Vision 4

We come to Vision Four and the title of this presentation is 'Differential Consciousness Field Theory.' Now, Field Theory is enormously powerful and you can find introductions like Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory, or if you're mathematically able, Quantum Field Theory of Point Particles and Strings, or if your engineering and math is up to it, Quantum Field Theory and Critical Phenomena, Second Edition, about 1,000 pages, from Oxford Science. Field Theory means that the theoria, the contemplative field of consciousness now extends itself to the entirety of an infinite range. And since it is an infinite range, the field has a particular peculiar quality in that you are able to have critical phenomena which disappear in upon themselves and are absorbed by the infinite field. Without an infinite field there can only be things and more things and if there was space in-between the things, that would also have to be something. And it is the phenomenal aspect that vision allows to disappear without oblivion and so the term in mathematics is that one carries it to its vanishing. The operation is symbolically able to be entertained by thought and it has a logical application, it has a pragmatic series of steps of development, including the vanishing and what we're looking at is how differential consciousness reappears not as a thing, but as the infinite field. This is very easy to say, it's very difficult to understand and then it is again extremely simple to behold. The classic way in which this was taught about 2300 years ago in Alexandria, was developed by a philosopher teacher named Euclid and he wrote a classic book called The Elements, which became the foundation of geometry and Euclid's Elements is still able to be taught. When I was in high school half a century ago we had Euclid's geometry, his Elements in the tenth grade and you were simply presented very carefully, step by step, of how to develop the logic of connectiveness, of how forms are made and the simple rule of thumb was point, line and plane. And in fact when we come to Art we're going to use Wassily Kandinsky's great little book called Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which he wrote as an introductory precis of what his Bauhaus art course was going to be, one of the foundations of the entire Bauhaus curriculum. And he followed it up by an expansion called From Point to Line to Plane. And those two books by Kandinsky were augmented by a nice little book of geometric pedagogy by Paul Klee and augmented by Walter Gropius' little books and several others, Moholy-Nagy. And these were the way in which one was taught that art is drawn out of the geometry of form and the relationality of movement and proportion and that what is included in this is an indefinite application once one learned to wean oneself away from the dependence upon a simply pragmatic sequence of steps and got that the pragmatic sequence of steps leads to a complexity which involves a zero-pointedness, which in vanishing creates a pivotal chirality so that one develops now a magnetic quality of the field, whereas the previous quality was one of electrical. All of this, point and lined plane, reappear in quantum field theory. Point, particles and strings, the points are the quarks, the particles are what is geometrically made up. If you have two up quarks and one down quark you get a neutron. If you have two down quarks and one up you get a proton. And so those points are elements that go up, go on to make a substance. Part of what is difficult for us is that we call those substances now elements because originally they were the elements. And in the classical understanding, the scientific understanding of the time that we're looking at...we're looking at Alexandria, about 90 AD to about 155 AD, in that era. We're using the Hermetica, we're using in particular the first treatise of the Hermetica, the Poimandres and we're trying to understand that at that time elements went to make up substances and substances worked together to make up nodes like glands, or like nexus' and that you had this kind of a structure. The deeper understanding where that there were points that went to make up the elements, that went to make up the substances that delivered an access of phenomenal concentration which would allow you to slip through the concentrated centre, pivotally and re-emerge into a different realm, a realm which was now...the Classical Greek term for it was, 'Numinous.' That the world is phenomenal, but that the spiritual realm was noumenal and that consciousness now a field which pervades the structure of symbolic thought, pervades the flow of experience and its images and its feelings and its language and comes to rest in the phenomenality of the body, with its nexes, its organs, its substances, its elements and the various points that are there. And that all of this has a layering which develops from how a unity divides in two and that two divides into four and that four divides into eight and that eight divides into a 16 and the 16 subdivides into a 32 and the 32 subdivides into a 64, giving you a way in which you can proceed, either by going back up the order, or by descent down the order and the figure who developed this first in Alexandria was a friend of Euclid, his name was Eratosthenes and it is colloquially known for the last 2300 years as the, 'Sieve of Eratosthenes.'
Now, this illustration is in the Shorter Science and Civilisation in China and it is a diagram drawn by a Chinese philosopher named Tu Zhi about 1,000 years ago and it is the structure of the I Ching. It is how the Tao as a field permeates and allows for the unity of the Tê to occur in its polarisation of yin and yang and how each of those is able to be polarised and further and further, until you have a Chinese, Neo-Confucian diagram which is exactly the same as Eratosthenes in Alexandria about 1300 years before. And we ask and in fact there was a title of a book, Was Pythagoras Chinese? Part of the interest is that we did not have the requisite background, the historical background to enable us to appreciate and understand some of the interchange. This is from the Beijing Review, January 27th 1990, exactly 17 years ago until today. 'The First Romans in China.' 'In a joint study, Chinese, Australia and Soviet historians have recently discovered that the town of Liezea in Gansu Province, set up during the reign of Emperor Yuandi of Western Han, 76 to 33 BC, was used for Roman prisoners of war.' Now, Gansu Province is a western province, whose capital was ancient Chang'an and stretched all the way to the outposts of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi Desert. So that by 60 BC they already had built a prison for Roman prisoners in far western China. 'The discovery has not only solved the historical mystery of the whereabouts of a 6,000 man army defeated by the Persians, but also of significant value to the relations between China and the west.' And later on when we go further into historical development, the third of our four phases of the ecology of consciousness, I will bring in some material and let you see that the flow of historical consciousness is kaleidoscopic in actuality and is not a dead record of things, as if it were like filing away the pragmatic sequences of a past and that then your history means that you're dead and you're over with, when actually it is the most fruitful stepping up of the energy of the field of consciousness from its differentiality, to the differentiality of differentiality, an exponential quality for which we use the English word kaleidoscopic. And so the field of differential consciousness, like the field of nature, allows for a dynamic flow. Nature allows for a dynamic flow of mythic experience to flow in its field, to have whatever tributaries, or branches, or whatever bays, whatever oceans experience can develop in its cycle. The field of differential consciousness allows for the flow of a historical experience which is exponentially visionary. And so history will be a very peculiar kind of field, it is a field where there are points, there are particles made up of those points and then there are strings, which is the fundamental access to pointedness that emerges out of a plasma of possibility. That the plasma of possibility is that if it can emerge in a realm of infinite possibilities at some juncture, or time, or circumstance, it will. It's known as the phenomenon of all possible worlds. This is now no longer a universe, but is a cosmos. A universe is conceivable by the structure of symbolic thought, a cosmos is only appreciable by prismatic art forms, like the spiritual person, or by analytic forms like science. When those forms, when the arts and the sciences emerge, they do not emerge out of a field of nature, they do not have as their dynamic the ritual comportment of phenomenal pragmatic steps, they do not have that kind of flow where experience deals with images, it deals with feeling tones, it deals with spoken language. But rather now it has transformed itself into a mysteriousness that has become exponentially mysterious and the ancient word for this was that it has become magical, supernatural. And so the field of consciousness is a field of supranaturality which when it touches anything it will transform it, it will change it. And so consciousness has a particular quality to it. The way in which Zhongshu, who is our Chinese complement to the Hermetica, the way that Zhongshu puts it:
So it is said for him who understands heavenly joy, life is the working of heaven. Death is the transformation of things. In stillness he and the yen share a single virtue, in motion he and the yang share a single flow. Thus, he who understands heavenly joy incurs no wrath from heaven, no opposition from man, no entanglement from things, no blame for the spirits. And so it is said, his movement is of heaven, his stillness of earth and with his single mind in repose he is king of the world. The spirits do not afflict him, his soul knows no weariness, his single mind reposed the 10,000 things submit.
Which is to say that his emptiness and stillness reach throughout heaven and earth and penetrate the 10,000 things. This is what is called heavenly joy. Heavenly joy is the mind of the sage by which he shepherds the world.
Now, this quality that is here in Zhongshu, that's here in the Hermetica, has a deep wave of differentiality giving it the breadth of infinity by which numinality can now, not come into being, but come into the play of continual possibility of creative, imaginative, of creative remembering, of rationality, of proportionality that plays kaleidoscopically eventually. It is extremely difficult to appreciate how profound what we are taking was without a little bit of a reminder. The Hermetic material, which as you have been seeing are like dialogues, they're like Plato, Platonic Dialogues, but they're 500 years after Plato. And just as Plato's Dialogues have a Pythagorean quality of differential conscious field playing through them, now the Hermetica has a very kaleidoscopic quality of the historical movement of differential consciousness playing through them. Dating the Hermetica between 90 AD and 155 AD is exactly the dates of one of the most profound science figures on the planet. His name was Ptolemy. And Ptolemy's...Claudius Ptolemy lived between 90 and 168 AD. He is famous for his geography, he is famous for a whole development of a theory of vision, he is extremely famous for what was called the Almagest, which is the astronomy outline of the cosmos. Almagest is the Arabic translation. In Greek it was called Syntaxis Mathematica. It is the synthesis of all of the operations raised to a mathematic extension. And by using the term, not mathematics, but mathematica, we can now understand that the Hermetica are a kaleidoscopic opening up of mathematics. That not just a geometry, but all of the realms of a mathematica are now given their kaleidoscopic, free, creative play and the most famous of all of Ptolemy's books, translated here in the Loeb Classical Library, was called the Tetrabiblos. And 'Tetra' means, 'Four' in Greek, 'Biblios,' 'Books,' The Four Books, but the original title of it was a very long title and what it meant was that astrology now has been taken out of its old compendia, old because the compendia was done just about 100 years before Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos. The old astrology, put together by Marcus Manilius in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius Caesar, so it was done about 10 to about 30 AD. And his Astronomica was the Roman compendia that Augustus Caesar declared that the entire world was moot for the Roman imperium and therefore the cream of the wisdom of the entire world should be brought together in organised, in useful nodes so that Romans, who are now made to rule the world, will have the best wisdom of the entire world put together by Roman minds. And so Manilius, like Virgil in epic poetry, like Horace in lyric poetry, like the Lex Romana, the Roman Laws, put together finally under Augustus Caesar, the architecture put together by, not just Vitruvius, but by Agrippa, Marcus Agrippa, who built for instance the Pantheon - still standing in Rome - 2,000 years ago. He was the son-in-law of Augustus Caesar and the most talented architect and quite a great General too of his day. Ptolemy in Alexandria, just 100 years later, erased permanently the veracity that the Roman mind had settled on as the cream of the world and Ptolemy's Almagest, his Syntaxis Mathematica, was the outline and the structure of the mind understanding the cosmos for 1500 years. The earliest dates of star and planet observations are from about 127 AD and the last ones are from about 151 AD. And so Ptolemy, who lived to be 78, from 90 to 168 AD, exactly at the time that the Hermetica were being written, Ptolemy was writing his great books, The Geography of the Earth, The Mathematical Structure of the Heavens and the relationship between them in terms of the astrological influences arranged in four books. And when the Tetrabiblos came out it made its appearance as being the place of man in the interpenetration of heaven and earth. And if a man knew the heavenly structure and knew the earthly structure and how they interrelated, in these four books he would a frame of reference which would allow him to master the universe. In the 140's when the Tetrabiblos, the Four Books came out, the four books relating the heavenly structure to the earthly structure and the way in which man was a predictable structure relating those, exactly at this time, not in Alexandria, but in Rome, as if to make up a Roman version of the new way to look at man's relationship between heaven and earth, a Christian bishop named Marcian, for the first time put four Gospels together, which became the seed of the New Testament. But Marcian was extremely anti-Jewish, felt that the four Gospels needed to be weeded out from the residue of Jewishness left over and so Marcian became more and more a Gnostic bishop, hating the flawed god of the Jews and wanted to make sure that the Christians were completely different and suspicious of the Jews, suspicious of the Jewish god and went after something new. In Rome, exactly at that time, an extremely bright, learned man named Justin Martyr decided that the Jews were extraordinarily brilliant and that there needed to be a refined vision that allowed for this to be seen as an Old Testament structure being brought into its completion at the same time as a New Testament structure was coming out of that completion into a perfection and so Justin Martyr put two Gospels together, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. The Gospel of Matthew is a very strict Jewish understanding of Jesus from the Old Testament being completely fulfilled. If you look at the Gospel of Matthew it begins: 'These are the generations from Abraham to Jesus.' Every single male descendant, first male descendant listed for 42 generations. Whereas Luke begins with the development of the way in which John the Baptist was engendered by a priest and Zachariah and his wife Elizabeth were very old, she was beyond childbearing and yet she found herself pregnant and Luke, in the beginning of his Gospel goes into all of the miraculous detail. That Zachariah for instance was one of the head priests in the temple in Jerusalem and because he didn't believe an angelic vision that he was going to have a son named John, he was struck dumb and he couldn't speak. And for nine months Zachariah could do the motions of a priest but could not speak and when John the Baptist to be was finally born they asked, because he had to write on a little board, that they wanted to name his son after him and he wrote, 'His name is John.' As soon as he wrote that he could speak again. And so what Luke was showing is that there a miraculous supernatural transform that happens when you move from the phenomenal cycle of nature to the liminal ranges of spiritual, heavenly consciousness. And as soon as that happens Justin Martyr wanted to show that if you took Matthew and Luke, those two Gospels and you interrelated them in just the right way, you would come out with the old and the new forming a unity that carried destiny into its perfection. One of the students of Justin Martyr...he was killed in I think 151, in the 150's, maybe it was 161. He was killed right after he did this because there were many people who always have been jealous of a new vision of wholeness, because it threatens the old. Not only was Manilius out of date, but the whole Roman imperium was out of date and completely transformed. The Caesars were out of date, replaced by the Flavians, they were out of date, replaced finally by Trajan and his adopted genius son Hadrian and finally the great Antonines came in with Pius Antoninus and for about 100 years Rome was indeed a glorious place, the Rome of the Antonines was extraordinary. It is a time when the vision of the way in which the Hermetica and the Ptolemaic geography, the Ptolemaic universe, the Ptolemaic understanding of the way in which astrological prediction in a square of four books allows you to have this interrelation if you knew how the optical, how perception, how seeing was created. One does not just see things in the world, but that there is from the eyes, from the mind, a wave of energeia that goes out and meets the waves of the things in their imagery coming in and it is the interplay of the waves, of sight, optical, playing with the waves of the resonance of things, so that if you put those together with the structure of the heavens and the structure of the geography of the earth together, now you have two pairs that come together in such a way that, knowing the optics and the astrology, the cosmology and the geography, man now for the first time is ready to take his place as the shepherd of the real, of the master of the entire range of the phenomenon and the noumenon as well. And so you find...and by the way, Ptolemy's Theory of Visual Perception is published by the American Philosophical Society, it was done in the 1990's. This is the society Benjamin Franklin set up in Philadelphia 300 years ago. This is contemporaneous with the Hermetica and the Hermetica went through a very deep transform of visionary opening out and the beginning of its opening out was the disappearing of the limitations of the phenomenal world into the stillness, the rest, the vanishing singleness of point of his mind, of his experience, of his body, into a supernatural pivot whose chirality now generated the ability for consciousness to send its particular waves out and it is the waves of consciousness through the eyes that creatively now see, not just to perceive things, but to play with the perceptuality of all possibilities. One can see like Pythagoras, who would say, 'You can carve a Hermes out of a special piece of word, out of a special piece of stone, but not just any piece. The form must be hidden inside that piece of wood, inside that piece of stone.' And that carried all the way into the Renaissance, when Michelangelo would go to the great marble quarry, he would with his big, gnarled, enormous hands...he had hands that looked like the Cecil B. DeMille 'St. Peter's' kinds of gnarled hands and he would touch the marble until he found the right piece. 500 years later, when Henry Moore was having a big show of his sculpture in Florence he went to the same mountain, to Carrara, to the same quarry. He sat in the same place that Michelangelo had sat and was watching the striations in the granite and putting his hand to the granite and when he would get the right tone, when his conscious artistic waves of perception found the resonant blocks of granite, he would have those sawed out and taken down to the ports on the Ligurian Sea and shipped over to England. There was a famous photograph of Moore putting his hands literally on the stones and his shape of his putting his hands on the stones is exactly the shape of Michelangelo putting his hands on the stones. It is the healing of the ancient Jewish tradition by feeling the spirit person in the phenomenal body and knowing how to sculpt and bring that spiritual art of person out of the phenomenal body, out of the phenomenal mind, into the visionary field where all possibilities are there, including the possibility of bringing you forth. And then of that person having been brought forth, can be exponentially raised to an eternal life, they need not ever die again. Let's take a little break.
Let's come back to a classic section of the first of the Hermetica, the Poimandres, written about 90 AD in Alexandria, written about the time that Claudius Ptolemy was being born, about the time that St. John was being arrested by Roman centurions in Ephesus and taken, bound, to Rome to appear before the Emperor Domitian, who was in the midst of his 14 year reign that was historically called even then the, 'Terror.' It was the worst possible, not the degradation of Caligula and Nero as Caesars earlier in the century. That was a degradation of person, it was a degradation of human beings, where their capacity for human relationality was trashed. But in the Terror of Domitian, it was the further possibilities of a spiritual contact with the universe, with the cosmos, with the heavens, that was being demonised. And in that time period the Hermetica was extraordinarily clear. Remember now it is...possible translation of the Poimandres is the, 'Mind shepherd.' The teacher who cares for the mind and the mind is not just the structure of symbolic thought as an integral, but it is the structure of symbolic thought is the integral of the entire cycle of nature that is pervaded by a field of theoria, of contemplation, of infinite scope and scale, able to be stepped up to a kaleidoscopic exponentiality. This is the famous quotation. I've put several translations together and if you get interested of course I in 1990 did all of the Hermetica in detailed notes, very much like our presentation notes and the 13 tapes exist in two different lecture presentations.
Then females separated from males, therefore carnal desire to restore wholeness, but this leads to death being born back to matter without mind recognition. God and holy speech said, 'Desire and multiply, but do not wander in the sense world which is then death. Recognise your wholeness in the good which is above all being.'
This is a quality where wholeness is the ability to come together in such a way that you are not framed by your ritual existence. The ritual existence, the body qua body, must be born, it must go through whatever life it can and it must die. If the basis of your square of attention is existence in its ritual traction then death must be a part then of that cycle. But if you step up your vision to the art of the spiritual person the basis of that frame of attention is no longer ritual, but is the methos of experience, the flow of experience. And by having vision as a differential conscious field take the place of nature in that transform and the art forms of the person and the spirit take the place of the ritual, prescribed, activity based sequences, now the flow of experience is able to flow in the field of consciousness. And when experience flows in the field of consciousness the structure of the mind will naturally find its referentiality, not in the world, but will find its referentiality in proportions of possibilities. My phrase for that for decades has been these are now ratios of the real. This is not the geometry of things, but this is the trigonometric functioning of possibilities and what holds the place of existentiality is the forms of art. And so the forms of art draw us forth from a referentiality of worldly things in the mind to a looking for possibilities of referentialities that are possible in the proportions. And because we're looking for the proportions of possibility and because their relationality has a tremendous ability to have not just integral, but to also have differential arrayed sets, now what is possible is a jump from the art, the forms of art, to the forms of science. The forms of science are those which are capable of an infinite analytic. One can know to any degree of specificity imaginable. If you would like to know what is the calibration of any possibility, one can approach that and come to inhabit a realm of relationality. If one would like to know what is the exact energy of the Higgs boson, which is like a condensed vacuum, one now by early 2007 knows that is one of the most heavy things, one of the most heavy particles in the cosmos, but it has a specific weight in its energy and one is expecting almost any week now from Fermilab, outside of Chicago, for the Higgs boson, which is now characterised within a range for the first time to be discoverable. It is only discoverable by the creative art being raised through critique of theories, of theoria, the art emerging as the prismatic forms out of the field of conscious theory, being able to be projected and enlarged, magnified, given exponential powers by the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history, that now the analytic is able more and more to use the creative energies, not of observers, but of creators who are creating. Making the theoria and the kaleidoscopic quality of history, so that history now will flow in the field of consciousness. The historical kaleidoscopic quality will be a radiance and because it flows like the river of experience, like the stream of the methos flowing through nature and then also flowing through the field of consciousness, it is possible for history as a flow, as a differential flow to flow through the field of differential consciousness, but it is also now possible, looking forward to a very special kind of discovery. It is able to flow through the field of nature, pristinely, freshly, originally again. And so as experience can be natural or conscious, history can be conscious or natural and when historical consciousness as a kaleidoscopic flow, as a radiance, a cascade of radiance, it achieves a form, a harmonic form. The cosmos is a harmonic form, it is an infinite harmonic form which generates the field of nature, not again but eternally. And so the Hermetica has this particular attentiveness which constantly the he who would learn, she who would learn, must be enjoined by the teacher, by Hermes, to enjoy the silence, that the silence is important. And one finds in the ancient Hermetica symbol that was popularised in the Renaissance, Hermes always has a finger out, 'Shh, now is not for you to speak.' It is a silence within a silence. Our silence first of all is a silence from not speaking that is not exercising the methos. Our silence now has allowed for the images to settle and become quiet, for the feeling tones to come into a juxtaposition of a stillness and rest and for a language that is not spoken, yet there is an engraved writing of it, but it doesn't come from a ritual, pragmatic activity, it comes from a resonance of prismatic beyondness. Now one understands what no one could speak about, but the understanding is not in the structure of thought, the understanding is in the differential field of consciousness. One knows without knowledge. The word for this was always recognition, re-cognition. It's not a cognition of referentiality, of language speaking of things in the mind, but it's the recognition of the mind to those prismatic forms, radiant, that are beyond nature. And so here from the Poimandres, this beautiful little section:
'Oh man,' he said, 'You have understood it right, but why is it that he who has recognised himself enters into the good as it were?' Said in God's speech. I answered, 'Because the father of all consists of light and life and from him man is strong.' 'You are right,' said he, 'If then being made of light and life you learn to know you are made of them, you will go back into life and light.' Thus spoke Poimandres. 'But tell me this too,' I said, "God said, 'Let the man who has mind in him recognise himself.' But have not all men mind?" 'Oh man,' said Mind to me.
His field of differential consciousness is speaking, but not in words, in language, it's speaking in direct recognition.
'Oh man,' said Mind to me, 'Speak not so. I even, Mind, come to those men who are holy and good and pure and merciful and my coming as a succour to them and forthwith they recognise all things and win the Father's grace by loving worship and give thanks to him, praising and hymning him with hearts uplifted to him in filial affection. And before they give up the body to the death which is proper to it, they loathed the bodily senses, knowing what manner of work the senses do.'
This has always been cited as the kind of talk that primordial Christianity talked, just this way. That the Greek of the Hermetica is remarkably the Greek of St. John and that that special Greek is also used by Matthew in his Gospel. And yet there's a very interesting interplay, because Matthew as a Gospel, though the scholars and critics have scrambled it so that they hardly know anymore, Matthew was a Levite, he was of Tribe of Levi and of the 12 Tribes, the Tribe of Levi was assigned and given a geography that was where Arabia is today, on the coast below the Gulf of Aqaba along the Red Sea and in Moses' time that was called the Land of Midian. Moses married a woman, Zipporah, whose father was the head of the Midianites, Jethro, which meant that he was the senior Levite priest at the time of Moses. Moses' sister, Miriam and his brother Aaron did not like the influence of Zipporah on Moses because they were assigned priesthood after coming through 400 years of generations of captivity in Egypt, but the Levites from Midian, from Arabia, were never indentured in Egypt, they kept the old traditions alive and this is why the generations of who is born from who, who is whose son, who is whose father was able to go back completely all the way to Abraham. And being a Levite in that Transjordan realm at the time of Jesus, Matthew was the inheritor, he was not just a customs collector, a tax collector, he was the keeper of the Levite chronologies that went all the way back, generation by generation and understood exactly what the familiar relationships were, what the heritage of the expanded family of the tribes, of the expanded tribes of the people, of the expanded people that went back, not only to Abraham, but went back before Abraham, some 500 years before, back to the time of Sargon of Akkad, back to about 2400 BC. We know this because in the Acts of the Apostles, which is the follow-up to the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament, one of the first martyrs, St. Stephen, tells the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, that they're murdering and they're murdering Jews because they have understood that there is a new transformation, a new calibration that has happened and he takes the heritages back to Abraham's father, Terah, who moved to Haran from Ur, where for hundreds of years that family heritage was in Ur and so it is said that Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldees. And Haran of course, not only where Terah, the father of Abraham moved, but the other sons of Terah, not just Abraham, because when it came time for the grandson of Abraham, Jacob, to take a wife, Rebekah, who was his mother, Isaac's wife Rebekah said, 'Do not take a wife from the relationship of Abraham. You have to go to Laban in Haran and you take a wife from that heritage, because this heritage is convoluted in such a way that it can only pass on to your older brother Ephron.' You will not be able to inherit and pass on that primordial link of the inheritance if you take a wife from here and so you must go back to the twinning, the genetic twinning and take a wife from Laban. And because he did so the...not only the two daughters of Laban, but the two handmaidens of the two daughters of Laban and so he had four wives. Two wives and two concubines and all of them produced children. The last to be produced though were from the wife that he always wanted, from Rachel and that's where Joseph and Benjamin came from. Now, Levi, the Levites, were that particular tribe at one end of the spectrum and the tribe at the other end of the geographical spectrum was the Tribe of Dan. And the Tribe of Dan were located just below Mount Hermon, which is a long ridge of a mountain and so Dan was the most northern and the Levites the most southern and in that parentheses one had from the Red Sea to the Mount Hermon extension is a parallel to the mountains of Lebanon on the coast. That was the Holy Land, holy because it was the parentheses of the 12 Tribes. What's interesting is that originally the heritage of Abraham was taken out of the caravan routes and put into raising animals, herds. The original family before it was split in Haran, in Ur, was that they ran all the caravan routes from India to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the Fertile Crescent. And the Fertile Crescent extended through the Persian Gulf, all the way along the Indian Ocean, all the way into India and so one had this enormous trade route. By land the beast of burden was the black donkey and the regional symbol for their marketing, their trade, was a black donkey, an ass. So when Jesus at the very end is riding into Jerusalem as the royal king, he rides a black donkey, which was provided for him by the household of Lazarus, because this was the remembrance of the origin of the great Semitic caravans. All of this kind of a resonance builds itself up over 2400 years and one finds about the time that you find Matthew writing his Gospel...he wrote it most likely in the coastal city of Tyre about 37 AD, within the first six or eight months of the Crucifixion-resurrection. Because from Tyre west the caravan routes were run by Joseph of Arimathea and his partner Nicodemus. And they ran from the coast of Phoenicia all the way that had been set up by marketing and trade routes by ship by the Phoenicians 4000 years from the time of David and Solomon, from the time of Hiram of Phoenicia. And that shipping was not so much just for the caravan routes that went east from there, but the ones that went west went all the way down the coast of Morocco and Africa, all the way up the coast of Spain, touching Brittany and France, what today is France, was Gaul and touching the peninsular, the Cornwall Peninsular of England and the coast of Ireland. Because a lot of the trade at this time, one of the most valuable items was tin. Without tin you cannot turn copper into bronze and so the tin trade was one of those rare metals that only could be mined in very few places of the world on an industrial scale. In Sargon's time, the tin mines were in southern Persia, what it is today, but in the time of Jesus, the tin was largely mined on the coast of...on the west north coast of the peninsular of Cornwall, at a place today in Somerset which is known as Glastonbury. And the tin was brought from there, from a few mines in Brittany, from a few mines in the north west province of Spain, Galicia and brought all the way and at each trading route that the Phoenicians had set up a customs was paid in portions of the tin and brought all the way so that it could be brought inland from the coastal cities like Tyre, along the great roads that ran from Tyre to Damascus and further east into Mesopotamia. And that trade route ran right at the base of Mount Hermon, right above the Sea of Galilee region and then it traced down, because the Province of Galilee and the Province of Perea, east of the Jordan, both belonged to Herod Antipas, but Sumeria and Decapolis did not belong to him, they were different provinces. The Ten Cities Decapolis belonged to his brother Philip, Herod Philip and Sumeria was a completely different political structure and so there had to be a customs inspection at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee. And that's where Matthew passed on this enormous trade all the way from England, through France, through Spain, through all the Phoenician ports and shipping places and stop there at Tyre and went inland one road going north, Damascus into Upper Mesopotamia, into Anatolia, the other going south, going down east of the Jordan and about midway between the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee. And where you would cross the Jordan coming west again, about where Jericho is today, about midway there on the east side of the Jordan is where the great metallurgical works were located since the time of Solomon and Hiram of Tyre. It is there at those metal works, the place in Jewish geography is called Succoth and it's there that all of the metal work for the temple, for Solomon's temple, were made, they were fashioned. The two columns, severity and of mercy, all of the gold, all of the silver, all of the metal work for the entire temple is made there at Succoth. In the time where the trade routes of east and west met, the most powerful of the eastern trade routes was commandeered in Alexandria by the family of Philo. His older brother Alexander was the inheritor of all of the great trade routes that ran by ship down the Red Sea, all the way out to India and back all the way up to the Phoenician coast, where they were met by the great trade routes that were now owned by other Jews like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. And so you had this very interesting kind of an interplay where from Ireland to India there were trade routes that were run by very few Jewish families that had been doing this for several thousand years. Understood how to do marketing, understood the languages, the finance, the business, how to set it up. Were extraordinarily capable at international financing, at inter-cultural proportioning, at ratioing and it is all of this that is brought together because one finds not only is the Hermetica a precise presentation of what you would find in the New Testament in Palestine, but it's not presented in a Palestinian, in a Jewish way, in an Israeli way, in a Galilean way, in a Judah way. In Alexandria it's presented in a world city scale, completely different. And so the Hermetica is an Alexandrian New Testament and one finds the cognate because you find in India and in primordial Britain cognate resonances of the same kind of a presentation. In India at the time that you have the Hermetica you have Ptolemy doing his great geography, his great Tetrabiblos, his great Syntaxis Mathematica. In India, especially in the eastern half of India, you find the birth of the Mahāyāna and if you look at the Mahāyāna, the early Mahāyāna has all of the same language, the same presentation that you find in the Hermetica, that you find in the Gospel and the Book of Revelation and the First Letter of St. John, so that you find cognate vocabularies in their differing languages and places all at the same time, radiating around. And in China the link comes about the time that the final Hermetica is being written, the final Hermetica, the Asclepius, was written by Apuleius, who was one of the master writers. He was born about 124 AD and died about 180 AD. His Asclepius is entitled in its Greek translation, The Secret Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew you find the Sermon on the Mount about 37 AD and by about 160, 155 AD, about 120 years later, you find the perfect Sermon on the Mount. That was a sermon to bring people out into their completion, this is the complementary sermon to bring their completion into the infinite expansion and radiance of perfection. And so you find hidden in all of these structures if one can engender the visionary field, what emerges is not just a guesswork of what's out there, but a recognition of the harmonic of the sets, of the tones that emerge from the silence. This then discloses that truth is a completeness capable of a recalibration into newness and so what follows the truth is the originality of the freshness, of the newness, of infinity occurring again in reality.
Next week we're going to take a look at the Odes of Solomon and the way in which I'm pairing it with Shakespeare's The Tempest, because the Hermetica needs to be brought forward into the time of The Tempest, about 1612, 1611, 1612, when you find this great Renaissance that has been going on for about 150 years, all of a sudden surfacing in an incredible array of events that happen almost one, two, three. The entire Bible is retranslated in the King James Version into an Elizabethan English that rivals the Classical New Testament Greek of the original and the Classical Hebrew of the Old Testament. And when we get to it we'll see about the same time, for the first time, the Ptolemaic universe, the Ptolemaic geography, the Ptolemaic optics, the Ptolemaic mathematics, is eclipsed for the first time, first by Kepler and then by Galileo and then finally understood by that most Hermetic of alchemists, Isaac Newton and translated into Principia Mathematica, not Syntaxis Mathematica, Principia. This is differentially conscious, originally new now and Newton knew, through recognition, that somehow all this relates back to the Book of Revelation, to the Book of Daniel and somehow they link together. He was never able to piece it together, but here we'll piece it together so you can understand it. Be sure and listen to the music: for Vision is Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Journeys and be sure to see the films. The four films for Vision are Lost Horizon, The Last Wave, Peter Weir's great Australian Aborigine vision, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Juliet of the Spirits by Fellini. Try and see those four films, try and listen to the music, try and do your reading in the year-long cycle, try and bring the pairs of these materials together, because the more that you do this, the more that the radiance will occur. I've worked it out so that it is a cycle of symphonies, each phase has its own symphonic quality. The intervals are always the way in which that symphony is given a coda that allows it to pass to the next one. More next week.