Symbol 8

This is symbols eight, which means that we're two thirds through the final phase of our first year. And in a traditional wisdom cycle, this is a time not for pressing ahead, but for beginning to relinquish the dynamic to to not go into the finish with some kind of huge powered up expectation, but rather to taper off and to let the momentum take itself in a very special way, and that you already have turned around within yourself Self and you're no longer looking to push ahead. But you're looking to remember. And so an ancient wisdom memory was the beginning of an entirely different order of intelligence. Memory was how was the phrase memory is the mother of the muses? There are nine muses. That number nine is a telling number in integrals, where we work with nature and we work with existence, and we work with the the actions of this world. Everything to do with this world, everything to do with the objectivity of the way in which bodies happen the way in which experience is generated, the way in which the mind objectifies. All of that comes under the aegis of a pattern that seems to be, if not dominated, at least structured by sevens, so that natural orders very often have sevens. And though the heavenly bodies there were seven spheres or seven heavenly bodies, there was the sun and the moon, and the five planets that were visible out to Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and those seven celestial bodies, seven spheres. All of that, nevertheless, is Earth centered. And in the ancient wisdom, it was that, yes, there are seven levels seven heavens. One could go to seventh heaven, But the earth itself made it. Eight so that the earth, our life, our bodies, our minds, nature grounded the order of seven into an eight, an octave, an ogdoad. And that that eight was as far as earthly wisdom could go. It was as far as the mind, in its symbolic summing up, in its symbolic indexing of the whole cycle of natural meaning and order, could go. And yet there was something beyond that that are even before our species, even before Homo sapiens sapiens, the forerunners to us in evolution, had presage of. There was something beyond Neanderthal burials on Mount Carmel and what is today Israel. 200,000 years ago show the skeletons of the Neanderthals outlined with pollen seeds, so that the bodies were outlined with flowers. More than 100,000 years before our particular species evolved. So this goes back to ancient times so that there was something beyond. And so the eight which can be written vertically like this. Eight was, in an integral sense an aspirant, aspirant culmination. One had the seven spheres, the seven stars, the sevens. And then the eighth would be the culmination, the perfection of that. But something beyond which had no way of being numbered. Initially, the eight would be put on its side so that you can get an infinity sign. What's beyond eight infinity? We don't know what that is. It's not numerable, it's not codifiable. But yet, as soon as visionary consciousness was able to return from the beyond back to the mind, with some transcendental experience, with some trance experience that could be remembered, that the mind gained not only its symbolic integral capacity, but gained the functioning of conscious memory. As soon as the mind began to to fill out enough to have a space for remembering, then there was a possibility of not just the natural order of seven, but the heavenly order of nine. Offensive though it may be. One gets used to the impoliteness of the 20th century. Except that the 20th century is gone and this is the 21st century. There needs to be a little more etiquette for understanding. This is not easy to deliver. So that one found a different kind of wisdom in a nine part quality. There was a ninth beyond the eighth, and who knew where that led. One of the texts that was found at the Nag Hammadi place in Egypt and the Nile River. Buried Hastily. About 365 A.D., wisdom communities all up and down Egypt were suddenly subject to a royal decree from Rome that anyone caught reading these kinds of sacred books would be killed. The books would be burned. You would be killed and everyone you associated with imprisoned. The reason for that is there was a Roman Emperor, Julian. They called him Julian the Apostate. He turned rogue against the Roman Empire ethos and said there were no issues of pagans being anti-Christian, that they were before Christianity, and they were just as holy and they should be worked in. And of course, he was killed within a couple of years, and the successors who brought in a new Roman emperor said anyone who reads this kind of wisdom literature will be killed. And so all that literature was buried hastily and found in 1945, about the same time that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and the Dead Sea Scrolls were also buried. But the Dead Sea Scrolls were not buried by the Romans. They were buried by the traditional Jewish orthodoxy that came out of the Council of Jamnia in 90 A.D.. Judaism, which had suffered mightily for several hundred years because of incursions into their freedom, because Hellenistic Judaism had developed into a cosmic vision of life. And out of that. Hellenistic Judaism came a whole spectrum of revelation and Christianity. Was just one part of that. And the Roman Empire, which was killing Christians, was also killing Jews. And so there was a motive for separation. The Jewish and Christian communities must be separated. And so before the Christian communities took upon themselves to adopt, the name of Christian was first used in the city of Antioch, used by people like Paul about in the 50s A.D., the Jewish sages got together at a place called Jamnia and decided we need to separate ourselves from these people. They're dragging us down. We need to emphasize that we are an ancient, traditional people and that our Torah, our prophets, are way before the Christians and have nothing to do with them. And so, at the Council of Jamnia, Rabbinic Judaism was born, and it was decided this will be the text of the Bible and it will not change. And indeed we have copies of it's called the Masoretic Text and the Masoretic Text of the Bible. That is, to Christians, the Old Testament is exactly the same today as it was in 90 AD. Not one punctuation mark has been changed. It is exactly the same. Difficulty is that when one looks at the Old Testament, one finds that many of the books that were included in the Old Testament and Hellenistic Judaism are not included. Not at all. They're not talked about at all. And the same for the New Testament. Many books that were originally a part of the New Testament were not brought into the canon of accepted works. The whole idea of four gospels was actually done about one 3140 A.D. before that, there were many Gospels, many stories of what had happened, and the selection of just four was a decision in Rome, over 100 years after the events were completed and finished. So both Judaism and Christianity formulated Related in a kind of an ossified, petrified way that we will not talk about these other things. So the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic materials of the Nag Hammadi were buried for different reasons, uh, at somewhat different times. The Dead Sea Scrolls were buried in the early one hundreds. After the defeat of Barsabbas in 132 A.D., there was never again a Jewish military threat against any, uh, Roman rule in Palestine, and no one talked about the Dead Sea Scrolls for at least 700 years. The only Dead Sea Scrolls that were found were found, um, at the time of Saadia Gaon, a great Jewish scholar who lived about 800 A.D. 800 C.E. and in Saadia's writings one comes across certain writings that were found in clay jars down by the shore of the Dead Sea, and that the people who followed the vision of these scrolls were called people of the cave, people of the caves, and out of the Dead Sea Scrolls found about 800 A.D. that material, that insight was taken to the far end of the Mediterranean Sea for safe keeping, because anything left there in the Palestine of 800 was subject to the Moslem armies. And so the Dead Sea scroll material of 800 AD was taken to Spain, and it's in Spain that you find the beginnings of Kabbalah and the beginnings of Kabbalah are the beginnings of trying to factor in a nine part heavenly understanding, based on recognition of memory structures into the traditional order. The next time any Dead Sea Scrolls were found was 1945, exactly the same year, exactly at the same time as the Naj Hammadi Gnostic material. They were found exactly when World War Two ended. They were found at exactly at the time that the first atomic bombs went off. It was as if the Earth opened up and not only sent flying saucers, but sent the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic material back into place. And all of that material for the last half century has languished in the hands of petty little academic mongrels. No one will get to see these until we have added our expertise to them, and they will read my edition. One of the Nag Hammadi writings has nothing to do with Gnosticism. It has to do with a high wisdom that wove itself into Hellenistic Judaism so tightly that it has to be given a different name, and the name that it's given in traditional wisdom. History is Hermetic, the Hermetic tradition. And this book that one of the books found, it was complete in the Hammadi works, is a hermetic text buried in 365 A.D. and never touched. Never seen. No one knew it existed. And its title is the eighth reveals the ninth. The eighth reveals the ninth. And what it says in there is that one learns after the seven levels of this earth to keep quiet. And the eighth sphere is a sphere of silence. And when one gets used to acclimated to the vast silence of the eighth one for the first time hears the transcendental voices of the heavenly choir singing in the ninth. Where does that come from? That comes from. Here's a little book. This was published in London in 1907. The translator is a man named GRS Mead. Made. Grs Mead. He was Madame Blavatsky's secretary. One of the really great so-called occult scholars of the late 1800s early 1900s. This book is called The Mithraic Ritual. It's a translation of an ancient ritual from Mithraism, the Mithraic religion that was, um, very successful in early Rome. One finds Roman Mithras Mithraic ruins all over. Here's a book on Mithraism and Ostia. Ostia was the seaport for Rome. And one finds these Mithraic temples all over the Roman Mediterranean world. It was the religion of the Roman legions, for instance, wherever they went. Here is from a Mithraic ritual. James Meade's recounting the visions that now present themselves to the inner eye of the initiate, are of so sublime a nature that he cannot hold himself steady, but is shaken, moved completely. It's as if there is an outer eye that looks out upon this world, but there is an inner eye that looks upon an inner world. What is that inner world? That inner world is the space of the mind. But if the mind is addicted to seeing images based on things of this world, it can't see any other way. It only sees in a habitual way. But just as the ear can be trained to acclimate to silence, the inner eye can be acclimated to see without images. Hence the ancient Jewish. Demand make no graven images of God. You will have no chance whatsoever to see God, because God has nothing to do with images from this world. And so a place of worship shall have no images, no images of God whatsoever, so that the inner eye gets a quietness and is able to see for the first time something which was invisible before, something which was never there for you before. And all of a sudden, just like the ear that has become acclimated to perfect silence, will not hear perfect silence indefinitely, but will we'll begin to hear celestial music. Where does that music come from? It doesn't come from any instruments out there. It comes from a remembered music that was there before the mind got addicted to external things. So that the learning on that level is a learning called learning by recognition, not learning by cognition. Learning by memory and memory as the mother of the muses. A nine part order, not a seven part order, but just as the eighth was a culmination of the seven. The nine has a culmination in the ten, but the ten is not written as a number, but is written as a set, as the primordial set of one and zero One so that it's something that counts. Zero. So that it's an order of unknown potential, because you can add more zeros in each time you do. The order replicates clones itself, but in a multiplication way so that you can write ten with a two, and that's ten times ten. That's 102 zeros. Or you can write ten times five. That's five zeros. 10,000. We know today in math we call this a algorithmic orders their ordinals. And there are ways of adding powers to numbers so that instead of numbers being arithmetical exclusively, numbers are still capable of being arithmetical. But now they're capable of being mathematical. That higher powers of the mind involve mathematics. Hence the really sophisticated men and women who had minds that had been cleared out of false hearing, out of false seeing, were able to get the equanimity of the eight, and have that transformed to the infinity, and have that paired with the set of the nine of visionary consciousness brought to its perfection with ten and ten is written one and zero as a set. That ten is not so much a number primordially like one through nine, but it is the beginning of a set that has a ratio of number to orders. And so the men and women who were able to see in this way, able to hear in this way, were called Mathematicae and the Pythagorean mystical communities. But you were enjoined to have five years of silence before you even began to expect to be able to hear or see anything, because 2500 years ago it was very difficult because there wasn't enough space of mind, there wasn't enough power of memory on this planet for more than just a few rare individuals to be able to do this. And so men and women had to be taught patiently. Don't chomp at the bit. Don't get pushy about this, aggressive about this. Don't walk out on somebody giving wisdom when you'll never run across it again. Because it's rare. The Mithraic ritual tranquility and equilibrium. And with them the restored benignity. The benign, the kindness of the appearances are obtained by the solemn invocation of silence, the supernal mother of all things, and the spouse of the divine. That the silence was feminine. She is. She is Sophia. She is the mother of wisdom. But she is not only the mother of wisdom, she is also the bride of wisdom. That for the earth bound she is a mother. But for the conscious she is a bride. Because there's a transformation. There is. In this literature that was found. This was something found before the nod and before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Back in the 1890s, a few things were surfacing and nobody knew where to put them. And there was a scholar. He was at the John Rylands Library, Manchester in England, and his name was Rendel Harris, and he made a translation and commentary on something called the Odes of Solomon. And no one knew in the 1890s. Where to put this. Here is the 13th Ode of Solomon, written about 50 A.D., about 50 CE, um, about 14 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, but written not by Christians, written by Hellenistic Jews who were still in a cosmic 10th Understanding of God. Behold, the Lord is our mirror. Open your eyes and see them in him, and learn the manner of your face, and then announce praises to his spirit, and wipe the paint from your face, and love his holiness and put it on. Then you will be unblemished at all times with him. Hallelujah! The Hellenistic Jewish ending of a prayer of a hymn is not a amen as closure, but Hallelujah as an opening. It opens up for for the rest. What? The rest of your life? The rest of the cosmos. It opens out. It's a differential greeting that this is a joyous thing. Hallelujah. So this whole quality in Hellenistic Judaism is that there is a spiritual joy. There is not a closing of perfection so that it stays here on this earth, but that it instead opens into the divine fields of invitation that heaven beckons us. Why? Because it is God's house, and because we inherit that house in the one of the great Hellenistic Jewish documents that was preserved in the New Testament, because they thought it was written by Saint Paul, and they dared not throw it out. The Epistle to the Hebrews, certainly not written by Saint Paul. In fact, the first time in in late Renaissance reading when Erasmus did his edition of the Greek Bible. He was the first person in Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years who could read Greek well enough to tell style, personal style, and he showed that this epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament is not by Saint Paul at all. It's not even the same kind of language or writing that if you look to see what kind of Greek is this, you find it's the kind of Greek that Philo of Alexandria used. It was written in Alexandria. It was written with a very cultivated, urbane quality of using Greek, but to use Greek not in a Greek document, but in a Hebrew document. It used a Hebrew structure of literature to give form to a Greek subtlety of language and nuance. And so it's a very peculiar kind of thing. You only find it. It's called today because of the Christian scholars that first used. It's called New Testament Greek. It's the kind of Greek that Saint John used to write his gospel. It's the kind of Greek that's used to write the Book of Revelation, so that the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of Saint John are the same kind of Greek used in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Uh, a friend of Erasmus named Martin Luther was the first to identify. He was a scholar. He wanted to know, since we're not going to be just in this kind of deadened tradition, since we can find out about things. Who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, and he came out with the right identification, um, more than 500 years ago. It was written by a man named Apollos. Apollos of Alexandria, and it was written about the same time that the Ode of Solomon was written about 50 A.D., 4050 A.D. in that decade written in Alexandria, and that the Alexandrian Greek of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Greek of Saint John's, Apocalypse and Gospel are also written in an Alexandrian Greek, very refined. It's the same Greek that Philo of Alexandria uses Philo, Judaeus, Philo the Jew, so that a Jewish literate writer is using the same rare, kind of cultivated Greek and Hebrew forms as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, as Saint John was very much a Hellenistic Jew genius. And it's the same writing that you find in the Hermetic Writings. The classic, they call it the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of Hermetic writings written down about 90 A.D., the same time as the Council of Jamnia in Jamnia in Syria. There was a decision in Alexandria to write down the Hermetic writings, so that Rabbinical Judaism begins exactly the same year that the Hermetic writings are committed to writing for the first time. Before that, they were never put into writing because they were only to be delivered after you had gone through the discipline of gaining your silence, of gaining your no image mind. Because these are hermetic writings were meant to evoke from you the remembrance of things divine. And they were written in dialogue form, because the dialogue form was a way of showing how polarities which synch matter together, that polarities, when there's a transform brought into play with them, polarities do something that they never do in nature. They exchange. They have a reciprocity between them, so that a part of this polarity goes into this one, and a part of this polarity goes into the other one. And you get you get the classic symbol that the Taoist symbol, the tai chi shows, so that you get what was called in the eight hundreds in Mahayana Buddhism. Shantideva writing about the same time as Saadia Gaon's writing about the sect of the cave Shantideva living in northern India. He said The most secret thing of a Mahayana bodhisattva is to teach the secret exchange of selves. That the classic Buddhist no self didn't mean that there was nothing going on. It meant that nothing worldly any longer recorded, but that only leaves it completely open, so that whatever is real, beyond the limitations of polarized matter and habitualized mentality, will naturally come into play, and that those forms are not from material and they're not from habitual mental, but that they're eternal forms that they always have been, they never are not. And so eternal forms come into play. And one learns to see eternally. One learns to hear eternally. And it's different. It's not something to walk out on and go. Who knows where. Where is there to go from eternity? So there is a quality of deep penetration that one cannot follow all the way. There's an etiquette of letting it be, letting it simmer, letting it just mature, and that its maturation is not something to grab or to have, or to possess or to hope for, or somebody else can give it to you. But rather it's an equanimity that in this silence something else comes up and that the voice of man changes. When man can speak with an eternal voice, when he knows how to speak the word, then nature transforms in accordance with how that is said, because it is a kind of a mix that will accept that kind of direction. That kind of fiat by spiritual voice. Because one then speaks eternal eternity. One speaks in the orders of the 10th. One speaks with the memory which is exchanged with a function that was there in the natural order, in the integral order. And that function was imagination. So that memory and imagination, exchange functions and memory comes into play in nature, and imagination comes into play in consciousness. And so one gets something else. All of this, all of these things were guests at 200 years ago, when William Blake was illustrating the Book of Job, he knew nothing at all about these things. No one knew anything at all about them. The traditional learning of Rabbinic Judaism is that while one cannot change the text, the Masoretic Text must not be changed. Nothing must be added, nothing must be taken away. But in order to foster the refinement and the possibilities of development, one can have commentaries, one can have learned commentaries. And over 2000 years a whole series of commentaries have been built up. And the rabbinic learning is to learn the whole history. The whole development of commentaries and the first commentaries are called Targums. Targums. Commentaries on books of the Old Testament. Targum on Ezekiel. And that the deepest learning was to master the Targums. Because you cannot change the text. And so the Targums are an addition to it, and they were always assumed to be developments after the sophistication had grown over several hundred years. And then one of the things that were found at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls was a Targum of Job that dates from 100 BC. It's all linked up with the Book of Daniel, as we talked about before, and one has to understand that there is something so magnificently brilliant who is in the second century BC. Able to command the sophistication of language so that one could write such a thing. And why would you write such a thing? And why would it be? This was out of cave number 11. We dated archaeologically as a grotto 11 of Qumran, and it's abbreviated, uh, um, uh 11. Q um, um, to show that it's, uh, from Qumran. This Targum on job buried there, not dug up for 2000 years. It shows a kind of language learning that somebody at that time, 2200 years ago, was enormously learned and cultivated and bore a remarkable family resemblance to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews that when one looks at the Epistle to the Hebrews, written about 45 A.D., you can see that sophisticated Alexandrian Greek was used to fill out a Jewish, an ancient Hebrew form where all of the parts of the form work together to make 12 phases of revelation come to not the 12th phase, but that the 12th phase reflected back, so that you saw the gestalt of the whole, so that the final phase of understanding was that it revealed what what you were looking at all this time, what you were hearing all this time. Ah. That's it. And in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Apollos of Alexandria writing before they were Christians. Writing about Jesus as a Hellenistic Jew says the telling phrase and by the way, the the paragraph in which it occurs, he says, we have here in Alexandria a cloud of witnesses who knew him. There are thousands of people who knew him here in Alexandria. The cloud of witnesses we know we know perfectly well because we talk with these people every day. The poignant trigger phrase in that whole gestalt making recognition, we heard him say, why do you worship angels? For angels are only messengers of God, whereas men and women like us, we are the children. We inherit the estate. The angels just work here. So why are you groveling before angelic powers, hierarchies all built on mental metaphysics. When you can discover your own true, eternal patrimony, your own true mother and father. Why would you not do this? Only because you simply don't know. And no one has ever taken the time to stop you from your pell mell water bug activity on the surface of things. On the surface of existence, on the surface of a mind that's heavily brutalized by addictions to mentality and just relaxed into the equanimity where the silence comes down and says, not shh, but. One looks up and in and in that curve, in that kind of a Retrospective pivot. The Greek term was metanoia. The mind stops looking out for confirmation and begins to look in for presence. So instead of having certainty based on argument, you don't have to have arguments and you don't have a hunger for certainty. And it isn't that one just knows. It's that one is also that the existentiality also occurs. The mind knows, but the body is. And this is a quality which Blake in his mysticism was convinced must be there somehow. But he couldn't find a way to express it, because what got into his way and everyone's way at the time was the realization that we are larded up with old false mythologies and all false symbol systems. And we need something like a new mythology with a brand new symbol system. And if we had that, maybe we would have a chance to integrate in such a way that we could get to the silence easier. And so he made up his own mythology. He took the time, devoted his entire life to it, and made a new mythology and a new symbol system. It was Blake's form of the French Revolution, the French Revolution, which said all the time previous to us ends. And we start with the year one. And Blake, towards the end of his life, meant for the illustration of the books of job to be that in a visionary way. This is the first vision. This is the very pristine first vision. But it has something to do with man's relationship with God. And what gets in the way is the obfuscating veil of images from this world that culminate in the Satan, that culminate in the reality of the of the liar. In Hellenistic Judaism, the Satan is very often referred to as Belial the liar, because as long as you are baffled by lies, you could never know truth. You wouldn't know it. Even if someone told you you would walk out onto the streets of sunny Los Angeles thinking there's something more interesting to hear. Let's take a break. In Jewish mysticism, you find something in Ezekiel that you didn't find Before, and that is the sense that there is a way of ascent, which is unusual. And that way of ascent is by chariot that one ascends to the throne of God in a chariot, a divine chariot. You're able to go. The phrase is chariots of fire. People like Erich von Daniken and so forth have made a lot out of the UFOs in Ezekiel. Wheels within the wheels. Way up in the sky. Chariots of fire. Rocket ships. Spaceships that ascend into heaven and carry man home. That sort of thing. Interesting as that is, it's also interesting to see that chariots are a cultural indicator because there were no chariots in ancient Israel and Palestine, there were no chariots in Egypt either, until a very certain date. Um, here in one of the early classic, early 20th century classic history of Egypt, James Henry Breasted. He shows a photograph. It was the first time that a textbook carried a photograph facing page 234 A chariot of the Empire. It's the first time that chariots were used in Egypt. Those chariots were not native to Egypt. Those chariots were brought by a people called the Hyksos who came from the Lake Van region. What's today Armenia and eastern Turkey. And the Hyksos came into Egypt and were there for several hundred years, and they brought the first chariots and the first pharaoh to use a chariot as a military weapon for himself was Ahmose the first. And this is about the late 1500s BC. But about a hundred years later, the chariot, instead of being a military weapon of sophisticated foreigners, brought into play as an Egyptian weapon, and it led to the spread of Egyptian power way beyond where Egypt had always had its power base along the Nile. Egyptian forces became very strong and they took over many regions, reorganized their military. It was like adding tanks to infantry. But 100 years after Ahmose, the chariot became the symbol of the power of man's ability to go to higher orders of things. And the Pharaoh, who came about 100 years later, who used the chariot as a symbol by which one could ascend to the one god, the sun god, was Akhenaten. And so the symbol of the chariot as a spiritual vehicle of going on high, intact. For a thousand years after that became the great symbol which influenced all of the cultures, all of the peoples who came at one time or another under the Egyptian influence. One of them was the early Greeks, who made Apollo the driver of the sun's chariot. The sun was Apollo's chariot. Apollo, who was the god who was the 10th in the order of the nine Muses. That while there are nine muses, memory is the mother of the muses, and those muses dance in a celestial harmony that's collected together by Apollo. And he's the God who drives the sun as his chariot. And so you have this tremendous relationship. This relationship that then dovetailed and blended into something which the Egyptians by themselves never had. And that was the insight that you have here in a kind of secret exchange. You have two different orders of divinity that come together and braid together and synch together. And those two orders of divinity come from ancient Iran. And they braid together in such a way that one can speak of God in a singularity, even though it's two. Brought into a new whole. And the name of the Iranian understanding of God from that is Ahura Mazda. But there was a time in ancient times when Uhura is different, Mazda is different. Mazda is splendor. Mazda splendor of the sun. Uhura was a transcendental, invisible wholeness which comes in and lends presence so that one not only has an integral, but one has an integral whose radiance carries the vibration of interchanged centers so that one gets a vivified vibrancy. It's the difference between water and wine. Nature can make water for sure. Hydrogen and oxygen. Those atoms go together. They exchange electron orbits and they become H2O. But water to become wine has to undergo a transformation. And while there are natural fermentations that go on, the best wines are made when man enters into the process, learns how the natural fermentation process can be improved, can be bettered, can be refined so that one comes out not just with fermentation, but one comes out with distillation. And distillation is an alchemical process. It means that you have changed something so that it no longer occurs in nature, but it occurs in a higher order. The Arabic word alcohol means a water which has become fired with a spirit. It is now something different. It's a distillation and it is an essence. It's an essentiality that was hidden as a potential in the water, and now has been brought out by the art of alchemy. The ancient name for Egypt was chem. Alchemy means the of of the ancient land of chem. Because this quality of transformation was brought into focus there, not originated there. Originated in two areas that were completely disparate and distinct at first, because civilization didn't start in Egypt until about 3000 B.C., 5000 years ago. It's a long time ago, but there were two places that are twice as old as Egypt. They were 5000 years old when the First Dynasty of Egypt came into play. 3000 BC. And those two places were the Zagros Mountains of Iran, on the border between Iran and Iraq, and the city of Jericho. The Jericho just down from Jerusalem, just down towards the Jordan River. Because Jericho and those communities like, uh, Tara Tepe and the Zagros Mountains had the ability to tame plants. They had agriculture about 10,000 years ago. And the development of domesticated grains very easily lends itself to distilling grains into alcohols, into the idea that you select from nature and you come up with a product. Man comes up with something that his consciousness interweaves with the process of nature, and you get something that lends itself to transformation, that agricultural products are not like natural grasses, but bread. Wheat is something which particularly lends itself to man's capacity to transform it. And that there's a responsibility for man, because the double mutation that makes bread wheat takes away its natural ability to seed itself. The old goat grasses always had a part of the shaft, the chaff that was like when it dried became like wings and the seeds of the natural goat grass, like California rye grass, that you see seeds itself naturally in the wind. But when that natural goat grass undergoes a mutation so that there are more kernels, the energy and the stuff that went into the chaff goes into making the kernels. And when it undergoes the second mutation and bread, wheat comes out, all of the energy of the plant goes into the fruit, the seed. So bread wheat is very heavy and its shafts are nothing but just little spikes. They don't catch the wind, they don't carry so that bread wheat will not fertilize itself naturally. It takes the hand of man to do that. So all of a sudden there's a new symbol, the symbol of the person in the springtime seating for the future harvest and that that bread wheat when it's harvested. A portion of that has to be set aside, not used. Set aside so you can seed next year. So the whole thing of the cultural transformation that's involved in this happened in those places 5000 years before Egypt ever came into any kind of dynastic beginnings. And we're talking about Akhenaten. That comes just a 3500 years ago. The symbol of the chariot is like this whole notion that man can make something by which he can ascend. And a thousand years after that image comes into play in Egypt and becomes a spiritual symbol, it has its era, when about 500 BC 5 to 550 BC. All of a sudden, the spiritual symbol of the chariot influences several cultures. At the same time. It influences the ancient Jewish mystical, visionary prophetic tradition in Ezekiel and about 100 years later, you find it used in the one of the dialogues of Plato. The myth of the chariot is a description of the vehicle by which philosophic dialoguing matures, both so that they together become not teacher and student, but both are students of a wisdom which they disclose in the mutuality of their trust together, so that Socrates is not a teacher instructing someone, but he says we have to become friends. We can only learn together because our capacity to learn is not something which is just limited to us, but is a gestalt that's made by connecting all the dots between us. And if we don't work together at this, then it will not. It will not be there. Neither of us alone can make it be there. If either of us alone did that, it would be just a projection, and it would be an illusion. Beautiful illusion. Big deal. But if we knit together, if we learn to weave our language together, learn to weave our equanimity together, then together we establish something a field of transformation where the higher forms, the differential forms come into actual being, come into actual play. And so that learning is a cooperative effort and that learning is essentially the establishment of a community of learning. It's not about a teacher who's smart and students who should pay attention. That's not it at all. That's like the what they used to say in acting, the Victorian stage model. There's nothing at all. Learning is deeper than theater in the round, as Socrates said it is that it's on a level of love. Lovers of wisdom. Philosophers are those who together make that love of wisdom. And out of that love of wisdom comes the fertility for all participants. The fertility for what? For having that presence of remembered consciousness come back into play so that one's own life then has that, and that's something from one's own life is exchanged with that and registers there also. So you find that a sense of the divine fiery chariot, you find it there in Ezekiel. You find it in the Katha Upanishad, written in India about the same time as Ezekiel. You find it as the central symbol in the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna and Krishna. Krishna is the chariot driver for Arjuna. The whole Bhagavad Gita takes place in a chariot in the middle of Kurukshetra, the battlefield outside of Old Delhi. It's still there. Indians will never build on it. You cannot buy that land. You can't. You can't put up whatever, anything. It's always left open. Because this is the place where in India, like in the Jewish tradition with Ezekiel. The vision of what was real. When men learn to participate in the community of the divine actually happens, and one gets a different history, one gets a history that's no longer purely natural. But one gets a supernatural remembrance of eternity affecting the history says it's different. It becomes instead a distilled liquor of meaning and not just a harvest from nature, but something which man makes by his conscious participation with it. History becomes an art. And so, after Ezekiel and the Jewish tradition, there is a sudden realization that there's an alchemy about history also. And this involves all kinds of things which come to play, especially in the book of Daniel and the Book of Job. There. What? Hekhalot. There there, there. Divine inspired wisdom literature that does what? Shows how transformation works. And generally that transformation works because of a cooperation of men and women together. Together they make it. A group together with job and the Hekhalot. You will find the book of Ruth. You find the book of Esther. Why are those books in the Old Testament? Why are they in the Bible? Why are these women's stories so important? And one finds also that in the late Hellenistic Jewish understanding of job, not in the book of job, as it was selected out at the Council of Jamnia and put into the Masoretic Masoretic text. And that's it. But they further development, because there was a development, there was a living distillation going on with these men and women. And a little bit later from the Council of Jamnia, this time maybe a little before, but it was excluded, is the testament of job. And you can find these things are reprinted. There is a there's a great two volume set published in 19 the mid 1980s, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Sooty means false epigrapher, writing false writings meaning false writings. By who? By the guys who are making the decisions back then that this is admitted under rule of law, and this is excluded where no recounts. They're always Elizabeth Harris's. But the reality is that there are always men and women who understand. Who say that these laws are they made for other laws? No, they're made for us, and we make them and we change them. And there are times when it's really radically necessary, not just to change them, but to transform them, that those social structures that have been working all this time, we've come to a maturity where they have to not just be changed, but they must be transformed. And we know how to transform. We know how to distill. And out of that distillation will come the process of transform. And one finds a very interesting thing in the testament of job, the very end of the Testament of Job, the little later Hellenistic Jewish version of the Testament of Job. Job. When he receives everything back from God. He has ten children. He has seven sons and three daughters, and the seven sons inherit all of his worldly goods. And the daughters say, well, are we not your children also? And he says, you inherit from me. What's in those three gold boxes? Go fetch them and bring them. And the three daughters. Take the signet ring. Job gives his signet ring, which was the way that you opened the the sacred vault. That's what an amulet was for. It's sealed that vault wherein the real treasure was put it. Usually it was something in the mind. And it was the recognition of the symbol on the signet that would open the mind so that that you would remember. Take the signet ring, go to the vault and bring the three golden boxes, so that I may give you your inheritance. So the older daughter Hermia comes back, and she and her two sisters, the three daughters of job, see him open these boxes. And he opened them and brought out three multicolored cords. Phylacteries cords that you wrap yourself with to pray. Three multicolored cords whose appearance was such that no man could describe. Since they were not from earth, but from heaven. Shimmering with fiery sparks like the rays of the sun. And he gave each of them one cord, saying, place these about your breast so it may go well with you all the days of your life. And at first they don't understand. They say, well, our brothers have everything, and you just give us these. He says, put them on and then try and then see. And when they put them on, they see in such a way that those worldly things were like the natural grasses that have most of the energy into the chaff, whereas what they have now is something distilled, or what they do carries the heavy weight of the fertility of conscious forms made by man's spirit, interweaving with nature and changing it into something heavenly. All of this material? Quite suspected 200 years ago, but no one knew. The traditions were so scrambled. No one could trust them in any form. And yet they all contained tantalizing bits. The development of the chariot in as the royal symbol of the divine ascent to the solar self. In the time of Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti became the prototype of a mystical pharaoh. And their whole place, the city of Amarna. All of those letters at Tel el Amarna were not discovered until the early 20th century. Here's the first of six volumes. El Amarna, 1903. And no one knew that all of this stuff was there. But it is the quality of the exchange of love. That's the key to spiritual form. It doesn't have anything to do with getting. It has to do with sharing. So here is Blake working on trying to find a way to do this. And one of his favorite phrases he put in pencil. He had a book by Emanuel Swedenborg about the wisdom of angels. Remember now angels are just. They just work there. It sounds so strange because everyone is inculcated with. Oh, God, the angels. Oh man, they have swords of fire. And all of this, their employees. Blake pencils in to his copy of Swedenborg. When Swedenborg is writing about how our quality of understanding has secret changes made in and Blake writes, yes, God becomes man so that man can be with God where he is, that there is that exchange and that man is not divine, because all of a sudden he's the big cheese. He's not the honcho. He's the participant in the sharing. He is a part of the love that goes both ways and participates in that. So the spiritual community is actually a resonance of love established. And if that community is not established, then that resonance that appears to be love is actually some form of projected ego, which is catastrophically fertile. And yet there would be a sore situation if there were no reality for spiritual forms on earth, unless there's somebody mature enough to carry it and be the conduit and help guide the communities to make that. Sometimes that's necessary. But generally the universe, the cosmos is already prepared for that, because resonant with recognition is something that occurs before it happens. Recognition is after it happens and you remember it. And what's paired with that is precognition, which happens before it happens, which is a mystery if you're trying to look at things in cause and effect materiality. But the fact is, it's like the pebble in the pool. The ripples go forwards and backwards. The future and the past are always in the same waves of actuality, all in the same harmonics, so that as one learns to remember from the going into the future waves, there are precognition possibilities before the events even happen. And that's the roots of prophecy. So that memory and prophecy are linked together. They're on the same ridges of resonance. They're on the same vibration. They carry the same energy so that a prophet like Ezekiel senses the future not by guesswork, but by extending in a fullness. From where they are. And of course, the great mysterious prophetic quality in the Old Testament is Daniel. The book of Daniel. And that somehow the book of Daniel is linked with the apocalypse, the book of Revelation, that the Book of Revelation is the ultimate apocalypse, remembering of the cosmic meaning of all of this. And that the book of the apocalypse and the Book of Daniel somehow go together. And we've talked several times. This is a study and a translation. Sir Isaac Newton's Daniel and the apocalypse. He spent the last 30 years of his life trying to figure out what the connection was. And he felt that since he had integral and differential calculus that he could find a way to put these together, and indeed one can approach it that way. But you always end up from the Newtonian side with a conundrum, and it has something to do with thermodynamics as something to do with heat. You have to shift and realize that it's not heat, it's the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole that is the indexing set, and that there is such a thing as a whole other order of that called the Magnetoelectric spectrum. But of course, that hasn't been developed yet. One of the great classics towards developing that elements of the theory of the Newtonian potential function, written by Bo Peirce, professor of mathematics at Harvard. His son was Charles Sanders Peirce, the great founder of pragmatism. A great friend of William James. Blake's time. He died in 1827. He died 60 years before somebody could even write on this level. And this level was made possible because of the equations of electromagnetic putting electricity and magnetism together by James Clerk Maxwell. But even so, it's difficult for anyone before the 1930s even to understand what all this has to do. What does energy have to do with the forms of imagination? And how does all of that fit in together with memory? And why, then, should the ecology of all this together give us a revelation of God? Is it not that science is at war with religion. And the answer is no. That's not it at all. There's nothing to do with that. All of that is a false thing. The key to it is the way in which history differentiates itself into sets of transformed malleability. And one of the one of the great discoveries along this way was a critic. He was a one of the great minor teachers of American philosophy, pragmatism. His name was Horace Kallen. He was a friend of John Dewey's. He wrote a little study of the Book of Job, and when it first came out, people Pooh poohed him and said, well, this is, this can't be. And his study, published in 1918, The book of Job is a Greek tragedy. You said, well, wait a minute. If we if we're reading the book of job and we're looking at structure. Okay. Yes it has. Yes, it has a it has a Hebrew structure. It it belongs with the Hekalot. It's a wisdom book, but it also at the same time looks like a Greek tragedy. It looks like one of those early Greek tragedies, not by Euripides or even Sophocles, but it looks like an aeschylean tragedy. The founder of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus, who was immortalized as a person who looked so much like an eagle that when he was old, his bald head looked like an eagle's egg. And he was, um, he was the founder of Greek tragedy as a form of distillation, whereby the dialogue energy taking place transforms Forms from the stage of this world into fades into an invisible potency on the inside realm of the mind's space, where there is a moment, a tragic denouement, where you realize that everything is lost. Lost so completely that you never had a chance to not lose it all. The devastating thing about a Greek tragedy is not that you lose something. It's not that Oedipus marries his mother, it's that he tried everything not to do that. And even though he was accomplishing everything, he still did that. What in the hell is going on? And that's the point, that there's something damnable in man's inability to bring perfection into the spiritual realm. He always messes it up. He never can do it, even though he tries mightily. And the tragedy is that he keeps trying to do it his way, and he can't do it his way, because his way is dependent upon an isolated individualism that doesn't work on those levels at all. Wallace Stevens, in one of his poems, says, these are the metal heroes that time granulates. That the ego realm granulates in face of the hurricane of cosmic consciousness, even in the Bardo Thodol the Tibetan Book of the dead. The very first thing is that you have a very nice time after you die, and after a couple of days, those transcendental winds begin to blow. And what do they do? They scatter the worldly self to the wind. So that there is a quality in here. Blake, in his realization that job was essential, left the book of Daniel alone. When we look at the Book of Job, we see that there's such a thing as the testament of job, and we see that there are antecedents. There are antecedents to job, that the story of job goes back a long way. And one of the first things is in these Tel Amarna documents that were unearthed about Akhenaton's time, the time of the chariot symbol coming into play in Egypt as a spiritual symbol. We find a letter, that letter number 256, that alludes to job as a prince of a land, and how he was the one who asked for an audience before the Lord personally so that he could have a dialogue personally with the Lord. And we know from archaeology now, this is from a large compendia published by Princeton, ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament, that the origins go back to several thousand years, even before that, that there is a Sumerian wisdom text, Man on Man and His God, a Sumerian variation of the job motif. It goes back into Sumerian times at 3000 B.C. 4000 BC. So the theme is ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient that there is such a thing as taking an ancient theme and understanding that at some time it went through a huge transform and distillation, but that both those events were in the far distant past, but that you have a crisis at the present, which is so deeply rooted that one has to go back to this earlier transform and to the earlier origins of it to carry it through. That's like a double distillation. And the book of Job in the Old Testament is such a thing. The author of it was enormously learned, unbelievably learned, and capable of using language in such a way that it was as sophisticated as if it were a classical Greek tragedy, mastered the language forms. And you might know that how you learn language configures the way the brain works. The neuronal patterns of the brain are configured by language. You learn different languages. Different areas of the brain are where the gestalt making focus would be. Japanese language is a little bit further back and lower than it would be for the English language, but it takes a mastery of language on the level of not just symbolism, but of transformational operators of symbols that work not just to preserve meaning and index orders by integration, but carry the ability to open up unknown, undiscovered, as yet unsuspected invisibilities so that they come into play and one learns to see in a way without looking. One learns to hear in a way, without listening. And on that level, the recognition is Instantaneous doesn't take place in time. It doesn't happen in time. It's not time dated. So that what one then sees and hears is always true in the sense that it reoccurs unbidden and is not a function of somebody having made these preparations. It always turns out to be that way. We're going to go next week from Blake and from our philosopher, Susan Susanne Langer. We're going to go to two of the most strange books in world history. In ancient times, the perfector of the Greek language form that Greek tragedy transformed into Greek tragedy transformed into Plato's dialogues. And the last, greatest. Plato's dialogue was called the Timaeus, and the Timaeus is about how the process of transformation itself can undergo transformation so that you can learn not just to transform something, but you can transform transformation itself, which leads not to a new vision of things, but leads to a new cosmos, a cosmos that never was before and only is now because a community did it. And that reality is such that it responds to our prayers. And if we pray together in that right way, that possibility comes into play, even though it was never real before. Plato's Timaeus is going to be paired with W.B. Yeats last great book called A vision. Yeats, who schooled himself young on Blake, came to understand that there's something in the development of precognition that reoccurs on the other side of the transform as recognition. And while Plato's theory of recognition learning by remembering Blake wanted to find a way in which he could learn by precognition that the forms of the real were there in precognition as well as in recognition. Blake. Though he was a natural mind reader, he had psychic abilities unlike almost anybody at the time, but the person who had greater psychic abilities than him was the woman that he married his wife. And so Blake, towards the end of his life, spent years taking the automatic writing of his wife Georgie, and trying to tease out of her precognitions the universal structure of what Plato had found in recognition. And Blake was the kind of stubborn Irish political poet saint. He just never would give up. And finally pulled it off and stunned the world that out of a suitcase full of automatic writings by a woman who was supposed to just be fashionable and nothing in particular, he drew a cosmic, universal philosophy that dovetails with Plato's Timaeus perfectly and proves his point. We'll look at that next week and for about the next month. Thanks.