Vision 3

This is vision three means that this is the third lecture in a sequence, and this sequence is not connecting the dots, but this is a phase form dynamic. That means that the first lecture morphs into the second and keeps morphing into the third, and so on, so that there is a continuity. That line of continuity in ancient times was called the horizon. That horizon is the meeting point of earth and sky, and the first people to really get the Isan were desert people, so that their sense of where the earth and the sky met was definitely the sense that this is not a meeting point, but it's a meeting continuity, so that the horizon was always a continuity that is so vast that instead of maintaining its levelness, it slightly curves, it slightly arcs. And so a horizon was misunderstood by the Greeks for the Greek clarity of mind in its geometric rationality, it saw a horizon as a straight line, which then separates two elements together. And out of this you get the idea that a horizon polarizes two different dimensions, that heaven and earth are polarities, whereas the original understanding of the horizon was that it was the gently arcing interface of heaven and earth, and that if one could follow it far enough, the earth would be a sphere, and that heaven would also be a sphere, but not an opposing sphere, but a sphere over the sphere of the earth. And that there was such a thing as a ratio of the Earth's sphere to the heavenly sphere, and that that ratio had a structural element that could be put symbolically into the mind, so that man had the capacity to tutor Himself to a certain extent in nature, but it was very difficult for him to go further. Without encountering the kind of geometrization limited case of the Greek sense of rationality. So that the primordial peoples, like the Chinese, or the ancient Iranians or the ancient Egyptians. Never made the mistake that the Greek mind made with its geometrization of limited cases. Its idea of geometry was always related to the physicality of the earth, the physicality of the heavens, and that what you had was a harmonic between spheres that was operating And that that horizon is the horizon of the meeting of two symbolic exchangeable elements. The Earth's element was life, and heaven's element was light. And that light and life are two different spheres which have an exchangeability at the horizon of man's participation in his consciousness. And so you find in the Hermetic writing the mind shepherd, you find this kind of language. But tell me, said I, where did the elements of nature come into being? And Hermes Trismegistus answers his student. They issued from God's purpose which beheld that beauteous world and copied it. The watery substance, having received the word, was fashioned into an ordered world. The elements being separated out from it, and from the elements came forth the brood of living creatures fire unmixed, let forth from the watery substance, and rose up aloft. The fire was light and keen and active, and therewith the air to being light followed the fire, and mounted up till the it reached the fire, and parted from the earth in water, so that it seemed that the air was suspended from the fire, and the fire was encompassed by a mighty power, and was held fast, and stood firm, so that the heavens were a paradox. They were the most dynamic firmament imaginable. Even beyond imagination. Notice that there are pair of elements air and fire, that rise up. There are pair of elements, earth and water that come down, and that they're related in a ratio in a proportion, and that it's a pair of pairs making a square, that the horizon is the diameter of the square, but not a straight line diameter. It is a slight curving arc that runs through the square, so that you have something rather interesting here. If you could make a smaller version of the slightly curving horizon In the square of heaven and earth. You would not have a line, you would have a slightly bowed surface and that slightly bowed surface. We would call and do call today. A lens and a lens helps you see. And a lens that can see heaven and earth together is called a visionary seeing. So Hermes Trismegistus steps it up in the next paragraph, takes it to the lens of the mind and the first mind, that mind which is life and light. Being bisexual, gave birth to another mind, a maker of things, the first mind. The genders were together in a whole. The maker mind became gender sundered, to use an odd kind of a language in the sense that there was a pair of genders, but the separateness is fertile if they exchange centers. That first mind, the mind which is life and light. Being bisexual, gave birth to another mind, a maker of things. And this second mind was made out of fire, made out of fire and air. Seven administrators who encompassed with their orbits the world perceived by sense and their administration is called destiny, so that the larger sphere of heaven, the larger sphere of light in a morphed phase in the hermetica written about 90 A.D. in Alexandria, That the stars are the congealed fire at the highest point of the air, and that that congealed fire has seven particular lights, five planets, and the sun and the moon. That those seven moving bodies have orbits. That their orbits are the described the orbits of the seven heavenly bodies that move their orbits describe the surface of spheres. That their orbits are not lines. They are not geometrical either. They are resonances of the lens of heaven and earth together, and that only through man's vision can the mind's eye see through this lens and be taught to see further through the differentiated lens of the seven levels. The seven stars that nature gifts man with the ability to see nature whole, light and life whole but only tutored consciousness can see the further refinement of the symbolic visionary structure of the seven further spheres that encompass and inhabit heaven, and that there is a reflection of this, and that the earth also has seven levels, not immediately seeable in terms of light. The seven levels of heaven are seen through the vision of refining light, but the seven levels of the earth are refinable not by light, but by life. And so there is a visionary refinement in consciousness to see the further structural levels of heaven by light, but to see the further refinable structural levels of earth of life, one has to have a quality. In ancient times it was called art. Art. The Greek word actually is not art ars, but techne. It means that there was an art to life that was also conscious, so that heavenly vision matched up with a refined sense of life, and that art was about life. It was about refining life. That's what it was all about. And that the refinement of life with its seven levels went with the refinement of heaven in vision, so that art and vision went together and were a new wholeness. And it was a wholeness as a pair that complemented a previous pair. And the previous pair was symbols from the mind and myth, from feeling toned experience, so that myth and symbols paired and came together with vision and art. And this made a new square. It made the kind of square that was held together by an exchange along a horizon. And the horizon was not a straight line of geometric city, but was the slightly bold surface of a lens of transformational vision. Only by having the transformational vision was the new wholeness of consciousness and nature brought together into a single square of understandability. Now you can see that this moves extremely far, and one would like to know with the hermetica written, written down about 90 A.D., what else was being written about the same time in the same kind of language? This language was very sophisticated. Greek, um, Greek as a discursive language owes its classical origins to Homer, about 1100 years before the poimandres, before the mine shepherd. But that Greek language was refined, especially in an era between about 605 hundred 500 BC, and the first refinement of the Greek language was in the Laws of Solon. The code of the City of Athens, written by Solon about 600 BC, and you find in there that the code of Solon has within it a an understanding in the way in which the language speaks, that there is a deeper level, there's a deeper structure below the the code of laws, and that that deeper structure has to do with the harmonics of earth and heaven in a ratio where they are brought together. And the refiner of that deeper language was Pythagoras, so that Pythagoras infuses the code of Solon with its esoteric Meaning, so that there came to be about 500 BC a distinct sense in the Greek language, the burgeoning classical Greek language, that you had two realms that were tightly related together. One was the political world of man, and the other was the visionary, symbolic world of the heavens. And so politics had to do with heavenly structure. Also, this entire ensemble made 2 or 3 generations of some of the most sophisticated human beings who have ever lived, and they became the classical Greeks. All of a sudden you had walking around in the same town, Aeschylus and Sophocles and Plato and Socrates and Thucydides and Herodotus and Euripides and Aristophanes, and they were all in the same town, using the same language. And from 500 to 400 A.D., that language that Pythagoras and Solon made came together in increasing sophistication, until it reached a point to where it took so much refinement to handle both aspects together that the general populace lost track of each other. And you had political people who didn't understand the inner structure, and you had inner structure, people who didn't understand the politics. And so you had a bifurcation that led to a massive civil war, like not a shooting civil war so much, although many people were killed, but a nefarious kind of civil war where people were persecuted for their beliefs. And the number one person who always stands out as Socrates, he was killed by his own town for teaching young men to question the gods of the state. And for someone like Plato, he was 27 years old at the time. It was the ultimate incomprehensible insult that obviously the Greek language had refined itself out of its ability to teach its refinement to further generations. And the problem for Plato was, why did this happen? How does this happen? What kind of education do we need then, to pass on the sophisticated understanding that we have? And all of Plato's dialogues are about that. So that in the Italian Renaissance. It wasn't just rediscovering classical learning, it was specifically rediscovering that the esoteric, symbolic visionary inside of language relates directly to the political exterior, governing side of language, and that those two form a whole that the Italian Renaissance was made by men like Cosimo de Medici, who were interested in keeping both halves together, not halves in the sense of geometric city, but both spheres, an interior sphere of conscious visioning art, and an exterior sphere to do with practical life, with how we govern, with how we make our money, with how we set up our political situation. And for about two generations, just like in classical Athens, there were a population of people in one little city called Florence, emulated in a couple of half a dozen other places, but mainly in Florence, where there were a couple of generations of people who really tried to understand, how do you keep all these spheres together? How do you have a mathematical understanding of sphere of spirit that expresses itself in art that is at home, in an economic system of governing that expresses itself politically? And the last person in Florence to embody that wholeness was someone named Machiavelli. We know Machiavelli today for his suspicion of Human nature. We know because his little book, The Prince, is always held as the sine qua non of understanding political power. And it is the prince. It prince means it's from the old founder of the Roman Empire, Augustus Caesar, who founded the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire, was the largest expression of the laws of Solon, put into a relationship with an interior esoteric language. The Roman Empire, when it was founded, was founded with one eye cocked to political realities power, money, military power. We have the biggest military, we have the most money. And everyone is going to do what we want them to do. But in order to keep this operating, we also want to make sure that everyone is conscious that we have the money and power because we have earned it, because we know how to administer it. And it's for your own good that you don't upset our boat. Can you do better than us? And so Augustus Caesar did not call himself a king. He did not call himself Pharaoh. He didn't call himself an emperor. He called himself. His term was that I am just the first man. I'm the princeps. You can have whatever opinion you want, but you have to hear me first. Now, if you have a lot of money and a lot of military power and a lot of savvy, of conscious structure, if someone hears you first, the chances are you're going to hear a chorus of yeas. And so Augustus Caesar set up what he called not the Roman Empire. His name for it was the Principate. I rule because I speak first, and you can say whatever you want to say, but I'll be listening. And so the prince is Machiavelli's understanding that the prince principal principate, the first, is the most important voice of all. But it's interesting because Machiavelli is not only famous for writing The Prince in ancient times, his discourses were just as famous as the Prince, and the Discourses of Machiavelli are very much a discussion as a political testament on the way in which republics are founded and lost, and along with the Prince and the discourses, he got very deeply into the symbolic nature of man. And he wrote a little play called the Mandragola, The Mandrake, the Root that's shaped like a man. And he also wrote one of the great histories of Florence. And when you put all these together, you realize that Machiavelli, as a Renaissance man, understood a lot. And the fifth book he's famous for is he goes all the way back to Livy, the Discourses on Livy. These discourses, uh, 1531, about the time that Erasmus is translating, uh, he made his edition of the Greek New Testament the first time that anyone could read it for about, uh, maybe 8 or 900 years. Read classical Greek. You have to know every iota, all the punctuation marks, because the words, the words are part of a mix that morphs constantly and only holds its shape for an instant. So that very learned classical Greek is a difficult medium to control. You can make forms for the moment, but you have to let them go at the same time, because the next way that you're going to express it will change, because the audience is slightly changed and you would say it a little differently. Classical Greek is not carved in stone. It's like a crapshoot depending on what the point is that you have to make. You're going to modify the language as you use it, so that classical Greek does not have a geometric city to its controlled use, but has a ultimate mobility. When Machiavelli writes of great men in the history of Florence, he points to Cosimo de Medici as the greatest individual, not because he could read classical Greek, but because he educated people to learn it well enough so that they could read it. Not because he was a great scholar, but because he put untold sums of money into buying all the great classical books and bringing them together, bringing them into one spot. And not only that of making sure that this one spot was completely refurbished. He completely rebuilt it. And Machiavelli says of Cosimo de Medici, this was a Renaissance man because he prepared everything from scratch. The place that he chose to bring all these great books. What were these great books? They were the classical Greek books, like Plato and Sophocles and Aristophanes and Pythagoras and the entire tradition. Where did he put those books? He put them into a building, which he morphed out of a monastery. He took an old medieval monastery and morphed it into a Renaissance community of scholars, who used a paired ratio to read their books. They used a political, worldly base that was constantly infused with a revelatory, visionary, conscious use of it. The old medieval monastery, it was called San Marco. It's in Florence. San Marco was an old medieval monastery next to a church, the church of San Marco. And so Cosimo, being a very good Renaissance man, being an Italian who was setting up a city state of Florence to echo the city state of Athens, and making sure that he did everything from scratch. You take the buildings and you redo them, not just refurbish them, but you recut them architecturally to be something else. You take the language and you recut it so that it has transforms. In it you make of the mind instead of a geometric figuring out angles, a lens, figuring out how light and life interface to make a fertility so that wholeness comes out. And the proof of it is that the mythological tapestry of antiquity comes through with a new living art. The fact that there is a mythological themes in Renaissance art is not just a modification of the medieval period. It's not just a revival of the classical period. It is a re presencing of the quality of wholeness that was there for just a couple of generations in antiquity and came back into life again, came back into light again, so that there were living people who were not imitating the past, but they were representing the past, morphed into their own lives, into their own visionary light, so that light and life were brought together in a new living lens. And the key to that lens, the key to the whole expression of this, was that the vision matched the symbols in exchangeability of centers. That conscious vision had a center, just like the symbolic mind had a center, and that those two centers could be brought together like a montage, and one could go back and forth between the two. And the proof of the viability of the two way street is that the mythology became more and more conscious, and the art became more and more transparent to feeling toned intelligence so that you would experience works of art not as medieval icons of some kind of meaning that you could put in an encyclopedia, but became revelatory to you because this was the way in which feeling tone, sentience blossomed into a living art. When Cosimo de Medici had San Marcos monks quarters revised, he had Michelozzo, his architect buddy, do this. The corridors were made so that each little cell, instead of being a dark medieval cell, was a beautiful alcove off a central, beautiful, well scrubbed like a Santa Barbara cord or the most expensive materials that you could imagine. Well lighted. Beautiful. And each of the little alcoves, each of the quote, medieval cells had its own expensive painting on the back arch. And all these paintings were made by another pal of Cosimo de Medicis, named Fra Angelico, so that he had Michelozzo, his buddy, who had been in exile with him. When Cosimo was thrown out of Florence as a young man by the political Albrizzi family, he went to Venice and he went with his buddy Michelozzo. And they didn't just go to be an exile, they went to party, and in their partying they decided that they were going to set up a new world. They met all these people coming into Venice from all over the world. And they even heard of China, because some Venetians named the polo brothers, had been to China and left all kinds of good inventions in Venice, like spaghetti and pasta, which they had brought from China. And they said, we have all kinds of possibilities. We're going to go back and we're going to take the franchise away from Venice, and we're going to give it to Florence. And so when they came back, this was their kind of a project. The Renaissance alcoves were made, each with a work of art, each with a painting of. This particular painting is very illuminating. This is Fra Angelico's, Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden after the resurrection. And it was meant to be a painting which someone in that quote cell meditated on, not just meditated, but contemplated because it was a work of art that held the exchange of mythological sentience with the conscious artistic expression. And what's so startling about this is that Mary Magdalene in medieval periods was always the ugly horror. She's the woman of the streets. Whereas at San Marco in the painting, she is a gorgeous, gracious woman of mature years who has this wonderful quality. She is in this kind of a salmon pink robe with a halo, not a halo. A halo is a geometric diagonal of a time bound Greek pseudo mind, such as the ancient Romans had. The ancient Romans never learned properly The Roman Empire never learned from its Greek model. The Roman Empire thought that the Greeks meant geometric city, whereas what the Greeks in the Greek mind meant was developed in Alexandria and Alexandria found that geometry is but a schoolboy starting point, and that geometry in order to apply to a spherical world. Spherical worlds that have harmonics, you have to transform geometry into trigonometry. And only with trigonometric relationalities do you begin to see how you can build structures that energize earth and heaven together, and that you're dealing then with harmonics? One of the great Renaissance books by Francesco Giorgi is called Harmonia mundi. Not just the world of harmony, but the harmonic world which interfaces firmly with heaven. And so this entire ensemble of genius brought back into life. And down below all these Renaissance cells in San Marco are on the upper floor. What is on the floor underneath the library? Not a stuffy old medieval library with dusty books. The most expensive floor. The most expensive shelves. San Marco had about 64 banks of shelves. A Cosmo was very wealthy. He had a lot of money. So many Florentine young bankers were studying in Paris that he built a school to educate them in Paris so that they could continue their Renaissance studies while they were in Paris. Um Cosimo also refurbished a library in Jerusalem, because there were so many young men wanting to make that pilgrimage, he wanted to make sure that their studies were able to be continued in Jerusalem, so that wherever Florentine young men would go, they would be able to keep in the continuity of their studies. And that this flow of experience, this dynamic, this mobility on the interfacing, spherical harmony of heaven and earth had a synthesizing thread, not a thread like a geometric Metric line, but a synthesizing thread in the sense of the most vibrant central horizon imaginable. And that was where the soul of man, as the center of his symbolic mind, met the beginning of the opening to the heavenly harmonics of unlimited. A universe where there is life without end. The world of light that was the hermetic material, encased first in a vein of pure philosophic blood, like the way in which the cardiovascular system carrying the blood of life, has interfaced at the center of it, the neurological system carrying the electricity of the neural system. The Hermetic education was that the life blood and the conscious neural energies were brought together in a single life, in a single being, a single person. That this was a Renaissance man. Not just that he could do a fantastic list of things, but that he was heavenly and earthly at the very same time, in the very same person, and had the fertility because he could pass it on not just as an education from instruction, but because of an exemplar of person. The young men and women could learn by being with such a person. And Cosmo, being the consummate Renaissance man, made sure that he educated, had educated a teacher who could teach this, who could not only inhabit the cells up above. In all of the progression, Fra Angelico called the whole set of all those cells together. He called it the vestibule of heaven, the vestibule of Paradise, that if one took oneself not just to your own self, but if you took yourself to a sequence of all the cells and went through the entire tapestry of all these paintings together, there were 44 of them that you would then have not connected the dots of each cell, but you would have gone through the thread of continuity of the entire mural, and that that entire mural as a set was the vestibule of Paradise, and it was an exact representing of the way in which Hellenistic Judaism became early Christianity some 1500 years before. How do we know? Because we have the documents. We know exactly. That's what they did. And so the Italian Renaissance in Florence, between about 1440 and about 1470, in that generation, brought back into life and light and being again a wholeness that had not been seen at that point for about 1200 years. No one had ever seen it in all that time. And when they came back into play, something very strange happened. There was a book written about the Puritans a few years ago. It was called To Live Ancient Lives, that when you live a life that is infused by light, and you can see visionary by a light which is infused with life, you begin to remember. You don't just remember what it is that you're reading, but you remember writing what you're reading. Let's take a break. These are a couple of shots of a sculpture. Judith by Donatello. Judith and Holofernes. And this sculpture by Donatello was in the middle of the courtyard of the Medici Medici Palace, the Palazzo de Medici, in the center of Florence. This was in the center of the garden. And you have to understand Cosimo de Medici. All the Medici are buried in Florence. And there's a nice little place where they're all buried. But Cosimo is not buried with his family. He's not buried in the sacristy with all the family members. He is specifically buried in his own place, and Donatello was buried right next to him, underneath the cupola in the nave of the church. Because Cosimo de Medici and Donatello were lifelong buddies, both born in the late 1380s. And you have to understand that Donatello's great pal was Brunelleschi, the architect, the one who built the dome for Florence Cathedral, among other buildings, and that Brunelleschi also designed the interior of the Palazzo Medici. The exterior had a kind of a fortress like quality, like a medieval fortress, except that the practice eye sees that something had been introduced into the arrangement of the exterior, and it was new at the time, because only a few years before an architect named Alberti Leon Battista Alberti, built a palace for the Rucellai family. Palazzo Rucellai, the family still owns it in Florence, and the Palazzo Rucellai, built by Alberti was the first in 1446. It's the first time that you find classic orders reintroduced into architecture, and it is a specific Alberti style of swashbuckling that he does this. He doesn't just build a classically beautiful building that antiquity would have recognized. He takes a medieval facade and he cuts it dramatically with diagonals and horizontals, so that you get the visual message that the Middle Ages are over. One of the great medieval things that was there for 1000 years is a pair of arched windows. It's called the two light ensemble of windows. Alberti put an architrave, cutting off the tops of the arches, so that you had a pair of rectangular windows for the first time. We still have rectangular windows and huge buildings today. Alberti is the first one to do that, and he did it dramatically. The Palazzo de Medici, built Exteriorly by Michelozzo but entirely by Brunelleschi, is the morphing of taking Alberti one step further on the exterior, but about ten steps further on the interior and the interior. Instead of having the fortress quality even transformed by the classical orders Ala Alberti, the inner courtyard is extremely light hearted, where the Brunelleschi's columns are an endless continuity around you don't get any sense of fortress corners at all, so that the entire courtyard floats almost like a Renaissance version of Islamic architecture, where the arches disappear into infinity, like the Alhambra. Only here you have the idea that the circumference of the inner courtyard has no beginning and no end, that its lightness makes the structure transcendent, not in the Gothic way of having to aspire to transcend and go up, but that the orders of heaven are brought into man's life. There, here the Gothic tried to get you to go to heaven by these huge cathedrals that were like spaceships of doctrine, whereas the Renaissance building is putting the light of heaven into the life of men. And in that courtyard is where Lorenzo de Medici married Clarice Orsini. And there were 50 women and 50 men. A jubilee of men and a jubilee of women brought together in 50 couples, and they danced the night away. And that's how Lorenzo de Medici took over the Palazzo de Medici. This is a typical Renaissance hermetic way. It's a style that had never been seen since classical antiquity. At the center of their classical learning was not the geometric unity of a straight line, but the horizon curving to make the lens of seeing light in life and life in light. You take our life and continue it in heaven, and you take heaven's light, and you make it seamless with life, so that the Italian Renaissance was a representing a presenting in living light, in the technicolor of a whole palette of life. And they saw that the hermetic material surrounded by the platonic material was the vivifying quality of antiquity. And what held the Platonic and Hermetic together was the Pythagorean structure of resonances that the Pythagorean harmonics held the distilled, esoteric quality of the hermetic material to the philosophically matured quality of the platonic material, and that those together then informed the politics and the art of the day into one massive whole which man could inhabit. The kicker in the whole works was that their understanding of the Hermetic Platonic synthesis through the A vegetarian led them to rediscover that in antiquity, when the Greek language. Refined itself from Athens to Alexandria, a fundamental refinement came into play. A refinement that was never there in Athens, even at the heyday of Pythagoras or. Socrates or Plato. Not even there for Aristotle. Not even there for Alexander the Great. But there for the people who inherited the vision of Alexander the Great. For the Alexandrians, their understanding was hyper refined. It wasn't just refined, it was hyper refined. That the language had taken it to a new level of capacity, where consciousness was such that it began to include the Earth as the set of heaven. I was talking during the break to somebody saying the old Pythagorean cosmologist Empedocles perished in Mount Etna. The volcano and the saying in colloquial antiquity was that Empedocles, trying to prove the reality of the world, leapt into Etna to see if he would stay alive. This is a popular misconception. Empedocles is a good Pythagorean. Saw that all the fire that congealed as the stars and distilled consciously as the seven moving stars, that if the earth had fire underneath, then the earth itself was a special star also, and was an eighth star that went with the other seven. And that when you include the earth, with the sun and the moon and the other planets, it makes a set of eight. It makes the complete ogdoad the complete octave, and for the first time, you have a set that is complete whereby you can tune an instrument to the entire octave, which means then that if man factors his earth in with the heavens, you have an expanded heaven, and you also have a paradisical earth as a practical reality. How do you bring this into play? How then do you live? If this is possible, it means that the potential for life hasn't even begun to be scratched, that there is such a thing not only as a Jerusalem, that one could go back with crusaders swords and recapture, but there's such a thing as a completely different city that isn't just in some geographical area, but is differentially, consciously dispersed wherever that population of men and women are alert to their heavenly light in their lives and their lives in that heavenly light, and that wherever they live, that is the city not only anywhere on the planet, but anywhere in that entire octave, which includes all the planets and the sun and the moon together, so that there is such a thing as humanity maturing to live in the entire octave of the entire star system and that that star system is not to be seen with the geometric mind, but with the minimum of a trigonometric functioning of relationalities, so that you get the harmony, the harmonics, which means that you have the ability to have a critical analysis of that can feed back in and correct what you're doing. Geometry applied to life is very often a question of the symbolic mind, thinking that it's the end all, and using a structure of a plan, like a cookie cutter to cut out of the dough of existence these shapes and god damn it, it's going to be this way. And all of that is an endless stupidity. All that is a box. Canyon of pride. The mind in its geometric phony superiority. Not having the humility to transform itself into the openness of the heavenly renaissance, of the true harmonic of a cosmic life. And the statue of Judith and Holofernes was the statue of humility overcoming pride. Judas, the embodiment of the humble Sophia of life, the wisdom of life, slaying the stubborn Holofernes who wanted to just have and have for himself, and to grasp on the basis of a mind stamping out the geometric plans of power without the humility of the exchange transform that was in the center of the courtyard of the Palazzo de Medici. When Cosimo Impero and Lorenzo. All the way up until the Medici mansion was sold by Cosimo the First in 1530s, and they moved to other digs. One of the great discoveries was not only that Platonism had a hermetic core and a Pythagorean interrelational structure, but that the cream of that entire ensemble had been distilled to a point of almost pure nectar by Plotinus, and that Plotinus was the greatest philosopher in antiquity because he brought after 800 years, he brought the Pythagorean mathematical relationalities all the way through the harmonics of music into the hyper dynamics of a trigonometric cosmic relationality, And the last work that Ficino, the man that Cosimo de Medici had trained from childhood to translate his Plato, to translate his Hermetic documents. The last translation that he made was the complete Plotinus in the year 1492, when the trigger of the new world was pulled. The New World, in the sense that there never had been a contact with the Western Hemisphere in the entire history of antiquity. They didn't know that some thousand years before Columbus, that the Chinese had had contact with the western coast of North America because there was no contact with China either on that level. The contact with China was through veils, darkly, as Shakespeare would say, through a glass darkly. They didn't understand that. The discovery of the new World for the West. For the West, that was not only Renaissance and medieval and classical, but ancient. Back to the origins of Egypt, back to the origins of Sumeria. The discovery of the Western Hemisphere was like a revelation that what they had been doing at that point for several generations had panned out. They were given a pristine Paradise on Earth. The other half of the earth, and that this was a chance to bring the entire Renaissance into play. This is the true origin of the United States. The United States is the greatest vision of the Renaissance, a new world where men and women have light and life furtively exchanged together on a truly continental scale, on a hemispheric scale. The Western hemisphere. W.h. Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to W.H. to the new love, because this is the life that is now possible on a cosmic scale. This is where the light and life come together in the exchange of love. Ficino's book is called The Book of Life, and it's all about bringing light into life through the exchange transform of love. That's what it's all about. But they are not subjects that you could hang on ideological hooks in some geometric plan of design. Like the medieval design of some kind of kabbalistic Sephiroth. Truly medieval, it is not a snapshot geometric of a plan that can be stamped cookie cutter. And then you have the secret of the ages. It's not that at all. The hyper speed of the dynamic consciousness of light, and the ability for feeling toned life to exchange through transforms of love is all about a cosmic dance, which is possible here on the Earth, and not only here on the Earth, but carryable into all of the moving bodies of the entire octave of the entire star system. Man can inhabit an entire star octave. Such a man to use the exemplar. The Italian phrase for it is uomini illustri an illustrious man, a man who shines by his inner light. The geometric, reductive mind says, O illustrious, because he does important things, or he has important stuff. Oh, he's illustrious because he's the mayor of this or that, or because he's the owner of this or that. The illustrious man of the Renaissance is the man of light who is alive in our lives, and whose life can carry over into the whole octave of light. That is an illustrious man. As Gurdjieff once said, these are remarkable men. This quality of bringing differential consciousness into the integral of nature, and allowing for the integral of nature to transform into the differential ecology of consciousness, has for its form. Art. Art is the form by which this happens. Because art is not a natural form, it's not a form of existence. It doesn't have a ritual quality to its organization. It can inform ritual, but if it does, it transforms it. So it isn't existence. It isn't an existential reality, nor is it a mentality. It's not about forms in the mind. It's not about strengthening those symbols so that they become such powerful ideas that one can have a confidence that this ideology or that ideology, this is the ultimate ideology. This is the synthesizing idea for all time. This is not it at all. Art is the art of carrying the transform on so that it is of an endless or an infinite quality of refinement. A work of art can be visited forever and never be exhausted. The art of life is having a life which is so nourished and enriched that it can be whatever it will be. And there is where the High Renaissance found something mysterious. They found that in that horizon of the hermetic center of the platonic tradition, interfacing with the Pythagorean, that that entire Ensemble had been done in antiquity, not by the Greeks in Athens, but by a community in Alexandria. And when they looked at the community in Alexandria, they found that they were not the Greeks in Alexandria who had done this. They were the Jews. It was the Hellenistic Jewish population of Alexandria that had performed this trigonometric transform. And when they realized that, they realized that the key to the hermetic material was not just a Greek refinement of the ancient Egyptian, but it had something to do with an esoteric tradition in Judaism, not the Judaism of a geometric mind, not the Judaism of a reductive tradition, but of something that opened up into infinity, that opened up indefinitely, and that the ultimate Hermes Trismegistus was Jesus. And when they looked at it with this vision, they discovered that Alexandria was a very peculiar place, because the language of the Hermetic literature was exactly the same language, that Saint John wrote his gospel in the same language that the Book of Revelation was written in. It was the same language. They talked the same language. They talked about life and light. And about the exchange in love and how that happened. And so they searched to try and find what else do we find in all these books that we're buying that were unearthing or bringing together. Who else wrote in this language? And they found a third figure. Someone else wrote in that language. His name was Philo. Philo of Alexandria in the medieval period called Philo Judaeus. But they stopped calling him in the Renaissance. Philo Judaeus, because they found a classical book in Greek. It's by a man whose very name means honesty. Eusebius. By Eusebius. It's called the Ecclesiastical History. The history of the Christian Church. It was written by Eusebius about 330 A.D., and it was written because he was under commission by one of the most ruthless men of history, the man who was the Roman emperor of the day, Constantine. How ruthless was Constantine? He said Rome is no more. I'm building my own town. They called it Constantinople. He said I'm moving the entire Roman Empire from here, where it has been for a thousand years, to where I want it to be. And so the Roman Empire moved from Rome. Numa Pompilius was never in the straits of the Golden Horn. He moved it to Constantinople, where it was. And in order to make sure that he moved it intact, he wanted a complete new cosmology, a completely new mythology, a completely new mythological cosmological mix, to make sure that the politics of the new city was the most improved version. So he used Christianity as that juice to seal it. His new politics And his new ideology was put together in a form that was meant to be held for all time. And so he held a conference to find out what is the most powerful version of Christianity. I want the original power that made this such a power in the old Roman Roman Empire. And he hired Eusebius. They didn't pay you in money in these days. They said, if you don't do the job right, you will be killed. So Eusebius was the director of the conference. He wrote up the report. And this is the report. This is what he delivered to Constantine to save his life. He will not lie under those circumstances. And in here, the person that he cites is Philo. They started calling him Philo of Alexandria because you can't call him Philo Judaeus if he's one of the founders of Christianity. He says, how do we know that he's a founder of Christianity? Because Philo is the first author who writes of the practices that, at the esoteric center of the practices and contemplative insights and living testimony are at the very core. And so Philo had to be a Christian. The trouble is, is that Philo of Alexandria died in about 42 A.D., eight years before Paul even started to go on any kind of mission, and that he left Alexandria only once to go to Rome, because he was the head of the Jewish community in Alexandria. And the Roman emperor was the crazy Caligula, who had sensed that the Jewish population of Alexandria had a more powerful god than he was able to. Control from Rome, and he wanted to dispossess the Jewish people of their means of livelihood. And so Philo was sent as the head of a deputation of five people to Rome to talk Caligula into not killing them all, just taking their property and having some kind of recourse that later on they could find a way to get it back, some of it back. And he actually did this. Eusebius says, we know that Philo was a Christian because no one but Christians has these insights and these practices. It's the only time follow ever left Alexandria. How do the Christians get into Alexandria? 20 or 30 years before Paul even realized that he had anything to say? It became a very, very touchy question which was never asked in the Renaissance. They never asked it, but what they saw was that there was some esoteric meaning that Judaism transformed into Christianity in Alexandria at that time, and that the Hermetic writings are it. This is the way in which Judaism transformed into Christianity, so that the Hermetic writings are a meeting of Judaism and Christianity together at the white hot moment of transform, so that the Hermetic writings were seen then as the most precious, valuable documents in the world. Nothing is more valuable than this, and that if we contemplate our sense of political life on earth and our sense of divine insight consciously into this lens of horizon, of exchange. We somehow are now on the anvil where God and man meet. What is going on here? And if that is true, then we have to understand something which we're not sure of. What is the history of Judaism such that it led to this, and they found a very curious, truncated kind of thing. They found that at the beginnings of Alexandria, when it was still Greek, Alexandria, when it was still in the hands of Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy, and his son, uh, his son was called, uh, formally Ptolemy the Second. But his name, the name on the on the lintel over the city. Read Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Philadelphus. Did you know that there was an American city very early on called Philadelphia? Named for him. That's where Independence Hall is. It's where Benjamin Franklin hung out. Well, I think it's where the American constitution was put together. What the hell's going on here? Maybe all this means something. I have a book called Hermetic America that shows this out. Philadelphia's was the one who built the great library in Alexandria. His father started it. But Ptolemy, being a general, didn't know how to build a library. He just went out and he took whatever books he could find. And they were not books. They were scrolls. He put them together in a building. He said, they're mine. Whereas Philadelphia's was cultivated, his name means brotherly love. Phila. Philadelphia. And he said, instead of just taking all these books, which means we can only get what books there are, let's invite everyone in the world who has any great books to make copies, and we'll bring them all together so that while Ptolemy Soter in Greek it means savior. Well, the first Ptolemy, who was the savior because he kept Alexandria going, kept the vision going. What was the vision? Alexander the Great's vision was the ecumene. All mankind is one family. So that Alexandria was the capital of mankind. It was built to be a transform, to take you out of various kingdoms and to put you into a cosmic humanity. All mankind. Everyone. The entire human family. Ptolemy the first was the savior of that vision. But Ptolemy the second, the brotherly love man, changed the library from just maybe 100,000 scrolls to a million. It made it exponentially huge. It became the largest library in the world by far. And this library prided itself on having all the sacred books. And when it came time to take stock, they had the best librarians in the world because they were the first librarians in the world of this nature. And the librarian at the time, his name was Eratosthenes. He's the first one to get the spherical diameter of the Earth right. He knew 300 BC what the size of the Earth was as a sphere. As a Pythagorean Sphere. He had the math. You could see it. He was the librarian. And he said, we to Philadelphia. He said, we have it all, except we're missing one important book. We don't have the Sacred Book of the Jews. We don't have the Torah and the prophets and the histories of our neighbors Semites over there. We don't have their sacred book. They've never let anyone have it. They've never let anyone translate it. And so Philadelphia's contacted the inheritors of Ezra, Nehemiah, Nehemiah, the Sanhedrin of the day. And he said, we need to have this as a part of the synthesis of the human family. And the Sanhedrin sent 72 translators, six translators for each of the 12 tribes to Alexandria, and they worked for years and years, and they made the translation. And it's called the translation of the 70. The Septuagint still in print. You can buy it. It's huge. And it took. What is called colloquially the Old Testament and put it into Greek. Now it turned out in antiquity that in putting it into Greek, they had to find a language that would carry and carry over, and the only language they found was the hyperdynamic Pythagorean style of refined Greek to carry it. And so the Septuagint is written in a style of Greek that naturally morphs into Alexandrian high toned Greek. It's very, very, very easy to go from the Septuagint to the New Testament, to the Hermetica, to Phylo because Philo of Alexandria could not read Hebrew so well as he could read the Greek. So he learned the Jewish tradition through the Greek language. But he learned it in a beautiful, deep way so that he could express himself in Greek as if he were expressing himself to a Hebrew traditional audience. And so Hellenistic Greek in Alexandria has a particularly Jewish tone to its cosmology and to its humanity. It doesn't see the world in platonic terms, necessarily, but in Platonizing terms. It doesn't see the world in Pythagorean terms, but in Pythagorean terms. It's a perfect blending, not Mulch together, but distilled together so that you get a liqueur, so that the language of Philo and the Hermetic writings in Saint John are a liqueur of the language of classical Greece. And it's the same language that Jesus spoke. He spoke that Alexandrian Greek. He could speak Hebrew, he could speak Aramaic, Aramaic. But when he delivered the precision of speaking in a form where consciousness comes into play with the forms of life, where light and life come together in the exchange of the love transform, he used classical Greek. How do we know? Because we have a record of five excerpted sermons. It's called the Gospel of Matthew, written in Greek. Where the delivery form is perfect. The classic example for all time is the sermon on the Mount. It's meant to be. How does one speak in an extended discourse in this Hellenistic Jewish way, in the high transform of Alexandrian Greek? How do you do that? And so they found Philo to be a Christian, even though he was never in a church. So there is a peculiar quality in antiquity. Eusebius himself says that Plato, that Philo was a platonic inheritor. And so he came into the Renaissance. And Philo's works were bought and collected and brought into play as an adjunct, as a further development of Plato and Pythagoras. And what went with Philo was Saint John and the Hermetica. And where did that go? It went to Plotinus so that the scheme ran something like this, from Homer to Pythagoras to Plato to Philo and Saint John and the Hermetica to Plotinus, and that this was the golden chain of Homer because it was the Greek language undergoing refinement and permutations all the way, and that if one had the complete command of all the permutations of classical Greek from Homer to Plotinus about 1200 years, you would have a complete history of the morphing of the language and the question that came up, what if you were able to have that complete morphing history of the language of the Jewish tradition of Hebrew. What if someone were able to go back and understand how Hebrew changed and morphed? Obviously, it was not only related to the Greek, but the understanding was that it was older than the Greek. That while the Greek language started with Homer about 1000 BC, the Hebrew language started about 3000 years earlier. It was too much for them, so they settled for twice the age. They said, we'll only take Hebrew back a thousand years before Homer to Abraham. How did Abraham use Hebrew, and how did it change all the time? And who is the contemporary of Homer in using the Hebrew language? King David. David lived about the same time as Homer. And so you find Donatello doing two statues of David of King David. The first time he does David is when they were just beginning the Renaissance. And David looks like this. Very nice young man. And when they got deep into the Renaissance, they began to realize the hyper dynamic, artistic ballet of the cosmos. David looks like this. It's the first nude statue since antiquity. He doesn't wear any clothes anymore, but he wears the hat of Hermes. He carries the sword of Judas because the pride of the box Canyon. Reductive, stupid. Geometric tyranny. Mind has got to go. And the cosmic mind of those who live in light and transform in love is here. That's what this renaissance is all about. So that there is a quality of seeing that the octave, once you master it, you tune your voice to that octave and you stop speaking in street cadence and you start singing in the hymn Cadence of Celestial Songs. There's a huge difference in that. More next week.