Vision 1

This is vision one and it's the beginning of our second year. Only our second year is not so much a second year, but it is a pair to the first year. Our education has both hands because we're informed about reality. We know that the electromagnetic nature of existence is that it's polarized, positive and negative, and that polarity works together not as an opposition so much, but as a set which has both push and pull And that the set of electromagnetic energy for existence is only one way out of two, which the equations for electromagnetic energy solve, and that they solve not only in a positive way, but they solve in a negative way. But when they were discovered, when they were creatively made in 1875 by James Clerk Maxwell, the Victorian English could not countenance that reality would include a negative solution to existence, and yet it does with equal application, so that here in the 21st century we're at home with the realization that there is not only our matter making our existence. But there's counter-matter. That has a complete mirror opposite charge. But not only that, there is positive and negative, but that there is a spin that electrons or positrons in the negative universe not only have a stable structure because of charge, but they have a transformational structure because of spin. And that is to say that there is a dynamic involved in the very nature of reality that allows for change in nature and for transformation in conscious nature. Our education has then not just two parts one and two, but they're both ones and they fit together as a set. And so though colloquially we're saying that we're beginning the second year, we're also recalibrating the first year, that the second year is a recalibration of the first year, because we're taking a different spin in nature, the spin, to use it in a metaphorical sense, the spin is always for integration. Nature integrates. Nature loves to explore all kinds of variants, but with always a mind to bring something into emergent vastness, into a quality. In Sanskrit it was called tathata. Google Translate. Translated in English in the 1950s and 60s by the English term Suchness. Suchness. Existence has this ability to emerge, and it emerges always with a purpose, to be, to achieve an integral, and that the entire ecology of nature can be characterized mathematically as a path integral, and one can learn much from that. But just as real as something that comes together is the other something equally which goes apart, and that is that integration is one mode, but differentiation is a complementarity Party to the integral, and that consciousness does not belong in the natural ecology of integration. Not that consciousness cannot work there, but it does not originate there. That the genesis, the generation of consciousness, is a differential mode of energizing, and that conscious dynamic is characterized not by bringing things together, but by exploring possibilities so that consciousness eventually is at home, and infinity. An infinity so profound that it is exchangeable logically with total, complete, pure emptiness. And the Sanskrit term for that in ancient times was taffeta for suchness, but shunyata for void. And that Suchness and the great void form a set, and that this set is real. So if the Zen koan characterized by the Japanese term for that koan mu. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. It doesn't mean equivalence as in an identity. From an integral standpoint, it means that form from an integral standpoint and emptiness from a differential standpoint are exchangeable. And because they're exchangeable, they have to be considered Heard together as a set in deep complementarity. The Japanese Zen koan mu. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form comes from the ancient Chinese. Understanding of Tao te that Tao the great openness and tae the great unity of existent. Form a set and in. We understand that considered together Tao te give us together in a set the realistic appraisal of ourselves, of who we are, of where we are, and what we can do. The Western version of bringing differential consciousness into play has a double origin. It has an origin going back equally both to India and to Egypt and the Egyptian lineage. The Egyptian history of the ideas involved in this eventually received a graph, starting very early, from a language that over the millennia evolved into Classical Greek. The roots of Classical Greek go back to about 2000 BC. It is called in Paleographic Archaeology. It's called linear A, and linear A is an early form of Greek spoken at a time about 2000 BC, about the time of Abraham, about the time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, and a later variant of linear A became linear B, and a later variant of linear B became the kind of language language that was spoken when the origins of Greek mythology were made about 1600 BC to about 1300 BC, and that language became, after several transformations, Classical Greek and the first writers in Classical Greek is Homer. About 900 BC, that Homeric Greek language underwent further refinement in an era of great philosophers, mainly Pythagoras and Plato, and that classical Greek went back into Egypt not as a continuation of the graph going back into antiquity, but went back as a conscious reformation of the entire language realm of the Egyptian Hermetic tradition, and it went back forcibly in the person of Alexander the Great, who went in and from the beginning laid out a new Egypt, a in fact a new city, Alexandria, which didn't exist before. There was a little fishing village called Rhacotis that was just a fishing village. He laid out one of the largest metropolises of the ancient world. The classic story is that he used a phrase from Homer from the Iliad. He loved Homer's Iliad because it was the archetypal manual out of which his great generalship. He was an unbeaten general. He never lost a major battle, and he felt a mystical kinship with Homer because his teacher Aristotle, had shown him how you read Homer by taking the little phrases in Homer and unfolding their integrated, packed amulet quality in the dynamic application of your own life so that you learn to live out the energy packed in those seeds of language. And it was called unfolding the Word. It was a sacred process. Only a God or a God's son could do it. And all other men, all other human beings, all other men and women, looked to this kind of divine king not because he was tough, not because he was militarily undefeated, but because he could do this thing. He could take sacred language and show how to live it out. And this was the sign of the divine King, so that the divine King later on in that Egyptian Hermetic tradition, became the embodiment of the word. He knew how to make the word into life and that the transformation by which this happened was a process of using light, which had gone into the integral ecology of integrating the word into an interior language symbol, and of transforming that interior language symbol by restructuring its light. And that this would then differentially play out as conscious life. Then, of course, the great symbol for that would be the Sun Ra. This ability to transform the integral word into conscious life was considered the sign of a of the Divine King and Alexander the Great and founding Alexandria set in motion a whole. Relationship in Egypt, where the Greek language absorbed and refashioned the Egyptian Hermetic tradition into a new, powerful expression. The Greek term for that tradition became the tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes thrice greatest, and that Hermes Trismegistus tradition that came out of Alexandria, that came out of the Egyptian history, recalibrated by the Greek language from Alexander on until what I used to call zero BC. Because around zero BC one finds a complete change in the most Fundamental form of integration. The most fundamental form of integration is not a powerful idea in the mind, nor is it some powerful thing in the world of space. But the most powerful integration is in the dimension of time itself, and that time when it is operating naturally in an integral. It will make a time form, but because the time forms have a beginning and they have a lifetime of development and extension, they also suffer. What all born things suffer, they suffer a death. So if there is such a thing as the end of a time form, and when a time form is over, everything made within the aegis of its purview. Everything within the bubble of that time form dissolves. It doesn't dissolve because it was wicked. It doesn't dissolve because it no longer works. It dissolves because that time form is over. So that one of the deepest things in the Egyptian sense of that necessary transformation that will surely come is that at the end of a millennium, at the end of some large time form, like an aeon, which is two millennia, or the end of some great time form? In Plato there was a time form as large as 26,000 years. An aeon for each of the 12 signs of the zodiac, plus an extra So that there is such a thing as the need for a transformation at the end of a time form period. The cognate tradition to Egypt occurred in India. But in India, the sense of time forms because it was not limited to the experience of a monkish set of those who withdrew from the world. The original monks are not Christian. They're not even Jewish. But they go back to the ancient Egyptian. There are illustrations of Egyptian monks 3000 years ago, 3000 years before the beginning of the current era. 5000 years ago, with the bald head and the robes and looking very much like monks have always looked. But the Egyptian quality of looking at time through a monastic withdrawal from the world in India had a different version. It was not so much withdrawal from the world, but making affinity to the cosmos. So the Indian sense of time is not by millennia or pairs of millennia, called aeons, or even 26,000 years, called the Great Platonic year. But the Indian sense of time was hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years kalpas. And that the time frame, then, is not according to this world at all, but according to the cosmos, for in India time is linked to the cosmos, while in Egypt time is linked to this world. But they are both distinct and different from the Chinese, where the sense of time was never considered separately from the sense of natural space. And the Dao in China is a completely different lineage from Egypt or from India, and has a has something to offer which neither Egypt nor India were ever able to offer. What China has to offer in its lineage is that change and eternity belong to the same set. And when they function together, then life is real. It's as if time and eternity in China were in a plasma form and not limited to solids, liquids, or even gases, so that the Chinese tradition has a plasma type quality of zeros and ones not linked in polarities, or even in disjunctive polarities, which don't link, or in deep senses of profound, subtle variants of integrals of revised polarities. But the Chinese understanding is that brought back into play in our time, in our century, of realistic complementarity, and in our time. The figure the Hermetic teacher who brought this back in was the great physicist Niels Bohr. And Niels Bohr is the first Westerner ever to put the Chinese tai chi symbol on the family crest of the Bohrs. He's the one who developed quantum physics. He's the one who saw most profoundly that you cannot look at structure in terms of suchness of existence or of emptiness, emptiness, void, or the relationship between them, unless you see that they always are together as a set. And because they are always together as a set, two functions occur as a set, one of them is continuity without end and the other is specificity to any degree of exactness. One of the outcomes of Bohr's understanding is a quantum physics, which sees that there are quanta which are quite real, and quanta are discrete bundles of energy and matter, but they occur in a continuity which allows for the intervals between the quanta to also be real. Though they are never counted, they are never counted because they are the intervals within which the ratio of one quanta to another are able to participate in making new sets of complementarities new sets of wholes. The closest that the West ever came to understanding that was in Pythagoras. Pythagoras came within an eyelash of being able to understand that, except that he was so severely disciplined in Egypt 22 years and then another 11 years in Iran, so that by the time he came back to his native Samos, he was so refined that he could not talk to anyone. And in fact, when he returned from his 33 years of journeying, he could not find a single student. No one could understand him. No one could hear him. His first student was a famous athlete who he paid to come and study under him. And the transformation of that man over a period of several years was so Found that at the end of three years Pythagoras said, I can no longer afford to pay you. The famous athlete said, no, I will pay you because I'm learning so much. And then the students flock to Pythagoras because they could see the effect. They could see what happened out of it. And the only figure to take the closeness of the Pythagorean to understanding, taught as a quantum transformational set was Parmenides. Parmenides, who wrote a mystical poem called The Way. But the way was not readable. Very few people could understand it, and the classic presentation of Parmenides is not in Parmenides, but in Plato's dialogue Parmenides and in the Parmenides. Plato sets up a chance to almost get to an understanding of Tao te. And then, because he was not able, as we used to say, in the Wild West, to pull the trigger. He wrote a severe criticism of knowledge in a dialogue called the Theaetetus, and then realized that the presentation of that severe radical critique. Of integration in the treatise left a puzzle as to why, then, is there a universe? Why are we here? How do on what basis are we here? And he wrote a dialogue that crowned everything. Having gone into the Parmenides, the mystery, the Theaetetus, the radical critique of knowledge, and then a then dialogue called the sophists, which matches up with the Theaetetus to talk about those who teach this critical way and what's wrong with them and what's wrong with them. And the sophists that comes out is that they founder not on synthesis, but they founder. The Greek term is Dionysius. They founder on division. They don't know how the division, the division of of experience. Shakespeare put it that way. The division of experience is what makes man noble, because he sees beyond the natural integral into possibilities that were never there in nature, and by Dionysius, by the process of division. He learns to analyze deeper than his mind can integrate, and he comes into the capacity to do something supernatural. Supernatural, that is, he becomes conscious of the limitations of his own mind and the dialogue that followed. The Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the sophist was the Timaeus, and in the Timaeus you have the beginnings of what became in classical Egyptian Greek tradition, it became a theory of music, which was not completely understood in antiquity and was one of the fundamental energizing centers of the rediscovery of the esoteric nature of classical antiquity that happened in the Renaissance and the they Renaissance understanding of music as the transform between the integral and the differential held in a complementarity set, is what made the Northern Italian Renaissance one of the greatest periods in the history of the planet, about 500 years ago. The understanding was completely profound at the time. The most conspicuous student of the time was called. He was so fantastic, and in this great Pythagorean sense, Pythagoras in classical antiquity was always alluded to that he became so energized by divinity that he became a golden man, and that his skin had the texture and timbre of like a living gold, so that he became like a shimmering, golden, mystical man. Later on in the English development of the Renaissance, he became the fabulous figure of an El Dorado, a golden man of the New World, who held the secrets of how nature transforms into conscious supernatural capacities and powers. In the Renaissance, the Golden Man was called Lorenzo the Magnificent IL Magnifico, and this is a little CD recording of some songs which he wrote, some little musical pieces which he wrote. Uh, Triunfo de Barco. Carnival songs. Carnival songs. They were songs that he learned to make spontaneously, and to accompany his singing of these spontaneous songs, he played an instrument called the lira da braccio. The lira da braccio is not a harp, but it is a bowed string instrument that has seven strings. Five strings are grouped together along the sounding board, and two auxiliary strings are paired and grouped so that you have a set of two and five, which is a transformation of the ancient mythological harp of Orpheus. Orpheus harp had seven strings. When did Orpheus heart harp have seven strings? About 1600 Hundred BC. In those days of linear B Greek, thousand years before the classical Greeks, Orpheus played a seven stringed lyre to charm the animals into a sense of participation with man's life. Because man knew the seven keys to bring the seven rays of light together in such a modulation that nature achieved its full integral. But by dividing the seven strings into five and two. In the Renaissance, one had a set of two strings and five strings, though they also could make seven strings. You could do things with the ratio of those strings together. So you had a new kind of music. Who taught this to Lorenzo the Magnificent? His teacher was named Ficino, Marsilio Ficino. And it is Ficino whose book of life forms one of our texts to begin this year. Vision one. We use Ficino's Book of Life, not a book of knowledge, a book of life. Because Ficino was the kind of philosopher for whom the transformation of language does not lead to certainty, it leads to certainty, but not to certainty. It leads to life. And when you're able to live it, you're quite certain that this is exactly what you want to do. The quality in Ficino is that he Discovered the core of classical tradition. The Hermetic tradition coming down through Egypt. Coming down through Pythagoras, but especially taking form in the way in which Dialogued language occurs in Plato. So that there is a thing called philosophy, the love of wisdom, not wisdom so much, but the love of wisdom. For wisdom becomes a thing in an integral. But the love of wisdom becomes a cooperative relationality in consciousness. And so a philosopher deals with conscious, loving, and not with just an integral thing which is loved or valued, not a possession which one has. But a non-possessiveness which one shares. And so there is a complete difference in regard that the philosopher in the Hermetic tradition is one who learns to share the love of the good life, and that the good life has a resonance with a differential form called the spiritual person, and is the spiritual person who loves and who is loved, and that the community of spiritual persons form a community which has a differential form, has a great function. It functions as a lens whereby the natural light is developed into the possibilities of not only all variants of light, but even all variants of invisible light, so that all energies have an ability to be lensed through the spiritual community and illuminate the cosmos, and that the cosmos shines not so much because there are objects called suns or stars which shine from themselves, but they shine in loving response to the spiritual community's effervescence. So that man belongs in the cosmos, not as a thing in a box, but as someone who shares the loveliness of the real. This is a completely different scale. It has nothing to do with instruction. It has everything to do with disclosure and discovery. Lorenzo the Magnificent made carnival songs because in Florence, there was a time of the year was called Colonne di Maggio. Colonne di Maggio began on May day and lasted until the 24th of June. May 1st is May day. The 24th of June is called Saint John's Day. Saint John was the patron saint of Florence, and on Saint John's Day it used to be all up until the end of the 19th century. In places like the wilds of Scotland, they would always, on the night of June the 24th, build huge bonfires on the top of hills, on the tops of mountains, and let the bonfire beacons burn to show heaven that we to make our stars to sing together. And when the embers were there, having the fire. Having burnt down and banked. The embers were kicked down the sides of the hills. Almost like a spiritual lava. To fructify the earth to make life happen again. And that man's spiritual fire, combined with the natural rain. And it was water and fire together, earth and conscious spirit from man that made the earth beautiful, that made life real. This is a whole different quality. One of the songs in here, from Lorenzo IL Magnifico, uh, is a development of a take off of a Renaissance tune made by an interesting character whose name was Heinrich Isaac Heinrich. Isaac was the official musical tutor for the Medici family. He was originally Flemish, born about 1450, and came to Florence about 1485, and he wrote a tune which went with the song, and the words of the song are Pelle, pelle, pelle, pelle means the little, the balls and the Medici coat of arms has these balls on it, and the parish were those who sang these songs and were supporters of of the Medici in the Renaissance. Lorenzo learned to play his bowed instrument, which later became the cello and the violoncello and the violin. Many instruments came out of it because it had a range of sublimity. That is, it not only went to where one could hear, but it extended our sensitivity to be alert to the silences that were beyond the range of this ear's hearing, but could be intuited by the invisible ears within the conscious spirit. One of the great examples of this is Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a piece for a concerto for the violin one time called The Lark Ascending. The lark comes from Shelley's poem The Skylark, that the lark is a bird which is able to fly so high that he flies out of sight. He flies, and so that he vanishes into the sky, so that the bird ceases to be a terrestrial thing and becomes the sky. And when one becomes sky clad, as the saying is, you have entered the world of great magic. You have entered the world of conscious supernatural in Tibet. The founder of the Vajrayana tradition, Padmasambhava, his lady, his great lady friend was called Skydancer because she could do that. She could sing in such a way that the illusion of your hearing went beyond the language into sacred realms of invisible apperception, of how the notes don't carry that far, but the harmonics do that. There are extensions in intuition, of harmonies, of resonance that go beyond this world. And when they go beyond this world, they go into the realm of the spheres, and it's in the music of the spheres that our singing joins the cosmos. And this is exactly the kind of music that you find in Pythagorean traditions. Here's a volume that came out, the Harmony of the spheres, a source book of the Pythagorean tradition in music. Joscelyn Godwin, who also did harmonies of Heaven and Earth, and of course, even in standard textbooks now, like this 1999 music in the age of the Renaissance, you find the mandolin, or in studies like this one, where a woman named Cathy Meyerbeer, music of the spheres and the Dance of death. That death is a limitation of the integral, but it is a node of transformation for the real. And so that the upper world and the nether world are all part of one spherical sky beyond the range of stopping so that the integral limitations which man gets from the hard existence which he has from the clever limitations of his mind, are no longer applicable to him as a spirit, nor to his home in the cosmos. We're going to take a break and we'll come back to this. This is a detail from a painting by Fra Angelico. Musicians. Renaissance musicians. And we're using. As part of the education, we're using music to help set the pitch pipe tone to the way in which experience feels in the phases of our education and in the back pages of our educational book. There's a whole page listing the music, and the music for the vision phase of our education is the composition Fra Angelico by Alan Hovhaness, the American composer who died just last year. Havana is a very large, six foot seven man who lived to be about 90. Born in Boston of Armenian and Scottish background, and Hovhaness is the first really Truly planetary composer. He went everywhere on Earth and learned all the musics, learned how to play all the instruments so that his music hundreds and hundreds of compositions. I called him once our Mozart. About 500 compositions, 62 symphonies. But like most things in the 20th century, all the really good stuff was unknown. Most of the people doing something new, and because it's new, you don't know how to look at it because it's new. And if you're just registering what you would recognize by looking to see, you wouldn't see it. But Hovhaness, Fra Angelico, and why would I use that as a music composition to set the tone for vision. Fra Angelico painted people like this. This woman. The whole notion of angelic figures that have a flame coming out of their forehead. You find this in William Blake. You find this because there is a quality of an energy flaming as if it were a sacred fire later on. The flame on the head like this was centered in the heart. And the flame on the heart was a center of Reformation symbolism, Luther and so forth. But the use of Fra Angelico, his figures. Here's an angelic presence coming to a figure in meditation. This painting was on a wall niche, and this wall niche was a cell. A cell made for prayer and contemplation and meditation. And it was on the second floor of a building in which there were 44 such cells. And this was in the first cell that these paintings, mostly by Fra Angelico. Fra means a brother, a father, brother. It's like Fra Filippo Lippi. It's a way of saying, brother, actually, Fra Angelico means brother Angel, but he was known in his time as a Giovanni da Fiesole. Uh, not that he was born in Fiesole, but he came from Fiesole. Fiesole is up on the rim of the hills above Florence. And Giovanni da Fiesole was one of the great painters in the Renaissance when it was first energizing itself. And Fra Angelico, in making a series of paintings for these cells, was going back to a primordial reality in the Christian tradition that predated the Appalachian Christian, the Christian religion when it began, I guess, you know, it was Jewish. Jesus was Jewish, and that the tradition began with a kind of Judaism, which scholars today call Hellenistic Judaism, that is, a Judaism that had as its language of communication Greek, that its center of population was in Alexandria and not in Jerusalem, not in Palestine, and that this language in fact necessitated the translation of what is called now the Old Testament, what was originally the Torah and the prophets and the wisdom literature, the Megilloth. They were translated into Greek out of the Hebrew, because the population of people could not read Hebrew, and so that population in Alexandria had a translation called the Septuagint, a very large book. It's still in print 2300 years later. The Septuagint means um, translated by the 70. Actually, there were 72. The Jewish population of 300 BC was very careful in their response to an invitation from Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria, the ruler of Alexandria. He said, I have the largest library in the world, and I want all the sacred scriptures, and I don't have the Jewish Sacred Scriptures, so I want to have a translation committee to translate them into Greek so I can have them in my library. And scholars coming from everywhere in the world can read them. And so the response from the Jewish community in Palestine was to send six translators from each of the 12 tribes, making 72. And they worked for many years in Alexandria to make that translation, so that when it comes to the New Testament, the New Testament is not written in Hebrew, it's written in Greek. Why is it written in Greek? Because it came out of Hellenistic Judaism, a kind of a Judaism in which the Greek language Wage of that era of that time was the most expressive medium. And yet it is exactly that Greek language that recalibrated the ancient Egyptian experience of religion, so that Hellenistic Judaism has a de facto recalibration of the ancient Hermetic tradition. Back to the Egyptian Thoth, back to the origins of the pyramid text, back to the origins of the what is called the Egyptian Book of the dead. The coming forth by day. So that in the New Testament right away you have many complex layers, all brought into play at the same time, so that it's very difficult to read a New Testament That book without understanding that it has dozens and dozens of layerings, and is so sophisticated as to almost stagger the ability to be a scholarly about it. One of the qualities in Hellenistic Judaism that became Christianity is that there is a period of transformation where one transforms from looking at this world to coming within and looking at an inner world. And that one of the qualities in that transform is that instead of looking at things as you do in this world, you train the site to look inwardly, not at things that are within, but at the wholeness, the unity Of all things, so that inner sight does not see things, but sees wholeness. Sees wholeness. Sees D.T. Suzuki one time in an interview with Huston Smith when. Huston Smith was a young man, he asked Suzuki about Zen and. And the lights were glaring like, they are on me and Suzuki and his glasses. And finally he understood what the young Huston Smith was asking. He said oh, oh, oh. He said that concerns consciousness. Perception in this world integrates to conception in the mind based on this world. But inner seeing does not see things. It sees wholeness which are so beyond things that it's the context out of which all things would come. So that the inner eye sees only the wholeness, the unity it sees in the Chinese phrase, it sees only tae, but sees tae not as a form, but sees tae within its context of Tao, so that it sees nothing. So that one of the qualities of Hellenistic Judaism. If you see an image of God, you have not yet learned to see the divine. You must see until the images of this world vanish, till they fade. And when you are able to look within with no images whatsoever, then you are a part of the family, of the inheritor of the divine. And that that transform. In Hellenistic Judaism and early Reality. It was called one time in scholarly parlance. Primitive Christians by a man named Bultmann, because he wanted to emphasize that this was original. The original Christians, not doctrinaire sects or groups, but the original. I would suggest a modification primordial instead of primitive, because there was nothing primitive about them. Primordiality. And that one of the tests in primordial Hellenistic Judaism is that you saw no images, and yet you were able to see clearly that whole tradition when it develops in India, especially the interface between India and China known as Tibet. It comes out as clear light. One does not see things, but one sees clearly the clear light, which doesn't register, so it's called Vajrayana. It's called the diamond vehicle that you see the scintillation of the illness without seeing specificity things. While in Hellenistic Judaism you saw nothing in primordial Christianity that came out of that. That was that Hellenistic Judaism. It isn't that one so much just saw nothing but that one heard the songs of the divine. But the songs of the divine were not of this world. They were made of those who had transformed in this world and were singing for the first time, and that what you heard was yourself singing with others in the same community, that the choir of angels were those transformed so that they were able to hear themselves originally spontaneously singing praises. It was the sound, not of those guys up there, but of us here singing out of the spontaneousness of the silence of the spirit. And one of the criteria of primordial Christianity was to be able to pray spontaneously in a beautiful use of conscious language. It was the ability to compose a spiritual poem, a spiritual hymn on the spur of the moment in praise of God. And that the spontaneity came out from the wholeness of your soul free, so that the language that was used was not the language of the world, but was the language of the spirit. It was a conscious language, was a magic language in the sense that those who could hear it were transformed. If, to use the Elizabethan pronunciation, they were transformed and became instantly a part of the community because they could hear. Their ears became tuned to hear the sacred songs of the community, and that this was a different form of prayer from saying, oh, give me this, give me that. If I don't have a new Bentley, I don't know what I'm going to do. Not only do you need no car because there are no roads, but you don't even need the need for no roads. That's called the high Dharma. This quality of mature Hellenistic Judaism, primordial Christianity, is that there was a period of transform, and it was going into partly the withdrawal from this world, but that that was just a superficial veil, that the withdrawal of the world itself took place on a veiled plane, because it wasn't withdrawal that you were practicing. It was opening up to ultimate disclosure, and that the ultimate disclosure was not of things, but of the wholeness of the real, which contained the Tao and the Tay in a set, in a Transform, but that that required a period of being within the Greek term for it. Actually, in Ancient Greek, monasterium monasterium, when it was translated into English in Elizabethan times, came out as a closet. If you can imagine, you went into your private closet within because they didn't want to say monastic cell. The Elizabethans didn't want to have anything to do with monastic cells. These are the people. This is Marlowe and Shakespeare, and thank you. But no, we're not into that. But a monastery is a quiet place. Within that one goes not to stay, but to transform. And so the original Cells of the community were monastic cells, so that you went there to make the transform and to come out singing. And those original cells, the original community that made that happen were called therapeutic therapeutics. Why? Because they could cure. They didn't adjust. They cured. And so there was a therapeutic to the entire ensemble of the activity that one knew how to integrate well enough to get to the transformational node of the silence, and then to go through that transform and come out and differentially sing spontaneously so that these cells decorated by Fra Angelico in Florence, were built under the direction of Cosimo de Medici, and the place was called San Marco. Saint Mark's and San Marco is world famous. Not now for the transform monasteries arranged like mature Hellenistic Judaism, primordial Christianity, but because it had the world's first great library in 1700 years. Cosmos Library at San Marco was the place in which he, with all of his money and contacts. He was an international banker. He was into trade, wool and various other Medici concerns, and he was one of the. He was the Bill gates of his day. He was really rich. Um, really rich and really refined. In fact, he is called the father of the country. In Italy, Pater patriae. He's the big daddy for everybody. He's the ultimate godfather. Not of this or that family, but of the entire place. Everybody. And when a Cosimo wanted things done, he knew how to do them. He didn't have to shout to get things done. He would make a suggestion in 45 levels of people said, let's get it done. Cosimo would like to get it done. Cosimo built San Marco not only for the library downstairs, but for the array of 44 cells of the monastery on the second floor, and had Fra Angelico set up the illustration of it, and in one place he had a mystical life of Christ, arranged so as to complement the 44 paintings in the monastery and transformed cells, and at the very beginning of the life of Christ. You don't find his birth, but you find the vision of Ezekiel. If you've been following the course, you get it right away. They're very wise. They're very wise. Why? Ezekiel is a different sort of prophet from Moses. Moses is the prophet sent to bring the people out of imprisonment. Out of that kind of exile. Whereas Ezekiel is the prophet who doesn't necessarily just bring people out of exile, but he makes a vision for a new covenant that this new covenant needs to be of a different sort, that the integral covenant of before is not enough because it led to a dead end. Great as it was not a dead end so much, but it led to a non-ending cycle of integral, and that that integral repeated and repeated, and it was stable as long as the repetition was kept accurately in the integral. Whereas Ezekiel was after something new, a completely new form, so that the cycle, instead of meeting where it had begun, it went one step further. So that instead of a circle, if you went through the cycle, the circle transformed into a spiral. So that time was taken out of a mythological circle and was put into a conscious spiral. Cosimo de Medici understood this extremely well, but he was not an artist himself. His grandson Lorenzo was fabulous artist could not only make music, he could make paintings. He could do everything. But Cosmo lived at a time where he had confreres in Florence who understood this, and one of the world's greatest artists was a contemporary of Cosimo de Medici. His name was Donatello. Donatello is the first great sculpture since classical antiquity. And he made a figure. About. 1410 to 1420 of David. King, David. And then about 20 years later he made another figure of David, King David, which looks radically different. And the second, Donatello David, is the first freestanding nude since classical antiquity and blew out the Middle Ages permanently. The first David that Donatello made understood the spiral of conscious time, that the line of conscious time spirals forth and creates a dynamic, so that conscious time has a dynamic which discloses itself as history. Conscious time, unlike natural dimension of time, has a supernatural generative quality known as history. In Egypt, the ultimate movement of God of the divine results in the appellation that the Lord is the Lord of millions of years And in the Jewish understanding of that God is the Lord of history. That our God has something to do with history, disclosing heaven to those on earth in such a sense that those on earth have an active part in participating. By allowing the dynamics of history to develop in such a way that it does disclose the cosmos. Not that the cosmos is there and then is disclosed, but that the spiralling development of conscious, dynamic, personal artistic history makes the cosmos happen. It happens because we do this. All of it is seated here in Ezekiel's vision. Ezekiel had this vision before. Well, about the time of Pythagoras, about that same time, Ezekiel and Pythagoras and Lao Tzu and the historical Buddha all lived at the same time. It's a great diagonal horizon, not a horizon that's a plane, but a horizon that's a radical diagonal that cuts through time space with a new consciousness everywhere on the planet. To understand that we are not just figures in someone else's puppet show. We're not figures being handled by bad demons and good angels. We are figures who, in our own freedom, disclose the conscious possibilities of the divine. And that's why we're family. That's why Cosimo de Medici took great care at making a spiritual family, and his spiritual family included not only people like Donatello. The first David is a statue based on the spiral line. The folds of the garment, the it's David standing over the head of Goliath. And in the middle of Goliath's head is the stone. But there's a second stone that's in this sling, and the sling is dropped on top of the head. And the empty right hand of David looks like he's just, uh. The movement goes from the head to the sling to the hand, to the dynamic of the folds. And this mystic spiral of the original. David shows the movement of the line, and it's the crowning point of a medieval understanding. Esoterically. But 20 years later, Donatello's David is the beginning of a Renaissance figure. Different because his David is nude, he doesn't have any folds of clothing to show the spiral line because his nude David carries the line wherever he goes in his entirety. It's the mobility of the body that carries the spiral in the Renaissance, different from a mental conception symbolically, of what it is, it is instead a conscious differentiation of doing. The Renaissance is about doing that. Man is mobile and capable of doing all things. He doesn't measure it with his mind. He calibrates it with his life. The Renaissance is about spiritual life, quite different, so that the Library of San Marco had all these beautiful volumes that Cosimo de Medici was having people go out and buy and bring together in Florence. He at one time you can see how long the library was. He had 32 benches of fresh cypress wood made. Each one was faced with an array of new books that were being brought in, books that hadn't been seen, sometimes for a thousand years. Books that were found in monastic libraries all over Europe and the Mideast. Volumes, like Tacitus, that nobody had read for maybe 5 or 600 years, except an errant monk here or there, silently. And all of a sudden they realized what we are doing here. Our distant ancestors did then, and that we have a tie with them, and that the tie is not on the level of causality, but on the level of a harmonic, which is made through differential resonance being put together into a scale, and that the scale is actually a scale which we recognize as the key to how music happens for us. Miss Maya Bayer, Kathy Meyerbeer and Music of the Spheres and Dance of Death as a beautiful page. Her chapter five Tonal Theories of Music of the spheres, and she goes into the ways in which musical theory and compositional practice and the structures, the mathematical structures of sound and of notes, and of them being collected together, eight notes being brought together as an octave. An infinity sign put into a horizontal, an eight put into a horizontal, that the horizon of a set that can open up into infinity is a quanta, which can be used on Earth, but also can be used to disclose a ratio relationality of wholeness that resonates out indefinitely into infinity. And she says here, the starting point for most theories was again, Plato, and in this instance was provided by the Timaeus. The last book we used last year, Plato's Timaeus, is the seed which now is transformed into the first book that we're using this year, which is a ficino's book of life. But we're pairing with Ficino's Book of Life, the first collection, The Hermetica The Writings of Hermes Trismegistus from Alexandria about 90 A.D., the kind of Greek that was used by Saint John to write his gospel, so that the hermetica is actually arranged in what we would recognize today in a scholarly way, because most of the scholars that dealt with it, they call it New Testament Greek. And one of the great scholars of New Testament Greek. His greatest book among many great books, The interpretation of the Fourth Gospel by C.H. Dodd, Professor Emeritus in the University of Cambridge in England, published by Cambridge, 1955. And the whole first section of his book is on the Hermetic literature. Because the patron saint of Florence, Italy, wrote in a language and in a compositional style that's clearly allied to the language and style of the Hermetic Books, the first one of which is called the Poimandres, the mind shepherd, that the learning of this Hellenistic Judaism, this primordial Christianity, was somehow brought into a distillation, not to get an essence, but to get a form available for a deeper transform, a form that was no longer staying in the integral, but transformed differentially into a possibility where it could then form a set with the highest integration from before and the broadest range of differentiation now possible, and that those two together as a set were the way in which the real could be lived, not just disclosed to the mind, but lived that one's life exemplified it. The ancient, esoteric West said, the life lived is the doctrine received so that you can test it. Are you living it? And it's called the living proof. She writes here, uh, Miss Mayr, Meyerbeer writes. She says this series that comes from Plato's Timaeus, which is actually Pythagorean, but it's Plato's transform of a Pythagorean quality that had been brought into essence by Parmenides, had been criticized in the Theaetetus and the Sophist by Plato, and then refashioned so that it was a platonic Pythagorean ism, so that the Timaeus is the Old Testament of Pythagoras and the New Testament of Plato, brought together as a Bible set, so that the Timaeus disclosed that there is a numerical. There is a mathematical structure to transform, and that the proof of it, the living of it, is the composing of music. By that she writes. The basic puzzlement becomes clear if the mathematical progression in the Timaeus is shown to have two orders, both of them beginning with one. The first order goes from 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 4, 4 to 8. It doubles the other order starts with one, but goes to three and then goes to nine, then goes to 727 so that it triples so that A doubling and tripling, a doubling and a cubing, so that taking unity as the common, it's always a common. It's called the Aletheia of existence. The aletheia of existence is that it is one. In Hellenistic Judaism, as in Judaism since the time of Abraham, hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one. That that is the starting point by which existence begins to have its form, and keeps its form and has its stability. But that woven in with that is also the understanding that change, as the mystery of nature, allows for all forms to transform. They not only can stay stable, they stay stable as long as time holds that when the dimension of time no longer holds. Space doesn't crumble. It evaporates. It leaves everything in pure air, mid air. But if you can fly, if you can suspend your need for judgement, then the aesthetic of pure spatial non temporality is no longer a threat, but simply an environment for transformation. An environment whereby one can pivot in the dance and begin a new course, a new course of motion, she writes. She says, starting from the number one which belongs to both orders, the doubling and then the cubing, they were often held because they were like this one order went this way and the other order went this way. That was the Greek lambda. The letter lambda in in Greek. So that lambda progression. Has something to do, I would imagine, with lamb, the sacrificial lamb. Can you imagine? We are we have the geometric progression of the numbers two and three, so that the pair and the triad progress. That is to say, they morph. And as they morph, they morph according to orders, orders that develop exponentiality. And she writes here, if these numbers, if these two orders two, four, eight, three, nine, 27, if these two orders are connected not only at one but connected along their morphing progression every paired lines. What we obtain are ratios of the musical intervals. These are 1 to 2 for the octave. 1 to 3 for the octave. Plus fifth. 2 to 3 for the fifth. 3 to 4 for the fourth and 8 to 9 for the whole tone. Although the Timaeus does not refer directly to music, these are the intervals that appear in the musical treatises of Greek authors insofar as they have come down to us. What the Renaissance discovered was that the experiential feeling, tone, sentience of our, of our experience in this world can be changed by compositions that consciously use this kind of musical ratio to bring out in us new qualities that were never there before. And of course, one of the great figures that developed this at the time was Palestrina and Palestrina, when he consciously, as a Renaissance composer, realized what he was able to do, used a form of song called the motet, and he made a series of 21 motets that went together as a transformational set, and they were 21 motets about the about the Song of songs. One of the texts from the Old Testament. The book that Solomon wrote his Song of Songs is his his singing. His father, David, was very good at singing psalms. In fact, David's Psalms are one of the high water marks in the planet of spiritual hymns from the conscious person. But David did not just sing his songs, he danced them as the phrase is. He danced them with all his might, and because he could dance with all his might, he was made king. And his city that was made for him out of that was Jerusalem. David comes about 1000 BC. He comes midway between Abraham and Jesus, and the lineage is Abraham. 1000 years, David 1000 years. Jesus. So that in the Renaissance. Renaissance, Hermetic Christianity was at the same time a Hellenistic Judaism de facto. So that when it came time to reading something like The Gospel According to Matthew, the 21st chapter, Matthew has 28 chapters. It's a lunar cycle, and three quarters through exactly 21. That's like a major Arcana. Oh my goodness. And when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, go to the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. And if anyone says anything to you, you shall say, the Lord has need of them. And he will send them immediately. This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet. And then they give a quotation. But the quotation when it says, tell the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on an ass. The king is coming, is re-entering his city of Jerusalem. David is coming again. Coming home. Why would he ride an ass, a donkey? Why would he? Because the original caravan animal in Abraham's time was the donkey, not the gray donkey. That's like a burro. But the tough mountain black haired donkey. Really a tough animal. There were no camels. There were no horses. The black donkey was the caravan animal. And Abraham ran the caravans for the Fertile Crescent because his father had set it up. His father was like Cosimo de Medici. He. Lived in Haran, which was at the top of the Fertile Crescent on the Euphrates River, and he had the rights for the caravans going from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Ocean. And his son Abraham not only had those caravan routes, but made sure that he had the ability to have a home in both places so that Abraham was at home. He was at home in the Euphrates River region. He was at home in Palestine. Jerusalem is made for David because this is the return of that original covenant. And Jesus remembering all of these lineages because he was the inheritor of that particular DNA. He was descended. That's what Matthew says at the beginning. He gives the 42 generations of Jesus and puts him in the house of David, in the lineage of David. All of this in the Renaissance. Was not grist for the mill, but was a contemplative tapestry from which to discover and rediscover capacities that have been lost to man in the meantime. And when they found how great were the volumes of Plato and Tacitus and Sophocles that the Middle Ages had lost, they wanted to know what has the Middle Ages lost of our own Christianity. And at the same time as that was happening, they were rediscovering the ancient classical learning and the primordial Christian learning. They rediscovered Hellenistic Judaism. And so they began to learn Hebrew. And someone like Johannes Reuchlin or Pico della mirandola learned Hebrew along with Greek and Latin, because this were these were the classic languages of disclosure, and by the time of Elizabethan England, all cultivated people in England knew how to read and write and sing in Hebrew, as well as Greek as well as Latin, as well as English four languages at the same time. More next week.