Vision 2

This is vision two, and I'd like to begin with the Hymn of Jesus. There's a musical setting of The Hymn of Jesus by Gustav Holst, who also wrote the composition called The Planets. That's a very popular. And The Hymn of Jesus was an ancient hymn in antiquity that was rediscovered and found and during the Renaissance. The Hymn of Jesus became a kind of an indicator for the Italian Renaissance. That part of the spiritual life was singing and dancing, and that singing and dancing were an integral expression with poetry, and that prayers are really hymns, and that hymns are really poems, so that the prayer, contemplative state of spirit expresses itself naturally and also spontaneously as well as consciously in poetry. In the Italian Renaissance that we're looking at the Ficino inspired renaissance of the Hundreds. We have to be aware that Italy, for some 200 years before this, already had examples in action, working examples in their culture, and that the foundations of the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy were already laid and these foundations were already working. For instance, the core of the Renaissance realization about the spirit, that the spirit dances and sings spontaneously in sacred poetry had one of its roots in Saint Francis of Assisi, who was born in the late 1100s. The Saint Francis of Assisi was already famous for his ability to compose songs, poems that could be sung, and even as a young man, Francis was famous as the. He was the superstar of his day for popular songs, and the little flowers of Saint Francis are really expressions of this kind of, um, almost like a John Lennon or George Harrison type of a figure. And he loved singing. He loved music so that we're not surprised that 200 years later, one of Ficino's most memorable punctuations to the entire year was the celebration of Plato's birthday on the 27th of November, with a huge banquet of students and friends at which everyone would sing as in a choir together, but at the same time there would be portions where individuals would sing their own compositions individually, and that one of the highest marks of Ficino's education was that you would be able to sing spontaneously, sing a spiritual song, that you would make up spontaneously on the moment to fit into the choral sequences of the choir, so that you had two distinct qualities merging together. You had the spontaneous individual voice, and you had the community choral programmed voice, and that you would bring the two together, and that the bringing of the individual and the community, the community which had been traditionally choreographed to sing in a certain way with the individual who sings spontaneously and bringing them together in the same event, was always a sign of the wedding of heaven and earth, of the divine marriage of spirit and body, and that this was something that resonates from antiquity in a time that we can date very accurately. And before then, it never happened at all. And after that time in antiquity when it reached its apex in the third century A.D., it spread throughout the ancient world to such an extent that one can hear today anywhere, say, in a place like Africa, you hear an individual voice singing, and then the voice of whoever constitutes the community chime in, and the individual voice and the community blend together, just like in ancient wisdom times. One of the characteristics 100 years ago of the joy of the safari in Africa was for Europeans who had forgotten all this to hear the beautiful, spontaneous singing of those porters who were constituting the the safari, one of the steps in that resonance of how Africans remembered to sing and dance, because the spirit and the body are real together in that way. What are the steps in that? One of the phases is the Ethiopian people. And the Ethiopian people originally came from India, and they brought with them their heritage from India, a certain kind of orientation towards an interiorization of life, a yoga. And you can find in the Ethiopian people in ancient times that they were the first people to get the resonance of the new wave of Hellenistic Judaism that was becoming what we now call nascent Christianity. The first Christian communities outside of Hellenistic Judaism were in Ethiopia, so that a friend of mine a number of years ago, Professor Wolf Leslau, who was at UCLA for umpteen years and before that in various universities around the world, was the great man in Ethiopic studies. His library contained about 2500 volumes, and they were all on Ethiopia. The UCLA Library on Ethiopian Studies is a duplicate of his own personal library. He said that when he first, as a young man, began to go into the back country of Ethiopia. He was surprised to find that the Ethiopian Christianity was very similar to what he had understood as being the gorgeous fringes of the Judaism that he was familiar with, having grown up in Vienna, born in Poland but grew up in Vienna because the earliest Christianity was definitely Jewish. It was a Hellenistic Jewish development that came later to be called Christianity, and there was a retrospective projection onto Hellenistic Judaism that made it, in retrospect, Christian. And so the Jewish communities, not wanting to have a point of confusion, separated themselves from that style of Judaism that could be confused with the nascent Christianity. And the decision for that was in 90 A.D., at a council called the Council of Jamnia in Syria, and it was decided there that the Jewish tradition would go back to a point before Hellenistic Judaism began to explore its cosmic range of possibilities that led to the development of being confusable. Because not being distinguishable from nascent Christianity, and at the Council of Jamnia, it was decided that the text of the Torah would remain Unchanged from that determined previous point, and that text is called the Masoretic Text and the Masoretic Text of the Torah and the prophets from 90 A.D. is exactly the same as you would find today in any synagogue in the world. No punctuation mark even has ever been changed. But nevertheless, in between the Masoretic Text established in Jamnia and the original that it was based upon, and what was the original that it was based upon? It was based upon an original about 450 years before that was determined in an era called the era of Ezra and Nehemiah and Ezra and Nehemiah were the high priest and the, um, uh, the speaker for the community at a time when the Jews came back out of their exile, out of their exile from the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, which it finally had been, um, morphed into the kingdom of Cyrus the Great. And Cyrus the Great said, you have served us well for 70 years. You can all go home. And so the Jews came out of exile, not from fighting their way out, but as a gift from Cyrus the Great for great service. They were not slaves in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. They ran the empire because they were multilingual. They were talented. They could do many things. They were excellent in business. They were excellent in keeping the community together, so that the administrative executive for 70 years had been a population of people who never failed to work together and keep accurately the kingdom, so that that kingdom worked very well. And that's how Cyrus took it over. He knew how to make things work. When the Jews came back from exile around 450 A.D., it was found that they had lost the sense of certainty in their own tradition. And so the traditions were brought back together and put into a special form. The form was a considered best text. Conclusion of researches into all the variants that were existing at the time and that Bible, that Torah, that prophets, that histories, all of that in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah was the prototype which the Council of Jamnia, some 500 years later, chose as the text. In the meantime, this was a form that was completely clear, almost a geometrical kind of boundedness that was imposed upon a field that was vast. It was not only vast at the time of the Council of Jamnia, it was vast at the time that they came out of the exile, because one of the big difficulties with the Jewish tradition in ancient times was its necessity to establish itself, its identity, its cultural values, its continuity vis a vis the overwhelming tidal wave of Egyptian history and Egyptian culture. The Jewish tradition always faced the Egyptian culture as if they were facing a stern father, symbolized by the pharaoh. Judaism has always struggled against Egyptian civilization, and in that struggle has defined itself as a child growing up and defined itself against a tyrannical father. But the Iranian Persian Neo-Babylonian Cyrus the Great culture was never a tyrannical father to the Jewish tradition. It was always the overwhelming eat more, mother. You're looking too thin. Have some soup so that the Egyptian tyrannical father civilization was countered by the Persian overweening mother civilization. And so the Jewish problems with the Persian Iranian ethos are not the problems with the father. They are the problems with the mother. One has to learn to to be free of them in the sense that, well, I'm all grown up now, mother. I'm not going to eat your matzo anymore. I'm going to eat filet mignon that I cook that kind of maturity. So coming back from the exile was a strange breaking away from the mother. Strange, because the Jewish tradition begins in its formative origins as a Movement between emerging from the mother and discovering and confronting the father, and the original prototype of that is Abraham, not Abraham, as some kind of symbolic figure, that you would have a metaphysics about Abraham. Because what did Abraham do? What was his business? He ran caravans. He ran the biggest string of caravans in the world. He ran caravans from the Persian Gulf region, all the way along the Euphrates River and up on an arc coming down to the Mediterranean Sea and all the way down the coast of Palestine to Egypt, and all the way into Egypt, up and down the Nile, so that the original patriarch that founded the Jewish tradition specifically was a runner of caravans, was a runner of caravans along the geology and geography of what has been called the Fertile Crescent, and that the Fertile Crescent is literally arable, farmable land in the midst of a desert. If you go along the Persian Gulf, Tigris, Euphrates valleys, it's extremely fertile. If you go more than 50 miles outside, you find nothing but stony desert. If you go into Iran, you find a desert plateau that's been desiccated for 7 or 8000 years. No one lives there. You can't live there. You can't live along the coast of southern Iran on the Indian Ocean. It's very unhealthful. No one lives there. There are no cities there to this day. The Arabian Peninsula is a desert. Egypt is a desert. North Africa, the Sahara. So that the Fertile Crescent is a form imposed upon an endless, seemingly endless desert so that it seems like a gift in the shape of this fertile crescent. And that fertile crescent has a mirror in heaven. It has the crescent moon, so that the crescent moon becomes a heavenly symbol that shows the form of which the whole swath of life, life itself is in this kind of ultimate form. And so the slim crescent moon. The ISIS moon is the symbol of life giving, and ISIS is the life giver, and she wears a crescent moon on her brow to show that she is Mythically, the mother of all life. She is the life giver. And Abraham, running the caravans along the Fertile Crescent, was like the sap of life on earth that mimic the heavenly sense of life, so that the patriarchal tradition from Abraham made of Judaism a very special from the beginning, a very special form, and that that form was held by something that was not military power, it was not geographical integrity, because they were all disparate cultures. What held Abraham's Fertile Crescent caravan together. He had a special covenant with his God, and that that covenant was held by a special symbol, which also art, like the Fertile Crescent arc, like the crescent moon. It was the rainbow, and so the rainbow became the symbol of the guarantee that God favored this man and his lineage in this special way. The reason for going into this at some length is that in the Italian Renaissance, when they rediscovered classical learning, they rediscovered Plato. They found editions of Tacitus. They found editions of Aeschylus and Sophocles of Thucydides, and they began to rediscover classical antiquity. They found that at the center of classical antiquity, at the apex of the power of classical antiquity, it had shifted its allegiance to Christianity. And that this Christianity, that it had shifted its allegiance to, was not the Christianity of later councils at the time of Augustine 400 A.D., but the Christianity of the earliest times. So when they discovered in the Italian Renaissance that classical basis of civilization, that they were rebirthing Renaissance, they Renaissance of the classical Learning. They also had, at the very same time, the renaissance of the essence that classical learning had transformed into, and that is early Christianity. But as they went deeper into recovering the classical learning, and thus the earliest Christianity, they found that the earliest Christianity was of a kind that was different from the Council's. It wasn't the Christianity of the medieval scholastics that developed out of the councils. And so they began to say to themselves, the medieval scholastic period is obviously one of degeneration, and that the reason that they had all these councils to fight over all these points. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Does Jesus have one nature or two. That his mother ever Mary. His Joseph. Et cetera. Et cetera. That all of these are issues of a degenerate mentality based upon a period of confusion, and that the Renaissance was a rediscovery of classical clarity. We have the clarity of Plato. We have the clarity of Thucydides. We have the clarity of Tacitus. We know what we know, and we're quite aware of where the limits of our knowledge are. And beyond that we don't know. But we know how to find out so that we have a certainty, a double certainty. We're quite clear about what we know, and we're also equally clear about a method of investigating what we don't know, to find out what we need to know. And in the center of that classical field that was transformed into the essence of an early Christian form that was really a kind of Hellenistic Judaism. They found a synthesizing, invisible thread that at the very center of the Christian crescent, in the classical crescent that had a Jewish crescent and an Egyptian overlay of a different kind of primordiality that it was both very ancient, but also was the core, the invisible core, the esoteric core of it all. And that was the Hermetic writings. So when they rediscovered the body of classical learning. They learned that it had a neural system of early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, but that the key in the system was the Hermetic Teachings. So that they found very quickly within one generation that if you rediscover Plato and Thucydides and Tacitus, you rediscover the origins of Christianity in Hellenistic Judaism, and that all of that has something to do with the ancient Egyptian Hermetic tradition coming all the way through the entire thing. And so the Italian Renaissance in northern Italy has a tripartite like a parfait. On the surface, it looks like a rediscovery of classical learning. But when you go deeper into it? It's a rediscovery of primordial Christianity and de facto Hellenistic Judaism. And deeper than that, the most esoteric. The foundation is the Hermetic writings. So that when you talk about the Renaissance, you have to be aware that there are three distinct levels one. Rather broad. Like the bread of a sandwich, the other fairly narrow, yet still substantial, like the meat of the sandwich. But the taste is in the mustard. That's just a trace level. But that's where the taste is, and that's the hermetic writings. So that not only is there a hymn of Jesus, there is also an addition in the very same set and series, um, the Hymns of Hermes. And while The Hymn of Jesus was set to music by Gustav Holst, the composer of The Planets. No one has set the hymns of Hermes to music. They can go that far yet. That's for the 21st century. When you look at the Hymn of Jesus, what does it say? How does it read? It reads. I would be begotten and I would beget. Amen. I would eat and I would be ate. Amen. I would hear and I would be heard. I would understand and I would be understood. And then one comes to, I would be washed and I would wash. Amen. This grace leads to the dance. Amen. I would play a dirge. A slow song for lamenting. Amen. The one eight. The one Ogdoad sounds plays with us. Amen. And then they talk about those whose nature it is to dance, do dance. And from this comes the whole motion. That the Hymn of Jesus was sung by a choir who were in a ring dancing. And from time to time there would be a pair of figures that would come out of the ring and do a dosido and go back into the ring so that you had this movement, not a circularity movement. They didn't return back to the circle. The circle was somewhat left open so that in its turning, the dosey doe was from the ends of the circle that came in to the center and went back out. And so if you followed it on a computer graphing, it would be a living infinity sign. That living infinity sign is the mystic eight. The ogdoad. Where does that come from? It comes from the ancient Egyptian understanding of how the structure, from unnameable openness emerges in a sequence of unfoldment, and the sequence of unfoldment is that the one becomes two. The two becomes four, the four becomes eight, and the eight integrate to the one which disappears back into the illness. The ancient Egyptian theology understood that the unnameable godhead can be designated as an atom, from which we get the Greek word atom, which means the fundamental element of the universe. An atom, which means the name of the first man. An atom at this atom, though is unnameable, cannot be named. Why? Because names are forms, and the ultimate Godhead is before form occurs. So that the ancient understanding was that in terms of time, God is eternal. And yet anything that we can name, anything that we can say is within a time form is time dated. So that the ultimate boundedness of form is not an outline that you draw with your finger or a stylus, or your motion of ideas about something. The ultimate boundedness of form is time. So that the movement of time always has, because of its nature, a beginning, a middle of some extent, and an end. So that all forms are drawn by time's movement from beginning to middle to end, and and that while there is a genesis that begins time, there is an apocalypse that ends time. Not all time. Just that time form and that that time form when it is finished, anything made by the boundedness of that moving time dissolves. And so a new time form must emerge. Where does it emerge? It emerges out of the formless. Eternal. So that men and women who live at an end of a time form of the largest extent have a very peculiar but very recognizable alignable, with other generations of men and women who also lived at the end of a time form. They all have the same task, and that is to bring out of eternity a new quality of time so that there can begin to be again something which will hold its traction in this world and will keep time. In other words, you have to have some way to have a calendar. You have to have some way to gauge the periodicity of time vis a vis a calendar, so that you know what the ultimate source of form is for whatever forms you're making. A culture that has no calendar will never have any integral possibilities. So that keeping the metronome of time is one of the most sacred of all events. And in the Jewish tradition, time is kept by the Sabbath. Every seven days Of the week and in the times of Israel and Nehemiah. The delivery of the reconstituted Torah was delivered on the node of every Sabbath for a three year time period. They took the Torah and how long it would take to recite it out loud, and divided it by the number of Sabbaths in a three year period, and portioned out the Torah into that delivery, and so that that delivery was given in this metronome pattern on every Sabbath, you would be given that portion that could be recited. And so the prayer, hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one means not all at once. Very few people can hear it all at once. But to go every Sabbath, to hear that portion then, and to carry it through a three year cycle, it was called the lectionary cycle in antiquity, so that one would have at the end of three years, you would have personally heard no excuses to be made. You have heard the law. You yourself would have heard it. This is the time delivery mode by which you can make forms in your life, and the community together can make forms in its life, and those forms will hold. They will hold as long as that time. Common denominator Nominator holds its metronome and is not interrupted. And as long as that goes on, you will be assured by covenant that those forms will hold individually and communally. Whatever happens within those boundedness, the integrations will hold. The integrals will hold. There is a deeper understanding, though, and the deepest understanding is that all those forms have at their foundation the ability to survive their own dissolve. Because they are time dated, they will all come to an end at some time, and will need then to be reconstituted so that all time forms gain something from the covenant. They gained the ability to transform beyond their own demise and come back again, resuscitated so that time can be reborn. And the Renaissance loved finding that out. And tough bankers like Cosimo de Medici said, well, boys, we're going to get it done. And so Ficino was trained from little boyhood. He was brought in to Ficino's father was cosmos doctor, and Cosmo was looking around to have somebody translate Plato for him. He had just bought for too much money a copy of all the dialogues of Plato hadn't been translated fresh from Byzantium, fresh from Constantinople, Which in the meantime was falling to the Turks. Falling to the armies of Mehmed the Conqueror. Mehmed, who decided that he will no longer stand to have the unassailable walls of Byzantium, stop the movement of Islam's complete victory. The walls of Byzantium were made in antiquity to withstand any siege. There were three of them, and the outer one was almost unassailable. It was like 100ft thick and 70ft high. And Muhammad decided that he would just take the new cannons that were there and position them and keep firing them day and night, for month after month and year after year, until the walls did get breached. And they did. And those Wise people in Byzantium understood that when you have an enemy like Mehmed the Conqueror, he will never give up. He has the will of the ant. So they left. They left in dribbles, ones and twos. And they went to northern Italy. And Cosmo brought them to Florence. And he bought a Plato. And he wanted to have it translated, but he didn't want to have somebody who was already co-opted by this or that school, by this or that faction. He wanted somebody that he could have trained from childhood so that he knew that his Greek would be pure, that his Plato would be exactly what it was in antiquity. And so the his doctor's son, little Ficino. Marsilio. Little Marsilio was chosen, and he was raised specially to translate. That's all he was raised to do. And as he learned Greek well enough to read his Plato well enough, he learned that he could also, with a bit of a transform, read the original Greek in the Bible. And we have to talk about how the whole Bible. How did the Torah become into the Greek language? After the break? We'll talk about that because the Renaissance got a huge surprise when they read Plato well enough. Somebody like Marsilio Ficino, he could see that the Torah and the New Testament had a very curious relationship between them, that the New Testament was a transform of the old. It wasn't a new in the sense of another. It wasn't a new in the sense of of a continuation. It was new in the sense that it was a rebirth of a time form. Let's take a break and we'll come back. I'd like to bring us back with a quotation from a very unusual source about the Hermetic literature, and it plays directly into the presentation in the first half this morning. This quotation reads, the writers of the Hermetica do not form in any strict sense a school. The idea that there existed a hermetic church, of which the corpus of writings was the sacred canon, is not supported by evidence. Their doctrines cannot be brought into any unified or consistent system. Why is that? This quotation is from one of the classic books in the study of the New Testament, The Great C.H. Dodds, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. Cambridge University Press, 1955. One of the greatest works in the 20th century on biblical study. The whole first section is on the Hermetica. Why? Because New Testament Greek is the same Greek that's used to write the hermetica. Why is it that they cannot be put into a church? Why was there no hermetic church? Because a church is an integral form. It is a structure that must hold its symbolic value. So that the language that's used flows and is distributed by the symbolic structure. And that that flow of language reflects the living experience and feelings of the people. So that a church, like a government, like any social form, is a symbolic structure meant to hold experience into a form. But the Hermetic literature is not a literature that has a feeling toned language held by symbols. It is a visionary language that's differentiated by a spiritual person, so that the Hermetic writings are not meant to be understood by the mind. The mind is like a church. The mind is like a government. The mind is a symbolic, integral form meant to distribute feeling toned language experience into a form and hold it there. Whereas the Hermetic writings are not the kind of language that holds in form. It's the kind of language that transforms so that any time that you have it, it dissolves forms especially, it's made to dissolve forms. So that hermetic language is like an acid that dissolves any container that you put it in, so that you have to handle it with something other than forms that will dissolve. What would be the kind of container that would hold an acid that dissolves any form? An example a magnetic container A magnetic container will hold an acid that will dissolve any form quite readily. In the cosmos there are many radioactive Active fronts of cosmic ray energy that would dissolve whole planetary systems. And it's held beautifully over thousands, sometimes millions, of light years because of magnetic fields that have an interchange and a confluence. With the magnetic field that holds the forms of Hermetic language is generated by consciousness, so that the hermetic forms are not integral forms in nature. They are differential forms in consciousness, so that those conscious forms are meant to have their structure, not in terms of integrals, but in terms of proportions and possibilities ratios, so that the original meaning of a rational mind is not a mind that categorizes and fixes something, but a mind that transforms into proportional distributions of possibilities. A rational mind is a ratioed mind, and it's the ratios of the real that give you the range of the possible. All of this was lost in the medieval period because scholastic philosophy is stupid about this. Because it considers rationality as working within a form that is held logically by the mind, with a consistent symbolic designation structure, where in language is categorized in such a way that you know what it can and cannot do, and will stay where you put it. Whereas hermetic Medical language is a magical language and not a mythic language. It doesn't stay put. It always transforms. And if it's not applied to something so that it transforms it in its own self, transforms itself. It applies to itself constantly. And so it is a language with a grammar like a whirling dervish. And if you apply it to something, it will dissolve its form and transform it. And so you have to be very circumspect about how you use it, because if you just grab it, it will dissolve your mind and will leave you exposed to what it will leave you exposed to what was there before the form was gelled, what was there before the mind was gelled into its form the mystery of nature, so that the old Hermetic discipline of alchemy was not the difficulty of transmuting lead into gold, but the difficulty of getting through the transform. Because in order to work the transform, the alchemist has to participate in the alchemy. And if you're not ready to have your mind dissolved and everything that you know vanished, then you better not play with it. So that all of the cautions are not cautions to keep you from making gold, but to protect you from committing conscious suicide. Now, that puts everything on a different basis. And because it is so radical, Anyone who approaches it from the limitations of a forwardness, a symbolic mind that has not transformed will always make up in imagination an extension of what it knows. To imagine that all this is how it happens. And so one has a imaginary compensation to a limited knowledge. And this, of course, stands you very well as long as the world doesn't change. But if the world begins to change more and more, that becomes unsure. And you have to expand your imaginary proportion. And after a while, the world naturally evolves and changes enough so that you have 51% imaginary compensation to 49% practicality, and then you begin to suffer from a neurotic situation because you're not dealing with reality. You're dealing with the imaginative 51% that you had to feed in to make up in a compensation. And when it gets to about 90%, you get psychotic. But a good alchemist understands that the plus that held its form has just now subsided into the X of the unknown, and you can deal with that. Alchemy always talked about not gold as gold, but gold in terms of its projective power. How many times can it multiply itself? This is good gold. It has a thousand applications because the x is multiplication, one can multiply. And multiplication also engenders division, so that you move from the realm of add and subtract to the realm of multiply and divide. And so a real mathematic has all four functions together. Addition. Subtraction. Multiplication, Division. Now you have not just an arithmetic capacity, but because consciousness can go into those processes and differentiate them into an endless array of techniques. And one can deal in that endless array of techniques with imaginary numbers as conveniently as with finger counting numbers. And you can take the results of that and apply it to the world, and it will work. A civil engineer who makes a bridge across the Golden Gate in San Francisco has to know how to deal with all kinds of mathematical functions that are not determinable by counting on your fingers. You have to know how ahead of time to put that mix in there. So that Golden Gate Bridge will stand and will do its work. And if you don't know how to do that, don't build bridges across golden gates. The largest form that is made within the integral mind is the idea of civilization. Civilizations are the largest forms that man makes, and yet civilizations are time dated. They have their birth. They have their genesis. They have their life. They have their old age, and they have their death. And it's not an issue to cry over. It's the nature of how this works. All time forms are dated. All constituent things will pass. All things must pass. I mean, even George Harrison could sing a song years ago about that. All things must pass. Anything that has a form that's been reached through an integral will come to an end of its substantiation and will face a dissolve. But we are of such a nature that we transform very easily and carry over the nothingness, the shunyata. We not only occur and reoccur, but we come back into occurrence again after it has ceased and can establish across the interval of no occurrence a Mentality, so that there is such a thing as a radical consciousness that can come back into nature and can recalibrate what was so that there's such a thing as a new past. And so the Renaissance understood, for the first time in over a thousand years, that man is free on a scale that includes everything, including time, forms, but that he has to learn, he has to educate himself. He has to teach himself how to do this. And that is largely out of the purview of a single individual, unless they're a real super Yogi. There are occasionally people who can do it all. Especially when there's the end of a time form and no one remembers. Then someone comes along and does it all because simply, that's the only way it's going to be done. Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita tells Arjuna. He says, you unfortunately live at a time where the old world will end and no one knows how to begin a new world. And God will not permit this. So he has sent Krishna to come and educate you guys. So it's the charioteer in the Bhagavad Gita who does the teaching, doesn't tell him a doctrine presents him again and again with a phase form transform that every time Arjuna tries to peg it down, the transform shifts just a little bit and Arjuna's attention is carried with it. And eventually the Bhagavad Gita shows that Arjuna has come full circle, and he's realized that at every spoke of symbolic certainty the wheel of the whole has turned, and he gets it in one Intuitive, saying that all of these spokes that failed occur in a wheel that doesn't fail, but it turns and that that wheel is called a dharmachakra. And it's the turning of the dharmachakra that in India a long time ago was the symbol of the new time form. In Greek, it's called an aeon. It means a time form which has emerged out of eternity because the eternal is a context which shelters a formless context, which shelters the process of form emerging and allows for the Tay to occur quite legitimately formed within an unformed town, because together they form a set of the real. They form, as Niels Bohr called it, so beautifully. They form a complementarity, so that one always deals then with reality as a set, not only what is there but what is not there. And that that together forms a set, the zero and the one together as a set. And as long as you have the consciousness of that, you can apply that binary paradox of a complementarity set to not only the analysis of anything that is, but the specific mathematical transform of anything that is into any possibility of which it is capable. And so men and women have slowly been taught and have taught themselves how to factor transform into the making of forms themselves, so that one has now forms that are especially full of zeros, so that they very easily take a transform. And we have gotten good at it so that we can make forms now that don't dissolve. But they shimmer briefly for a nanosecond and are something else. So we don't have to have an apocalyptic crash of civilization to have a new civilization just because the old one is dead. Because the old one, the old time form, was made specifically to carry a shimmer and be something else completely new. And that was done 2000 years ago. The trouble is, is that the shimmer happens whether or not anyone knows, because it's not dependent on majority rule. If any one, any one does it, then it has really happened because an individual consciousness is not individual. It's not a singularity form. The consciousness in any spirit is consciousness. It's not distinguishable from the universe as a whole, and in fact, the universe as a whole in its conscious differential form is called the cosmos because its movement is already eternity factored in to the time element that gives boundedness to any form, so that it is not a structure that has dharma. It's a structure that has what's called high Dharma means that the transform is just as real as the form. All of this was rediscovered in the Italian Renaissance 500 years ago within one generation. It came in such a series of quick waves that the only people that could deal with it were just a handful of people who were really surfing the wave cycle. And one of the persons who was surfing that wave cycle was Cosimo de Medici. And when he discovered he was born in 1387, and when he discovered that he was getting old and he was going to die, he was curious about the ultimate mustard in the sandwich. Let's let the bread go. Let's let the meat go. Let's get to the the condiment. And so he had Ficino, who by this time was old enough to have begun to translate Plato out of the Greek into a very readable Latin, and from that it could go into Italian very easily. He stopped Ficino from continuing and completing Plato, and he said, please translate for me this little book that I have just purchased. And it was the Corpus Hermeticum. It was the Hermetic writings. And so Ficino stopped his Plato translation and completely translated all of the Hermetic writings. And Ficino, on his deathbed, 1464, had the pleasure of hearing his own educated savant read him the Hermetic writings and tell it to him in a language that he could understand, and he died happily. But Ficino's relationship with Cosimo was that of a genius to his patron. But the best gift that he gave to Cosimo, not the translation of Plato, which eventually was completed, nor even the translation of the Hermetic writings which was completed before Cosimo died, nor even eventually. The end of the whole program was to translate Plotinus, which in 1492 Ficino finished long after Cosimo had died almost 30 years later. But the best gift that Ficino was able to give Cosimo was that he educated his grandson from birth into a realm of hermetic, transformable personality, and the grandson's name was Lorenzo de Medici. Lorenzo the Magnificent, because he was a character. Ficino's Book of Life, which we're using along with the first of the Hermetic writings, the mind Shepherd, when we opened it up. Right away, the title page says Marsilio Ficino, Marsilio Ficino, Florentine Medici philosophy a philosopher with grand patronage of the Medicis, the Florentine doctor and philosopher writes this to Lorenzo the magnificent guardian of his country. Good Italian style. The paterfamilias is the guardian not just of our family, but of the country. Old Italians used to speak of the Italian race, used to watch the bocce ball in San Francisco, and the old Italians would argue, and somebody would get a little too violent. Some old man would say, we don't hit each other. We argue. That's the way of the Italian Race. We're mature. We argue all the time so that we don't wait to hit. I actually heard that. Down there in the Marina before it was fancy. Why do you owe the Italians come down here? Because we can't stand those people. They leave us alone here. The. Letter to Lorenzo de Medici offering him this book. A book of life. A book of life. What? What is a book? A book is usually a form of symbolic language. So that a book is a form of the mind. But a book is a particular kind of a form of the mind that will take a transform so that when the mind transforms, the book will be able to be read in between the lines. The Greek word for book is codex. And before there were codex, books were not in this form. They were on scrolls. They were on rolls. So that when you read a scroll, you had to unravel the scroll one way and you had to keep on reading. And if you wanted to cross-reference something before, you had to reroll it and go back. And it was a very painstaking thing. So nobody read scrolls, usually more than just once through. Very few people went through it. And so the idea of putting pages in a choir of leaves so that you could easily go back and forth and have an index that quickly cross-indexed the whole thing. The book as a codex is a alchemical form, a magical form. It is a visionary form. It's a spiritual form. It's meant to follow your transformed, the reader's transform and to be there for you at all levels of your capacity. Whereas a scroll is an integral form coming from myth and ending in symbolic structure in the mind. The scroll, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, is meant like any good amulet to hold what's put in it and stay there. Where is the codex? Is not meant to hold what is put in it, but to disclose its range of possibilities according to the lights of the reader. And the more that you wake up as a reader, the more there is to find in reading the book, and that you can reread the same book many times, many different ways. In fact, Saint John and the New Testament says, if all the books that could now be written, the world is not large enough to hold them, what's in there? Meaning that the scale of transform 2000 years ago, for those Hellenistic Jewish writers had gone off the map, had gone off the scale of this world, not just gone off this world, but the books that could be now written. The world couldn't even hold them. That man had outdistanced a single world by so much that he belonged. Naturally, they'll come up as a glitch in the tape. You see how the spontaneous punctuation comes in? The listener will say what? The reader on the level of New Testament Greek with a Hellenistic Jewish insight. And you have to understand that the two go together. The man known as Saint John is a Christian. Later on, he belongs in the Jewish tradition. He's Jewish. When Jesus was crucified. John was about 11 years old. He was just a boy. That's why the concern for him on the part of Jesus, because he was just a boy and he was coming up to his bar mitzvah, and he had to be cared for. And because he had been under the care of Jesus as his surrogate father, care was made to transfer the responsibility for that boy approaching his bar mitzvah to someone else. And so it was transferred to Mary, not his mother. Jesus's mother was almost 70 at the time. She only lived about a year or so after that. It was transformed to transferred to Mary Magdalene. You raise him. He is now under your care. And she did. And she raised the 11 year old to be able to write New Testament Greek better than anyone outside of Alexandria could write universal genius because he could command the language. What does the language say? Here's how he begins. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. That darkness, as a shunyata, as a non form of formlessness, doesn't overcome light, because it is in complementation to light. Deep complementarity. Light shines in an infinite darkness with the integrity of its own radiation. Those photons, once they are made, have a very, very long lifespan. They last a very long time. In fact, photons, I would suppose, last longer than protons even. But there is a quality to that form of light which allows for life to survive in form. So that life can come into a form. And that's why a life has its form. It has a beginning. It has a birth. It has an extent, and it has a death, a beginning, a middle and an end. But that life, because it is an expression of light and not a de facto artifact of the form, can survive a transform, and in that realm of light come back through into another life and another life. And because it has that capacity, it can come back in rebirth. But not only can it come back in rebirth, but because light itself can undergo an immersion in eternity and then reoccur, someone who is capable of a rebirth into another life is also capable of a deeper transform into life eternal. Both extremely difficult from the world's perspective and both extremely natural in terms of the cosmos. So this is a very difficult Quality of relationship and understanding. And. One that obviously, as you can see, has its jaggedness when presented in this kind of purity because usually it has to be disguised. But the time for disguises are over, because the world in which disguises worked at all is gone forever. They will never work again. This quality of the Hermetic writings coming back into play in the Italian Renaissance, the Hermetic writings by 1464 were completely translated. Within a couple of years, Plato was completely translated and brought into play. But concomitant to that Cosmo had set up in the hills above Florence. There's a small suburb now. It was a special separate town called Fiesole, and next to Fiesole there was a villa that was owned one of the villas owned by the Medici. They had a villa in Fiesole and very close to it. Ficino was set up in what was called the Platonic Academy at Careggi. The Platonic Academy at Careggi today still stands. It's a big Italian villa of about three stories. It's stucco is a sort of a deep daffodil yellow. And it's owned by Lawrence Rockefeller. Today, Ficino's Platonic Academy at Careggi. You could walk from there over to the Medici villa at Fiesole very easily, and there was a lot of concourse between these two, and it would take a while, but you could come back down into Florence, back into the centre of Florence. And at the centre of Florence was the great cathedral, the Duomo, and it was a set of architectural presentations. The base of the Duomo had been designed in the time of Giotto, in the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance. Giotto had not only designed the base, but the big bell tower, the baptismal bell tower, but the technology, the architectural understanding of form was not advanced enough to put a dome over it. So the architect who put the dome over it was a contemporary of Cosimo de Medici's. Cosimo, born in the 1380s. Brunelleschi. The architect was born in the 1380s. Donatello. The sculptor was born in the 1380s, all in Florence. So there was a whole generation of geniuses that came into play. When he did his civilization series, Sir Kenneth Clarke said the conference. The confidence level of the Medicis in Florence was that they were the equals of the highest apex of genius in the days of ancient Athens. And he said, and they weren't far wrong, because as Athens had built the Parthenon in the time of Pericles, the Florentines finished the the cathedral, the IL Duomo. And what distinguishes the Florentine Duomo from the Parthenon in the Parthenon? All of the elements. The columns are slightly bowed so that the building stands not because it has the squareness of the perpendicular, but because everything is slanted in just the right way that the building holds as a unity. And the building would have stood intact to this day had the Turks not stored their ammunition in the building. And that's what blew the Parthenon from the inside out. It was made to withstand any kind of pressure on it, because it was a form like Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. It had tensegrity, which meant that stress on any part of the Parthenon was distributed throughout the whole structure. How do you top that? The Florentines topped it with Brunelleschi because he made the dome, the roof of the cathedral a double a pair, so that a man could walk in between the two and walk up to the top. And on the very top of the Duomo, they put a cupola where a human being could stand on the top of this particular kind of Parthenon, and know that man had built it to accept his mobility of getting to the top, to the apex, and on top of the Duomo, one can look out above the valley where Florence is, and you're on the level of the hills of Fiesole, of Careggi, and you can see the beginnings of of the countryside of all of Italy in that area. So the Duomo in Florence accepted the mobility of man to the apex. Man learned to build his structures so that they were not temples in which he was a little figure. He was still a little figure proportionately, but he was a mobile little figure who could go anywhere in the structure, including to the top, so that this changed the symbol of man from being like the way some children draw human beings. They draw a circle and they put little stick legs and little stick arms and little stick head. That's man as a target. He's stationary. It's very medieval. Whereas the man who is built like a sculptor's model, with the articulation of the arms and forearms and shoulders and legs and thighs and calves, it's a figure that's mobile. The mobility of that figure in Greek antiquity was called Homeric man, because Homeric man was made to be mobile. And when you look at the Greek vases before the classical Athenian period. You see in the Greek vases that all men and women are drawn with this mobility of the sculptor's model. Man is mobile. He is built for adventures into the unknown. And so the Florentines rediscovered that the medieval concept of the integral man who stays put in the integral cannot transform, is not the model for our kind of life. Our kind of life is a mobility of adventure into the unknown and to develop all of this, and it's amazing to realize that at the same moment that Ficino was completing his translation of Plotinus, Columbus was discovering America very same time. There's a deep Synergy. No deeper than synergy. The synergy is a confluence of energies. There's a deeper. There is a range of resonance to the point of a harmonic that anything on the harmonic resonance has within its waves a direct relationship, so that Ficino's translation of Plotinus vibrates at the same harmonic frequency as the discovery of America. It occurs together like that, so that the Italian Renaissance understood correspondences that are seemingly separate. But if you connect them all not with connecting dots to make lines that come to some integration, but that the similarities mount up together and are like the petals of an exfoliate rose, or are like the voices in a single choir that one has to train oneself to see and to hear in terms of the choirs of harmony, rather than in terms of integrals. And so there's such thing then, in the Renaissance as the Harmonia mundi, the harmonic world. And if you can see the harmonic world, this world is but one example out of almost an infinite amount of number of worlds. So that man's possibility is his ability to transform on any level into anything. Pico della mirandola. Once in his great dignity of man. Oration on the Dignity of Man, characteristic of Northern Italians. To write an oration on the Dignity of man. Man does not have any particular quality. He has little bits of all qualities, including the ability to transform into anything. So that man is free to rove along the structural core of anything that he makes, including time forms, so that one doesn't just read Tacitus now in 1475, and think that you're reading about something that happened in 100 A.D. you have the capacity to develop, transform into you so that you read Tacitus now in 1475, and you see the tacitean world of 100 A.D. in a it's like a transparency overlay. And one can understand that a lot of those things are happening again now, and that you can take not just the lessons of the past, but you can take the strategies and tactics of a renewed past in a transformed person, and that you can make a novel solution that never would have occurred in nature. That man has learned to live spiritually rather than mentally, and that the spirit and the body together form a tort that's much deeper than the mind and the body. The mind and the body form an integral. There's no doubt that's great for athletes, but the spirit in the body is of indefinite value because it makes the spiritual athlete more next week.