Symbol 7

This is symbols seven, and we're here to look at the way in which the phases of maturation actually happen. It's as if we, in order to be natural, need to recapitulate the way in which reality actually occurs. That the life cycle of any being, if we could follow the entirety of it, goes through the phases of the way in which it came to be what it is. The human embryo is obviously from a aquatic or marine level of existence. We were once ocean beings many hundreds of millions of years ago. And further back than that, we can see that the way in which the embryo begins, it begins with two cells, a sperm and an egg. But the polarity of sperm and egg cells is somewhat misleading. We understand that it takes millions of sperm cells and only one will find its way to the egg. And so an abstract understanding of polarity of male and female. Of sperm and egg. An abstract understanding is misleading. Though that is the case if you bracket out only the trigger mechanism, only the trigger response of it, the actual context is somewhat different. This abstraction, this ability to put a bracket around the central trigger mechanism of an event, has a name in English. The name is taken from the Greek. The name in English is eidetic. Eidetic. And it is this eidetic abstraction that is the fundamental traction upon which the mind functions in its process of thinking. This eidetic moment, this bracketed abstraction, is not the same thing as a moment of thought. A moment of thought is an integral that is reached through a compression, and that this compression is a compression not of perception, but a compression of existence and experience into essence, so that the mind basing its Idea, which is already an abstract quality. But if the mind bases its idea of conception upon an abstract understanding of perception, then you get the idea of cause and effect. And while this seems to be the working mechanism of how events occur in the universe, it is actually only a supposition by the mind and only works as long as one stays within the abstract thinking horizon. And that cause and effect the abstract process of identically bracketing out everything else except only this focus. While it works for thought in a logical way, it does not work in experience at all. Nor does it work in vision. And today we're going to look at the way in which the mind, in its abstract eidetic bracketing of essentials, misses the point, misses the point of the way in which experience occurs, in which myth the mythic horizon of feeling toned language occurs, but also, on the other hand, misses the way in which vision, which consciousness occurs, so that there are a pair of flows which the mind, in order to work exactly in its logical cause and effect way, its eidetic bracketing of the trigger mechanisms. The following of the dots. The connecting of the dots to make ideas on that basis. Conceptions on that basis distort by filtering both feeling and consciousness. And one of the figures that we're looking at, William Blake, took this as his basic problem in his life, in his time, because by his time, by the late 1700s, in the England in which he grew up, the massive success of the idiotic, mechanistic, mental, logical process had reached an ability to go down into the very structure of physics and of the universe. And in the method of Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics, by the late 1700s, there was a growing revulsion against the accuracy of the Newtonian mathematical universe, the mechanistic universe, and the foundation of that Newtonian universe. While it was intellectually on the creme de la creme level. His mathematics. Newton's mathematics was not understandable by more than. More than the difference in votes in Florida for Bush and Gore. If there were 327 people in England who could understand the Principia mathematica of Newton, I'd be surprised. So in lieu of that, they put their focus of trust on another book of Newton's. One that he wrote before the Principia so that it was simpler in the sense that it was more general, but it was published later so everyone could say, well, this is the latest news. And that was Newton's optics. And it didn't take a great deal of salon chutzpah to finally say, well, I understand Newton. I understand the whole idea that light is the key to everything. And if you can deal with light, you can show that sunlight can be fractioned out by a prism into a spectrum, and that the whole issue then is that if the mind is refined as a prism, it will be able to take the natural light of experience and show us the spectrum. And isn't this the way in which a vision is related to experience through the mind? And the answer to that is yes, it most certainly is. But it is not in any way that anyone in the 1700s could have understood. Not Sir Isaac Newton, not William Blake, nor anybody there who lived. The person who came closest to understanding at that time was Benjamin Franklin. And Benjamin Franklin was convinced that he simply didn't know. He didn't know enough, but he knew that the basis of the way in which the mind's prism bridges by transform the flow of experience to the flow of consciousness in its full spectrum, was not the arbitration of light, but deeper than light was electricity. And that the electromagnetic energy had something much more universally primordial about it than even light. That light was the human focus of that energy, but that in God's wide world, the entirety of the electromagnetic energy, it wasn't known to be electromagnetic in the 1700s. All they knew, all that someone like a Franklin knew, is that energy is more primordial than light. And electricity is the tab of that energy, that universal flux that we can get a hold of. And what that means no one at that time knew, curiously enough, the first man to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism was an unlearned, unschooled man who at one time was the janitor in a place in London, and his name was Michael Faraday. And he became convinced that there was a relationship between electricity and magnetism. And it was his Friday night lectures to the general populace in London. He believed that the man on the street, the woman on the street, are the people you talk to about reality. Why? Because he was not conditioned by the intellectual eidetic abstraction, cause and effect, mechanistic university learning. He was just a man who wanted to know. And that somehow his experience of wanting to know flowed in some complementary way to the consciousness of knowing, and that the mind somehow took these two flows and crossed them together, so that you got a locus called an idea, and that an idea was not an abstraction, but was a focus, was an integral. And Faraday's idea about ideas is the winning one. Ideas are not abstractions, they are integrals. And you can follow a path integral into infinity with exactness. But you cannot follow an idea which is an abstraction further than the mind. Any good Yogi Knows that the mind at this level is a radio which must be turned off. A television set that you have to turn off. A computer screen you have to turn off. And the mind itself can be refined enough to see that it is limited, because its process of effective action based on abstraction does not work efficiently in experience, and it just doesn't have the wings to go into consciousness. It can build jets that can fly in the air. It can build rockets that mechanically, chemically can fly in space, but it can't build UFOs that can go interdimensionally outside of all the galactic structures in the wink of an eye. The mind can't do that. But consciousness can. And experience in a very profound way, love's consciousness as if it were a long lost sibling, not their brothers or their sisters that were kept apart, that were orphaned, that were exiled by the mind. The more that it became tyrannical in its exercise of its abstract cutting off of everything and just centering on the mechanical pound double triggers that it says, this is what is important. This is what unifies and pulls together everything. But abstraction is not an integral in and of itself. It's simply a process. Whereas an integral, a true integral in the mind is objective. It's an objectivity, exactly like existence, so that when the mind has its true integrals, its symbols which are brought into being by a focusing compression, by taking experience and compressing it, so that meaning juice is brought out and that juice is concentrated until it's a refined essence of it, and then distilled into a liquor of it. That liquor of the mind has a direct alignable relationship with existentials, so that someone's mind who is matured in a truly integral way, can know what something is without consulting perception or conception as mediators. It's an Is knowing for Blake and those few people in the 1700s wrestling, trying to find how to know this. Is this true? Is this the way? Is this traditional wisdom? They struggled with this mightily. And Blake is one of the best strugglers of his time. And he knew in an instinctual way from the time when he was a visionary little boy who could see angelic presences. He knew that there was some relationship between the visionary realm and the experiential realm of images and energy that are brought into play in mythology, and that symbols Prismatically bridge. The mythological images and language and play with the quality of visionary, not visionary, myths. A visionary use of that kind of language, while its myths in the mythological stories, in the mythological in consciousness, that language becomes prophetic. And so William Blake's books are books of prophecies and critic after critic. I mean, thousands of them talk about Blake's mythology. And yet the books, the collections of his books are labeled William Blake's Prophetic books, so that there is a deep, flowing relationship between prophecy and mythology, vision and feeling. It's like when you're in a deep desert, say, like the Gobi desert. Let's take the most severe area of the Gobi Desert, the Taklamakan area, the desert. Taklamakan means that place from which no one comes back. If you want to see a vision of hell on earth, the Taklamakan Desert will do. At 150°F, water surface water would simply evaporate upon exposure. So it's the only way to get it to flow is to dig down 100ft or so and make underground streams to drain the glaciers from the mountains through underground rivers. This is the way in which prophecy, as a conscious visioning, can see that this is the only way to do this, and then to affect those underground streams, and then to protect the maintenance of those streams by a mythology which allows for one to appreciate that all this is not only necessary here, but that it is like a structure by which life works. Blood does not flow on the outside of the skin, but in hidden streams inside the veins, the arteries. And so there are parallels between a mythological understanding, mediated by a symbolic structure and a conscious vision of what that meaning does in its spectrum. But it's not at all the eidetic, abstracted, mechanistic cause and effect quality that the intellect in its arrogance supposes. In fact, all of that is just supposition and can be shown. Blake. Born in 1757. Found himself as an energetic young man, interested in the visionary aspects of life, in the mystical resonances of that found himself in a crowd of people who included some of the most unusual characters of the time. One of his close friends was Tom Paine, who wrote The Age of Reason and was one of the influences on Jefferson. Another close friend of his was Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most gorgeous women of the day and one of the most revolutionary. Her vindication of the Rights of Women is still in print after more than 200 years, and she finally became, through a marriage with William Godwin, the mother of the woman who became Mrs. Shelley, Mary Shelley. So Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who was a very good friend of William Blake, who illustrated who illustrated some of her works by phone calls. That doesn't sound right, does it? I must be tuning in to Austin or some of the other places. What I'm conveying to you is that Blake was an extraordinary individual, surrounded by very, very extraordinary people and someone like a William Blake, who has a mystical take on himself from birth, grows up in a very peculiar way. It's difficult to understand if you if you don't have that. By the time that you're an adolescent, you're convinced that your your energy of person is something that flows through you from something higher, that you don't get your sustenance from, from the world of things, but that your sustenance comes from. It's heaven sent. That it comes down through you. And so your basic response is a response that when you look for your source, you don't look to the world, you look to divine things. And one of the visionaries whose works were in vogue in fashion in the London of that time was Emanuel Swedenborg. And Swedenborg had two principles in his mystical books. His collected works run to several dozen volumes. And those works emphasize that there is a relationship between heaven and hell, and that there's a relationship that's mediated, especially by the apocalypse. I think eight of his collected volumes and maybe another six as commentaries. About 14 of Swedenborg's volumes are all about the book of revelation, about the apocalypse, that somehow the relationship of heaven and hell, of above and below, of this life and the next life of the polarities. For Blake, he always called them the contraries that the contraries that carry energy into structure, that polarities carry energy into structure, and that you cannot have structure stable and maintainable without the polarities, so that the contraries have their function, in that they style energy in such a way that it can glom together and make existence so that existence is founded upon polarities coming into collision with each other and finding some kind of a way to stabilize, not stabilize through annulment, where one wins over the other or where one absorbs the other, but that both maintain themselves in such a way that both then are put into structure in such a way that they're both there together, but through the arrangement are stable, and that the key to changing form to transforming a structure is to go into this polarized, frozen structure to find. We would say in the 20th. In the 20th century, artists used to talk about the grain. You've got to find the grain of the wood or the grain of the stone. The traditional thing was always jewels. Jewel crystals. You have to find the crystal structure, because you can only cut it along the lines of structure. And so you have to know what its structure is. And then you have to know how to cut. And out of that you can bring the jewel. So that transformation is an issue that involves the symbolic structure of the prismatic arbiter of experience and consciousness of myth, and the visionary quality that, when put into language, largely comes out in traditional histories as apocalypse, as books of revelation. And in the Christian tradition, that was the large context of Blake's time. The tradition. The Christian tradition was always that there is an apocalyptic understanding of symbols that's at the very center of this prismatic bridge, and that whatever, whatever consciousness and apocalypse that we have is related to the mythological pairing of it, but that those two are polarities that are only held comprehensively by an integral symbol or integral symbol interface. And for Blake, that integral symbol interface was Manufactured mechanically by Newtonian science. By Newtonian abstraction. So that you got a surrogate symbolism and not the real thing. You didn't get a symbolism which was alive. You got a symbolism which was a surrogate, which was a mechanical reproduction of it. And so when you translate it experience in terms of the mechanical reproduction, you got a false reading of experience. And when you translated what the meaning of visionary apocalypses were in terms of that symbolism, you also got an abstract distribution of meaning which has a very peculiar quality. Um, perhaps the best way to explain this, if you take a pair of opposites, say, like the portrayal of black and white and you put black and white together. Let's take a circle of black and white where right down the diameter one half is black and the other half is white. If you use an abstract process of mechanical distribution of the meeting of those two, you will tend to eventually have layers where one half is black and one half is white. But the layers alternate so that a mechanical distribution of black and white is that you would have a circle with a diameter and say three levels, the inner level, the black would be on the right side and the white on the right. The next level they would alternate and there would be a layer of half circle of white, and then the other half circle of black. And the third layer, they would go back and there would be black and then white in the original, so that you would get this alternating quality and effect. We would call that an optics, a diffraction surface, so that if you have a very complex abstraction that mechanically distributes polarity, then with thousands of layers of this, what you would get is a diffraction pattern and not at all anything clear. And Blake was enough of a visionary. He said, the industrial science of our day is leading man into a cacophony of false images that look beautiful, do nothing but lead him astray, and eventually he will become confused and blinded by the proliferation of his own ignorance. We're close to that. So what is there to be done? Instead of having mechanical distribution of polarity, if you have a transform where the polarities are able to be changed into a complementarity, then instead of getting a circle which is half white and half black, you have a sinuous diameter instead of a straight diameter, splitting black and white into two sides. You get a sinuous diameter, and you get a center of black in the very core of the white and the center of white in the very core of the black. You get a Tai Chi symbol. So the classic tai chi symbol is an integral, whereas the parfait of mechanically distributed black and white layers gives you a diffraction pattern which is not at all a symbol, but is a quality that leads the mind to need to make up the difference. And it leads to an addictive quality of needing to find rationalities for what you're seeing. And of course, this is a deeply psychotic condition. That this happens almost all the time doesn't make it right just because 100 out of 100 people see this way and believe that this is the right way does not make it real at all. They are all wrong. And so the quality that Blake, by 1790, he was trying to find a way to bring the two largest polarities that he could imagine together. And the two largest polarities were heaven and hell. And he wrote a visionary book called The Marriage of Heaven and hell in 1790, and illustrated it, that heaven and hell both have to be brought together in such a way that their polarity is not mechanically distributed. They have to be an integral, which allows for a complementarity, so that at the very center of hell is the seed of heaven, And that heaven is vast enough to take the seed of the center of hell and encompass it, and not be tainted by it. And that in this way two very powerful qualities come together energy and imagination. That heaven has all of the imaginative grandness, but hell has the energy. And that these two need to be brought together. Not so that they make some kind of a hybrid, a bastardization of trying to force good and evil together, but that there is a transform where what comes out is no longer good and evil, but reality. Later on, about a hundred years after Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche would write a book, Beyond Good and Evil, that that polarity and the abstract mind was one of the bugaboos of Western civilization, and was directly the fatal flaw that would cause its demise, its downfall. And for Blake and Nietzsche both, they saw that it was an inevitable process. You cannot forestall a civilization based on that kind of understanding. To stand in any other way in which it does. And that is in ignorance, deceived by appearance, and confident that the mind's abstractedness is the arbiter of all meaning. This is to put an abstract judiciary in charge of human lives. It's like the problem that's coming up in this country now. The election of the executive is not arbitrated by the judicial in terms of the American Constitution, but by the executive branch. It isn't a matter for the courts. It's a matter for the House of Representatives. It's not a nation of laws, after all, but a nation of people whose representatives speak for them. This quality in the marriage of heaven and hell, by the third plate, after the title page and the beginning plate, called the argument, the true focus is on the third plate. And here's how it reads 1790 A new heaven is begun, and it is now 33 years since its advent. The eternal Hell revives and low. Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb. His writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom and the return of Adam into Paradise. Without contraries there is no progression, attraction and repulsion, reason and energy. Love and hate are necessary to human existence. From these contrary spring, what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active springing from energy. Good is heaven. Evil is hell. They must find a way to be married. And this in 1790, came out about a few months after the French Revolution and was deeply related to the French Revolution, was deeply a line of demarcation where the French Revolution said all of the time before this was of a single piece, and we now start with the year one. And they did that. This was a new era in calendar, a new era for man. And to inhabit this, we need to have a new humanity. And so the French Revolutionary Republic found a few individuals around that they considered honorary citizens. Schelling and Fichte and Schiller and several others in Germany were invited to become citizens Of the new Republic of Man. And in England. In London, Blake was one of those individuals who felt deeply affined to the French Revolution. And when the French Revolution began within a couple of years to suffer, the carriers of the revolution, like Robespierre, became petty dictators. They styled themselves finally, as the directory that they were directing. The way things are going to be in this new way. And so a new world order based upon an abstraction distribution pattern comes out and shows a sociological diffraction pattern, just like you would expect from the physics of the whole thing. And after ten years, most of Europe was just revolted by the tyranny of the mob. How dare they? At least kings were noble and had good silverware. So that it's very difficult to look at people like William Blake, who are at the white hot center of their time, because so many of the issues are misunderstood in our own time. The ignorance in our own time is even worse than in their time. The ignorance was there in a natural way, in their time, in ours. It's because of massive regressions. The man and woman on the street today don't even know what the French Revolution was, much less anything else or what the American Revolution was, which preceded it by several decades. In fact, it's very interesting when Thomas Jefferson left Paris for the last time The night before he left, he gave a dinner, and at the dinner was Lafayette and many other individuals. And in the morning, as Jefferson's coach was heading for Calais, all those men at the dinner began the French Revolution the next morning. So the French Revolution is deeply, deeply hooked in with the American Revolution. The figure of Benjamin Franklin was there for a long time in Paris. Mon Cher papa, educating a whole generation of Frenchmen to understand that you have to put in a transform into something even deeper than experience or consciousness. You have to put the transform into history. And that history is like the grown up, wild version of differential consciousness. It's like going all the way back. That deeper than experience and wilder than experience are the mysteries of nature that you have to go back to nature. History is like nature in that it is the wildest, largest ocean of that kind of a process. But whereas nature is the wild ocean of the way in which integration happens, history is the wild ocean of the way in which differential consciousness happens. What comes out of history is an objectivity called science, not the science of Carl. Jung once said, most science, as it's practiced today, is just meal talk. It's the science that learns to see deeper than Newton, learns to see in an Einsteinian way, and then learns to see deeper than Einstein learns to see. As we talked last week about how pure vacuum can have its condensation in such a way, that time comes into play and time only comes into play when something like the Higgs boson allows for eternity to slow down enough so that it looks like energy, and allows then for that energy to slow down enough so that it becomes matter. Because without those subatomic particles like electrons and protons, there's no way to have atoms and to have existence. And the reason why they're There that slow compared to eternity, is that's the only way they can exist. But one can learn, transform deep enough to take matter back into energy, and one can raise consciousness to a wild level to take energy back into eternity. Let's take a break. We left off where there were two levels of application. One of them was there must be a way to change matter back into energy. And there must be a way to change energy back into eternity. And for a visionary like Blake, maturing at the time of the French Revolution, it seemed that this was the moment. And at that time, looking for what is the transform that will allow this to happen? It must be something which God has already given man, because it cannot be man made. And the sensitive visionaries of the time looked. Where else are they going to look? They look to the Bible. They look to the Book of Revelation. They look to the Apocalypse of Saint John. They said it must be in here. We don't understand. We don't know yet. But it's because we don't understand. And we don't know. It must be in here. Which is why someone like a Swedenborg would spend a dozen or 14 volumes trying to open up, trying to explicate, trying to unravel the symbolism of the Book of Revelation. And somehow this is published by the Swedenborg Foundation. Blake and Swedenborg. Opposition is true friendship, that there is somehow a way in which the energies of man are released. If his prismatic transform is activated, how are you going to do that? And. The problem became exacerbated because it was realized that God has been speaking to man longer than the New Testament. Well, how did he say it back then? And of course, you go back and you you realize that this was the age at which archaeology was beginning, which the finding of ancient things was beginning. And Blake for a while went back to the pagan origins before Christianity in England. He went back to pagan Britain, back to ancient. He called it Albion. And it was at that time that a volume on the ancient megalithic monuments of England was being displayed in the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia By a man named Stukeley. Not only about Stonehenge, but more particularly about a complex called Avebury. And as Stukeley showed to The Sound of Music. It's wonderful. You have to be ready to be ready. You have to be prepared to be prepared to hear what I'm saying. It's an acquired taste, but it's good cooking. Stukeley had an illustration of the mystical landscape north of Stonehenge, where Avebury was, and at the center of the Avery complex was a large corralled area, but leading up to it was a kind of a sinuous energy flow, as if it were like a frequency, a sine wave frequency of energy. And that if you looked at the layout, this wall, this enclosure came up to the circle of the center of Avebury and then snaked down, and that the whole form was that of a serpent, a pregnant serpent, that the serpent was like a terrestrial form of primal energy. The way a serpent goes is the movement of energy in a living creature. That serpent energy. They didn't know about Kundalini in England at that time. So that this was An ancient monument to the wisdom that God had put in man that had been brought out in Paleolithic times, that this was an example of the frequency of the energy that was midway between matter and eternity. And that this was how Paleolithic men and women calibrated themselves in their ceremony of celebration for the summer solstice, for the sun's apex, for the calibration of the way before Stonehenge. Stonehenge already is very sophisticated compared to Avebury. And of course, Avebury is set like a circumflex over an even more ancient mound called Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill, which was so mysterious that the 1700s never got it. In the 1800s and the 1900s. And it wasn't until the mid 20th century that a man named Michael Damms was in a rainstorm on top of Silbury Hill one time, and he realized that the ground, the sunken ground around Silbury Hill, filled up with torrential rains and made a circular lake around Silbury Hill, and that the strange conical mound of Silbury Hill became like a the breast of the mother of earth, reflected in the sky of the water, was the celestial mother, and had been made 8 or 9000 years before. Stonehenge, only about 5000 years old, but Avebury somewhere in the middle there, somewhere around 7000 years ago. There is in southern Ohio. Another serpent mound that swallows the serpent is swallowing the egg. The big Orphic egg. And that was made by Paleolithic American Indians around Miami, Ohio. The great serpent mound. It's still there for Blake, though he couldn't maintain that God would be silent from such early days until the apocalypse of the New Testament, so that there must be something in the Old Testament. There must be something in God's word that was really the focus where one should emphasize And they had difficulty understanding why it should be so. But they found that there were. Definite indications that the Book of Job was the monumental transform. And that's why Blake illustrated the Book of Job. To put it into its 22 phase or 21 phase in a zero context, to put it into its calibrated wholeness, so that the prismatic transformation of the Book of Job could be made available to his time. And that it had something to do with the reoccurring symbolism of the vision of Ezekiel. Of the for the Quaternary. The quadratic symbol of the lion, the ox, the eagle and the man. The four faces of the Messenger of God. That that image reoccurs in the Apocalypse of Saint John. In fact, reoccurs in such a way that the entire structure of the New Testament is four Gospels an ox, a man, an eagle, and a lion, and that the four Gospels structure was made because of the cue from apocalypse symbolism, and not because there were only four gospels. There are many Gospels, but there were only four selected in order to fit that symbolic shape. A man named Tashfin did that about 140 A.D., but there is a quality in the Old Testament that is mysterious and was mysterious at that time. What is the relationship, then, of the book of Job to the Torah? And that relationship between the Torah and somehow that prophetic quadratic symbol of Ezekiel, not only related to the Torah, but related to the Torah through the prophets. Because wasn't it prophetic consciousness which was the pair to mythological language sensitivity that made the meaning of symbolism in the first place? So this was a huge complex that was very difficult for them. They were on the verge of understanding but didn't have the historical background. They didn't understand Judaism well enough, deep enough to understand what all of this was for. And we're trying to guess their way back from a Christian perspective. Which, of course leads one into the operation of an abstract mechanical distribution pattern. Of course, you get a diffraction pattern out of your understanding, and the mind comes up with all sorts of rosy things that are pretty to look at and are beautiful as metaphysical speculations and don't have any reality whatsoever. And so the enlightenment, crunched in. An age of revolution, became radicalized into a romantic rebellion. Not only is this society no damn good, but the whole mind that was based upon it is also suspect. So we're going to put our trust into the wildness of exploration, of heroic ideals out into the wilds of of art. But Blake was not ready to give up the fight. Someone like Shelley already had made the decision. Let's scrap the whole situation and go on to something that's an adventure of exploration and Prometheus Unbound by Shelley as that. But for Blake, he was deep enough as a traditionalist. He liked tradition, and he had the confidence that the key was there in the Book of Job. There's something about the Book of Job where God has put the transform that's necessary already. We need to go back and take a deeper look at all of this. Not what it means in terms of intellectual distribution of meaning, but to bring our experience and consciousness into such a play. That the polarities are there and we just keep them there until they. Settle in their own complementarity, and we will know that they. Have found their true complementarity when our symbols are alive. That the living word is the proof. For our understanding, because we're not living in the 1700s, we're not even living in the 20th century anymore. We need to go back and take a look a little bit at the classic transform of the Jewish tradition when the Book of Job was written, because it was an era very similar to the French Revolution, very similar to the American Revolution, and it was at that time a revolutionary document. It was a bill of rights for spiritual man at the time, and it's deeply related to the Book of Daniel. Because the Book of Daniel was the workbook of how to change matter back into energy. And then the Book of Job took it so that you could change energy back into eternity. And they were a pair of transforms that Judaism made through several generations of intense suffering. And that's why it left the Empress that it did. If we look at that period in Jewish history, it's called the Second Temple period. Here's a compendium of writings Jewish writings of the Second Temple period. What second temple? What was the first temple? The first temple was made by Solomon, designed by Solomon. But because he couldn't find the workmen and the architectural acumen in Palestine, he brought in Egyptian architects and Egyptian workmen, and the first temple, made about 980 BC, was made under the direction of Solomon, but by using Egyptian workmen and Egyptian architects. But they use native materials. They use the cedars of Lebanon, huge cedar forests at the time. But that first temple, Solomon's Temple, was destroyed At the beginning of the classic period known as the exile, about 600 BC, more or less, the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar simply abducted the entire population of capable Jewish men and women, not to become prisoners, but to become functionaries to run the Babylonian. The Neo-Babylonian Empire. They were good linguists. They were good at international relationalities, and they would stay together as a community. And if you held the leaders of that community, they would stay there where they were taken. And so the exile was not one of imprisonment, but of exile. And it's important to realize, because at the Second Temple period, The obverse of the exile happened. Instead of being taken away into exile, the exile occurred right in the center of the community. Because coming back from the exile began about the time of Cyrus the Great, back in the, in the, in the five 30s, five 20s. But it was codified and brought together around the four hundreds and around the four hundreds BC, Ezra and Nehemiah brought together an understanding that we have to reestablish that this is a second temple, and that the second temple is somewhat different from the first. The first was the living tradition that Solomon received from his father from David. And where did he receive it? How did he receive it? He received it in the context of the promise of the covenant. That was the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the was the covenant maker. That's why the temple was put on the highest point of Jerusalem. It means the high piece of David, Jerusalem. It's on the crest of the of the mountain ridge there. And just as Jerusalem is in the high, clear, pure air, you can see from that heaven portal, you can see down to hell. You can see down to the Dead Sea. There's no life in the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is a dead. Not only is it surface about 1400ft below sea level, but the depth of it is very deep. So that the Dead Sea is also about 1300ft deep, so that the bottom of the Dead Sea is about a half mile below sea level. And any kind of earthquake makes petroleum levels geologically underneath that send huge chunks of asphalt bitumen up to the surface, and releases all kinds of chemicals and minerals into the water so that you can take a stick and throw it on the Dead Sea, and it will float on the surface like a mirrored image. It's very difficult to swim in it. The buoyancy is even more than the Great Salt Lake, which reminded the early Mormon pioneers of the Dead Sea. It was like archetypal remembrance. There was a man named George Adam Smith. The historical geography of the Holy Land. For about 90 years it was the standard guide to Israel, the Dead Sea. How did he describe it? There is perhaps there is perhaps no region on earth where nature and history have more cruelly conspired, where so tragic a drama has obtained, so awful a theater. The peculiar thing about the Dead Sea is that with this deadly mixture, no life can be there in the water. And yet the water is limpidly clear, like Lake Tahoe. You can see to incredible depths so that the appearance is one of the most clean, beautiful blue water that you could imagine. And nothing can live there. It's not potable. You can't drink it. And at the far end of the Dead Sea is where Sodom and Gomorrah and three other cities of total corruption were, where God had just killed them in pillars of salt, so that the Dead Sea was like the locus of the netherworld of hell itself. And yet, at the other end of the Dead Sea is where the Essenes founded their Qumran community of absolute purity, because they felt that they were exiled not by being taken away from Jerusalem, but because the Second Temple in Jerusalem was commandeered by a Hellenistic ruler named Antiochus. Antiochus the Fourth, and he made the Second Temple into a Greek temple to Zeus, and anyone who came in and practiced Judaism there was killed. So that the most poignant rabbi of the day. We don't know his name. He's known to history as the teacher of righteousness. Said we are in exile, in our own home, in our own city, in our own temple. So this is a different exile. This is an exile. That's the obverse of the other one. So that we have to go back to that exile to find out how it was handled, so we can make an inside out obverse of God's resolution of that exile to handle this exile. And the resolution of that exile was the Book of Daniel, because it was the integral of the vision of Ezekiel. And the book of Daniel is like, if you could distill Ezekiel's prophecy, you would come up with the crystal. That is the book of Daniel. But what's interesting is that no one in the exile wrote the Book of Daniel. The Book of Daniel was written at the same time as the Book of Job, because that transform capacity was not there at the time of Ezekiel. Ezekiel went as far as anyone could go in his day. Absolutely. On the cutting edge of consciousness, you couldn't go any further. But some 400 years later, one could go further. And they did. And so the Teacher of Righteousness distilled Ezekiel's vision into the book of Daniel. And the book of Daniel is all about transforming matter into energy. What kind of energy? The kind of energy that's there at the core of imagery and feeling and language and experience and the roots of meaning. And the core of that is a dream, a dream energy. The Book of Daniel is a dream work book of how to learn to interpret dreams. And like any good workbook, it's made to carry those who study it into the deeper levels of the transform so they can finally do it. But it isn't just like dreams on the first level. One works with one's own dreams, but deeper into not dream analysis, but dream integral, deeper than that of working with your own dreams is working with the dreams of others in a large population. The dreams of a people. And deeper than that is working with the dream, the master dream that God sends to man as a being. So there are several levels of development of sophistication in the book of Daniel. Like a good work book takes you from the beginnings, the grade school into the university level, and then from there takes you into real life. And so the Book of Daniel is all about that, of learning how to take the language of symbols, living symbols that are distilled from experience, of taking the existence, the ritual, comportment, existentials of matter and transforming it through the energy of dream language into that kind of energized symbolic mind which is alive and which is alert. And so that symbolic mind, which is alive and alert, can be transformed by vision into the spiritual person, into the prism of the spiritual person who doesn't see by the observation of diffraction grating, but who sees by the rainbow covenant of the original promise, God's first covenant with man. The sign, the symbol of it was the rainbow. Abraham. He says, how shall I know? God says, I will put my symbol in the clouds for you. That's how you will know that you can see that and and know in your own life how that works. And That you will live that rainbow gorgeousness of the full spectrum of your spiritual possibility. So that the Book of Daniel was that kind of transform. And it was written about the same time that the temple, the Second Temple in Jerusalem, was turned into a temple to Zeus. Jews were forbidden to worship in a Jewish way in their own temple, in their Jerusalem. So not only was the temple obfuscated, but Jerusalem itself, as the guarantor of the temple, was eradicated. And so the vision was not only to have a way to handle transforms to an inner exile, but there is a need for a new Jerusalem. And you find in Blake and all the writers of the time the search for the New Jerusalem, the context for that symbolic transform is the New Jerusalem. On that we will find it, but we will find it not as individuals, granulated by an abstract mechanical distribution of mentality. The statement in Moses as God shows his face to no man, but it's in the face of the community as a whole that one sees the image of the divine, so that it's the integrity of the community and the differential spectrum of their possibilities. That is where one will find God's face. And there was a beautiful study of Blake's book of Job, written by great poetess Kathleen Raine, called The Human Face of God William Blake in The Book of Job. It's all about this. But just as the Book of Daniel was a transform of taking you from matter into energy, from ritual existence, into the objectivity of the symbolic mind, the symbolic mind had to be further transformed. Just as ritual is transformed into symbol by myth. And that's the place of mythology, is to be the operative language of that transform. So to vision apocalyptic seeing is the transform from the mind into spiritual person, into the art of life. And in Blake's contraries, it was a very clear polarity. If you stayed in the mind, that was a death. But if you completed the transform, the other transform one came into life, not just life in a natural way, but the supernatural way of eternal life. Choose life, not death. But how to convey this? Because the language not only of Blake's time, but the language that had been used for several thousand years in many developments and many varieties. In fact, all languages were all conditioned by an abstract veil and filter, and didn't allow for even the development of the mythic experience level. You couldn't even get out of the polarity of existentials into a living symbol mind, much less transform a living symbol mind into a spiritual person. And so the problem was exasperated, exacerbated. But as the Book of Daniel is that transform of feeling toned, the mythic horizon of experience, the Teacher of Righteousness also made the Book of Job so that one could take visionary language and transform the mind into life, into spiritual life. And Blake finally was the only individual in his time to be able to not through understanding the historical levels, but to to find a way to express the book of job in a way in which at least that transform at the time worked. They didn't know why it worked. It's rather like somebody coming upon magnetoelectric anti-gravity. And you can do it, but you don't know. You don't know the physics. You don't understand. Differential conscious physics are quite different. Let's go back for a second. Here's the writings of the Second Temple period. The Book of Daniel and the Book of Job, written within about ten years of each other, around 160 to 150 BC. Not only was there a community founded after 20 years of searching to try to find where should we go, not where we should go intellectually. One would never go to the Dead Sea intellectually. One would never found the Essene community for purity on the shores of a dead sea in the middle of hell. But the living symbol was clear. So that one went to the center of what? In the landscape was negative. But you paired that up always in integrals and differentials. As always, parentheses, not just polarity, but complementarity requires perotinus also, so that the Dead Sea location for the Essene community at Qumran was the polarity. But the complementarity that was paired to that polarity was to find somewhere to deal with the Hellenistic threat to Judaism. And where would you go? When did that Hellenistic threat begin to Judaism in the first place? The Greeks never bothered us before. They said, well, when did it start? Well, it started with Alexander the Great. He conquered all the land that we could visit if we lived long enough so that Alexander the Great, his landscape, we had to find the center of his landscape in order to go there and found the other half of the community. And it wasn't easy. It took about 2 or 3 hours to realize that the center of Alexander the Great's empire of his Hellenistic vision was the city of Alexandria in Egypt. And it just so happened that the largest Jewish community in the world was there in Alexandria. It was estimated by Philo at the time as a million people. Alexandria had about 2 million people at a time when Athens, which was a huge city, had about 200,000. Only Alexandria and Rome were cities of more than 200,000 at that time. There was one in China. Chang'an was quite large, but they didn't know about Chang'an. In Alexandria. The curious thing about Alexandria is that geological circumstance and history have served to obliterate classical Alexandria. Almost nothing survives. The land has subsided so much that French underwater archaeologists a few years ago found Cleopatra's palace under 60ft of harbor water and silt and everything. The subsidence was colossal, so that literally the evidence has been erased, except for only two things that still survive from ancient Alexandria. One is there's a single huge pillar of the Serapeum. It's called Pompeys Pillar, but it wasn't built by Pompey at all. Huge. Even by 21st century standards, the pillar shows that the building was colossally huge, the scale about ten stories tall, just the initial one pillar out of hundreds. And the other thing that survived is the only church, the only religious structure from ancient Alexandria. And it's called even now in Egypt, it's called Nebi Daniel. It's named for Daniel. And the earliest text of the Book of Daniel come from Alexandria. Why would they take texts of the Book of Daniel to Alexandria and found the earliest church on that? Because the earliest churches were not yet Christian, they were Jewish. And if you're working with transforms, that's where you would use them. That's where you would find them. And so Nebi Daniel is there yet today. And in this volume on the writings of the Second Temple period, they're talking about the connection between the Qumran community and the new calendar, the visionary calendar set out in the Book of Jubilees and how. Both the Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls, they're called the Qumran texts in a polite, academic way. It's the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Book of Jubilees has been known for about 130 years. And that kind of literature sometimes is called apocryphal literature that isn't in either section of the Bible. And yet it's from that in between where the Old Testament leaves off and the new has not yet begun in that gap in that zero space is a set of all the phases and all the developments of the transform. It's all there. And just like that, transform was unknown because the Dead Sea Scrolls were effaced as completely as the city of Alexandria. So the transform on the other end was also effaced. The transform that took those early Jewish Christian communities out of the symbolic energy into the eternal cosmos. And those texts also were found about the same time that the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic materials, the Hermetic Gnostic materials, both sets were effaced at the same time because both transforms work together. It's a double transform. In math. There are many names for this sort of thing. It's very effective here in writings of the Second Temple period. This is a standard academic textbook on this. It's like a textbook of the history. These Jubilees and the Qumran texts, issued from the unnamed circles related to those responsible for the competition for the composition of Daniel and also the Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch, missing for a long time and found in Ethiopia, are missing because those committees and groups who face this material never thought that there would be anything like this in Ethiopia. And of course, early Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism, which were indistinguishable, were We're alive and well for about 1700 years in Ethiopia, almost unknown until a Scottish traveler named Robert Bruce, of all things, went to Ethiopia and brought back not only Saint George and the dragon icons. The royal patron saint of England goes back to a mysterious mystery play, but also brought back the Book of Enoch. And it took a long time. Bruce lived at Blake's time in Blake's era, and nobody would touch it. And the first real great edition was 1912, Oxford University Press R.H. Charles magnificent edition, and brought back and showed that the Book of Enoch, written about 196 B.C., and then, having had an overlay about 80 BC, put on top of that. So that you can take the two qualities, the two layers, and you can see the development of the Qumran community, the Essenes in between the two. And you get a trajectory so that you can understand how this all of this came to rest in two places that held like a hum, the tuning fork of the apocalyptic transform from matter to energy and energy to eternity. And they were Alexandria and Jerusalem, two cities. A tale of two cities. More next week.