Vision 4

This is vision four, and this is the second year of a two year cycle. And we saw in the first year how nature has its own ecology. And that in that ecology, the things that exist emerge and they emerge out of a matrix of change. And so the most practical way of beginning in the first year of this education was to begin with nature, in the sense that it was in flux. And we began by using the Chinese classic of change, the I Ching and Thoreau, the American sage of nature, especially his essays on walking. But when it comes to the second year, the ecology that we're looking at is a complementarity to the ecology of nature. And just as we saw nature develop into ritual, that somehow out of the matrix of change, what emerges is a selection that maintains its stability. And we call stable things existentials they exist. They have emerged into existence. And that ritual action, that pragmatics of their coming into existence, their emergence was what the A classical Greek word physis would relate to, so that if you would read Aristotle's Physics, he is talking about the process of emerging, of Ephesus, of coming into being, of coming into existence and establishing itself. And that's all a ritual. Or as we styled it, a ritual comportment. It's the way in which action purposes itself to found stability, and that bodies like we have, or any bodies, any existentials, are stable in the sense that they are polarities that have been synched into an emergent existentiality and we call that real, whereas it's actually conditional All existentials are conditional on their polarities, maintaining that cinched relationality. And we discover now in the second year, beginning with vision, that the ecology, that vision, belongs to the ecology of consciousness. Consciousness is about transform. It's not about existentials. It's not about cinching polarities into stability. It's about changing, transforming any kind of a sensed polarity into something else so that consciousness has a whole different energy mode. We might say that nature works by integration, whereas consciousness works by differentiation. Not that it takes things apart, but that it's able to analyze. It's able to differentiate and able to reform and that what is reformed are not new holes, so much like existentials, but whole new ratios. So that consciousness deals with proportions and deals with proportions in a differential way, in that each element of a proportion, each element of a ratio, the numerator, the denominator, are not only capable of calibration, but they're capable of being recalibrated so that the very measure of something can be changed, so that the differential consciousness, the whole ecology of how that works and comes into being is quite distinctly different from nature. Nature likes to integrate. It likes to bring things into a stability so that something is. And we say in nature, we say that existentials are. They exist. And that's a fundamental quality that one can trust. But when consciousness comes into play, when it comes into play vis a vis nature, you cannot trust existentials. And if you carry over the expectations of an integral habit of comportment, than consciousness is going to introduce very first thing anxiety, because you can certainly no longer trust things that you used to be able to trust. You cannot even have confidence that your ability to trust remains that ability to trust, because it will also be amenable to conscious transform. And thus consciousness, when it first comes into play, gives us cause for alarm. And so in ancient times, any threshold of transformation that would bring consciousness into play, the differential quality of being alert to change, to ratios to proportion was looked upon as something suspect, that you would be cautioned to pursue this. And so in ancient times, what we call vision now was called magic. And that this realm of magic, this realm of being able to change things because the changed things are no longer in nature. They belong to something else called super nature or the supernatural. And all human societies had a very well-founded caution when it came to stepping into the realm of consciousness, into the realm of magic, into the realm of the supernatural. That realm belonged to the gods. And that only special heroes or heroines, special men and women who had to go into that realm because something had happened in the lifetime of those people. Someone had to go into that realm, into that supernatural realm, and bring back from that supernatural realm something that was not to be found in nature. Bring back something which we. Today would call consciousness, because we're discovering now that consciousness. Is so profound and vast that it operates as a whole dimension. And just as time and space are four dimensions, and we well know now, after 100 years of. Of physics and math, that time and space form a four dimensional continuum. And yet, even in antiquity, back to the beginnings of written civilization, 5000 years ago, our ancestors, men and women understood that the supernatural is a dimension that changes all of nature, so that time and space are reformed. They're recalibrated. You're no longer working with a set like a deck of values that has its hierarchies, has its suits the game with its rules. Now there's a joker in the deck. It changes the entire way in which one computes possibility, because consciousness enters in as a fifth dimension to time and space. And whereas you had a five dimensional continuity before, what is peculiar about consciousness coming into play as a fifth dimension is that it makes real discontinuities. It's like someone who was used to seeing that this is the way things are, and all of a sudden, with enough consciousness, one can see. One can analyze, one can bring down that this was not a fluid continuity at all, but was a series of frames per second. And when the first meditators, when the first yogis, some 10 or 12,000 years ago, were going into consciousness with enough sophistication, they began to suspect the world. This is not really the way it is. All of this is convention. And when we bring our consciousness into play in an accurate sort of a way, it changes the world and we know that it changes it. Because, look, we are bringing such and so into play. And now nature is doing it a different way. And one of the first things that consciousness did was to take man out of the realm of following the animals and showing them that he could select and tame the animals, instead of having to deal with what was provided on the hillside in forms of plants, he could tame the plants. He could go and select the plants that he wanted, cultivate them, and help them to grow where he wanted them to. And so the Neolithic food revolution of taming animals and plants some nine 10,000 years ago, was the introduction of consciousness into time and space, into nature. And what grew out of that was a form remarkably different from the tribe. The tribe is at home In the ritual existentials that emerge out of nature. It's at home in the myths that develop out of ritual, out of the feeling toned experience that is generated from ritual, and even at home, though not so much in the realm of symbols. The interiorization of meaning. The interiorization of experience that forms into meaning, that centers around almost like a magnetic field, around powerful images that are distilled into ideas, into symbols. And out of that interiorization of experience comes a whole realm of the mind. And we saw that the mind like Existentials, the mind is very objective that the forms of the mind have an objectivity. Symbols are as real as existentials, and you can align an image in the mind with something in the world, and you can draw an integral path between them. And you can come to understand how to pull this together. But when consciousness comes into play, first thing that it transforms is the mind. And then it reaches through the mind and transforms the things. And pretty soon you have a field of crops growing where there was largely a desert alongside of a medium sized river 10,000 years ago. All of a sudden you had rectangular Plots of barley growing and a place that was just a trail intersection became one of the first towns in the world called Jericho. And Jericho alongside the Jordan River, one of the first places on the planet where men and women tamed the plants and the animals for the first time. And brought into play a kind of a geometric city of the transform of the land, so that that spot where Jericho is near the Jordan River has been for 10,000 years a magical spot. It's a conscious place. And 2000 years ago, it's the place where baptisms were first done. Right there at that ford of the Jericho River, a place where a thousand years before that, Elijah transporting himself on the fiery chariot, not dying, but going to heaven alive and alert. Elijah crossed the Jordan right there. So certain areas, certain spots. The area in the 20th century became the site of the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River and still there. Consciousness, as we're seeing by looking at vision, we're beginning to understand that we have to deal all the way back to nature and realize that nature now has a recalibration. Quality has the ability to accept a transform, and that consciousness does not come as an alien or an enemy, but comes as the weaver for the pattern deeper than the weaver. Comes as someone who can reweave a new pattern unseen before. And we're taking a look at the way in which we began with the I-Ching and Thoreau. We're looking at the way in which, in order to understand vision not as magic. That would be an atavistic way of looking at it. We're using the English term vision, which came into play about 600 700 years ago. The English language, about 700 years ago underwent a vast transform from what it had been to something completely new. The English language about 650 years ago had been used by that time for at least that long, 650 750 years. But Old English is markedly different from Middle English. Old English is very Germanic, very Latin. The epic in English literature, written in Old English as Beowulf, he likes to get out his sword and slay the monster Grendel, and after 50 years, Beowulf has to fight an even worse monster, Grendel's mother, who comes looking for him. You killed my son. But in Middle English, you do not find a Beowulf epic. The whole way in which consciousness has rewoven time and space has changed. And what you find in Middle English is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is markedly different from Beowulf, as you could ever expect. And the Middle English of Chaucer was in such a whirlwind of transform that within 200 years of Chaucer, the language changed again. What had taken almost 800 years to make a huge transform happen now in only about 200 years, because 200 years after Chaucer came Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Renaissance. English is so protean that within the short career of Shakespeare writing, it lasted only about 20 years. The early plays of Shakespeare are markedly naive compared to the last plays of Shakespeare. There is a world of difference between a midsummer Night's Dream and A tempest. The Tempest shows that in 20 years, Shakespeare's own transformed language transformed again in his own hands, and we have, for the first time in world history, an author who is so conscious that he transforms the time and space of his language within his own lifetime. And one of the reasons Shakespeare is as great as he is, is you have in the concourse of one working generation, a man who masters the art of transforming himself, so that his last play, The Tempest, is all about the problems of now having enough capacity to transform, that you can transform your ability to transform, that you have an exponential quality. That magic is not just magic, but it's magically magic. It's not just conscious, it's consciously conscious. It becomes like super consciousness. How can that be? It becomes super conscious because vision has gone through a prism, has gone through a lens, a kind of a lens that focuses the conscious energies of vision, brings it together into a focus as if it were a lens, and shows you the spectrum of possibilities beyond belief. And that spectrum of possibilities beyond belief is called history. And that prism is called the person, the artist, the artist who is so consciously differential that there is complete possibility. Range is infinite. And you find in the old Shakespeare you find after The Tempest that he has, Faulkner said. Once he could understand Shakespeare, breaking his pen and leaving it on the table because he had entered into a realm that was so vast that he himself was staggered by what he had unloosed what he had opened. And it's interesting, because the beginnings of that quandary are there in the dramas Hamlet and King Lear, the beginnings of Shakespeare beginning to suspect himself of infinity and capacities, that there is no end to what he could transform? And it's just about the same time that one finds the first mathematical work in the world by a Johannes Kepler, who understood the math of how planetary orbits are not perfect spheres, but that they are ellipses, and that the ellipses mean that the sun and the earth work together in tandem and form what we call today a barycenter. That the center of orbital centrifugal force is a non-existential focus. There's nothing there but pure space, and no time. But consciousness is there. And so a mathematical barycenter is a very curious kind of magical location. It doesn't have any time. It doesn't have any existentiality, but occurs in a definite mathematical space. And its link with actuality is the conscious dimension that we mathematically know that it's there. It's very near the surface of the sun because the sun is so much larger than the Earth. But those two bodies working together in tandem produce that. And then Kepler's Math. By the time that Shakespeare wrote A Tempest was improved enough that he began, Kepler began to understand. It's not just that the Earth and the sun make this, but that all the planets have this relationship with the sun, so that there is a series of barycenters going out into space that are only perceptual to consciousness. And by 1611, when the tempest came out, Kepler was able to understand he could mathematically plot the barycenter progression of all the planets with the sun. And he saw that they formed a perfect Pythagorean harmonic, and he was devastated. He was devastated that some 2200 years before him, someone had understood this and that he had just rediscovered what Pythagoras already knew around 500 BC, that reality in terms of differential consciousness participating in nature reality assumes not a geometric distribution, but a harmonic transformation, and that we are such that we can understand harmonic transformations just as well as understanding geometric distributions, and that the geometric distributions of divine contact with man that used to be limited to the geography, the landscape. All cults of gods are formed around locations on the landscape. All ideas of divinity having a place for man's life are in temples or synagogues or Places on the landscape, and they all have a kind of a geometric to their distribution. All of a sudden, the realization is that our sense of divinity is so vast, more vast than that, that God does not need to be limited to landscape. Sites can be anywhere. That conscious time space extends it to even into the realms of complete zero and ultimate infinity. So that by 1611, it was quite apparent that the early classical Greeks, by the time of Pythagoras, had mastered indeed a whole realm of a five dimensional continuum, a five dimensional discontinuum. What we're looking at, at the beginnings of vision, is the way in which the Italian Renaissance rediscovered that in an intuition, in an expectation that this probably was true, but it took almost 150 years for it to mature, so that people like Shakespeare and Kepler could look on their work tables, could make an artistic or mathematical designs of their own expressions that this indeed is how it is. And we're looking at the. This is a collection of the Hermetic writings. We're looking at the first of the Hermetic writings. It's a little dialogue called the Poimandres, the mine Shepherd, and it was written about, written down about 90 A.D. in Alexandria, and rediscovered and translated and brought back into play some time in the early 1460s in Florence, Italy. That until that time, the only people that even knew of the existence of this were a few scholars hidden here and there, mostly Byzantine scholars who never went anywhere out of fear of getting into complicated relationalities with who knows what kinds of assassins. And so it was a great revelation that these things existed, and that they existed in the way that they they do. And the man responsible for bringing this into play, the translator, his name was Marsilio Ficino. And so we use as the pair to the Poimandres we use Ficino's little book, The Book of Life, which is hiding up here. Here it is. It's translated into English. Ficino's book of life. And he wrote this little book as an encouragement to the grandson of his patron. His patron was Cosimo de Medici, and he made the translation of the Hermetica for Cosimo Cosmo, towards the end of his life, said, you're translating all these wonderful things for me, especially Plato, but I want you to stop translating all these things and translate the hermetic material for me. This is a crash program. This is the Manhattan Project of the Renaissance, because Cosimo understood that the platonic dialogues written about 500 years before the Hermetic Dialogues, that the platonic dialogues had been distilled. They had gone through a distillation process and that whereas Plato was good fine wine, this was the liqueur, this was the cognac. And so the Hermetic dialogues are like cognac to the fine wine of the platonic dialogues. And Cosimo wanted to sip some fine cognac, some philosophic cognac, and on his sickbed, for the last couple of months of his life, Ficino read him the translations, and Cosmo was very happy. And Cosmo's son Piero, sickly and not lasting very long, gave way to Cosmo's grandson called Lorenzo IL Magnifico, Lorenzo the Magnificent. And it was for the young Lorenzo that Ficino wrote the Book of Life. He wrote or translated the Hermetic Documents for Cosimo. He wrote the Book of Life for Lorenzo, so that we have here in these two books which we pair together, we have the parentheses of the Italian Renaissance in Florence. We have the parentheses that made a renaissance for the first time in about 1200 years. We know now because we know an awful lot about history. We know a lot about backgrounds of things that there have been in various cultures renaissances many times in the world. But this was the first one. This was the one that about 150 years ago, a historian named Jacob Burckhardt singled out that here, out of what was an evolving realm of the medieval world. Suddenly, the classical world reappeared in full garment and full dance. How could this be? What happened? It was called the rebirth of learning. Meaning the rebirth of classical learning. It was no longer an extension of the medieval period, but was a transformation of it. When you look at the Italian High Middle Ages, you find Dante and you find Dante's Divine Comedy, a wonderfully cultivated, thoroughly medieval. Dante's guide is Virgil, going through the various levels through the geometric city of the Inferno, the geometric city of the Purgatorio, the geometric city. Even if the Paradiso one finds that geometric mind of the Middle Ages. But you do not find the transform there. At the very end of the Paradiso, after his guide Virgil has gone as far as he can go. And Virgil can't go into Paradise, because he was. He died before a Christian Paradise was even made, and so he couldn't go into the Paradise. So his guide became Beatrice. Dante's love of his life that he saw once when he was a little boy. And it's the spirit of Beatrice that takes him further, and she takes him as far as she can go. And towards the end of the last canto in the Paradiso, she can go no further, and his guide becomes an esoteric scholastic, who shows him that he can only take him a little bit further, and that what he beholds after that is the highest vision that the Middle Ages could find from the integral ecology of their mind. And that is that the great eagle of heaven has an eye through which man could look, but he doesn't know what he sees. He can see in the way in which heaven's eagle sees. But he doesn't know what that is. All that he knows is that he feels kinesthetically, that he is moving in the great sweeping motion of all the stars in their order. And that's as far as Dante can go. That's as far as the High Middle Ages could go. The Renaissance is different. It transforms, that goes through the eye and looks at a completely new cosmos that doesn't have just one joker in the deck, but every other card is a joker that the factoring in of the zeros with the ones of the discontinuous openness with the existentials of both body and mind, constitute a mysterious binary language of zeros and ones. And out of that man learns to write something completely new. He learns not to write just new programs, but he learns that he is of such a nature that he can go outside of programming itself into something called composition. The American photographer Edward Weston in one of his Daybooks had a beautiful phrase wonderful to repeat. Weston, trying to convey something in his daybooks to himself, said composition is the strongest way of seeing. It makes of one no longer a figure in a story. Even the hero is but a figure in a story. What is beyond the hero? The storyteller. One transforms and becomes the storyteller. And this takes you outside of the comic strip, outside of the frames of reference. Outside of the limitations of nature, outside of the limitations of time and space. So that man becomes at home in any world, in any time, in any way of organic entity. He has freed himself completely. Not the freedom of choice, but the exponential freedom of unlimited possibilities. Let's take a break and we'll come back. We shift our pair of books were always articulating our movement by pairings of books. One reason for that is over the last 2000 years, the book, or the Greek word for it is the codex has been the way in which we have indexed our minds to look at our experience and activity. It's a mental indexing of nature, and books also are forms that come out of the differential consciousness. They're quite different from what came before. So we're using books because books are still a part of the tool tooling. It's the way in which our minds have been tooled. It's the way in which the environment that we find ourselves in has been calibrated, and it is the best method of transform that we have available to us. But we live in the 21st century and the old forms are dead. The book is not going to be viable much longer. There will always be books, but it won't be the transform of choice. And so in order to wean us away from the book. We pair books together. We use disparate books that are paired together so that the two books form a set, because with sets, we can use our differential consciousness in a structural way and not be co-opted by the tool that we're using. It doesn't mean much to you at first, but as you get into it, as you begin to develop, it's a very fine point. Most people writing on transformation think that symbols transform. And of course, as long as you're confident in your mind, you will believe that symbols transform. Symbols do not transform. Psychologists who say that symbols transform are good psychologists. They're not very good yogis. And they don't transform themselves. Consciousness transforms vision. And it works back through symbols first. But to not to know what the order is. Is to betray your lack of experience. Symbols do not transform. E equals MC squared is useless. Without understanding the consciousness of how to use that people wrote. E equals MC squared glibly for several decades. But it was a great surprise that you could turn that into an atomic bomb. And when the first people who began to realize that you could do that, they were very afraid not of atomic energy. They were afraid, like the old Shakespeare was afraid that they had opened a door that will never be closed again, that we will have come into powers that are almost godlike, and we're not sure we're ready for that. And the old trepidation of being fearful of something new comes back into play. One of the differences between, as we were speaking earlier this morning, one of the differences between Old English and Middle English. Old English had an epic of a hero who slays monsters. Whereas Middle English, the Middle English epic Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is about taking a pilgrimage with a group of pilgrims going on a quest together, and that this quest has a transform that's in the proportion and ratios of the group together. And it's not about a single hero with a sword. It's not about Conan, not about Beowulf. There's no hero. There's no protagonist. Canterbury Tales doesn't ship in terms of Hollywood because there's no role for the big star. There is a whole series of episodes of different persons who together make the Canterbury Pilgrim entourage, and they are going to this place one of the best little books on Middle English literature, Tradition and Structure, and Middle English literature. The title is Allegory and Mirror. Middle English changes Old English, which talked about the might of an arm, the sharpness of the sword. And now it's not about that, it's about allegory and mirror. It's that we are involved in a magical reality, a conscious time space, and that the dangers and the treasures are not dragons and gold, but aspects that are brought into play by our capacities and powers that are let loose. And if we don't understand what it is that we are doing, we run up against versions of ourselves that are not very nice. We become much more fearsome than any dragon. The kinds of books that come out then about Middle English literature, the visionary landscape, a study in medieval allegory. And it has a melancholy devil with big wings. Gustave Doré's illustration of Lucifer in hell being very melancholy and trying to find a way to get back or get even or. And one is reminded that in the medieval high medieval period, just at the time where visionary consciousness was coming into play, you changed from church liturgies that were centered in the cathedral. Those church liturgies were centered in the cathedral, and it was a kind of a Christian mythos. All of a sudden, the mass in the cathedral is transformed into a completely different presentation. What you have in that early Renaissance, that late high medieval threshold period, that liminal quality of period, are cycles of plays called mystery plays. And we still have three great cycles from Chester, from York, from Wakefield. The Midlands of England had cycles of mystery plays, and they were put together where there would be this little play put on by such and such a guild, this little skit put on by such and such a guild. And the cycle of these mystery plays is a transform of the mass. The mass took place in the church. The mystery place took place distributed throughout the whole town, throughout the whole city. It wasn't the priest that was officiating, it was the entire population of the people. According to the sociological guilds, the trades, the crafts which they were able to do. And the cycle is not about a single mass where the transform is for the body of Christ. The transform now is on a cosmological scale, because the mystery play cycles begin with the fall of Lucifer and end with Judgment Day, so that there is a cosmic dimension to transformation for man, rather than a psychological transformational theater limited to the integral so that you have these kinds of studies, the English dream vision, and you have a pilgrim who is beholding this fabulous, radiant lady. You find this sort of medieval dream vision still active in a writer like J.R.R. Tolkien and in Lord of the rings. Um, the Lady Galadriel, who is the great elf queen, is this radiant figure, and one approaches her with somewhat caution and trepidation, and certain individuals are afraid to approach her because she's fearful, because she can do many things that are magical. She can do many things that are terrifying, and one walks very softly. And yet She. She is that image of the beautiful feminine that comes into play in a dream vision. And in the high medieval dream vision, one finds that the medieval version of this is that one is dreaming, one is asleep in one's bed, and it is the dream which then carries it. Whereas in someone like Chaucer, it's the love vision that carries it. You're not dreaming, you are in love, and it's the love vision. And in fact, the whole volume of Chaucer's Love Visions published a number of years ago. Um. All of these are related. All of these are related together, and they're related in a specific way in classical antiquity, but the way in which they are related in classical antiquity does not take place in the Greek or the Roman traditions. The tradition that they took place in was the Jewish tradition, and not for a long time in the Jewish tradition, but in a very narrow wedge in one single lifetime. In one generation of writing that three great versions of transform came out and were expressed by a single writer within one generation, and became like a template against which, when the Renaissance began to recover, this bring back into play classical antiquity. They disclosed to their surprise, this fabulous treasure, that there are three different ways that one can transform, and that the transformation is styled in a very specific way. You can transform by dream. And in that narrow wedge of the Jewish tradition, the workbook of Dream transformation analysis was the Book of Daniel. That's what the Book of Daniel is all about. And it was written about 164 160 BC. You can transform by dream, but you can also transform by suffering profound suffering. Not philosophically analyzed, but accepted to the last drag will transform and the classical Jewish work that treats that as the Book of Job and the Book of Job is written exactly at the same time as the Book of Daniel, because the author was the same person about 160 BC. And when we look, we don't find the name of the author. We don't know his name, but he was called the Teacher of Righteousness. And we know this because the Dead Sea Scrolls contain a third volume of his that was lost, and no one knew it was there until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the mid 1940s and translated a very good version, the Dead Sea Scrolls in English. There's a fourth edition now three times the size of Geza Vermes The third is the Dead Sea Scroll, which is called the Thanksgiving Hymns, and the Thanksgiving Hymns are about the transform of the personal lyric focus of a consciousness. The Thanksgiving hymns, by the way, uh, in the ancient term, are called the Judeo. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a piece of music called Hodie, which is the Christian version of, uh, they're the Psalms from Qumran, because the Teacher of Righteousness was the founder of the Qumran community. And where was that community founded? At the mouth of the Jordan River, not far from Jericho, in that old location again, but founded in such a way that that community was paired. One community was there. Where was the other community? The other community? The pair to Qumran was the Jewish community in Alexandria in Egypt. And this formed a very odd couple, kind of like the odd couple of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. A very odd couple, because the Qumran community was founded specifically to be suspicious of hellenizing elements that had brought Classical Judaism to a dead end. I mean, a dead end, because in 168 BC in Jerusalem, the temple, not Solomon's original temple that had been destroyed. But the Second Temple, it's called in Jewish literature the Second Temple period. But the Holy Temple in Jerusalem was converted by Antiochus the Fourth into a Greek temple, and a statue of Zeus was put in the Holy of Holies. And if you went in to practice your Jewish faith in Jerusalem, in the temple after 168 BC, you were killed. And so the remnant, the strict Jewish remnant that refused to have this happen, the leader of that remnant was the teacher of righteousness. And for 20 years searched to try and find what is God doing? What is the mystery of this? And founded Qumran and the worst place possible on the edge of the Dead Sea. Horrible locale. I don't know if you know, but the Dead Sea is called the Dead Sea because there's no life. There are no fish, no frogs, nothing. The Dead Sea is very, very deep. It's like Lake Tahoe or Lake Baikal. It's one of those lakes that is more than 1300 feet deep. Even though narrow enough, you can see the other shore. It's like a chasm. And the chasm goes down deep enough so that it is capable of bringing up some remnants of oil in the subterranean deposits, and it comes up in the form of asphalt. And the Romans called it the asphalt sea. And the asphalt Floats like black blobs in the water, and the water is like mineral oil. You can float on the surface of the Dead Sea and go down about two inches, because the water is so viscous and the stench and the fumes of the petroleum, chemical quality and the air around it, and because of the tremendous low humidity, all of the mineral salts from time to time will take and form these pillars of salt. At one far end of the Dead Sea, where Sodom and Gomorrah were, the pillars of salt are real. The hellish quality of the Dead Sea, with the black bituminous globs floating on it. This was the place the Teacher of Righteousness has founded a community of the pure. The Essenes, about 160 BC. And the whole point of that community was to be suspicious of the hellenizing elements that had corrupted Judaism to the point of making it a capital crime to worship in the Temple in Jerusalem, which is very curious because the Alexandria Jewish community were Hellenistic Jews. They couldn't read Hebrew very well. They read Greek. That's why the Old Testament had been translated several hundred years before into Greek. And so the Alexandrian community faced a very peculiar problem. They had to be suspicious of their own structure of mind. They had to be suspicious of the hellenizing aspect that they had to use in order to read the scriptures. And so this was an impossible thing, seemingly. How do you become adept at being suspicious of your own language, thought, forms of your mind? And they did it by introducing a quality of reading between the lines and reading allegorically that it doesn't literally mean what it says, but what it says is only a veil, a smokescreen through which one has to look to see the real. And so allegory was born in Alexandria, in the Jewish community, because they had to find a way to look through the language they had to use in order to read the scriptures. And so the old saying was not to consult the scriptures so much as to search them. And the key to the transformed community of these Alexandrian Jews was they got very good at searching the Scripture for hidden meanings, for allegorical meanings. And the all time great author of that is Philo, Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus. And he's the one who brought this whole practice into play that comes into play not in a Greek way so much, and not in a Christian way so much, but in a Jewish way, because the whole idea of cultivated Judaism, then, is that one needs to be able to read a midrash on something which founds itself on seeing through the language to hidden meanings in the midrashic quality of Judaism is developed and born at that time, and has a particular Alexandrian kind of exquisite refinement of being not only cultivated in the sense that one knows a lot, but being erudite in that one knows how to know. And so you find in the Alexandrian Hellenistic Jewish community, which was a huge population, several hundred thousand people. Philo says there are more than a million Jews in Alexandria in his time, bigger than the population of Palestine. Total. And they had to use the Greek language to read their own scriptures, but look through it. So the allegorical quality was so difficult to master that you had to take yourself out of the social scene out of the society that was traditionally handed to you. And so there were whole communities of people at certain times in their life. They abstracted themselves from regular life to go into a retreated practice in order to find how they could learn to do this. And the most sophisticated group at this were located about 25 miles west of Alexandria, at the end of the lake. Lake Marriott and antiquity. It was a place where there were vineyards and wine was made there, and they were on the way many holiday spas. So it was not a desert place. It was a very refined place. It was sort of like Santa Barbara would be today. And that community was called the community of the Therapeutae, the community of the Healers. And they were the other pair to the Qumran people. And Philo says that. Whereas the Qumran were the active people, the Therapeutae in Alexandria were the Contemplatives. They led the contemplative life. And we talked last week about how when Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine. Constantine, who was never a Christian, he at the very last minute on his deathbed, said, okay, I believe. And then he died. And he did that just to please his mother. He was that kind of a character, the very tough, wooden, vicious man who was afraid of his mother. So he hired a man named Eusebius. Eusebius, whose very name means faithfully trustworthy, and he knew that Eusebius would not lie to him because he would kill him if he lied, because he had several hundred people at a conference at Eusebius church to find out what was the exact ancient truth of the Christian religion, so that they could exactly get it right, so that they could then make it official throughout the entire Roman Empire and make it the state religion. And Eusebius says that the earliest Christian practices are described accurately by Philo of Alexandria. He says, how do we know? Because in the most esoteric inner elements of our Christianity, this is what men and women still do today. 320 A.D. except that Philo of Alexandria died in the early 40s A.D., at least a decade before Saint Paul ever went on any mission, before he even realized that he was going to go on any mission, there was no Christianity. It hadn't been thought of yet. They were Jews. Eusebius didn't know that. He didn't know that. They're tracing the deepest characteristic roots, the uniqueness back to Judaism, but a specific kind of a Judaism, a Judaism that not only was Alexandrian but was paired with an assassin. Judaism in Qumran. And the three workbooks that were used originally that the Teacher of Righteousness wrote were The Book of Daniel, the Book of Job, and the Thanksgiving Hymns. So that men and women could learn all three of the avenues. All three of the ways. Why those three? Because there is an ancient Pythagorean ratio ness to those three ways we talked of last year, a couple of months ago, about the deeper, esoteric quality of the Greek vision of how man goes outside of himself to find something other than just more of himself, and that there were three classical ways in which you did that. You could go outside of yourself in ecstasy. Ecstasy is standing outside. That ecstasy takes you out. And the mythological figure that conveyed that was Aphrodite, not Aphrodite of the beautiful hips, Aphrodite of the beautiful smile. And the other way. Is that you could be scared out of your wits. Terror. So that not only Aphrodite, but Ares, the god of war, so that those two were like a pair. So that Venus and Mars are like a pair. Still today, in the popular books. Somebody from Venus and somebody from Mars. Nice little polarity. But the esoteric meaning of that is not the polarity at all, but that there was a triad because there was a third way, and the third way was neither terror nor ecstasy, but evenness of mind. Not Aphrodite or Ares, but Athena. Athena. Transcendental wisdom is a way of going outside of yourself, but not a transcendental wisdom of crossing your fingers and your eyes and getting the Kundalini energy up to a certain point. And you take off, man. You take off. That's not it at all. The classical locus of the expression of what that evenness is, is in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna. He says, evenness of mind is yoga. It's not a control of anything. It's not a control of the body by the mind. It's not a control of the mind by the body. It is an evenness where the existentials and the symbols are so evenly balanced that the distribution becomes endless. And in that equanimity, a transform happens all by itself. It comes as a gift that divine wisdom is a gift neither through ecstasy nor through terror, but through the gift of A transcendence. And so one finds the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job about the two different ways in which one can deal with things. But there's a third way, and that's the Thanksgiving hymns, the Judeo, uh, there was a theological study of the Thanksgiving hymns done about 25 years ago. Qumran and predestination. One of the aspects of the evenness of mind is to overcome the destiny or the predestination, to overcome the way in which the world is structured. There's no way out of that structure as long as you remain in the world. It isn't that the world does this to you, it's that you're factored in to the way in which this process works and only works to that extent. It's not that it is a belief structure. It's something more profound. It's that this is the way integration happens all over the universe. The integral, the path integral will always flow in a certain ecology. It has to. That's what it does. But the path integral, which culminates with a symbolic mind able to have powerful ideas, is not the be all and end all of reality, because ecstasy and terror and high wisdom transcend it on every level. And the conscious universe becomes a cosmos, something completely different. And the access to the cosmos is through the spiritual person, which is a differential form, not an integral form. No one ever found their person by integration. More that you integrate, the tighter that you get a logical understanding of a psychological centering, and you can get very good at that. And there are very high powered ways of doing that. 20,000 years ago they might have been little difficult trails, but by the 21st century, the 20 lane highways. What do they lead to? They lead to a mind which is extremely powerful, extremely clear, extremely accurate, that doesn't know that it is in a context of unlimitedness that has nothing to do with its integral capacities. It has no humility. No wonder it's melancholy with all of its power. Looking around, what else is there? The greatest image of that was made by Albrecht Dürer. Uh, he had an engraving done about 1504 of this angel surrounded by all the latest new Renaissance emblems and symbols and tools, the sextants and the the globes, the crystals, the pyramids and everything. And when you looked at the eyes of the angelic being, they were full of pathos, because none of that does you any good vis a vis the real. All of that is reduced to a game, a mind game level of mind games, a psychological mind game. It's not nourishing at all. And the worst thing is to become so good at it that you win. And because there's nothing more lonely than the victor of having vanquished everything and come into control of everything and be completely unsatisfied, that wasn't it at all. And so there is a quality in this study of modes and analogy in ancient and medieval verse, ancient and medieval verse, that there was a cusp, a threshold at which one could tell that you were gaining freedom personally and spiritually on a transcendental level, from the conditioning of the world. And what was that way that you were able to compose a spontaneous poem of thanks, a Thanksgiving hymn. It is the spontaneous, personal hymn. It is the personal, artistic lyric expression of thankfulness that is the first sign that's the hallmark of the spiritual person Maturing into differential consciousness and being able to live on that five dimensional freedom. No wonder that one finds at the pinnacle of the high medieval personality, someone like Saint Francis of Assisi, who transcended completely the medieval world, largely because he was one of the greatest lyric poets of his time. And The little flowers of Saint Francis are spontaneous, because the proof of it was not that you composed it so much by the mind, with symbols placed just so, but that spontaneously it came out of your spirit and expressed itself. The ability to talk endlessly beautiful lyric language was the proof positive that someone had developed their differential consciousness to the point of freedom. And all of this was in direct opposition to the pretend mode, that the mind makes up the fool's gold rather than the real gold. And so one finds in the Qumran community, especially after about 100 years, 150 years, which is about the lifetime of a powerful idea they had let go of using Daniel, let go of using job, let go of the Thanksgiving hymns. And the community began to hope for something that we need some kind of transcendental leader who will come and lead us to victory in a war against the evil ones. That some Messiah will come and will be like our victorious, avenging God, and we will kick hell out of those who persecute us. And so you find later scrolls at Qumran not about Thanksgiving hymns, but about like the War Scroll, the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, or like the Temple Scroll, where everything is laid out, that we are going to reestablish this temple exactly the way the symbolic plan needs to be. Misunderstanding that the focus is like a berry center that can be everywhere or anywhere, even in infinity, and not some particular place on a mound in some geographic area. To think that a New Jerusalem needs to be in Jerusalem is a misunderstanding. Completely. Totally. But no wonder because the base was so fragile. The ancient library of Qumran. They might have had somewhere around 80 or 90 texts, several versions, maybe bringing it up to 100 150. The library in Alexandria had more than a million volumes. It's like that. The difference between 100 and 1 million. It's an exponential field, a base from which to develop something completely different. And so in the Italian Renaissance, in that high northern Renaissance in Florence, when it became a fact that there were people getting used to reading the classics again, they read the classics of a certain period with absolute shock. One of the classics at that time, rediscovered, was that there was a history of Rome, written at the time of the founding of the Roman Empire. Not only Virgil, whose epic The Aeneid was commissioned by Augustus Caesar, he wanted something like Homer to make sure that he had an epic foundation for the empire. Augustus. Very careful. Someone who would never have called himself a dictator because that promotes a faction against you. He always called himself princeps first. Napoleon called himself First Consul. Don't call me the emperor. Call me First Consul. You can say whatever you like to say, but you must hear me first. And then decide if you're going to agree or not. It's a whole different process. Not only did he have Virgil, but he had Livy. And Livy wrote a history from the founding of Rome up until nine BC. And Livy was the source that in the Italian Renaissance the political focus went to. Not only did Machiavelli write The Prince, which is about the Augustus Caesar operating in his time, but he wrote a series of discourses on the history of living. And these two books go together. This book is like the key to this door. The Prince by Machiavelli opens the door of the Discourses on Livy. And it's here in Livy that you find how the Roman Empire was set up to work forever, because it would co-opt and curtail any sense of possible transcendence and curl it back into a manageable matrix which was controlled by a bona fide authority. Hours. And so, by having closed off all of the areas of transcendence, we cannot have too much real ecstasy, and we're not going to allow too much real terror, and we're not going to allow equanimity to really get settled. So as long as we keep this mix going, people will stay where they're put, they will stay in the structures that we control. And this was an extremely difficult situation. And by the time of Shakespeare, it was apparent that some human beings, some men, some women had grown so vast in their transformative capacities that they were beginning to outstrip the society as a whole. The most peculiar night of all was the last night. He was the Renaissance transformed version of the high medieval knight errant. Don Quixote is Don Quixote. Who faces. What does Cervantes say? He read so many books on chivalry that his mind dried up and blew away. More next week.