uh, and you were not allowed to go over the, uh, R-h-e-i-t-o-i. Rheitoi. The Rheitoi Bridge.
But in Roman times, having the Roman imperium and having taken over Greece and the Greek mysteries went so far as to have lavish buildings built for the Eleusinian Mysteries. And three great Emperors were interested in outdoing each other. And the grandeur of the buildings that are were due to Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. And that was called the Antonine age. The height of Roman spectacle splendor. Well run. Well governed. But with enfolding reach and with that kind of imperial assumption that one could do these things. And Roman chariots were allowed to go even up to where it was convenient for those wealthy who were really not initiated to have their chariots driven up there and for them to go in and then participate.
And one can find exactly how they treated all of this because one of the great events in 79 A.D. was the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius and its ash rain to the tune of dozens of meters and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. And in Pompeii, the great Temple of Isis, the Iseum. I-s-e-u-m. The Iseum was found intact. And one can see, for instance, in the illustrated index at the end of this 700-page study on the Isis book of Apuleius Metamorphoses, there is a diagram of the Iseum. And all of the illustrations that give a sense that here is the interior with all the murals intact. And one of the centers of it is used as the Penguin Classics cover for Apuleius The Metamorphosis, in standard English is called The Golden Ass. Because of the ability to behold, one becomes golden as being of the sun itself. And the humility of the donkey to let others ride.
In The Metamorphoses, which is the chosen title by Apuleius. He was born about 124 A.D. and he lived into the 180s. And he wrote The Metamorphoses about 170 A.D. And its title is a resonance of a title of Ovid's great epic in 15 books, The Metamorphoses. And like Ovid, he broached the realization for readers that the first ten chapters of The Metamorphoses were about a classic set of being so enmeshed in success in the world, but not success as a man, but in success of being an ass, literally the beast that he has been changed into it. And he participates in that way with all the corruption of the great and **inaudible word** Roman largesse of pleasure and overdoing and spectacle and erotica and sexuality acts, etc., etc., etc., Until he comes to a surfeit and develops the sense that he needs to have not just a change, but he needs to have a metamorphosis of his entire being. Starting with being able to come back and become the man that he really is, as Lucius.
And the 11th book is the Isis book. And this is the concluding study. After about 40-50 years of scholarship, uh, published by Brill in Leighton, um, Holland, the Netherlands. And just came out in 2015, in fact, just came out a couple of weeks ago. It has a title page with all of the credits, and one sees the, uh, great list of people involved, many of them women. And out of this, almost dozen editors, authors over many, many years. This is the concluding volume of a whole set of volumes going back. The first volume was so early on that it was issued as a kind of an academic paperback. Not paperbacks as you would think commercially, but these academic books. This one is published in Sweden. In Lund, Southern Sweden, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche, which is also in The Metamorphoses in The Golden Ass. Well, the first volume in the series was published with that. I'll bring it next week so you can see. The Tale of Cupid and Psyche is the tail end of book four, all of book five and the beginning of book six. So that The Tale of Cupid and Psyche in The Metamorphoses is a massive presentation of the lesser mysteries.
And Book 11 The Isis book is a classic, brilliant presentation of the greater mysteries as far as they could be expressed. But expressed both lesser and greater. One should call them not the lesser mysteries, but the prepara
preparation. The Latin is proprietorial. The proprietorial gives way to the wonder. Not just greater, but more vast than great. More superlative than best.
The quality of that opening is expressed here as presence. Because one of the tabs of great prophetic language is in the complex Book of Isaiah, written in the latter part of the 700s B.C. And the three different authors that make the Isaiah, totaling 66 books. The 63rd book of Isaiah is where for the first time clearly one gets the expression in writing of the Angel of the presence. Which is a beholding of the divine involving one's reality.
This quality of the Book of Isis comes because Apuleius just like Ovid in his Metamorphoses, where Ovid begins with the four ages of man, the time forms of man and ends with the incredible life and person of Pythagoras. So challenging was Ovid's Metamorphoses that the ruler, founder of the Roman Empire, Augustus Caesar, took violent umbrage against Ovid for threatening enmasse the very foundation structure reach, power of Imperial Rome, which most people would never have recognized at all. But surrounded as he was by all of the best learned people that money can buy, and power can sequester Augustus understood, and he exiled Ovid not just out of Rome or out of Italy, but out of the Roman Empire. He was thrown out of the entire empire. He was thrown out into a small fishing village in the Black Sea in what is today Romania, where nobody spoke Latin or Greek. And there he spent the rest of his life in complete exile. Because if one can read Ovid, read The Metamorphoses with opened eyes you can see the end of the Roman Empire in 8 A.D. That it was inevitable.
In 170 A.D. 162 years later, Apuleius shows that there is an end to the entire imperium of all of the manufactured religions of man. Because they are vulnerable. Unstoppably so. Because the very reach of power is itself a self-curling back recursive repeat that limits because all you do is follow a wheel interminably. And later centuries in the West it was called the Wheel of Fortune. Dame Fortuna. Round and round you go where it stops, nobody knows. You find that wheel in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, where after meeting the challenge of the lesser mystery of Thunderdome, two men enter, one man leaves. But if the man who's going to leave has broken a deal, he has to face the wheel because that is a higher law. That means, yes, you are free to be tried for really something serious by the Wheel of Fortune.
In Tibet it's the, um Bhavacakra tantra. It's the wheel of life. And all of the wedges of that wheel have their various icons. But just outside of that iconic complete mandala. And because it is complete, it only circles again and again. And so, the angular momentum of that endless repeat is the ghost realm of the pretas that are just floating like blue ghosts, bluish white, that mimic the fact that they're enjoying that this demonic ride is without end. Like now.
Those limitations can be as powerful as we see them today. Aliens from other devolved star systems and power structures from our own history in collusion to have it all now. The fog of the preta is overwhelming to anyone who can see. And is recursive in the sense that it goes back to all of those other alien star systems as well. And to wake up here is to vanish that fog to make transparent that entire wield of, wheel of power on every star system involved at once.
8 A.D., Ovid was writing The Metamorphoses in 7 A.D., and it is about that time that in Alexandria a great pair of profound seers, Jesus in Alexandria and Mary Magdalene were beginning to see through the entire power structure preta fog into the very context within which it has its energy source in limited time. In circular time. In the idea of an eternal return, which no one can argue with. It is our time now to be in power totally. Is that right?
Have you ever heard of (sound of pop). That's the champagne cork. Bon voyage, sucker.
The quality of Apuleius in presenting the lesser and the greater mysteries. The Tale of Cupid and Psyche in the very middle of The Metamorphoses and presenting the Isis book as the coda end of it. The preparation, the **inaudible word**, the opening of the eye of seeing. All of this is as Sherlock Holmes remarked afoot.
We'll take a short break and we'll come back and see one of the most brilliant psycho historians in the 20th century was Erick Erickson, who had a way of circumventing and pulling the rug out from under the great ages of Roman Empire Imperium by taking the life cycle of different human beings who would make this freeing by taking the angular energy and making the circle into a spiral. And he came close, though, of having a limitation of the eight. His wife, who was with him all those decades, Joan M. Erickson, put a new edition of The Life Cycle Completed. Uh, Eric died at 93. She outlived him by a number of years. She put a ninth stage in, saying the eight are enough to release a ninth.
Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back and refresh ourselves. What is being presented here. Not lectured here. Presented here is the nature of the challenge and the consciousness of the response. The tendency for those who are not brought forth into the time that is actually occurring. Do not know what time it is. And so, they rely upon instruction, inculcation, habituation. Which comes into conflict into a contract which exacerbates. Because in a powerful time form like the one that we have just entered not even 20 years ago, is so challenging. And the response so
comprehensive is not the right word. The response is so perfecting of a maturity that it staggers so that one doesn't fall back just on custom and tradition. On inculcation and indoctrination. But is rammed back into other time forms. So that the dead past becomes zombie like the Day of the Dead rising from the tombs as hungry ghosts ready for whatever blood and nourishment can be commandeered. Each new major, the spire spiral, that ascent Ad Astra pair of the ascent to the stars. Per Astra, the struggle.
Some 4000 years ago in ancient Egypt the pyramids gave way so that the sarcophagus in the most secret royal sacred reach of the pyramid. The sarcophagus where the body would go was largely out of a caustic limestone that ate the bodies. Sarcophagus means body eater. So that eventually the physical form, including the sinews, the bones and so forth, would be absorbed and the sarcophagus, when it was effective and well built, the burial when it was well done, the sarcophagus would absorb the body. It would be empty. The realization eventually came that this was devastatingly profound. And a smaller version of that was to preserve the body. To mummify the body. To place it in a coffin. So that the most ancient Egyptian religious writings are called The Pyramid Texts, and the intermediate are called The Coffin Texts. And the archetypal interior of the lid of the coffin is the Goddess Newt. And she stretches with her toes and her fingertips the whole length of the coffin lid and her body is full of stars.
If you've seen the film with Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren 2010, a sequel to 2001 The Space Odyssey from 1968, the monolith, the alien monolith that has been there for 4 million years, buried on the moon. And there was one that changed the apes into the beginnings of man 4 million years ago. And this one is a giant two kilometer floating around Jupiter in between the orbits of IO and Europa. Very close to Jupiter, actually. The last phrase from 2001 is the challenging mantra puzzle. The phrase is on looking into that monolith, My God, it's full of stars.
Newt was that star spangled body of the Goddess welcoming one into eternity.
All of this as a development comes in our time, in our lifetimes, the proverbial now, which includes the present that has its resonances. Now a living memory but living projections. So that the commandeering of this wedge of effective time, what has led up to our power and where our power is going to go. All of this is a part of a circularity. That generates an angular momentum of hungry ghosts, as we talked about in the first half. Makes a miss of the eternal return. The bona fide doctrine that there is no use in fighting us because we're going to be back. And we're back now and we're back to stay. Is the rhetoric of the last time that there was a time form change like ours 2000 years ago with the founding of the Roman Empire by Augustus Caesar. Who for a long span, 44 years was more or less, not the dictator. He's called himself, what translates as the first citizen. Prince is from, um Princeps, the Principate. I am the first citizen. You can say whatever you like, but you will have to hear me first and then decide if that's what you want to say.
In the form of Augustan Rome, there was a special building that held all the prophetic books, not just the books, any pages, any prophetic writing whatsoever were commandeered by imperial power and confiscated and put there. Because it was feared that it is prophecy even just if a drop leaks, it's going to break the dam. Ovid broke the dam wide open and was exiled for it. Apuleius came along in Antonine Rome and exposed at the height of Roman power, not at the beginning of it, at the height of Roman power, that it was a death dealing, not life serving.
The quality of An Eighth Reveals the Ninth is a quality of an ancient treatise, one of the original 14 hermetic. Its title translates The Eighth Reveals the Ninth. Like Joan Erikson's The Life Cycle Completed updated with the ninth cycle. She calls it a very, very old age. And the concern with very, very old age is to be able to understand that where all of this misconception wheels is like an impelling going downhill into an endless crisis, a society in permanent war that is only satisfied when everyone is dead. That that madness, that insanity, fueled by an unsaneness is the obviating of nature and of consciousness and the bridging of them by wisdom learning.
This volume published by the State University of New York, was edited by, uh, two professors at Middlebury College in Massachusetts. One was Daniel S. Lopez, who has one of the great and is one of the great writers and editors, researchers on Mah?y?na Buddhism. The other is Stephen C. Rockefeller. And both were professors of religion at Middlebury College, but Stephen C. Rockefeller was also the dean of the school. They held a conference in 1984 and they invited to speak three persons who represented the depth of the understanding of the Christ and three from the Eastern Studies who represented those experts of the Bodhisattva tradition in Buddhism. One of the Eastern sages was the Dalai Lama, for instance. One of the Western was, um, Robert A.F. Thurman. Both of them enormously formidable, both still alive. And then there was a question-and-answer period, and all of this was summed up by Stephen Rockefeller, who in his, um, appreciation acknowledged certain things at the beginning. But at the end he talked about the chance meeting of someone from the East and the West and how there was a bridge on one of the trails out from Middlebury College to a mountain retreat adjunct to Middlebury. And that this retreat center had a trail, and it's called the Frost Trail. It's named for the great poet Robert Frost. And along that trail, just as you're getting pretty high up to get to the retreat, uh, there is a bridge over a fairly steep ravine. And going across that bridge, the Dalai Lama met a person coming from the retreat who was a Rabbi. And they met, as Stephen C Rockefeller relates. And the Rabbi, seeing before him, this distinguished feature gave him a Rabbinic blessing. And the Rab
Rabbi, as he finished his blessing seamlessly, the Dalai Lama gave his blessing. And with these two blessings, they beheld each other in a what we would call classically a beatific moment. And came to shake hands and the Rabbi went on his way back down to the college and the Dalai Lama went on his way back up to the retreat. It is this momentary meeting-ness, as Stephen Rockefeller, uh, shows, is sorely needed.
The volume was published three years later in 1987 by State University of New York. And it's, um, it's interesting. But nowhere in this does one come to understand the continuity of the Christ and the Bodhisattva. They are not East and West. There are planetary. Of a great thrust of the last carrier wave of the time forms of civilization. And in our new carrier wave, the hearkening goes back to that carrier wave and sees all of the obfuscations and skews and misleadings and errors and omissions and commissions of lie and deception all along the way. And it is a junkyard that litters history. So that one understands that you are really not on the verge of some great powerful future, but that you are standing on the edge of a smoldering charnel ground.
And archetypally who is there to receive you is a very evil magician who seizes the élan. According to a wisdom story retold actually in English at a lecture in New York City in the early 1940s by Heinrich Zimmer. Zimmer was a specialist in the wisdom of India. His great, one of his great volumes was Philosophies of India. Six major sages of India over the millennia. And I remember reading a paper bound version of that about 1960 at the University of Wisconsin, and priding myself that I was able to discursively discourse to other people who hadn't read it, that so and so as important and so forth.
Heinrich Zimmer delivered a series of wisdom lectures. He, uh, was fragile physically, and he actually died in 1943 of a severe cold that turned into pneumonia in New York City in the rainy weather winter there. This wisdom story bears the title The King and the Corpse. It's about this young would be Prince who is trying to leave these charnel grounds, comes upon this powerful magician who has drawn a magic circle and says to the young Prince, the only way to really do anything effectively beyond this is that this empty circle needs to be filled with the dead corpse of someone who really was evil and is hanging on that tree way in there. And if you will go with this knife and cut down that dead corpse and bring it over and just throw it here in the center of this circle, I will make sure that it will not be in that circle anymore. And you will be free to go. And so, the Prince goes and cuts down the corpse, brings it back, as Zimmer relates. And it was written down as one of the tales of a Bollingen volume book called The King and the Corpse.
Um, later on, it was so impressive that Thomas Mann, having finished his great Joseph and his brother's epic four volume book on the historical 12th, uh, 11th son of Jacob, Joseph and all of his brothers who sold him into slavery into Egypt, and then Joseph rose on his own merits and became the head, the visionary person, second only to the pharaoh in Egypt and saved the whole civilization by saving up for seven years when everything was flush and weathering through seven very lean years that would have been decimating. Thomas Mann took The King and The Corpse, and he wrote a short little novelette called The Transposed Heads.
So that the Prince, as soon as he threw the body, and the magician used his power wand and the corpse disappeared out of the circle and was back hanging from the tree. And the magician said to the Prince, you have not really cut him down, and really brought him back and really thrown him here. And this is what has happened because of your ineptness. Go and cut him down again and bring him here and throw him in here. And again, and again this is repeated. And would repeat throughout the entire life of the planet.
In the meantime, the Prince has balked and balked. And finally, the realization is that the magician is threatening him and saying, if you do not, I have this knife and I will cut your head off. If you don't do this, you will lose your head for real. The only way out of this charnel ground is through me after doing this and doing it right. And until you do it right, you're going to do it over and over again until you get it right. Getting it right is redoing it.
Wisdom is not a toy. It's not a ploy. It's not a deploy. So that the patience that matures into Viera, the virility of life, has a resonance with the order that matures and becomes the meditation. The Sanskrit word for that is the Dhyana. D-h-y-a-n-a. Dhyana is not just meditation, it is the order that has risen to the high dharma level of not being orderly, but even being completely free is the way in which a meditation matures. Not just maintaining the ritual round monkish like, nun like soldier like, endless.
And those two have a resonance with a third. That third begins with the giving-ness. The Sanskrit word for that is D?na. Not so much giving, but gifting. The gifting-ness matures to prajñ? wisdom. Love thy neighbor as thyself. That continuity has tensegrity and expands infinitely. It doesn't matter what star system or what galactic system or what cluster are super cluster or galactic systems. Presence is shareable.
More next week.
END OF RECORDING