Symbol 9
Presented on: Saturday, December 2, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Symbols Nine and we're beginning with Yeats and Blake, William Blake and W.B. Yeats. Of Blake we're using his illustrations to the Book of Job and the great Ralph Vaughan Williams did this, 'Job, A Masque for Dancing.' It's a symphonic piece but he didn't include it among his nine symphonies; it would have been a tenth symphony. We're using in our learning musical classics for each of the phases and for each of the intervals. So the eight phases and the eight intervals have 16 classics of music, ranging from Cesária Évora in Brazil, to something like Vaughan Williams', 'Sinfonia Antartica.' The 'Sinfonia Antartica' is his Symphony Number Seven and if you get interested there are many different recordings. This Naxos recording I think can be found for like $4, $5. The best recording is Sir Adrian Bolt, who recorded all of Vaughan Williams' symphonies and in fact when he was recording the Ninth Symphony, Ralph Vaughan Williams died just seven hours before they did the performance that was recorded. And Sir Adrian, a really extraordinary figure. The other great conductor, Sir John Barbirolli, for whom the Fifth Symphony was written, also understood how to produce Vaughan Williams. Vaughan Williams is underrated still. He was officially an atheist who was as deeply spiritual as Beethoven, but he would never allow himself to be bureaucratised into any kind of formality. He also did ten Blake songs that are on CD and I think that you'll get that Vaughan Williams understood and appreciated Blake in a very deep way. Yeats also honed a great deal of his deeper qualities on Blake and in 1893 he did an edition of the works of Blake, In The Muses' Library. And along with a friend of his, Edwin J. Ellis, whose book The Real Blake has been a classic for a long time, Yeats and Ellis together did a three volume presentation, a larger version of Blake.
And it's quite interesting to realise when we're dealing with symbols at this particular stage, we're dealing with the third pair of people and books that align themselves and if you have an alignment like this, of three, instead of just having a line which has a geometricity, you now have a line which is a mythic narrative, you have a beginning, a middle and an end. So that with a mythic horizon of experience, the geometricity now has the ability to both deepen and complexify into a trigonometry. So instead of a diagrammatic, geometric by which one could develop some kind of metaphysics, you now have a trigonometric functioning structure which is able to develop proportions and ratios, by which one does not have a metaphysics, but by which one has a music. And so we're learning not to stop with metaphysical diagrams, but to go on and realise that one can develop a score which can be played, like a composer who develops the score, not to have something diagrammatic on his page, but something which can be conducted and performed. And the expansion of it is that experience in the mythic horizon is carried through the entire psychophysical structure into a visionary expansion of experience, which allows for the spiritual person now to emerge as a dual form. Once one has the ability to do a trigonometric functioning transform of a geometric - geometry into trigonometry - it's well within reach to do the second transform and that is to develop a trigonometry into a calculus. And with a calculus you can move infinitely between the ones and zeros that were the original parenthesis limiting our ability to go any further. And because the ones and zeros are the most primordial polarities, they do the binding of a dynamic so that its energy becomes form and holds. And as long as the zeros and ones of a polarity hold energy into form, it will remain that way, unified into whatever size of form, a particle, an atom, a chair, a planet, a star, will always be unified by the energy being held in the form by the polarisation of the zero and one limitation. But if you're going to transform something you need to take the polarisation of zero and one and turn it at a right angle, so that it becomes now capable of being uncoupled from its polarity and the oneness is able to go through its natural progression, which includes not only that there is a zero and a one, but that there is a pair of zero and one together which would make a third and that the interiorisation of that third, the zero, the one, the pair zero and one, make a very interesting quaternary in the mind. And that's there where symbols come in: they cinch in fours, in squares, in frames of reference, the way in which polarisation, coming out of a dynamic, will make the forms of things and the further transform of that, of the mythic experience of it by triadics, generating a milieu out of which a complexity like the mind, like symbolic thought, will complete the structure, complete it in a four quality. And if it is done in such a way as to let that frame of reference remain open, a quintessential fifth quality will emerge, consciousness. In show business the fifth business is the magical part of the show and when the show is performed, completely done right, everyone is absorbed into the magic of the theatre, the audience, the actors, the sets, the props. And anyone who has ever been caught into that kind of a high quintessential, hermetic magic flow knows. One of the best songs ever done was from the musical, 'State Fair,' 'It's a Grand Night for Singing.' 'The stars are shining above and I feel like I'm falling in love,' which we do. And it is that quintessential quality of conscious magic that is generated by the completeness not being completely bricked up, leaving the window open. There was a time in England when William Pitt was being bulldoggish about running everything, not just the North American colonies, but he made attacks on the window space that businesses had in London, so many places were bricked up in their window space. William Blake's father was a hosier and haberdasher and had a shop at the corner of Broad Street and Marshall Street in London and they bricked up all the window space on Marshall Street, so as to lower the tax at the time.
Blake was born in 1757 and he came into a family where traditionally the family were what was called at the time and historically now, the term is Dissenters. Dissenters from the Church, Dissenters from the Church authority, Dissenters from the theological doctrines. That the Bible was something open for individuals to read themselves and to generate a relationship to God, or to Jesus, or to anyone in the Bible personally, so that one would have a personal quality. But because the social milieu was so difficult, so straitened...the 1700's was known as the Enlightenment and that was for the crème de la crème of a few. Most societies in the seventeenth century...1700's, eighteenth century, were so strictured that towards the end of it you had revolutions, like the American Revolution, the French Revolution. The Dissenters were an English revolution that went on and on. The key to that was in the apex of the Renaissance, a Dutch scholar named Erasmus, who was a genius. His Collected Works from the University of Toronto Press run to 100 volumes. Erasmus was the first person since antiquity to learn Greek well enough that he could not only read something like the New Testament originally, but see all the errors that had crept in through bad editing, bad patchwork. And so Erasmus, a contemporary of Paracelcus, was the first to put together a New Testament in the original Greek that was accurate since ancient times, because the Greek had been tampered with already in the first century AD. And by the time of Erasmus in 1500 the hundreds of councils, the scrambles, the doctrinaire push and shove, had completely distorted everything, so that when Erasmus' Bible first came out, of the Greek text, of the New Testament pristinely, his first comprehensive reader was Martin Luther, who said, 'I ain't gonna be a monk anymore, I'm gonna get married and I'm gonna write for the rest of my life against all of this phoniness.' And so you had something called the Reformation. And of course polarities are always working in forms and as soon as you have a Reformation, you have a Counter-Reformation. And the Counter-Reformation was to make a society of professional hit writers, not hit men like a gang would have, but hit writers called the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. An Order specifically organised in the Counter-Reformation to out-scholar these protesting Protestant scholars and to go everywhere in the world before they got there, 'Let's go to Japan, let's go to China, let's go to South America, everywhere and let's prepare everybody for our way of looking at things.' So the Dissenters come out of the Reformation and by the time of the 1700's, 250 years after Erasmus, you found increasingly a suspicion that truth was only able to be discerned by letting the mind expand itself into a spiritual consciousness that would emerge a prismatic person. One of the early testimonies to this was Benjamin Franklin, who wrote his autobiography at about the time that William Blake was a young boy in London. And Franklin remembered as a boy that when the Bible was read in the family, not in the church, they had to strap the Bible to the bottom of the stool and with the Bible strapped to the bottom of the stool it could be on the lap and the father could read the Bible to the whole family and they could discuss it. And one of the children are keeping a look out so that if somebody came who knew what they were after, what they would do, you could turn the stool over and it was just a family sitting there having an evening. The gamble of placing all of the authority of God and man on authoritarian structures began to crack about the time that William Blake was an adolescent. That would have been about the age of 14, that would have been about 1771. You get this tremendous sense that the whole structure was cracking in huge ways. If you've ever been to a northern city in the spring, when frozen rivers first begin to thaw they crack. The sound's like cannon shots, you can hear it all through a city, no matter how big the city is. I remember in Calgary, Alberta, when the Bow River would first break, it would sound like the fourth of July, only huge cracks just billowing through a city of half a million people and not a very big river. It is the cracking of authoritarian structures in the 1770's that begins to be sensed by special persons like a William Blake, who's a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson. That something has happened, that this is not a flaw in the world, or in us, it's a flaw in what has imprisoned us and now's the time to break out.
G.E. Bentley Jr. is one of the great Blake scholars of all time; he's at the University of Toronto, has been there for decades and decades. And he entitled his huge Yale University Press biography of Blake, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. And the quote on here is from Catherine Sophia Blake, Blake's wife: 'I have very little of Mr Blake's company, he is always in paradise.' Bentley writes...and he's been a Blake scholar for, at this time, for nearly half a century, a whole shelf-ful of great books on Blake: 'From his earliest childhood Blake saw visions. When he was four years old, God put his head to the window and set the child screaming and once his mother beat him for running in and saying that he saw the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields. Later when he was eight or ten, one day as he was walking on Peckham Rye near Dulwich Hill, in the Surrey countryside, not far from his grandfather's residence in Rotherhithe, he saw a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars.' And the first illustration in Job is that there is such a thing as a tree that has all the musical instruments in the cosmos, which are God's gift to men, not to angels, but to men. The angels will sing but it is man who plays the music. And after all the travails and trials of Job, at the very end of the Book of Job is the illustration where men have learned to bring the musical instruments out of the Tree of Life and put them in their own hands and make the music. That now that music has a quality that expands the world into a realisation where it cannot be imprisoned again in the old forms. But the demonic always responds with a countermove to make a new imprisonment, largely by trying to co-opt what the new freedom is all about. We saw this in San Francisco in the early months of 1966 already. The development of an incredible urban rush of freedom and experimentation and joy was co-opted, so that by the summertime all of the sources of joy - drugs, music, the whole thing - were all now run by professional gangsters and if you did anything you were putting money in their pockets.
Blake and Yeats are two of the most devastating critics of an imprisonment of mankind. Blake, that the spirit was not allowed to be an ordinary part of their personal lives and Yeats, that our personal lives are not allowed to resonate with the entire cosmos. So that here you have like a one, two step...and I use it towards the end of Symbols, at the very last, the third of the pairs of symbols. So that the first pair of the second year in Vision, which will be the first great Hermetic treatise, the Poimandres. 'Poimandre,' 'Poi,' in Greek, 'Poiesis,' means to, 'Creatively make something,' out of which we get, 'Poetry.' 'Mandres,' is, 'With the mind,' but it's the mind that is guided, so that G.R.S. Mead translated it as, 'The mind shepherd,' but it should be, 'The creative mind's shepherd.' The Poimandres from about 980 AD in Alexandria and we'll get to that in just a little bit, just for a moment. And I'm pairing with it the origins of the interpenetration of Taoism and Buddhism in Zhuang Zhou, about 300 BC. The taproot of Zen is in Zhuang Zhou. And the inheritor of Zhuang Zhou 1,000 years later was Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, who's the true, not the founder of Zen, but the one who took the seed in Zhuang Zhou and allowed it to have an expansion that could never be corralled again, for instance, there is no Seventh Patriarch. The Sixth Patriarch made sure that it was broadcast in an energy dynamic, such that anyone who heard it ever again, they were the Seventh Patriarch, no matter when they lived, or how many there were. And there have been millions of Seventh Patriarchs in the last 1400 years since Huineng. But the key, the seed is in Zhuang Zhou and we're going to pair Zhuang Zhou with the Poimandres.
In-between Blake and Yeats and the Poimandres and Zhuang Zhou, we will have our fourth interval and when you look at your course outline you'll be able to see your navigation chart. You'll be able to see that the interval text in-between them is the great Yoga Sutra by Patanjali. Patanjali is the greatest yoga writer in Indian history and he deserves a place of honour. The deepest yoga is the pivot that penetrates so that language does what it says infinitely. And in the Yoga Sutra the phrase in Sanskrit is, 'Pranama,' it means, 'The name breathed is the real name of that form.' It's not a label on that form, it is the essence of its unity in any creative transform of it; it will be the exfoliation of that unity and to the flower. And we'll see that all of this is set in such a way that those, that last pair, that Blake and Yeats and the first pair, with the interval text in the middle, that's a five part structure called a star of realisation and that old Hermetic star is very ancient. One of the beautiful figures in the twentieth century who used that star as his symbol is Jean Cocteau. And the young Jean Cocteau learned to colour outside the lines and then to realise that if you colour outside the lines you get a radiant aura which can extend indefinitely. And so the young Cocteau was one of these geniuses, not of Surrealism, but of supranatural realism. Quite extraordinary. We use his film 'The Beauty and the Beast' as one of our films, one of the all-time great retelling of a fairy tale, because a fairy tale is a visionary genre, not a myth whatsoever and not a story, but a bit of realisable seed, whose full growth unfolds the reality of the cosmos.
For young William Blake, he was uncomfortable taking his father's place in the business, he didn't want to sell hose and haberdashery, he wanted to draw. So on the backs of all of the bills of sale he would draw these fantastic pictures, but they were not pictures of just drawings, they were what he was seeing, because he could see visionarily even as a little boy and a child. And they finally...the father realised that he had to do something realistic and practical about this son, the oldest of four surviving children. So he apprenticed him to an engraver, James Basire, who was doing a lot of the professional engraving for the burgeoning archaeological publications and the architectural publications and he didn't teach the new stipple kind of engraving, but the old line, like Flaxman's illustrations to Homer, like Matisse, the living line, to present the form. And so William Blake was apprenticed to James Basire and after being a year in the studio, a great commission came up for Basire and that was they were refurbishing Westminster Abbey. This book was published by the Dean of Westminster Abbey about 130 years ago - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley - and it was published for the 800th anniversary of Westminster Abbey in 1876. Westminster Abbey had been founded by Edward the Confessor, the last English king before the Norman conquest of 1066. And there was an Edward the Confessor chapel in Westminster Abbey and one of the earliest post-Norman invasion kings, Edward I, who lived in the late 1200's, was buried in Westminster Abbey. And wouldn't you know, while 16 year old William Blake was engraving the interior of Westminster Abbey to make an accurate record of its intricacies in the Gothic architecture, he was constantly being taunted by other boys that would come in, see this boy their own age being serious, being up on scaffolds, he was like a young Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. William Blake's Sistine Chapel was Westminster Abbey. And they would tease him and try to distract him and he once had to cuff a boy for trying to disturb his engraving tools, because when you engrave you engrave on copper. You have to first sketch it and then you have to engrave it and you have to prepare the copper, it has to be absolutely smooth. So you have all these implements: you have acids, you have hammers, you have inks, you have brushes, you have paper and you have to marshal all of this material into its right sequence and be able to do this and the young adolescent Blake could do this. And almost like a divine gift they decided to open the tomb of Edward I after almost 500 years and the engraver for that event was 16 year old William Blake and he engraved the whole process. And when they opened the crypt under the floor of Westminster Abbey, went down into the rock-cut tomb, into the mummified, embalmed body of Edward I and brought it out and undid the wrappings, as soon as they undid the wrappings, the entire body crumbled into dust. And visionary William Blake, at 16, having engraved the entire event, was moved that he had been positioned to understand the whole ecology of what had happened. And he remained for another couple of years engraving Westminster Abbey, deepening, deepening constantly in his quality and as he did so, the spiritual energy of the imagination of William Blake began to exude his sense of reality outside of any lines that anyone could draw for him, social, religious, political, personal. And he finally met the woman he would be with for the rest of his life, Catherine Sophia - became Catherine Sophia Blake - and her brunette hair, her black eyes, her patient quality was exactly melded to her, almost like Benjamin Franklin's wife Deborah Read, who Benjamin Franklin had to teach how to read and write and became his companion and who literally ran the businesses of Benjamin Franklin all the rest of her life. Catherine Sophia Blake was always there with William and in the Book of Job illustrations, out of the 21 illustrations plus the title page, of the 21 illustrations, only three do not include Job's wife with him. They're like a tuning fork for the ratios of the real. And two of the cuts that do not include her are cuts where the Satan makes his way from the celestial throne realm down to earth to cause trouble, to cause disease, to cause death, to cause the corruption of things. So whenever the Satan is featured in the descending mode she is not there. By the way, the Ancient Hebrew always puts the article before the appellation; it's not, 'Satan,' it's, 'The Satan.' The reason being is that, 'The Satan,' is neither male nor female, is a neuter, is not a being, is a neuter delusion that is only there as long as the delusion is supported by an illusion. If the illusion is seen transformably into realisation, the delusion vanishes without leaving a trace. And so a neuter figure like the Satan literally only exists as long as the effect of what that figuration would be continues to be practised. When it is not done, it doesn't occur. It's not that it's over, it's that it doesn't occur. The ancient yogic technique was a yogic master would be able to vanish a demon so that there was not even a wisp of soot in the universe, simply imploded into nothingness. In the great medieval illuminated manuscripts, like the Book of Kells, whenever the Satan was portrayed was always a burnt out cinder stick figure on the margins of the page, never in the composition.
Blake began to get interested then, as a Dissenter, as a visionary, as an artist, as a poet, as a man... 'What about the visionary origins then of the great spiritual developments that led to the Bible?' The Old Testament and the New Testament. And increasingly his sense was that the Book of Job was a fulcrum that brought the old to a climax and was like a presage of the new. And so the Book of Job for him increasingly became one of great interest. In 1805, a friend and patron of his, Thomas Butts, paid him a nice sum of money - a rare occurrence for Blake - to do 19 illustrations to the Book of Job, which he did. Another friend of his, some 15 years later, John Linnell, seeing that Blake was getting old, he was having a tough time economically, he said, 'Why not do a new edition of these illustrations to Job and expand it a little bit?' And so in 1821 the quality of the Book of Job illustrations began to take hold, but it was such a poignant quality that Blake's visionary sense went back to another interest of his and that was in the Books of Enoch. Bentley writes, 'Blake had been immersed in the Bible all his life and illustrated it extensively, particularly for Thomas Butts etc. Consequently he was deeply interested in the publication for the first time in modern European language of the Book of Enoch, translated by Richard Lawrence in 1821.' Now the Book of Enoch had been cast out of the New Testament as late of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. And for 1500 years it was not heard of in the west, or the Orthodox east, the only place that it survived was in Ethiopia. And a Scottish adventurer explorer named James Bruce, in 1771 was in Ethiopia and he found a complete manuscript, in fact he found three of the Book of Enoch and brought them back to Europe. One of the manuscripts was commandeered by the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and two of them went to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. No one knew how to really translate this Ethiopic manuscript for a while and Richard Lawrence, in 1821 finally brought out a preview edition, later he would refine it in 1838. It was reprinted in 1883 and then was given a centenary edition in 1983, by Wizard's Bookshelf, an occult resource series. What happened in the Book of Enoch was that it was the original vision of heaven and hell brought together in a mythic horizon of humanity, so that one for the first time could understand that the mythic surface of experience is not encased by heaven and hell, but is expanded in those realms. And therefore the realisation of experience on the surface of our lives, of our world, needs to have a double transformation for itself to come into realisation. One transformation is energising into the unity of the earth, the other is energising the creative imagination of the heavenly expanses. Blake would do both at the same time and the illustrations to the Book of Job, when they came out in 1825, were like his magnum opus diamond: 'This is how this happens.' Let's take a break.
Let's come back to William Blake and W.B. Yeats as a pair and we're gonna move through Patanjali, Yoga Sutra to another pair, Zhuang Zhou one of the greatest Taoists and Poimandres, which is the first Hermetic treatise. We're looking at the fulcrum of the wisdom tradition of the planet. One of the qualities that gets in the way is that there has been a baffle of ignorance for so long that the attempts to penetrate the baffle have been subjected to, not only the baffle, but the countermeasures of auxiliary baffles. So that while you have books like this, On the Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of the Magical Order, 1827-1893, W.B. Yeats, etc., etc., etc. Or books that purport to have The Inner Teachings of the Golden Dawn, or A Friend of Yeats, Egyptian Magic: Essays on the Nature and Applications of Magical Practices in Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt and the entire occult ensemble for thousands of years. Most of it is diagrammatic extraneousness and it is time, not so much to put iodine on the sores, but to recalibrate so that realisation is possible and maturation to the real is our expectation within a life. The great biography, G.E. Bentley Jr. on Blake, records, 'The Book of Enoch was composed in the first century BC and exerted an enormous emphasis on the New Testament and then in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake had written of the giant antediluvians chained to earth, who are our energies. In the Book of Enoch he found an ancient prophecy which expressed his own ideas in Hebraic form. No wonder he began to illustrate it with such enthusiasm, it was deep calling to deep, vision answering to vision.' Well this is true, but it's true when recalibrated, for instance, the Book of Enoch has five different books brought together in a hand. Four of those five originate about 200 BC and they originate as visions originally that came because of a pressure that had been applied to the Jewish tradition that had never been there before, that happened in the middle of the third century BC. By the middle of the third century BC, the most dynamic, powerful, synergising city in the world had come to a population and power which was enviable and that was Alexandria. And Alexandria was made from the beginning, like San Francisco, to be a world city, it was never a fishing village. The central core of the synthesising of Alexandria was its great library and people from all over the known world who came to research and study there and it was known as the, 'Musaeum' and the, 'Musaeum' is the original museum. And it was huge, it was enormous; they had more than 1,000,000 scrolls. They had hundreds, if not 1,000 researchers, writers, scholars, the crème de la crème. And by the middle of the third century BC, by 250, the greatest of all of the Ptolemaic rulers, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the son of the original Ptolemy, Ptolemy Soter...Ptolemy Philadelphus was born in the lap of luxury and power and was sent to the Island of Kos in the Aegean and Kos is an island in-between Rhodes and Samos. Samos, where Pythagoras was active, Rhodes, where Greek shipping routes outdid the Phoenicians for the first time in the Mediterranean. And on Kos, Ptolemy Philadelphus was raised to be the most intellectual, powerful ruler possible, so when he became the head of the Ptolemaic Dynasty Alexandria became one of the most shining cities imaginable. The major east-west street and the major north-south street were entirely colonnaded, miles and miles and miles on their entire length and marbled and all the buildings built out of marble, so that in the moonlight the city shone like a vision, it dwarfed everything in the world. And one of the reasons Rome got so interested in being grand and grandiose and grander and more grandiose, was to run competition to Alexandria. When he realised that his musaeum library collection was missing a special wedge of wisdom, namely the Jewish tradition, the Torah, the prophets, he made special arrangements with the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem to have 72 translators, six for each of the 12 Tribes, sent to live in Alexandria long enough to translate all of the books, which we now call the Old Testament of the Bible, into Greek. It took a long time and painstakingly it was translated individually by these...they call it the Septuagint, the, 'Seventy,' they were really 72. Each individual translation was checked and argued against and compared with the others, so that over decades one finally had a presentation of the Torah and the prophets and the wisdom books, the Old Testament, that was never there before in the original Hebrew. The original Hebrew Old Testament was not committed to writing so much as it was committed to being heard, to be recited each Sabbath. And it was so extensive that it took three years of Sabbaths, a lectionary cycle, to hear and every male in the tradition was required to hear it completely, all the way through without a break. So that you would at least have heard, you would have not been surprised by anything, you were given the word. The Septuagint for the first time - because Greek was such a refined language - and the translation had to be exact, not as a transliteration, or just a mechanical translation, but a correct presentation in Greek of what this is, what it does and checked out so that it was understood that this was absolutely the way to do. The original Enochian Book comes at the tail end of the success of that venture at the end of the 200's BC and it is for the first time an exploration of heaven and hell by someone who knows the entire Old Testament completely and now is able to carry wisdom into the completed universe. And eventually there would become three other books added to it. One of them is a book on the way in which astronomy would be understood about 200, 180 BC, complete with movements of planets and stars and constellations and so forth. The fifth book does not appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls; all the other four books of the Book of Enoch have fragments in large sections that appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The fifth book actually transposed so that it was placed as the second book, chapters 37 to 71 of the Book of Enoch. And those chapters were written after the great earthquake which closed Qumran, closed their library collection in 31 BC. And Qumran and its scrolls and its development did not reassert itself for about 20 years, 30 years, almost 40 years. And the person who reasserted Qumran in that Essene community and brought it back into vibration was John the Baptist. Because John the Baptist was threatened, like all little two year old and younger children with being killed. All the male babies were killed by Herod the Great under his jealousy that he was told that a Messiah was born who would completely eclipse his whole family dynasty's hold on the kingdom forever. To protect the young baby, John the Baptist, his mother Elizabeth, an older woman - whose husband Zacharias was the helper to the head of the temple, he was a professional priest, he was of the Levite trade - the young baby, John the Baptist, was taken to the caves around Qumran and raised out in the wilderness. He never knew towns, he never knew cities. He was a spiritual genius wild card who was uncompromising, in fact he was as Jesus was correct to point out, he was, 'Like a re-embodiment of the fiery spirit of Elijah,' who had crossed the River Jordan exactly at the ford where John the Baptist began his public baptising. And Elijah chose that place to ford, to hide from those who were after him because he had challenged all of the ancient gods of the Phoenician and Sumerian and Jewish territories to meet at the top of Mount Carmel, to build two sacrificial pyres to God and to have a sacrificial bull cut up and placed there and that the fires would be lit by the prayer calling a fire down from heaven. And 400 priests of Baal and the various sects tried all day and could not light that fire. And so Elijah called once and the fire burnt on the pyre and of course it proved that their gods had no effect whatsoever in reality. But like a swift countermove, they sought to kill Elijah and so he was guided to quietly hightail it across that ford of the Jordan into the wilderness, where he maintained himself for quite some while, three and a half years. And in all that time he said, 'Since you have doubted me, even while having called out for me to have the divine fire light the sacrifice, there will be no rain in Judea, or Sumeria, or Phoenicia, or any of these places for three and a half years.' And so the drought as it went on, because Elijah was away, he was outside, he was in the east Transjordan wilderness, when he came back, he came back very quietly and he went to live in a Phoenician coastal town with a widow and her son died and Elijah brought the son back to life and then disappeared again, went back into the wilderness and did not die. He was raised in a chariot of fire, as it said and he would return, he would come back. John the Baptist was that figure. The Book of Enoch, the fifth volume, consists of three parables and those three parables are the original triad presenting the Son of Man as the incarnation of the Messiah. The author of that particular book in Enoch was Jesus' father Joseph, who raised the young Jesus to the age of 12 and wrote the Son of Man parables to express succinctly, so that others could appreciate the shape of the upbringing and learning of the young boy to the quality of his maturation. At 12, 13, a Jewish male must go through a Mitzvah and the Mitzvah must be preceded by a year of learning so that one can present oneself to an enquiry, person or board. Only when Jesus had his Mitzvah in the temple in Jerusalem, he knew more than the enquiring priests and instead of going back to the family home, he went on again and returned to Egypt where he had been raised for the first five years of his life. So the Book of Enoch has a very curious quality to it. It shows where the original tutoring came from for Jesus and that's why the Book was thrown out of the New Testament by Constantine's Roman Empire taking over of Christianity. They didn't want to have any complications here because they wanted to have a completely divine being as the centre of the religion. A god fine, he can be a god, but he cannot be a man.
When the manuscript of the Book of Enoch was brought back by James Bruce, for decades, it took over 50 years for it to be first translated and not translated very well. Lawrence's translation was not very well at all, even the revision is 1838 is not very good. But in 1893 a young genius named R.H. Charles translated the Book of Enoch in such a way that it was incredibly refined and quite accurate. It was the same year that Blake brought out his edition of The Poems of William Blake. R.H. Charles spent about 20 years collecting more and more fragments and versions and comparing and deepening his understanding of the way in which Ethiopic and Greek and Hebrew and English and everything worked together. And finally in 1912 Oxford University Press published his great translation of the Book of Enoch, which for the rest of the...almost the rest of the twentieth century was the standard presentation of it. But this is a visionary text that has not only layer upon layer, but it has an interpenetration of five different thrusts brought together in a star of realisation. It's like a hand that now has a thumb. Now you can grasp what it means, now you can hold what it is and use it. Now you have not only an integral by which the mind understands, but you have a hold, a grasp by which one can begin now to apply that to the world and change it.
When Yeats realised the incredible synchronicity of what he was doing, where he was, all of his maturation to that point...born in 1865, he was 28 years old at the time, the time when a man's maturity is not just that he's of age at 21, but by 28 he begins to sense that he has the energy to do something about this in the world. And Yeats found exactly at that time, with this confluence of things, that one of the things that had happened for him was that he had an insight that most occultists really didn't have and that was a legitimate deep contact with the wisdom of the real east, of India. One of his friends, who helped found the Dublin version of the Golden Dawn, the Hermetic Society in Dublin, was Charles Johnson. And Johnson and a number of others with Yeats...and it is Charles Johnson's translation of the Bhagavad G?t?: The Songs of the Master, that gives us an insight...it's still in print 100 years later, it was published in 1908. In Book Seven of the Bhagavad G?t? is a sequence of verses, just a handful, in which the author of the Bhagavad G?t?, Vyasa, who wrote the Mahabharata...the war itself was fought in 3102 BC, but the Mahabharata came at the third century BC, it's the first time that all sacred wisdom was being written down all over the world, just as in Alexandria Sanskrit for the first time was being written and not just recited from memory, in India...and Vyasa was the first to use Sanskrit as a written symbol literate language and a confrère of his at the time was named P??ini, who did the big grammar of Sanskrit at the time, so that one would know the vocabulary, the syntax, the ways in which to use a written Sanskrit language and Vyasa was the first to really do this. In the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad G?t?...it has 18 chapters because it is the Upanishad of the Upanishads. And the Upanishads, from 700 BC to Vyasa's time, were constantly being refined and honed. The first, the B?had?ra?yaka Upanishad, the, 'Great Forest Breath Teaching,' over 700 pages. Finally, in the Isha Upanishad was 18 verses, so the 18 chapters of the Bhagavad G?t? is the radiance of the Isha Upanishad brought forth. And in the seventh book, which is the beginning of the middle third of the 18, these verses Charles Johnson translated them in 1908, a very close friend of Yeats. 'Earth, water, air, fire, ether, mind, thought, self-consciousness, thus is my nature divided eightfold.' You wonder why there are eight phases in this course. Because it's real. 'This is my lower nature, but know thou also my higher nature as manifested life, whereby this whole world is upheld. Know that all beings are born from this, for I am the fourth coming and withdraw of the whole world. But higher than I nothing is Arjuna, on me all this is woven as a string of pearls on a thread.' In order to test themselves, the great Swami was brought and his translation, Mohini Chatterji's, still in print I think, somewhere in the world. This is the 1887 translation of it...publication and this is how he translates the seventh chapter, these verses, verses seven through 12 I'll read, I think this is all we need right now. This is Chatterji's 1887 translation of the Bhagavad G?t? in this trying to find a way to bring out a poignancy, because one cannot understand the west at all without India and one can't understand the world without everything from Ireland to India being complemented by everything from India, through China, Japan, down through Indonesia etc. North America, South America, all of these are complementarities. His translation: 'Oh conqueror of wealth, there is nothing superior to me. All this is threaded by me as gem beads by a string.' And for this he uses the Sanskrit to lead up to that in the previous verses. 'Earth, water, fire and air' and he uses those translations because everyone knows those four elements, earth, water, fire and air. Then he uses, 'Akasha, manas, buddhi and ahamkara, thus my nature eightfold divided. This is inferior. Different from this, know my superior nature, which is the knower, by which oh thou of mighty arms, the universe is upheld.' In other words there are four elements as types that make the quality of existence and there are four of symbolic thought and that those eight together enfold, like petals, a ninth, which is the relationer, the ratioer, of all eight of those and all of the different proportions that they have and when it is open it isn't that there is a ninth there, it's that the ninth is the completeness of the pattern that has been opened, it is everywhere that they are. And whatever ratioer, whatever proportion that they may be, they are the harmonic of the music. In order to hear it, one must compose a work of music and perform it. You can't find a self that is there, one discovers by disclosure the distribution of the self wherever the harmonic reach is. These qualities, without which one cannot begin to understand where we are at the beginning of the twenty first century at all, much less at the beginning of the twentieth century, much less 3,000 years ago at the beginnings of something that was begun 1500 years before that and that is an international range of humanity that courses through the known world. Even by 4400 years ago, Sargon the Great of Akkad had trade routes that ran from India, into the central regions of what is today Romania and Poland, all the way through the Aegean to the stretches of the Mediterranean coasts. But vicissitudes always come in, it doesn't maintain itself at a high quality, there are always vicissitudes and such things ebb and flow. But Alexandria was the way in which it was brought together permanently for the first time long enough for a great - not a synthesis - but for enough pressure and heat to bring in a new quality of man. It was like taking the carbon-based metabolism and making a diamond out of it, making a jewelled person. In the Vajrayana the cosmos is called a, 'Jewel matrix.' Rightly so.
Illusion and delusion are related like this: if you took a special binoculars that would evenly distribute the light of all the stars and spaced them evenly all at the same...you would get a polka dot universe that the fascists would love: 'Everything is organised the way that we should see it.' But if you take the binoculars away, you would see the many coloured, star-spangled Milky Way spread of stars of all kinds of sizes, even planets and comets, meteorites and everything, plus the spaces in-between that are not dead, but are as astronaut after astronaut in EVA's would say it's like a velvety invitation to be, not blank space at all. Because it's filled with all of the energies and dynamics of the relationalities, like in this room all you need is to be able to tune and you could play a radio in here, many stations, a TV, many stations. The air is full of energies, you need a tuning calibration to bring it through. That's what this learning is, to recalibrate the species, so that you are able to see and hear and sense all of the energies that are now broadcast beautifully.
The quality here of Yeats, when he began to understand the wisdom of India through people like Charles Johnson, through Mohini Chatterji and himself, he made his own translation of the Bhagavad G?t?, but he also translated the Ten Principal Upanishads and they were published at the same time that the book that we're using in our learning, Yeats' A Vision, they were published in 1937 together. Here's just a sample of Yeats translating the beginning of the Chandogya Upanishad, one of the greatest, earliest, about 650 BC: 'Speech, eyes, ears, limbs, life energy come to my help. These books have spirit for theme. I shall never deny spirit, nor spirit deny me. When I am one with spirit, may the laws these books proclaim live in me, may the laws live.' And so there is this quality in the young Yeats, where he got energised and realised that he was being singled out, he was being specialised, like Blake was being singled out, that, 'You must be some kind of jewel pivot of language and images to aid in large scale arrays of transformation, not just a transformation, but the recalibration of the entirety, the entire range.' When he was getting set to write A Vision - and I'm using Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose in the new Norton Critical Edition - he wrote a poem which was to be the beginning of A Vision. Instead, when he finished A Vision he made it the epilogue. A Vision itself is not just by Yeats, but is the automatic writing by his wife, Georgie Yeats. And she began just writing automatically because she would go into these channel trances and not just pages, suitcases full of reams of pages and Yeats, because of his background, his nature, realised that he was the one who could take the automatic writing of thousands of pages and bring it together and disclose what the symbolic pattern was, that it must be there. She was not crazy, the happening was not crazy, he devoted himself therefore to bring it all out and when he did, the more that he did, the more he realised that all of the occult traditions had fudged enormously on the basis of trying to make something appealing for members, for fame, for money and he wrote 'All Souls' Night' and made it the epilogue of A Vision. 'Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell and many a lesser bell sound through the room and it is All Souls' Night. And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel bubble upon the table. A ghost may come, for it is a ghost's right, his element is so fine, being sharpened by his death, to drink from the wine-breath while our gross palates drink from the whole wine. I need some mind that, if the cannon sound from every quarter of the world, can stay wound in mind's pondering, as mummies in a mummy-cloth are wound, because I have a marvellous thing to say, a certain marvellous thing to say none but the living mock, though not for sober ear it may be all that hear, should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.' And right at the very end, this is how he ends it: 'But names are nothing. What matter who it be, so that his elements have grown so fine the fume of muscatel can give his sharpened palate ecstasy. No living man can drink from the whole wine. I have mummies' truths to tell whereat the living mock, though not for sober ear, for maybe all that hear should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock. Such a thought, such thought have I that hold it tight till meditation master all its parts, nothing can stay my glance until that glance run in the world's despite to where the damned have howled away their hearts and where the blessed dance, such thought, that in it bound I need no other thing, wound in mind's wandering as mummies in a mummy-cloth are wound.' He finished this in 1928 and from then on he applied himself to his wife's automatic writings, to his entire background, a whole lifetime of material. Someone once said of the old Yeats, with his shock of greyish, whitish hair and his glasses and his impeccable dress and his intensity, someone wrote of him, 'Today I have seen God and he wears glasses.' More next week.