Richard Rolle (1300-1349)
Presented on: Tuesday, July 19, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
The date is July 19th, 1983. This is the seventh lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Ware on the mystic century tonight's lectures and title Richard Raleigh, R O L L E, who lived 1300 to 1349, the fire of love and the mending of life.
I visited a friend at the Los Angeles international airport, and apparently many of our cassettes are being listened to and various parts of the country. This individual's was from the Los Alamos scientific laboratories, and they're making a regular little class of our lectures there. So I'll have to enunciate a little clearer because we have apparently a very large audience for many, uh, they're unfamiliar, and yet desirous to understand why it is important for us to be talking about the individuals and the time periods which we find of concern to ourselves. The problem is very succinct. We live in a time of great proliferation of ideas.
Our problem today is not really one of alienation, but one of grounding in abundance. So the problem incumbent upon us is to make some judicious selection and that that selection of value is which we, which wish to promote and sustain and pass on. And if possible, share and make the basis of a larger community, we have need of an integrating criteria. We have need of those primordial forces, which go along with fundamental particles that go to make up reality along with the quarks. And leptons, they're also electromagnetic forces and strong forces and weak forces. And we live in a time where the traditions that were to hand the perception of these forces onto us, we're more or less interrupted and have been interrupted now for almost three generations. And so we're forced to go back and reassess all of past history, like intelligent children, trying to ascertain what parent page our orphan civilization should adopt. So we're a people looking for parentage looking for heritage, and we find ourselves having great affinity with the widest assortment and the most unusual arrangement. And so we find on the shelves of individuals, books of African sculpture and Asian wisdom, Greek philosophy, modern physics, 19th century, impressionistic art, and all of it is easily and effortlessly put together in terms of human beings living here today.
One great concern that I've been following for almost four years now is to reconstruct at least in part the connections, which made a tradition throughout history for the human race and to the best of my ability, I have been trying to assiduously pursue the developments from the beginnings to the present day. And we have discovered along the way that there have indeed been other attempts on this order. One that comes to mind was the good, uh, [inaudible] who 450 years ago wrote the chronologic. I Mystica bringing up to his present day, some understanding of the highlights and the high points of human understanding that had led to this situation, which he found in his day. Ours is a very peculiar time. Now we have in our abundance increasingly accurate pictures of reality.
The gentlemen from Los Alamitos assured me that within the next two or three years, we will be able on the level of chemistry and physics and astronomy to characterize aspects of reality with a confidence and a precision almost unheard of. And yet he assured me that in his travels lecturing and being a consultant on the highest levels, the most powerful corporations in our day, DuPont and general electric and H T and T, and the federal that 99% of the time after the scientific talk is over after the Shoptalk is over the conversations, moved to religion.
There's an overwhelming intuition that all of these pictures of reality should go together. They should make a hole and they don't. They can be juggled together. They can be held together by powerful synthetic outlooks, but they don't move in a pattern which can be lived. And so the problem is to establish a sense of perspective, which allows us to sustain and maintain our clear pictures of the world, and yet find the interconnecting tissue. Also the forces that allow us as full intelligent human beings to live a life in consonance with the realities, which we can describe and declaim and specify so wonderfully and accurately in this search for the forces. The 14th century in the West was one of the high points of human experience.
We have seen how moving from the great Sufi poet Rumi, who was able to discover that language itself had an architecture of meaning that the ways in which we use language transform and from the simple kind of barter sign notation that we use for commercial interchange, et cetera, language transforms under a pressurized and interiorized synthesis language transforms into a song, a melody, a poem of sacred meaning. And we saw how this most fruitful, mystical perception on the part of Rumi, the SIS L'Amic Persian Sufi penetrated into the West just at the time where scientific discovery, which had blossomed under the focusing of Arabic and Jewish and Christian thought in the 12th century, whether it was a great interchange and persons in all three cultures were, uh, wonderfully educated in each other's backgrounds. And interchange was possible that that had come to a halt, but institutions call them reactive.
If you like reactionary, if you like had arisen and had promoted vested interests to compartmentalize human experience. And so by the year 1300, we found a fractionating of the experience of wholeness that was in gendered in the 12th century compelled, uh, individuals at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th to go two ways to either enter into these powerful authoritarian orders, especially the mendicant orders of the Catholic church, like the Dominicans and the Franciscans and so forth, or they were forced to go their own way and be outside of the power processes of their time. Now, this is extraordinarily like the tendency in the late 20th century, where you may enter into corporations, or you may go your own way.
This development seemed to have two major developments almost as if in the cloud chamber of the 14th century, we observed two very strong particles splitting off, and one of them going into a curlicue that tightens upon itself and the other going into a curlicue that increasingly becomes wider and errands and goes off. The one that devolved upon itself was the Germanic tradition in which mystical experience gave rise to the perception of the need for communities secret communities, if they needed to be kept together and kept alive by individuals who would secretly teach students in the fundamentals. And we found that with Meister, Eckhart and Yon Rosebrook even with yanas toddler, that the dramatic tradition began increasingly to formulate a community tradition. And we'll see that later on, and those who took the hermetic science, uh, uh, origins class could appreciate that this gave rise then to the reformation and to that hermetic tradition, which finally blossomed into Rosa Christianism in the early 16th century.
But the other movement was the English and the English went a totally different way. They went the way of the errand individual who refused to be sucked into any kind of an order, and also refuse to participate in any kind of a community. And so we have tonight the first great English mystical mind who was an unlicensed hermit, he refused even to be licensed as a hermit. He wanted to go his own way. He wanted to do what came to him specifically and individually without a single compromise. And in doing so, Richard Raul pioneered the English way of X centricity of the individual and the best of the English minds are those who are really peculiar. As many of you might have this role who was born about 1300 came of a, uh, ordinary family, but his father was somewhat educated. And so he was sent as a youngster to Oxford and there at Oxford, he came across in the books and the lessons left from a century before the great overwhelming synthesis of the genius of Robert Groza test day, Roger bacon and admin st had been enough Canterbury.
And when he saw her writings, his affinity was for this tremendously mystical, scientific tradition out of the 1220s. And yet he was living in the 1320s. And instead of there being a pristine, fresh, mystical Franciscan order, which he could have gone into whole heartedly, the Franciscans had changed. They become a mendicant order in competition with the Dominican's they had from themselves up into a powerful organization. There was nowhere for him to go. And so at the remarkable age of 19, he left, he quit and he went home and he asked his sister for two of her frocks, one gray and one white, and he cut the sleeves out of the gray one. And then he put on the white one and then the gray went over it and put on an old straw hat and went to live in the rocks.
His father was overwhelmed. His university son from Oxford was living in his sister's clothes out in the rain. So of course you can imagine the scenarios and his retort was I'm going to live the life of perfection, get back to Oxford, you know, get those clothes off. All of this, his claim was that the life of perfection he knew was attainable. He'd seen the testimony, he'd seen the writings and that the perspective that he needed was not at Oxford. It wasn't at parents. It wasn't in any of the orders and it wasn't at home. They sent an individual to him who fortunately understood. He was the deacon in the area there.
And the deacon took a look at young Richard girl, and then talking with him, questioning him. He realized that he was an unusual lad with a great amount of integrity. So he thought I'll let him play the game, assume the role for a while he'll tire off the soon enough. And so this, uh, deacon, his, uh, um, name actually, let's see, we have it here someplace. I think it was, um, yeah, the Archdeacon of, um, Durham. They're not giving his name here, sustained him and became his first patron after a year of living in a little shed on the land of this man and meditating increasingly every day, Richard Raul began to have very recognizable, but to the early 14th century, very peculiar experiences in himself. And by his own testimony, he caught fire and he used to touch his chest to see if he was burning.
And in fact, he says, right at the very beginning of his work, I was more astonished than I can put into words. When for the first time I felt my heart glow hot and burn. I experienced the burning, not in my imagination, but in reality as if it were being done by a physical fire, but I was really amazed by the way, the burning heat boiled up in my soul. And because I had never, before experienced this abundance by the unprecedented comfort, it brought in fact, I frequently felt my chest to see if this burning might have some external cause.
So he had this peculiar experience and one sees this illustrated in many of the mystical iconographies that the world I remember seeing at the de young museum, a, um, as a Terek Japanese Buddhist sequence with the meditator having and the money per a chakra, the flames around it. And then the next sequence, the flames were all over the body. And then the third sequence, there was the Nimbus and the halo and the flames were on the outside of that, the transposition of a universal focusing of energy, pure energy into a pattern of wholeness and like any yoga, once one aspect of a human being becomes disciplined and integrated. The rest of us falls in to that order.
You can integrate any part. And because we are whole, the rest of it organizes rule and experiencing this began to assume a characteristic stance. He became extremely critical of the phony religiousness around him. And he held up as an ideal. One of the great friends of Robert Groza testy, who became the arch Bishop of Canterbury, a man named Edmund st. Edmund, his name was Edmund wrench, but he came became st. Edmund of Canterbury. And, uh, he loved from 1180 to 1240, roughly contemporaneously with gross attested. Now, if you remember, Robert grows a testy who was the founder of the scientific tradition in England, one of the founders of the university of Paris, the first chancellor of the university of Oxford led her on the, uh, great leader of the Lincoln cathedral with a tutor of Roger bacon, a man of extraordinary intellect, but one for whom the experience of universal light was the primordial energy, which needed to be understood and assessed.
And so this mystical light, which was a transposition internally of physical light into the Luke's, like in Fiat, Luke's the light of creativeness. Now this Edmond, how does a youngster ask his parents if he could wear the hair shirt of the men, deacons, who were meditating in the caves. And he found that when he was out alone in the fields with his hair shirt, that he had perfectly natural visions of the Christ coming and talking with him and walking with him. So Edmond of Canterbury at a very young age had fashioned two wedding rings, and he placed one of the wedding rings upon an image of the Madonna and the other wedding ring upon himself. And ever after that considered himself in a state of universal marriage. Now, Richard roll was extremely impressed by the dedication of an individual human being to a universal value and thereby setting up a transposition, taking the inside of the particular individual and pulling it out to the universal that as long as the commitment was held firm and the ideal fed energy and continuity, he believed that this was totally possible.
And of course, roll when he was in his meditating stance began to bring forth from himself a tremendous amount of writings. And in these writings, he emphasized the quality of mystical love and that the necessity was that the individual had to put aside every single possible contact with the world. And that only then in the sense of seeming isolation, what did he fall back upon the universals that were moving within himself? In fact, he writes in his book, the fires of love, which has 42 chapters, much like the book of Joe. He gives us an account and the two paragraphs, he says in chapter 15, when I was flourishing unhappily, and the youth of awake full adolescence had already come over me, the, of the creator poured forth. He restrained the petulance of temporal beauty and turned me toward the desiring of in corporal embraces.
Incorporeal embraces raising my soul from the depths. He carried it over to the heavens so that I might burn, especially for the delight of eternity we get in this imagery, the powerful insight first manifested into language, Brian Dionysius, the Areopagite around the year 500, that there is a state of mystical reverie, a state of deep samadhi in which this phenomenal realm of time-space ceases to have an integral connection and to the mind which has schooled habitually to being magnetized by the continuity of perceptions, begins to sense the interrelational nothingness and that the world disappears. It's like an illusion where instead of looking at the parts, one looks at the connections and the connections yield, no time space, phenomenal reality, and Dionysius. The Areopagite says that in this highest mystical darkness, if one stays there for some duration, one begins to sense that far away on the distant edges of a universal darkness, there are glowing spinning forms.
There are glorious whirlpools of light, which he felt and Intuit and name they end Jelic presences. We, of course today would recognize and intergalactic astronomy that this is a perfectly good description of galaxies out into the depths of universal darkness and space roll. And following that tradition forcing himself like a good 14 century Yogi into this mode of topis of preparing by austerities a receptivity for universals trans personnels found himself raising my soul from the depths. He carried it over to the heavens so that I might burn like a star. So that might burn, especially for the delight of eternity, more fully than I was ever delighted before in certain fleshly embracing, or even in worldly for luxuriousness. And he goes on, he says, actually I was accustomed to seek for quiet, however much I used to travel from one place to another for it is not wicked for hermits to leave theirselves for a rational cause.
And to return to them again, if it seemed appropriate, indeed, certain of the Holy fathers acted thus. And he's speaking here out the prime Orgill origins, the monastic tradition, if you remember, the monastic tradition got it's tremendous drive and current in the fourth century, when the Roman empire under Theodosius, especially in the three sixties, decided that there was a competitiveness on the part of the early Christian Church to the authority of the Roman Imperium. And that even though Constantine had already brought Christianity into the full swing of the empire, there were religious structures, especially mystical religious structures that fed and energized the Christian tradition and transformed it from a simple, uh, religious, uh, communion ritualistically based. It transformed it from that to this most powerful ancient current that survived from ancient days from even before the Egyptians, even before the Greeks and that the plug, the car, the symbolic root of this power source was the temple of serratus and Alexandria.
And so Theodosius sent his troops to destroy the temple burn, the library, the last vestiges of learning in the ancient world. It wasn't the Arabs who destroyed the libraries of Alexander. It was Julius Caesar and it was Theodosius. It was the Romans. And you remember those of you who heard that lecture when the Roman soldiers swung their swords at the great statue of serratus that their sword shattered, because the statue had been covered with a mixture of ground jewels and a kind of a indelible glue with an Electrum base golden silver base, which was harder than the blades of the swords. And finally, after tipping over the great statue of serratus, they found inscribed in the stone at the base, a st. Andrew's Christian Cross. And they were horrified that they had made some great sacrilege, but those last Wiseman and Alexandria who had known the glories of the ancient wisdom flood, and they couldn't take many books with them, but they had the learning and they had the learning in the old way.
It was in their bones, they lived it. And so they fled out across Lake Mary Artis across the nature. And desert finally made their way, way down the Nile to where the early Christian Hermitage is like st. Pajamas. And they're into these communities of brothers and sisters meditating and doing pennants. They brought the car, the Crystalens scintillating car of ancient wisdom. So that Christian monasticism in the three seventies to about 400 was the place that received the ancient esoteric pagan wisdoms. So that the experiences of Christian mysticism in the monastic vein were very, very close to the Buddhist experience. The Dallas to experience the mystical Islamic experience. All of this was wrapped up as true esotericism is not in doctrines, but in the life lived, the old paramedic Maxim was the life lived, is the doctrine received so that wherever there was a conscientious, purifying and disciplining by a person of himself of his own integration, combing the circuits and getting oneself straight and organized, what would occur to him were the truths that were structurally buried in the monastic tradition itself.
And Richard Raul was one of those who saw this to the extent that he could not go along with the political organization of the orders at the time. He could not even allow them to license him as a hermit. So he became a free Lance, one of a kind oddball. And as he wrote, uh, more and more individuals began to think of him as being, I think at our time, we would think of someone like Timothy, Larry, a strange genius outside of any particular order, and yet someone that you would like to listen to. So they began to seek him out.
And in fact, um, he wrote a number of poems at this time, the form of perfect living, the form of perfect living is one of the great poems that he wrote at this time. Contemplations on the dread and love of God. These are some of the titles, the remedy against temptations. And then of course the mending of life and the fire of love. Now I have excerpted for you. He died, uh, in, um, the 13, uh, four days, probably 1349. It's assumed that he died of the black plague and the 1347 to 1350 era Europe was decimated. In fact, we should turn that on its side, 90% of some places of Europe were killed in a matter of months. So that the aspect of the European scene there right in the middle of the 14th century, took on the aspect of a tribal house in the middle of a cemetery. There were hardly enough people left alive and most places even bury the dead so that the world suddenly was depopulated.
And the famines that came with us and the Wars and the anxiety, and we've talked about this gave rise to speculations that this must be the end of time for all practical purposes, every structure that one could have sent it to in terms of a human being had come to a close. This must be the end of days. And therefore all the apocalyptic visions like from walking a Fiora saying that the age of the Holy ghost would be one of purifying by fire that this was upon now. And that in fact, there was no sense in even pretending to support any kind of historical development anymore. This was simply yet, so someone like Richard Reuel beginning to write these great mystical treatises, I've consuming oneself in a fire of mystical deep samadhi. So that all that was left would be the pristine universals scintillating in the great darkness of God's perception. And that's all that there would be. These became the overwhelming prototypes of human responsibility.
Now he writes in here, he says, but certain things opposed to charity it get in the way because the fields of the flesh take one by surprise and disturb one's trend grow times only. I think you're in a better position now to realize that when he talks about the filth of the flesh, he's not just saying that it's wrong to eat meat, take lovers, and why now he's living in a time where the world is easily crumbled by disease and war and famine, and the sight of rotting human corpses by the thousands was a commonplace. It was an indelible lesson in the mortality of man, but it didn't matter what age you were or what position you had in society. The winds of ill circumstance would blow on you. And in a week, in a month, you were crumbled. You were just a putrid corpse.
So he's writing from this perspective, you see, in addition, the needs of the body, intense human affections and the difficulties of exile breaking in upon one change the shape of this burning love and the lesson and disturbed the flame. So he's talking about an interdiscipline here about organizing the energy within oneself to become like a flame later on Saint John at the cross, but right, the living flame of love, one of the real great mystical treatises of the late 16th century, same kind of idea there that our spirit is like this Holy fire, the temple of the body. And when we tend it, it becomes a coherent flame. And he says that this can be blown or diminished, but it can also be steadied and be encouraged. And that when this happens, this flame allows us, this inner fire allows us to perceive through the world to the, beyond that this invisible presence, schools, us to see the invisible realms.
And when we do, we notice that the physicality that we've been addicted to and habitual to is in fact, a very scattered wide net and that we easily pass through any part of it to a beyond. And he says for that most blessing, glowing fervor absent up to that time on account of such things appears and eye remaining as if frozen, until it returns to me, seem abandoned while I do not have, as I have been accustomed to that sense of inner fire, to which the whole of body and spirit give applause and in which they know themselves secure.
So there was no way to lure this gentleman back to town. There was no way to give him a position in a university. And as soon as they realized that he could write, he could think he could speak offers were there, but you can see how little it meant because he was discovering, they all tried path out and realizing for himself that if this continuity were possible, what else might with increased capacity occur to him? So he began to experiment and he says, in fact, therefore I offer this book for consideration, not as philosophy, not for the worldly wise, not by great theologians and startled and infinite questionings, but by the unsophisticated and the untaught who are trying to love God, rather than to know many things,
Yes,
Four, he is known and doing, and in loving and not in arguing so that this involving, and whenever you have a form, which involves upon itself, it creates a universal phenomenon, which we notice increasingly in contemporary science, we call them, uh, solar times now and, uh,
Mmm, Mmm.
Advanced biochemistry. And what happens is there's a phenomenon where a universal energy pattern folds in upon itself and becomes hermetically seal. It is able to convey its impression totally without dismembering itself, without having a leak, without having a connection. So that the wholeness of the pattern is projected. It's rather like concentrating. It's rather like making a ring of your exhaling and blowing and having the whole ring of your XLH patients stay together. And it penetrates. And the way that it penetrates is with the fullness, all of its integrated pattern, this type of structuring happens in very deep longterm, somebody so that what one experiences is the wholeness of the universe. And it occurs to one, not in a fragment or in a development, but in fullness, in a glowing fervor, as Richard Raul would say here, and that therefore he could care less about arguments.
He could care less about how loss suffers or theologians that, of course, this pulls the plug on many of the great orders that were struggling for power at the time, because they were all based as we have seen upon great intellectual, powerful systems, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Don SCOTUS, all of these great developments were based upon large intellectual structures. Raul is turning 180 degrees away from them and walking away and saying that none of this works it's worse than useless because it doesn't work. It doesn't do anything but that this way produces an experience, which you yourself may have. So he's inviting us, he's inviting us to come along with him. So he says, moreover, I observed that those things that are considered by these questioners, who are superior to everyone else in knowledge, but really are inferior. And their love cannot be understood for this reason.
I have decided not to write for those people unless having put aside and forgotten all things which have to do with the world, they burn to be enslaved by single-minded desires for the creators. So he's saying right at the beginning of the great fires of love, he is not writing a structure like an argument. He's not writing a book of philosophy where here are the axioms, here's the development, here's where it leads to so that he purposely takes the experience and preserves it whole throughout every section, every of the 42 chapters. So that what he's presenting each time is the wholeness of the experience from different glints. So he is inviting someone not to read this as a book, but to take this as clues of an experience, which one could have
For oneself, please turn your cassette now. And I will commence playing again on the other side, after a brief pause, have for oneself
In this very arcane hermetic way to reconstitute as much of the wholeness of that experience as possible within oneself, and then through your discipline, not to promote the experience,
But to learn, to manifest different aspects of its fullness so that it is like a Juul with them that turned every which way, reveals increasing facets and possibilities. And this rapid natural rotating of the Juul of divinity within is what produces the phenomenon of the fire of the burning. And he says in many parts that I am burning in comfort. I'm not burning.
That's honey, like he says, it's honey light. There's the burning fervor. There is the sweetness. There is the song that is, it comes out in a form, which we call language any, a peculiar special kind of language, which we call song it's melodic. It has any melodic line and it has an illustrative rhyming expressive capacity. Yep. Reflects parallels and paralleling within it expressively so that we have song and sweetness and fervor, and that they are all held by the quiet way. And that if you do not have this quiet way, the three 10 to go out, I'd produce the fireworks. One becomes extremely adapted one or the other or the other, but in this very arcane hermetic way to reconstitute as much of the wholeness of that experience as possible within oneself, and then through your discipline, not to promote the experience, but to learn, to manifest different aspects of its fullness so that it is like a Juul with them that turn every which way, reveals increasing facets and possibilities.
And this rapid natural rotating, all of the Juul of divinity within is what produces the phenomenon of the fire of the burning. And he says, in many parts that I am burning in comfort. I'm not burning in anxiety. I'm not burning in a sense of pain and burning in a universal presence. And is this rapid rotating then glinting and allowing for the facets of the universal capacity to flash that produces the sense on the temporal, that one is caught fire, or that one has a fire, or one has an energy that has assumed like the fabled Kundalini some sort of a amperage in its course.
He goes on. He says accordingly, because I am arousing everyone here to love. And because I will try to show the superheated and supernatural feelings of love to everyone, the title, the fire of love is selected for this book. So the fire of love is the title for the book. And he's going to emphasize in here that there is a triad of capacities that are held together by a fourth, there is they fervor. There is the sweetness honey light. He says, it's honey, like there's the burning fervor. There is the sweetness. There is the song that is, it comes out in a form, which we call language any peculiar, special kind of language, which we call song it's melodic. It has a melodic line and it has an electric of rhyming expressive capacity yet reflects parallels and paralleling within it to expressively so that we have song and sweetness and fervor, and that they are all held by the quiet way.
And that if you do not have this quiet way, the three tend to go out and produce the fireworks. One becomes extremely adept at one or the other or the other, but with the quietness, with the quiet way, the three stay together in proportion and they transform, they occur increasingly with irregularity and a continuity within. And he says, of course, as this happens, one begins to see the world quite a new way. In fact, he says, when he looks at oneself and quite an extraordinary way, he says here, everyone lingering in this broken down house of exile recognizes that no one can be filled with the love of eternity or sooth with heavenly sweetness, unless he is genuinely turned around toward gun. It's like Plato's metanoia. There's a turning around within that to a change of mind, a change of focus that when we turned around inside moving inside toward God, he must be turned toward him.
In fact, and be inwardly turned in spirit from all visible things before he will be able to experience at least in a small measure, the sweetness of divine love. And of course the emphasis here he's like in Yon of Roy's Brook, the detachment that all of our capacities are schooled in such a primordial way to perceive and conceive in certain ingrained ways. And that we subconsciously in voluntarily transmute all of our experience into those grained patterns. And only by patiently schooling ourselves to let go to stop magnetizing. Our perception stops schooling our sense of gestalt based on the visible world to learn, to erase those connectors, unplugged them, not allow them to happen.
At least slow them down, at least puncture their overwhelming avalanche of coercion so that we free ourselves from the compulsiveness of shaping the inner world in terms of the outer. And when this happens, he says, we begin to notice that the interior realm in comparison to the external world seems to grow and burst into flame. And the outer world looks like a broken down house of exile, no matter what the conditions are further, indeed, this turning is brought about through well ordered love. And that's the key right there is that there are two processes that are integrated and they're integrated in a way that allows for the processes to accumulate. That is instead of going straight line from an origin to an object, they have what is called a cumulative penetration that goes so far and they have a recursive function. They go further, further and further.
So that by this accumulated penetration one school's oneself to be almost like a inner drill, boring diamond, like through the substance of reality. And the substance of reality is not these physical things, but the way in which the mind habitually sees them, when this diamond cutter field that penetrates through that scan, it realizes that there's an affinity probably marginally between our inner selves and the world out here. And that, that affinity is based upon a kind of intact hermetic seal patterning that runs through the core of it all. And that what we thought was real, what we thought with time, what we thought was space is actually kind of right, the shaking, reverberations, the spinoffs, and that no wonder we couldn't focus and couldn't find some way to settle in because we were trying to organize ourselves along the jugglings, rather than around the workings of the Carters of the rhythms of energy.
So he says, it's rather like stopping, watching a juggler and trying to orient yourself to the moving balls. And you move yourself in to the juggler who juggles because he's balanced. And then from that perspective, one realizes that juggling or not one is in control. One sense not into a hole, but one fits as a whole. And so he says, indeed, this turning is brought about through well ordered love so that he loves what ought to be loved and does not love what ought not to be loved. And he burns more intensely in the love of things that ought to be fully loved. And what is that? That ought to be fully Rob the wholeness, the wholeness Richard girl, using the vocabulary that he's used to says, God, God, God, that God ought to be loved. Most of all, the things of heaven ought to be loved.
A great deal. The things of earth ought to be loved little and only in proportion to necessity a real turning away from these things. He says a real turning away from these things, which in snare, there are lovers in the world and do not defend them, consists in the denial of like carnal desire and the hatred of wickedness wickedness. So that one has not the taste and doesn't seek anymore for these contexts. So the notion here is not a puritanical notion. The notion here is a yoga notion that one is detaching patiently in order to allow for the circulation of new perceptual forms to occur. And that the universal consensus is that these universal forms occur without our bidding. We need not prime them. We need not help to imagine them. We need not even think that we could sketch them in once. Basic intuitional outlines are there, that they in fact are occur as wholesomely and suddenly as a flame and are there of themselves.
So role rights, and indeed that has been written. Nothing is more wicked than to love wealth because when the love of temporal things seizes the heart, if any man is allows him to have no devotion within for the love of the world and the love of God can ever exist at the same time and the same soul, but whichever love is the stronger will drive out the rest so that it may appear openly, who is a lover of the world and who is the lover of the divine. And of course the emphasis here at this time, we've gone over this several times is that this was the beginnings of the ideas that there are ways to organize human life, not based upon the increase of wealth, but upon the sharing of goods to allow for the living of the good life, not the good life in the sense of having more things, but of having a more acronyms life so that these internal qualities could manifest themselves.
That was the purpose of the socialistic communities of the middle ages. That was the purpose of the friends of God, was the purpose of the beginnings and all of these groups. And of course, wherever these, uh, ideas resurface later on in history, they were seen for their one-sided political dynamite right up into our own time, right into the 20th century. These ideas just powerfully are there and they seed all kinds of ideas. But the origin of it was that we live together. We cooperate together. We make a community together because we're not trying to follow a monastic ideal. We understand the monastic ideal. We want to take that monastic ideal in its essence and put it into our secular lives because we don't want to be cajoled into having a stereotyped form of perceiving the divine, which we're going to have. If we go into any monastic ideal, therefore we put it into the secular life and we take a real chance because we can mistake and think that like many of the other vagabond groups at the time that we can do anything, but what we're doing as we're walking a very tight as a Terek balance, we're learning how and no particular way to see what is as it is.
And in order to do this, it takes a long time. He says many times in here do not think that in 10 years or 20 years, you're going to see this because it takes a long time. We have therefore to make the basic necessities of life for ourselves. We need food and clothing and shelter and education so that we need to live as a community over a long duration. But we have a very serious religious purpose in mind in our sharing and our cooperation.
And as long as we pass this down and education to those coming after us so that they understand why we have come together, why we are sharing what the basis of this is, what the purposes are. We can then make it possible for ourselves to have a universal brotherhood, the universal community. So this is what this was leading towards. Very, very succinctly role says in truth, there are reprobates reprobates, uselessly hold themselves altogether, opposed to God. That is, they take over this idea of saying, well, all right, I don't want to have some inculcated idea. I don't want to carry somebody else's images around and force myself to visualize in those terms. Therefore, I going to deny God and denied divinity in the name of God. I'm going to get rid of all aspirations for God so that I can be totally free. And he's saying in truth, these reprobates uselessly hold themselves altogether, opposed to God, indeed.
They listened to the word of God with anxiety. So that every time they hear some kind of image or some kind of vocabulary that speaks of this, they get chilled with anxiety. Somebody going to put a yoke on me, somebody is going to color me. And with these ideas, somebody is going to do this to me. Don't want to hear it. Don't want to feel it. So he says the experience then is that the entire spectrum that we're out begins to fill them with anxieties. Every single experience becomes something that irritates them increasingly because they don't want to be contaminated. And he says, as long as you get into this condition, you're absolutely hopeless. There is nothing you can do except you turn around and go within and organize your love. And this is why the loving aspect is so important into it. Organize your love.
It's like a wisdom and loving kindness together. You have to know, but you have to understand that you're knowing together. And the fact goes together. That's indelible in this. He says, and thus, many of these people experience God as a devil because they go to the point where they become completely turned over. You can uses that term in Antia drama. When all the psychic values turn upside down and everything that was positive becomes negative. So that the archetype, all images work exactly the opposite when it's Carla and they mirror dilemma. So any process that would normally help you shoot you back in.
So you have to, you have to work in, in negatives or you have to work in dissolving. So he says in dust, the dissolvable, the devil possesses, many whom we judge good that many who say, Oh, you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do this. And I don't do it. I don't do it. And therefore, I'm good. He says the devil actually isn't image, Oh, God turned upside down. The idea of God becoming so anxious, producing that, it finally becomes like a devil. Indeed. He, that is, this image owns many alms givers, many chased men, many humble men. And of course, those confessing themselves to be centers closed with hair shirts and afflicted by penance for commonly mortal ruins hide under the appearance of sanctity. He even holds some fervor and toiling in pour tune it in preaching. But without doubt, he goes without all those who are firing in love and who are always avid for loving God and sluggish for all vanity, wicked and truth are both fervor toward shameful of, and as if dead just spiritual exercised or depressed by too much weakness, all the love of these people is out of order because they love temporal rather than eternal goodness and love their bodies more than their souls.
And of course he is saying poignantly about the mendicant orders of his day, about the church of his day and yet, and yet, because he didn't want to be prosecuted. He was trying to stay out of the way, but he keeps putting into the fires of love enough passages to show that he doesn't fall into the trap, which caught so many of the mistakes and caused them to be Marguerites that the individual should not mistake his universal capacity for God itself, for God himself. That man does not become God that did not become identical. And that was the snag point of a lot of mystical Harris's at this time. And there's a lot of inquisitional work going on by the Dominican's. Especially at this time, there were many individuals who were seized and grabbed and killed, and most of them were around this point that the individual felt that his capacity was God-like had become godlike.
So in this rule says, moreover, it is obvious to lovers that no one attains to the highest devotion in the first years, nor is he intoxicated with the sweetness of contemplation on the contrary one is without difficulty admitted, rarely for a brief time to any tasting of heavenly things and progressing little by little at length. He grows strong in spirit next, when he has already taken to himself, seriousness of behavior and stability of spirit in proportion as present, present mutability aroused, he arises and Jade Jadah, certain perfection is required by great labors, so that joy and divine love is experience. And so as the mystical exercises take hold, as the metanoia becomes more and more, a viable direction of accumulated penetration within there is a quality, a penumbra of tone that arises probably the best description. I saw filmed interview with DT Suzuki, and he was searching for a word and he just made this motion.
Something rises, it rises it's we have the word elation. Instead of inflation, we have lofty as an ideal, there is a quality of rising this. And as that quality comes, it moves towards a fullness. And this is what role is saying is actually the honey sweetness and the fervor combined together so that there is this floating expansiveness that occurs. It's like a euphoria only instead of being a crowding. Euphoria is a clearing euphoria, so that the indel ability, all of the resonances implicit within the structures of these integral hermetically seal patterns in the universe begin to occur together. And the individual finds that he is in tune and in sync with the cosmos and that this experience gives him some completely new check. He says, in fact, in here among all the things we do for think we ought to concentrate more on love of God than on knowledge and on debates.
Certainly love delights the soul and makes the conscience tender, drawing it away from delighting and lesser loves. And then not the appetite for its own excellence knowledge without Rob does not build towards eternal salvation, but in flight one for the most miserable damnation, therefore our soul ought to be strong and laying hold of hard labors for God. It ought to be made wise by the taste of heavenly things, not by the world. And so in the fires of love, roll schools, a whole generation of English mystics into the taste of heaven. He, in fact, because he was a torrential genius made the first translations of the scriptures into common English. The first translations of the Bible into English were not by Wyclef, but by Richard roll about the 1330s, 1340s. And like all of the other mistakes that we've been looking at, they were constantly shying away from the power sources and looking toward the common man, the individuals, because they saw with universal eyes, that these people were closer to the capacity of discovering within then people were, who were increasingly habituated to the world and to its power patterns.
And so Raul, especially towards the end of his life, began to take himself to various convents and nunneries, and he ended up at a nunnery, uh, in Hampole where he died. And he was busily teaching the sisters there, the women, because there was a great prejudice at the time that women were somewhat inferior to men and their reason and logic and, and all these kinds of capacities. And what role was saying by his example and his life was that all of the sophisticated and sophistical argumentation in the universities by the men are leading us further and further away from the experience of the divine. Whereas it is the women who really in their simplicity of wholeness have the best chance for a real penetration through.
And so the occurrence in England at this time of great female mystics is almost to be expected, but this background, now we're going to see one of those. And we're going to see a, uh, a couple of other mistakes in this tradition. And then after two weeks of that, we'll see how this tradition finally had a penetration into the culture at large, and then Ang run where the language became so important as a spiritual medium, by which the transmission of qualities of human wholeness, which we would call character could be put together in patterns of universal journeying. The great genius of the English language of that time would take all of those insights. All of those capacities and Geoffrey Chaucer would put it all together and write the Canterbury tales about pilgrimage, spiritual to Canterbury, and about all the human types, this whole Panorama, this encyclopedia, a physical manifestation of man kind. And we have a real look then at one of the great occurrences in the 14th century, in many ways more profound than Dante's divine comedy, because it was a taking of the universal message to the common people on a journey together without any kind of authority like Virgil or any kind of a God sent image like this treaty, but that among themselves and the community of the Fairfield for a folk, that one could also understand quiet completely well. We're working our way towards
Chaucer. Mr. Ware has been quoting in this lecture on the fire of love and the meaning of life by Richard role. That name is spelled R O L L E. It's translated with an introduction by ML de Maestro. And it's published as an image book division of a devil day company, garden city, New York publish 1981. [inaudible].