Johannes Tauler (1300-1361)
Presented on: Tuesday, July 12, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
The date is July 12th, 1983. This is a sex lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Ware on the mystic 14th century. Tonight's lecture is entitled. Yohanas taller. The name is spelled T a U L E R, who lived 1300 to 1361 meditation's tonight were discussing Johannes taller and taller. Yeah, it was, um, a very, very formative German mystic. I have a blind drawing of teller done in 1840. And this line drawing was published in the Pietist of provincial Pennsylvania by Julius Saxy about 1899 and taller for the Rosicrucians and early, uh, Philadelphia. And that area was a root source for them. In fact, toddler was a root source for their hermetic endeavors and the 16th century 17th century. When the [inaudible] made his great mystical history, he has chronological Mystica toddler figured as one of the pillars and transition figures from ancient medieval mysticism to the modern world.
Toddler also was the spiritual tutor to his writings and his example of Martin Luther and gave Martin Luther the encouragement and the sense that he could have a way to operate breaking away from the church institution, breaking away from the Pope, breaking away from the Catholic church and still preserve the integrity of Christianity. So without taller, an awful lot of religious history just not occur, but more poignantly than anything for the development of socialism, you know, Honda's taller as the first rail prime figure who shows that religious insight and social philosophy go hand in now we've had several grades, mystics who developed that perception. Yeah, Roy's Brooke and Meister Eckhart, but it's through Johannes tall that we see the example and the great fusing together. I've religion and Paula texts and social theory in history. So that ever after tolerance writings are like sticks of dynamite.
And that's why you find precious little in English on him, because he's a dangerous writer in terms of structures that are meant to keep us within he dissolves cages and when they don't dissolve so well, he shows you how to literally become invisible and drop out of that. Chyler was born about 1300 as fast. It was a very wealthy man in Strasburg. And so tolerance from birth was given a very easy situation to be in when he was young, he was given a chance it's to develop his education at the Dominican convent in Strasburg. And I think that he was about 12 years old when he went there. And the reason for this is that the great Meister Eckhart went to Strausberg in 13, 12, and he was one of the most famous men in Europe. At this time at Eckhart who had developed his unorthodox had developed his liaisons with the religious socialist groups of the day. Well like the brother and of the free spirit or the friends of God. And if you're remembering the lecture on yang of Royce drug, that there were stages of mystical initiation and the inner core, once one had had some experience with religious communities with communes to better one's life, along with ones sense of religious perception, that one pass through several stages and phases in the inner core where the friends of God, the Omni D did do the friends of God.
And what is it in German, cautious free and dead go to screen day. The friends of God where sect that form, the very inner, quiet, calm of this Whirlpool of trees in the late middle ages. Now this turbulence was of an almost unprecedented scale. There were religious upheavals along with all of the psychological vomiting that goes along with it, which we know so well in our day. It was as if the 1960s were taking place in the 1320s. But along with that inner turmoil, intellectual vertigo, um, spiritual anxiety, there were real terrorists for some reason, yet undetermined the Rhineland area of Europe suffered devastating earth quakes. And the middle of the 14th century saw an earthquake so terrible that the city of Baal basil on the corner of Switzerland and Germany and France was leveled to the ground so that the Rhineland was increasingly a sailed by terrible storms by famine, by these earthquakes.
And then it's as if that were not enough, the black death, the bubonic plague swept in and the mortality rate approach 90%. So that one in 10 was left alive in many areas of Europe, this incredible scourge of humankind brought, of course, to them foremost, the image of the apocalypse, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, so that it became almost a daily specter year in and year out for decades in the middle of the 14th century. And it's exactly at this time period that your hottest toddler comes on the scene. So he is in every way, a godsend and a beacon and responded, as you will see tonight in championship form. Now Eckhart taught in Strasburg from 13, 12 to 13, 20 for eight years, taller would have been 12 years old to 20 years old, so that Tyler was raised to manhood and to his sense of mystical maturity, very early by one of the great masters of Europe. And of course that card being a Dominican was a master of the logical form of analysis that st Thomas Aquinas had mastered.
He was extremely learned in the vast spectrum of cultural learning that Albert, the great Albertus Magnus had acquired. So that toddler coming right on the heels and Eckard received this tremendous development of the Dominican genius, the early Dominican genius and the Dominicans in order to establish their intellectual hedge money. Remember Saint Dominic was a Spaniard and it was he who initiated the concept. And the tactics that later came to be known as the inquisition. The first real inquisitor was st. Dominic, so that the founder of the order of the Dominicans had this capacity and the Dominican order in itself had this capacity to interrogate someone with such especially sharp intellectual tools that later on without the interdiscipline of religious compassion and insight, they would literally dissect the victims so that the Dominican's had as their mendicant order beginnings, this fearsome aspect to them, their chair, intellectual chair at the university of Paris was in the monastery, which was built at that time called San shock.
And later on in French history, the Dominican's would be called the Jacobean from San shock so that the Dominican order figures very prominently in European history, again and again, even up through the French revolution, even up into the 19th century, and the reason why they were figuring so prominently is that there was a love, hate relationship with reformers, with the order, because wrapped up in these tremendous inquisitorial techniques and capacities, where are these unbelievable flowers of understanding like Meister, Eckhart and Yohanas Tallaght. And the very order that could chop you up could give you the insights to give you the flowering so that the social reformers and the political revolutionaries were constantly caught in a quandary because the same source that was eating them up could also feed them thus in French political history. There is a sense that in the political arena, there are two hands from the same person, the right and the left.
So the whole concept of right and left originate in this very area. Now, Tyler, by the time he was 19 or 20, but under Eckhart for about eight years, streamline refined person, enormously capable of receiving instruction, especially spiritual unfoldment. He went to the university of Paris, briefly found that there was very little, they could teach him there and quickly went on to cologne because it was at cologne that Albertus Magnus had set up the real intellectual powerhouse of the Dominican order. It was at cologne that Albertus Magnus took Thomas Aquinas from the university of Paris to Polish him up so that Aquinas could later on develop his tremendous intellectual capacities in his Summa. Theologica in his Summa country.
So Tyler went to cologne and he spent some time there, not very much time, but some time there. And while he was there, he became acquainted with another German mistake named Henry [inaudible]. When he came back to Strasburg, he was about 23 years old. He was already very capable, but he was not yet of an age where he could take care of himself as a priest. And they Jamaicans were the black friars. They were the preachers, the preaching order, the Franciscans were the Greyfriars and the Franciscan, or was a competitor to the Dominican's all the way.
Coming back to the city of Strausberg, where he grew up, where his father was well known burger, as we would say, European history, that car had left. He was still alive. And what was, there was legacy that the spiritual groups, the communes of those who sought to live the private of life together, we're developing rather rapidly. Now that men can orders realize that these groups outside the arm of the church, outside the pale of ecclesiastical we're competition and in a special, in one overwhelming issue in these communes of people, both the radical types. So the brethren of the free spirit and the religious centering types of the friends of God and dozens of others in between, but in all of these communities, it was the women who formed a very important role of being the teachers. Now, nuns could join different orders at the Franciscans orders of the Dominicans, but they were women and they were not primarily equal in the sense of being, be able to teach we're less than men did the teaching and the orders, but in these communities, if were not sanctioned by them, church were rather secular. In fact, the women assumed the roles, teachers and initiators and so forth, and of course began to cause a sense of ease in those areas where institutional order was the paramount, the Dominican orders, the Franciscan orders, all that these orders had come in to save the church structure in a time of great need.
The integration of Arabic and Jewish and Christian thought was proceeding so rapidly in the 13th century that without the religious orders, a hundred years before there would have been an ecumenical civilization by the 14th century, it would have been an interreligious community only by the imposition of an intellectual structure through the mendicant orders that allowed for the precipitating of a distinct Christian ruled civilization. And it was in balance to this precipitated ordered, structured that the community and the communes of the perfect day as they were called, came into existence. So just as you have skyscrapers and hovels in the 20th century, you had choices, structures, and religious communes in the 14th century and the mistakes, those who in retrospect, that we call the mistakes where the sentence jurors around which these secular leaning communal orders, where men and women were of an equal stature. It was, it was the mystics like Meister, Eckhart, like Yohanas toddler, like Yana Rosebrook Richard's role, all of them that we will see from here on this development.
It's not handled in the textbooks that are available for us for obvious reasons. The obvious reason is these social orders still obtain. And the solutions to them exactly the same as they were. Then there is no change and no difference. There are two books there. One can go to, to find some material. One is called the heresy of this free spirit in the later middle ages. And this book by Robert Lerner published by the university of California, press 1972 gives you a picture of the radical movements. The heresy of the free spirit was rather than free wheeling, um, X Oh, Terek experimental commune movement, much like the hippies of the 1960s, almost the same. In fact, many of the religious songs of the time, which were in classical Latin were transposed into a kind of guttural Latin, which could be understood by common people and were sung by persons who had left the monastic all over Europe.
They traveled around much like rock groups would travel around today. And these were called the goalie yards, the goalie, and in the early 20th century, a German composer named Carl Orff took many of the song cycles of the, and made a record Carmina Burana communica Toulon, and they're available on records and what they are, same songs and drinking and free love in Latin two, get the juices flowing of the social movement in this development. They heresy free spirit had a very serious purpose in mind and reduce down to some rule of thumb. It was that only by a calm, inner spirit can a human being contact God, therefore, in order to forestall any anxiety that would upset the spirit, make one unstable one, indulge the senses freely with no restrictions whatsoever so that the inner spirit could be calm. And the other senses fully satiated at any time, any place in any way.
So it was religious technique, but one highly dangerous, of course, a falling susceptible to misuse directly. Okay. Diametrically on the other side, the converse, you pull that concept through a black hole. And on that side of the universe where the friends of God said yes is so that a calm, inner spirit is the only way to contact God, but the peculiar quality of the calm human start is that it doesn't belong to the human being. It isn't manmade. It isn't of man. It exists in man. It has a presence in man, but it isn't his property. It isn't a possession of his, it is not an object of his that he may manipulate, but the only way in which it may occur in the sense of manifest so that it can be contacted is for him to purify his outer life. Purify has senses. And until they are transparent until they cease to exist by transparency.
And that this meant that the friends of God had indeed to be of a different order from religious rule, but it did not mean free spirit so much as an inner quality of transcendence. And it was Yohanna's taller who taking the cue from Eckard who developed the religious philosophy, the social implications and the practical yoga techniques for developing all this and toddler did this in a series I've learned spiritually learn it sermon cycles. That is to say he realized that it took time. It took a duration. It took people time to get the feel of getting a hold of themselves, anchoring themselves down so that they could take stock of what they had to do of having ways to progressively refine themselves. It take a year for some people, it may take several years. It may even take a decade. So that one had to have a form of instruction of initiation that could be spread out over a long period or could be condensed into a short.
So Tyler developed this sermon cycle, especially for this and one cycle that he developed is fully translated into English. The publisher called it the inner way. Actually it should be more properly called the festival festival or festival sermon cycle. And there are 36 sermons and they are in the cycle of Christian festivals for the complete year. So that one could take these sermons and read them at the appropriate times during the year, while you were celebrating the festival year. And of course in toddlers time, there was still the sense of the archetypal ritual year, the great year. It was still a part of human life. We unfortunately do not have it any longer is a great travesty that we do not have it. I, in my own way, have been trying to establish a, an anchor on the senselessness of time by giving some results to celebrations.
And it's just one way to say that there is a place in the annual cycle where there is a presence. And then we come back to that presence and that everything that happens in between hasn't border and that this periodicity and this cyclicity lends us a sense of orientation. And that wish that we find that we are no longer in a chaos, but we are in a cosmos, but there was still the sense of the annual cosmos intolerance time. And so he gave spiritual instruction in common language based in this cycle of sermons for festivals throughout the Christian cycle. I will later give you two examples. One from the feast of Saint Andrew and which begins the cycle, and one from the feast of all saints day, which comes the day after Halloween. So I'll give you those two later on. He also developed a series of sermons in a cycle to go with the orderings in the new Testament. So that one could reading through the new Testament, find a cycle, find a pattern. He also did another cycle of sermons that were on an annual basis, but in a different order altogether, we have 145 sermons from toddler.
Four of those sermons are not tolerant but belong to my shirt Eckerd, but they were so close that they were undistinguishable until modern scholarship painstakingly, dead well, language analysis and research, and found a material to substantiate the research. It's an indication that Eckhart and toddler really go together. They're very, very close. But as a matter of in fact, just as tolerant, Eckhart are almost inseparable. They are rather like what a Tibetan Lama told me one time. He said there are spiritual traditions passed down like water in a waterfall. It makes no difference and would be foolish to try and say, this bucket of water is different from this. It's the same waterfall. And it nourishes that card and tolerant that way. They're part of a waterfall. And of course, Yon Roy's Brooke is right there with him. He belongs in the seat. Same time, the same century, all of the figures that we are dealing with in this course from Eckhart on are part of the same waterfall, William OCHEM, all of them. And we'll see that that waterfall includes oddly enough persons like Jennifer Chaucer.
That's a terraces like a flameout standard Christian apologists like Thomas or campus. They were all in this mystical waterfall of the 14th century, all the part of it. So there's the heresy of the free spirit in this volume, the chapter on the friends of God. And this is about the only thing that's available, really studies in mystical religion by Rufus Sam Jones. And if you don't know, Rufus M Jones was the great Quaker scholar and the Quakers of course are not. They don't call themselves Quakers. It comes from a colloquial slang experience. People quaking before a judge, as a ruling was going to come down. What are they called? They're called the friends, friends. American Quakers are called the American friends, just like the friends of God, part of the same. He wanted a farm so that the experience of George Fox and the experience of William Penn and the experience.
So the American friends service committee, uh, in our time, all of these belong to a tradition. And when we looked for the sources of that tradition, we find the clear, calm, melting lice of the Himalayan experiences of Eckhart and taller right there at the stores. In this chapter on the friends of God Jones record, he says one of the most important, remarkable expressions of mystical religion in the history of the Christian Church, is that what you flowered out in Germany in the 14th century and whose exponents are known under the name of friends of God, the title does not cover a set nor even a society in the strict sense of the word yet rather names, a fairly definite type of Christianity, which found its best expression in persons of the prophet class. In that century, both men and women, and one of the hallmarks that was a friends of God, was there visionary capacity to see not only what was happening, but what was to come just as if one second profoundly into the nature.
Oh, reality. Time-space one begins to feel that current times passes through the present through oneself, through one's experience and just as they pass becomes understandable. And the present existential the future becomes identifiable. So that images, the image base belongs not to a static photographic remembered past, but to a movie, a center, I can't keep him from the Greek moving images so that the image base becomes dynamic and the future becomes not something that is yet to happen, but a certain do because the flow of time-space is known understood. So that many of the men and women, especially the women in these friends of God, realize what they were doing was opening up the whole nature of man. And whenever there were rocks, the way of this stream of unfoldment, just as water hitting Rapids, there's a lot of foam and a lot of tossing and there became these cataracts taller.
Yeah, it was one of the great religious geniuses of all time, any culture, because he was able to understand along with the best of these prophetic persons, along with the best of the visionaries of these persons, how to smooth out the flow of time, space of visionary capacity so that there were not these rough areas and in doing so, taler developed a very special insight along with his sermons, along with his development, he began to pioneer the sense that religion and society go together. They cannot be taken apart. And in connection with this, when he was about 40 years of age, he went to the city of balm, not very far from Strasburg, with a friend of his named Henry of Nord Lincoln. You can look him up and R D L I N G E N, Henry of Norlene, and they're involved. They just fell up to an experimental center for the friends of God, a religious commune, which became a pilgrimage place in ball for individuals to come and learn how to do it, how to make these communities run, how to let the visions flow, how to let the religious insight permeate the life tone so that they set up a school by demonstration of how the religious life flows.
And this was a very, very peculiar time because in the 14th century, of course, the pups were not in the Vatican and were not in Rome. The pups were in France and oven young.
This was the time of the great exile. That's the path of seeing the Babylonian captivity of the Pope's and where were they? They were in Southern France and Southern France. Of course I've been young trying to assert its hedge funding religiously. Whenever it discovered that there were communities in areas that were jeopardizing its tenuous, hold on a floor would issue interdicts to these locations and places for breeding them to give sacraments and masses for the people, forbidding them to hear confession for the people. And you can imagine what kinds of thumbscrews this was when that was life blood of the experiences of the site of one of these papel interdicts about this time was the city of [inaudible].
So Tyler left and went back just Jasper and you have to get the vision. Now, this is a very tough man. He knew what he was doing, and it was always the impossible possible philosophers. Man, the man who had a million diamonds sums this up. So he went back just Jasper just-in-time 1348 to be there. When the papel introduct went into force and the black plague came to Strasburg. Whenever plague hit all who could fled these areas into the countryside, fled, not just walked fled so that in this deserted city of Strasburg under a Papo edict, that no one could have religious solids and the plague daily murdering the citizenry toddler alone, stood up to the situation and began to make interesting kinds of statements. Like when the church forbids us to give mass and to hear confession and to administer the sacraments, they have a right to do this, but there is a communion with God through the Holy spirit that is in the heart of the person.
And no one controls that. So that on the surface tolerance still is listed in the Catholic encyclopedia. And they say very bluntly that he never said no to the church. And that's technically true, but he sure did yeoman labor in the end of the 1340. And when Chaucer was a young lad of eight or nine and London learning the wine merchants trade toddler was slugging it out toe to toe with the black death and the papel introduct giving solace to the whole city of Strausberg. And of course a man like this and conditions like that is a hero isn't any question and tolerance fame developed, even beyond that of the contacts and ball, which was a university town and lots of students would come and they would see what Tyler was doing. And they'd realize that their books weren't the only thing that there was something you did in life as a human being, because you had this learning and you had this courage.
Well, now they got another lesson deeper about what religion does for man in the face of incredible terror, political medical Starrco religious terror. Because the worst thing that happens in terror is that it brings compulsively out of people. The urge to flee the experience of death. First of all, brings out in the human being, the urge to flake. And our whole sense of anxiety is because we try to quell this flight mechanism. We want to get out and we know we can't get out. And that's what produces anxiety. So Tyler like a champion and went right to the heart of the matter. I say, there is nowhere we need go.
The solace is within and it's right there and it is reachable and I'm not going anywhere and I've reached it. And so he began to spread that very interesting legend about himself, which is not historically true about which is metaphysically exact, and the story that he's spreading. I ran like this, that there was a hypothetical master, okay. Who was very knowing about religion and delivered beautiful sermons. And people came to hear him. In fact, his spread fame spread from country to country. So that even 20 or 30 nations removed, he was well known, spread to a certain area where a layman heard of this great man, and this layman who had a direct contact with God spoke directly to him. Journeyed, you hear this master discourse, wait until they had heard five sermons.
And he had taken down every word that the master had delivered. So finally he presented himself before the master and he said, master, I had heard your sermons. And I have written them all down here and here they are. And everything you say is beautiful and just right. But somehow I have the sense that you do not live. As you would speak to others, you tell them, right, but you yourself do not live this life. You do not live the religious life. You indulge yourself in man's world master. Of course he takes some umbrage, but is picked by the accuracy of the claim. They sell replies to this layman. Who, who are you?
Who are you to tell me? And then finally, but who are you? And the man says, I am actually not speaking for myself, but I am just a mouthpiece, a humble messenger to you from the Holy spirit. And there is a way and what you can learn if you really will learn, it's not based on these books, but it's a hard way. And you may not be able to sustain it. You may not be able to stand up to it. And of course, by this time, regardless of whatever mental machinations the master had, they are all convoluted and they come labyrinthian organized and polarized around this question. Can he do it? Is that the way we are always baited? Can you really do it? And through that, dare God works incredible wonders because we can't quite feel safe and just throwing it away and saying, sure, are we sure?
And the more integrity that one has, the more we have to make sure we have to know. And so the master puts himself under the tutelage of this layman and this layman delivers to him an alphabet of discipline. And he says, I don't know how long it will take you to learn this alphabet. But the language of the spirit requires that you learn this alphabet. And however long it takes, that's how long I will have to be here. Well, this alphabet is available. It's translated into English, a woman, get it. Of course, Susanna wink worth about 130 years ago when people still thought about these things and the alphabet runs like this, I'll just give you the ABC and a few others after a manly and other childish start, ye shall with still earnestness begin a good life, B bad ways. He SU and practice all goodness with diligence and full purpose of mind. See carefully endeavor to keep the middle path and all things with seemliness and moderation. Of course, as one, reach to this, please try to cassette now, and we'll commit to playing a gun on the other side, after a brief pause, [inaudible].
END OF SIDE 1
Yes, timeless universal wisdom. You could be a Buddhist. You could be a Dallas, you could be a Muslim. It holds because it's a structure which is primordial T truthful and upright. Shall you be towards all without guile or cunning and no other man's good things. Shall you desire be they what they may corporeal or spiritual. So this alphabet was given to the master in the story that Tali spread about himself. And after three weeks, the master went to the layman and said, I'm having a tough time. This a is really difficult to realize. And so the layman said, well, I am in no rush. You take your time. We're here to do this right. If it can be done. And with that little snag, of course, within three more weeks, the master had managed to get to eight and began on B. It took two years to get through the alphabet and the master all this time under toodle, each of the layman was letting go of his sermons off his prestige of his position of his earthly possessions.
He had to sell them, especially some of his books in order to survive. And people said, we don't want to hear you. You don't even know what you're talking about. So they stopped coming. He suffered the ridicule and the shame, not only of anonymity, but the ridicule of having been famous and then being nothing not famous. And so for years, the master put himself under this total edge and finally to cut a good, long story short, he had a dream and in the dream, all of the sense of innuendo and ridicule came to a head and he had that experience of being scrubbed out, clean, like a whistle, like a whistle. And the master sent for the layman. And he talked to him in the layman, looked at him closely, and he said, you are ready. You are ready. Now, go and give your sermons going, get your books back. Now I have nothing more to say, there is nothing more to give you you yourself right now, a vessel that the Holy spirit can contact in your own. Right? And he left. So the master advertised and he gave a sermon. And after the sermon was over, he walked away from the palpate. And about 10 minutes later, he looked back in and there were still 40 people in their seats. And he wondered what was going on. And an hour later he looked back and there was still 12 people and they had completely passed out.
So he sent a messenger to get the laymen back quick. And he came down and he said, this is what happens when you really get through to people. They aren't just fooling themselves anymore. They knew that they heard when they couldn't take it. Some couldn't take it so much that here they are. So they carried the comatose bodies into the convent. And the next day they were came to and they were given herbal tea. And the admonition may the Holy spirit be with you. And here's the address as a friend. So taller spread this legend at the time that the black death was mauling his hometown of Strasburg at the time that the papel introduct was forbidding him as a priest to deliver the basic rudimentary religious, uh, life to the people. And it was a parable that was just an believably out and accurate.
So Tyler then stayed there. He made one long visit to cologne sometime in the 1350s, but he stayed at, in Strausberg and died there June 16th, 1361, his sermons were not printed. Of course there were no printed box at that time until 1498. And at that time, 1498, they were printed in Leipzig and 84 of the sermons were printed. And of course, you know, who was around at that time. Yeah. Tris Damian's is always somebody who remembers how we got here and takes the time to tell us all over again when we got here because of incredible sacrifice and because of wisdom and compassion, which if we continue not to remember, we're not going to pass anything on ourselves. The next edition was in ball in 1522. The very year that John Rice line passed on and the very, uh, area, then there was a third edition in cologne in 1543 now, but contemporary publishing of tolerance, sermons in English is almost nil.
There's this volume called the inner way that was published in 1909. And there Susanna wink where it's published in 1857. And that's it, that's all there is in his time. However they development isle tolerance sense of religious cycles by using these sermons placed in an order gave to the persons of Europe at the time, a design, a template, a guide, a plan, an architectural drawing by which they could organize themselves individually or communally or historically, so that after toddler's time after the 1360s, we see the beginnings of a change in European society. And of course the development of the sense of that change gave rise to what we call the Renaissance. It gave rise to a secular order of society paying lip service yes, to the church. And yet we could not have had somebody like a cosmos Domenici without having had someone like Yohanas tone.
Cause he set the stage for the idea of the commune to spread itself citywide so that there could be communes called cities and cities, which were communal in nature. And very often in the Renaissance, they would talk of themselves as the commune of Sienna or the commune of Florence and so forth. It was this idea of the city state and that part of the city state's responsibility was to see that human life was nurtured and carried on regardless of what the religious authorities were going to say, because they confidence was that even in a secular way done, right, there is a spiritual nature to the whole situation. And of course this would be revived in the French revolution and in the 19th century, by every, uh, radical and revolutionary sinker, whether it was [inaudible], whether it was predom any of the thinkers at that time, Emerson, they all included the idea.
The man has a basic right to have a religious experience based on his own qualities as an individual. And that he has a further ride to have liaison with others of that nature and form Tom packs, even to the extent of forming communities and political entities on that basis, that the religious individual nature of the human being is sacrosanct. Not because somebody gives it any law, but because it is there by discoverable disciplined experience, we can find it ourselves at any time. And we know that others also may find this so that the basis of the glue of political structures is not really law and it's not really history, but it's religious presence. And when it's founded on that, it's unshakeable even in face of an epidemic of the black death, even in face of authorities, which forbid us any kind of communication, any kind of relation because it was done.
And it was done many times, but rarely ever so succinctly and nicely as tolerant dead in Strausberg in the late 1340s. Now I want to give you just one or two. I think I'll give you one, uh, obvious sermon, just so you have the experience of having just one of the sermons. This is the sermon from the festival cycle, taking the ritual year and giving you a chance to orient yourself during an entire year to one cycle of realization. And this is the first one in the festival cycle. This is for the feast of Saint Andrew, the apostle and the beginning, quotation, every sermon of tolerance usually has a quotation just to start you off. It starts you off by referring to scripture, but it starts you off also by saying, here is a human experience raised to a spiritual level, which has happened before and here it is useful to us again, don't throw it away.
Somebody else along the line is going to need it too, just like we do now and just like they did then. So it gives you the sense of continuity. So the quotation here is from John rabbi where Dwella style. Remember two individuals heard a Jesus speaking and they wanted to find out more about it. So they ask him where he lived, where do you live? Where do all us down. And his reply comments, see comments and tolerance starts off with just this little quotation. And he says that he sees three lessons intertwined immediately. And just this quotation. One of them is that there is a sense that wisdom overflows that isn't something you stuff in your pocket or in your portfolio or in your gross shrine or in your rolls rices. Even if you have 22 of them, wisdom, overflows doesn't have any container that holds it.
It's even more dissolving. Then hydrofluoric acid, you can't even keep it in bees, wax wisdom, overflows. It's constantly going out in the universe. And that, along with that, that there in fact is a dwelling place. It's like wisdom, not only overflows, but it overflows from a fount. And that found is that swelling place. And that that dwelling place is the stronghold of all beings. Every being has it's found there. And in fact, in this found in this dwelling place, he has a quality of inscrutable being in the universal sense that this presence of the divine actually obtains there. So wisdom overflows, and it overflows from a dwelling place. In third, there is always an invitation to us to learn about that source of wisdom that it exists. And it is there in a presence somewhere. And that we always have an invitation to learn, to seek and seeking an ordered way and seeking an intelligible way in a teachable way.
We can learn how to follow up that invitation and get there and get there to that stores. And that that invitation is always personal come and see, you want to find out good. You can find out it's there and we can get there. And when we get there, you will know it, that sort of thing. So Tyler says these three seem to be intertwined right away and packed into that little succinct come and see. So he's beginning this festival cycle with just that blast of possibility and presence, possibility and presence, but he says, what gets in the way then out of all this, that it doesn't allow wisdom to overflow into us. Doesn't allow us to have confidence at that drawing place could be there and doesn't allow us to follow up. The invitation is that we have a kind of a bitter quality that the sweet honey of the spirit doesn't get through to us because we're filled with bitterness.
So we experienced it as interference and said, we shuck off continuously just from habit and from being filled with bitterness, any kind of sweet approach, Oh, that can't be as to send them out. That's too simple. That's childish. I didn't want to hear that. So with our bitterness and our skepticism and our doubt filling us up, we can't feel and experience and sense the sweetness of that invitation of that message. So he says, this is where the seeking after has to begin to purify itself by cutting down on the base of that betterness, that bitterness comes because it's allowed to accumulate and to proliferate by a base of activities, by a base of misunderstanding within ourselves.
And the beginning of undoing that base pulling those plugs, undoing the switches is letting go of things, letting go of the processes, letting go of the objects, which we are clinging to. Now that process begins then to allow us to clear ourselves out. And it's like a saying that used to appear on the back of some [inaudible] books. You can't give away what you ain't got. So if you've given it all away, you ain't got nothing. We got nothing more to worry about, brother, that kind of experience becomes perceptible. That in fact one can do that, but Tyler is very complete. He says, don't be giving away objects all the time and not be giving away your attachment to them. That in fact, if you find that there's kind of like a pride coming from being able to give your things away, then get them back and start working on your inner sense because there's nothing to Crow about that you can give them a way that's easy for you. I'm more aesthetic than thou. He has a real pitfall because it blinds us with a particular paradox that we can't solve. Somebody else has to come along and say, no, that's not. It there's an inner way.
And he says, in fact,
It's the experience of the sense of presence within that gives us the tell tale sign, the quality of experiencing that we have in fact begun to get some of the sweetness of life back, some of the bitterness of ourselves out, some of the sweetness of ripe back. And as we do that, he says there again, seemingly three ways that come up all together. And so we have to use our sense of discrimination and our sense of proportion to look at these three ways that are braided together. And they come up like this and he says, these three ways, present us with the experience of that dwelling place presence inside. First of all, at the height of penitence, that there are cycles of penitence. There are cycles of giving up detaching inside and at the height of one of the cycles we haven't experienced of the blessedness, the gracefulness of having participated in this, not of having done it as a triumph, but having participated in this it's like in the Bhagavad Gita, it says yoga is even as of mind, there's that experience of even this of mind, it's a one realizes that in these cycles of penance,
Inter
Engagement, that even if you have objects and things, you get to a stage where you realize that if you coordinate cycles of discipline for yourself, you'll get a stronger and stronger focus. You'll start to get that experience. That indel ability at the dwelling place the presence within evermore sharper, because you can become better at it. You get to know how you can pace yourself. It may take a week for one kind of cycle. It may take a month for another, and it may take a year. So you start blending these together and you realize that it stays with you longer, that it really sticks. And it doesn't just go on a minute and it doesn't just go tomorrow and something doesn't just happen. And then you begin to lose it. It starts to stay there and it starts to stick. And so he says that we experienced this at the Heights of pennant penitence, and we experience it in wilderness. The second one is in wilderness wilderness and the wilderness toddler says is the withdrawn spirit.
Isn't the wilderness or just the desert out there. It's a withdrawn spirit. So instead of always going out, yes, I learned to let it collect the withdrawn spirit and what it discovers of course at first is the barrenness. We have, we have nothing inside. And we experienced that, bearing us as nausea, sometimes as boredom as so watch. But as soon as that barrenness has this permeability of the dwelling place introduced to it, it begins then to really become a wilderness. And in that wilderness, we had the experience of a symbol. It's taller, says it's like the burning Bush, like the burning Bush, like Moses in the wilderness experience, the divine is a burning Bush. And he says, this is a metaphor for a quality of experience that comes up in the midst of the wilderness is an indelible flaming presentation of a center that we didn't see before.
We wouldn't have guessed that it could have been there. And so we put this sense of cycles of penitence and the experience of the wilderness of the withdrawn spirit, to the point where we see the burning Bush together with the third. And the third is the mountain in the cloud. The mountain in the cloud, Tyler says, we have this experience as if we're going up. There was a, some kind of a Mount at the top of the mountain, the apex of the mountain, the purpose of it is obscured by a cloud. But this cloud is actually a union. So radiant that we experienced it as a nothing. We experienced it as a white out. It's not anything it's a cloud. It's an obscurity. The teller says it is not an obscurity, but an overwhelming radiance. So gradient that we experienced it as a knot and that what put us off, except for the fact that we realized that we have climbed a mountain to get there.
We've gone through a wilderness to see this burning Bush. We have gone through cycles of penitence to get this quality of presence. So he says there too, and that cloud, we have to learn to stay there and acclimate ourselves to it. And we see, in fact that this cloud is an eternal splendor of divine light that has collected around us because we have earned by our discipline and preparation, the right to be there, to experience it. It's like the old Hindu sense of topis topis discipline. The toppest works. If you go through X amount of topics, no matter what, it will produce a resolution in the universe to, to come to you. You can think of it as power. If you build a condenser power will condense. If the force is there, it will attract and condensed. So man, through his discipline through his top is makes a spiritual energy form.
Condenser. The tower says using the imagery and the 1350s, he says, it's like a mountain with a cloud. And you know, you've climbed that mountain. You aren't just anywhere. You're in a very special place. You worked hard to get there, stay in that cloud. And you acclimate yourself and you see that this was a cloud of splendor. The light of all creatures is as night compared to this divine light. The light of all creatures is as night compared to this light. And he says, then you will realize if very profound sense of aliveness about Nan's quality in the universe, that man in this way, experiences the divine above and beyond the hierarchies of angels.
The man has a great secret capacity that he can climb the ladder of the hierarchy beyond its highest rung, that the angelic orders that the established religious orders and their highest mysticism have given to you, they've given it in good faith. But now you see that you even as a being transcend all that, and he says, this makes you free. And you never again are in a position to be claimed by any terror or any authority whatsoever. And that on this basis, man, as a religious spirit, then in habits, the world and a new way. And when individuals like this come together, they form communities that are distinctly well. I was just going to talk about fire. So I think we'll save it till next week. We'll talk about all this mysticism moving to
We'll talk about the fire of love Richard [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible].
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